In the fourteenth century, the French infantry, composed merely of more or less badly-armed archers, inspired its leaders with no great confidence. Its want of skill and its cowardice too often compromised the issue of an engagement. It was necessary, in order to support those combatants always ready to take to flight, to employ foreign mercenaries, English, Italian, or German, who fought well when they were liberally paid. These mercenaries, more practised in war and more courageous than the soldiers of the ban, were entrusted with the management of the cannon, which at this time were first employed, and which were carried by the camp followers. We may here repeat what we have spoken of elsewhere, viz., that the imperfections of the earliest cannons, the difficulty which attended their use, and the danger incurred by those who discharged them, caused the old arms to be long preferred to these new ones. In fact, long after the new artillery had made considerable progress, it was employed simultaneously with the ancient style of projectiles. The long period during which this important transition in projectile weapons was slowly taking place, was one of the most wretched in the annals of military art. All the great battles of the fourteenth century present us with striking examples of an entire absence of skill in tactics. Mons-en-Puelle (1304), where King Philippe le Bel was all but surprised in his camp; Cassel (1328), where Philippe de Valois escaped half naked from his enemies’ hands; Crecy (1346), where the English used cannon for the first time; Poitiers (1356), where King John was taken prisoner on the battle-field; Nicopolis (1393), where knighthood covered itself with disgrace; Agincourt, where the flower of the French nobility perished--are all examples of the most shameful confusion during the struggle, of the most disgraceful butchery after the defeat. It is not too much to say, that during the whole of this long epoch of bloody contests, true knights and staunch soldiers were very rare, and that good leaders were even rarer still. In Italy, the _condottieri_, whose principal commander was the Englishman, John Hawkwood, and in France, the free companies, commanded by the renowned Armand de Cervoles, and even those bands of _routiers_, _Brabançons_, and _tard-venus_, who pillaged and plundered the realm to such an extent, says an old chronicler, “that not even a cock was heard to crow in it,” were the only troops who showed any acquaintance with the resources of military warfare or the slightest knowledge of strategic science. It was amongst the ranks of these indefatigable soldiers that the celebrated Bertrand du Guesclin made his first campaign (Fig. 47).