Then Edward, in defiance of his previous pledge to parliament, took control of the country without consultation. He embarked upon a reassessment of the whole administration, and in particular of its financial resources; he appointed new collectors of the wool supplies; he levied fines on individuals, and communities, that had evaded the tax. On 29 December Stratford entered the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral, and delivered a sermon in English defending his actions. He declared that he was only enforcing the collective will of the parliament and that the king had been swayed by evil councillors. He alluded to the Magna Carta, with the clear implication that the king had broken its provisions. He knew that the nation was supporting him, and he demanded a trial by his peers. He was effectively defying the king to do his worst.
The king then called a parliament, to which he reluctantly admitted Stratford himself. The archbishop was formally reconciled to the king – he was received ‘into the king’s grace’ – and the work of parliamentary negotiation began. In return for an extra 10,000 sacks of wool, Edward agreed that his chief ministers would in future be approved by the magnates and the council. Accommodations and compromises were agreed on every side; the king was reconciled to the Lords on the condition that he would be their good lord, and he eventually reached a settlement with the Commons on the understanding that he would ‘rule them by leniency and gentleness’. He had a more astute understanding of political realities than his father had ever shown. He knew when to turn his cheek. It was only to be expected that, five months later, he reversed his concessions on the grounds that he had granted them unwillingly. Within two years he had regained most of his power. In his duel with parliament he had survived.
The war with France continued like a piece of vast background music. In the summer of 1340 the English fleet surprised and destroyed French ships on the Flanders coast at Sluys. It was the first notable victory of the conflict and after the battle the king issued a gold coin, called the noble, in which he was portrayed standing on board a warship. Here was the image of the master of the seas. His reign had become identified with the pursuit of war. No French minister had dared to inform Philip VI of the English victory, and it was decided that only his Fool could break the news with impunity. So the Fool declared to his master that the English were arrant cowards; when asked the reason he replied that they, unlike the French, had not leapt into the sea.
The defeat of the French fleet meant that the English were at liberty to invade by means of the Channel. Yet Edward’s squabbles with his allies, and with the Flemish in particular, meant that no immediate successes were achieved. The French forces ducked and wove, refusing to be drawn into battle. This was in fact to become the pattern of the French defence. In the autumn of 1340 a truce was agreed. But it could not last. There were inconclusive hostilities in Brittany, and in Gascony, over the succeeding few years and then in 1346 Edward made the decisive move of invading Normandy; he hoped to join his Flemish allies in an assault upon Paris or perhaps a march into Gascony. He kept the French king guessing.
On 11 July 1346, 8,000 men (half of them archers) sailed south from Portsmouth to northern France. They marched through Normandy on their way to Paris, plundering and wasting everything in their path. They advanced as far as the suburbs of the capital, where they turned north towards Calais in order to join forces with the Flemish allies. Philip VI marched rapidly across the great northern plain of the Somme in an effort to divert or destroy them; on the afternoon of 26 August, he attacked them as they assembled near the wood of Creécy-en-Ponthieu. An impetuous army of Genoese crossbowmen and French cavalry were beaten back by the English forces and, in the ensuing mêleée, the French army was effectively crushed.
Gunpowder cannon were for the first time used in battle, causing more panic than death; but the palm of victory must be awarded to Edward’s archers who, wielding longbows, defeated the knights of feudal chivalry. It had been a day of partial eclipse, of thunder and of lightning; at its close the French knights lay on the field, many of them despatched by the use of long and slender daggers known as ‘misericords’ or mercy killers that ripped open the body from the armpit to the heart. One among the 30,000 dead was John, the blind king of Bohemia, whose motto of Ich dien or ‘I serve’ was adopted by subsequent princes of Wales.
The battle of Creécy was a signal victory, of which Edward took immediate opportunity; he marched north and, nine days later, he was waiting beneath the walls of Calais. This town would be an excellent base for further incursions into French territory; it was also a convenient port for raids against French pirates. The townsmen of Calais endured almost a year of famine. The commander of the French garrison wrote to Philip VI that ‘we can find no more food in the town unless we eat men’s flesh … this is the last letter that you will receive from me, for the town will be lost and all of us that are within it’. The letter was intercepted before it reached the French king and was delivered to Edward; he read it, applied his personal seal and sent it on to its destination.
In the eleventh month the women, children and old people of Calais came out from the gates as ‘useless mouths’ to be removed. The English would not allow them to pass through their lines, and they were hounded back to the town ditch where they expired from want. So the town was forced to submit. The story of the six burghers of Calais, coming out with nooses around their necks and submitting to the clemency of a gracious king, may well be authentic. It is a type of political theatre at which Edward excelled.
He had already vanquished another ancient enemy. In the year of Creécy, David Bruce, or David II of Scotland, had invaded England; he had inherited the ‘old alliance’ with France, and hoped that the absence of Edward would demoralize the English forces. But at Neville’s Cross, close to Durham, the Scottish forces were overwhelmed and David Bruce himself was escorted to the Tower of London where he remained for eleven years. The Black Rood of Scotland, a piece of Christ’s cross kept in a black case, was taken in triumph to Durham Cathedral. So Edward III was victorious over all his foes. The knights and lords now clustered around him in amity. He had become their ideal of a monarch.
Whether it meant as much to the English people is open to doubt. The war against the French represented a quarrel between two monarchs, who were members of the same family and who both spoke French as their native language. What had the affairs of princes to do with the condition of England? The people had in any case far more serious matters with which to deal when, in 1348, all the forces of infection and death were unleashed in an epidemic without parallel.
It was named as ‘the pestilence time’. The disease itself was called ‘the plague’ or ‘the Black Death’. It may not have been bubonic plague, however; it has been variously described as anthrax or influenza or a form of haemorrhagic fever. It may have been a disease that no longer exists. Contrary to popular superstition it is unlikely to have been carried by rats.
It came out of Central Asia in the early 1330s and then spread throughout the known world by means of the trade routes. It had reached Italy by 1347 and, in the summer of the following year, touched Bristol and other ports. By the autumn of 1348 it had reached London before travelling north. It manifested itself in buboes, ulcerated swellings in the groin or armpit; a contemporary described a bubo as in ‘the form of an apple, or the head of an onion … it seethes like a burning cinder, and is of the colour of ash’. In some cases the body erupted in abscesses filled with pus. This was accompanied by aching limbs, vomiting and diarrhoea; the victims were generally dead within three days.
They were buried in mass graves, laid side by side in long trenches, the adults carrying their dead children on their shoulders. An old belief still persists that the parts of certain graveyards must never be disturbed for fear of ‘letting out the plague’. It is not completely without justification; the spores of anthrax can survive for hundreds of years. The cemeteries of London were soon filled, and 13 acres (5.2 hectares) of land were purchased on the borders of Smithfield to be con
verted into a vast graveyard. One third, or even perhaps one half, of the population died. There had never been mortality on this scale, nor has there been since. At the best estimation a population of approximately 6 million was reduced to 3 million or 4 million. It remained at this level until the early sixteenth century.
It is likely that, before the plague, the country had been overpopulated; it may even be that malnutrition actively hastened the fatalities. So on some form of Malthusian calculation the distemper freed the energies of the surviving population and increased the availability of resources. It did not seem like this at the time. According to Henry Knighton, a chronicler of the period, ‘many buildings, great and small, fell into ruins in every city, borough, and village for lack of people; likewise many villages and hamlets became desolate, not a house being left in them, all having died who dwelt there; and it was probable that many such villages would never be inhabited’. Men could not be found to work the land, so women and children were obliged to drive the plough. In a school textbook of the next generation there is a set sentence, ‘The roof of an old house had almost fallen on me yesterday.’ Ruined buildings were a familiar hazard.
A Franciscan friar, John Clyn, left an account of the period. ‘Lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time’, he wrote,
and fall away from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, as it were, in the grasp of the wicked one – myself awaiting death among the dead [inter mortuos mortem expectans] as I have truly heard and examined, so I have reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man may survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence.
He added, some time later, two words – ‘magna karistia’ or ‘great dearth’. Then another hand followed. ‘Here it seems that the author died.’
The plague was generally considered to be an act of God, punishing sinners for their pride and presumption, their vanity and faithlessness. It represented an evil so great that, according to William Langland in Piers Plowman, ‘prayers have no power to prevent this pestilence’. Langland also stated that the south-west wind, blowing in the evening, was a baleful sign. It was the breath of the devil. It was said that all those born after the arrival of the pestilence had two fewer teeth than those born before. In 1361 the pestilence time returned. It was known as ‘the mortality of children’. A third epidemic followed in 1369, and a fourth in 1374. It was noticed at the time that the wealthier classes were not so severely affected as the rest of the population; they were not forced into close or intimate contact with the sick.
Despite these grievous blows the society of England held together. The courts of justice were closed, and the meetings of parliament were repeatedly delayed, but no general collapse of order occurred. The records of Church and state reveal a surprising continuity and coherence of administration. The level of wool exports, for example, remained stable. Yet the pestilence had slow but permanent effects on English society. The shortage of labour had the immediate result of increasing both the level of wages and the chances of employment. The phenomenon of the landless or impoverished peasant wholly disappeared. But the rising demands of the working people who had survived, their worth now doubled by the epidemic, provoked a reaction from the landowners and magnates. The knights of the shires, in particular, perceived a threat to good order.
An Ordinance of Labourers was passed by a parliament in 1349, forbidding employers to pay more for labour than they had before the pestilence. The same Act deemed that it was illegal for an unemployed man to refuse work. The measures were not realistic. Many workers and their families could simply move to another district and to a more generous employer who was willing to ignore the law. Some migrated to the towns, for example, where there was a great demand for manual labourers such as masons and carpenters. A ploughman might become a tiler. More than enough work was available. So from a court roll of the period we have the following entries.
Thomas Tygow of Hale is a freelance roofer and he took at Hale from Hugh Skynner of Little Hale on various occasions in 1370 a daily wage of fourpence and his dinner, contrary to statute; excess 3s. 4d … William Deye is a freelance ploughman and took from Gilbert Deye at Ingoldsby on 2 December 1370 3d and food, and did this for the rest of the week, and received the same from others in the following year; excess: 12d … John Couper, carpenter, refused to work by the day in order to earn excessive money, and he took a lump sum from William Bourton of Sudbrooke; excess estimated to be 2s.
Many younger people now possessed their own holdings of land. And the best land did not remain vacant for very long. There had once been too many farmers and labourers working too little soil, but now they were dispersed over the countryside. Some lords tried to tie down their servile population by enforcing the obligations and duties owed to them, but any success was balanced by the problems of a reluctant and disaffected workforce. As that workforce became more aware of its value, the old tradition of labour service could not hold.
Wealthier peasants were ready to take on more land; they left wills, written in English, to confirm their aspiring position. The relatively low cost of produce, and the incidence of high wages, encouraged many of the larger landlords to give up production and lease their farms to the highest bidder. Or they converted their arable land into pasture; the rearing of sheep required less investment of labour than the growing of crops.
The old manorial and village ties were being dissipated. The pestilence slowly began to dissolve, therefore, the old certainties of status and position; the traditional network of communal relations was being supplanted by the exigencies of private interest. There is evidence that the remaining people, on the land, now worked harder; manor accounts show that output per man increased, and that women often took over jobs previously reserved for men. Their wages increased proportionally higher than those of men.
In this context we can place the various ordinances and measures taken by the Lords and Commons to discipline the thriving peasantry. Legislation was passed to forbid the wearing of costly clothes, and to impose restrictions on the daily diet. Women were to dress according to the social position of their fathers or husbands, and the wives of servants were not allowed to wear veils above 1 shilling in value. The wives of yeoman were not permitted to purchase silk veils, and agricultural labourers were not allowed to wear cloth priced at more than 12 pence a yard (0.91 metre). A worker’s gown and coat must ‘cover his privy members and buttocks’, and the toes of his shoes or boots ‘must not pass the length of two inches’ (5 centimetres). This was in remonstrance against the fashion for tight-fitting and figure-hugging clothing, as well as the taste for elongated shoes. At dinner or supper the lower classes were to enjoy only two courses. Laws were also passed that prohibited peasants from carrying weapons or indulging in disorderly games. Idleness, if proven, could be punished. Despite these maladroit exercises in social control, the feudal England of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was coming to an end. The English poet, John Gower, wrote at the close of the fourteenth century that:
The world is changed and overthrown
That it is well-nigh upside down
Compared with days of long ago.
There is no known response of Edward III to the pestilence time. He no doubt regarded it simply as a threat to the supply of soldiers for his army. All his thoughts were of war. An armistice was agreed after the fall of Calais that endured for six years before foundering on claims of bad faith. The king combined in warfare against the French with his eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, prince of Wales. The young man would also become known as the Black Prince, on account of his armour rather than his morals or disposition. Edward of Woodstock embarked upon what was effectively a reign of terror by which contingents of his army were despatched to ravage selected bands of French territory; ordered to pillage, burn or destroy what
ever lay in their path, they were dedicated to wiping out the lives and the livelihoods of the people of France. They had not been summoned in a feudal call to arms; they were either forcibly conscripted or they were mercenaries paid by the day. Many of them were common thieves or murderers attracted to the prospects of spoil. In this pursuit they were eminently successful. The folk memory of English raids lived in the French national consciousness for many hundreds of years. Edward of Woodstock boasted that, in the space of seven weeks, he had laid waste 500 cities, towns and villages in the region of Bordeaux that had never known warfare in its history. It was a policy that had already been successfully deployed in Scotland.
The strategy of the French seems to have been to refrain from open confrontation but, in the autumn of 1356, the two armies came into contact; a French reconnaissance party stumbled upon the forces of the English. Battle could not be honourably delayed. The new king of France, John II, held a vast superiority in numbers with an army of 35,000 against the Black Prince’s 7,000; but his position, at Poitiers, was on rising ground covered with hedges and vineyards.
The location itself was not the principal difficulty. The English could always now claim the mastery of the field by the use of the longbow, and the Black Prince followed his father’s tactics at Creécy by using the archers as the main fighting force. The French cavalry were flung against the English line, only to be cut to pieces by a hail of arrows; the rest of the French knights then followed on foot, but they were also repulsed by the bows of yew. The average length of the bow was 6 feet (1.9 metres), and the arrows were 3 feet (0.91 metre) in length. The archer drew it to the ear, rather than to the chest, and with that momentum he could send it 250 yards (228 metres); he fired ten volleys each minute. This was a new age of warfare.
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