JAMES . S HISTORY OF EDWARD THE BLACK PRINCE.

THE character and exploits of the Black Prince tire a part of his- tory, or form a splendid historical episode, rather than a history itself. Prince EDWARD exercised an independent sway only in

his brief and unsuccessful government of the Provinces conquered in the South of France, and assigned to him by his father under

the title of Aquitaine. With the exception of the brilliant victory of Poitiers, he was not so much a commander, as a gallant and chivalrous soldier, whom circumstances rendered conspicuous, and whom knightly courage and courtesy have rendered famous to all ages. At Cressy, be had neither responsibility nor power ; his extreme youth deprived him of actual command, although his station gave him a nominal one. At the singular and romantic night melh of Calais, fortune rendered his father the most con- spicuous person for knightly deeds. The expeditions of the Black Prince in France, however successful in scattering his opponents, ravaging; their lands, and taking their towns and castles, were distinguished by no singular circumstances, and produced no en- during effects : except the campaign that closed with the battle of Poitiers, they were marked by no grand event. The courage and skill exhibited upon that bloody field, with the courteous consi- deration and chivalrous humility displayed after the victory, and in the subsequent entry into London, are subjects of striking and dazzling interest ; but, in their leading points, they are known as well and as widely as the language. The same cannot perhaps be said of his successful invasion of Spain to restore PETER the Cruel, or of the decisive battle of Najarra ; but they are known sufficiently—as much as they deserve; for PETER and EDWARD ought never to have been connected, and Najarra was a mere vic- tory. Few, except the professed readers of history, know the de- tails of the Black Prince's unsuccessful government of Aquitaine; nor is it needful that they should. The loss of the English pro- vinces belongs to history, and history tells it. The sad termina- tion of such a glorious career—when EDWARD, deprived of the means of paying his army by the treachery of a tyrant he never should have trusted, involved in a struggle for his territory by the discontent of his new subjects and the rising power of his old. enemies, and sinking himself under a mortal disease, returned home to die—is a mournful historical episode, and an episode unfit to stand alone.

Nor are particulars enough preserved of the Prince's private life to furnish matter of characteristic interest. We know that his profusion kept him always involved in pecuniary difficulties. We also know that he married his cousin, the daughter of the Earl of Kent, commonly called "the Fair Maid of Kent." It is said that the Black Prince sought the hand of the young and wealthy widow for a friend; but, meeting a decided refusal from the mother, afterwards obtained her for himself, having lost his heart during his proxy courtship. All the rest of his personal career is matter of regal grant or knightly joust. The biographer must draw his matter from the dryness of state papers, or the quaintness of an heraldic chronicler.

The hero of the work before us seems therefore unfit for the subject of a book ; he is evidently incapable of occupying two- thlek octavos. Indeed, the mode of treatment which Mr. JAMES has adopted, sufficiently supports this opinion. The History of the Life of Edward the Black Prince consists of 1038 pages. We pass 388 pages before we learn any thing more of the nominal hero of the volumes than mere formal facts, that might be told in a single page ; and this bareness is not remedied afterwards by any closer narrative. The work contains forty-two chapters ; not more than half-a-dozen are solely devoted to the Black Prince. We have not attempted to reckon in how many his name is mentioned, however meagerly ; but we do not think it would amount to half. The book, in fact, is an historical hodge-podge, without unity, and so far as we can see, without purpose. It commences with the reign of EDWARD the Second; it treats in its progress of the his- tories of Flanders, of France, of Spain, and of Scotland. This is

not done succinctly ; neither is it done completely or continuously;

though it is spun out to a bewildering length and a tedious mi- nuteness. We read much and learn little. Mr. JAMES displays

great industry, great research, great honesty ; but Ile seems to have neither critical nor historical perception. He is so wrapt up in antiquity, that one fact to him is as good as another, provided he finds it in a chronicler. He scarcely draws any difference be- tween actions which must always preserve a romantic attraction from the sigularity of their circumstances, and those which, even at the time of their occurrence, had little more than alocal interest. Nor is his uxecution of a nature to redeem these faults. He ex- pands his style by a lawyer-like enumeration of particulars, when he should embrace them in a comprehensive description ; and too often attempts to dignify very commonplace facts, or commonplace thoughts, by clothing them in the inflated language of romance. In many places this defect, indeed, is not visible; but we incline to attribute it more to the magnitude of the events than to the judgment of the historian. This criticism applies to the work as a whole. There are parts of it that will yield pleasure in the perusal, by their novelly and their character. The age was singular, marked, and various. In Flanders, the burghers had risen to considerable wealth, and acquired great power, which they used to expel or curb their native princes. In England, the municipal corporations and their magistates bud attained considerable distinction ; much as we talk

about the aristocratical pride of the middle ages, royalty itself con- descended to dine with wealthy traders; the commons were

aspiring alter liberty; and the splendidly barbarous feats of

chivalry were practised in all their glory at the court of EDWARD. France, dismembered and devastated, had to contend at once with zi combination of natural, social, and political evils. Famine and

pestilence invaded her plains. Her nobles and commons struggled with the monarch for power ; and in the streets of turbulent and insurrectionary Paris, the Dauphin and the demagogue simulta- neously harangued the citizen mob. The foreign armies, which treaties left unemployed, set up for themselves : many of the people they bad ruined joined them ; and hence arose numerous hordes of mercenaries halt-brigand half-soldier, whose generic term -was Free Companions, or, more self-complacently, Great Compa- nies. The wretched peasantry beset at once by such numerous evils, goaded by the remembrance of the past tyranny of their

lords, and instigated by the opportunity which the absence of so -many in Englamil as prisoners gave them, rose in a servile insur- rection, and committed unheard-of atrocities : whilst the regular

partisan warfare, the romantic enterprises and exploits of indivi- duals, and the jousts and tournaments of chivalry, are often full of an archaeological kind of charm, and strongly mark the manners -and character of the times.

In various sections of Mr. JAMES'S book, the spirit of all these things is indicated, or brought out ; sometimes by the narrative of the author himself, sometimes by abridgments and quotations from the original chronicler. We take a specimen from the gene- 1.0 account of the war of the Jacquerie; whose atrocities bore no

small resemblance to those which distinguished the Revolutionary iusurrection four or five hundred years later.

The first rise of the Jacquerie took place in May 1:35S, by which time the state of the country had arrived at such a pitch of confusion, that the inha bitants of each village were obliged to fortify the ends of their streets and keep watch and ward as in a city the proprietors of lands on the banks of large ,rivers spent the night in boats moored in the midst of the stream ; and the high roads throughout the land, scarcely traceable amongst grass and -weeds, attested the interruption of all ordinary communication, and the general disorganization of society. While this melancholy state continued, a handful of peasants in the neighbourhood of St. Leu and Clermont, in Beauvoisis, not amowiting in the whole to a hundred men, met for the ostensible purpose of bewailing their fate. From lamentations they proceeded to murmurs, and from murmurs to outrage. Rude orators started up amongst them ; and declar- ing that the knights and gentlemen were the causes of all the misery they suf- fered, the betrayers of their country, and the destroyers of the state, they found ready listeners and prompt instruments ; and the assemblage, with one consent, declared that they would put to death all the gentlemen in the land. The cry spread throughout the country ; village after village took it up, the serfs poured 'forth armed with pikes, a number of the more discontented commons of the towns joined them, and taking the title of Jacques, from the name of "Jacques bonhornme," which the nobles had been accustomed to apply to them, they proceeded in large bodies through the country, with a determination to slaughter all the gentry without discrimination. Their first success was in an attack upon one of the fortified houses of the lime, which they broke into, slew the knight to whom it belonged, and mas- sacred his wife and children of all ages. Still, as they proceeded, their numbers increased, and one crime quickly brought on others of a deeper die. Women -were violated before their husbands, their children, or their fathers, and slaughtered by their side. Fire, plunder, and massacre swept some of the fairest re,gions of France; castles were stormed and taken; palaces and houses were levelled with the ground ; and at every step some new and fiendish cruelty was invented by the revolted peasantry. A single instance may suffice. Al- most all the respectable classes fled before their approach ; but in one of the castles taken, not far from Clermont, they found a gentleman of the country, with iris wife and several young children. The knight was instantly slain ; and after having committed the most horrid excesses on the person of the un- happy lady, they roasted the body of her dead husband, and eudeavoured to force her and her children to eat the flesh. They ended with an act of mercy —the death of all ; and having burned the castle to the ground, proceeded to -commit new crimes in the country before them.

The insurrection now spread in every direction ; and under the leading of one of the most infamous of the degraded monsters who blackened their cause, by rendering their existence a tissue of brutal horrors, their proceedings as- sumed a greater degree of importance, and threatened the very being of society in France. Against the female sex in general their detestable hatred seems to have been excited ; and it is impossible to furnish a sufficient picture of the strange and awful mingling of animal appetite and ferocious cruelty which their conduct displayed. The fall of a great body of nobles at Cressy at Poitiers, together with the imprisonment of a multitude in England, had left the ladies of France almost unprotected ; and while the Jacques, separated into several bathes, marched on through the Beauvoisis, Soissonois, and Vermondois, a num- ber of unprotected women of the highest families in France fled to Meaux, only guarded by the young Duke of Orleans and a mere handful of men at- arms. By this time, however, several bodies of the nobility were moving against the Jacques, though the great inferiority of their numbers would have rendered the efforts of the knights perfectly unavailing had their adversaries passessed the slightest military knowledge. Caillet, their principal leader, was Slain near Clermont, with three thousand of his companion% by the King of Navarre ; and a great many detached bodies were cut to pieces in the fields.

But the principal torrent was now flowing towards Meaux; and the tidings that the young Dateless of Normandy, the Dutch."' of Orleans, and neat three hundred ladies had sought refuge in that town, drew otO the bands of re Yelled serfs from the countries round about, api well as multitetnet from Paris and other towns, filled with every fearful passion that can brutalize humanity., Meaux itself might have been defended ; but it waif unhappily found by the Duke of Orleans and his fair companions, after they lord taken refuge within its walls, that the inhabitants were among the most discontented of the com- munes, and the strongest partisans of the Jacquerie. tin&r these eircesn- stances, he retreated to the town-house and a market-place, defended by the river Marne, which flows through the middle of the city; and here the whole party awaited their fate in trembling expectation, while the insurgents only de- layed the attack till greater numbers arrived.

It happened, however, that two gallant knights, one attached to France and one to England, were returning together from a campaign in Prussit,•which they had been making as fellow-soldiers during the truce that had supervened between their respective countries. These were the princely Count de Foix, the head of a house fertile in noble names, and the famous Captal de Duch, Knight of the Garter, and one of the most gallant officers in the armies of the Black Prince. Journeying leisurely homeward, accompanied only by fury men-at-arms, they first heard of the horrors of the Jacquerie, and the dangers of the ladies of France, when they arrived at Chalons in Champagne; and;. without a moment's hesitation, they gave their banners to the wind, aud march-- log forward effected their entrance into Meaux. Their arrival spread gladness amongst the fair refugees, but that gladness was of very short duration ; for the overwhelming 'northers of the insurgents which poured down upon the city seemed to render all hope of defence vain. The inhabitants of Meaux threw open their;gateeto the enemy ; and the market- place itself was soon besieged by the Jacques of Brie, while a large body from Paris, under the command of a Le tital grocer called Pierre Gille, followed to swell the ranks of the assailants. Every hour their numbers increased ; and the only alternative left for the choice of the three nobks who commanded in Meaux was to pause and run the risk of the market-place being stormed by the immense multitude without, or to strike one daring blow for deliverance. Their deter mination was soon taken; and drawing up their men in m-der, with the banners of the Duke of Chicane and the Count de Foix and the pennon of the Camel displayed, they er tiered the gates to be thrown open, and with levelled lances rode out upon the serfs. Nothing had been heard before amongst the leaders of the Jacquerie but menaces and imprecations. The sight of the men -at-arms, however, abated the courage, and their advance shook the ranks of the ill disciplined peasants; sonic attempted to fly, the nobles pursued, the villains overthrew and trampled on each other, and in a few minutes the whole was a scene of slaughter and confusion. The insurgents fled in every direetion ; but, jammed up in the narrow streets of a small and confined town, the one impeded the other ; an 1,

while the unsparing swords and the heavy horses of the tnensat-ai ars mowed or • trampled them down by hundreds, their own terror and haste were more de- structive than the enemy. At length, issuing out into the fields, a part of the Jacques escaped ; but not before seven thousand of their number had fidlen under the blows of a handful of men who could scarcely be seen nialueuvering in the plains round Meaux. The knights ceased not the pursuit and slaughter till they were compeneg!. by mere weariness ; and then returning to the city, they bore the glad tidings of their extraordinary victory to the ladies they had left within its dangerous walls.

That single day may be said to have put an end to the Jacquerie. Scarcely a peasant appeared in arms after the rout of Meaux ; and the conduce of the burghers of that town in admitting the nuirderous bands within its walls, was punished by the destruction of the greater pair of the city, which was burned to the ground by the victorious leaders. Thus cadetl the insurrec- tion of the peasantry ; an insurrection for. which there was, unhappily, great cause. Centuries of civilization, however, were wanting to render such a move- ment even hopeful.