Misery and disease killed a hundred thousand people in Paris alone.

At last the cessation of the war in Holland and the temporary lull of strife in England enabled the Regent to take up again his long-interrupted advance upon the South.

Orleans was the key to the Loire; and its reduction would throw open Bourges where Charles held his court.

Bedford's resources indeed were still inadequate for such a siege; and though the arrival of reinforcements from England under the Earl of Salisbury enabled him to invest it in October 1428 with ten thousand men, the fact that so small a force could undertake the siege of such a town as Orleans shows at once the exhaustion of England and the terror which still hung over France.

As the siege went on however even these numbers were reduced.