introduced.
    In Louis XIth's time extraordinary commotions existed throughout all Europe.
England's civil wars were ended rather in appearance than reality, by the
short-lived ascendency of the House of York. Switzerland was asserting that
freedom which was afterwards so bravely defended. In the Empire, and in France,
the great vassals of the crown were endeavouring to emancipate themselves from
its control, while Charles of Burgundy by main force, and Louis more artfully by
indirect means, laboured to subject them to subservience to their respective
sovereignties. Louis, while with one hand he circumvented and subdued his own
rebellious vassals, laboured secretly with the other to aid and encourage the
large trading towns of Flanders to rebel against the Duke of Burgundy, to which
their wealth and irritability naturally disposed them. In the more woodland
districts of Flanders the Duke of Gueldres and William de la Marck, called from
his ferocity the Wild Boar of Ardennes, were throwing off the habits of knights
and gentlemen, to practise the violences and brutalities of common bandits.
    A hundred secret combinations existed in the different provinces of France
and Flanders; numerous private emissaries of the restless Louis - Bohemians,
pilgrims, beggars, or agents disguised as such - were everywhere spreading the
discontent which it was his policy to maintain in the dominions of Burgundy.
    Amidst so great an abundance of materials it was difficult to select such as
should be most intelligible and interesting to the reader; and the Author had to
regret that, though he made liberal use of the power of departing from the
reality of history, he felt by no means confident of having brought his story
into a pleasing, compact, and sufficiently intelligible form. The main-spring of
the plot is that which all who know the least of the feudal system can easily
understand, though the facts are absolutely fictitious. The right of a feudal
superior was in nothing more universally acknowledged than in his power to
interfere in the marriage of a female vassal. This may appear to exist as a
contradiction both of the civil and canon law, which declare that marriage shall
be free, while the feudal or municipal jurisprudence, in case of a fief passing
to a female, acknowledges an interest in the superior of the fief to dictate the
choice of her companion in marriage. This is accounted for on the principle that
the superior was, by his bounty, the original granter of the fief, and is still
interested that the marriage of the vassal shall place no one there who may be
inimical to his liege lord. On the other hand, it might be reasonably pleaded
that this right of dictating to the vassal