A French armada, including Castilian and Genoese vessels, assembled at Sluys on the Flemish coast, to intercept the king. In June 1340 he sailed from Orwell to attack it, despite Archbishop Stafford warning him he did not have enough men. Although the French fleet included so many vessels that their masts looked like a forest, Edward won a great victory. Directing his fleet from his flagship the Thomas of Winchester, he used wind and tide to defeat them, grouping his own ships in threes – one carrying men-at-arms flanked on each side by another with archers. Outshooting the enemy’s crossbows, his longbowmen massacred the French before his men-at-arms boarded. He captured 166 vessels. The main English casualty was a cog carrying ladies of the court, which was sunk by gunfire, while the king himself was wounded by a bolt in the thigh. His campaign on land was less successful, Philip VI refusing to settle matters by a duel or a full-scale battle.
Shortage of cash forced Edward into a truce. Informed by an official in London that funds for his immediate needs were available at the Tower, he arrived there at midnight, having sailed up the Thames, so unexpectedly that the constable was away. He then sacked the chancellor, the treasurer and three senior judges, arresting leading merchants and legal officials for corruption.
He also tried to send the previous chancellor, Archbishop Stratford, to Flanders as security for his debts. Stratford, who saw himself as another Becket, compared the king to the evil Rehoboam of Scripture who had threatened to chastise his subjects with scorpions, whereupon Edward unfairly charged the primate of encouraging him to wage war without sufficient funds. In a letter to the pope, he claimed that Stratford had hoped lack of money would bring about his defeat and death, even accusing the saintly archbishop of lecherous designs on the queen. In the end Stratford escaped when parliament decided that a lord spiritual could only be tried by his peers.
Out of character, the king’s behaviour can only be explained by stress. His debts amounted to five times his revenue and he had pawned his crown. His perseverance was astonishing, and so was his ability to extract taxes despite bad harvests. The victory at Sluys helped to some extent, most people realizing that it made a French invasion less likely. Even so, in 1341 he was forced to appoint ministers on the advice of his lords in parliament, just as the Ordinances had stipulated thirty years before, a concession Edward cancelled after extracting the money he needed.
When his Florentine bankers, the Bardi and Peruzzi, collapsed (from lending all over Europe rather than the king’s default), he borrowed from wealthy English merchants and a single, exceptionally rich, nobleman, the Earl of Arundel. The country accepted it would have to give more towards the war effort, allowing the king to levy his hated taxes on wool. Why there was such hatred of the French in a period supposedly antedating nationalism may be hard for us to understand, yet it was there all right. Edward whipped up xenophobia to overcome the grumbles of magnates and commons.
He also adopted a cheaper strategy. The Duke of Brittany having died early in 1341, the Breton succession was disputed by his brother’s daughter Jeanne, Countess of Blois, and his half-brother, John of Montfort. While Philip VI accepted Jeanne’s claim, Edward recognized John as duke in return for homage to him as King of France. Edward arrived in Brittany in 1342, besieging key cities, and when he went home left behind Sir Thomas Dagworth, an Essex man who although nearly seventy was an outstanding soldier. The Breton war enabled Edward to attack Philip on several fronts at once with small armies. In 1345 his cousin Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Lancaster regained the Agenais while Dagworth ravaged Brittany. Edward prepared an invasion.
He was a master of logistics. Commissions of array no longer summoned the old feudal muster but raised troops by indenture with young, energetic nobles and gentry, who each assembled a retinue – the indentures specifying number, type, period of service and rates of pay, which came from the Exchequer. Every town supplied a fixed quota of men, similarly paid, while a substantial number of archers were criminals recruited by free pardons. Horses, weapons, armour and victuals (salted and smoked meat, dried fish, cheese, flour and beans, ale) were gathered from all over England and stockpiled. The army was shipped across the sea with munitions and supplies in an armada of requisitioned ships.
In July 1346, instead of going to Flanders as the French expected, Edward landed in Normandy with 15,000 troops and sacked Caen, killing most of its population. Among the loot was a document containing Philip VI’s plan to invade England in 1339, which the king sent home to be read out at St Paul’s by the Archbishop of Canterbury – to show his subjects he had saved them from the miseries he was inflicting on the French. Burning and slaying, he marched to Paris where, since he was in no position to besiege it, he torched Saint-Germain and Saint-Cloud nearby. Having panicked Philip into recalling the troops sent to deal with Lancaster and Dagworth, Edward retreated northwards.
After a lengthy pursuit the enemy caught up with him near the little town of Crécy-en-Ponthieu, early in the evening of 26 August. The English, about 2,000 men-at-arms and 7,000 archers with 1,500 Welsh knifemen, occupied rising ground, one side of which was protected by a small river and the other by woods. Edward formed them up well before the battle. His cavalry were to fight dismounted, in three divisions six men deep, his archers on the flanks. After going among them, chatting and joking, he gave orders to sit down to eat and drink until the trumpets sounded, plenty of cattle and large supplies of wine having been found nearby. One reason for confidence was his archers’ ability to shoot twelve arrows a minute, with a killing range of about 150 yards against unarmoured men and about 60 yards against men in armour. At most, the enemy’s crossbows shot four bolts a minute.
The French army was three times larger, 10,000 men-at-arms (many from the upper nobility), with 6,000 mercenaries and 14,000 levies. Philip wanted to wait until the next day, but his nobles insisted on fighting immediately and, in their haste to get at the enemy, rode over their own crossbow men. Until after nightfall, in charge after charge French mailed cavalry were shot down by English archers, Philip being hit in the face by an arrow and having his horse killed under him before being led away. Over 1,500 French noblemen died, with 10,000 other troops, their corpses lying in heaps, while Edward lost only a hundred men.
Crécy was followed by other victories. In September Lancaster led a chevauchée that culminated in the capture of Poitiers, and regained four Gascon provinces. In October a raid across the border by the young King of Scots was defeated at Neville’s Cross near Durham, David II being taken prisoner and brought in triumph to the Tower of London where he spent nine years. In May 1347 Sir Thomas Dagworth routed the pro-French Bretons at La Roche-Derrien, capturing their duke.
Only a month before La Roche-Derrien, Calais surrendered after an eleven-month siege that had begun after Crécy, during which the king housed his army in a town of wooden huts. A show trial of rich burghers, pardoned at Queen Philippa’s dramatic intervention, was staged to distract attention from other townsmen being evicted from their homes. They were replaced by settlers who made the port an English gateway into France for the next two centuries.
Although Edward’s sole gain was Calais, the war was popular as a source of plunder and profit. In 1348 there were few women who did not own something from Caen, Calais or some other town over the seas, such as clothing, furs or cushions. French tablecloths were in everybody’s houses, ladies wore French matrons’ finery. The Parliament Roll records how lords and commons approved motions thanking God for their king’s victories and agreeing that monies voted for him were well spent. He had finally united the magnates behind him. No one could have foreseen the calamity that stopped the war.
The Great Pestilence (later called the Black Death), which reached England in June 1348, combined bubonic and pneumonic plague with other diseases. It killed quickly and horribly, exterminating half of England’s population within a few months. In September, on her way to marry the King of Castile’s heir, Edward’s daughter Joan was struck down at Bordeaux. ‘No f
ellow human being can be surprised that our very souls have been in torment from the sting of this bitter grief, for we are human too’, wrote her father. ‘But we, who place our trust in God and our life in his hands . . . give thanks to Him that one of our family, free of all stain, whom we have loved with pure love, has gone before us to heaven.’11
Edward ordered public prayer, fasting and penance. Dead peasants could not work the land and, realizing they were indispensable, survivors demanded pay that threatened the entire economy. In June 1349 the king issued the Ordinance of Labourers, confirmed by parliament in 1351 – anyone asking higher wages would be imprisoned; everybody under sixty must work. Despite being proclaimed at the shire quarter-sessions by country gentlemen called justices of the peace, it had no effect. Yet the Ordinance at least showed awareness of the problem.
Ignoring the plague, Edward kept an ever more splendid court. In 1348 the Knights of the Order of the Garter, which had been founded four years before, were given magnificent robes to wear at their ceremonies in St George’s Chapel. For all the story of the king picking up the beautiful Lady Salisbury’s garter and declaring, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (may he be ashamed who thinks evil of it) to save her from embarrassment, it had a political function. Most members, veterans of the campaigns in France, were not only successful commanders but magnates, such as Lancaster and the Earl of Warwick, which reassured the old nobility.
During Christmas 1349, Edward learned that the French had bribed the Italian mercenary who was governor of Calais to hand over the city. Terrifying the governor into turning double agent, the king and his eldest son crossed the Channel and entered Calais secretly, fighting incognito under Sir Walter Manny’s command and ambushing the enemy when they came to take possession. Characteristically, Edward gave his prisoners a sumptuous dinner on New Year’s Eve, presiding in person and wearing a pearl coronet.
The next year he destroyed the Castilian fleet off Winchelsea in the engagement known as Les Espagnols-sur-Mer, confirming his control of the Channel. Determined to conquer France, Edward then embarked on a series of chevauchées, to weaken the new Valois king, Philip’s son John II. Yet for a decade after Crécy no more decisive battles were fought on land. While Edward retained Calais and what had been recovered in Gascony, he did not make any further gains.
Despite the Black Death, it was easier for him to find money for the war, presented to parliament as ‘a joint stock enterprise undertaken for the defence of the realm and of his legitimate claim to the throne of France’.12 Everyone knew of his victories from his letters to bishops and abbots, read out in parish churches, marketplaces and shire courts. Since 1345 a gifted treasurer, William Edington, Bishop of Winchester, had been centralizing royal revenue under the Exchequer so that the king’s income could be properly budgeted, which enabled him to finance campaigns without asking too much in taxes. In any case, lords and commons were more inclined to finance hostilities because of the loot.
Even the magnificent new coinage introduced in 1344 served as propaganda. Gold nobles, half-nobles and quarter-nobles had an image of the king in armour, standing in a ship and bearing a shield with the arms of France and England. A jingle ran:
Four things our noble showeth unto me,
King, ship and sword, and power of the sea.
Accompanied by the words, ‘King of France and England’, so that no one could fail to understand its meaning, the image symbolized Edward’s claim to the French crown, his victory at Sluys and his control of the Channel. Unlike Henry III’s gold penny, the noble proved a lasting success.
The king had built a team of commanders, from very different backgrounds. Lancaster, whom he made a duke in 1351, belonged to the blood royal, while the Hainaulter Sir Walter Manny was a kinsman of the queen and Sir John Chandos’s Derbyshire manor had belonged to his family since the Conquest. By contrast, Thomas Dagworth – aged nearly eighty when killed in an ambush – was of humble origin, as was his successor as Captain of Brittany, Walter Bentley, another fine soldier. (Bentley made his fortune by marrying Jeanne de Clisson, a female pirate known as the ‘Lioness of Brittany’.) The team included semi-bandits like Sir Robert Knolles and his half-brother Sir Hugh Calveley, who led ‘free companies’ of brigands. There was even an ex-serf from Norfolk, Sir Robert Salle, personally knighted by the king. But his best general was his eldest son Edward, Prince of Wales, nicknamed the ‘Black Prince’ from his armour.
In 1354, in secret instructions to the Duke of Lancaster, the king revealed how aware he was of his Plantagenet inheritance. In return for peace, Lancaster must demand the duchies of Aquitaine-Guyenne and Normandy and the county of Ponthieu, just as the king’s ancestors had held them. He must also obtain Anjou, Poitou, Maine, Touraine, the Angoumois, the Limousin and all lands ruled by Henry II. The next year, Edward launched two major offensives. The attack he led in the north was let down by the defection of his ally the King of Navarre, and failed. The other offensive under the Black Prince laid waste to Languedoc, destroying whole towns.
Unexpectedly, the Black Prince then won a shattering victory. In September 1356, on a similar chevauchée, he was intercepted by John II near Poitiers – and, astonishingly, 6,000 Englishmen routed 20,000 Frenchmen. His father’s aims now grew more attainable. John was brought to England, to be housed in the Savoy Palace at London for the next four years.
David II was still in the Tower and in 1356 Balliol surrendered his claim to the Scottish crown to Edward, who immediately led a vicious raid into Scotland, known as the ‘Burnt Candlemas’, although bad weather soon made him withdraw, with a great booty of loot and livestock. If he hoped to become King of Scots, it was an odd way of endearing himself to his future subjects. However, later that year he released David, whom he recognized as king while extracting a crippling indemnity.
In autumn 1359 Edward again invaded northern France, to capture Rheims (crowning place of the kings of France) for his coronation. Rheims proved impregnable and after two months spent camping before its walls in the snow, he set off on a chevau-chée that took him to Burgundy. He then appeared before Paris, but the Dauphin refused to come out and fight, so he returned to the coast through the Beauce, inflicting terrible devastation.
Despite vast plunder, Edward then accepted that he did not have the resources to make himself King of France. He compromised. In May 1360, by the Treaty of Brétigny, John II ceded Guyenne, Poitou, the Limousin and other territories in full sovereignty to Edward, who renounced his claim to the French throne. Created Prince of Aquitaine, the Black Prince ruled the new state from Bordeaux as an independent country, installing a glittering ducal court at his capital. It seemed that his father had achieved a large part of his ambitions.
Had Edward III died soon after Brétigny, he would be remembered as our greatest king. He had united England behind him with his ‘we’re all in this together’ approach, victory after victory and a river of loot. The loot took the sting out of taxation that came to be taken for granted by the Commons.
His reputation as a conqueror and his awesome presence, enhanced by dazzling pomp, had given him a god-like image. He increased his popularity still further by fostering a sense of nationalism. In 1362 a statute ordained that English must be spoken in the law courts, while from then on the king opened parliament in English. He encouraged his courtiers to read the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, who was made one of his ‘varlets de chambre’ in 1367 and awarded a gallon of wine a day in 1374.
French resurgence
The Black Prince possessed all his father’s magnificence and physical courage, but not his charm or political sense. Haughty and extravagant, he made himself disliked throughout his principality, even in the Gascon heartland, which was normally unshakably loyal to the Plantagenets. During an ill-judged intervention in a war for the Castilian throne, although he won a splendid victory at Najéra in 1367 he incurred huge expenses. To pay for these and for his lavish court, he levied a hearth tax that alienated local magnates as well as sq
uires. In 1369 they appealed against it to the new French king, Charles V, who took the opportunity to ‘confiscate’ Aquitaine. War broke out first in northern France, however, where Edward’s county of Ponthieu rose against the English and declared for Charles.
Because of ill health, Charles V employed a Breton squire, Bertrand du Guesclin, to fight the war for him. Realizing English archers and dismounted men-at-arms were unbeatable, Bertrand used guerrilla warfare, with hit-and-run raids that cut communications, isolated strongholds and wore down morale. The Black Prince fought back ferociously, massacring the entire population of Limoges after its recapture in 1370, a crime which shocked all Aquitaine. Then his health cracked, and he returned to England as an invalid.
When Poitou went over to Charles in 1372, King Edward sailed for France in August with 14,000 troops, but his armada was blown back to port by storms. Then a Castilian fleet defeated the English at sea, making it impossible to send reinforcements to Aquitaine. The next summer John of Gaunt led a chevau-chée from Calais to Bordeaux via the Auvergne, the sole answer the English could make to the new French tactics, but it ended with Gaunt losing half his army and all his horses. By the end of 1373 the Principality of Aquitaine had ceased to exist beyond the old frontiers of Gascony. The only other English possessions in France other than Calais were one or two seaports in Brittany and Normandy.
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