ELEVEN
EDWARD WAS PROBABLY still encamped before the walls of Calais when he first heard reports that the deadly disease which had swept across Asia had now come to the borders of Europe. To him Asia would have been a semi-legendary place, known only from merchants and distant travellers. He and his contemporaries may well have regarded the disease as divine punishment on the unbelievers in the East for fighting with crusaders of the true faith. But as he sailed into Sandwich in October, the Genoese ships in the Mediterranean a thousand miles to the south docked with a deadly cargo. Cyprus and Sicily experienced the first full onslaught in November 1347. By December it was in Genoa, Marseilles and Avignon. Contemporaries simply called it ‘the pestilence’. Today we call it the Black Death.
The Black Death was more than just a disease. Its arrival was arguably the single most important event in European history between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Industrial Revolution. Although the population of Europe, including Britain, had been declining since about 1315, when a spate of poor harvests had been swiftly followed by a cattle murrain, the decline had been small and comparatively slow: no more than a ten per cent reduction over twenty years. A society which was basically confident that God’s will protected them was completely unprepared for the shock which followed. As the plague reached a town or village, a number of people very suddenly grew sick and died. What was worse, the plague lingered, so that even if you were not among the twenty per cent to die in the first month or so, there was a good chance you would be caught up in the next month’s mortality. And then there were subsequent attacks in subsequent years. Although we tend to think of the Black Death as being the period of the first shock of the disease, between 1347 and 1351 in Western Europe, it came back again and again, with catastrophic consequences every time. Each outbreak disrupted farming, trade and legal systems, so that food production and conveyance collapsed, and violence broke out. The population continued to decline for the next one hundred and fifty years. Society was severely tested, and was forced to develop increasingly flexible systems in order to maintain the political status quo. It was therefore not just the disease which mattered. The economic consequences and the profound psychological shock combined to alter the culture, attitudes, faith, geographical horizons and personal identities of people in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe. To quantify the effect simply in numbers of dead is to miss the point. Europe had been plunged into a horrific and ongoing crisis which cracked the cultural plinth on which society was built.
By spring 1348 the plague was in Normandy. Caen and Rouen experienced particularly heavy death rates. By May it was in Paris. No one could ignore it, nor its unstoppable progress. It was not just the stories of the disease and the dying which gnawed at the conscience of the as-yet unaffected, it was the stories of the houses left empty, whole families dying in rural areas, and their animals dying. The fields sown in springtime lay untended in the summer as the sower and his wife rotted in their house, unburied.
The plague had still not yet arrived in England. While it remained overseas, Edward’s reaction was to ignore it. It was not so much a strategy of putting his head in the sand as one of not deserting his royal duties. As a king he was expected to be seen, give audiences, attend parliaments, provide leadership and hear certain law cases. He was expected to be lavish in his hospitality and his spending, the money spent being employment for many. To fail in these duties would be to give in to the plague, and to fail as a monarch. It was not in Edward’s nature to give in to anything, least of all a disease which still remained on the Continent.
Edward’s priorities in 1348 were the celebration of his military successes of the previous two years and his dealings with parliament. It had been more than a year since Edward had held a parliament, and so he could be said to have broken his promise to summon one every year. The last had met in September 1346, while Edward was at Calais, but this was largely to gather the financial support necessary for the siege. He himself had not actually attended a sitting or heard petitions since the summer of 1344. And some merchants and minor landholders thought that Edward was implementing highly dubious measures. To mark the knighting of the prince of Wales in 1346 Edward had levied a ‘feudal aid’ of forty shillings on every single manorial unit in the kingdom. This had not been done since the reign of Edward I, and the commons thought it had been pardoned in 1340. Even if it had not, it should have been no more than twenty shillings.1 A forced loan of twenty thousand sacks of wool in 1347 had not lightened the mood of such men who saw their economic opportunities in a purely personal light. While all England was united in its joy at the string of victories over France, a few of those who spoke for the country had misgivings about how it had been financed.
The first parliament of 1348 was held in January. Its two principal purposes were, as far as Edward was concerned, to discuss the truce recently agreed at Calais, and to address the problem of law and order. Although Edward’s earlier efforts to enforce provincial order had mainly been successful, his absence abroad had led to local tax-collectors taking the law into their own hands, and bands of criminals once again being protected by local gentry, through the bribing of local judges.2 Before he had left England in 1346, he had issued the Ordinance of Justices, to prevent royal judges being bribed, but in his absence this had proved weak.3 The commons now seized the opportunity to renew their earlier complaint of ‘maintenance’ by the nobility and gentry. They demanded that the provisions of the Ordinance be extended. They recommended that six persons be appointed in each county – local landowners, not agents of central government – to hear cases of breaking the peace.4 As for the truce, or rather the need for increased taxation for the resumption of the war, the commons had doubts. They debated the matter for four days and eventually decided that they could not advise the king on this matter, but would support the advice of the magnates.5 They probably hoped that France would be destroyed cheaply by disease rather than expensively by renewing the war.
Edward was not satisfied with these answers, and a second parliament followed soon afterwards, meeting on 31 March. He was not yet ready to put local justice in the hands of local landowners, probably suspicious that this would simply lead to greater abuse of legal privileges. And he wanted a more constructive answer with regard to the truce. There followed a series of bargains between king and people. Edward accentuated the danger of invasion in order to gain support for the potential renewal of hostilities. Action to control the purveyors for the royal household was taken. Edward agreed not to ransom the Scottish prisoners at the Tower – including Sir William Douglas, the earl of Menteith and King David – so they could not renew hostilities. He made sure of this in the case of Menteith (who had previously sworn homage to him) by having him publicly executed. He agreed to suspend the eyres or tours of his justices in the counties. And he agreed to use his influence to improve the lot of English merchants buying and selling at the wool staple in Ghent.6 The result was that parliament agreed to a further three years’ subsidy: not enough in itself to mount a major campaign, and not too much to bankrupt the kingdom, but enough to satisfy the king for the time being.
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As the plague hit Paris and killed thousands, in England the king held a series of splendid tournaments. In mid-February he was jousting at Reading, then later that month at Bury St Edmunds, where he appeared dressed in a huge bird costume, possibly playing an eagle.7 In early May he held a great tournament at Lichfield.8 Here he fought in the arms of one of Lord Berkeley’s knights, Sir Thomas Bradeston, who had been with him at the arrest of Mortimer in 1330 and had since become one of his most trusted captains. At the same tournament he ordered robes in blue and white to be made for himself and eleven knights of his chamber, as well as the earl of Lancaster and twelve of his knights, and many ladies, including his (Edward’s) daughter Isabella.9 Later that month he held a tournament at Eltham, and a month after that, on 24 June 1348, he held a great tournament at Windsor to celebrate the churching of Queen Philippa after the birth of their eleventh child, William of Windsor. King David, Charles de Blois and many other prisoners of war attended, all decked out in fine new robes at Edward’s expense. The younger royal princes were all present too, decked out ostentatiously in velvet: Lionel in azure blue, John and Edmund in purple. After Windsor the next tournament was at Canterbury, probably in mid-August, and another was held at Westminster.10 Edward travelled, was seen by his people, and dressed himself, his family, his royal prisoners and his entourage splendidly. He was parading his victorious royalty around the country: the champion of England, his conquests made glorious by the honour done to his prisoners.
There are two ways of looking at this huge parade. On the one hand, this is just what Edward did for fun, and after Crécy and Calais he deserved to flaunt his laurels. On the other hand, it would be foolish to forget that the backdrop to this display and ostentation was that the rest of Europe was dying by the million. At the time of the Windsor tournament, England still had not been directly affected. Edward was taking great pride in the ceremonial triumphs he held up and down the country; but he was also displaying a steadying leadership in the face of the dread which now must have permeated the court and country. Many people must have realised that, unless all the ports were closed, England would be the next kingdom afflicted.
The ports did not close. Had they done so, there would have been an outcry in parliament. The merchants would have bitterly complained, they would have been ruined, and they would not have been able to pay their taxes. Edward would have cut himself off from his fellow monarchs, including his daughter, Joan, on her way to Castile to be married to Pedro, heir to King Alfonso. He would have cut himself off from Calais, Ponthieu, Gascony and Brittany. So, as Edward charged down the tournament lists at Windsor, and as his courtiers played romantic games with each other behind their masks, the boats came and went out of the ports all around the country. And because all the ports remained open, there were many potential infection points. Edward had no way of knowing it, but by taking no action to limit the potential places of infection, he was worsening the effects of the disease when it arrived.
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For Edward, the grief began early. On 5 September his three-month-old son, William of Windsor, was buried at Westminster Abbey. His birth had been greeted by the king with great celebration, Philippa’s churching being the cause for the tournament at Windsor at which he paraded his most prestigious prisoners of war. Silver vessels, including several lavish silver bowls befitting a king’s son, had been purchased for him in London. A fine cradle had been commissioned (costing five pounds), as well as a daily cradle (costing eight shillings).11 Edward clearly had expectations of this boy, his only son to be born, like himself, at Windsor. In death, he was treated to a full royal funeral. Gold cloth was purchased, two thousand gold leaves, large quantities of black cloth, and wax candles. The gold cloths were placed over his little body. Sixty pennons stamped with gold lay over and around the bier on which he lay. Around him burned six lamps and one hundred and seventy square candles. Fifty paupers dressed in black circled the shrine, while a chariot covered in black cloth acted as his hearse.12 Compared to the other infant royal burials, this was striking ostentation, and a sign of a genuine disappointment.
‘Disappointment’ is a strangely distant word to use, however. For this little boy was not the only member of the royal family to have died. Even before the welter of tournaments had come to an end, Edward had received the tragic news that his beloved fourteen-year-old daughter, Joan, had died of plague on her way to marry Pedro of Castile. Every bit of care had been expended on the arrangements for her journey. Way back on 1 January 1348 Edward had written to the Castilian royal family announcing he was about to send her, and detailing who would accompany her. A month later, somewhat anxious, he had written to make sure that if she should bear Pedro a son, then that boy would be king of Castile. Eleven days later he sent orders to all his admirals and seneschals to assist the bishop of Carlisle who would accompany Joan. After all the precautions Edward could possibly have taken, she arrived at Bordeaux by ship during the height of the outbreak, and died there on 1 July.13 In the circumstances there was no choice but to bury her at Bordeaux. Edward had lost a daughter who was ‘beautiful in body, and abundant in moral virtues and grace’.14 One can imagine the dread of the messenger returning to England to break the sad news.
If Edward felt he had been unfortunate in September 1348, losing two children, the truth was that he had barely begun to experience the suffering which some had suffered. Agnolo di Tura, a Sienese chronicler, had no illusions about the extent of the calamity:
I do not know where to begin to tell of the cruelty and the pitiless ways [of the plague]. It seemed that almost everyone became stupefied by seeing the pain. And it is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth. Indeed, one who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed. The victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath the armpits and in their groins, and collapse while talking. Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through breath and sight. And so they died. None could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices. Nor did the death bell sound. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo di Tura, buried my five children with my own hands.15
Although Edward did not know it, plague was already creeping through Dorset. A ship had landed with the disease, probably in early August.16 Mindful of the threat across the Channel, on 17 August the bishop of Bath and Wells ordered processions to take place every Friday to pray for protection from the disease which had ‘come from the East’ into France, ‘the neighbouring kingdom’. His prayers probably came a few days too late. By October, Dorset was overwhelmed with suffering. Towns which traded with the area ceased to welcome travellers. Those with the wherewithal, aware of the terrible mortality across the Channel, removed themselves to their most isolated estates, and stayed there. All England was plunged into fear.
The first action Edward took to combat the plague was at the end of September, when he ordered prayers and processions throughout England for deliverance from the pestilence.17 But the second thing he did was far less predictable. He decided to confront the danger head-on, like a soldier. While the rich and powerful throughout England isolated themselves in terrified huddles in their rural manors, Edward decided to go to Calais, and see for himself what the plague held in store. His journey was superficially to take part in the negotiations for continuing the peace treaty: normally a duty for ambassadors. But there was propaganda value in Edward going in person. France was recognised as the source of England’s plague: it was in ‘the neighbouring kingdom’ as the bishop of Bath and Wells had put it. And it was generally understood in England that France was labouring under the mortality. It was said that at Avignon more than thirteen hundred people had died in a single day, and that religious communities of one hundred and forty monks at both Montpelier and Marseilles had been reduced to only seven at the former place and only one at the latter. If mortality as great as this was being experienced in holy, godly communities, what hope did the layman have? Edward’s journey to France was a public statement that he and his companions were not afraid, that they could rely on God’s protection. In an unprecedented move, he had the news that he was going to France proclaimed in all the towns of England.18
Edward departed from Sandwich on 29 October, accompanied by the prince of Wales, the bishop of Winchester and the earl of Warwick. He settled the arrangements for the continuation of the truce near Calais on 13 November, and returned to England on the 17th. By then the first cases of plague had been found in London.19 Nevertheless Edward returned directly to the capital. As Londoners shut themselves up in their houses, Edward exchanged the Palace of Westminster for the Tower of London.20 His court had so many people coming and going that no attempt to isolate him would have been of any use. So he decided to carry on, as usual, with his games and celebrations. He held an elaborate games at Otford, for Christmas, at which many guests came. They dressed in the masks of lions’ heads, elephants’ heads, ‘wodewoses’ (wildmen of the woods), men wearing bats’ wings, and girls.21 Edward took centre stage in a complete set of armour for himself and his horse in which everything was ‘spangled with silver’ and his tunic and shield worked with the motto: ‘Hay, hay the White Swan by God’s Soul I am thy Man’. Nor did he stay at Otford but moved on to Merton for Epiphany (6 January). There his games included the spectacle of thirteen men dressed in masks of dragons’ heads parading with thirteen masks of crowned men, or kings. Payments for ten black coats – a very unusual item in Edward’s wardrobe accounts at this time – may indicate a mourning tone, but if so one suspects it was so the thirteen kings could be seen to be jousting against those who were in funereal despair.
In the early new year the plague began its huge, deadly sweep through southern England. Modern examinations of the evidence suggest that the mortality in southern England was especially high, around the forty per cent mark, due to the number of ports. In London the numbers of dead crept up, from twenty per day to forty, and then sixty. The chronicler Avesbury noted that from the feast of the Purification (2 February) to after Easter (12 April) more than two hundred bodies were interred every single day in the new cemetery adjacent to Smithfield.22 This was one of two emergency cemeteries purchased in order for the citizens of London to have a place of burial, and by the end of the plague they had received about sixty thousand corpses.23 The benefactor who provided this particular cemetery, as well as a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary on the site, was none other than Sir Walter Manny, now Lord Manny.24 There was clearly more to this friend of Edward’s than extraordinary courage and indomitable fighting skills.
The plague’s relentless progress meant that parliament had to be cancelled. Edward first gave the order on 1 January to delay the assembly until a fortnight after Easter, and then on 10 March he cancelled it until further notice. By then the country and the capital were in chaos. The economy was experiencing chronic deflation, the food supply had collapsed, and law and order was in tatters. To quote the famous description of the chronicler Henry Knighton:
In the same year there was a great murrain of sheep everywhere in the realm, so that in one place more than five thousand sheep died in a single pasture; and they rotted so much that neither beast nor bird would approach them. And there was a great cheapness of all things for fear of death, for very few took any account of riches or of possessions of any kind. A man could have a horse which was formerly worth forty shillings for half a mark (6s 8d), a big fat ox for four shillings, a cow for twelve pence, a heifer for sixpence, a fat wether for fourpence, a sheep for threepence, a lamb for tuppence, a large pig for fivepence and a stone of wool for ninepence. Sheep and oxen strayed through the fields and among the crops, and there was no one to drive them off or to collect them, but they perished in uncounted numbers throughout all districts for lack of shepherds, because there was such a shortage of servants and labourers. For there was no recollection of such a severe mortality since the time of Vortigern, King of the Romans, in whose day, as Bede testifies, the living did not suffice to bury the dead.25
It was at this point that Edward founded – or, to be exact – completed the foundation of the Order of the Garter. On St George’s Day 1349, at the very height of the most horrific disease the kingdom had ever seen, Edward held a great tournament at Windsor during which he formally instituted his Order of twenty-six men who would joust and pray together once a year, and conduct themselves everywhere like proud Arthurian knights.26 How inappropriate, we might say, how insensitive! And yet, the more we examine this foundation, the more we are forced to accept that the plague was one of Edward’s key reasons for founding the Order at this particular time.
To understand this, we must review the events described above. As the crisis grew over the course of 1348, Edward held parliaments and a number of tournaments, doing what he did best: pushing himself forward not only as the kingdom’s leader but also as its champion. Then his daughter died. In August he established the collegiate chapel of St George at Windsor, and may have meant to found an order along the lines of the Garter soon after, but in September the death of a second child cruelly destroyed any such chivalric dream. Then the country was wholly plunged into despondency with the arrival of the plague. In October, Edward publicly proclaimed he was going to France, where most of the country believed (rightly) that the disease was already raging. It was an act of defiance: a ‘publicity stunt’. He then returned to England, and did not attempt to avoid London, where the plague was spreading, but then, perhaps acting on the advice of his physicians, he withdrew and held his games and celebrations at slightly quieter spots, Otford and Merton. And he was probably wise to accept his physicians’ advice, for then the true horror of the plague in southern England became apparent. He was forced to cancel parliament. At the same time the most dire rains began to fall, the cattle murrain took hold, and the deflationary cycle started.27 Against these problems even Edward faltered. But at the very height of the plague, when two hundred men, women and children were being buried in London every single day, and lords and ladies were hiding in their isolated manors up and down the country, when sheep and cattle were dying in their thousands, and the social order seemed to be falling apart, he threw aside the advice of his physicians. His people needed leadership, and he was the king of the English, chosen by God. He could do nothing to halt the plague, but he could demonstrate effective leadership in spite of it. His founding of a chivalric order at this point in time was a second act of defiance against the disease, a second ‘publicity stunt’. Edward demonstrated that it was business as usual in England in the only way he knew: a high-profile tournament. It demonstrated to his subjects that their king was not hiding in some out-of-the-way manor, waiting for the all-clear, in contrast to almost every lord and bishop in England.
In this reading of the evidence the key factor influencing the foundation of the Order is the timing of the tournament, at the very height of the plague. This implies that no garters, mottoes or any other objects or phrases associated with the Order were its direct cause. This is not surprising: the idea of founding a chivalric order had probably been in Edward’s mind since returning from France in 1347, if not since giving up the Round Table plans in 1344.28 But it is patently obvious that the emblem of the garter itself has nothing to do with the disease. Likewise, it is highly doubtful that the motto honi soit qui mal y pense (evil to him who thinks it evil) was connected with the calamity. So, why this emblem and this motto? What else was going on in Edward’s mind at this time?
We could say that, because the garter and motto had been in frequent use at tournaments in the period 1346–48, they were simply adopted because they happened to be there when the Order was formally constituted. But Edward had been planning the Order for at least a year, so it is unlikely that the regalia of the Order were merely incidental.29 In addition, there is no doubt that a Companionship of the Garter – of twenty-four knights, one of whom was almost certainly the prince – was in existence by the end of 1348.30Edward seems to have borrowed this idea, and used it as the basis for his more distinguished and formal Order in April 1349. But this still does not explain where the emblem of the garter comes from. Nor the motto.
A number of modern writers have tried to associate the adoption of the garter and motto with Edward’s claim on the throne of France.31 Although this suggestion is superficially attractive, given the recent conquests in France, it does not stand up to detailed scrutiny. For a start, it is very difficult to see how a garter can be symbolic of Edward’s dominance over Philip’s kingdom: a man’s garter is hardly a fearsome article of clothing. Because of this, it has been suggested that the garter is meant to represent a sword belt.32 This too is difficult to accept: not least for the common-sense reason that the Order would then have been called the Order of the Sword Belt. We might also object that a sword belt is a far less powerful symbol for an order of chivalry than other knightly accoutrements (a sword, for example). As for the motto, the language in which it was written – French – has often been seen as good evidence that it relates to Edward’s claims on the French throne, as Edward’s other known mottoes were all in English. Indeed, scholars have repeated this particular argument so many times that it is now said to be a widely accepted ‘fact’. But it is a huge assumption, without any evidence to support it. The wording has no political or military overtones at all, and the two contemporary English literary references have nothing to do with the political struggle against France.33 We should also remember that all Edward’s other adopted mottoes were personal, not international statements. ‘It is as it is’, as we have seen, was probably a tacit announcement of the death of his father, aimed at those in the know. Similarly the apparently love-related motto he used the previous Christmas – ‘Hay, Hay the White Swan, by God’s Soul I am thy Man’ – was anything but international propaganda, requiring either familiarity with the English poem or song from which it came (if literary) or the identity of Edward’s ‘white swan’.
One fact which has escaped previous writers’ attention is that the garter was a chivalric emblem with a history which predated Edward’s victories in France. Edward himself purchased pearl garters in the early 1330s, and by his own admission, Lancaster wore garters in his youth.34 In particular, Lancaster’s phenomenal military success in 1345 may have been the reason why now it became an especially prominent chivalric symbol. It had the advantage that it was highly visible, for it could be worn over the plate armour which knights now habitually wore.35 So when Prince Edward presented garters to the twenty-four ‘Companions of the Garter’ in 1348, the recipients were probably members of a company – possibly an unofficial jousting fraternity – formed in honour of a victorious war leader, either Edward or the earl of Lancaster.36 Furthermore, because the honi soit motto was integral to the garter badge in the very earliest records (before the foundation of the Order), it follows that it was not necessarily Edward’s motto, but either that of the Companionship of 1348 or the originator’s own.37 If the originator was Lancaster, this would explain why the language is different to Edward’s other mottoes. French was Lancaster’s first language, and, although he also spoke English, French was certainly his language of choice: he wrote a whole book in it, and nothing in English or Latin.38 Moreover, Edward had good reason not to anglicise this motto in 1349, for only a French or Latin tag would have been suitable for an order which marked out with great distinction Hainaulters and Gascons as well as Englishmen. To use an English motto would have alienated all the non-English members of the Order and their companions, and made it an inward-looking, English-only institution, not an outward-looking pan-European one.39
There was one other key element to the inaugural Garter tournament in April 1349, and it is most revealing of the atmosphere at court in the tense months while the plague raged around the country. As probably every reader knows, Edward was once thought to have adopted a garter as the symbol of his Order having picked up the countess of Salisbury’s garter at a ‘ball’ after the fall of Calais, saying honi soit qui mal y pense to those who suspected that he was holding a lady’s undergarment for all the wrong reasons.40This story is normally dismissed by modern historians, being too romantic, unsupported by contemporary evidence, and contrary to the received wisdom that the Order was conceived purely as a political or military institution. The story was probably devised in the fifteenth century to explain why the premier chivalric order was denoted by a garter (of all things!) and the strange motto.41 But this level of scepticism has meant that no one has seriously examined it in the light of what we know about the foundation of the Order and its inaugural tournament.
The story of the countess of Salisbury’s garter is essentially another love story – like the story of the visit to Wark – in which Edward was depicted as conscious of his own illicit desire for a young and beautiful noblewoman. The high-profile tournaments of 1348–49 were certainly social occasions at which such love-making could – and did – happen. Thomas Burton noted with horror how Edward summoned many ladies to the jousts of 1348, adding ‘there was hardly a lady there assigned to her own husband; they were with other men, by whom they were debauched as the lust took them’.42 Writing about the Lincoln tournament of 1348, Henry Knighton, an Augustinian canon at Leicester, stated that forty or fifty beautiful women attended, and ‘inflicted wanton and foolish lusts on their bodies, according to popular rumour. Nor did they fear God or blush at the stories people told, as they threw off the bonds of marriage.’43 In this light the fifteenth-century story about Edward’s flirtation with a married lady who had lost an undergarment seems wholly in keeping.
If we now examine the fifteenth-century story more closely, we note that it does not name the lady concerned in its earliest versions. That is a sixteenth-century addition.44 So, on the face of it, even though the countess in 1349 was a young and desirable woman – Joan ‘the Fair Maid of Kent’ – there would appear to be no grounds for connecting her with the tournament. However, surprising though it may be, there is a strong reason for taking Joan seriously as playing a lead romantic role in the inaugural Garter tournament of 23 April 1349.45 She was about twenty years of age, a member of the royal family, and undoubtedly very beautiful.46 She was also in the extraordinary situation of publicly having two husbands at the same time. She claimed that she had first married Sir Thomas Holland, one of the founder Garter knights.47 But she was officially married to the second earl of Salisbury, another of the founder knights. In May 1348 her supposed first husband – who was now the steward of her second husband – stated to the pope that she had been forced into her marriage with Salisbury. He stated that she had previously agreed to marry him and had slept with him, so he now claimed her as his own wife. She supported this story, obviously preferring the steward to his lord. Her marital status was in question for a full eighteen months, and it was not until November 1349 that the pope ordered her to divorce Salisbury and marry Holland, which she did.48 The crux of the matter is that on 23 April 1349, while the marital rights to this most famous royal beauty were being argued over, her two husbands were on opposing sides at the Windsor tournament: Holland was on the prince’s side, Salisbury on the king’s. Therefore there is no doubt that the countess of Salisbury was a focus of romantic attention at the inaugural Garter tournament. She was being fought over – literally – by at least two of those present.49 She did not drop her garter for Edward (women in 1349 did not wear them), and the motto honi soit probably has nothing to do with her, but the allure of the countess of Salisbury was indeed connected with the inaugural tournament of the Order of the Garter. Later her wedding dress was given to the collegiate chapel of the Order,50 and this – coupled with the French story of Edward’s infatuation at Wark – is probably why her name finally crept back into the tale after more than two centuries’ absence, transformed into the fictitious woman who lost her garter.
This allows us to complete the picture of the foundation tournament of the Order of the Garter. In April 1349, Edward brought together his long-standing ambitions for a chivalric order and realised them in an institution which built on a companionship or jousting fraternity formed to celebrate his victories and those of the earl of Lancaster. The despondency of the plague called for a high-profile publicity stunt, and Edward provided one. It was a lasting statement of his chivalric ideas, just as later his great castle at Queenborough would be a lasting statement of his military genius. But it was also timed as an act of defiance against everything that threatened those ideals. It drew him out of his own personal grief and gave him and the country something positive and glorious on which to focus at the height of the worst epidemic the country had ever seen. Those of his companions who braved the pestilence and journeyed to Windsor to take part in that inaugural tournament were rewarded with founder-member status of the most prestigious and exclusive order of knighthood in Europe. And they took part in a tournament which witnessed some of the most famous knights of the day fight over the most beautiful woman in the land. What better distraction from the plague could there have been than to watch twelve men on each claimant’s side battle for his comrade’s right to make love to the royal countess? No doubt many contemporaries would have agreed with Henry Knighton in saying that all this was foolish and immoral, but it was in keeping with the chivalric values of the time. Most knights experiencing the horrors of the Black Death would far rather have jousted for the kisses of a beautiful and desirable twenty-year-old princess than sat alongside Henry Knighton in his cold abbey at Leicester, solemnly recording the number of dead recently interred in the local plague pits.
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Successful though Edward’s tournament may have been, people were still dying. After a winter of plenty there followed a season of dearth. Prices went up, and wages doubled. To return to Henry Knighton’s chronicle: ‘In the following autumn no one could get a reaper for less than eight-pence with food, or a mower for less then twelvepence with food. For this reason many crops perished in the fields for lack of harvesters.’
Knighton’s words show us how inflexible medieval society was. When one sector experienced a crisis, the entire community reeled, unable to adapt by assigning tasks to other people. In 1349 many systems simply collapsed. Men who had lost their wives and children could provide a mobile workforce, but only if they broke their feudal bonds and left the manors on which they were bound to work. Faced with starvation, this is what they did in many places. Hence a manorial bailiff, having lost a third or a half of his workforce to plague, now found the remainder threatening to leave unless he paid them double their usual wages. This was threatening the established order. Manorial lords did not normally need to buy food, requisitioning it from their demesne farms. Now, not only had much of their workforce died, and the remainder gone off to work for someone else, their own animals were dying in the fields. They had cows but no one to milk them. They had sheep but no one to shear them. They could not pay their tithes to the church, so the clergy could not function. So many clergymen died that many church benefices remained unfilled. Manors often ceased to exist. No lord, no workforce and no clergy meant no flock in either sense of the word. The unrepaired thatched roofs collapsed in the rains, the cob walls soon were in ruins. One did not need to catch the disease to feel the dire effects of the plague.
Edward’s reaction to this is understandable. It was simple logic: all the economic damage would be minimised if those workers who survived remained on their estates and worked for the same wages as before. The danger was that entire manors would return to waste ground as survivors only worked the most economically viable units. Then taxes – such as the sums levied on personal estates (normally a fifteenth in rural manors) – would be greatly reduced in value. Wool taxes too were clearly going to be greatly reduced. Therefore it was with the idea of trying to maintain the status quo as far as possible that Edward issued a royal ordinance. No lords were to offer higher wages to their workers than before the plague, and no labourers were to seek increased payments.
The policy was bound to be unsuccessful. When the labour supply was so short, and the currency supply unchanged, wage inflation was inevitable. Nineteenth-century ‘whiggish’ commentators, convinced that history is one great march of progress towards modern society, tended to regard Edward’s actions as backward-looking, and castigated him for trying to stand in the way of progress towards a free-market economy. But in 1349 it was difficult to understand how society was changing, and impossible to see how high wages or large amounts of derelict property could benefit the nation. Rather we should interpret Edward’s action in much the same way as his Windsor tournament of April 1349. It was an attempt to advertise to the country that stability could be maintained. With courage, knights could still travel around the country and joust. Labourers could still be forced to remain on their manors. Edward could – and would – remain in control of his kingdom.
By early September two of the founder knights who had attended the Garter tournament at Windsor in April were dead. Philippa laid gold cloths on the tomb of one of them, Hugh Courtenay, the twenty-two-year-old heir to the earldom of Devon. John Montgomery, governor of Calais, died, and so did his wife. John Offord, the archbishop of Canterbury, died, and so did his successor, Thomas Bradwardine. Sir John Pulteney, four times Lord Mayor of London, died. Most lordly families lost several relations, some noble titles died out. The dowager countess of Salisbury died, so too did Lord Thomas Wake, the bishop of Worcester, the abbot of Westminster, Sir John Fauconberg and the queen of France. Clerks and workmen died in large numbers: the Surveyor of the King’s Works, William Ramsey, was one of the most prominent. In Florence, the chronicler Giovanni Villani, hoping to note down the total number of fatalities at the end of the outbreak, became one of them.
It was after all these deaths that the Flagellants arrived. Their presence was yet another shocking jolt to an already-reeling society. Philip de Valois had thrown them out of France, so horrified was he by their self-immolation. Dressed only in loincloths, this unofficial religious order walked from town to town whipping themselves with a heavy whip which had three leather thongs studded with metal spikes. With a few of the brethren leading the others in a dirge, exhorting them to whip themselves to redeem the world of its sins, the group lashed itself until each member was bleeding down his back. Sometimes they whipped themselves until they bled to death. Such extreme physical punishment in the name of God is perhaps not too distant from chivalric ceremonies such as jousts of war, and it may have been because of Edward’s martial reputation that the Flagellants came to England in October 1349.51 But the Flagellants were not welcome. Soon they were driven out of England as they had been driven out of France. Their rules, which held it a sin to converse or have intercourse of any sort with a woman, were not likely to endear them to a king as fond of female company as Edward.
*
In August 1349 Philip decided to break the truce which had prevailed throughout the plague.52 Perhaps it was thought that English plague losses had been so heavy that Edward could not possibly afford to send an army abroad to protect his French possessions. Perhaps the Gascons, who had carried on their small-scale raids on French property, had committed too many robberies to remain unpunished. Either way, by the end of the month Guy de Nesle was raising an army to attack the English in Gascony.
England was just beginning to emerge from the disease stages of the plague, and to begin to rebuild economically. It was thus with a shock that Edward learnt of the French plans. His reaction was to defend, and for this there was no better leader than Lancaster, whose very name struck fear into his adversaries. But the armies he would lead were another matter. There were no soldiers available. Lancaster took with him about three hundred men and went on a destructive rampage, hoping that through fire, speed and terror he could force the French to renew the truce. But it was not the destruction in the south-west that forced them to the negotiating table: it was Edward himself.
Calais. The town had festered in the minds of the French ever since it had fallen. It was as great a loss to them as Crécy. To regain it, they could try to besiege it, but then they would have to fight a naval engagement with the English, who would break the siege from the sea. So treachery was practically their only option. Aimeric de Pavia was the man they hit upon. He was a Genoese soldier of fortune who had previously fought for France. Indeed, he had been within Calais when Edward had been besieging it. As an experienced and talented sea captain, he had been offered a new position by Edward, anxious to secure his services. Aimeric had accepted, and had been made captain of the king’s galleys at Calais. Now Geoffrey de Charny, the famous French commander, approached him with a bribe. The plan was for Aimeric to allow access by night through the postern gate to the town.
Aimeric was a loyal man. He had remained at Calais and starved for the French king’s benefit, only to see the French army march away and leave the townspeople of Calais to their fate. That was no way to repay loyalty. So now, at the point of considering betraying the town, Aimeric sent one of his galleys across the Channel with a message for Edward, who was then at Hereford. He told him what de Charny was offering: forty thousand florins (£6,000). Immediately Edward saw the chance of grabbing the money, saving Calais and having an adventure all at the same time. With the prince of Wales, Sir John Beauchamp, Lord Stafford and the young Lord Mortimer – all Knights of the Garter – and Sir John Montagu, Lord Manny, Lord Berkeley, Lord de la Warre and the earl of Suffolk, he rode to Westminster. In order to ensure that no one heard that he was gathering a few hundred archers, he ordered that no one was to leave England, covering his reason by saying it was because of the plague.53 Then he went down to the coast, and crossed with his knights’ retainers and his archers to Calais.
In Calais Edward and the prince went anonymously through the streets, dressed in the clothes of merchants. Few of the townsmen knew they were there. This gave Edward a few days to prepare – the date set for the betrayal of the town was the night of 31 December – and in that time he ordered a false stone wall to be built inside the postern gate. He partially weakened the drawbridge, and stationed a large stone on the battlements of the gatehouse above. Then he and his men settled down to await the betrayal in a room in the castle of the town.
Towards midnight a French advance party under Oudart de Renti rode up to the postern gate. They found the drawbridge down, and the gate open. There was Aimeric de Pavia, waiting for the first instalment of the money. Having received it, Aimeric declared he had no time to count it, but would lead them into the castle to allow them to signal to their fellows that all was well. The room to which he led them was, of course, that in which Edward and his knights were hiding. As the door swung inwards they found themselves confronted with a grim knight in full armour. That first moment of shock was followed by another, for the grim knight then bellowed his war cry: ‘Manny! Manny to the rescue!’ Sir Walter rushed forward into the group, only to stop short after a moment and declare: ‘What! Do they hope to conquer the castle of Calais with so few men?’54 When the French had surrendered, they were locked in the same castle room. Edward, Manny and the rest of his men then took up their positions behind the false wall which had been built carefully without mortar, resting stones upon each other.
The advance guard had instructions to raise the French flags over the castle if all was safe for the main party to enter the town through the main gate. Edward’s men raised the French banners, to lure them forward. When a sufficient number had entered, trumpets sounded, and down went the stone on the drawbridge with a crash, cutting the troops in the town off from their fellow men. And down went the false wall too, to the alternate cries of ‘Treachery!’ and ‘Manny to the rescue!’ There the trapped French found themselves facing the banners of Manny, Stafford, Mortimer and the prince. Once more Sir Walter charged forward. This time, unlike any previous encounter, the king of England was beside him, fighting as an unmarked knight beneath the Manny standard. The king tackled Sir Eustace de Ribbemont, one of the principal commanders of the French army, and beat him to his knees. Then, with about thirty knights and a few archers, he ran out of the town to attack the rest of the French.
It was a rash move. Edward and those who had charged with him found themselves facing a large number – perhaps eight hundred – men-at-arms.55 Edward ordered the few archers who had followed him to take positions on the ridges above the marshes, so that they were free to shoot at any men who approached. And then, pushing back his visor and showing his face to all, he lifted his sword and yelled his war cry ‘St Edward and St George!’ Any Englishmen there who did not know King Edward personally was with them had no doubt now. The bewildered French men-at-arms suddenly found themselves facing the extraordinary situation of the English king standing before them, outnumbered more than twenty-toone, and yet preparing to do battle. It would probably have been calamitous had not the prince of Wales heard his father’s war cry, and hurried ahead with all the available men, catching up as Edward plunged into the French ranks. The French had not been expecting this – they had thought they would walk into Calais unopposed – and before long the king and his son had fought through their adversaries to seize Geoffrey de Charny and hurl him to the ground while the remainder of the French fled. All the French captains of the attack were captured: de Charny, de Renti and de Ribbemont. Calais had been saved, the money seized, and Edward had gained more valuable prisoners.
Edward was so pleased with himself that he entertained the French leaders to dinner the following evening. A picturesque irony was given to the proceedings by the prince and the other Knights of the Garter waiting on the captured men. Edward wore a chaplet of pearls, and, after the dinner, went among his prisoners talking to them. To Geoffrey de Charny he was stern, saying that he had little reason to love him, since he had sought to obtain cheaply what Edward had earned at a much greater price. But when he came to Eustace de Ribbemont, whom he had beaten in hand-to-hand combat, he took off his chaplet of pearls. ‘Sir Eustace’, he said,
I present you with this chaplet, as being the best fighter today, either within or without doors; and I beg of you to wear it this year for love of me. I know that you are lively and amorous, and love the company of ladies and damsels; therefore, say wherever you go, that I gave it to you. I also give you your liberty, free of ransom; and you may set out tomorrow, and go wherever you please.56
Edward knew the value of publicity: to give a man he had beaten a permanent reminder of their fight and an incentive to tell people about it was worth far more than mere pearls and a ransom.
*
On 12 January 1350 Edward, now back in England, ordered prayers to be said in thanks for his safe delivery at Calais. The plague was clearly on the wane, and his reputation was higher than ever. The French had once more been forced to the negotiating table, and hard talks had followed. It took until 13 June for an agreement to be reached, during which time both sides remained uneasy. Neither Philip nor Edward was confident that the outcome would be peace; both anticipated renewed conflict, and spent the first half of the year re-arming as best they could.
Edward had one propaganda advantage in his re-armament campaign: the Castilians. After Joan’s death on her way to marry Pedro of Castile, King Alfonso had thought better of his alliance with England, perhaps suspecting it would draw him into a conflict with his immediate neighbour, France, and decided instead to further his friendship with Philip. As Philip proceeded to rebuild his maritime forces, he offered a large sum to Alfonso for the use of a Castilian navy. The Castilian ships were huge, famous as towering castles of the sea, and because they were so large they were the ideal means to defeat the English, for lines of crossbowmen could shoot down on the smaller English vessels and clear the decks of longbowmen. So, as far as the English were concerned, a Castilian navy in the area was a potent invasion threat. Acts of piracy in the North Sea by the Castilians played into Edward’s hands. When on 27 March 1350, Alfonso died of plague at the siege of Gibraltar (the only crowned European monarch to die in the Black Death), the threat of piracy worsened. The word on the shipping lanes was that the Castilians aimed to capture the English wine fleet from Gascony.
Even before Alfonso’s death Edward had been making plans. On 26 March the orders went out for men to assemble at Sandwich on 6 June. The captains of Edward’s flagship, the Thomas, were directed to find a hundred sailors in Kent and Sussex. Edward ordered rigging to be purchased ‘for the king’s ships’. One preparation now considered essential – the secrecy of the mission – was ordered on 23 June, when Edward issued the directive for no one to leave the country. On 10 August he wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury desiring prayers for the forthcoming battle to put an end to the threat of the Spanish invasion. Shortly afterwards he set sail.
The Castilian fleet probably numbered forty or forty-four large ships; Edward had about fifty smaller ones.57 With the prince of Wales was Edward’s third son, the ten-year-old John of Gaunt, whom we might suspect had asked to follow his brother (in whose household he was serving as an esquire). The other vessels were commanded by an array of Knights of the Garter and assorted military heroes: the earls of Lancaster, Northampton, Warwick, Arundel, Salisbury and Huntingdon, Sir Reginald Cobham, Sir John Chandos and the inevitable Lord Manny. Crowds gathered in the harbour at Winchelsea, and the Sussex cliffs were crested with people hoping to see another English victory. Among them were men and women from the queen’s household; Philippa remained where she was, six miles from Winchelsea, worried for Edward and her sons.58
In order to engage the Castilians, it was necessary either to collide with them or to sail ahead of them and furl the sails, slowing down to meet them. Various captains manoeuvred their ships into position. English archers in the raised wooden forecastles and rearcastles waited until the great Castilian ships were in range, and then loosed their arrows. The new rigging Edward had specially ordered may well have been specifically with the Castilians in mind, allowing archers to be placed high above the English boats and able to attack the Castilians at deck-level. But to fire a longbow is not easy at the best of times, and it would have been far more difficult to shoot accurately from the rigging or crow’s nest of the lurching English vessels. Some crossbowmen were picked off by the English, but the choppy waters of the Channel were less conducive to archery than the calm waters of Sluys which had allowed Edward’s archers to massacre the French ten years earlier. The only way any Castilian ship was going to be overwhelmed was the old-fashioned way: by catching it, throwing grappling irons on board, climbing up and over the side and attacking those on deck with swords.
Edward led by example. Picking out one of the larger galleys, he ordered his captain to sail straight for it. He presumed that the Thomas was sufficiently large to withstand a collision. But when the two vessels crashed into each other, timbers shook, the hull cracked, and immediately the Thomas was in danger of sinking. But the forecastle of the Thomas tore away that of the Castilian vessel, and left its front mast dangling. Edward was all for drawing alongside and boarding it, but the knights with him urged him to engage another ship, for the one he had rammed was already sufficiently damaged. So Edward disengaged from the first vessel and targeted another, his knights reduced to bailing out water with the sailors. They did not have to bail for long. Another large galley, seeing the royal standard, sailed directly for the Thomas, and its captain had every intention of boarding it. As the two ships came alongside and grappled each other, the Castilian crossbows rained bolts down on to the English decks and their experienced archers picked off the longbowmen in the rigging. Rocks piled on the decks of the galleys were hurled down on to the English men-at-arms as they tried to scale the sides of the vessel. The resulting fight was bitterly fierce, with many dead on both sides. But Edward’s men once more prevailed. Having gained this new vessel, he hoisted the flag from the Thomas, announcing to the other captains that the king had been victorious.
The battle continued until dark. For a while the prince’s ship was in danger of sinking, which would have instantly meant the loss of two of Edward’s sons, but the earl of Lancaster saw the danger and sailed to his aid, helping him overcome the galley he had grappled. Even after dark one ship carried on fighting against the Castilians. This was the Salle du Roi, commanded for Edward by Robert of Namur. The Castilians had grappled the ship, and decided to drag it away from the battle to ransack it, with their sails fully unfurled. In the darkness many men on both sides were killed as they fought across the decks, unable to see, and lost their footing, or were shot by unseen bowmen. Eventually one of Namur’s men cut the sails of the ship, deadening their flight, and Namur’s men fought off the Castilians.
Contemporaries suggest that, over the course of the battle, between fourteen and twenty-four Castilian ships were captured, and the remainder of the Castilian fleet fled.59 No English vessels were seized. Some were sunk on both sides, but it was a great victory for the English, hailed in some quarters as a success as bold and as great as Crécy.60 On landing, a little after dark, Edward went to Philippa and returned to her both Edward and John. It had been a day of courage, destruction and near-disaster, but ultimately it was one more victory for Edward.
When news of the battle of Winchelsea reached France, few would have taken much interest. It was not that the French did not care that their Castilian allies had been defeated in their first engagement with the English, it was because, seven days earlier, King Philip had died. In his career he had chosen to make an enemy of his cousin, Edward, and for that he had been repeatedly outwitted, out-negotiated, betrayed, defeated and humiliated. His insecurity and impatience, leading to his bitter reproaches towards his own people, had only made matters worse. After Crécy he was a broken man. After Calais, his was a broken reign. When his queen had died of plague, he had waited only a month before marrying his seventeen-year-old cousin, Blanche d’Évreux. Philip himself was fifty-six, which raised eyebrows, but what was shocking was that she had been betrothed to his son, John, causing many recriminations from members of the French nobility and the alienation of the heir to the throne. When the truce was announced in June 1350, France was doubly joyful, for it saved them from their own king’s ineptitude as well as Edward’s ruthless destruction. Philip’s death brought an end to a twenty-two-year-long reign which had been as disastrous for France as that of Edward II had been for England. Together they stand as a reminder that, in the middle ages, kings did not have to be good men but they did have to be good kings.