Soon the French host was wavering in a fatal confusion.

"You are my vassals, my friends," cried the blind John of Bohemia to the German nobles around him, "I pray and beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that I may strike one good blow with this sword of mine!" Linking their bridles together, the little company plunged into the thick of the combat to fall as their fellows were falling.

The battle went steadily against the French.
At last Philip himself hurried from the field, and the defeat became a rout.

Twelve hundred knights and thirty thousand foot-men--a number equal to the whole English force--lay dead upon the ground.
[Sidenote: The Yeoman] "God has punished us for our sins," cries the chronicler of St.Denys in a passion of bewildered grief as he tells the rout of the great host which he had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls.

But the fall of France was hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at a single blow of a system of warfare, and with it of the political and social fabric which had risen out of that system.