by David Green
This was the environment in which the prince was raised: with a legacy of domestic strife, a deposed and possibly murdered grandfather, and a king and father seeking to regain authority and military prestige for the throne after years of disgrace and disruption. The reconstruction of the prince’s career must be set before such a contradictory background and perhaps appropriately such a reconstruction is dependent on a variety of not always complementary sources.
These sources are numerous although often problematic. It has long been held that the evidence of chivalric and other chronicles is unreliable if not deliberately mendacious and more recent studies have relied rightly on governmental and administrative documentation as the basis for their conclusions. Nonetheless, the Black Prince’s reputation was shaped by contemporary literary sources and those written soon after his death and the popular conception of his character remains bound up with them.6 Such chivalric characteristics and qualities as the prince was believed to have exemplified were considered worthy and laudable up until at least the end of the nineteenth century, resulting in a plethora of biographies, plays and other tributes. One of the most striking of these being an equestrian bronze unveiled in 1903. It was commissioned for Leeds in 1894, a year after the acquisition of city status. Thomas Brock designed and cast the statue. A noted sculptor who made the statue of Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace Brock also designed the queen’s head on the coins of the realm. The Black Prince was chosen as he was thought to represent a range of admirable virtues including chivalry, courage, democracy and good governance [see fig. 5].
Edward was therefore destined to become a chivalric icon because the main sources for his character, if not his career, are the chronicles of Jean Froissart and the near-contemporary biography composed by Chandos Herald.7 That these portraits were flattering, if not encomia, is not in doubt. Nor can it be questioned that this was the milieu in which the nobility and aristocracy wished to be seen to exist, and in some cases did so. According to Froissart, and the anonymous herald of Sir John Chandos, the prince’s days both on and away from the battlefield exemplified chivalric virtues and he was the cynosure of knightly skills in hunting, feasting, jousting and ‘courtly love’. As such, they were deliberately selective in their choice of information. Chandos Herald makes no mention of Roger Clarendon and John de Galeis; the former was and the latter may have been the prince’s illegitimate sons, or the colourful past of Edward’s wife, Joan the ‘Fair Maid’ of Kent.8 Neither does he discuss the siege (or sack) of Limoges, although by contrast Froissart paints a vivid portrait. Rather, the Black Prince was described as:
This noble Prince [who] … from the day of his birth cherished no thought but loyalty, nobleness, valour and goodness, and was imbued with prowess. Of such nobleness was the Prince that he wished all the days of his life to set his whole intent on maintaining justice and right.9
These were the traits of an ideal prince, an ideal knight and entirely in keeping with those values expressed by such as the author of the probably contemporary tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Arthurian ideal there described further found favour in the court and was developed by Edward III in his putative military organisation, the Round Table, and later found form in the Order of the Garter. This chivalric/Arthurian atmosphere coincided with the revival of alliterative poetry, such as Sir Gawain, and many such works may have been created in the Lancashire/Cheshire region. The palatinate of Cheshire was the first major estate granted to the prince and links with the earldom were evident in the composition of the prince’s household and military retinue. In several campaigns, the bulk of his expeditionary forces were recruited from the area and some of his most high-ranking officials and military associates lived or held land there. It thus provided an audience and milieu for chivalrous writing and it has been argued that the works of alliterative revival could have been encouraged by or written for ‘expatriate’ careerists from Cheshire, such as the professional soldiers Hugh Calveley (see fig. 4 for tomb in Bunbury church), Robert Knolles and Sir Thomas Wetenhale, seneschal of the Rouergue, when they lived and fought with the prince in Gascony and elsewhere.10
Other literary sources may also provide other references to the prince and to his followers. It has been suggested that the anonymous poem Wynnere and Wastoure could refer to the Black Prince. According to one interpretation it is concerned with the economic problems of the day and involves representations of Edward III and the Black Prince along with allegories of the papacy and the mendicant orders (Wynnere) and the nobility and the soldiery (Wastoure). It may have influenced William Langland. Lines 72–5 may be a description of the prince’s funeral achievements.
With ane helme one his hede, ane hatte appon lofte,
And one heghe one the hatte ane hattfull beste,
A lighte lebarde and a longe, lokande full kene,
Yarked alle of yalowe golde in full yape wyse.11
Mention of the prince’s arms of peace, the three ostrich feathers, has also brought some to the conclusion that the poem must refer to Edward of Woodstock. However, it might also refer to any number of the sons of Edward III or indeed Richard II, Roger Clarendon or Henry Bolingbroke; many members of the royalty and aristocracy of Europe used the ostrich feather device. Intriguingly, it has also been suggested that the second knight may be one of the members of the Wingfield or de la Pole families, both of whom were closely linked to the Black Prince [see illustrations 18, 21, 22]. The poet also rails against Sir William Shareshull, chief justice of the realm and close associate of the prince of Wales.12
At the age of sixteen, Edward, who was to become the Black Prince (although not in his lifetime), set sail for France and was knighted on landing there. The campaign that followed will be discussed below, as will the battle that concluded the chevauchée, the widescale, destructive, fast-moving raid that characterised English military strategy in France in this period. The victory at Crécy in 1346 established the prince as a chivalric exemplar and the glory of that success, much increased by the triumph at Poitiers ten years later, drew men to his service in large numbers. Next the territorial settlement of the treaty of Brétigny (1360) provided Edward with a principality comprising nearly a third of France and real status on the European stage. The result of such military success and chivalric glamour has left us with a picture of the man probably far removed from reality, being little more than a blueprint of the ideal knight.
The picture that such evidence paints shows that the foundation of chivalric achievement was military ability, and consequently there is little to choose between the image of the Black Prince as a chivalrous knight and the Black Prince as a victorious general. This was not a static period, however, in terms of an appreciation either of chivalry or military virtue. The very character of the chivalric ethic was in a state of flux as both the structure of the aristocracy altered, and, more prosaically but no less significantly, the means by which armies were recruited, organised and fought. Such a fluid state was compounded and encouraged by a range of social, economic and political forces that shaped and distorted late medieval society.
Of these, plague was one of the most significant. The emergence and impact of the Black Death has long been held to have changed the conditions in which people lived, both noble and peasant, and their conception of the world about them. That it also acted as a catalyst to a variety of existing trends is also widely accepted. Of these, for example, the decline of the feudal/manorial system had been evident for some time, but the scale of mortality in the plague years after 1348 broke many of the few remaining bonds that tied men to the soil. That the government in England tried repeatedly to re-establish these bonds is probably indicative of the ineffectiveness of such legislation as the Statute of Labourers (1351). The introduction of sumptuary and game laws later in the century may be indicative of similar forces at work attempting to shore up the borders of a social system that if not destroyed was almost fatally wounded by the Black Death. The breakdown of the land-service ne
xus also had implications for the army. Again this was not a new phenomenon, but it is significant that the Crécy-Calais campaign of 1346–7 was the last major expedition recruited with a substantial ‘feudal’ element. In its place developed a paid, although not standing, army.
Mercenaries also were, of course, nothing new, but after 1347 in England all members of the army received at least nominal payment for military service. The distinction between a mercenary and a professional soldier could sometimes be vague and the ‘mercenary’ aspect of the chivalric classes was very apparent in the Black Prince’s retinue; professional soldiers were, for example, a core component of the army that he led to Spain in 1367. To provide a literary comparison, there may be analogies to draw with the character of Geoffrey Chaucer’s knight, as some have interpreted him as a routier, a cynical mercenary, rather than a ‘parfait gentil knight’.13 Whether or not this is an accurate assessment of the Knight, it is certainly the case that the aristocracy and the institution of knighthood were increasingly the targets of literary and physical attack both in England and France throughout the later years of the fourteenth century. Outbreaks of social unrest proceeded from the Black Death to the Jacquerie, to the Peasants’ Revolt and combined in later years with English failures in the French campaign. The motivation behind these events was very different and should not in all cases be seen as part of some growing class consciousness (although the Peasants’ Revolt had decidedly revolutionary overtones). Nor should the association with the Black Death be seen as a direct link or indeed reason for rebellion. The plague may have created the conditions whereby a Peasants’ Revolt was more likely, or, indeed, could take place at all, but it did not create the revolt. By contrast, in France opposition to the knightly aristocracy was not simply the result of ‘feudal’ oppression but a reaction to the defeats at Crécy and, particularly, at Poitiers, which were attributed to the failure of the chivalry of France to fulfill adequately their traditional martial role.14
The role of chivalry in the person and retinue of the Black Prince mirrors the part that it played more generally in the fourteenth-century phases of the Hundred Years War. The prince’s retinue encompassed the aristocracy at its greatest extent in terms of military and chivalric ranks and titles. This ‘community’, noble and otherwise, was bound together by a variety of ties in Edward III’s campaigns and chivalry was not the least of these. The clearest manifestation of the combination of chivalry and royal policy was in the foundation of the Order of the Garter in 1348. The prince and a number of the members of his retinue were important members of that Order.
Chivalry, at root a combination of Christian and warrior ideals, had strong religious connotations and was a guiding ethos among the members of the prince’s retinue and within his household. However, in order to examine the nature and character of that ethos one is required to use sources that are by no means reliable. Nonetheless, they convey an image that the aristocracy wished for itself and which, to an extent, governed their behaviour. Chivalry provided the Black Prince, his household and retinue with a collective identity within that greater bond of international knighthood, which, although weakening, still had a part to play in continental relations.
The chivalry of the fourteenth century was not chivalry as it is commonly viewed, through a Victorian filter, just as many of the buildings and stylised details of the Gothic Revival have little to do with the practicalities and underlying philosophy and theology of medieval Perpendicular architecture. Many, if not all, of the military aristocracy (in its widest sense and including the broad body of ‘professional’ soldiery), considered themselves chivalrous, but it was not a chivalry that would sit easily on the canvas of a pre-Raphaelite painting. This was a ‘Chivalrous Society’ only in a highly restricted class sense. Chivalry was founded on caste solidarity and mutual self-interest and was self-sustaining because it justified the primacy of the ruling order and conveyed real benefits to those who practised it. Consequently, for much of the prince’s lifetime, anti-French propaganda had little effect on the aristocracy since the chivalric elite was an international order, membership of which transcended national boundaries. In addition, for many on both sides of the Channel, there had been shared military experiences, perhaps in the crusades in Prussia, and there were kinship ties between a great number of families. In the context of the Hundred Years War, one reason that this war occurred was due to such ties between the families of Plantagenet and Valois.15
2
Formative Years: Sea Battles and Sieges (1330–45)
The prince’s infancy has not left a surfeit of records, so information concerning his childhood is relatively sketchy. We do know that news of the prince’s birth at Woodstock on 16 June 1330 so delighted Edward III that he rewarded the yeoman who told him of it with a pension of forty marks a year.1 The prince’s first biographer, Chandos Herald, tells us nothing about his early years and merely lists the virtues that he acquired in childhood.2 The Register that provides such a wealth of detail about Edward’s career until 1365 only begins with the preparations for the campaign of 1346. It was concerned with matters such as estate administration, orders to officials, demands for troops, rewards for service and many others, and was divided geographically into sections dealing with Cheshire, Cornwall, and the English estates. There are only very fragmentary remains of the North Wales register and most unfortunately, the Gascon register, if such a volume existed, does so no longer. The records of the daily business of government and administration necessarily increased as estates were bestowed upon the prince: the earldom of Cheshire in 1333, the duchy of Cornwall in 1337 (on its creation), and, on only the second occasion that the title had been granted, the principality of Wales in 1343. The prince also held the office of custos angliae (keeper of the realm) when his father was campaigning abroad in 1338, 1340 and 1342–3. It was a mainly ceremonial office, but not an unimportant one. As keeper he was advised by a number of peers, Ralph Neville, the earls of Arundel, Lancaster, Huntingdon, and principally John Stratford, the archbishop of Canterbury.3
The prince’s childhood was spent, for the most part, in the household of Queen Philippa, with his sisters Isabella (b. 1332) and Joanna (b. 1333). His estates, as they accrued, were also administered through his mother’s household until he, and they, outgrew it. The first of these estates was granted on 18 March 1333 and thereafter the foundations of the prince’s household and administration were laid alongside the government of the earldom of Cheshire. Many of the officials appointed to his service in these early years would become long-standing associates and have distinguished careers, but few of them at this point were high ranking or men of great standing in their own right. A number would later achieve episcopal rank, including William Spridlington (bishop of St Asaph, 1376–82), John Harewell (bishop of Bath and Wells, 1366–86), John Fordham (bishop of Durham, 1382–8, of Ely, 1388–1425) and Robert Stretton (bishop of Lichfield, 1360–85),4 but at this time the only figures of national significance were the masters of the household, Sir Nicholas de la Beche and Sir Bartholomew Burghersh, senior. Among the episcopacy, the prince was also close to Henry Burghersh, bishop of Lincoln (his godfather) and William Edington, bishop of Winchester. Edington would have links to the order of the Garter and shared interests of religious patronage through the houses of Bonhommes at Ashridge and Edington.
Among the officials of the prince’s household in these early years Guillaume St Omer and his wife, Elizabeth, from the queen’s homeland of Hainault, were steward, and mistress and guardian of the young earl respectively. Joan Oxenford was the young prince’s nurse as she would be to Edmund of Langley.5 It may be that the prince had as his tutor the renowned scholar, Walter Burley, but this is conjectural, as the tradition first emerged in the sixteenth century.6 John Brunham was treasurer, and by 1334, William Stratton was employed as tailor. foreshadowing Edward’s later interest in and considerable expenditure on clothing.7 Financial concerns, income, or rather the lack of it, would become an acute proble
m for the prince and it was an issue for his father and administrators from an early stage. Despite its limited size and range of functions, the prince’s household could rarely ‘live of its own’. The crown made occasional additional payments, but it was not until 1336 that a partial solution presented itself with the reversion to the crown of the earldom of Cornwall following the unfortunate death of John of Eltham, the king’s brother.
Cornish wealth lay mainly in tin and the stannary towns that served the industry. Yet this could not all be used to allay the prince’s financial concerns, since 1,000 marks was already assigned to the king’s companion and the future earl of Salisbury, William Montague, with a further £100 to be paid to one Thomas West, so additional revenues were attached to Cornwall and granted to the prince from Exeter (Devon), Mere (Wilts), and most importantly, Wallingford (Berks). On 9 February 1337, Cornwall and its attendant ‘foreign manors’ (estates held outside the county) passed to the king’s eldest son. With the acquisition of the duchy, as with Cheshire, four years earlier, the prince acquired further servants and officials and a central organisation developed to co-ordinate the activities of local government. Again, a number of those who soon found employment in Cornwall would become of importance elsewhere in the prince’s demesne.8 Of these, the most significant was Peter Gildesburgh who came to the prince’s notice through service to the king and the Burghersh family. In 1340 he became controller of the Cornish stannaries and in the following year keeper of the prince’s wardrobe. He later became receiver of Cheshire and, in 1349, he was the prince’s envoy to the Pope in Avignon.9