State therefore was concerned the distinction between the ideal and practical view of “dominion” was of little account.  Wyclif’s application of the theory to the individual conscience was of far higher and wider importance.  Obedient as each Christian might be to king or priest, he himself as a possessor of “dominion” held immediately of God.  The throne of God Himself was the tribunal of personal appeal.  What the Reformers of the sixteenth century attempted to do by their theory of Justification by Faith Wyclif attempted to do by his theory of Dominion, a theory which in establishing a direct relation between man and God swept away the whole basis of a mediating priesthood, the very foundation on which the mediaeval church was built.

[Sidenote:  England and Aquitaine]

As yet the full bearing of these doctrines was little seen.  But the social and religious excitement which we have described was quickened by the renewal of the war, and the general suffering and discontent gathered bitterness when the success which had flushed England with a new and warlike pride passed into a long series of disasters in which men forgot the glories of Crecy and Poitiers.  Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of Bretigny was really fatal to Edward’s cause in the south of France.  By the cession of Aquitaine to him in full sovereignty the traditional claim on which his strength rested lost its force.  The people of the south had clung to their Duke, even though their Duke was a foreign ruler.  They had stubbornly resisted incorporation with Northern France.  While preserving however their traditional fealty to the descendants of Eleanor they still clung to the equally traditional suzerainty of the kings of France.  But the treaty of Bretigny not only severed them from the realm of France, it subjected them to the realm of England.  Edward ceased to be their hereditary Duke, he became simply an English king ruling Aquitaine as an English dominion.  If the Southerners loved the North-French little, they loved the English less, and the treaty which thus changed their whole position was followed by a quick revulsion of feeling from the Garonne to the Pyrenees.  The Gascon nobles declared that John had no right to transfer their fealty to another and to sever them from the realm of France.  The city of Rochelle prayed the French king not to release it from its fealty to him.  “We will obey the English with our lips,” said its citizens, “but our hearts shall never be moved towards them.”  Edward strove to meet this passion for local independence, this hatred of being ruled from London, by sending the Black Prince to Bordeaux and investing him in 1362 with the Duchy of Aquitaine.  But the new Duke held his Duchy as a fief from the English king, and the grievance of the Southerners was left untouched.  Charles V. who succeeded his father John in 1364 silently prepared to reap this harvest of discontent.  Patient, wary, unscrupulous, he was hardly crowned