ABSTRACT
For nearly nine years after the Treaty of Brétigny England and France were nominally at peace. In England these were carefree years, politically. Edward III, presiding over a magnificent court, felt that he had earned rest after his high deeds; ‘I am growing old,’ he told the king of Cyprus, who visited him to urge him to take the cross as a crusader, ‘I shall leave it to my children.’1 The Black Prince took his beautiful bride, Joan of Kent, to Aquitaine, which his father in 1362 granted to him as a principality, and at their court ‘abode all nobleness, all joy and jollity, largesse, gentleness, and honour’.2 Adventurous spirits meanwhile sought martial renown in wars overseas; on the crusade that the king of Cyprus led; in the Breton war of succession, which still continued; and in Spain. In their insouciance, the English seem hardly to have noticed the slow drift towards a new confrontation with France. When in 1369 the Hundred Years War reopened as a result of deliberate provocation on the French side, they were ill prepared. The pattern of events which followed this resumption of hostilities was, partly in consequence, in very marked contrast to that of the years which preceded the Treaty of Brétigny.
