The Large Companies were bands of adventurers, in turn soldiers and brigands, who enrôlaient themselves to make fortune, and who resorted to plundering as soon as they did not find any more enemies to be fought.

In 1366, Charles V, who did not need their services, skilfully decided them to take the way of Spain, and Du Guesclin, which could speak to them, succeeds with leading to it: it was only forced to make them some concessions, and it was on its authorities that the Pope, to save Avignon of their visit, made them give by his legate one present of one hundred thousand franks and the discharge of their innumerable sins.

The English were not happier on sea than on ground.

A many fleet, carrying 10 000 soldiers and a formidable artillery, put the seat in front of Saint-Malo, but the Breton ones, firmly determined not to become English, resisted all the attacks, and the duke of Lancaster, after having made rage of all his guns against the city, was tiny room to be withdrawn (1378).

During this time the French fleet and the fleet Castilian devastated the coasts of England, and burned several cities there.

It was under the reign of Charles V that Dieppois sailors, by seeking a passage towards the Indies, discovered the gulf and the coasts of Guinea; they brought back of it an enormous quantity of defenses of elephants, that the natives sold to them at cheap price, and thus the ivory sculpture became a particular industry of the town of Dieppe.

The first establishment that they founded (1334) accepted the name of Small-Dieppe, and they kept a long time the monopoly of the trade with the countries of Africa.

The chroniclers were the first writers in prose who gave up Latin for French.

Four names dominate all the others, Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart and Commynes.

Villehardouin, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, writes the history of the conquest of Constantinople; Joinville, one century later, tells the reign of Louis saint, of which he was the devoted servant; Froissart, which lived in second half of the fourteenth century, left a marvellous account of the One Hundred Years old war, until the year 1400: it is a brilliant storyteller who likes to describe the beautiful feats of arms, the massacres, cruelties, the tournaments and the festivals.

Commynes, born with the middle of the fifteenth century, makes known to us Louis XI and Charles the Bold one; it is a true historian, who seeks the causes of the event and their consequences, studies the institutions and penetrates the secrecies of the policy.