e English tongue".

Albany seems to have made all due efforts to obtain his nephew's
release, and James was in constant communication with Scotland. He had
been forced to accompany Henry V to France, and was present at the siege
of Melun, where Henry refused quarter to the Scottish allies of France,
although England and Scotland were at war. Although constantly
complaining of his imprisonment, and of the treatment accorded to him in
England, James brought home with him, when his release was negotiated in
1423-24, an English bride, Joan Beaufort, the heroine of the _Quair_.
She was the daughter of Somerset, who had been captured at Bauge, and
grand-daughter of John of Gaunt.

The troublous reign of James I gave him but little time for conducting a
foreign war, and the truce which was made when the king was ransomed
continued till 1433. It had been suggested that the peace between
England and Scotland should extend to the Scottish troops serving in
France, but no such clause was inserted in the actual arrangement made,
and it is almost certain that James could not have enforced it, even had
he wished to do so. He gave, however, no indication of holding lightly
the ties that bound Scotland to France, and, in 1428, agreed to the
marriage of his infant daughter, Margaret, to the dauphin. Meanwhile,
the Scottish levies had been taking their full share in the struggle for
freedom in which France was engaged. At Crevant, near Auxerre, in July,
1423, the Earl of Buchan, now Constable of France, was defeated by
Salisbury, and, thirteen months later, Buchan and the Earl of Douglas
(Duke of Touraine) fell on the disastrous field of Verneuil. At the
Battle of the Herrings (an attack upon a French convoy carrying Lenten
food to the besiegers of Orleans, made near Janville, in February,
1429), the Scots, under the new constable, Sir John Stewart of Darnley,
committed the old error of Halidon and Homildon, and their impetuous
valour could not avail against the English archers. They shared in the
victory of Pathay, gained by the Maid of Orleans in June 1429, almost on
the anniversary of Bannockburn, and they continued to follow the Maid
through the last fateful months of her warfare. So great a part had
Scotsmen taken in the French wars that, on the expiry of the truce in
1433, the English offered to restore not only Roxburgh but also Berwick
to Scotland. But the French alliance was destined to endure for more
than another century, and