men, and more still by preventing it from passing under
the control of foreign princes who had married French princesses. As a
French constitutional lawyer has remarked: "France is the only one of
the great states of Europe where we see the crown remaining for more
than eight centuries in the same family.... It is to the Salic Law that
France owes the long persistence of the Capetian dynasty."

In the first half of the fourteenth century it was a danger of exactly
the kind alluded to above that menaced the kingdom of France: a foreign
prince claimed the throne as his heritage through his mother. In order
to understand the absolute futility of the claim made by Edward III. of
England, based on the alleged rights of his mother, Isabelle de France,
daughter of Philippe le Bel, it is necessary only to recall that both
Isabelle's brothers, Louis le Hutin and Charles le Bel, had left
daughters who would have had prior rights if any woman could have
inherited. The potent reasons of public polity which would also have
absolutely excluded Isabelle and Edward III. have been mentioned above,
and are stated in a different way by Froissart. He says that after the
death of Charles IV., "the twelve peers and all the barons of France
would not give the realm to Isabel the sister (of Charles IV., Louis X.,
and Philippe V.), who was queen of England, because they said and
maintained, and yet do, that the realm of France is so noble that it
ought not to go to a woman, and so consequently not to Isabel, nor to
the king of England her eldest son: for they determined the son of the
woman to have no right nor succession by his mother, since they declared
the mother to have no right: so that by these reasons the twelve peers
and barons of France by their common accord did give the realm of France
to the lord Philip of Valois, nephew sometime to Philip le Beau king of
France." Then, as all the world knows, ensued the great wars between
France and England of which Froissart tells with such evident enjoyment
of deeds of valor and splendid martial pageants; for, he says, "sith the
time of the good Charlemagne, king of France, there never fell so great
adventures."

The history of the Hundred Years' War is quite beyond the scope of this
volume; but let us be humble camp followers of the great armies that
march across Froissart's pages, where perchance we may find some women
as amazons, as heroines, or as pitiful victims in this sanguinary and
ruin