was regarded in Europe as a greater and more powerful sovereign than Edward III.

He had the pope settled in the midst of his kingdom; and he often traversed it with an array of valiant nobility whom he knew how to support and serve on occasion as faithfully as he was served by them.
"He was highly prized and honored," says Froissart, "for the victory he had won (at Cassel) over the Flemings, and also for the handsome service he had done his cousin Count Louis.

He did thereby abide in great prosperity and honor, and he greatly increased the royal state; never had there been king in France, it was said, who had kept state like King Philip, and he provided tourneys and jousts and diversions in great abundance." No national interest, no public ground, was provocative of war between the two peoples; it was a war of personal ambition, like that which in the eleventh century William the Conqueror had carried into England.

The memory of that great event was still, in the fourteenth century, so fresh in France, that when the pretensions of Edward were declared, and the struggle was begun, an assemblage of Normans, barons and knights, or, according to others, the Estates of Normandy themselves, came and proposed to Philip to undertake once more, and at their own expense, the conquest of England, if he would put at their head his eldest son, John, their own duke.

The king received their deputation at Vincennes, on the 23d of March, 1339, and accepted their offer.