The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

  The Black Death reached its peak in England in August of the following year. It subsided then but returned with somewhat lessened fury in 1361 and 1368.

  There was no escape possible, even by the method of seclusion made famous by Boccaccio. To go to sea seemed the surest way to invite fate, for the contagion spread more quickly aboard ships than anywhere else. It was not uncommon to see along the southern shores of England ships under full sail being driven by the waters of the Channel, tossing about aimlessly and making it clear that all on board had died. They would vanish finally beyond the horizon into the rough embrace of the Atlantic.

  3

  One of the most astonishing phases of what has been called the Great Emergence (the trend toward modern conditions of living) came about as a result of the Black Death. England, for the first time, began to have labor troubles.

  It happened because the population of the island had been cut almost in half. Most of the great landowners had survived, by immuring themselves behind the thick stone walls of their castles, but after 1349 there were not enough laborers to go around. Much of the land remained untilled and crops were not harvested, while untended flocks and herds ran wild. It followed naturally that a competition developed for the services of the yeomen. Wages went higher and higher, but the laborers, finding such things sweet on the tongue, showed little tendency to work at the beck of the once omnipotent landlord. Labor had gained the upper hand, an extraordinary thing to happen in a country which was still feudal by instinct.

  This could not continue beyond a brief, a very brief, period. The land magnates were stirred to fury, and in the cities the prominent merchants swore they could not pay such wages as were demanded. They overlooked the fact that whatever advantage the poorer classes had gained was swallowed up in the increased cost of living. Not being organized, the people could not make themselves heard at Westminster.

  The solution reached by the government made it very clear that the tendency toward better conditions had not touched the minds of the ruling classes. A royal proclamation was issued making it incumbent on all unemployed to accept work at the wages which had prevailed before the plague. When this failed to have the desired effect, a Statute of Laborers was passed by Parliament which read:

  Every man or woman, of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able of body, and within the age of threescore years—and not having of his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken …

  This meant that the laborer was in a worse position than he had been for a century at least. While his pay went back to the low levels of previous years, the costs of living remained at the highest peak. The sorriest aspect, however, was that again the agrarian laborer was bound to the land. It was specifically forbidden him to quit the parish where he lived in search of better employment. If he disobeyed, he was regarded as a fugitive and was subject to imprisonment. Later the punishment was raised to branding on the forehead with a hot iron. The free men of England had been reduced again to slavery.

  If they had been organized sufficiently to hold meetings of protest in all quarters of the kingdom, they might have compelled some amelioration of this great injustice; but the day of labor unions and parties was far in the future. They lived in smoldering discontent under the conditions which had been forced upon them, growing unhappier with each passing year. This led inevitably to trouble, to the Peasants’ Revolt which occurred in the reign following that of Edward. It was a sanguinary failure from the standpoint of the leaders who died on the gallows. But it opened the way to later reforms.

  It is probably incorrect to say that the laboring classes lacked all organization. Delving into the records of the day, one is likely to stumble over certain odd circumstances which suggest that there were stirrings continuously under the surface. These seem to trace back to one man, a friar named John Ball, who had the habit of assembling the people in the market place after they had heard mass, and haranguing them about their wrongs. He was called the Mad Priest by Froissart, but instead he was a man of a fine and high courage and with such an eloquent tongue that no one could hear him without being persuaded to believe. Twice he was thrown into Canterbury Prison by the archbishop, but word of him got about through all the shires by a system of whispers. “The angel of the Lord will open the prison as he did for Peter” and “Be of good cheer for soon the bell will be rungen by John Ball.” It was clear that the men of the soil waited for a signal which was to come from the wandering priest, and this was known and planned for whenever the plowmen got together in secret.

  The signal came in time, but that is a story in the future and does not belong here.

  The Black Death brought many changes in conditions, mostly for the worse. Farm laborers who refused to accept the hard laws imposed on them formed themselves into bands and lived by waylaying those who passed on the highways. So many priests had died that many churches were closed and people fell easily into immoral ways. The ownership of lands became so involved by death that the number of lawyers increased by leaps and bounds. In one district the number of wills for probate rose from 22 to 222 in a single year.

  One circumstance is cited as a great boon. Fecundity in women became most pronounced, and the birth rate began to increase as soon as the Black Death had passed. Twins and even triplets became almost commonplace. Thus, according to medical authorities who had shown a complete ignorance about everything else, did nature find a remedy for the evils of the plague.

  CHAPTER XIV

  The Battle of Poictiers and the Peace of Bretigny

  1

  THROUGH all these years of strife the king had one aide on whom he could always depend, his cousin, Henry of Lancaster. This nobleman was not only a fine soldier but a man of great courage, honesty, and tolerance; a scholar of sorts, moreover, and deeply religious. Having raised him to the rank of duke, Edward sent this cousin on a mission to Avignon in 1353 to discuss with Pope Innocent VI the possibility of a lasting peace between England and France.

  The duke had two hundred men-at-arms in his party, and when he arrived on Christmas Eve he was met by such a host of churchmen and soldiers, not to mention curious townspeople, that it was difficult to cross the bridge into the papal city. Lancaster had seen the need to make friends and, with a prodigality worthy of Edward himself, had ordered that one hundred casks of wine be ready in the building he was to make his headquarters. After seven weeks of fruitless discussion, there was nothing left in any of them but a hollow sound.

  The first impression gained of Avignon by this urbane ambassador was that the term “Babylonish captivity” was a complete misnomer. It should have been called the “French captivity,” for the papal court at Avignon was overrun with Frenchmen. There were French cardinals everywhere he turned, favoring him with sharp looks out of the corners of their eyes and questioning him to find what he proposed to say to the pontiff. French officials of all kinds were doing the same with the members of his train. Outside there were French architects, French builders, French sculptors, French merchants of Eastern goods, all trying to get their share of the enormous wealth which had been left by John XXII, so much of which had already been spent on the Palace of the Popes.

  “Peace?” said Innocent VI. “That will depend on the terms you bring me.”

  BATTLE OF POICTIERS 1356

  Innocent was a man of impartial and judicial mind, although he had been born Étienne Aubert at Mons in Limousin. He wanted above everything to stop the war, but he knew the temper of French royalty too well to see any chance when he heard the terms that Edward was proposing: to give up his claim to the throne of France in return for having his possessions in that country confirmed to him in full sovereignty. The wise Pope knew this would not be acceptable, so it was clear from the start that the mission would not succeed.

  The popes
at Avignon had all been Frenchmen, and all of them, even the present incumbent with his real desire to be impartial, had found it necessary to favor the French cause. The miraculous victories won by the English had begun to suggest to quizzical and irreverent minds that the Lord on high was not in accord with His vicar on earth. The court at Avignon, where rumor and tattle were always rife, had fallen into the habit of discussing this in sly whispers. Even bits of doggerel were coined and passed from ear to ear. One of these was current when Lancaster paid his visit. A translation into English runs as follows:

  The Pope is on the Frenchmen’s side,

  With England Jesus doth abide;

  ’Twill soon be seen who’ll now prevail,

  For Jesus, or the Pope, must fail.

  The only result was that at Avignon Lancaster met Charles, the King of Navarre. The Navarrese king was young but he had already earned the name of Charles the Bad. It was well deserved, for Charles of Navarre was crafty, unscrupulous, cruel, and notoriously unfaithful in affairs of the heart. Although he was married to Joan, a daughter of the King of France, he was on the worst of terms with that monarch. His royal cousin, he informed Lancaster, meaning his father-in-law, had an eye on his possessions in Normandy which were strategically important. He proposed to the English ambassador an alliance between England and Navarre, with a promise on his part to join any army of invasion they sent into France. This alliance was confirmed later.

  In the meantime King Philip had died, with no one to lament his passing. He had not been a success as a king; a glum, proud, and bitterly suspicious figure, whose defeat at Crécy had left France prostrate. He had been succeeded by his son John, who is known in history as John the Good for no visible reason except perhaps his personal bravery in battle. Otherwise he was credulous, vain, and cruel, and with all the incapacity to rule wisely which his father had displayed. One of his first acts was to behead the constable of France, a brave and loyal man named Raoul, Count of Eu. The new king showed Raoul a letter and demanded to know if he had ever seen it before. When the constable protested he knew nothing about it, the king cried, “Ha, wicked traitor, you have well deserved death!” So the constable went to the block without the formality of a trial and not knowing what the letter had contained.

  John, it seems, liked only one man in his train, a naturalized Castilian called Charles of Spain. When he gave to this favorite some of the Norman properties of Charles of Navarre, the latter had the Castilian murdered in his bed. This led at once to hostilities.

  Edward was not anxious for war at this stage. He had sent his chamberlain to ask Parliament if they would favor the making of a permanent peace, and the members had responded with loud cries of “Yes! Yes!” England, clearly, had no more stomach for war. Still, there was the obligation to support Charles the Bad.

  An army was raised and sent across the Channel under the command of the Duke of Lancaster, and word was sent to the Black Prince at Bordeaux to support the move by advancing against the French flank. The prince had just completed a drive up the Garonne River for the purpose of paying his troops (being completely out of funds) with the spoils of that rich and quiet country. It was said that after the sacking of Carcassonne and Norbonne the horses of his army were so heavily laden they could hardly move. As Charles the Bad in the meantime had made his peace with France and left the English in the lurch, the Black Prince now found it necessary to march again to aid the hard-pressed army of Lancaster. He was slow in getting under way and did not reach the Loire country until much later than had been planned. In the meantime the duke had been forced back on Cherbourg and seemed about to suffer a major reverse. Word of the movements of the Black Prince came just in time, and the French king, who was eager to wipe the score of Crécy off the slate, moved his troops south to meet the heir to the English throne.

  The Prince of Wales dallied along the Loire in an attack on Romorantin. A favorite squire was killed by a stone from the battlements, and Edward swore to avenge him by burning the place to the ground. This was accomplished by the use of Greek fire but not before the French army crossed the Loire south of him. When he became fully aware of their movements, the French had swung around him and were across his line of retreat to Bordeaux.

  Prince Edward’s army was a small one. He had in all about ten thousand men, including two thousand cavalry and four thousand bowmen. It was certain that the French were out in force, and the situation looked desperate for the English. Falling back toward Poictiers, the prince sent out a party to reconnoiter. When they returned after a brush with a party of French horse, he dispatched the Captal de Buch with a strong force and with instructions to get as close as he could to the French lines. The Captal, who was a brave and resourceful soldier, gained a position on a high hill, from which he saw the royal banners of France waving over Poictiers. The whole countryside was covered with troops. Realizing that they had the full strength of France against them (some prisoners placed John’s army at sixty thousand), the Gascon rode back with his information.

  “God help us!” said the Black Prince. But he spoke in reverent terms and not in fear.

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  The prince resembled his father in his tendency to loose planning, but he also had the king’s great tactical skill in ordering a battle and in fighting it through. He placed his meager forces as skillfully as Edward had done at Crécy. He took up his position on the field of Maupertuis on the crest of a slope so thickly covered with grapevines that the presence of the English was hard to detect. The ground here was unfit for cavalry and only a narrow lane gave access to the crest where the tiny English army waited. The bowmen were placed behind the hedges and in the thick vineyards, with the rest of the troops on foot behind them. The prince lacked one advantage that his father had enjoyed at Crécy: he had no protection on either flank, for the wood and abbey of Nouaille on his right offered no effective cover, and a ravine on the left might delay but not halt an attack. All that John of France had to do, in fact, was to divide his forces and push divisions of his men around both English flanks until the Black Prince would have only two courses: to retreat, which would be to invite complete disaster, or to surrender.

  Fortunately for the English, the French king had no more sense of generalship than his father. He does not seem to have thought of the obvious and certain way of beating a small army with a large one, that of surrounding it. At the same time he did not like the look of the field at Maupertuis. It was not a fair and open field where knighthood could perform to advantage. He decided, on that account, to propose terms and sent the Cardinal Talleyrand de Périgord to discuss the matter with the English.

  Edward had no illusions about the danger which faced him and he agreed to give up what he had won during the campaign. In addition he promised not to fight against the French for a period of seven years. John scoffed at these terms.

  “First,” he cried, “he must surrender himself to me with one hundred of his best knights. Then we shall talk of other conditions.”

  It was Edward’s turn to laugh. Had the French king forgotten Crécy that he allowed himself to entertain such a degree of confidence? He, Edward, would never give himself up.

  Back and forth all day rode the Cardinal Talleyrand, striving to reconcile the two viewpoints and making no progress whatever. In the meantime the Black Prince had his men hard at work digging ditches and erecting ramparts of earth back of the encompassing vines. He even had time to do something about his vulnerable flanks in case a flash of military intelligence might come to the French king or his overconfident knightly advisers.

  It was a Sunday, September 18, 1356, a bright and cheerful day. The French, sitting in their tents, were a happy and rather noisy lot. The late King Philip had created a brotherhood called Our Lady of the Noble House in opposition to the English Order of the Garter. The membership was limited to five hundred knights who had sworn never to retreat in battle but, if necessary, to die on the field. There was some rigmarole as well about never yielding more than
four acres of land under any circumstances. They were all on hand, these five hundred bold knights, and it did not enter the head of anyone that on the morrow things would happen to make a mockery of their oaths. All they could see was that the English were trapped and must come to terms or be crushed.

  The English remained stubborn and the bright sun sank in the west with no advance in the negotiations.

  The battle began early next morning. The Black Prince stationed himself on the level ground above, where he could command a view of the narrow path winding crookedly up the hill. Sir John Chandos stood beside him as usual. This English knight, the finest the wars had produced, was tall, clean-shaven, with a nose like the beak of an eagle, and a disfiguration caused by the loss of an eye in battle. He was the ablest lieutenant of them all and his advice was always good.

  As they stood together waiting for the French to advance, a scout brought word that the French king had donned black armor with a white plume in his helmet. A shout of laughter arose when it was reported soon after that nineteen French knights were also wearing black armor and with the same kind of plume in their head guards in order to protect the king from identification during the battle.

  The talk between the prince and John Chandos was directed to one point. How much had the French learned from the battle of Crécy? Had they become convinced of the futility of sending knights against English archers before making an effort to rout the men of the longbow?

  It soon became apparent that John of France had learned nothing. On a field covered with thick hedges and screened by vines, the stubborn king ordered an attack by his knights. He sent them up the narrow path, four abreast, and the English bowmen, shooting from cover, cut them down as fast as they appeared. The French army had been divided into three divisions. The king commanded one, his three oldest sons shared the leadership of the second, and his brother, the Duke of Orleans, led the third; five Bourbons who had forgotten nothing and learned nothing.