1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Brétigny

BRÉTIGNY, a French town (dept. Eure-et-Loir, arrondissement and canton of Chartres, commune of Sours), which gave its name to a celebrated treaty concluded there on the 8th of May 1360, between Edward III. of England and John II., surnamed the Good, of France. The exactions of the English, who wished to yield as few as possible of the advantages claimed by them in the treaty of London, made negotiations difficult, and the discussion of terms begun early in April lasted more than a month. By virtue of this treaty Edward III. obtained, besides Guienne and Gascony, Poitou, Saintonge and Aunis, Agenais, Périgord, Limousin, Quercy, Bigorre, the countship of Gaure, Angoumois, Rouergue, Montreuil-sur-mer, Ponthieu, Calais, Sangatte, Ham and the countship of Guines. John II. had, moreover, to pay three millions of gold crowns for his ransom. On his side the king of England gave up the duchies of Normandy and Touraine, the countships of Anjou and Maine, and the suzerainty of Brittany and of Flanders. As a guarantee for the payment of his ransom, John the Good gave as hostages two of his sons, several princes and nobles, four inhabitants of Paris, and two citizens from each of the nineteen principal towns of France. This treaty was ratified and sworn to by the two kings and by their eldest sons on the 24th of October 1360, at Calais. At the same time were signed the special conditions relating to each important article of the treaty, and the renunciatory clauses in which the kings abandoned their rights over the territory they had yielded to one another.

See Rymer’s Foedera, vol. iii; Dumont, Corps diplomatique, vol. ii.; Froissart, ed. Luce, vol. vi.; Les Grandes Chroniques de France, ed. P. Paris, vol. vi.; E. Cosneau, Les Grands Traités de la guerre de cent ans (1889).