Being thus delivered from every external war and declared enemy, the wise King of France was at liberty to devote himself to the re-establishment of internal peace and of order throughout his kingdom, which was in the most pressing need thereof.
We have, no doubt, even in our own day, cruel experience of the disorders and evils of war; but we can form, one would say, but a very incomplete idea of what they were in the fourteenth century, without any of those humane administrative measures, still so ineffectual,--provisionings, hospitals, ambulances, barracks, and encampments,--which are taken in the present day to prevent or repair them.

The _Recueil des Ordonnances des Lois de France_ is full of safeguards granted by Charles V.to monasteries and hospices and communes, which implored his protection, that they might have a little less to suffer than the country in general.
We will borrow from the best informed and the most intelligent of the contemporary chroniclers, the Continuer of William of Nangis, a picture of those sufferings and the causes of them.

"There was not," he says, "in Anjou, in Touraine, in Beauce, near Orleans and up to the approaches of Paris, any corner of the country which was free from plunderers and robbers.

They were so numerous everywhere, either in little forts occupied by them or in the villages and country-places, that peasants and tradesfolks could not travel but at great expense and great peril.

The very guards told off to defend cultivators and travellers took part most shamefully in harassing and despoiling them.