By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  The chevauchée has been defined as ‘a typical campaign’ of the Hundred Years War, ‘the aim of which was to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy through the destruction of his resources’.72 The Black Prince’s campaign of 1355 achieved just that. His army of between six and eight thousand men, English and Gascon, left Bordeaux in early October to carry out a fast raid into the Languedoc. From the start, the main targets were lands in the hands of his enemy, Count Jean of Armagnac, a chief commander of the French king, John II. Though it was originally intended as a profitable diversionary tactic to co-ordinate with English forces operating in northern France, thereby dividing the enemy, a change of plans meant the campaign was now purely a raid. Gaining momentum from its successes along the way, the army eventually reached Narbonne on the eastern coast before returning to Bordeaux: a march from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and back. It has been aptly described as ‘a remarkable exercise in devastation and destruction … perhaps the pre-eminent example of the chevauchée strategy’ that ‘assaulted over 500 villages, towns, castles and other settlements and strongholds’.73

  To create the most damage possible, the army moved forward in three columns abreast, thus widening their path of depredation. On one Sunday alone (15 November), Edward’s forces burned four towns including Fonjeaux and Limoux – while he rested in a religious house. Major strongholds were avoided, not least because French counter-strategy had meant they were strengthened in readiness. However, overconfidently, Edward could not resist marching up to Armagnac’s base at Toulouse, a calculated insult to the Count. From here he moved on Carcassonne where, as we have seen earlier, he refused a pay-off from the city and burned its suburbs. Two French armies closed in on Edward as he made his way back to Bordeaux, but his reaction to them is disputed between those who believe he was trying to avoid battle, and those who think he was actively seeking one. A letter from the Black Prince to the Bishop of Winchester gives the impression that Edward was goading the enemy, and that he headed home when it was clear that the French would not give battle. Armagnac seemingly made the conscious decision not to engage Edward, despite the damage to his lands. Edward arrived back in home territory on 2 December, with very few losses in men, and very great gains in wealth.

  Our two main English eyewitness sources for the campaign are Edward himself and his chief secretary accompanying him. Both appear indifferent to non-combatants, coldly analysing the raid in factual military and financial terms. Edward’s despatch restricts itself to trumpeting his successes (‘not a day passed without a town, castle, or fortress being taken’) and describing his army’s pillaging in conventional terms: ‘laying waste the countryside’; ‘burnt and destroyed’; ‘burning the town so that it was completely destroyed’ (Carcassonne). His only acknowledgement of non-combatants is when they ‘fled’ to Carcassonne, ‘took refuge in the castle’ of Narbonne, and at Samatan, ‘whose inhabitants left empty on our approach’.74 His secretary, Sir John Wingfield, writing to the same recipient (the Bishop of Winchester), offers more details, but in the same conventional phraseology of burning, destroying and laying waste. His main concern is to express the great financial gains of the campaign: ‘It seems certain that since the war against the French king began, there has never been such destruction in a region as in this raid. For the countryside and towns which we have destroyed in this raid produced more revenue for the king of France in aid of his wars than half his kingdom … as I could prove from authentic documents found in various towns in the taxcollectors’ houses.’75

  A third source, Robert of Avesbury, adds a human dimension, but only in as much as he tells of the anxiety of the people of Montpellier, who ‘feared lest they should suffer the same fate’ as the people of Narbonne, and many of whom, from the town and surrounding countryside, ‘went in terror to Avignon, with such property as they could carry, that they might be under the protection of the pope’.76

  There is no mention of prisoners, ransoms or killings. There was plenty of the last of these: just south of Toulouse at Lacroix-Falgarde, light troops stormed the town and put many non-combatants to the sword; at Carcassonne, there was widespread rape. Nor is there much talk of booty, either. But booty there was, and prisoners, too. Jonathan Sumption writes, ‘The Prince was highly satisfied with the campaign. A great quantity of booty had been brought from Languedoc, enough to fill about 1,000 carts according to one report. The ransoms of French prisoners were collected gradually over the following months as contracts were enforced and promissory notes were cashed. Many of the Prince’s followers became rich men.’77

  However, he and other historians question the military value of the raid: ‘No battles had been won, no territory conquered, and no castles garrisoned.’78 Clifford Rogers disputes this assessment, claiming that Edward achieved a set of vaguer objectives: punishing rebels, aiding allies, and making gains to the enemy’s disadvantage (certainly true economically). There was another, transient advantage to add to the very real financial one. The impact of the expedition astonished France, bringing fierce war to a region which had previously escaped it. The impact can be assessed from the quotations cited on pages 199 and 238–9, taken from accounts describing the effects of chevauchée in the Hundred Years War. By penetrating so deeply and successfully into a region regarded as safe, the Black Prince was showing the French people that he was more powerful than their king, who was too feeble to protect them. But the propaganda victory did not translate into hard political gains. Edward wanted ‘to terrify the inhabitants into changing allegiance … but they still feared French revenge at a later date more than they feared the enemy at the gates’.79 The dread of a future, retributive atrocity neutralized the dread of a present, aggressive one. The Black Prince showed he understood this equation at Limoges.

  The 1355 campaign is also interesting as it raises the question of whether Edward had adopted a battle-seeking policy. This has generated an ongoing debate between medieval military historians which is too involved to engage in great detail with here. Clifford Rogers sparked the debate with a series of scholarly articles and a book that offer contemporary evidence of Edward III and the Black Prince actively pursuing battle with the French. Some of this evidence can be interpreted in different ways; for example, when Jean le Bel quotes the King as saying he will go to France ‘and do battle with King Jean’,80 is this a genuine quote and, if so, is it merely figurative? The Christmas letters home from Edward and Wingfield also indicate this intent in 1355; but then, for the satisfaction of honour, they would, as they are unlikely to say that Edward fled from the French at the faintest whiff of them. Apart from the sheer riskiness of battle and the general strategy of commanders to avoid it, there is also the practical matter of plunder: why risk losing the incredible wealth gained in a battle that could see it, and much more besides, lost to the French? It is easy to determine what a King John of England would do – grab the easy money and run – but a wholly different and more robust personality such as the Black Prince is a different matter.

  Did the Black Prince, as one chronicle suggests of his father the King, ‘lay waste to all the country, so that he would be giving the Frenchmen sharper provocation to fight?’81 Rogers makes a strong case for this, arguing that the serious political and military situation within France at the time (compounded by the recent reaping of the Black Death) left King John II vulnerable to a decisive blow. He sees the move on Toulouse in this light: more than a shameful insult, the display of destroying the area outside the city was intended to draw the garrison out into the field of battle. At one point in late November, Edward’s troops were drawn up in battle order, but the French, though greater in number, drew off. Edward’s advance guard caught up with some, capturing men-at-arms while massacring the poor carters. There are always exceptions to the general rule of battle-avoidance, and Edward may have been one of them, just as William the Conqueror was at Hastings, deliberately targeting King Harold’s estates to provoke him into a battle that William needed. He
witt wrote: ‘Since it was impracticable to occupy France … the enemy was to be weakened by the destruction of his resources. Devastation was a negative, economic means for the attainment of the ultimate, political end.’82 This impracticability (although not completely insurmountable: colonization, allies and a subjugated and cowed population might have achieved a similar result) might have meant that Edward sought a decisive, crushing victory in battle to radically alter the political situation in one swoop. The refusal of the inhabitants at Carcassonne to submit revealed the limits of ravaging; and the approach of the French armies soon afterwards made battle-seeking more possible. Is it a coincidence that the English sources seem to suggest a greater willingness for battle after the failure at Carcassonne?

  The great English chevauchées of the Hundred Years War became more infrequent after the Black Prince’s death as they failed to achieve major political or military objectives. Thereafter, they still played a dominant role in warfare as raids had always done – the extent of devastation in fifteenth-century France was every bit as great – but sieges were to determine the outcome of the great conflict. The French had starting responding to the chevauchées by adding greater strength to the major fortresses, abandoning the countryside and shadowing the English army with forces of their own, thereby preventing raiding parties peeling off from the main columns. All the while they scrupulously avoided battle. It was an extremely successful strategy and one that must have crossed the keen military minds of Edward and his commanders. It was nothing new: Duke William of Normandy was doing the same thing against his enemies three centuries earlier in the 1050s. If battle-avoidance proved so effective for the French, it was obviously detrimental to the English.

  Ravaging had many adaptive advantages – provisioning for the army, weakening the enemy politically and economically, punishing dissidents, plunder – to which battle-seeking or battle-avoidance could easily be added. If a main purpose of Edward’s chevauchée was to take on the French in a pitched battle, he obviously failed. But then, he had much to compensate him, as the chroniclers attest: such was the booty, Edward’s men ‘didn’t know what to do with it all’.83 Some of that plunder had come from garrisons and castles, but most of it came from non-combatants who, as usual, had paid the price of war. Jean de Venette reflects sadly on how the ravaging of the Hundred Years War has destroyed his home village and all the livestock, exposing the reality of military campaigning:

  The English, destroyed, burned, and plundered many little towns and villages capturing or even killing the inhabitants. The loss by fire of the village where I was born is to be lamented, together with that of many others near by. The vines in this region were not pruned or kept from rotting. The fields were not sown or ploughed. There were no cattle or fowl in the fields. No wayfarers went along the roads, carrying their best cheese and dairy products to market. The eye of man was saddened by the looks of the nettles and thistles springing up on every side. Instead of houses and churches there was the lamentable spectacle of scattered, smoking ruins to which they had been reduced by devouring flames. What more can I say? Every misery increased on every hand, especially among the rural population, the peasants, for their lords bore hard upon them, extorting from them all their substance and poor means of livelihood.84

  CONCLUSIONS

  The cases of ravaging discussed above were chosen not just because England has hitherto come off rather lightly as a place of atrocity, but also because they highlight important aspects of this form of campaigning. The Harrying of the North is an example of a pre-emptive scorched-earth policy, carried out to prevent an enemy creating a power base in the region by denying him supplies and the economic infrastructure necessary to sustain a competing polity. The Scottish invasions of 1138 demonstrate another form of extreme ravaging, this time fuelled by border tensions, ethnic hostility and growing national identity. John’s chevauchée of 1215–16 makes explicit the links between ravaging and acts of cruelty and how it could be a carefully targeted weapon. And the Black Prince’s raid of 1355 shows how waging war in such a manner undermined the financial basis of an enemy and challenged its leadership’s authority. Of course, most cases of ravaging exhibit many or even all of these features, and others, too.

  Before an army destroyed it gathered – or seized and stole. Military logistics were always to the forefront of a commander’s mind. An army could take with it only limited provisions; these had to be supplemented by living off the land an army passed through. If ravaging had no military or political objectives, it would have still occurred for this reason. What an army gained an area lost, for, as has been succinctly noted, ‘one man’s foraging is another man’s ravaging’.85 What an army could not use it destroyed so that the enemy could not benefit from it, either through supply of goods or through the taxation levied on them.

  Historians can sometimes lavish too much attention on the text of De Re Militari (or, more accurately, Epitoma Rei Militaris) Vegetius’ late Roman handbook on war – he was, after all, just a donkey doctor – but the blindingly obvious recommendations in his beginner’s guide to warfare are much quoted for the eternal, common-sense truths they propound, a pertinent one being: ‘On any expedition, the single most effective weapon is that food should be sufficient for you while famine should break the enemy’.86 Ravaging achieved just that. Commanders considering the impact of their troops travelling across friendly or neutral territory would ensure their troops bought what they needed, keeping his men under better control than the inflated prices. Henry V famously kept his troops in check during his invasion of Normandy: he treated the duchy as his sovereign territory and wished to impress his just lordship on its inhabitants. Duke William of Normandy only just managed to keep his invasion force gathered at Dives in line in 1066 by regular pay and markets. On Louis VIII’s long march through friendly lands as he headed south to Avignon in 1226, he brought with him cattle and fodder from his own provinces. Conversely, three centuries later, when Charles V failed to pay his troops in 1527, they sacked Rome utterly.

  Maintaining discipline and restricting ravaging were always easier in friendly territory, but could also be achieved (or at least the urge to loot could be channelled) in the field of operations. We have seen how ravaging could be accurately targeted against specific areas and enemy estates and to the extent that particular buildings in a town or village could be singled out. Even the Black Prince’s chevauchées, infamously symbolic of the destruction of medieval warfare, were focused affairs. During the raid into Languedoc of 1355, the captain of Arouille immediately surrendered his castle and three local towns under his control; all were spared. The following year, on his way to victory at Poitiers, Prince Edward’s forces inflicted huge damage on the western borders of the Limousin region, only to stop their depredations abruptly and briefly at Bellac: the widow there had connections with the English royal family.

  Ravaging was also employed as a diversionary tactic. When in 1216 John heard that his castles at Windsor and Dover were besieged, he immediately embarked on a ravaging expedition of his enemies’ estates at harvest time, successfully drawing them away from the sieges. Similarly, it was a device for goading a reluctant enemy into battle. This did not work on Count Baldwin of Flanders, who reassured his men as they watched his territory being burned by his enemies: ‘They can’t take the land with them.’87 Baldwin, like Alexander II, David I, Louis VIII and any number of other leaders, was prepared to torch his own lands to hinder an advancing enemy. A scorched-earth policy – counter-ravaging as a defence mechanism – turned the tables on the enemy presence. Count Raymond of Toulouse used it effectively against the French at Avignon in 1226:

  The provisions of the [French] soldiers failed them and numbers of the troops died; for the count of Toulouse, like a skilful soldier, had, before the arrival of the French, removed out of their way all kinds of provisions, together with the old men, women, children, and the horses and cattle, so that they were deprived of all kind of sustenance. And it was not
only the men who suffered, but also the horses and cattle of the army perished from hunger; for the count had ordered all the fields throughout the district to be ploughed up, so that there was no supply of fodder for the cattle except what had been brought from the French provinces; therefore large bodies of troops were obliged to leave the camp to seek provisions for the men and food for the horses, and on these trips … they often suffered great losses from attacks by the count of Toulouse who, with his troops, lay in ambush for them.88

  This passage is instructive as it shows Count Raymond protecting his people by destroying their land and forcibly removing them from their homes to prevent their being taken hostage for ransom. Their miseries may have been compounded by hungry enemy soldiers becoming further antagonized by the lack of food and booty, increasing their hostility and inducing more violent behaviour against non-combatants.

  Brutality was likely to be intensified when colonial motives and ethnic tensions came to the fore. It was one thing for a non-combatant to have his land ravaged either as a warning or as a political measure, but another to be physically ejected from his home area. This was the fate of the inhabitants of Petit-Andely when the French took the town at the siege of Château Gaillard; they were replaced by French colonists. It was the frequent fate of the defeated in many towns; population displacement was a significant feature of medieval warfare. An alternative way of achieving the same effect was to take not just homes, but also liberty and life.

  As in siege warfare, fear was considered a necessary part of many campaigns, a way of breaking resolve and encouraging either capitulation or coming to terms. The destructive nature of ravaging heightened fears. It worked well for John in 1215, when he met little resistance heading north; his cruel reputation had worked similarly against the Scots in 1209; and David’s barbaric Galwegian troops played their part in forcing Stephen to negotiate in 1136 and 1138. There are endless examples of fear working; but it could operate both ways, as the Black Prince discovered at Carcassonne. There is also plenty of evidence to show that it could be counterproductive, as we have seen. Roger of Wendover reports that in the Welsh Marches, English troops occasionally followed the Welsh tradition of decapitating enemies. Welsh raiders of Hubert of Burgh’s lands were beheaded when caught in 1231, Burgh delivering the heads to King Henry III. Prince Llewelyn, in typical Celtic border practice, then slaughtered non-combatants, women and children included, in churches. In 1245, Matthew Paris relates the return of a contingent of English troops to camp with the heads of one hundred Welshmen killed in – or just after – a skirmish, and how the Welsh decapitated everyone in a number of towns that they took in 1258. The English even offered bounties for Welsh heads. The belief that this might decrease Welsh raiding parties was not borne out. Frederick Suppe, who has studied this grisly practice, concludes that the only real benefit for the English was that such savagery vented their anger and frustration and gained a little ‘psychological retaliation’; the evidence ‘suggests that brutality only incited the Welsh to reciprocate. Terror, then, was no military deterrent.’89 What worked in one place did not necessarily work in another. This was the cycle of atrocity that remained unbroken in the Middle Ages.