Edward III’s first campaign in France, halted by the truce of 1342, had been inconclusive and without strategic result except for the naval battle fought off Sluys, the port of Bruges, in 1340. Here where the mouth of the Scheldt widens among protecting isles to form a great natural harbor, the French had assembled 200 ships from as far away as Genoa and the Levant for a projected invasion of England. The outcome of the battle was an English victory that destroyed the French fleet and for the time being gave England command of the Channel. It was won by virtue of a military innovation that was to become the nemesis of France.
This was the longbow, derived from the Welsh and developed under Edward I for use against the Scots in the highlands. With a range reaching 300 yards and a rapidity, in skilled hands, of ten to twelve arrows a minute in comparison to the crossbow’s two, the longbow represented a revolutionary delivery of military force. Its arrow was three feet long, about half the length of the formidable six-foot bow, and at a range of 200 yards it was not supposed to miss its target. While at extreme range its penetrating power was less than that of the crossbow, the longbow’s fearful hail shattered and demoralized the enemy. Preparing for the challenge to France, Edward had to make up for the disparity in numbers by some superiority in weaponry or tactics. In 1337 he had prohibited on pain of death all sport except archery and canceled the debts of all workmen who manufactured the bows of yew and their arrows.
Another new weapon, the gun, entered history at this time, but meekly and tentatively and much less effectively than the longbow. Invented about 1325, the first ribaud or pot de fer, as the French called it, was a small iron cannon shaped like a bottle which fired an iron bolt with a triangular head. When a French raiding force at the opening of the war sacked and burned Southampton in 1338, it brought along one ribaud furnished with three pounds of gunpowder and 48 bolts. In the next year the French manufactured more in the form of several tubes bound to a wheeled platform, with their touchholes aligned so that all could be fired at once. But they proved too small to fire a projectile with enough force to do serious damage. The English reportedly used some small cannon at Crécy without noticeable effect and definitely had them at the siege of Calais, where they proved powerless against the city’s stone walls. Later, when cast in brass or copper and enlarged in size, they were useful against bridges and city or castle gates or in defense of these, but stone walls withstood them for another hundred years. Difficulties in re-loading, ramming the powder, inserting the projectile, and containing the gas until it built up enough explosive force, frustrated effective firing throughout the 14th century.
In the sea fight at Sluys, with Edward in personal command, the longbowmen dominated the English armament, with one ship of men-at-arms placed between every two ships of archers, plus extra ships of archers for reinforcements if need arose. Not naval power but the strength of soldiers and archers on board ship determined sea battle in this era. They operated from high-decked cogs of 100 to 300 tons fitted with fighting platforms or “castles” for the archers. The battle was “fierce and terrible,” reports Froissart, “for battles on sea are more dangerous and fiercer than battles by land, for on the sea there is no recoiling or fleeing.” Under the archers’ attack the French were driven from their decks and, pursued by ill-luck and error, were engulfed in defeat.
No one dared tell the outcome of the battle to Philip VI until his jester was thrust forward and said, “Oh, the cowardly English, the cowardly English!” arid on being asked why, replied, “They did not jump overboard like our brave Frenchmen.” The King evidently got the point. The fish drank so much French blood, it was said afterward, that if God had given them the power of speech they would have spoken in French.
The English victory led nowhere at the moment because Edward could not deliver sufficient force on land. His various allies from the Low Countries, acquired at great expense in subsidies, were slipping away, having no basic interest in his goal. Even his father-in-law, Count William of Hainault, returned to a more natural attachment to France. With his own forces inadequate and his finances bankrupt, Edward was forced to accept the Pope’s offer to arrange a truce. He withdrew, but only pour mieux sauter.
What was he really fighting for? What was the real cause of a war that was to stretch beyond imagining halfway into the next century? As in most wars, the cause was a mixture of the political, economic, and psychological. Edward wanted to obtain the ultimate sovereignty of Guienne and Gascony, that lower western corner of France remaining from the Duchy of Aquitaine which the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought to his ancestor Henry II five generations before. The King of France still retained superior sovereignty under the formula of superioritas et resortum, which gave the inhabitants the right of appeal to the ultimate sovereign. Since his decisions were more than likely to go in their favor against their English overlord, and since the citizens, knowing this, exercised the right frequently, the situation was an endless source of conflict. To the English superioritas et resortum was politically and psychologically intolerable.
The situation was the more galling because of Guienne’s importance to the English economy. With its fertile valleys, long coast, and network of navigable rivers all leading to the main port of Bordeaux, it was the greatest wine-exporting region in the world. England imported the wine and other products and sent back wool and cloth, taking on every transaction a handsome revenue from export taxes at Bordeaux and import taxes at English ports. Between Bordeaux and Flanders the same flourishing commerce was exchanged, arousing the envy of central France. To the French monarchy the English foothold within the realm was unacceptable. Every French king for 200 years had tried by war, confiscation, or treaty to regain Aquitaine. The quarrel was old and deep and bound for war as the sparks fly upward.
Edward III was fifteen years old when he ascended the throne in 1327, 25 when he embarked on war with France, and 34 at the time of the second attempt in 1346. Well built and vigorous with long-flowing golden hair, mustache, and beard, he was at the height of his energies, expansive and kingly, vain, gracious, willful, and no stranger to the worst in man. Having grown up under the vicious strife surrounding the murder of his father’s favorites, the deposition and murder of his father, and the overthrow and hanging of his mother’s lover, Mortimer, who had seized power, he seemed, as far as history knows, unscarred by the experience. He understood practical politics without possessing any larger sense of rulership. He had no great qualities apart from or ahead of his time, but shone in those qualities his time admired in a king: he loved pleasure, battle, glory, hunts and tournaments, and extravagant display. One analysis of his character contains the phrases “boyish charm” and “a certain youthful petulance,” suggesting that the King of England too showed signs of the characteristic medieval juvenility.
When Edward launched his claim to be the rightful King of France, it is uncertain how seriously he took it, but as a device it was of incomparable value in giving him the appearance of a righteous cause. While desirable in any epoch, a “just war” in the 14th century was virtually a legal necessity as the basis for requisitioning feudal aids in men and money. It was equally essential for securing God on one’s side, for war was considered fundamentally an appeal to the arbitrament of God. A “just war” had to be one of public policy declared by the sovereign, and it had to be in a “just” cause—that is, directed against some “injustice” in the form of crime or fault on the part of the enemy. As formulated by the inescapable Thomas Aquinas, it required a third criterion: right intention on the part of the participants, but how this could be tested, the great expounder did not say. Even more convenient than the help of God was the “right of spoil”—in practice, pillage—that accompanied a just war. It rested on the theory that the enemy, being “unjust,” had no right to property, and that booty was the due reward for risk of life in a just cause.
The claim to the French crown gave an excuse of legality to any vassal of France whom Edward could recruit as an ally. If he, not Philip, were the rightful King of France, a vassal could transfer his homage on the ground that it had simply been misplaced. Allegiance in the 14th century was still given to a person, not a nation, and the great territorial lords of duchies and counties felt themselves free to make alliances as if almost autonomous. The Harcourts of Normandy and the Duke and other lords of Brittany, for various reasons, did just that. Edward’s claim through his mother gave him the one thing that made his venture feasible—support within France and a friendly beachhead. He never had to fight his way in. In either Normandy or Brittany this situation was to last forty years, and at Calais, captured after the Battle of Crécy, it was to outlast the Middle Ages.
In Brittany the war centered upon the relentless feud between two rival claimants to the dukedom and two parties of the population, one supported by France and the other by England. As a result, France was perpetually endangered by the access given to the enemy. The Breton seacoast was open to English ships, English garrisons were on Breton soil, Breton nobles were openly allied to Edward. Brittany was France’s Scotland, choleric, Celtic, stony, bred to opposition and resistance, and ready to use the English in its struggles against its overlord as the Scots used the French in theirs. Along its rockbound coast, in Michelet’s words, “two enemies, earth and sea, man and nature, meet in eternal conflict.” Storms throw up monstrous waves, fifty, sixty, eighty feet, whose foam flies as high as the church steeple. “Nature is atrocious here; so is man; they seem to understand each other.”
The contestants for the dukedom were two relentless extremists, a man and a woman. In 1341 the last Duke had died, leaving a half-brother, Jean Comte de Montfort, and a niece, Jeanne de Penthièvre, as rival heirs. Montfort was the candidate and ally of England while Jeanne’s claim was assumed by her husband, Charles de Blois, a nephew of Philip VI, who became the French candidate for the dukedom.
Given to the study of books as a child, Charles was an ascetic of exaggerated piety who sought spirituality by mortifying the flesh. Like Thomas à Becket, he wore unwashed clothes crawling with lice; he put pebbles in his shoes, slept on straw on the floor next to his wife’s bed, and after his death was found to have worn a coarse shirt of horsehair under his armor, and cords wound so tightly around his body that the knots dug into his flesh. By these practices a seeker of holiness expressed contempt for the world, self-abasement, and humility, although he often found himself guilty of a perverse pride in his excesses. Charles confessed every night so that he might not go to sleep in a state of sin. He fathered a bastard son called Jehan de Blois, but sins of the flesh did not have to be eschewed, only repented. He treated the humble with deference, it was said, met the complaints of the poor with goodness and justice, and refrained from too heavy taxes. Such was his reputation for saintliness that when he undertook to walk barefoot in the snow to a Breton shrine, the people covered his path with straw and blankets, but he took another way at a cost of bleeding and frozen feet, so that for weeks afterward he was unable to walk.
His piety detracted not at all from his ferocious pursuit of the dukedom. He stated his claim below the walls of Nantes by having his siege engines hurl into the city the heads of thirty captured partisans of Montfort. His successful siege of Quimper was followed by a ruthless massacre of 2,000 civilian inhabitants of all ages and both sexes. According to then current laws of war, the besieged could make terms if they surrendered, but not if they forced a siege to its bitter end, so presumably Charles felt no compunctions. On this occasion, after he had chosen the place of assault, he was warned of rising flood waters, but refused to alter his decision, saying, “Does not God have empire over the waters?” When his men succeeded in taking the city before being trapped by the flood, the people took it for a miracle owed to Charles’s prayers.
When Charles captured Jean de Montfort and sent him to Paris to be held prisoner by Philip VI, Montfort’s cause was taken up “with the courage of a man and the heart of a lion” by his remarkable wife. Riding from town to town, she rallied the allegiance of dispirited partisans to her three-year-old son, saying, “Ha, seigneurs, never mourn for my lord whom you have lost. He is but one man,” and promising that she had riches enough to maintain the cause. She provisioned and fortified garrisons, organized resistance, “paid largely and gave freely,” presided over councils, conducted diplomacy, and expressed herself in eloquent and graceful letters. When Charles de Blois besieged Hennebont, she led a heroic defense in full armor astride a war-horse in the streets, exhorting the soldiers under a hail of arrows and ordering women to cut short their skirts and carry stones and pots of boiling pitch to the walls to cast down upon the enemy. During a lull she led a party of knights out a secret gate, and galloped by a roundabout way to take the enemy camp in the rear, destroyed half their force, and defeated the siege. She devised feints and stratagems, wielded her sword in sea fights, and when her husband escaped from the Louvre in disguise only to die after reaching Brittany, she implacably continued the fight for her son.
When in 1346, Charles de Blois was finally captured by the English party and taken to prison in England, his cause was pursued by his no less implacable wife, the crippled Jeanne de Penthièvre. The pitiless war went on. Its two chief protagonists met fates expressive of their time, insanity and sainthood. The blows and intrigues, privations and broken hopes of her life proved too much for the valiant Countess of Montfort, who went mad and was confined in England while Edward made himself guardian of her son. Shut up and forgotten in the castle of Tickhill, she was to live on for thirty years.
Charles de Blois, after nine years as a prisoner, was to win his liberty for a ransom variously reported as 350,000, 400,000, or 700,000 écus. Although he was ready at last to come to terms, his wife refused to let him renounce her claim, so he renewed the struggle and was eventually killed in battle. Afterward he was canonized, but the process was nullified by Pope Gregory XI at the request of the younger Jean de Montfort, who feared that as conqueror of a saint he would be regarded by the Bretons as a usurper.
While famous exploits and great reputations were made in Brittany, a different kind of struggle was fought for Flanders.
Trade and geography made Flanders a crucial stake in the Anglo-French rivalry. Its towns were the leading commercial centers of 14th century Europe, where Italian merchant bankers and moneylenders made their northern headquarters, a sure sign of lucrative business. Wealth generated by the weaving industry enriched the magnates of the bourgeoisie, who enjoyed a luxury that had astonished Queen Jeanne, wife of Philip the Fair, when she visited Bruges. “I thought I would be the only queen here,” she said, “but I find six hundred others.”
Though a fief of France, Flanders was tied to England by wool as Gascony was by wine. “All the nations of the world,” proudly wrote Matthew of Westminster, “are kept warm by the wool of England made into cloth by the men of Flanders.” Unexcelled in Europe for its quality and colors, including heavy cloth for common use, the cloth of Flanders was sold as far away as the Orient and had achieved an economic success that made Flanders vulnerable to the disadvantages of a one-industry economy. In that situation lay the source of all the turbulence and uprisings of the previous hundred years, and also the lever that both France and England used in their contest for control of the region.
The Count of Flanders, Louis de Nevers, and the Flemish nobility were pro-French, while the merchants and working class and all who depended on the cloth industry were oriented toward England in self-interest if not sentiment. The feudal and natural tie with France predominated. Flemish cloth and French wine were exchanged in trade, the Count’s court was patterned on that of France, the nobility intermarried, French prelates held high offices in Flanders, use of the French language was spreading, Flemish students went to schools and colleges in Laon, Reims, and Paris.
In Flanders at the beginning of the century, the despised commoners had inflicted upon French knighthood an unforgettable defeat. In 1302 the array of French chivalry in splendid armor rode north in support of Flemish urban magnates to crush a revolt of the workers of Bruges. In the clash at Courtrai, French foot soldiers and crossbowmen were about to overpower the Flemish workers—too soon. The knights, frantic for the charge and fearing to lose the honor of victory, ordered their own infantry to fall back, causing them to break ranks in confusion. Shouting their war cries and riding down their own men in wild disorder, the knights charged, ignoring the canals beneath their feet. Horses scrambled and fell, knights plunged into the water, a second wave piled upon the first. The Flemish infantry, armed with pikes, speared them like fish, and holding firm against all assault beat back the knights in a bloody massacre. Seven hundred gold spurs were stripped from knightly corpses after the battle and hung up in triumphant memorial in the church. The loss of so much French nobility caused royal commissioners afterward to scour the provinces for bourgeois and rich peasants prepared to pay for ennoblement.
The knighthood of France was not daunted by Courtrai nor was its contempt for the commoner-in-arms in any way altered. The battle was considered an accident of circumstance and terrain unlikely to be repeated. In that sense the conclusion was right. In another revolt and another clash 25 years later, the knights inflicted a terrible revenge at the battle of Cassel, where they butchered Flemish workers and peasants by the thousands. Yet the lost spurs of Courtrai were a valid omen of the rise of the common soldier armed with pike and a motive, and an omen, too, for the knights, which they ignored.
After the Count of Flanders had been re-established in power by French arms, Philip VI exerted pressure to tighten relations and isolate Flanders from England. Against this effort the industrial towns, led by Ghent, rose in revolt under Jacob van Artevelde, one of the most dynamic bourgeois figures of the 14th century. An ambitious merchant of the class that was pressing to take over political power from the nobility, he had noble pretensions of his own. His two sons called themselves messire and chevalier, and the oldest son and a daughter were married into the nobility. Gaining control of the insurrection, Artevelde defeated the Count’s forces and forced him to flee to France in 1339, leaving the country under Artevelde’s control.
Meanwhile Edward, as the supplier of wool for Flemish industry, was exerting pressure for an alliance that would give him a base from which to attack France. The Flemish cloth manufacturers favored the English alliance and Artevelde attached his fortunes to it. The obstacle of French sovereignty over Flanders was overcome when Edward assumed the title of King of France. In that capacity he signed a treaty with Artevelde in 1340 after the victory of Sluys, but the device was hollow and lasted only long enough to give Edward a springboard before Artevelde’s ambition brought him down in ruin.
Artevelde was a man of brutal action who once, when he and a Flemish knight disagreed, smote him to the ground with a blow of his fist under the eyes of the King of England. Besides using Flemish funds to finance Edward’s war, he violated Flemish sentiments of homage. He proposed that the King’s eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales, later known as the Black Prince, should supplant the Count of Flanders’ eldest son, Louis de Male, as heir and future ruler of Flanders. This was too much for the good Flemish towns. To disinherit their natural lord in favor of the English prince, they stoutly told Artevelde, was “a thing they would surely never agree unto.” Moreover the Pope, under King Philip’s pressure, had already excommunicated them for deserting their sovereign, causing much uneasiness and damage to business. Resentment rose against Artevelde, combined with suspicion that he had embezzled funds for his own use.
“Then every man began to murmur against Jacques” (Jacob) and when he rode through Ghent, “trusting so much in his greatness that he thought soon to reduce them to his pleasure,” angry crowds followed him to his house, demanding an accounting for all the revenues of Flanders. Then he began to fear and on entering his house, closed fast the gates, doors, and windows against the mob shouting in the street. Coming to the window “in great humilitie,” Artevelde defended his nine years’ governorship and promised a full account next day if the crowd would disperse. “Then they all cryed with one voyse, Come down to us and preche not so hyghe, and gyve us an account of the great treasure of Flaunders!” Now in terror, Artevelde shut the window and attempted to escape out the back door to an adjoining church, but the mob of 400 men broke down the doors, seized and slew him on the spot. Thus in July 1345 Fortune’s Wheel brought down the great master of Flanders.
Afterward representatives of the Flemish towns hurried to England to appease King Edward, who was in a great wrath at the event. Assuring him of the alliance, they suggested a way in which his line could still inherit Flanders without dispossessing the rightful lord. Let Edward’s eldest daughter, Isabella, then aged thirteen, marry the Count of Flanders’ fourteen-year-old son Louis, who was in the communes’ custody, “so that ever after the county of Flaunders shall be in the issue of your chylde.” Edward was much taken with the scheme, although the prospective bridegroom, out of loyalty to France, was not. When Edward tried to force the betrothal on him two years later, the Count’s escape, leaving behind an unwed princess, was to impinge indirectly but decisively on the life of Enguerrand de Coucy.
To contemporaries the power of the King of England seemed puny compared with that of the King of France; Villani referred to him as “il piccolo re d’Inghilterra” (the little King of England). It is doubtful if he actually intended to conquer France. Medieval wars between Europeans were not aimed at strategic conquest but rather at seizure of dynastic rule at the top by inflicting enough damage to bring about downfall of the opponent. Something like this was probably Edward’s aim, and owing to his base in Guienne and his footholds in Flanders and northern France, it would not have seemed unrealizable.
The first abortive phase had been so costly as to have been ruinous if Edward had absorbed the cost; instead, he passed on the ruin to others. He had financed the war through loans underwritten by the great Florentine banking firms of the Bardi and Peruzzi. The sums, according to Villani, amounted to between 600,000 and 900,000 gold florins owed to the Bardi and two-thirds as much to the Peruzzi, secured on expected revenue from the wool tax. When this brought in too little and Edward could not repay, the drain on the Italian companies bankrupted them. The Peruzzi failed in 1343, the Bardi suspended a year later, and their crash brought down a third firm, the Acciaiuioli. Capital vanished, stores and workshops closed, wages and purchases stopped. When, by the malignant chance that seemed to hound the 14th century, economic devastation in Florence and Siena was followed first by famine in 1347 and then by plague, it could not but seem to the unfortunate people that the anger of God had been loosed upon them.
To raise an army for a second assault after being bankrupted by the first would have been impossible without the consent of the three estates represented in Parliament. Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself. The governing fact was that medieval organization by this time had passed to a predominantly money economy. Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal’s obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay. The added expense of a paid army raised the cost of war beyond the ordinary means of the sovereign. Without losing its appetite for war, the inchoate state had not yet devised a regular method to pay for it. When he overspent, the sovereign resorted to loans from bankers, towns, and businesses which he might not be able to repay, and to the even more disruptive measures of arbitrary taxation and devaluation of the coinage.
Above all, war was made to pay for itself through pillage. Booty and ransom were not just a bonus, but a necessity to take the place of arrears in pay and to induce enlistment. The taking of prisoners for ransom became a commercial enterprise. Since kings could rarely raise sufficient funds in advance, and collection of taxes was slow, troops in the field were always ahead of their pay. Loot on campaign took the place of the paymaster. Chivalric war, like chivalric love, was, as Michelet said of the whole epoch, double et louche (a provocative phrase which could mean “double and squinting” or “equivocal” or “shady” in the sense of disreputable). The aim was one thing and the practice another. Knights pursued war for glory and practiced it for gain.
In 1344 the three estates in Parliament were informed by Edward of a breach of the truce by the King of France and asked to “show their opinion.” The advice of Lords and Commons was “to end the war either by battle or honorable peace,” and, once attempted, not to abandon the effort at letters or requests of the Pope or anyone else, “but to end the same by dint of the Sword.” Clergy and Commons voted subsidies, and in 1345 Parliament authorized the King to require all landowners to serve in person or supply a substitute or a monetary equivalent. A man with £5 of income from land or rents was to supply an archer, a £10 income supplied a mounted spearman, £20 supplied two of these, income over £25 supplied a man-at-arms, meaning usually a squire or knight. Towns and shires were required to raise a given number of archers, and the system as a whole was to be administered by sheriffs and county officials.
Ships had to be requisitioned to carry men and horses and initial food for both. They also carried millstones and bake ovens, armorers and their forges, and extra materials to keep the bowmen supplied with arrows. Most ships were small, averaging 30 to 50 tons, with one large mast and a rectangular sail, although some ranged up to 200 tons. A medium-sized ship carried 100 to 200 men and 80 to 100 horses.
To fill out the ranks of “arrayed” or drafted foot soldiers, men were recruited by promise of loot, by pardons of those under sentence of outlawry, and by promoting anti-French feeling already aroused by French raids on Southampton, Portsmouth, and other south-coast towns. King Edward’s assumption of the title of King of France was proclaimed to the people along with his messages on the justice of his cause and the wickedness of France. Under the ever-present fear of French invasion, warning beacons were planted along the coast, bodies of armed men and horses stationed at intervals, stores laid by, and small ships drawn close in to land or onto the beach—not without economic disruption.
In July 1346 the King was ready for his renewed attempt. Accompanied by his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, he set sail for Normandy with 4,000 men-at-arms and 10,000 archers plus a number of Irish and Welsh foot soldiers. (Another force, sent earlier on the longer voyage to Bordeaux, had already engaged French forces along the frontiers of Guienne.) Guided by Godefrey d’Harcourt, who had been banished from France, the King’s expeditionary force landed on the Cotentin Peninsula, where Harcourt promised rich opportunities for loot in the prosperous unwalled towns of his province. Although Edward “desired nothing so much as deeds of arms,” according to Froissart, he also, in another case of medieval squinting, apparently welcomed Harcourt’s promise that he would meet no resistance because the Duke of Normandy and his knights were fighting the English in Guienne and the people of Normandy were not used to war.
So fruitful proved Normandy that the English needed to make no further provision for their host, and so unwarlike that the inhabitants fled, leaving their houses “well-stuffed and granges full of corn for they wist not how to save and keep it.… Before that time they had never seen men of war nor they wist not what war or battle meant.” At prosperous Caen, which was unwalled, the townspeople and a force of knights sent to the defense under the Constable, Comte d’Eu, offered a vigorous defense, but the English, drawing on prepared reinforcements, prevailed. The Constable was captured and, along with many other prisoners and wagons full of booty, was sent back to England to be held for a great ransom that was to have tragic consequences. “Burning, plundering and laying waste,” the English advanced from town to town, gathering up rich draperies, jewels, plate, merchandise, livestock, and men and women as captives.
The sack of Normandy by an army led by the King of England himself was the prototype of all that was to follow. Organized in three corps or “battles,” the invaders “overran, spoiled and robbed without mercy,” finding so much booty that they “rode but small journeys and every day took their lodgings between noon and three of the clock.” The soldiers “made no count to the King or his officers of what they did get; they kept that to themselves.” While they moved along one side of the Seine toward Paris, King Philip, who had been at Rouen without taking action, followed them along the other side and reentered Paris as Edward reached Poissy, twenty miles west of the city. Here, while the King of England kept the Feast of Our Lady in mid-August in robes of scarlet furred in ermine, his army burned and plundered surrounding villages. The flames at their gates struck the citizens of Paris with “stupefied amazement,” wrote Jean de Venette, “and I who have written this saw all these deeds, for they could be seen from Paris by anyone who would ascend a turret.”
Philip VI had meanwhile issued the arrière-ban or general summons to all capable of bearing arms in the war area. Based on the principle that all subjects owed their lives to “defense of country and crown,” the general summons was supposed to be used only when the call to nobles had not or would not suffice to repel the enemy. It was issued, like all public announcements, by “public cry”—that is, by heralds riding forth to proclaim the order aloud in market place and village square. Individual letters also went to towns and abbeys, requisitioning the customary subsidies. Some towns still paid their service in bodies of foot soldiers, hastily assembled, untrained, and virtually useless; others paid in money, which permitted the hiring of more effective mercenaries.
Non-noble military contingents were furnished by towns and districts according to number of hearths and the relative prosperity or poverty of the community. In some regions every 100 hearths were obligated to pay for one soldier for one year. In poorer districts the obligation might be one soldier for every 200 or 300 hearths. The number of effectives raised at this rate was not large: in 1337, for example, Rouen supplied 200 men, Narbonne 150 crossbowmen, Nîmes 95 men-at-arms. In the light of these figures, the chroniclers’ buxom references to tens of thousands shrivel to a more modest reality. Each levy from town, district, fief, or area of special status had to be negotiated separately at a different rate, for a different duration, and on the basis of different rights and privileges, causing endless disputes in the process. Lords of duchies and counties and great baronies like Coucy paid their own men through their own treasurer, although as the war stretched on they had to be recompensed by the King.
Knights and squires of noble estate received fixed rates of pay like other men. For banneret (a lord who led other knights under his banner), bachelor knight, and mounted squire the standard rate in the 1340s was respectively 20, 10, and 6 to 7 sous a day. A persistent problem was the need to make sure that a ruler was getting the count and quality he paid for. To this end a montre or review was held periodically, generally every month, by officials with watchful eye to see that a valet was not counted as a gentilhomme, that sound horses were not substituted for nags during the review and then withdrawn, and that pay was honestly distributed in coin and not in kind. In a loosely structured army, hierarchy of command was lacking. Apart from the King, who led in person, the permanent officials were the Constable, a kind of administrative chief of armed forces, and two Marshals of indeterminate function; otherwise, military decisions seem to have been reached by group council among the leaders.
Because of the necessity of donning armor with all its straps and buckles, battle was a more or less fixed engagement, arranged by the logic of approaching positions. The invention of plate armor early in the 14th century now supplemented chain mail, which was penetrable by the crossbow. While styles of armor varied and changed from one decade to the next, the basics were a suit of plate armor consisting of a chest piece, a skirt of linked hoops, and arm and leg pieces, all worn over a hauberk or shirt of chain mail and a leather or padded tunic, or a tight-fitting surcoat. Over the plate was worn a sleeveless jerkin embroidered with the coat-of-arms identifying the wearer. Chain mail covered the neck, elbows, and other joints; gauntlets of linked plates protected the hands. The helmet, formerly open over the face, now had the added protection of a visor hinged by removable pins at the brow or on the side. Weighing seven to eleven pounds, it was dark and stuffy inside, despite eye slits and ventilation holes. The weight of all the added protection was somewhat compensated by a smaller shield that allowed greater freedom of action.
“A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse’s backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons. He began battle with the lance used for unhorsing the enemy, while from his belt hung a two-handed sword at one side and an eighteen-inch dagger on the other. He also had available, either attached to his saddle or carried by his squire, a longer sword for thrusting like a lance, a battle-ax fitted with a spike behind the curved blade, and a club-headed mace with sharpened, ridged edges, a weapon favored by martial bishops and abbots on the theory that it did not come under the rule forbidding clerics “to smite with the edge of the sword.” The war-horse carrying this burden was itself armored by plates protecting nose, chest, and rump and caparisoned with draperies that got in the way of its legs. When his horse was felled, the knight, weighed down by his armor and tangled in weapons, shield, and spurs, was likely to be captured before he could manage to rise.
Tactics on the continent were simply the cavalry charge of knights followed by hand-to-hand fighting on foot, sometimes preceded or supplemented by archers and infantry, both of which the knights despised. In the Scottish wars, however, the English had found that foot soldiers equipped with the longbow and trained to keep a disciplined line could, by aiming at the horses, throw back a charge of mounted knights. A really useful discovery of this kind will take precedence over class disdain. Given the constant intercourse between France and England, the French must have seen the longbow in use, evidently without giving thought to its implications for themselves. French chivalry refused to concede a serious role in war to the non-noble, even though the Normans had once captured England by virtue of the archer who shot Harold through his eye.
The French too used archers and crossbowmen, usually hired companies of Genoese who made the crossbow a specialty, but when their blood was up, they hated to give the crossbow the scope for action that would take the edge off the clash of knights. Chivalry maintained that the combat of warriors must be personal and bodily; missiles that permitted combat at a distance were held in scorn. The first archer, according to a 12th century song, was “a coward who dared not come close to his foe.” Nevertheless, when it came to fighting commoners as at Cassel in 1328, the French had given their crossbowmen the tactical scope that accounted for that victory.
The crossbow, made of wood, steel, and sinew, and pulled by aid of the archer’s foot in a stirrup and a hook or winding handle attached to his belt, or by a complicated arrangement of winches and pulleys, shot a bolt of great penetrating power, but the bow was slow and cumbersome to wield and heavy to carry. The crossbowman usually carried about fifty bolts with him into action, and his equipment en route had to be transported by wagon. Owing to the long wind-up, the crossbow was in fact more useful in static situations such as clearing ramparts in sieges than in open battle. A charge of knights willing to take some losses could generally shatter the crossbowmen’s line. Although its mechanical power when first invented had been frightening so that it was banned by the Church in 1139, the crossbow had continued in use for 200 years without threatening the knights’ mailed dominion.
Protected by plate armor and the pride of chivalry, the noble felt himself invulnerable and invincible and became increasingly contemptuous of the foot soldier. He believed that commoners, being excluded from chivalry, could never be relied upon in war. As grooms, baggage attendants, foragers, and road-builders—the equivalent of engineer corps—they were necessary, but as soldiers in leather jerkins armed with pikes and billhooks, they were considered an encumbrance who in a sharp fight would “melt away like snow in sunshine.” This was not simple snobbism but a reflection of experience in the absence of training. The Middle Ages had no equivalent of the Roman legion. Towns maintained trained bands of municipal police, but they tended to fill up their contingents for national defense with riff-raff good for nothing else. Abbeys had better use for their peasants than to employ their time in military drill. In any epoch the difference between a rabble and an army is training, which was not bestowed on foot soldiers called up by the arrière-ban. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.
On August 26, 1346, the English and French armies met at Crécy in Picardy 30 miles inland from the coast. Like the clash in another August in 1914, the battle opened an era of augmenting violence and disintegrating control. It had not been planned by the victors. Informed of the great host that was gathering around the French King in answer to his summons, Edward showed no desire for a confrontation, or at least not without first securing his retreat. Turning away from Paris, he marched northwestward toward the Channel coast, presumably making for Flanders, where he could be sure of ships. If that was his objective, it was not likely to make him King of France.
The French army by forced marches caught up with the English before they could reach the sea, but not before Edward, realizing he would have to fight, took up a good defensive position on a broad hill above the village of Crécy. So confident were the French nobles before the battle that they talked of whom they would take prisoner among their opponents, whose repute and combat records they knew from tournaments. Only King Philip was irresolute. “Mournful and anxious,” he seemed to fear some further treason after the defections of Brittany and Harcourt, or some other hidden peril.
Camping too far from the enemy on the night before combat, his troops did not reach the battlefield until four P.M., with the sun in their faces and at the enemy’s back. The crossbowmen were tired and complaining after the long march, and their bowstrings were wet from a sudden storm, whereas the English archers had protected their bowstrings by rolling them up under their helmets. What followed on the French side was a chaos of mindless audacity, bad luck, mistakes, indiscipline, and the knights’ chronic disease of bravado, intent on proving valor devoid of tactical sense or organized plan.
Seized by last-minute advice to postpone action until the next day, Philip issued orders for the vanguard to turn back and the rear guard to halt, but he was not obeyed. Without giving the crossbowmen a chance to soften the English line, the forward knights plunged uphill against the enemy. Out of range of their targets and pierced by English arrows, the Genoese crossbowmen fell back, throwing down their bows. The King, who on sighting the English changed color “because he hated them,” lost control of the situation. Seeing the Genoese flee, either he or his brother, the Count d’Alençon, shouted, “Slay these rascals who get in our way!” while his knights “in haste and evil order” slashed at the archers in their effort to cut a way through. Out of this terrible tangle in their own ranks, the French launched attack after attack upon the enemy but the disciplined line of England’s longbowmen, stiffened by the long practice their weapon required, held firm and sowed confusion and death by their missiles. Then English knights advanced on foot, preceded by archers and supported by pikemen and murderous Welsh with long knives who went among the fallen and slew them on the ground. The Prince of Wales fought at the head of one battle group while King Edward retained command from a windmill on the hilltop. Through the failing light and on through darkness until midnight the melee continued until King Philip, wounded, was led away by the Count of Hainault, who said to him, “Sire, lose not yourself willfully” and, taking his horse’s bridle, pulled him from the field. With no more than five companions, the King rode through the night to a castle whose seneschal, summoned to open his gate, demanded the name of the summoner. “Open your gate quickly,” said the King, “for this is the fortune of France.”
Dead upon the field lay some 4,000 of the French army, perhaps including Enguerrand de Coucy VI. Among the fallen were the greatest names of French and allied chivalry: the Count d’Alençon, brother of the King, Count Louis de Nevers of Flanders, the Counts of St. Pol and Sancerre, the Duke of Lorraine, the King of Majorca, and, most renowned of all, King John the Blind of Bohemia, whose crest of three ostrich feathers with the motto “Ich dien” was taken by the Prince of Wales and attached to his title thereafter. Charles of Bohemia, the blind King’s son and future Emperor, less rash than his father, saw what was coming and escaped.
It was no lack of prowess that defeated the French and allied knights. They fought as valiantly as the English, for knights were much the same in all countries. England’s advantage lay in combining the use of those excluded from chivalry—the Welsh knifemen, the pikemen, and, above all, the trained yeomen who pulled the longbow—with the action of the armored knight. So long as one side in the contest made use of this advantage while the other side did not, the fortunes of war were to remain unbalanced.
Pursuit for the strategic purpose of destroying the enemy’s armed forces did not belong in the medieval lexicon of war. Evidently somewhat stunned by his own victory, Edward made no effort to pursue. Absorbed in the riches of conquest, the English spent the day after the battle in counting and identifying the dead, giving honorable burial to the noblest, and reckoning the ransoms of prisoners. Afterward, despite his claim to be King of France, Edward appeared to lose interest in Philip, who had taken refuge in Amiens. Keeping to the coast, the English marched north to assault Calais, the port opposite Dover where the Channel is narrowest. Here, blocked by a tenacious defense, they bogged down in a siege that was to last a year.
The defeat of French chivalry and of the supposedly most powerful sovereign in Europe started a train of reactions that were to grow more serious with time. Although it did not bring down the French monarchy nor bring it to terms, it did cause a crisis of confidence in the royal government, and a general resentment when the King once more had to resort to extraordinary taxation. From this date, too, began an erosion of belief in the nobles’ performance of their function.
Philip had neither the instinct for rule possessed by Philip the Fair and St. Louis, nor councillors capable of reforming the military and financial customs to meet the new dangers that had come upon them. The provincial estates whose consent was required for new taxes were reluctant, like most representative bodies, to recognize crisis until it was underfoot. Given an inadequate and obsolete system, the King had to devise substitutes like the sales tax—called maltôte because it was so hated—or the equally unpopular salt tax; or else he fell back on devaluing the coinage. In disruption of prices, rents, debts, and credit, the effect of this subterfuge for taxation was regularly disastrous. “And in the year 1343 Philip of Valois made 15 deniers worth three,” wrote one chronicler in sufficient comment.
Each time they were summoned to vote aids, the Estates voiced their loud discontent with fiscal abuses. Each time they made their grudging subsidies contingent on stated reforms, in the belief that better management by more honest men would enable the King once again to live of his own.
After Crécy and the loss of Calais, a new Estates General was summoned in 1347 to meet the King’s desperate need of money for defense. Armed forces and a fleet had to be reconstructed against the danger of renewed invasion. Sharpened by the shame of steady defeats, the Estates’ displeasure with the royal government was outspoken. “You should know,” they told the King, “how and by what counsel you have conducted your wars and how you, by bad counsel, have lost all and gained nothing.” If he had had good counsel, they said, no prince in the world “should have been able to do ill to you and your subjects.” They reminded him how he had gone to Crécy and Calais “in great company, at great cost and great expense [14th century speakers and writers had an affinity for double statements] and how you were treated shamefully and sent back scurvily and made to grant all manner of truces even while the enemy were in your kingdom.… And by such counsel have you been dishonored.” After this scolding, the Estates, acknowledging the need for defenses, promised subsidies, but on rather indefinite terms.
While besieging Calais, Edward still hoped to cement an alliance with Flanders by his daughter’s marriage to the young Count Louis de Male. The death at Crécy of the boy’s father, Count Louis de Nevers, removed the main obstacle. But fifteen-year-old Louis, “who had been ever nourished among the noble men of France,” would not agree and “ever he said he would not wed her whose father had slain his, though he might have half the whole realm of England.” When the Flemings saw that their lord was “too much French and evil counseled,” they put him in “courteous prison” until he should agree to accept their counsel, which greatly annoyed him, so that after several months in prison he gave the required promise. Released, he was allowed to go hawking by the river, but kept under such close surveillance lest he should steal away “that he could not piss without their knowledge.” Under this treatment he finally agreed to wed.
Early in March 1347 the King and Queen of England with their daughter Isabelle came up from Calais to Flanders. The betrothal took place in great ceremony, the marriage contract was drawn, the wedding day fixed for the first week in April, and lavish gifts were prepared by the royal parents. Louis continued to go hawking daily by the river, making pretense that the marriage pleased him greatly, so that the Flemings relaxed their watch. But they misjudged their lord’s outward countenance, “for his inward courage was all French.”
In the same week that the marriage was to take place, he rode forth as usual with his falconer. Casting his hawk after a heron with the call “Hoie! Hoie!” he followed the flight until at some distance off he “dashed his spurs to his horse and galloped forth,” not stopping until he was over the border in France, where he joined King Philip and told him how with “great subtlety” he had escaped the English marriage. The King was overjoyed and speedily arranged Louis’ marriage with Margaret of Brabant, daughter of the Duke of Brabant, Flanders’ neighbor on the east, who was closely allied to France. The insult to the English crown was sharp, and doubtless sharper to the fifteen-year-old bride. Her feelings could not have been soothed by a song written in her name and, according to Jean de Venette, sung everywhere in France with the refrain, “J’ay failli à celui à qui je estoie donnée par amour” (I have lost him whose love I was given to be). Four years later she revenged herself on a different bridegroom by jilting him in her turn almost at the church door. Either because these aborted betrothals gave her a taste for independence, or because she had a character notoriously willful, Isabelle of England was still unmarried when she met Enguerrand de Coucy VII thirteen years later.
The capture of Calais a few months after the Flemish marital fiasco was the single great result of the campaign. Philip had assembled a relief force and started toward the city, but, hampered by lack of money and the losses after Crécy, turned away without fighting. Waiting for the relief that never came and cut off from food, the citizens of Calais held out until, reduced to eating rats and mice and even excrement, they were starved into surrender. Recently wounded, their captain, Jean de Vienne, bare-headed and holding his sword reversed in token of submission, rode through the gate to hand over the keys of the city to the English. Walking behind him barefoot in their shirts were the six richest burghers with halters around their necks to signify the victor’s right to hang them at will. In that somber scene, watched by the hollow-eyed, desolate survivors, a French cause was born: to retrieve Calais.
Exasperated by the prolonged resistance which had dragged him, against the medieval habit, through a winter’s siege, Edward was in a furious mood and would have hung the six burghers but for Queen Philippa’s moving plea for mercy. The drawn-out effort from August 1346 to August 1347 had soured his troops and exhausted his resources. Provisions, horses, arms, and reinforcements had to be brought from England, where the requisitioning of grain and cattle caused hardship, and the necessary mobilizing of ships wrecked commerce, reducing revenues from the wool-export tax. It has been estimated that some 32,000 combatants, plus the crews of ships and all the service troops needed for the siege, making a total of 60,000 to 80,000 men, were employed in the course of the Crécy-Calais campaign. The drain having reached its limits, Edward could not advance from his victory. The new foothold in France led nowhere but to acceptance of a truce running until April 1351.
If belligerents could make sober judgments during the course of a war, which they rarely can, the first ten years of the Anglo-French contest would have shown the English how inconclusive were their triumphs: to win a smashing naval victory, a smashing field victory, and a permanent foothold on the coast was still far from conquering France or its crown. But the taste of plunder, the gorgeous stuffs and rich ransoms flowing to England, and the glory and renown of Crécy cried by the heralds in public places had excited English blood. On their side, the French would now never stop short of the goal that the poet Eustache Deschamps was to make his refrain forty years later: “No peace until they give back Calais.” Crécy and Calais ensured that the war would go on—but not yet, for Europe in 1347 stood on the edge of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history.