5
The English army did not attempt to pursue the remnants of Philip’s host as it straggled away towards Amiens on the night of 26 August. They were exhausted and needed time to rest and recuperate, and it was not until the following day, a Sunday, when the heralds had completed their grisly task of identifying the dead nobles, that they realized the extent of their victory. At least two French contingents arriving to join their army and with no inkling that the battle was over were quickly seen off with more slaughter. However, true to the code of behaviour between gentlemen, the body of John of Bohemia was washed and wrapped and sent back to Germany, while those of the princes and the more important nobles were transported to the monastery of Maintenay, ten miles to the north. A truce of three days was announced to allow the locals to find the bodies of the common soldiery, which were stripped and buried in grave pits in the valley. Spin is not only a twenty-first-century political ploy and a report of the battle was sent back to England by fast cutter. Embellished somewhat, the account, combined with a report of the capture of Caen, was to be read out in every church, and in a very short space of time all over England there was genuine delight and pride in the great victory over a hated and feared enemy. Now Parliament and the people might grumble at the prospects of more taxes to keep the war going, but they would pay up for what they could see was a continuing success.
Meanwhile, in Amiens the hunt for the guilty was on. The fault lay with evil counsellors, corrupt officials, the weather or even the displeasure of the Almighty, and it was always easy to blame the foreigners. The Genoese crossbowmen were all traitors and were to be hunted down and killed, and many of them were massacred before it was pointed out that they were valuable assets who might be needed elsewhere, whereupon Philip rescinded his order. In any age, a military commander who cannot identify his mistakes is doomed to repeat them, and the French refusal to face facts and recognize that their way of waging war was obsolete in the face of rapidly discharged missile weapons and professional dismounted infantry was to cost them dear in the future. It was inconceivable that well-born French nobles could be defeated by low-born archers – ‘gens de nulle valeur’, people of no worth, as one French chronicler put it. And in any case, by refusing to take prisoners for ransom the English were not playing fair, while the behaviour of the Welsh in despatching the wounded was very bad form indeed.
On 29 or 30 August, the English army set off again, burning and pillaging as it went. The areas around Hesdin, Saint-Josse and Étaples were all reduced to smouldering heaps of rubble, while anything that looked like being properly defended was bypassed. The question was what to do next. Despite the capture of Caen and the great victory of Crécy, underneath the propaganda and the jubilation there was not a great deal to show so far, at least nothing of any permanence. Despite Edward’s insistence that he had come to France to claim his own, French troops relatively quickly reoccupied the areas that the chevauchée passed through, and stern punishment was meted out to those Normans who had thrown in their lot with Edward, including the garrison of Caen, who were rounded up and executed. What was needed was a concrete and obvious advantage, something that could be held and shown to be a lasting gain from the war, and that meant a city that was not part of the English lands in France. Edward would capture Calais and annex it to the English crown in perpetuity.
Calais, with a population of about 8,000, was not then a town of any great commercial significance. Its harbour was small and liable to silt up, and most travel between England and Europe was through Wissant or Boulogne, both of which had much better and more easily navigable approaches. For all that, it was the nearest French port to England and might be developed, and it had for years been a scourge of English trade as a nest of piracy. From the French point of view, although it was only a minor trading post, the town was close to the border with Flanders and important as a military base to guard against Flemish incursions, and it had been well garrisoned and stocked with enough provisions to withstand a long siege. Moving through Neufchâtel and Wissant, the English army reached the heights of Sangatte on 3 September, from where they could see their objective.
It is unlikely that Edward ever thought that he could take Calais by a coup de main, for it was well sited for defence. To the north was the harbour and the open sea, to the west was a river with only one bridge, the Neuillet bridge, and to the east and south was marshland criss-crossed by streams and rivulets that constantly changed their course. Within those natural defences was a series of well-constructed walls, themselves protected by moats, and at the western end was the castle, with its own separate system of walls, towers and ditches. The English did not even attempt to assault the walls, but instead prepared for a long siege. This was standard practice since, before the development of effective cannon, it was very unusual for a medieval castle or fortified town to be taken by assault. Far more often it was starvation, disease or treachery that forced capitulation, and it was common for a besieged commander to agree with the besieger that, if not relieved by a certain date, he would surrender the fortress. If, however, a castle or fortress had to be assaulted, there were three ways in: over the walls, through the walls or under the walls.
Assault over the walls could be achieved by the use of belfries or scaling ladders, or both. The belfry was a three- or four-storey wooden tower on wheels or runners. Packed with archers and men-at-arms, it would be pushed up close to the wall until the attackers could leap from the top storey onto the wall. It was a very old stratagem – the Romans had made frequent use of belfries – and it took much time and labour to place them in position. Once packed with men, a belfry was very heavy and the ground had to be levelled and a road built to allow it to be pushed along. All this preparation would be obvious to the defenders, who would try to set the belfry on fire with fire arrows or by throwing burning balls of straw soaked in pitch at it, and mass their own men on the walls as it approached. While the belfry was still theoretically on the equipment tables of a medieval siege train, it was hardly ever actually built or used.42 Scaling ladders were easier to make and to conceal until the last minute, but, unless there were sufficient archers or crossbowmen to keep the defenders away from the walls, this too was a dubious way of earning a living, particularly for the first man up the ladder.
Attacking through the walls meant creating a breach, and this could only be done with a battering ram or a bore, both of which were very slow and vulnerable to boulders and, once again, fireballs hurled onto them from above. Going under the walls involved the use of miners. Rather than attempt to tunnel beneath the walls and then emerge inside the castle, like the demon king popping up through a trapdoor in a pantomime, miners would try to collapse the walls. The mining team would tunnel under the wall, supporting the roof of the tunnel by wooden pit props.43 The tunnel would then be packed with combustible materials (dead pigs, having lots of body fat, were a favourite) and ignited. Once the pit props had burned through, the tunnel would collapse and the walls above with it.
There was a variety of machinery which could be used to hurl projectiles at the walls or into the besieged town. The mangonel relied on the energy of twisted ropes – human hair was regarded as the best material for mangonel ropes – to hurl a stone or fireball from the end of a beam. The springal, little different from the Roman ballista, was a giant crossbow, but, like its hand-held baby brother, it was slow to load and only effective if used in massed batteries. The trebuchet relied on a counterweight on a beam with a huge sling on its end and could deliver seriously large stones against or over a wall, while the petrary was an enormous catapult. It was claimed that the mangonel could be used to propel dead horses into towns in an early version of biological warfare, and the chronicler Froissart avers that, when the French were besieging Auberoche in Aquitaine in 1345, they captured an English messenger sent out to contact relieving forces, killed him and returned his body over the walls with a petrary – a somewhat unlikely tale. Edward may have had some early cannon in his siege train, and there is some evidence that three may have been on the field at Crécy. Descriptions are vague: they may have fired stone balls or large darts, but, as the secret of casting gun barrels was as yet unknown and the manufacture of gunpowder imprecise, they will have done little but frighten the horses and were probably more dangerous to the gunners who served them than to the enemy. If they did exist, they seem to have played little part in the siege of Calais.
At Calais, going over or through the walls was not an option as the moats and ditches protected the approaches; mining was ruled out because the soil was waterlogged and siege engines were too heavy to be moved over the marshy ground. Starvation was the only answer and the English were quite prepared to wait. At long last the requested reinforcements arrived from England and the fleet under Sir John de Montgomery, Admiral of the South, hove to off Calais at around the same time as the army got there on land. The soldiers began to block off all roads and tracks running to and from the town, and a vast camp was set up on the dry ground around the church of St Peter where the roads from Boulogne and Ardres crossed. The camp was intended to be in position for the long term, and soon shops, armourers’ tents, quarters for the nobility, butts for the archers, paddocks for the horses, and all the facilities of a large town were in place or being constructed. While the army was on the move, it could feed itself from the French countryside, but, now that it was static, the available food in the immediate area would soon be exhausted and provisions would have to be brought in.
It is sad but perhaps inevitable that interest in military history is centred on the battles and those who fought them, and that most soldiers would rather be out killing people than in barracks counting blankets. But the fact is that you can have the best soldiers in the world, superbly trained, highly motivated, brilliantly led and equipped with the best weapons that money can buy, but, if you cannot feed them, house them, resupply them, move them and tend them when they are sick or wounded, then you can do nothing. Administering an army is far more difficult than commanding it in battle. The real heroes of most of England’s and Britain’s successful wars are the logisticians, and they get precious little recognition for it. For the siege of Calais, government agents went out all over southern England to purchase foodstuffs and other supplies for the army. They had to be found, collected, paid for, moved to the ports, loaded on ships – which themselves had to be impressed – and delivered to the army. The French scored a minor success when a fleet of galleys from the Seine intercepted one of the first supply convoys and sank or burned most of the ships, killing the crews and dumping the cargoes. Future convoys would have men-at-arms or archers on board and the supply line was never broken again, but the need to put soldiers on the ships did increase the expense of the logistic effort.
While arrangements for the siege of Calais were being put in place, and the king’s agents were scouring the southern and eastern counties for supplies, the Scots decided to take a hand. After Crécy, frantic messages had gone from the French to the twenty-two-year-old Scottish king David II, son of Robert Bruce, who had been married to Edward III’s sister Joanna at the age of four and had returned from exile in France in 1341, pleading with him to do something to distract the English. Assuming that all the English soldiers were safely out of the way in France, David invaded England in early October 1346, a move generally popular with the Scottish magnates, who assumed that the north of England was ripe for the plucking. Storming down the Roman road and pillaging as they went, they took the castle of Liddel Strength, eight miles north of Carlisle, and beheaded its captain, Sir Walter de Selby. At this point, David’s chief military adviser, Sir William Douglas, the thirty-six-year-old Lord of Liddesdale, advised that enough was enough, they had done what they promised the French they would do, and it was now time to return over the border before retribution arrived. David rejected this sound advice, claiming that there was no one to oppose them but ‘wretched monks, lewd priests, swineherds, cobblers and skinners’.22 The raid continued and included the despoiling of the priory of Lanercost, which presumably accounts for the Lanercost chronicler’s obvious hatred of the Scots, claiming as he does that King David and his men made a habit of defecating in the fonts of churches that they passed. Given that the Scots were almost as terrified of the wrath of God – as opposed to that of his earthly representatives – as everyone else, this charge seems unlikely.44
But David’s assumption that England had nothing with which to reply to a Scottish incursion was very wrong. Edward had not arrayed any troops north of the River Trent, and the defence of the Scottish marches had been entrusted to the very capable hands of William de la Zouche, the fifty-two-year-old archbishop of York, Warden of the Marches and principal commissioner of array in the north, who mustered an army at Barnard Castle on 15 October before moving north to Bishop Auckland, south of Durham, the following day. The army numbered around 1,000 men-at-arms, 2,000 archers and 5,000 spearmen, against probably a similar or smaller number of Scots. The usual three divisions were commanded by the archbishop himself, Ralph, Lord Neville, and Henry, Lord Percy. The Scots army was encamped in the priory grounds of Beaurepaire (which still exists but is now Bearpark), a few miles north of Durham, when on the morning of 17 October 1346 a foraging party of around 400 men under Douglas ran into the archbishop’s vanguard in a thick mist and got very much the worst of the encounter, with only Douglas and half his men getting back to raise the alarm.
The Battle of Neville’s Cross which followed went on for most of the day.45 The Scots came on in the same old way, and the English archers on the wings slaughtered them in the same old way. When the lines of infantry met, it was rapidly evident that the Scots could not hold and the officers and men on the Scots flanks began to flee the field, leaving the king and his immediate household to fight on. Lanercost probably exaggerates the speed of desertion, though he does say that Earl Patrick should have been named Earl ‘Non Hic’.46 In any event, the Scots king and Sir William Douglas were taken prisoner and carted off to the Tower, while the remnants of their army fled back to Scotland, not even stopping to defecate in fonts on the way. The captor of David received an annuity of £500 a year and promotion to banneret. Brave but foolhardy, David was said to have sustained two head wounds from arrows. The surgeons removed one, but the arrowhead of the second remained lodged in his head for many years, until it apparently popped out one day while he was at prayer.
Back at Calais, a brief attempt to bring down the walls by hurling rocks at them failed when the ground was too soft to allow a firm foundation for the trebuchets and petraries; an ingenious plan to assail the walls from boats fitted with scaling ladders was finally abandoned despite considerable expenditure in preparing the boats. And so the blockade went on. Although the town was well provisioned, its stores would not last forever, so the commander of the garrison, Jean de Vienne, an experienced and competent officer, decided to evict his useless mouths, expelling around 2,000 civilians – women, children, the old, the sick and the weak – into no-man’s-land between the walls and the investing army. At first Edward would not allow them to pass through his lines and, as there was nothing for them to eat save what little they had managed to carry away with them, they soon began to die. Edward relented and the dispossessed were allowed passage through the siege lines. While no food could reach the garrison overland and attempts to run supplies in by sea were usually prevented by the English navy, the occasional blockade-runner did manage to reach the harbour, but the quantities that could be delivered by this means were small.
During the latter part of summer and autumn, life within the English camp was reasonably comfortable, but with the onset of winter conditions began to deteriorate. An army on the move could keep reasonably healthy, but, once it became static, disease inevitably followed. Edward’s army of 1346 was no exception. Little attention was paid to the cleanliness of water sources, latrine arrangements were primitive, flies and rats abounded, and soon dysentery – ‘the bloody flux’ – began to take its toll. Dysentery is an infection of the gut and is passed on by contact with an infected person or by touching or eating something that has been handled by an infected person. Symptoms include watery diarrhoea, often with blood in the faeces, nausea and vomiting, stomach pains and fever. While medieval man was probably more resistant to it than we are today, it could still be fatal, and, even if it was not, a man’s ability to do his duty was severely affected. Many of the spearmen and archers would have been infested with worms, and colds and influenza would have been common. Malaria was then endemic throughout Europe but was more of a summer affliction, there being a lot fewer mosquitoes around in the winter.
On top of the health hazards, manning siege lines was boring and gave few opportunities for acquiring glory or loot. Hence there was a steady trickle of desertion by archers and spearmen, while many of the knights found excuses to return to England to sort out a land dispute or see to a son’s marriage. There was also a problem with the horses, which started to die off from the cold. Or so the chroniclers tell us, but, as horses grow a substantial winter coat and are very capable of surviving all but the most severe weather, it may have been an epidemic of strangles,47 or perhaps starvation: hay would have been running out and barley and rye intended for the horses may have been eaten by the men.
In February 1347, commissions of array were issued for another 3,600 archers and the commissioners in Wales were instructed to provide more spearmen. These reinforcements were needed not only to make up the shortfall brought about by sickness, desertion and leave, but also to replace a contingent that had been sent off to Brittany with Sir Thomas Dagworth. This knight had served in Brittany in the previous year with a small mobile force which had not only managed to distract the French from their sieges of the English garrisons of Brest, Lesneven and La Roche-Derrien, but, in a series of battles where his tiny band of men-at-arms and archers had seen off far more numerous French soldiers, had also forced Charles of Blois to lift the sieges. Dagworth then joined thechevauchée to Crécy before being sent back to Brittany in January 1347.
Sir Thomas was typical of the professional soldiers who would make their reputations and fortunes out of this war. A younger son, born around 1306 of good but impoverished stock, he tarted life as estate manager for the earl of Hereford and obviously impressed, for he married, far above his station, a grand-daughter of Edward I. He was knighted, possibly in recognition of service in the Scottish wars of the 1330s or perhaps as a result of the connections he made by his marriage. In 1345, he commanded a sub-unit under the earl of Northampton in Brittany, where he did well and was appointed commander of English forces there when the earl returned to England in January 1346. In the next four years, Dagworth would receive a large cash grant from Edward III, be ennobled, be called to Parliament and die fighting. A natural leader whose loyalty was unquestioned, he cared about his men, looked after them and made sure that any credit went to them – a hitherto unusual attitude to find in a commander but one that would become the norm as professionalism continued to permeate the English army.
The French had still not faced up to the implications of what they termed la déconfiture de Crécy (the collapse of Crécy), but Philip could not ignore the English army camped around Calais, where determined attempts to lift the siege by sea had proved futile. In early 1347, the French vassals were ordered to muster their troops at Amiens by Whitsuntide (28 May in 1347). The troops did arrive, eventually, but it was not until July that the army was ready to move, and, when they did, Edward was understandably concerned. Although the summer weather had improved the health of his army, there was still a large number on the sick list; long months in the siege lines had induced boredom and low morale; many soldiers had lost their physical fitness and fighting edge; and in June a reinforcement of the healthiest 100 men-at-arms and 400 archers had been sent off to Dagworth in Brittany. Although this detachment weakened the Calais army, it was a highly cost-effective investment. Charles of Blois had reinstituted the siege of La Roche-Derrien, hoping that by so doing he could lure the English army into trying to lift the siege, which might allow him to fight and win a battle on his own terms. Instead, it was the French who suffered a crushing defeat, for on 20 June 1347 Sir Thomas Dagworth led a night attack on the French army dispersed around its siege lines and defeated it piecemeal. Sir Thomas himself was wounded and captured, escaped, then captured and escaped again. When dawn broke on 21 June, nearly half the French men-at-arms had been killed, and those nobles not killed had been captured, including Charles of Blois himself, whom Sir Thomas sold to the king for £3,500. At a stroke the whole balance of power in Brittany had been reversed and the foundations laid for the eventual success of the Montfort faction in the Breton war of succession.
Meanwhile, within Calais the siege was biting ever more sharply. The garrison had eaten all the horses and was starting on the cats and dogs, so Jean de Vienne expelled another 400 citizens who were not contributing to the defence. This time Edward did not permit them to pass through his lines; he refused them food and water, and let them die. Not everyone in the English camp agreed with this, but most did. By allowing the previous expellees to pass without hindrance, the English had given de Vienne a pain-free way of extending the siege by reducing his ration strength, and there was also the question of spies and messengers being sent out in the guise of refugees. It was a harsh decision, but the right one in the circumstances.
With the approach of the French army from Amiens, summonses were sent to England to recall knights on furlough and those who had gone back to buy horses to replace those that had died during the winter. In any siege the investing army had not only to worry about sallies from the defenders, but also to guard against the risk of being attacked from behind by a relieving force. The French army got as far as Sangatte, saw that the English were apparently soundly entrenched and well able to withstand an attack (which they probably were, but not as well able as it appeared), issued a half-hearted challenge to come out and fight, and then withdrew. The news of La Roche-Derrien had reached the army, the men were not enthusiastic after Crécy the previous year, and many saw no point in continuing the war. As they scuttled back to Amiens, they were followed up by a mounted party led by the earls of Lancaster and Northampton, who gave them no chance to rest or recover their appetite for a fight. Philip now ordered his divisions to disband.
Inside Calais, Jean de Vienne had hung on in the hope of relief, and with the withdrawal of Philip’s army that last chance was gone. A messenger was sent out offering to negotiate and Edward sent Sir Walter Manny in to parley. De Vienne said that he would surrender the town if the lives of the garrison and the property of the inhabitants were spared. Manny relayed the king’s orders that, in accordance with the customs of war at the time, the lives of a garrison that held out during a siege were forfeit. Only unconditional surrender was acceptable and Edward would do with soldiers and civilians as he wished. This policy was not popular with Edward’s own knights, who pointed out that to kill men for doing their duty could rebound on them in the future. The whole point of adhering to modern laws of armed conflict that protect prisoners of war is to ensure that the other side does the same, and Manny and the others were arguing that very same point. Eventually, the king gave way. It was relayed to de Vienne that the majority of the garrison and the civilians would be spared, but not their property, and six of the leading men of the town were to come to King Edward dressed only in their shirts and with nooses around their necks bearing the keys of the city.
On the morning of 3 August 1347, Calais surrendered, and what happened next became the stuff of the French legend-makers, desperate to produce some tale of heroism from the disastrous years of 1346 and 1347. The story goes that the six burgesses, led by Eustache de Saint-Pierre, who had supposedly volunteered for the task, came out of the city gates to find the whole English army drawn up on parade, with the king and his queen and senior officers seated on a platform. The emaciated party approached the platform and fell on their knees, and Saint-Pierre asked for mercy. Edward refused and ordered them to be beheaded. At once there began a murmuring among the senior officers – to execute the men at once was bad enough, to execute them unshriven would be disgraceful. Edward was unmoved, and only when the pregnant queen, Philippa of Hainault, pleaded piteously with him was he moved to spare their lives. The truth, though, is surely that this was a carefully prepared and rehearsed charade to show the world that Edward was capable of great mercy: a queen might well argue with her husband in private, but not in public; similarly, whatever advice the king’s senior commanders might proffer in the council chamber, they would not cross him in the presence of a beaten enemy. As it was, Saint-Pierre and his companions were indeed spared.48
Jean de Vienne and the more prominent of the French knights were sent off to join the growing band of notables in the Tower, and all the buildings of Calais and their contents were now to be the property of King Edward. Despite the insignificance of Calais as a trading port, it turned out to be stuffed with riches of all descriptions, largely as a result of many years of piracy, and, once the majority of the inhabitants had been expelled with little more than what they stood up in, the spoils of victory were collected and doled out. It was said that there was not a woman in England who did not wear something taken from Calais. It was Edward’s intention to keep Calais, but rather than rule it as part of English France, it would become a colony, with English merchants and tradesmen encouraged to settle there permanently with the promise of free housing and land. Calais remained English for another 211 years, until it was lost through Tudor neglect and French guile in the reign of Mary Tudor.
Edward’s initial intention was to follow up the victories of Crécy and Calais by another great chevauchée, which might end the war once and for all. However, the army was tired after over a year of constant campaigning and money was once again in short supply, so, when the inevitable approach for negotiations was made through the offices of the French cardinals, Edward was prepared to listen. For the French, a truce was imperative: they had suffered serious reverses in Normandy, Aquitaine, Flanders and Brittany, and, wealthy though their nation was, they were short of cash to pay the army. Messengers sped between Calais and Amiens to try to get agreement – almost any agreement – that would end the fighting. The English were, of course, in much the stronger position, and, when a nine-month truce was signed at the end of September 1347, it left them in possession of all that they had gained and held.
The return home of Edward and most of his army was greeted with acclaim. Parliament agreed that the money had been well spent and the king’s personal position was enormously strengthened by his obvious prowess in battle. At the same time, the taking of Calais and its plantation by settlers were seen as providing England with an opportunity for trade and an entrance to Europe that did not depend upon Flemish support, which might not always be provided. On St George’s Day, 23 April 1348, the king founded the Order of the Garter, a chivalric order which would comprise but twenty-six members and be a close companionship of those who had proved themselves in battle; it was also intended to promote King Edward’s court as one just as glorious as any in Europe. The order was to be headed by the king and his successors, who would choose the membership, and there were only two stipulations: knights were not to fight each other and they could not leave the kingdom without the king’s permission. Of the twenty-six original members, eighteen were definitely present at the Battle of Crécy and the others had distinguished themselves in various ways. The order would have its chapel in Windsor Castle and would support a chantry of twelve priests and twenty-six ‘poor knights’ – originally men who had been captured by the French and who had had to sell their estates to purchase their freedom.
The Garter was not the first such order of chivalry. There was already one in Hungary and another in Castile, but both are now long gone and in any case were not as exclusive. Much speculation surrounds the origin of the name, mostly centring around a garter supposedly dropped by the countess of Salisbury at a post-siege celebratory party at Calais and picked up by the king with the words ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’, which can be translated ‘Evil to him who thinks evil’. There are, however, a number of candidates for the countess. It is unlikely to be Katherine Montagu, countess of Salisbury, as she would have been getting on for fifty in 1347; it just might be Joan, the daughter of the earl of Kent executed by Queen Isabella’s Mortimer, who had a racy past;49 and legend also cites a mysterious Alice of Salisbury, who by some accounts was a mistress of the king and by others a victim of rape by him. We shall never know, but a more likely, albeit mundane, explanation is that the badge of the order had to be something that could be worn over armour, so the order might just as easily have been the Order of the Armband. (Similarly, the motto could equally well be translated ‘Shame on him who thinks badly of it’ – ‘it’ referring to Edward’s claim to the French throne.) Now the Garter is the oldest order of chivalry in the world, and, while the twelve priests did not survive the Reformation, the twenty-six knights live on. Retired service officers, they are no longer necessarily poor, very few are knights and their appellation was changed by William IV to the Military Knights of Windsor.
At this time, Europe was struck by a catastrophe so appalling that it made any major military endeavour impossible until it had run its immediate course. Sometime in the winter of 1347, a terrible sickness arrived in Sicily, supposedly on a ship from either the Black Sea or the Middle East, and was carried on to Marseilles, from where it spread rapidly throughout Europe. While today we refer to it as bubonic plague, because of the buboes that appeared as symptoms, modern medical science still does not know exactly what it was, although it is believed that it was some form of virus spread by fleas that live on rats and mice. In the unhygienic conditions of the time it was almost impossible to prevent it spreading, particularly in towns where people lived close together and sanitation was poor, and the mortality rate was very high indeed. In August 1348, it arrived in England, either on a ship from Bordeaux carrying wine or on one from the supply run to Calais landing at Weymouth, from where it spread inexorably through Dorset, Somerset and Devon and then to London, where it was first reported in November. The symptoms were swellings (buboes) in the groin and armpits, black blotches on the skin, a fever and death within four days.
France, already reeling from military defeat and without a strong central administration, suffered appallingly. Crops went unharvested and fields untilled; fodder that would have gone to warhorses went to animals that were of greater agricultural value; and knights who found their incomes gone took to brigandage. As the population shrank, so did state revenues, and the currency was devalued. The court and government fled Paris, with Philip wandering around the borders of Normandy with a handful of clerks and personal servants. To many of the French, this was God’s punishment, although witchcraft and sorcerers of various hues were also blamed. So, too, was the practice of blasphemy, which was now to be punished by the removal of the tongue for persistent offenders; and, inevitably, the Jews, who came in for even more persecution than usual.
In England the effects were less, but still serious. The death rate was particularly high among the clergy, who, if they were doing their job properly, were in constant contact with victims; in the dioceses of York and Lincoln 44 per cent of the beneficed clergy died, while in Exeter, Winchester, Norwich and Ely it was 50 per cent.23 For long it has been generally accepted that up to a third of the population died in that first visitation, which by 1350 had largely run its course and was now in Scotland, but some modern authorities think that the figure may have been much higher. Dislocation was far less in England than in France, largely for the reason that the former had both a more efficient central government which controlled the whole country and a popular king, while the latter had to make do with various semi-independent feuding magnates and a failed and unpopular king. In England this first outbreak tended to hit the poor and undernourished, while the nobility, who lived in a (relatively) cleaner environment, were less severely affected – unlike their counterparts in France, where the queen, the duchess of Normandy and the Chancellor all died, as did many of the aristocracy.50 With the reduction in the labour pool, English agricultural workers were no longer so closely tied to their lords and could demand higher wages. Various strictures emerged from Westminster exhorting labourers to claim no more than they had before the plague, and lords who paid over the odds were to be fined. (The French took a rather different view and there labourers who would not work for the old rates were branded.) While in France law and order and government did break down for a time, in England, despite rising crime and economic problems, the authorities never lost control. Recent excavation of a so-called plague pit in East Smithfield, London, has revealed that, far from being tipped higgledy-piggledy into a hole in the manner of Belsen, the bodies were buried in neat rows, each body in its own grave, albeit not in a coffin.
While neither side could embark on any large-scale operations of war, the fighting did not die down completely. In 1349, there was an attempt to bribe a Genoese mercenary commander in Calais to leave the gate open and the drawbridge down one night to allow a French raiding party to recapture the town. The man took the money, agreed to betray the town on 31 December, and sent a fast galley to report the bribe to King Edward. The king crossed to France with personal retainers and archers and ambushed the raiders as they crept through the gate. The Genoese kept the bribe. Then Philip persuaded the Castilians, who since the death of Joan Plantagenet had thought better of their alliance with the English, to send a fleet into the Channel, presumably to disrupt the wine trade from Bordeaux, the supply convoys to Calais, or both. English intelligence gave early warning, and on 29 August 1350 off Winchelsea at the Battle of Les Espagnols sur Mer, the English fleet, with King Edward, the Prince of Wales and the ten-year-old John of Gaunt aboard, won a great victory over a smaller fleet but one composed of much higher (and thus more difficult to board) Spanish ships. Edward was now thirty-seven and this was the last time he engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, but by now his prestige was such that he did not have to.
Then, in August 1350, just as France was recovering from the Black Death, Philip VI died, to be succeeded by his thirty-one-year-old son, Jean II. Jean is known in French history as Jean le Bon – John the Good – the myth-makers having taken note of his undoubted personal courage and love of tournaments, while quietly ignoring that he was vicious, irrational, unjust, militarily incompetent and stupid (which, in the pantheon of French royalty, means that he was very stupid indeed). He is described as being handsome and with a fine red beard, although in his portrait in the Louvre it looks more like designer stubble that has got out of control. He too founded an order of chivalry, the Chevaliers de l’Étoile (Knights of the Star), whose members had to swear an oath never to leave a battle alive, which largely explains why the order no longer exists. What particularly annoyed the English, and reinforced the existing antipathy to the papacy that would eventually find expression in the Reformation, was the creation by the pope of twelve cardinals to mark the crowning of Jean II – eight Frenchmen, three Spaniards and an Italian, completely ignoring the English candidates.
Jean was, however, in no position to renew the war just yet, although he did start to gather the funds for it, largely by imposing even more oppressive taxes and debasing the currency – minting more of it while reducing the silver content. Despite the truce of Calais, the skirmishing in Aquitaine and Brittany had never died down, and in Brittany on 20 July 1350 the great Sir Thomas Dagworth was treacherously ambushed and killed, having fought furiously to the end. The following year, Henry of Lancaster led a short but devastating chevauchée through Artois and Picardy, and in Brittany the Battle of the Thirty was perhaps one of the last hurrahs of chivalric warfare. A French force commanded by Jean de Beaumanoir sallied out of the castle of Josselin and arrived outside the walls of Ploermel eight miles away. Rather than undergo a siege, the English garrison commander, Robert of Bamborough, agreed that thirty men-at-arms from each side would fight a decider on foot. Rules were agreed, stipulating which weapons could be used and when there would be breaks for refreshment and the dressing of wounds, and the location was to be midway between the two castles. On 13 March 1351, the encounter duly took place, and the English lost, although they accused the French of cheating.
Dagworth’s successor as theatre commander in Brittany was Sir Walter Bentley, a hard professional from a Staffordshire family that had often in the past been in opposition to, and in trouble with, the king. Edward III was not, though, a man to hold grudges against those who could be useful to him and who were prepared to serve him loyally – the fact that he did not believe in the inheritance of the sins of the fathers is shown by the inclusion among his senior commanders of a Hugh Despenser and a Roger Mortimer, both sons of men whose execution Edward had ordered or been associated with.
On 14 August 1352, Bentley, with a small force of perhaps only 200 men-at-arms and 300 archers, beat a far larger French force at Mauron, midway between Rennes and Ploermel. In accordance with English tactical doctrine, he placed his men on a slope with a hedge in front, men-at-arms on foot and archers on the flanks. The French had learned a little from Crécy, and their commander, Guy de Nesle, ordered the majority of his men to dismount while several hundred mounted men were ordered to ride down the English archers. Had the attack been properly coordinated and commanded, it might have worked. As it was, the French mounted knights did disperse the archers on the English right, but, instead of then wheeling round and attacking the English line in rear, they carried on to plunder Bentley’s (sparse) baggage convoy. On the English left the archers repulsed the cavalry, but in doing so they were unable to deliver the usual arrow storm on the advancing French infantry, and de Nesle did get his infantry line to close. However, after a march uphill in layers of clothing worn both under and over their armour, these men were in no shape for pitched hand-to-hand fighting and were seen off by the English men-at-arms. As usual, casualties are hugely over- or understated. According to the chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, the French dead included ten great lords, 640 knights and noblemen, and a number of ‘common people not counted’, while 140 knights and nobles were taken prisoner.24 A more recent source claims eighty nobles and 500 men-at-arms were killed and 160 knights taken prisoner.25 The real figure is probably 200 or so French killed (many of whom were Knights of the Star), while the prisoner figure seems credible. Neither source makes any mention of English casualties, and yet there must have been some among the archers on the English right. Le Baker says that Bentley had twenty archers executed on the spot for running away when the French cavalry attacked, but this is most unlikely – although he may well have had one of the captains or vintenars executed as a warning to others.
Although England’s economy had recovered more quickly from the plague than that of France (wages had gone up, but prices had too, so the lords could retain almost the same income as before), Edward was quite happy to negotiate while still preparing for a renewal of the war. Desultory negotiations had been going on since the capture of Calais, but always foundered on Philip VI’s refusal to restore the English lands other than as fiefs of the Valois, which was quite unacceptable to the English. Things had changed by 1353, as not only had Philip been succeeded by Jean but also Pope Clement VI had died and Innocent VI was elected to replace him. Innocent was even more pro-French than his predecessor, but he did see the need to end the war in a Europe still trying to recover from the ravages of the plague.
Serious deliberations began in the castle of Guînes, five miles south of Calais, which had been taken, in breach of the truce, by a coup de main led by John Dancaster, a squire stationed in Calais. Bored by garrison duty there, he had collected a few soldiers, taken them over the Guînes wall by night with blackened faces, and seized the castle. The go-between, moving between Avignon, Paris and Guînes, was Cardinal Guy of Boulogne, and the result, arrived at in April 1354, was the Treaty of Guînes, by which, in return for giving up his claim to the French throne, Edward was to receive Aquitaine, Normandy, Touraine, Poitou and the town and surrounding area of Calais in full sovereignty. It would bring the war finally to an end, give the English what was rightfully theirs, and allow Jean to retain part of his kingdom rather than lose all of it. The treaty was to be ratified by the pope at Avignon. It did not happen. Jean thought better of it, his magnates were against it, and Guy of Boulogne was in any case out of favour. King Edward was angry and frustrated with the collapse of the negotiations, particularly as he had assured Parliament in Westminster that a permanent peace had been obtained and that there need no longer be increased taxation to support the war.
The French king must be made to see the error of his ways and this time there would be no compromise. The plan for 1355 was to attack France from three directions: the king himself would strike inland from Calais, Henry of Lancaster, now a duke, from Normandy, and the Black Prince (as the Prince of Wales was known after Crécy) from Aquitaine. There were problems with the weather and with finding enough soldiers, but in October 1355 Edward landed at Calais with perhaps 8,000 men and moved inland towards Amiens, where Jean of Valois had assembled a much greater French army. Then, bad news arrived from England: the Scots were on the rampage again, had invaded England on 6 November and were laying siege to Berwick Castle. They were perfectly accustomed to coping without a king (David was still a prisoner in England) and claimed that they were bound by treaty to attack England if France was invaded. When the Scots last invaded, in 1346, there had been sufficient troops in the north to deal with them, but the need to raise three armies in 1355 and the reduction in the population caused by the plague had forced the king to array men from the north, and there were very few left in the border counties. Edward had no choice but to reverse his progress into France, return to Calais and re-embark.
Lancaster’s army never got to Brittany: constant bad weather and unseasonable winds kept blowing his fleet back to England’s shores. The only English army that crossed the Channel and stayed was that of the Black Prince. Prince Edward landed in Bordeaux in September 1355 with perhaps 1,000 men-at-arms, 1,700 archers and a few hundred Welsh spearmen. Now twenty-five, he had proved his personal bravery at Crécy but had never previously been in independent command. His father had, however, provided him with seasoned and wise officers to assist him. The earls of Warwick, Suffolk and Salisbury had all served in the Scottish wars, at Crécy and at the siege of Calais. They would give advice when needed and curb any tendency to hot-headed adventurism.
At Bordeaux, the English were joined by their Gascon troops and, having unloaded his horses and allowed his men time to recover from sea sickness, the prince moved off on a chevauchée through Armagnac and Languedoc. He burned, he killed, he looted, he levelled, and by November he had reached the Golfe de Lion, having traversed 300 miles from coast to coast. So far, he had avoided fortified towns and castles. While tempted by Toulouse, he bypassed it, and when he came under a bombardment from French trebuchets at Narbonne – and it was apparent that the garrison was a strong one – he wisely withdrew, burning the suburbs as he went. Now it was time to turn about and return to friendly territory – the nights were drawing in, the rivers were rising and a large number of horses had been cast, having been ridden too hard on inadequate feed. French troops were also on the move, as were private adventurers who sniped at the baggage train, heavy with a month’s worth of loot. To return to Aquitaine meant crossing a series of rivers, now swollen with the rains and their bridges broken down by the French, but to the amazement of the latter – the Ariège and the Garonne were supposed to be impossible to cross with horses – the English managed as much and struggled on westwards. Soon the pursuing French forces were only a day’s march behind, and at night the English could see their enemy’s camp fires. But the French too were held up by flooded rivers and dissension among their commanders, as they argued about what to do next, and on 28 November 1355 the Black Prince and his army crossed the border into Aquitaine.
In some ways, 1355 had been a disappointing year: the expected perpetual peace had not arrived, the three-pronged attack had not happened, and the Scots had once more invaded England. The latter threat was soon dealt with, however, and, while the Black Prince’s mounted raid led to no great battles, it once again demonstrated the inability of the French king to protect his subjects, put heart into the Gascons, reduced the taxes that could be raised from the raided areas, and liberated a great deal of valuable plate, cloth and wine, to say nothing of horses and prisoners for ransom. Edward’s troops had good reason to be satisfied and they looked forward to similar success the following year. In that hope they were not to be disappointed, for 1356 would see the second of the great English victories on land of the Hundred Years War.
The tomb of Edward the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral. A highly competent military commander, his early death at the age of forty-six set back by forty years England’s hopes of regaining her rights on the continent of Europe.