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Particularly in the northern Celtic districts pastoral husbandry was thoroughly predominant. Brittany was in Caesar's time a country poor in corn.
The race whose history is lost far back in the Chanson de Roland and the Crusades, which settled in Flanders, and then in Brittany, but became, as soon as it left the provinces for the capital, nomadic, changing its base at will from the garrison of the officer to that of the official, seems to have narrowed and refined its stock and condensed all the power of its past, all its hopes for the future, in one last offshoot.
Charles V., encouraged by his successes, determined to take part likewise in that which was still going on between the two claimants to the duchy of Brittany, Charles of Blois and John of Montfort. Du Guesclin was sent to support Charles of Blois; "whereat he was greatly rejoiced," says Froissart, "for he had always held the said lord Charles for his rightful lord."
Henry III. was born here, and always bore the name of Henry of Winchester; Henry IV. here married Joan of Brittany; Henry VI. came often hither, his first visit being to study the discipline of Wykeham's College as a model for his new one at Eton, to supply students to King's College, Cambridge, as Wykeham's does to his foundation of New College, Oxford; and happy had it been for this unfortunate monarch had he been a simple monk in one of the monasteries of a city which he so loved, enjoying peace, learning and piety, having bitterly to learn: "That all the rest is held at such a rate As brings a thousand-fold more care to keep Than in possession any jot of pleasure."
If England attacked France, Spain was to help; but occupied as she was with Granada the amount of aid likely to be forthcoming was problematical. In brief, Henry was prepared to pay for the marriage, and Spain could exact a high price. France then was occupied in the west with the contest in Brittany, and in the north she was supporting the Flemings in their normal resistance to Maximilian.
In 1373, when the Duke of Brittany sought English aid against a threatened invasion by Charles V., Du Guesclin was sent at the head of a powerful army to seize the duchy, which he did; and two years later he frustrated, by a defensive policy, the attempt of the duke with an English army to recover it.
He had, therefore, interests and means of interference on either hand; and it is clear that Charles set before himself two different lines of policy, according as he looked one way or the other. At the time of Duke Philip's death a new league had been formed against Louis, embracing the King of England, Edward IV., the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, and the Kings of Aragon and Castile.
At the height of this struggle came the triumphant entry of Christianity into France, and there it was preached by women, and there it consecrated the divinity of a woman who in the forests of Brittany, of Vendee and of Ardennes took, under the name of Notre-Dame, the place of more than one idol in the hollow of old Druidic oaks.
In 1486 Maximilian was elected "King of the Romans," in other words his father's presumed successor as Emperor. For the time, then, the consolidation of France was more advanced than that of any other Power; her desire was to complete the process by the absorption of Brittany.
"I hope," he said to Dionis the day when Madame de Portenduere was summoned to pay her debt, "that we shall soon be rid of those nobles; after they are gone we'll drive out the rest." "That old woman with fourteen quarterings," said Goupil, "won't want to witness her own disaster; she'll go and die in Brittany, where she can manage to find a wife for her son."
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