For nearly two hundred years the English ruled Abbeville. When, in 1272, Eleanor of Castile was married to Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., the town was included in the estates which she brought to England as her dowry; and being near the sea coast, and consequently within easy reach of England, its new lords were able to retain their hold upon the city even after the disastrous close of the Hundred Years' War had given almost every English conquest back to France. Towards the end of the fifteenth century it fell into the hands of the Burgundian party, but the French crown finally reclaimed it in 1477. Since that time it has twice seen an international alliance concluded within its gates. In 1514, Anne of Brittany, the wife of Louis XII.--"Pater Patria"--died without having an heir in the direct line, and her husband, unwilling that the crown should go to François d'Angoulême, determined to take another wife, and made advances to Henry VIII. for the hand of his beautiful sister, Mary Tudor; and after the negotiations were completed, they were married at Abbeville. As far as Louis's purpose went, however, the marriage was a failure, as the King died a few months later, and the Duc d'Angoulême, his son-in-law, ascended his throne as François Ier. To his reign belongs the second alliance in the history of Abbeville, the pact signed between the King of France and Cardinal Wolsey, on behalf of Henry VIII., against the common enemy, Charles V.--a figure so commanding, so infinitely greater than his contemporaries, that beside him the brilliancy of François, the gallantry of Henry, and the pomp and magnificence of his favourite Wolsey, seemed entirely eclipsed, and the three men appear almost as puppets, unstable and vacillating, now the closest of friends, and now the bitterest of enemies.
Abbeville still maintains many of the old picturesque landmarks which made it a favourite sketching ground for Prout and for Ruskin. The market-place is surrounded by a number of houses with high pitched gables, coloured in various tints of white, grey and pale green. Some beautiful drawings by Ruskin, executed in pencil and tint, which have lately been exhibited to the public, bear testimony to its picturesqueness, of which a great deal still remains in the side streets and along the river front.