What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact. - Barbara W. Tuchman

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.