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The courtship falls to the house of Avennes, Counts of Hainault. Holland, together with Zeland, which it had annexed, is thus joined to the province of Hainault. At the end of another half century the Hainault line expires. William the Fourth died childless in 1355. His death is the signal for the outbreak of an almost interminable series of civil commotions.

This he sought to secure by an unworthy alliance with the most scoundrelly amongst his ambitious contemporaries, and he would have given up his own city as well as France to the King of Navarre and the English had not another burgher of Paris, John Maillart, stopped him, and put him to death at the very moment when the patriot of the states-general of 1355 was about to become a traitor to his country.

In the year 1355, Francisco Balducci Pegoletti, an Italian, wrote a system of commercial geography, of great importance, considering the period in which it was written. Its title translated into English, is, "Of the Divisions of Countries, and of their Measures, Merchandize, and other things useful to be known by the Merchants of various parts of the World."

John having succeeded Philip in France, in 1350 Edward made another effort to recover the French throne; but no monarch of spirit cares to have his throne pulled from beneath him just as he is about to occupy it, and so, when the Black Prince began to burn and plunder southern France, his father made a similar excursion from Calais, in 1355.

We owe to Wickliffe the earliest version of the Scriptures into English, which is among the first prose writings in the old tongue. The very oldest book in English prose, however, is the account given by Sir John Mandeville of his thirty-three years' travel in the East, from which he returned about 1355. It is an odd and amusing compound of facts and marvelous stories.

It was not even attacked; and when, in 1355, Edward the Black Prince marched into it, the inhabitants had opened the gates to the conqueror before whom all Languedoc was prostrate. I am not one of those who, as I said just now, have a head for such things, and having extracted these few facts had made all the use of M. Viollet-le-Duc's, pamphlet of which I was cap- able.

In 1355 they sent a deputation to the Pope at Avignon begging him to ask their lord if it was his wish that the town should retain its privileges. The minutes of the municipal meeting, at which this decision was come to, are in existence, and they show how the Romance language was written at Martel in those days: 'Item fo ordenat que Moss.

There is one about whom there can be no doubt at all. As early as 1351, amidst all his embroilments and all his reconciliations with his father-in-law, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, had concluded with Edward III. a secret treaty, whereby, in exchange for promises he received, he recognized his title as King of France. In 1355 his treason burst forth.

Some proceedings, on the part of the new monarch, were regarded as a signal to break the truce which had subsisted for a short time between the English and the French. Various displays of hostilities followed, and many negotiations were entered into without success. The Black Prince, being appointed captain-general, sailed for Bordeaux in August, 1355, and arrived there after an easy passage.

This, and his refusal to accept any of the royal princesses chosen by his father, so enraged Dom Affonso that he determined to have Dona Inez killed, and this was done by three knights on 7th January 1355 in the Quinta das Lagrimas that is, the Garden of Tears near Coimbra.