Attached piecemeal to the French royal domain in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Picardy might seem on the maps to be a region close to the centre of royal power in the later middle ages. Such an impression, however, is deceptive. Though it formed no single province or appanage, the centrifugal tendencies of its nobles and the independent urban traditions of an area that had been at the centre of the early mediaeval communal movements were enough to ensure that the grip of the crown had been periodically weakened during the fourteenth-century struggles with the Plantagenets, fatally so in the fifteenth. Such interests were realigned during the late fourteenth-century ‘régime of the dukes’ around the Valois dukes of Burgundy. For much of the fifteenth century, the region was controlled by the English or Burgundians, formally so after the Treaty of Arras in 1435 conceded the Somme towns to Philip the Good, on condition that the crown might redeem them at some future date; Boulogne and Ponthieu were ceded without condition to the male line of the Burgundian dukes.

Burgundy was the dominant power in northern France from the 1420s to 1477 and became in consequence deeply embedded in the clientage networks of the local nobility. Artois, with its intimate connections with Flanders, was a natural adjunct of the Burgundian state; Picardy, which in a sense stood at the crossroads between the Ile-de-France and the Low Countries, was more equivocal in its loyalties.