Charters usually promised more than they gave. In spite of remonstrances, the citizens did have to supply considerable sums in tribute from time to time in the ensuing centuries. Whether under the name of loans, or advances, or octrois, Kings like François I. and Henry IV. bled the merchants freely, and, if they protested too loudly, quickly brought them to their senses by the threat of force. But, in the meantime, whilst Charles de Valois, with the aid of the Chartrain contribution, was asserting the rights of his wife to the throne of Constantinople, or earning, at Florence, a place in Dante’s Inferno, the town of Chartres, profiting by his absence, was quietly organising and ameliorating its administration.
The development of the municipality and the subsequent absorption of the domain of Chartres by the Crown by no means diminished the loyalty of its citizens. A worthy reception was given to Philippe-le-Bel when he came with his son, the boy Prince Charles, after his victory over the Flemish at Mons-en-Puelle, to render thanks and offer his armour at the shrine of the Vierge-Noire. The King also founded in commemoration of his victory a service in honour of Notre-Dame-de-la-Victoire. Down to the year 1793 the martial ex-voto of the royal father and son was shown from the pulpit on each anniversary of the defeat of the Flemings. In that year, however, the rich armour was stripped of the precious metals with which it was adorned. The gold was sent to the mint in Paris. The remaining fragments, pieced together, may be seen in the town museum (see p. 317). The example of Philippe-le-Bel was followed some years later by Philippe de Valois after his similar victory at Cassel. Fully armed, he rode into the Cathedral, knelt before the ancient statue, and left a thousand pounds to redeem the armour and steel which he had dedicated to the Virgin.
It was at this period that Chartres may be said to have reached the zenith of its prosperity. From this time forward we have to trace the process of its decay. For not only was Chartres, like all provincial towns, destined to suffer from the centralising tendency of the new era which succeeded that of feudalism, but it was also condemned by its position at the gates of Paris not to escape any of the catastrophes attendant upon the political and social developments of the day. Its history, however, becomes on that account more rather than less interesting. It was taken and retaken in the fifteenth century by the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, the English and the French, twice besieged in the sixteenth century by the Huguenots of the Prince de Condé and of Henry IV., and torn asunder by the passions of the Fronde in the seventeenth.
With the fourteenth century France entered upon a period of disaster and defeat. To the terrible ravages of the Black Death were added the horrors of famine, and the shame and devastation of the Hundred Years’ War. The odds in that war, brought on by the continual intervention of the French King on behalf of Scotland and his obstinacy in the matter of Guienne, must have seemed at the first enormously in favour of France. But the vast superiority of the French in numbers and wealth was to prove useless in the face of the English yeomen. Crécy and Poitiers revealed the fact, bewildering to feudalism, that the superb bravery of French knighthood was futile when confronted with the English unmounted churl shooting his cloth-yard shaft. A cavalry charge in the face of those archers had no more chance of being successful than the charge of the Dervishes at Omdurman, or the later frontal attacks of our own infantry upon positions defended with magazine rifles. King John, taken prisoner at Poitiers, was carried captive to London, whilst in France, his routed soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, pillaged the country, and held the Chartrains prisoners for six months within their walls. The captive lords procured the sums needed for their ransom by extortion from the peasantry, who were driven by oppression and famine into frantic insurrection, butchering their lords and firing their castles. And Paris, impatient of the weakness and misrule of the Regency, rose in arms against the Crown.
Chartres in these days was compelled to strain every nerve to defend herself. A band of mercenaries was engaged to garrison the town. The Church of S. Saturnin, which was then in front of the Porte des Épars, and several convents, hospitals and mansions outside the walls, which might have given a foothold to the enemy, were destroyed. And in 1358 an order was issued that everyone should co-operate to fortify the town, ‘which is the safety and salvation of all the people within and without.’ Money for this purpose was raised by an extra tax upon beasts and skins. The ramparts of the town were now defended by a ditch and moat, and the gates, which had formerly been square and without ravelins, were modified and reconstructed in accordance with the more modern ideas of fortification, which the introduction of
