that the ostensible object of all this conflict from first to
last was the establishment of the Plantagenet kings of England as kings of
France in the place of their cousins the Valois, we must remember what was
meant by those terms in the fourteenth century, when Edward first engaged
in the duel. There was no conception of the conquest of a _foreign_ power
such as would lie in the mind of a statesman of to-day. Society was still
feudal. Allegiance lay from a man to his lord, not from a man to his
central political government. Not only the religion, the thoughts, and the
daily conduct of either party to the war were the same, but in the
governing society of both camps the language and the very blood were the
same. Edward was a Plantagenet. That is, his family tradition was that of
one of the great French feudal nobles. It was little more than one hundred
years before that his great-grandfather had been the actual and ruling
Lord of Normandy, and of France to the west and the south-west, for the
first Plantagenet, had though holding of the Crown at Paris, been the
active monarch of Aquitaine, of Brittany, of Anjou, Normandy, and Maine.

So much for the general sentiment under which the war was engaged. As to
its particular excuse, this was slight and hardly tenable, and we may
doubt whether Edward intended to press it seriously. He engaged in the war
from that spirit of chivalric adventure (a little unreal, but informed by
an indubitable taste for arms) which was the mark of the fourteenth
century, and which was at the same time a decline from the sincere
knightly spirit of the thirteenth.

The excuse given was this. The French monarchy had descended, from its
foundation in 987 right down to the death of Charles IV. in 1328, directly
from father to son, but in that year, 1328, male issue failed the direct
line. The obviously rightful claimant to the throne, according to the
ideas of those times--and particularly of Northern France--was Philip of
Valois, the first cousin of the king, Charles IV., who had just died.

Charles IV. had been the son of King Philip IV., and Philip of Valois was
the son of Charles of Valois, Philip IV.'s brother. Philip of Valois was
therefore the eldest in unbroken male descent of the house.

It might be claimed (and it was claimed by Edward III.) that the daughters
of elder brothers and their issue should count before the sons of younger
brothers. Now there were two female heiresses or their