nts, sallies, outfalls, and knightly spear-runnings. Their
knights and squires, lad, are every whit as good as ours, and I could
pick out a score of those who ride behind Du Guesclin who would hold the
lists with sharpened lances against the best men in the army of England.
On the other hand, their common folk are so crushed down with gabelle,
and poll-tax, and every manner of cursed tallage, that the spirit has
passed right out of them. It is a fool's plan to teach a man to be a
cur in peace, and think that he will be a lion in war. Fleece them like
sheep and sheep they will remain. If the nobles had not conquered
the poor folk it is like enough that we should not have conquered the
nobles."

"But they must be sorry folk to bow down to the rich in such a fashion,"
said big John. "I am but a poor commoner of England myself, and yet I
know something of charters, liberties franchises, usages, privileges,
customs, and the like. If these be broken, then all men know that it is
time to buy arrow-heads."

"Aye, but the men of the law are strong in France as well as the men
of war. By my hilt! I hold that a man has more to fear there from the
ink-pot of the one than from the iron of the other. There is ever some
cursed sheepskin in their strong boxes to prove that the rich man should
be richer and the poor man poorer. It would scarce pass in England, but
they are quiet folk over the water."

"And what other nations have you seen in your travels, good sir?" asked
Alleyne Edricson. His young mind hungered for plain facts of life, after
the long course of speculation and of mysticism on which he had been
trained.

"I have seen the low countryman in arms, and I have nought to say
against him. Heavy and slow is he by nature, and is not to be brought
into battle for the sake of a lady's eyelash or the twang of a
minstrel's string, like the hotter blood of the south. But ma foi! lay
hand on his wool-bales, or trifle with his velvet of Bruges, and out
buzzes every stout burgher, like bees from the tee-hole, ready to lay on
as though it were his one business in life. By our lady! they have shown
the French at Courtrai and elsewhere that they are as deft in wielding
steel as in welding it."

"And the men of Spain?"

"They too are very hardy soldiers, the more so as for many hundred years
they have had to fight hard against the cursed followers of the black
Mahound, who have pressed upon them from the south, and still, as I
under