86 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)capture in 1360 at the siege of Rheims, fetched a more modest £16. Pend-
ing the payment of the agreed ransom sum, the captive was held as a kind of
hostage. Th e wait was sometimes a long one. When Charles d’Orléans (the
French literary fi gure famous for his ballades and rondeaux) was captured
by the En glish at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, for example, he was held
for twenty- six years before his ransom was paid in full. If a prisoner’s ran-
som was paid on his behalf by another party, then that party thereby ac-
quired a lien over the released captive, together with a legal claim on him for
indemnifi cation of the amount paid— with the net eff ect being, then, that
the prisoner’s payment obligation was simply redirected from the captor to
the ransom payer.
One of the most prominent prisoners of the Middle Ages was King John
II of France, who was captured by the En glish at the Battle of Poitiers in
1356, during the Hundred Years War. Aft er some four years as a prisoner,
the Treaty of Brétigny was concluded, in which the “king’s ransom” (all too
literally) was fi xed at three million crowns. John was then released, with his
son left in En glish custody as a hostage pending the payment. Th e escape of
the son from En gland angered his father, as a grave breach of honor. Th is
act, combined with an inability to raise the ransom money, led John to sur-
render himself to the English— an act of nobility that astonished his con-
temporaries. His captors appropriately held him in great honor as an exem-
plar of upright conduct, but he died shortly aft er his arrival in En gland, in
- Another famous royal captive, incidentally, was King Richard I of
En gland, who was taken prisoner in 1192, but that was in essence a case of
kidnapping rather than of capture in war.
Th e Law Merchant
With the great fragmentation of jurisdictions in the Middle Ages, problems
of fi nding a suitable law to apply to cases of foreign trading risked becoming
very acute. Th e solution reached, largely by the merchant community itself,
was, in eff ect, to devise a transnational, uniform body of customary law.
Th is was very much in the spirit of ancient Roman ius gentium, which had
been largely a law of commercial transactions between private individu-
als. Th is medieval counterpart of that earlier law became known as the law
merchant. It dealt with the myriad problems that arose in international