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    Medieval History

    Page 9

  • 1330-1382 Nicholas Oresme was another of those pesky Franciscan philosophers at the University of Paris. He studied the action of falling bodies and came up with the observation that the velocity of all falling bodies increases uniformly and at the same rate. People today make a big thing about Galileo dropping things off the leaning power of Pisa and being the first to discover that all objects fall at the same speed. He probably had a press agent. Nicholas went on to say that no one was sure that the sun and stars moved around the Earth, and that it might be that the Earth was rotating.

  • 1340 The English and the French had been fighting for some time, when Edward III brought matters to a head by proclaiming himself king of France. This allowed him to urge the leader of the middle class of Flanders, Jan van Arteveldt, to rebel against French overlordship. The French attacked Flanders, concentrating their fleet at the port of Sluys. This is where the English caught them. In the battle that followed, the ships grappled on to each other so that they formed an almost solid mass. English knights mounted their horses and charged the enemy by jumping from ship to ship. The English won the battle in this improbable manner and established their naval control of the Channel, thus ensuring that the Hundred Years' War would be fought on French soil and French expense.

  • 1350-1364 John the Good, king of France.

  • 1364-1380 Charles V, king of France.

  • 1377-1399 Richard II, king of England.

  • 1378 While on an "inspection" of conditions in Rome, Pope Gregory XI died. The curia met immediately to choose his successor and were put under great popular pressure to choose an Italian. Their choice, an Italian who took the name of Urban VI and whom they had chosen because he was a somewhat shy and retiring chap, turned out to be a lot different once he had gotten to be pope. A large portion of the curia (all of the Frenchmen, in fact) left and repudiated their choice of Urban. They elected another pope Clement VIII, a Frenchman and returned to Avignon.

  • 1380-1422 Charles VI, king of France.

  • 1381 The English Peasants' Revolt. The king's advisors decided that it would be a Good Idea to establish a new tax, and a bunch of peasants, who were tired of paying for a war with France that had been going on since 1336, got together to march on London and ask the young king to reconsider. They presented their ideas to the king, he said that it seemed like a pretty good plan to him and that he would start working on it, Meanwhile, they should go back home and wait. They did. Wat Tyler stayed behind, wanting to discuss the particulars with the king, and so the sheriff of London stabbed him. The king never got around to the reforms he had promised.

  • 1399-1413 Henry IV, king of England.

  • 1413-1422 Henry V, king of England.

    Medieval History Page 10