In 1340, Edward III officially laid claim to the French throne and thereby transformed his struggle with Philip VI, the Valois king of France, from a feudal squabble between liege lord and vassal into a war between two contenders for the royal succession. In practice, this claim to the throne remained a secondary goal for the English during the Hundred Years War, at core a bargaining tool in their negotiations for an expansion of their continental empire and an end to French sovereignty over those lands. Moreover it enabled Edward III to defend alliances with enemies of the French crown such as Lewis of Bavaria and the Flemings, who were in turn able to pose as supporters of the true king of France against the Valois usurpers: the Flemings informed Benedict XII that they could not be excom- municated for breaking their oaths to the crown because Edward was the rightful king of France. This Machiavellian manipulation of Edward's claim to the French throne for ulterior ends has led many historians to dismiss the

actual legal foundations of that title, influenced also by the pervasive notion that the Salic Law confined the royal succession in France to males in direct line and hence barred Edward from inheriting a claim through his mother, Isabelle. This myth was firmly established by the anonymous French treatise Pour ce que plusieurs (1464) when it was published in conjunction with Claude de Seyssel's La grande monarchie de France in 1507, 1541 and 1557: the anonymous author even claimed that Edward III had publicly accepted that Philip of Valois was rightful heir to the French throne because of the Salic Law. Yet in reality this was an otiose Frankish law concerning private inheritance that could have no direct bearing on the royal succession; more- over, it is clear that the Salic Law was not used by official Valois writers until around 1413, when Jean de Montreuil added a marginal note to a text that he had originally composed in 1406.