According to the terms of the Treaty of Bre'tigny, which was sealed on 8 May 1360, Edward III was to be given full, sovereign rule over Guienne, Saintonge, the Angoumois, Poitou, the Limousin, Pe'rigord, the Agenais, Rouergue, Guare, Bigorre and Quercy, as well as Calais, Gu� nes, and the surrounding areas, and on top of these lands he was to receive the almost unimaginably huge sum of 3,000,000 gold écus, or £500,000. The French, furthermore, agreed to abandon their troublesome old alliance with the Scots. In exchange, Edward was to cancel his own alliance with the Flemings, abandon his claim to the French throne, and agree to a perpetual peace and alliance with Valois France. Surprisingly enough, the current orthodoxy holds that these terms represented a major defeat for Edward III, one which he accepted only because of the threat of imminent military disaster. It seems to me, however, that this interpretation, put forward most elaborately by John Le Patourel but also found in the works of Kenneth Fowler, Edouard Perroy, Philippe Contamine and others, is wrong on both counts: the treaty was in fact a triumph for King Edward rather than a surrender, and the campaign of 1359- 1360 was hardly the military failure often described.

To decide whether the terms of the Treaty of Bre'tigny represent a strategic success or a strategic failure, it is necessary to review the history of English war-aims and peace negotiations over the preceding quarter century. One reason for the misinterpretation of the peace of 1360 is a number of misreadings of the terms of earlier, unimplemented agreements. Let us begin with the English objectives. Edward III began his war with France with three basic aims: to end French interference in his subjugation of Scotland; to end the meddling of the Valois royal administration in his government of his French territories, especially Guienne, by persuading the

French to acknowledge that he held them as allods (that is, in sovereignty, not as a vassal's fiefs); and to regain the lands occupied by Charles of Valois in 1324 which by the treaties of 1326 and 1329 were supposed to be returned to the Plantagenets but which, by the outbreak of the war in 1337, it had become clear that the French did not intend to hand over.