time yielding place to the new; for during the fifteenth
century feudalism as well as chivalry was going to its death in France
and in nearly all Europe. In France the civil wars had not only
demoralized chivalry, they had also served to sever the intimate ties
that bound the feudal lord and his family to the soil of their fief
almost as rigidly as the villain was bound. Some families were utterly
destroyed, some sought new lands, and found them in parts of the country
far distant from their ancient holdings. With all his theoretically
arbitrary power, the old baron, reared amid the peasants he was to
govern, felt a certain kinship with them, and was often regardful of
their time-honored customs and privileges, forgoing in their favor what
arbitrary despotism or caprice suggested. No such ties bound the new
nobles to their new vassals; the hold of the feudal lord upon his
vassals was weakened, as was their influence upon him. Many new families
had risen into prominence, and kings no longer hesitated to ennoble
parvenus, a sure sign that the solidarity of the ancient nobility of the
soil was broken. This had come to pass in France by the time the great
Louis XI. ascended the throne, not a generation after Jeanne d'Arc, and
the same process was going on in England through the Wars of the Roses.
Louis was the determined enemy of feudalism, which he would have
uprooted utterly. Much he did uproot; more he would have done, had he
lived.

In the midst of this generation of struggles between the king and the
faltering remnants of feudalism there are two or three instances in
which the women as well as the men of the middle class deserve mention.
Before we deal with the short and sad career of the last of the great
house of Bourgogne, Marie, daughter of Charles le temeraire, we may
glance at the simple story of a woman who defended Beauvais from this
same Charles.

The danger from England had passed; there was no longer need of a Jeanne
d'Arc to drive out the insolent _Goddems_; but a new enemy was found for
France in the person of that great Duke of Burgundy whom modern history
has named Charles the Bold, more properly Charles the Rash, or, as his
contemporaries first called him, the Terrible, "that wild bull wearing a
crown, that wild boar who rushed straight ahead, his eyes shut." In the
spring of 1472, while Louis XI was intent upon reducing to submission
the rebellious Duke of Brittany, Charles le temeraire, impatient at