n was an accident of the field.
The victory would have been less by far if the whole of the king's command
had fled, with the king himself at the head of the rout.

A modern parallel more nearly exact would be the transference in the midst
of a conflict of some great financial power from one side to the other; or
again, in a naval war, the blowing up of so many capital ships by contact
mines as would put one of the two opposing fleets into a hopeless
inferiority to the other. To capture a king was to capture not so much a
necessary part of the mechanism of government as the most important and
the richest member of a feudal organisation. It meant the power to claim
an enormous feudal ransom for his person. It meant, more doubtfully, the
power to engage him, while he was yet a prisoner, to terms that would bind
his lieges: "more doubtfully," because the whole feudal system jealously
regarded the rights both of individual owners and of custom from the
peasant to the crown. Finally, to capture the king was to get hold of the
chief financial support of an enemy. A feudal king had vast revenues in
the shape of rents, not competitive, but fixed, which came to him as they
did to any other lord, but in much greater amount than to any other lord.
The king was the chief economic factor in that autonomous economic
federation which we call the feudal organisation of Gaul.

The fact that his capture was an accident in no way lessened the result;
it was regarded in the military mind of those days much as we regard the
crippling of a modern financial power by some chance of speculation. It
was only a bit of good fortune on the one side, and of bad fortune on the
other, but one to be duly taken advantage of by those whom it would
profit.

The immediate result of that capture was twofold: an admission on the part
of John of the Plantagenet claim, and a corresponding spontaneous movement
in France which led to the defeat of that claim; the signing (ultimately)
of a treaty tearing the French monarchy in two; and, finally, the
rejection and nullifying of that treaty by the mere instinct of the
nation. But these lengthy political consequences--followed by the further
success of the Black Prince's nephew at Agincourt, and again by his
successor's loss of all save Calais--do not concern this book.

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_HISTORY IN WARF