That it was not was due to two serious misjudgments on the part of the King of France. It provoked what proved to be the last great English campaign in France in the fourteenth century. This final push, on which the English expended much treasure, ended in a humiliating failure. But it cost France two critical years and its government a serious loss of face. The virtual abandonment of the attempt to eject the English from Gascony was a less dramatic and perhaps less obvious mistake but in the long term proved to be even more significant.
It was a missed opportunity which France would not make good until the middle of the fifteenth century. The struggle between the two countries subsided by into a tired stalemate, followed by two decades in which public opinion became increasingly hostile to the war in both countries.
Governments presided over by incapable monarchs were weakened by internal dissension, deficits and the distracting personal ambitions of the princes who stood behind the thrones: Louis of Anjou and Philip of Burgundy in France, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock in England.
The proclamation passed almost unnoticed at the time. John was in England and did not hear of it for several months. The trial opened on 4 December in the great chamber of the Parlement of Paris before the King and the handful of the peers of France who had not sent their excuses. The outcome would have been a foregone conclusion even if John had been there to answer. In one sense all this was an empty formality.
French armies had already overrun the whole of the duchy except for the western extremity of the peninsula which was controlled by the English garrison of Brest.
