lem was found in expeditions to Spain or Italy, but the plague of the routiers, succeeded in the fifteenth century by that of the écorcheurs, was not effectively solved until the creation by Charles VII of a French standing army between 1445 and 1448. Even then, the crown found it difficult to enforce a monopoly over the raising and maintenance of troops in the kingdom, and noble leagues such as the Public Weal ( 1465) or the 'Guerre Folle' ( 1488) demonstrated the difficulty of exercising control over the gens d'armes. This could defeat even the most resolute of later medieval regimes. Warfare waged abroad, especially the Italian campaigns begun by Charles VIII in 1494, probably contributed most to the process whereby the nobility of France and their military following came to see the crown as the primary focus of their loyalty.

Yet the Valois monarchy emerged victorious from the English war in 1453. In the fifteenth century a war of raids, or chevauchées, gave way under Henry V ( 1413-22) to one of conquest and occupation which the English war effort was unable to support. Edward III's war had been based upon plundering expeditions of relatively short duration. The only strong-point which experienced English occupation (and colonization) on a permanent footing in the fourteenth century was the town and March of Calais ( 1347). With Henry V's second Norman campaign ( 1417) the war began a new and far more ambitious phase. To conquer and hold down not only Normandy but all France then subject to ' Charles, who calls himself dauphin', exiled to Bourges after 1418, proved beyond the resources of the Lancastrian crown and its FrancoBurgundian allies. Financial insolvency does much to explain the ultimate Lancastrian defeat, but the defection of Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1435, as well as the moral superiority achieved by the Valois monarchy after the success of Joan of Arc's mission to have Charles VII crowned and anointed as 'true king of France' at Rheims in 1429, must also figure prominently in any analysis. But the recovery was gradual--it was not until twenty-two years after Joan's execution at Rouen in 1431 that the last English possession in France (with the exception of Calais) fell to Valois troops. There was resistance

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