and Flanders at the head of the French knighthood fell hotly on the Prince’s line.  For an instant his small force seemed lost, and he called his father to support him.  But Edward refused to send him aid.  “Is he dead, or unhorsed, or so wounded that he cannot help himself?” he asked the envoy.  “No, sir,” was the reply, “but he is in a hard passage of arms, and sorely needs your help.”  “Return to those that sent you,” said the king, “and bid them not send to me again so long as my son lives!  Let the boy win his spurs, for, if God so order it, I will that the day may be his and that the honour may be with him and them to whom I have given it in charge.”  Edward could see in fact from his higher ground that all went well.  The English bowmen and men-at-arms held their ground stoutly while the Welshmen stabbed the French horses in the melly and brought knight after knight to the ground.  Soon the French host was wavering in a fatal confusion.  “You are my vassals, my friends,” cried the blind John of Bohemia to the German nobles around him, “I pray and beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that I may strike one good blow with this sword of mine!” Linking their bridles together, the little company plunged into the thick of the combat to fall as their fellows were falling.  The battle went steadily against the French.  At last Philip himself hurried from the field, and the defeat became a rout.  Twelve hundred knights and thirty thousand foot-men—­a number equal to the whole English force—­lay dead upon the ground.

[Sidenote:  The Yeoman]

“God has punished us for our sins,” cries the chronicler of St. Denys in a passion of bewildered grief as he tells the rout of the great host which he had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls.  But the fall of France was hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at a single blow of a system of warfare, and with it of the political and social fabric which had risen out of that system.  Feudalism rested on the superiority of the horseman to the footman, of the mounted noble to the unmounted churl.  The real fighting power of a feudal army lay in its knighthood, in the baronage and landowners who took the field, each with his group of esquires and mounted men-at-arms.  A host of footmen followed them, but they were ill armed, ill disciplined, and seldom called on to play any decisive part on the actual battle-field.  In France, and especially at the moment we have reached, the contrast between the efficiency of these two elements of warfare was more striking than elsewhere.  Nowhere was the chivalry so splendid, nowhere was the general misery and oppression of the poor more terribly expressed in the worthlessness of the mob of footmen who were driven by their lords to the camp.  In England, on the other hand, the failure of feudalism to win a complete hold on the country was seen in the persistence of the older national institutions which based its defence on the general levy of its freemen.  If