In 1340, two more young "royals" were buried beside John of Eltham in St. Edmund's Chapel. These were his nephew and niece who died quite young--William of Windsor and Blanche de la Tour--children of Edward the Third. The boy was born at Windsor, which was fast becoming a rival to Westminster as a royal residence; and little Blanche was born at the Tower of London. The effigies in white alabaster are very small, only about twenty inches long: but they are in full costume of the time. The boy wears the short close-fitting jerkin, with a wide jewelled belt round the hips, and a flowing cloak fastened with a jewelled clasp falls to his feet. The little girl has on a full long petticoat with a tightly fitting bodice, to the square neck of which her mantle is fastened by a cordon with a rose and two studs. The hideous muffled chins of the last century had given place to a horned headdress (the horns are broken in little Blanche's effigy) and a close net of gold, each wide mesh, through which the hair shows, being fastened at the crossing with pearls or precious stones. Blanche's feet rest against a little lion: but her brother's have been broken off obliquely. The tomb altogether has been cruelly used, and no trace of the children's faces remain. Yet who can wonder, when we see the way in which John of Eltham's splendid monument has been mutilated.
[Illustration: TOMB OF WILLIAM OF WINDSOR AND HIS SISTER BLANCHE.]
When these two little children were laid to rest in the Abbey, their father was just beginning his great wars with France--the wars that lasted for a hundred years and only ended in Henry the Sixth's reign with England's final loss of her French possessions. And six years after, in 1346, Cressy was fought and won by their brother, the Black Prince. With the battle of Cressy, England entered upon a career of military glory, which, though for a time it proved fatal to her higher interests, gave her a life and energy she had never known before, and laid the foundation of the Englishman's dogged love of fighting that is not quite dead yet, if we may judge by the way British soldiers and sailors fought at El Teb.
At Cressy, too, Feudalism received its death blow, when the English churl struck down the French noble, and the despised yeoman "proved more than a match in sheer hard fighting for the knight." Though the nobles rode into battle as of old at the head of their vassals and retainers, the body of the army consisted no longer of baronial levies, but of stout Englishmen serving willingly for pay, and armed like Chaucer's Yeoman on the pilgrimage to Canterbury:--