Many of the decapitated nobles were at least friends of Edward. Without being guilty of treason, they might well have considered the rights of De Montfort in Brittany as superior to those of Charles of Blois. Edward denounced the assassinations committed by King Philip in issuing an order to his lieutenants to recommence the war. The French were by no means gladdened at this renewal of hostilities. They feared not so much the enemy as the tax-gatherer, and began to think that their intolerable burdens would be made permanent. In February, 1345, therefore, Philip found it necessary to issue a proclamation, stating that it was not his intention to unite the gabelle of salt or the tax of four deniers the livre to his domain: in other words, he promised that they were not to be permanent. Edward had hitherto neglected Guienne, against which his enemies directed their principal efforts. The chief men of Bordeaux and Bayonne and the noblesse, true to the English crown, came to the festivity which Edward gave on the occasion of his instituting the order of the Garter, and their representations made so great an impression on him, that he despatched Lord Derby soon after, with three hundred knights, six hundred men-at-arms, and a greater number of infantry, to Bayonne. The French, not in force to defend the country south of the Dordogne, endeavoured to prevent Lord Derby from passing that river at Bergerac, and marching to the recovery of Périgord and the districts north of Bordeaux. The English accomplished this, the Genoese alone withstanding their arrows, and the troops which the French had raised in the county flying before them. Derby marched into Périgord, and so well provided was he with what Froissart calls artillery, his engines throwing immense stones, that all the fortresses in upper Gascony submitted to him. The strongest of these was Auberoche, which fortress, as soon as Derby retired for the winter to Bordeaux, the nobles of the county in the French interest came to besiege. There were ten or twelve hundred of them, and Auberoche was hard pressed. Lord Derby and Sir Walter Manny instantly left Bordeaux, with three hundred lances and six hundred archers, and, with this small force, surprised and fell upon the army besieging Auberoche at the time of supper. The French were routed, and all the chief nobles of the district taken: every English soldier had two or three. The consequence of this victory was not only the fall of Réole and the places held by Philip north of the Garonne, but the capture of the important town of Angoulême by Lord Derby. The general submission to the English commander was not only due to his prowess, but to his _gentillesse_, in preventing his soldiers from pillaging and burning the towns and massacring the prisoners, as was then generally the custom in war. [Sidenote: [1345-1346 A.D.]]