And I shall begin with No. 3—The Castles of the routiers.
The face of a country is like that of a woman. It tells the story of its past. The many-windowed English mansion sleeping among turfy lawns to the plash of a fountain, and the cawing of rooks in the beechwood, tell of a tranquil past life-record broken only by transient unrest; whereas the towers on the Continent with their meurtrières and frowning machicolations, bristling on every hill, frequent as church spires, now gutted and ruinous, proclaim a protracted reign of oppression and then a sudden upheaval in resentment and a firebrand applied to them all. The old English mansion has its cellars, but never an oubliette, its porch-door always open to welcome a neighbour and to relieve the indigent. It was not insulated by a dyke, and its doors clenched with a portcullis. The spoils of the chase were not a drove of "lifted" cattle taken from a peasant left stark upon his threshold, but foxes' masks and the antlers of deer. The pigeons coo about the English gables and the peacock dreams in the sun on the balustrade of the terrace, as in past centuries, but the castle of the French noble and the burg of the German ritter are given over to the bats and owls, and are quarries whence the peasants pick out the heraldic carvings for the construction of their pig-styes.
Nowhere did tears so stain and furrow the face of the land as in that portion of France that was ceded to England. De Quincey says: "Within fifty years in three pitched battles that resounded to the ends of the earth, the chivalry of France had been exterminated. Her oriflamme had been dragged through the dust. The Eldest Son of Baptism had been prostrated. The daughter of France had been surrendered on coercion as a bride to her English conqueror. The child of that marriage, so ignominious to the land, was King of France by the consent of Christendom; that child's uncle domineered as regent of France; and that child's armies were in military possession of the land. But were they undisputed masters? No!—under a perfect conquest there would have been repose; whereas the presence of the English armies did but furnish a plea, making strong in patriotism, for gathering everywhere of lawless marauders, of soldiers that had deserted their banners, and of robbers by profession. This was the woe of France more even than the military dishonour." [Footnote: Essay on Charles Lamb.]
The Hundred Years' War, that has left ineffaceable traces in the south of France, began in 1336 before the conclusion of the Treaty of Bretigny, which was in 1360, and it lasted till 1443—over a century, though not without interruption; and it desolated the fields of Perigord, Quercy, and to a less degree Rouergue and the Limousin, and wrought havoc to the gates of Paris.
The close of the fourteenth century saw no hope anywhere, only gathering storms. In France, to the prudent Charles V. succeeded the mad fool Charles VI. In England the strong King Edward III. was followed by the incompetent Richard II. In Germany the Emperor Charles IV., a statesman, had as his successor the drunken sot Wenceslas. In England the Wars of the Roses were looming in the future. Agincourt proved more disastrous to England than to France. There was hopeless turmoil everywhere. As Luther said when a somewhat similar condition existed in Germany—"God, tiring of the game, has thrown the cards on the table." In France the free Companies ran riot unrestrained. About them one word.
The engagement of mercenaries in the war between England and France had begun early. As Michelet says: "The population of the North saw appear among them mercenary soldiers, the routiers, for the most part in the service of England. Some came from Brabant, some from Aquitaine; the Basque Marcader was one of the principal lieutenants of Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The mountaineers of the South, who to-day descend into France and Spain to gain a little money by huxtering, did so in the Middle Ages, but then, their sole industry was war. They maltreated priests as they did peasants, dressed their wives in consecrated vestments, beat the clergy, and made them sing mass in mockery. It was also one of their amusements to defile and break the images of Christ, to smash the legs and arms, treating Him worse than did the Jews. These routiers were dear to the princes precisely on account of their impiety, which rendered them insensible to ecclesiastical censures." [Footnote: Histoire de France, ii. p. 362. The first to introduce them was Henry Courtmantel when he rebelled against his father. On his death in 1163 they disbanded, and then reunited under elected captains, and pillaged the country.]
From 1204 to 1222 was the period of the Crusade against the Albigenses. Pope Innocent III. poured over that beautiful land in the south of France—beautiful as the Garden of God—a horde of ruffians, made up of the riffraff of Europe, summoned to murder, pillage and outrage, with the promise of Heaven as their reward. After committing atrocities such as people Hell, these scoundrels, despising the religion they had been summoned to defend, with every spark of humanity extinguished in their breasts, looked about for fresh mischief, and found it, by enrolling themselves under the banner of England; their tiger cubs grew up with the lust of blood and rapine that had possessed their fathers. Generation after generation of these fiends in human form ranged over the soil of France committing intolerable havoc. A carpenter of Le Puy formed an association for the extermination of these bands. Philip Augustus encouraged him, furnished troops, and in one day slaughtered ten thousand of them. But so long as the English claim on so large a portion of the soil of France was maintained, the bands were incessantly recruited. The French King hired them as well as the King of England. So, later, did the Popes, when they quitted Avignon, and by their aid recovered the patrimony of S. Peter.
The barons and seigneurs in the South were no better than the routiers. They transferred their allegiance from the Leopards to the Lilies, or vice versâ, as suited their caprices. The Sieur de Pons went over to the side of France because he quarrelled with his wife, who was ardent on the English side. The local nobility helped the routiers, and the routiers assisted them in their private feuds.
The knights of the fourteenth century were no longer the protectors of the weak, the redressers of wrongs, loyal to their liege lords, observers of their oaths. They had reversed the laws of chivalry. Their main function was the oppression of the weak. They forswore themselves without scruple. The Sire d'Aubrecicourt plundered and slaughtered at random pour meriter de sa dame, Isabella de Juliers, niece of the Queen of England, "for he was young and outrageously in love." The brother of the King of Navarre plundered like the rest. When the nobles sold safe-conducts to the merchants who victualled the towns, they excepted such articles as might suit themselves—silks, harness, plate. A prince of the blood sent as hostage to England returned to France in defiance of treaties, and if King John surrendered himself, it was because of the ease and pleasures he enjoyed in London, and to be rid of cares. The name given to the Companies in the South was Raobadous (Ribauds)—the very name has come to us under the form of ribald, as indicative of all that is brutal, profane, and unseemly.
Among the commanders very few were English. There was the Welshman Griffith, whom Froissart calls Ruffin, who ravaged the country between the Seine and the Loire. Sir Robert Knollys, or Knolles, led a band of English and Navarrese, "conquering every town and castle he came to. He had followed this trade for some time, and by it gained upwards of 100,000 crowns. He kept a great many soldiers in his pay; and being very liberal, was cheerfully obeyed." So says Froissart. Sir Robert Cheney was another; so was Sir John Amery. Sir John Hawkwood was taken into the service of Pope Gregory XI., and sent to ravage in Italy. Bacon, a notorious brigand, may or may not have been English. The name is common in lower Brittany. "This robber," says Froissart, "was always mounted on handsome horses of a deep roan colour, apparelled like an earl, and very richly armed."