The mounting of the men-at-arms for the pursuit gave the finishing touch to the English tactical methods, and the nation was now ready for war on a grander scale. Moreover, there was playing round the knees of good Queen Philippa a little boy of three years old who was destined to be the victor of Poitiers. It is therefore time, while the quarrel which led to the Hundred Years' War is maturing, to observe the point to which two centuries and a half of progress had brought English military organisation. AUTHORITIES.--By far the best, so far as I know the only, account of the rise of English tactics and of English military power is to be found in _Die Entwickelung des Kriegswesens in der Ritterzeit_, by Major-General Köhler, vol. ii. pp. 356 sq., and vol. v. pp. 97 sq., a work to which my obligations must be most gratefully acknowledged. The authorities are faithfully and abundantly quoted. Freeman's _Norman Conquest_, Mr. J. H. Round's _Feudal England_, Hewitt's _Ancient Armour_, Oman's _Art of War in the Middle Ages_, Grose's _Military Antiquities_, and Rymer's _Fœdera_ are authorities which will occur to every one, as also the Constitutional Histories of Hallam, Stubbs, and Gneist. CHAPTER II Attention has already been called to the defects of the feudal system for military purposes, and to the shifts whereby successive sovereigns sought to make them good. With Edward the Second resort was made to a new device. Contracts, or as they were called indents, were concluded by the King with men of position, whereby the latter, as though they had been apprentices to a trade, bound themselves to serve him with a force of fixed strength during a fixed term at a fixed rate of wages. In some respects this was simply a reversion to the old practice of hiring mercenaries; but as Edward the Third placed his contracts for the most part within his kingdom, the force assumed a national character. The current ideas of organisation were still so imperfect that the contractors generally engaged themselves to provide a mixed force of all arms; but as they naturally raised men where they could most easily get hold of them, that is to say in their own neighbourhoods, there was almost certainly some local or personal feeling to help to keep them together. For the rest the contractor of course made his own arrangements for the interior economy of his own particular troops, and enjoyed in consequence considerable powers, which descended to the colonels of a later day and have only been stripped from them within the last two generations. It is not difficult to imagine that men thus enlisted should presently, when released from national employment, have sold their services to the highest bidder and become, as they presently did become, _condottièri_. It is characteristic of the commercial genius of our race that England should be the cradle not only of the soldier but of the _condottière_;[15] in other words, that she should have set the