There are few darker periods of England’s history than the last three decades of the fourteenth century. The famous victories of Edward III and the Black Prince had set standards of achievement which their successors could never hope to match. The one-sided treaty of Brétigny which followed them had embodied England’s territorial claims at their grandest and most ambitious, drawing lines across the map of France from which another generation of English diplomats was unable to retreat with honour. Prisoners of their own triumphs, the English were condemned to see the conquests of the past thirty years overrun by the armies of the King of France in less than ten. Edward himself, a senile, pathetic symbol, outlived all the companions of his great years, and finally his son the Black Prince as well. Rarely has nemesis followed so quickly and directly upon hubris. When Edward died in 1377, he was succeeded by a vulnerable child, who was destined to grow into a neurotic and unstable adult presiding over a divided nation, until he was finally deposed and murdered by his cousin.
Although these were years of defeat for England, they were not sterile years. The conduct of the war passed into the hands of the growing class of career soldiers and adventurers. Their leaders were men of courage, determination and strategic imagination, who ensured that England remained an effective belligerent even against the background of financial penury and persistent retreat. Great maritime bases were established on the Atlantic coast of France from Calais to Bayonne. English war fleets operated from Dordrecht to Lisbon. English armies operated not only in France but in Flanders, Portugal, Navarre and Castile, and as free companies in Italy and Germany. English diplomats were active in every European country. Yet all this effort was destined to end in failure. For in the fourteenth century, as in almost all periods, the chief material of war was money. England was among the most intensively governed states of contemporary Europe, but it lacked the resources to fight an aggressive war of conquest against a country with three times its wealth and population. For much of this period England also had to take on Castile, the principal naval power of the Atlantic seaboard; Flanders, still the greatest industrial and commercial power of Europe outside Italy; and Scotland, a constant menace in her rear.
However, France too paid a heavy price for her success. On the surface, these were glittering years for France: years of extravagant ceremony at the grandest court of Europe, of great palaces, of famous paladins making their reputations as far afield as Naples, Hungary, Poland and Constantinople, of astonishing artistic creativity among painters, sculptors, jewellers, poets and novelists. Yet beneath the surface the French government lived constantly at the edge of bankruptcy and the population subsisted in fear and insecurity. Large parts of the country, especially in the south, were ruined and depopulated by the burden of war taxation. In the wealthier northern provinces around the capital there were co-ordinated movements of rebellion and social revolution. These pressures would have been difficult for any government to contain. But the inexperience of Charles VI and his gradual relapse into insanity after 1392 divided the French political world, as the King’s relatives competed for the plunder of the state, sowing the seeds of disintegration and civil war in the following century. Like England in the dotage of Edward III, France was destined to destroy herself by the completeness of her victory.
The late fourteenth century was above all a self-conscious age. Its achievements and failings were remorselessly analysed by the chroniclers, lawyers, social commentators and poets of the time. From Chaucer and Gower in England to Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pisan in France, contemporary writers were convinced that they were living through fascinating times: times of great wickedness and great achievement, of intense personal heroism and collective mediocrity, of extremes of wealth and poverty, fortune and failure. More than six centuries later, it is possible to agree with all of these judgments. It is also possible to reconstruct the mood of the time with the aid of a range of narrative, literary and record sources far wider than those available for any earlier period of medieval history, and drawn from the whole of western and southern Europe. I have made use of all of this material. But the narrative is shaped mainly by the extensive record sources of England, France and Spain. In this and other respects, the principles on which this history is written were explained in the preface to the first volume, and have not changed.
I should like to thank Sir William Harding for making many helpful suggestions about the text, and saving me from countless solecisms.
J.P.C.S.
Greenwich
February 2008