APPENDIX 5
THE QUESTION OF Edward III’s decision regarding the landing place of his massive expedition to France in 1346 is a difficult one. It is not so much one of when he made the decision – although there is doubt about that too – but whether he changed his mind. Did he always intend to land in Normandy? Or were contemporaries correct to believe that he had originally intended to sail to Gascony?
The case that Edward originally intended to sail to Gascony is based on the chronicles of le Bel and Froissart, together with support from a newsletter written five days after the invasion by Sir Bartholomew Burghersh (copied in Murimuth’s chronicle). Froissart mentions that the wind was fine for a trip to Gascony when the king embarked but that on the third day it changed, and drove the fleet on to the shores of Cornwall, where it remained at anchor for six days and nights. It was at this time, according to Froissart and le Bel, that Edward changed his mind, persuaded by Sir Godfrey de Harcourt that Normandy was a better destination. Sir Bartholomew Burghersh’s letter to the archbishop of Canterbury written on 17 July supports this, stating that Edward made sure all his ships had victuals for a fortnight (the length of a trip to Gascony) and that,
intending to have passed by the Needles at the end of the Isle of Wight, and so have held his direct course towards the Channel, the wind was so contrary to him that he could not keep to that route by any means, albeit he lay a long while, waiting if God were willing to have given him weather to pass; and since it did not please God that he should go that way, he turned to the land where God should give him grace, and arrived well and in a good state, with all the fleet, in a country which is called Cotentin, in Normandy.1
To this one should add the background detail that Burghersh was a well-travelled man, having been sent abroad several times on royal duties, and no stranger to sailing across the Channel. He was also close to the king. So we should perhaps trust his word in a news letter to the archbishop.
There are several reasons to doubt this interpretation. Richard Barber in his The Black Prince (1978) stated with confidence that, although the fleet may have been intended for Gascony when originally summoned, its destination had been settled as Normandy by 3 July, when Edward anchored off the Isle of Wight. It was because the wind changed direction after this, when the fleet was at Yarmouth, that Edward ordered the fleet to return to the safety of Portsmouth. Sumption in his Trial by Battle (1990) provides a looser interpretation, simply saying that Edward had originally intended to go to Gascony but then changed his mind; he does not say when exactly, but he suggests it was at the meeting on 20 June.
Clifford Rogers in his War Cruel and Sharp (2000) provides the most developed argument on this question. He points out that it made more military sense going to Normandy than to Gascony. He suggests that to attack in Gascony would have been a poor strategy, especially if it had entailed raising the siege of Aiguillon, where a few hundred English knights and archers were pinning down several thousand French troops. But to spread rumours that he intended to attack in Gascony and then to launch a surprise attack in Normandy would have been very sensible, and would have directly led to the historical problem with which we are now faced. In support of this interpretation he points out that Edward ordered that no ships at all be allowed to leave England in the eight-day period following his departure, and even concealed his destination to his own chancery officers. If it was widely anticipated in France that Edward would sail to Gascony, he says, ‘there would have been little point in taking such precautions in order merely to prevent the French from receiving confirmation of what they already expected’.2 He also claims that ‘Edward’s own testimony is that he spent ten days on the Isle of Wight waiting, not for favourable winds, but for all his ships to gather’, a point noted by Barber too.
The problem is a classic case of where the historian may (if he so wishes) regard the question as a relatively trivial detail, but the biographer does not have this luxury. If Edward was forced to change all his plans and quickly adapt to a radically different situation and series of objectives, then that says different things about Edward than if he always intended to go to Normandy. Similarly if he always intended to go to Normandy and managed to delude everyone, including men like Sir Bartholomew Burghersh, about his intentions, then that says much for his ability to control information and yet retain the confidence of an otherwise misinformed army.
In addition to the various arguments already published, there are at least three further reasons to agree with the Normandy destination. First, as all the above-mentioned writers note, an initial decision – probably the final decision – was made before the fleet set out, as the ships’ captains carried sealed orders telling them where they were to assemble in the event of a storm. However, storms were not the only vagaries of the weather which could affect the eventual destination. If the fleet were becalmed for a long period they would not have sufficient supplies to reach Gascony. Thus, if the sealed letters had indicated that ships’ captains were to make for a port in Gascony, they would not have been able to do so if lack of wind had delayed them on the way. Similarly, if a storm were to strike in the Channel, the chances of all the waterlogged or damaged ships managing to make the journey with soaked rations and damaged spars all the way to Gascony were small. One could argue that the sealed letters contained a destination which was to be made for only in the event of a storm, but if so this would simply reinforce Normandy as the destination, as it was contrary winds, not a storm, which led to the delay.
The second reason is that an eight-day period of secrecy, during which no English vessels left port, would not have been a long enough time to guarantee the secrecy of the journey to Gascony. Travelling that far by ship could take weeks, so an eight-day headstart would not have guaranteed that Edward could have landed in the country around Bordeaux before a spy in England could have informed Philip who could in turn have sent a message to his army in the south-west. A royal messenger with regular changes of horses could transport a message at ninety miles per day in summer. If Edward had been delayed by only a few days, he would have run the risk of disembarking after a long journey only to have to fight sooner rather than later. This causes us to wonder why there was only an eight-days’ prohibition if he was heading to Gascony.
The third point – and arguably the strongest evidence for the case that Normandy was the destination all along – is Edward’s actions on arrival. He came prepared to speak about Normandy as his patrimony – his ancestors’ lands – and he came with a well-worked-out speech. He claimed that it had been illegally taken from the kings of England by France ‘in the time of King Richard’. Clifford Rogers touches on this, and considers that the reference to Richard, although it was a mistake, was ‘close enough’.3However, in appealing to the men of his own generation to right a wrong suffered by Richard the Lionheart, Edward was not making a mistake at all. Any well-informed man (and certainly Edward himself) would have known that it was King John who had lost Normandy, as this formed an important and prominent section of the most popular lay chronicle of the time, the Brut, which boldly (albeit incorrectly) talked about ‘how King John (Edward’s great-great-grandfather) lost Normandy in the first year of his reign’. Moreover either Edward himself or his mother had borrowed (and presumably read) a history of Normandy. So he was not making a mistake but purposefully associating the duchy with England’s great crusader king. Of course, Edward could have dreamed up this propaganda during the crossing, but deliberately to misrepresent his own family history seems a well-planned move, and one which had been worked out in advance. Further support to this idea is given in the many and frequent allusions to the conquest of England which are mentioned in Chapter Ten. Finally, if one were to look for a blueprint of how to invade and conquer a country, one would have to consider the events of 1066. Duke William’s strategy on that occasion had been a diversionary attack using allies on a different part of the coast, a surprise landing on an unprotected beach, and a confrontation, followed by a march on the capital. Edward’s strategy of 1346 follows Duke William’s of 1066 in all these aspects, except that he hesitated before attacking Paris.
In conclusion, it is almost certain that Bartholomew Burghersh’s belief that he was being sent to Gascony reflects Edward’s deliberate spreading of misinformation rather than a change of strategy in 1346. It would appear far more likely that Normandy was his intended destination from the moment he set sail, a decision probably made, as Sumption suggests, on or before 20 June 1346.