All these changes were symptoms of a great movement that was passing over all Europe. The art of war, like all the other arts, was undergoing a transformation so fundamental that it has received the name of a renascence. England, cut off by her expulsion out of France from her former contact with continental nations, exhausted by her civil wars, reduced to her true position as a naval power, and above all wedded to the peculiar system which had brought her such success, lagged behind other nations in the path of military reform. The century of the Tudors' reign is for the English army a century of learning, and to understand it aright we must first look abroad to the countries that were before her in the school, and glance at the innovations that were introduced by each of them in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not without such study can we trace to their source innumerable points, great and small, that are observable in our army of to-day, nor grasp to the full the greatness of the English soldiers who, long before the renascence of the art of war, had divined its leading principles, had established for their country noble military traditions, and above all had made it a national principle that the English must always beat the French. AUTHORITIES.--Monstrelet as before is the most important authority for the wars in France. The _Wars of the English in France_ (Rolls Series) are valuable in elucidation. For the rise of the Scots in France M. Francisque Michel's _Les Ecossais en France_, and Forbes Leith's _Scots Men-at-Arms in France_. For the Wars of the Roses the sources of information are proverbially meagre, but the material has been worked up with admirable skill by Mr. Oman in his _Warwick_, to which I am greatly indebted. For the reorganisation of the French Army Daniel's _Ancien milice Française_ may be consulted. BOOK II CHAPTER I [Sidenote: 1420.]