the English for 34,000écus.^169 The situation has been neatly summed up
by Michael Jones.‘The war with England...inevitably pushed [both]
Philip VI and John II into exacting exemplary punishment from those
accused of delivering towns or castles, or holding“treasonable”commu-
nications with the enemy, in an attempt to maintain loyalty.’^170 Never-
theless, the fear and hostility that such actions caused meant that, from
the late 1350s onwards, the kings of France drew back from proceeding
against their domestic political opponents‘in such an arbitrary or per-
sonal manner, but [instead] tried...to represent the repression of
treason as the impartial, legal prosecution of a public crime’.^171
The events of 1345–50 had left the unfortunate Raoul with little time
to sire any children by his wife, Catherine of Savoy. (That said, we do
hear a little about a certain John du Bois,‘bastard of Brienne’, who is
sometimes regarded as an illegitimate son. It has to be said that this is
unlikely. If he had been Raoul’s son, he would surely have been the
‘bastard of Eu’, rather than‘of Brienne’.)^172 Whatever the truth on this
particular point, it is clear that Raoul’s execution marks the end of the
Brienne house of Eu. Even if Raoul had had any legitimate children, it is
doubtful whether the king would have relented about confiscating all of
his titles and estates. As we have seen, John II tried to keep Guînes in his
own hand, but he did not manage to hold it for very long. By contrast, a
few years later, he formally accorded the county of Eu to John of Artois,
the son of the traitor Robert, who had played such a significant role in the
outbreak of the Hundred Years’War.^173 As for the post of constable, this
passed into a range of other hands, but it would soon be granted to
Raoul’s kinsman, Walter VI.^174
The Thickets of PoitiersThe fall of the house of Eu may well have encouraged Walter VI to lie
low–and, indeed, to begin to plot his return to the Mediterranean
sphere. There are a number of signs that suggest that, by around this
time, he had given up on any hope of restoration in Florence, and was
turning back towards his old goal of recovering the duchy of Athens. It
was in 1348, for example, that the head of his father, Walter V, was
(^169) Ibid., 156. Guînes was formally surrendered to the English under the terms of the treaty
of Brétigny in 1360. It then remained a part of the‘Pale of Calais’until 1558.
(^170) M. Jones,‘The Last Capetians and Early Valois Kings, 1314– 1364 ’,inThe New
171 Cambridge Medieval History, vi (Cambridge, 2000), 391.
172 Cuttler,The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France, 56.
173 SeeEuropäische Stammtafeln: Neue Folge, iii, part 4, table 683.
See theChronique des comtes d’Eu, 447.^174 See below,180.
The Thickets of Poitiers 177