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"The French were also unified by their hatred of the French (meaning the Franks) but they weren't French yet..."

Premature anti-Frenchists... I respect their enthusiasm.

[muawiyah]

The French, who weren't even French yet, but unassimilated etc (listed above) did invent the chevauchée whereas the English had only the pall mall ~ and those things'd give you cancer!

The other day while reading through one of those older scanned books you can find on the net I ran across a reference to Cornwall that referred to it as being the country that lie on both sides of the English Channel ~ that is, today's Cornwall and Brittany.

I'd already surmised that they worked in unison, but this reference suggested they worked in unison up to the end of the Hundred Year's War ~ and were quite a bit wealthier than their neighbors the English and French who were busy impoverishing each other with warfare.

Supposedly whoever it was in charge of Nantes during that period also held title to most of the land currently counted as being part of Cornwall, so that would have been one of the larger mini-states that were common in Europe in the 1300-1500s.