The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  The prince led the vanguard in the engagement with a collection of his father’s great captains, including the earls of Warwick, Northampton and Kent, as well as Godfrey de Harcourt and John Chandos. Under the weight of the initial French cavalry charge, the prince’s standard fell, and the prince himself was struck down, to be rescued by Richard FitzSimon, his standard-bearer. In the midst of repeated French cavalry charges, King Edward was approached about the question of removing his 16-year-old son from harm’s way and famously answered, ‘let the boy win his spurs, for if God has so ordained it, I wish the day to be his’. 13 And so, of course, it happened.

  Late in the day, the blind and aged king of Bohemia ordered his men to lead him into the English line directly at King Edward. Shouting his war-cry of ‘Prague’, he and his men were quickly cut down in an empty but glorious chivalric gesture. Meanwhile, the English cavalry now remounted and charged the remaining French units. The French infantry fled. Philip VI was largely abandoned, but for his personal bodyguard and some foot-soldiers from Orléans. His standard bearer was cut down and the oriflamme fell to the ground. Wounded in the face, the French king had two horses shot from under him but managed to escape the field with the assistance of John of Hainault, Edward III’s erstwhile ally and mentor. The defeat was devastatingly complete. At least 2,000 French knights and esquires died at Crécy. As well as King John of Bohemia, the dead included the counts of Alençon, Blois, Flanders and Harcourt, along with the duke of Lorraine. Despite the scale of the defeat, however, Crécy was strategically insignificant.

  Although Edward III had earlier proclaimed in Normandy that he ‘had come into this land not to lay it waste, but to take possession of it’, in fact the reverse was true. With limited financial and human resources at his disposal, Edward had been unable to occupy the territory he had devastated earlier in Normandy or to capitalize now on his victory in Ponthieu. He chose, therefore, to march north to Calais hoping to capture the port and thereby secure a permanent gateway into France.

  In 1346, Calais was not a major port in the way that Boulogne, St Omer or Dieppe were; its population was well under 10,000. Its attraction to Edward lay in its proximity to Flanders, whose border stood just a few miles to the northeast. All the same, Calais was well fortified and strongly garrisoned. When the English arrived before the city in early September, it was clear that it would not fall easily to assault, but would only be taken as the result of a prolonged siege.

  With recently arrived reinforcements, the English dug in just to the south of the city. The command centre, wryly referred to as ‘Villeneuve-le-Hardy’, served as a distribution point for the badly needed food and clothing brought in by sea or overland from Flanders via Gravelines. By the time the siege ended 11 months later on 4 August 1347, some 32,000 troops had taken part in the single largest English military undertaking of the Middle Ages.

  The siege had both a primary and secondary purpose: capture of the port was crucial to the continuation of the English war effort, but the siege may very well have been designed to entice Philip VI into a second battle, with the stakes being raised higher still by the outcome of Crécy. Edward made this clear when parliament was informed in September that ‘he did not intend to conclude [the siege of Calais] before he had conquered the town, with the help of God, and...after this conquest he would go after his enemy in pursuit of his quarrel, without returning to England before he had brought an end to his war overseas’.14 Jean le Bel was even more precise, reporting that the king had declared ‘neither for winter nor for summer would he depart until he had the town at his mercy, unless King Philip would come to combat him, and defeat him’.15 Philip attempted to draw Edward away with an attack on Flanders, but a siege at Cassel failed. He also wrote to his Scottish ally David II, urging the opening of a second front, although in the event this proved disastrous.

  Although the French did manage to obtain supplies by sea in March and April 1347, thereafter the English were able to close the shipping lanes and further tighten the noose around Calais. On 25 June, a supply fleet was intercepted by the English, prompting the Commander of Calais, Jean de Vienne, to write a desperate letter to Philip VI stating that, having eaten horses, dogs and cats, ‘we can now find no more food in the town unless we eat human flesh...Unless some other solution can be found this is the last letter that you will receive from me, for the town will be lost and all of us within it’.16In fact, the letter was intercepted by the English, but Edward, having read it and appended his own personal seal to it, sent the letter on to his cousin of France.

  After yet another supply convoy was captured by the English in July, the mounting pressure felt by the beleaguered garrison of Calais is vividly illustrated by the decision to expel some 500 townspeople who could not aid in the defence.

  Given the harsh conditions being endured by the English army, it is difficult to accept the account of the chivalric chronicler Jean le Bel who reports that Edward fed them all and then sent them on their way, each with a gift of 4 s. Knighton’s chronicle rings truer: trapped between the walls of their native city and the English lines, they suffered and died of hunger. Finally, on 27 July 1347, the king of France arrived at Sangatte, overlooking Calais, with some 15,000–20,000 troops. Recognizing instantly that he could not challenge the English position, he entered into several days of perfunctory negotiations. During the night of 1 August, however, the French army burned their tents and marched away.

  Two days later, Jean de Vienne rode out with a rope around his neck, followed by his knights and the leading burgesses similarly encumbered, to surrender. Edward would have executed both the garrison and the burgesses, but Walter Mauny appealed to his chivalric sense to spare the garrison and Queen Philippa convinced him to spare the burgesses as well. Calais was now an English town.

  Although the siege of Calais was settling into a prolonged and painful stalemate, the Scots fulfilled their obligation to the French, as embodied in the Treaty of Corbeil. In October, an army led by King David II and Sir William Douglas invaded northern England, besieging the castle of Liddell. Lanercost Abbey and Hexham Priory were pillaged – much to the dismay of the contemporary Lanercost Chronicler, who expressed his utter disdain by referring to the Scottish king as ‘not David the warrior, but David the defecator’.17 On the morning of 17 October 1346, in a thick fog, a Scottish raiding party under Douglas encountered an English force under the command of the archbishop of York, William de la Zouche. Having suffered heavy losses in the ensuing skirmish, Douglas hastened back to the main Scottish army, but could not rouse King David to action. According to the Lanercost Chronicle, David scoffed: ‘There are no men in England, but wretched monks, lewd priests, swineherds, cobblers and skinners. They dare not face me: I am safe enough.’18 But he was not safe at all. At the battle of Neville’s Cross, near Durham, disaster befell the Scottish cause. Not only was the king himself captured, but so were Douglas and the earls of Fife, Menteith and Wigtown. 19 The earl of Moray, John Randolph, was killed in the fighting, along with the earls of Strathearn and Sutherland, as well as the Constable, Marshal, Chancellor and Chamberlain of Scotland. Both the military command and the administrative centre of the Scottish kingdom were destroyed in a single day.

  Amid the defeat of the French king at Crécy, the capture of the Scottish king at Neville’s Cross, and the fall of Calais, Edward III had much to celebrate upon his return to England.

  The central element in the celebrations that ensued was the foundation of the Order of the Garter in 1348. This was an event that has more often than not been mischaracterized and devalued. The traditional tales of Edward III picking up and replacing the garter of his alleged mistress, the countess of Salisbury, has no basis in historical fact. In actuality, the king had adopted both the symbol of the garter and the Order’s famous motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense (‘Shame on him who thinks ill of it’), for the Crécy campaign. It appeared on streamers displayed from the ships that had carried his troops to Normandy, as well as ro
bes and other accoutrements (including a bedcover) displayed by the king during the campaign. That the motto was in French (whereas all of Edward’s other mottoes were in English), and the streamers and robes were in the blue and gold of French royalty, reflects the audience to whom Edward was issuing this defiant challenge.

  The vindication of his cause at Crécy and Calais justified the use of both the symbol of the garter and the motto in the creation of a chivalric order to commemorate these victories. Much more than his earlier scheme for a Round Table in 1344, or the pageantry of his many tournaments in the previous decade, the Order of the Garter has a gravitas about it that is altogether lacking earlier in the reign. The simplicity of the rules of the Order, and the emphasis on the annual Feast of St George, convey this seriousness of purpose. The Order was limited to 26 members: the king, the prince of Wales, and two teams of 12 knights attached to each. Although this may initially have reflected the origins of the Order in the context of a tournament with two teams of knights attached to the king and prince, respectively, over time the exclusivity of membership in the Order added to its prestige, and the success of these knights as commanders in France reinforced this image. This was soon recognized by those well outside the aristocratic circle who formed its founding membership. As early as 1352, the author of the Middle English poem Wynner and Wastere described Edward’s tent decorated:

  With English bezants full bright, beaten from gold,

  And each one gaily encircled with garters of blue ...

  He then goes on to give, in English, the Order’s motto suggesting the burgeoning English national identity and pride. The founding members of the Order of the Garter included King Edward and the Black Prince, Duke Henry of Lancaster, and five present and future earls. All had fought at Crécy or the concurrent campaigns in Brittany and Aquitaine. Membership was based on chivalric accomplishments, so that alongside the king and his heir we find simple knights, largely unknown otherwise, such as Sir Otho Holand and Sir Walter Paveley. Not all were English: Sanchet de Abrechicourt was from Ponthieu; Henry Eam from Brabant; and Jean de Grailly, captal de Buch, from Gascony. The Order of the Garter, and its headquarters at Windsor Castle, physically embodied Edward III’s vision of kingship, chivalric in nature and international in scope. Unfortunately, the same year that saw the articulation of this vision by Edward III also witnessed an unprecedented vision of disease, despair and death as the bubonic plague made its way across Europe.

  The great pestilence, or the Black Death as it is generally known, was a catastrophic event of unprecedented scope. The bubonic plague had not visited the Mediterranean world since the sixth century, and in consequence there was little if any resistance to the virulent bacillus, yersinia pestis. Moving from east to west, the disease devastated both the Byzantine and Islamic civilizations before making its way into western Europe. As many as 200,000 were said to have died in Constantinople following the arrival of the plague there in the spring of 1347, while half the population reportedly perished in both Alexandria and Cairo.

  The disease quickly made its way across the Mediterranean, reaching Sicily and Italy in the autumn, and from there spreading throughout the continent. The pestilence first made landfall in England at Bristol in late June 1348. According to Higden’sPolychronicon, the pesitilence ‘raged so strongly that scarcely a tenth of mankind was left alive’. 20 Although this sort of hyperbole is typical of the contemporary chronicles, recent research has convincingly demonstrated that the traditional estimate that one-third of the population perished in the first outbreak of the plague is too low a figure: in all likelihood, 50–55% of the people in England died in 1348–1349.

  From Bristol, the plague moved quickly on to Dorset, Devon and Somerset. Turning inland from the south coast, the pestilence reached London on or about the Feast of All Saints. According to Robert of Avebury, ‘between Candlemas [2 February 1349] and Easter [12 April], more than 200 corpses were buried every day in the new burial ground next to Smithfield, and this was in addition to the bodies buried in other churchyards in the city’. The disease continued its inexorable spread, reaching York in the spring of 1349. Even Scotland was stricken by 1350 as recorded in the Scotichronicon of John of Fordun. In Ireland, the Franciscan friar John of Clynn chronicled the spread of the disease from Dublin to his own house in Kilkenny. Clynn appears to have been a victim of the plague himself, and he concluded his entry with this poignant ending: ‘I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future and any son of Adam can escape this pestilence and continue the work thus begun. ’21

  The first wave of the great pestilence was an indiscriminate killer. Even the royal family was touched, as Edward III’s daughter Joan died of the plague in Bordeaux on 2 September 1348 as she travelled to Spain for her marriage to Pedro, heir to the throne of Castile. The king’s pain at the loss of his daughter is evident in his subsequent letter to the Castilian court. Nevertheless, he demonstrates an outward courage and dignity that must have impressed all those who suffered a similar grief. The king wrote:

  No fellow human being could be surprised if we were inwardly desolated by the sting of this bitter grief, for we are human too. But we, who have placed our trust in God, and our life between his hands...give thanks to him that one of our own family, free of all stain, whom we have loved with pure love, has been sent ahead to heaven to reign among the choirs of virgins, where she can gladly intercede for our offences before himself.22

  Here, as elsewhere, the king’s rather conventional, but altogether genuine, faith provided him with strength in a moment of crisis.

  To the medieval mind, the cause of the Black Death was obvious. No agency other than God Almighty was capable of unleashing such a horrible scourge. The initial reaction in England was not unlike that in other lands: Edward III ordered prayers and public penance. But this was the occasion of a social and economic crisis as well as a spiritual one, and here too the king took action. Making common cause with his aristocracy, as early as 18 June 1349 Edward issued the Ordinance of Labourers, which obliged agricultural workers to accept employment at the wage rate that had been established in 1346. Refusal to accept employment under these terms was cause for imprisonment. This ordinance was reissued in statutory form by the first post-plague parliament in February 1351.

  Justices were commissioned to hear labour cases in the county quarter sessions, and the records indicate that enforcement of the statute was vigorous, with some £10,000 collected in fines between 1352 and 1354. These fines testify to the fact that the great landowners clearly struggled to find the necessary labour to continue direct demesne farming, but in an ironic case of adding insult to injury, heriots and entry fines imposed upon the survivors of the Black Death boosted manorial incomes throughout England in the short run and may have slowed the transition away from direct demesne farming despite the greatly diminished labour pool. These factors, along with the increasing concentration of land in the hands of the greatest noble houses, help account for the class tensions that would erupt at the very end of the reign.

  The great pestilence also interrupted the war with France, as both kingdoms came to terms with reduced tax revenues and manpower. Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the first visitation of the plague, while the royal court celebrated Christmas 1349 at Havering, word reached the king of a plot to betray Calais to the French. In an episode of chivalric derring-do, unequalled except perhaps by his grandfather’s struggle with a knife-wielding Assassin while on Crusade, both the king and his son Edward hastened to Calais in secrecy with a small force of household knights. There they fought incognito under the banner of Sir Walter Mauny, overwhelming the French army led by Geoffrey de Charny and saving the English gateway to France. Edward followed this up by defeating the Franco–Castilian fleet off Winchelsea the following summer, and there continued to be sporadic fighting, particularly in Gascony, but neither side was willing or able to launch a major campaign.

  The death
of Philip VI in August 1350 provided the English king with some breathing space, and over the next few years Edward was able to concentrate his attention more fully on domestic affairs. Ever since the crisis of 1340–1341, Edward had been served by a corps of talented administrators, William Edington most of all. Edington had been sponsored in royal service by his early patron, Bishop Orleton. In November 1341, he became keeper of the wardrobe, and was responsible for guaranteeing the flow of cash to support the king’s wars in Scotland and Brittany. He excelled at the task and was made treasurer in April 1344. He was to serve in that capacity for 12 years, until November 1356 when the king made him chancellor, an office he would hold for a further 7 years.

  Meanwhile, Edward had arranged Edington’s provision to the see of Winchester in 1345, reversing his promise of 1341 not to appoint clerics to high administrative posts. Other trusted administrators such as John Thoresby (chancellor, 1349–1356), Sir John Stonor (Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1342–1354) and Sir William Shareshull (Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, 1350–1361) provided a continuity of tenure that had been lacking in English government since the reign of Edward I.

  During this relatively stable period in domestic affairs, one legal enactment stands out and reinforces the king’s relationship with his magnates, the Statute of Treason of 1352. This was a landmark in that it defined treason to a number of specific acts, such as: plotting to kill the king, queen or heir to the throne; raping the king’s spouse or eldest daughter; waging war against the king in his realm; counterfeiting the great seal or money; and killing officials such as the chancellor, treasurer or royal justices when they are in their places performing their offices. The statute marked an end to the cycle of political violence that had marred the entire reign of Edward II and the early years of Edward III, and it provided the aristocracy with greater assurance about the security of tenure of their estates. As such, it can be seen as the culmination of a process of reconciliation that had begun as early as 1330. In these same years, the crown also addressed the increasingly contentious issue of relations with the papacy. The Statutes of Provisors (1351) and Praemunire (1353) responded to the xenophobic atmosphere occasioned by an increasingly French-dominated papacy, restricting the pope’s ability to reserve ecclesiastical appointments and provide his own nominees for them. While part of the inspiration for these statutes came from commons petitions, they were very much the product of the king’s council, and remind us that although parliament was becoming an increasingly important institution, Edward III maintained his prerogative powers throughout his reign while nonetheless cooperating with the political community. Unfortunately, in the later years of the reign, this cooperation broke down. The king put his trust in William Wykeham (Chancellor, 1367–1371), who (like Edington) became bishop of Winchester, but by then the combination of failure in war with other social and economic crises precluded a continuation of the smooth relations that had characterized the middle years of the reign.