[Illustration:  France at the Treaty of Bretigny (v2-map-2t.jpg)]

[Sidenote:  Peace of Bretigny]

In France misery and misgovernment seemed to be doing Edward’s work more effectively than arms.  The miserable country found no rest in itself.  Its routed soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, while the lords captured at Crecy or Poitiers procured the sums needed for their ransom by extortion from the peasantry.  The reforms demanded by the States-General which met in this agony of France were frustrated by the treachery of the Regent, John’s eldest son Charles, Duke of Normandy, till Paris, impatient of his weakness and misrule, rose in arms against the Crown.  The peasants too, driven mad by oppression and famine, rose in wild insurrection, butchering their lords and firing their castles over the whole face of France.  Paris and the Jacquerie, as this peasant rising was called, were at last crushed by treachery and the sword:  and, exhausted as it was, France still backed the Regent in rejecting a treaty of peace by which John in 1359 proposed to buy his release.  By this treaty Maine, Touraine, and Poitou in the south, Normandy, Guisnes, Ponthieu, and Calais in the west were ceded to the English king.  On its rejection Edward in 1360 poured ravaging over the wasted land.  Famine however proved its best defence.  “I could not believe,” said Petrarch of this time, “that this was the same France which I had seen so rich and flourishing.  Nothing presented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated, houses in ruins.  Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere marks of desolation and conflagration.  The streets are deserted, the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude.”  The utter desolation forced Edward to carry with him an immense train of provisions, and thousands of baggage waggons with mills, ovens, forges, and fishing-boats, formed a long train which streamed for six miles behind his army.  After a fruitless attempt upon Reims he forced the Duke of Burgundy to conclude a treaty with him by pushing forward to Tonnerre, and then descending the Seine appeared with his army before Paris.  But the wasted country forbade a siege, and Edward after summoning the town in vain was forced to fall back for subsistence on the Loire.  It was during this march that the Duke of Normandy’s envoys overtook him with proposals of peace.  The misery of the land had at last bent Charles to submission, and in May a treaty was concluded at Bretigny, a small place to the eastward of Chartres.  By this treaty the English king waived his claims on the crown of France and on the Duchy of Normandy.  On the other hand, his Duchy of Aquitaine, which included Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, and Saintonge, the Limousin and the Angoumois, Perigord and the counties of Bigorre and Rouergue, was not only restored but freed from its obligations as a French fief and granted in full sovereignty with Ponthieu, Edward’s heritage from the second wife of Edward the First, as well as with Guisnes and his new conquest of Calais.