in 1482. The political shape and structure of early modern Europe, in which the United Provinces of the Netherlands were to play so significant a role, was therefore largely determined by fifteenth-century dynasticism.
The ever-present nature of warfare in the later Middle Ages was much commented upon by contemporaries. With pardonable exaggeration, the inhabitants of the Welsh March or of certain southern French dioceses, such as Cahors, could complain that they had seen nothing but war in their lifetimes. War was endemic in one form or another. In many parts of Germany the prevalence of private warfare, stemming from feuds between noble families or urban factions, was recognized by the formal institution known as the Fehde. This form of regulated private war--which inevitably became uncontrollable--was paralleled in parts of southern France by outbreaks of feuding between private parties, often taking the form of cavalcate or mounted raids, conducted by one noble family and their adherents against another. The most notable and protracted of these was the great rivalry and conflict between the south-western houses of Foix and Armagnac, which began in 1290 and ended only in the second half of the fifteenth century. But such feuds were to be found, normally of a less protracted nature, among most northern European nobilities-from the gentry 'gangs' of fourteenth-century England to more serious feuding in areas of extreme political fragmentation such as the Pyrenean frontier of France, or the German province of Westphalia. Some of these conflicts assumed proportions of more general significance. The clashes of the houses of Armagnac-Orléans with that of Burgundy in the 1390s, or the great quarrel between those of York and Lancaster in England, elevated feud into the arena of national politics. Yet even apparently insignificant regional affairs could erupt into more general warfare, such as the breaches of the peace in the south-western French province of the Agenais which led to an Anglo-French war in 1324-5.
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