AT the end of the thirteenth century the ancient feud between France
and England which had existed ever since the Norman Conquest in
1066 assumed a new color. Hitherto all the wars between them had
been wars of a feudal nature arising from the circumstance that the
English king held in France, though in vassalage to the French king,
the provinces of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, Guienne
and Gascony, in addition to controlling the policy of certain other
fiefs adjacent to these territories, of all of which the French king
coveted possession. In 1204 Philip II had conquered the lands north
of the Loire from John of England; in 1224 Poitou passed to France.
But in the southwest the great rich territories of Guienne and Gascony
still were held of England. These two provinces were an object of
French territorial ambition in the reign of Philip IV. But the induce-
ment was now not so much of a feudal nature as of an economic
nature.

The entire character of the rivalry between England and France was
changed by the end of the thirteenth century. Once feudal and political,
the antagonism between them now became primarily a commercial
one, in which the stakes were the wine trade of Gascony and the
woolen manufactures of Flanders, which were dependent on English
raw wool. A conditional factor was sea-power or maritime supremacy
in the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel, then often called the
"Narrow Sea." A glance at the map will show that the bond of con-
nection between England and Flanders and between England and Gas-
cony was the sea. It was absolutely necessary in the interest of Eng-
lish commerce that England be able to keep the sea lanes open between
the eastern ports of England and the ports of Flanders, and between
Southampton or Portsmouth and Bordeaux.

Another ground of dispute between the two nations was the fisheries
in the North Sea, the Channel and the Bay of Biscay, the last the
greatest whaling ground of the Middle Ages. Bayonne throve on whal-
ing. The hardy Basque fishermen were famous whalers, and to this

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