As often happens with men of extraordinary force Philip the Fair did not bequeath any legacy of energy to his sons. Philip of Valois, son of Philip the Fair’s brother, had no notable inheritance of character, but he was made of livelier stuff than his cousins. Although three reigns had passed since his uncle’s death it was only a period of fourteen years, and the royal power was then at the greatest point of concentration it had yet reached. A man of but ordinary vigor and judgment, one would suppose, would have been able to entrench himself strongly. Yet the promise of Philip’s early years of victory over the Flemish was unfulfilled by his serious defeats at the hands of the English. He jumped into the arena promptly enough. At his coronation at Rheims on Trinity Sunday, 1328, the Count of Flanders, whose duty it was to bear the great sword, did not answer the herald’s summons, although he was there in plain view. When Philip asked for an explanation his vassal answered that he had been called by his title, and, because of the disobedience of his people, his title was now but empty sound. Philip was fired with instant sympathy. “Fair Cousin,” he said, “we will swear to you by the holy oil which hath this day trickled over our brow that we will not enter Paris again before seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the countship of Flanders.” He found that he had entered upon no easy task, for the Flemish burghers were both brave and obstinate. However, he won a brilliant victory at Cassel, where, according to Froissart, of sixteen thousand Flemish “all were left there dead and slain in three heaps one upon another.” So annoyed was Philip by the trouble he had been put to to save his word unbroken that he gave the Count of Flanders some rather threatening advice when he left to make his deferred entrance into Paris. “Count,” he said, “I have worked for you at my own and my barons’ expense; I give you back your land, recovered and in peace; so take care that justice be kept up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to return; for, if I do, it will be to my own profit, and to your hurt.” The count, however, could not keep out of embroilment with his people. Because England supplied the wool which the Flemish looms wove it was important to the manufacturers of Flanders that peace should be preserved between the two countries. Heedless of this necessity, the Count of Flanders, in 1336, eight years after the battle of Cassel, ordered the imprisonment of all the English in Flanders. King Edward retaliated in kind and clapped into jail all the Flemish merchants in England. The people of both countries were well aware that Philip of France was the instigator of all this turmoil.