The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Dominance

  In the heat of July 1346 the English army marched through a broken, hell-bright landscape of coastal Normandy. All around them, fields were lit up in ghastly orange by marauding bands of arsonists. Ghost towns and villages lay smashed, burned and looted behind them, abandoned by terrified families. The roads inland teemed with refugees fleeing the maw of destruction that sucked in everything it encountered. Thousands of ordinary soldiers from England and Wales had poured ashore off a massive fleet of 750 ships in mid-July. Their leaders were the English aristocracy and gentry military men, but in visiting terror the mob answered to no master but themselves.

  As they marched they spread out across the fertile Norman countryside, fanning across a front twelve to fifteen miles wide to torch or pillage all that they came across. The summer air would have been thick with choking smoke and loud with the screams of those villagers who had been too slow or too feeble to escape. And as the army marched a few miles inland, 200 ships of the English navy hugged the shoreline, provisioning the men on land and disembarking to destroy every settlement they sailed past, until one royal clerk estimated that literally everything within five miles of the coastline had been ruined or plundered.

  This had once been Plantagenet land. Long ago, when John was on the throne, it had been raided and burned by the Capetian kings battling their way west. Now John’s great-great-grandson Edward III was exacting his brutal revenge as he shepherded an invasion force of perhaps 10,000 men in the opposite direction: across the duchy of Normandy, towards the Seine, and on towards the two great cities of Rouen and Paris.

  Between 1341 and 1346 war had not abated. Rather, it had intensified. Edward had suffered a setback in Scotland in July 1341, when David II had returned from Normandy to oust Robert Stewart as guardian of the realm. He had re-established the Scottish monarchy of the Bruce family, with whom Edward was forced to agree a three-year truce in 1343. That Edward was not more bullish in the aftermath of his brother-in-law David’s restoration might have been surprising were it not for events across the Channel; for in April 1341 Duke John III of Brittany had died, and Edward had been presented with an opportunity to pursue war with the French via a proxy conflict. The main focus of the war between the houses of Plantagenet and Valois shifted to a succession crisis in Brittany, in which Edward backed John de Montfort and Philip supported his cousin Charles of Blois.

  The war of Breton succession lasted, on and off, for five years. The logistical difficulties presented by fighting in north-west France were considerable and cost some significant casualties, including Robert of Artois, the exiled enemy of King Philip VI, who had first encouraged the English king to pursue his claim to the French Crown and had subsequently become a trusted captain in Edward’s armies. Robert died after complications with wounds sustained during an attack on the town of Vannes. For Edward, however, the risks were justified by the cause.

  The king’s ambitions were growing. At some point between 1341 and 1343 he had commissioned a copy of William of Newburgh’s history of Henry II’s reign, which recalled the glorious days when kings of England had ruled Normandy, Maine, Touraine and Anjou as well as Brittany and greater Aquitaine. The war, in Edward’s mind, was gaining a greater purpose than simply safeguarding the status of his Gascon lands and Ponthieu. Edward was beginning to countenance a full turning-back of the clock, to a time before the 1259 Treaty of Paris – before the loss of Normandy in 1204, even – when his ancestors had ruled over a mighty continental empire. A new gold coinage issued in 1344 for use on the international exchange markets proclaimed Edward to all the merchants of Europe as ‘king of England and France’. This was becoming more than simply a piece of tactical rhetoric. In 1345 peace talks over Brittany, mediated by Pope Clement VI at Avignon, collapsed, and Edward made ready to escalate hostilities.

  A three-pronged attack was planned. William de Bohun, earl of Northampton, led an army into Brittany. Henry Grosmont, earl of Derby, who was fast becoming the king’s best friend and most trusted commander, led another, smaller, expedition south, to Gascony, where he was appointed lieutenant of Aquitaine. Edward himself led a vast force of between 14,000 and 15,000 men across the Channel to Normandy. All in all, these three invasion forces comprised the most substantial military force that had been sent to France since John’s attempt to retake Normandy in 1214.

  The character of the English war effort had changed since 1340. Edward had dropped his old-fashioned strategy of alliance-building in the north-west and direct invasion in the south. Alliances were too expensive, allies too prone to defect. One of the casualties of Edward’s exorbitant bribe policy had been the Bardi bank, to whose ruin the English king contributed when he failed to honour the massive debts incurred in part as retainers to his northern allies. By 1346 Edward’s only allies were the pro-English faction in Brittany and the Flemings. Every man sent to fight under the royal arms in 1346 came from England.

  Thus the brutal men who landed with the king in St-Vaast-la-Hougue on 12 July 1346 spoke in the same mother tongue. Their battle cry was ‘Saint George!’ (The French cried ‘Montjoie St-Denis!’) They had various specialities: perhaps half were archers trained in their home villages to fire a deadly longbow with some accuracy. Others were engineers, miners, diggers, clerks or servants. Many had been pressed into compulsory service, and some were criminals pardoned for their crimes in return for serving in the field. All were equipped and supplied with a huge wealth of supplies and weapons compulsorily purchased in a fearsome war drive. They brought with them thousands of white-painted bows and arrows, and more food than they could eat before it rotted.

  The army was instructed by Edward on their first landing not to molest the local people, nor to rob shrines and churches, nor to commit wanton arson. The king commanded restraint, lamenting what a royal proclamation called ‘the wretched fate of … his people of France’. But this was a vain hope. Edward had brought with him many old and accomplished soldiers, many heading professional companies of mounted archers, hobelars and men-at-arms, but the king could by no means claim to dispose of a uniformed, well-drilled army. Such was the unprecedented size of the invasion force that there was a sizeable element of press-ganged infantry: poorly equipped and undisciplined villagers, stirred up back in England by constant royal propaganda denouncing Philip VI and the French people as spies and aggressors who wished to invade England, convert the population to French-speakers and incite the Scots to invade the north. No disciplinary instructions on earth could prevent them from tearing Normandy to pieces, like a pack of distempered dogs.

  The army marched through the countryside, slaughtering and brutalizing as it went. Flags and lances bobbed above three parties. The rearguard was marshalled by Thomas Hatfield, the warlike bishop of Durham. The king commanded the middle. The vanguard was nominally led by Edward’s eldest son, Edward, prince of Wales and duke of Cornwall. He was sixteen years old, tall and striking, already a brave young man in his father’s mould. He had been knighted as soon as he landed from the ship, alongside some other young men of the campaign: William Montagu, son of the earl of Salisbury; and Roger Mortimer, grandson of the man the coup had displaced. The earls of Northampton and Warwick rode at the Black Prince’s side to guide his hand.

  The build-up to Edward’s invasion had been cloaked in secrecy. Very few men had known the destination of his vast army before its departure from the English coast. Philip VI had received information that the king intended to make for Gascony, to reinforce Henry Grosmont (now raised to the earldom of Lancaster after his father’s death in 1345) in resisting the siege of Aiguillon, deep in the south-west, at the confluence of the rivers Lot and Garonne. Philip’s son John, duke of Normandy, was leading the siege; thus when Edward’s main invasion force landed at St-Vaast-la-Hougue they had found it largely undefended.

  The army reached Caen on 26 July. After brief negotiations with the garrison of the castle, they stormed the rich residential suburb of the city, leaving 2,500 corpses l
ying torn and bleeding in the streets, and sending the richer citizens back as prisoners to England. Then they marched along the south bank of the Seine for a fortnight. The French army was belatedly moved into a position to defend against the invasion; it broke the bridges across the river to prevent the English from crossing it and shadowed the invaders along the north bank.

  By 12 August, the English were within twenty miles of Paris. Panic broke out in the city as the citizens realized the impact that such a violent and depraved army would have upon their lives and livelihoods. Philip’s government was compelled to call in fifty men-at-arms to attempt to keep the peace as terror racked Europe’s largest city. Throughout the city and suburbs buildings were barricaded and doors battened shut as the people prepared for street-to-street fighting. In the distance, downriver on the Seine, smoke was seen pouring from the towns of St-Cloud and St-Germain-en-Laye. The English were not far away.

  Philip VI sat with his advisers in St-Denis and floundered. On 16 August the English rebridged the Seine. Desperate to keep them at bay, Philip offered a pitched battle on a plain four miles south of Paris and the French army marched to the allotted battleground.

  But the English, instead of marching either south to give battle, or east to besiege Paris, headed sharply north, towards Flanders, in an attempt to join forces with a Flemish army that was in the field near Béthune. They marched north for more than a week, pushing so hard that the exhausted infantry went through their shoes and foraging parties left the countryside stripped and bare of all food and supplies.

  When the English reached their intended rendezvous, they found that the Flemish army had given up and gone home. But it was too late to avoid conflict of some sort. Philip’s eldest son John, duke of Normandy, had abandoned Aiguillon in mid-August and marched rapidly north to defend the duke’s beleaguered duchy. The road to battle had been joined.

  The English and French finally met before a forest between the villages of Crécy and Wadincourt on Saturday 26 August 1346. The English were arrayed in two lines of infantry and men-at-arms in their impressive plate armour, who fought dismounted from their horses. The Black Prince commanded the front line, with Warwick and Northampton. The king drew up the troops, laughing and joking with them as he did so; then he took his place commanding the rearguard. On either side of the foot soldiers were two huge blocks of archers, dismounted from their horses and surrounded by baggage carts to inure them against cavalry charges. It was the archers that would decide the fate of a famous battle.

  The French arrived at Crécy in dribs and drabs, but they comfortably outnumbered the English – Philip VI may have had 25,000 men in the field, including large numbers of Genoese mercenaries. The English had no more than half that total. The French king arranged his men in three battalions: crossbowmen at the front, with two divisions of cavalry behind them. They were flanked by infantry.

  The sides stood and faced and shouted curses at one another and waited for their commands. At around five o’clock in the evening, it began to rain, and against the deafening rumpus of bugles and drums, the French crossbowmen and English archers began to loose their volleys. The English arrows were lethal: fired at a rate of five or six per archer per minute, they fell from the sky like a blizzard. The crossbow bolts of Philip’s Genoese mercenaries, meanwhile, were fired at less than half the rate and fell short of their targets. Here was the vital difference between the sides, and an advantage that would play out for much of the Hundred Years War: the longbow was the deadliest weapon in the field.

  King David II of Scotland might have told his sponsor Philip VI about the devastation that English longbows had inflicted at Halidon Hill; but if he did, the lesson was not passed on. The French cavalry – so long the pride and scourge of Europe – saw the crossbowmen in front of them falter, and took their faltering for cowardice. As the cavalry chased on the heels of the stricken crossbowmen, they too were thrown violently from their horses by the sickening thud of deadly white wood and metal into their bodies. Arrow shafts buried themselves deep into human flesh and horseflesh, creating a writhing, screaming chaos of rearing animals and dying, terrified men.

  As the arrows whipped through the air, so Edward ordered another, novel assault. For the first time on the battlefields of France, cannonfire was heard. The English had brought several cannon to the field: primitive devices that used gunpowder to shoot metal bolts and pellets wildly, and in the general direction of the enemy. They were not so deadly as the longbows, but with the whistle of arrows punctuated by the ungodly roar of cannon-blasts, the demented battle-cries of men-at-arms in the melee, the agonized screams of terrified horses and men dying with their limbs severed and intestines spilled, the drums in the background and trumpets screaming into the evening, the battlefield at Crécy would have sounded like Hell itself.

  The hero of the battle was afterwards judged to be the Black Prince, who fought valiantly in his first armed conflict, slashing at armed men, cutting down horses and bellowing instructions to the troops around him. At one point he was felled, and his standard bearer had to commit an act of utter desperation, dropping his flag momentarily to help the stricken prince to his feet. Thus Froissart relayed the tale that has since entered the corpus of English legend. As the fighting escalated around him the prince feared his men were falling too fast around him, and sent word to his father that he required help.

  ‘Is my son dead or felled?’ asked Edward, according to the chronicler.

  Informed that the prince was not dead but faced difficult odds, Froissart has Edward reply: ‘Return to him and to them that sent you here, and say that they send no more to me for any adventure … as long as my son is alive … they suffer him this day to win his spurs.’

  Several hours of fierce, bloody fighting routed King Philip and his allies. Their cavalry charges were skilfully made. Their horsemen regrouped and recharged with enormous bravery and accomplishment at each turn. But they were as helpless against the dismounted English positions as Edward II’s cavalry had been against the Scottish schiltroms at Bannockburn. The French king lost thousands upon thousands of men: 1,542 knights and squires were found dead by the English front line, and the losses among the ordinary soldiers were innumerable. Many important nobles allied to Philip’s cause lost their lives, including the blind King John of Bohemia, who emulated Sir Giles d’Argentein, the tragic hero of Bannockburn. Hearing that the French were losing, the sightless king asked to be led into the thick of battle, certain that he would be cut down. His body was found lying roped to the comrades who courageously undertook the suicide mission of leading him into the melee. Besides King John two dukes and four counts were killed. They were all given an honourable burial by the victorious English.

  Edward sent proud news of victory back to England, boasting in a letter to parliament that ‘the whole host of France has been laid low’. The news very swiftly spread across the country, via a network of Dominican friars whom the royal government at home employed as travelling newsmen. All realized that Crécy was indeed a thundering, wonderful victory. It offered tangible return for all the hardships faced by the English people who had paid for their rampaging army. It offered massive propaganda value. And it was bolstered further in October when forces under Ralph Neville, Henry Percy and William Zouche, archbishop of York, routed a massive Scottish invading army at Neville’s Cross in county Durham. Four Scottish earls were captured, and the marshal, chamberlain and constable of Scotland died. The earl of Moray was killed in battle. Almost the entire military leadership of Scotland was removed in a single day, and King David II was captured and brought to England, there to remain a prisoner for eleven years.

  Crécy was also a landmark moment in the history of the medieval military. The new, more professional means of recruitment and radically revised field tactics that had been developing since the 1330s were proven not just against the Scots, but against the full might of the French army.

  So 1346 was a very good year for English military powe
r. Yet it did not settle the war. For at the heart of Edward’s tactics lay a paradox: although his army had inflicted a crushing defeat on the combined forces of the French king and his son, it had in no way endeared the people of Normandy to English lordship, or won favour for an English king over a French one. And while he severely discomfited Philip VI, the duke of Normandy and their allies, Edward’s victory at Crécy did not destroy French military capability or curb Philip’s overall political power.

  So the two sides remained in the field. For the rest of the summer the earl of Lancaster continued to command action around Gascony. Sir Thomas Dagworth won a brilliant victory in Brittany, where he defeated and captured Charles of Blois at La Roche-Derrien. Meanwhile, in September 1346 Edward and the Black Prince began a brutal and terrible siege at Calais, which lasted until October 1347.

  The siege of Calais was in some ways an even greater military occasion than the battle of Crécy. Almost 26,000 men took part – the largest English army that would take the field during the entire history of the Hundred Years War. Every English earl was present at some point during the siege, with the exception of four who were elderly or infirm. The financial demands placed on England to maintain this massive army for over a year were extraordinary, and included numerous new goods and export taxes that spurred widespread grumbling at home. Victory at Crécy, however, had transformed Edward’s status. The chronicler Jean le Bel wrote that 1346 had shattered the image of the English, recasting them from an ignoble race into the finest and most knightly people on earth. As the English camped outside the walls of Calais, the national gathering of magnificent soldiers served simultaneously as a pageant of chivalry and a hostile invading army.

  Inside the town, meanwhile, the townsfolk grew so desperate and hungry that they began to chew the leather from their saddles. They held out for a year, during which Philip VI tried to goad the English into leaving Calais by bringing his armies close enough that they might be lured into a pitched battle. Eventually, in October 1347, when it became clear that the English could not and would not be removed, a deputation of citizens emerged to surrender to Edward, wearing nooses around their necks to symbolize their utter subjection. In a choreographed show of chivalric might, Edward allowed Queen Philippa to plead successfully for his clemency. The bedraggled supplicants were spared, but their town was seized and would remain in English hands for more than two centuries. The king and his companions returned to England as conquering heroes.