tion]

It must be clearly grasped by the general reader how natural was both the
real and the fantastic side of that pursuit. It involved no question of
nationality as we should now understand it. It was based upon still living
traditions of feudal connections which were personal and not racial; the
chivalry of France and England was a French-speaking society based upon
common ideals and fed with common memories. Gascony was in favour of the
Plantagenets. Further, Guienne--the district north of Gascony beyond the
Garonne--was Edward's feudal own. He was not king of it, but he was feudal
lord of it, and had done homage for it in 1331 to the Valois. It was not a
new or distant tie. For the rest of the quarrel my first section in the
essay on Crecy already alluded to must suffice, but for the link with
Gascony a more particular emphasis is needed. The trade of Bordeaux, its
great town, was principally with British ports. Its export of wine was a
trade with Britain. It lay far from the centre of the French monarchy. It
had counted in its _Basque_ population an element indifferent for hundreds
of years to the national unity of Gaul. The moneyed interests of its great
commercial centres, of the western ones, at least (which were by far the
richest), were closely bound up with England, with English trade. Add to
this his actual feudal tenure of Guienne, and we can see how the feeling
that all the south-west corner of France was his grew to be a very real
feeling in Edward's mind, and was shared by his son.

When, therefore, upon the 20th September 1355, Edward, the Black Prince,
landed at Bordeaux, it was to find a province the nobles of which were
honestly attached to his cause and the greater townsmen as well; while in
the mass of the people there was no disaffection to the idea of this one
out of the vague, many, French-speaking feudal lords whom they knew to be
their masters, being the actual governor of the land. There was no
conquest, nor any need for it, so far as Gascony was concerned; and in any
expedition the Prince might make he was as certain of a regular following
from the towns and estates that lay between the mountains and the Garonne
as the King of France was certain of his own feudal levies in the north.
But expeditions and fighting there would be because the Black Prince came
with a commission not only to govern Gascony, but to establish himself in
the more doubtful Guienne, and even to be--if he could conqu