CHAPTER I
In 1389, in the Celestine Convent in Paris, an old man imagined the English Parliament gathered in London before Queen Truth. The young Richard II sat beneath her throne wearing the crown and a tunic embroidered with the leopards of England. Opposite him stood his uncles John of Gaunt, Thomas of Woodstock and Edmund Langley, sons of the warrior-king who ‘by God’s will had broken the close of the gilded fleurs de lys’. Around them the chivalry of the land stood, stained to the tips of their fingers with the blood of their enemies.
Who can count how many churches you have left in ruins … how many widows, beggars, cripples and orphans you have made in Scotland and France, the Queen asked them … but although you succeeded in capturing the King of Scotland and triumphed by God’s leave on the awful battlefields of Crécy and Poitiers, yet now as we speak you hold scarcely a hundredth part of these two kingdoms.1
Philip de Mézières, the sombre spirit who composed this allegory, had been a minor witness of the great reversal of fortunes which the Queen described: a soldier in Normandy at the lowest point of the civil war of the 1350s, a councillor of Charles V in the time of victories and a recluse watching events from his cell during the troubled reign of Charles’s son. He was a moralist, an advocate of ancient ideals of chivalry which had perhaps never existed, and he was readier than most of his contemporaries to discover the hand of God in recent events. But he could see as well as the English noblemen in his arresting parable the scale of the transformation which had come about in just twenty years.
At fifty-six Edward III was past the age when he was physically capable of fighting in France although it would be some time before he realised it. The English King passed much of his time at the royal manors of Havering and Sheen. On his rare visits to the great public palaces at Westminster, Windsor and Eltham he tended to remain secluded in his chamber away from the noise, gossip and publicity of the court. The daily business of government was left to his Council. Edward’s Council was ill-suited to the conduct of a major war. In 1369 the dominant figure there was William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. Wykeham was a man of modest origins who had had been Edward’s Chancellor since 1367. He was ‘head of the King’s privy council and controlled his great council’ according to the complaints made at his impeachment in 1376. William of Wykeham loved power. But he was not good at using it. Although only moderately venal himself, he proved to be a poor administrator and a bad judge of subordinates and he presided over a notable decline in the administration’s traditionally high standards of competence and honesty. He was also completely inexperienced in foreign affairs.
With the reopening of the war with France political influence progressively passed to another of the King’s ministers, William Lord Latimer. He was a very different kind of man. Latimer was a professional soldier who had fought with English armies in Scotland, France and Gascony during the 1350s before making his reputation as the leading English captain in Brittany during the 1360s. He returned to England at about the end of 1367 aged thirty-eight with a large personal fortune and high ambitions. Shortly after his return he was appointed Steward of the royal household, a powerful position which gave him the ear of the King and a large measure of control over other people’s access to him. When the break with France came in 1369 Latimer threw himself into the daily grind of military administration with all the energy and efficiency that was not forthcoming from William of Wykeham. He was continually conducting musters, inspecting ships, directing requisitions, paying troops and transacting the miscellaneous diplomatic affairs which the Exchequer clerks darkly referred to as the ‘King’s secret business’. So far as anyone maintained a continuous surveillance over the English war effort in these years it was Latimer.2
But if the English King had servants what he lacked was friends and colleagues. Edward had survived most of the men who had helped him to defeat the French in the 1340s and 1350s. William Bohun, Earl of Northampton, who had commanded his armies in Scotland and Brittany, had died campaigning with the King in France in 1360. Henry, Duke of Lancaster, Edward’s ablest strategist and diplomat and perhaps the real architect of the treaty of Brétigny, had died of plague in 1361 within a year of its conclusion. Not one of the six earls whom Edward had created in 1337 to serve as partners in his great enterprise was still living in 1369. In his prime Edward’s partnership with the English nobility had depended on a certain personal chemistry, a generous purse, a splendid court and a high degree of accessibility. His relations with a younger generation were inevitably more distant. The vacuum left in his counsels was never filled. The Prince of Wales, who as Edward’s heir could have been expected to succeed to Henry of Lancaster’s influence, was an outstanding military commander but a man of poor political judgment who had been away in Aquitaine since 1363 and eventually returned, broken in health and spirit, in 1371. In his absence the dominant figure at court and occasionally in government was the King’s second surviving son, John of Gaunt.
John of Gaunt was a controversial figure in his own day and has remained one ever since. His historical reputation has suffered from the fact that he was a mediocre soldier in an age of great ones and from his obstinate pursuit of what seems in retrospect to be the doomed project to make himself King of Castile. It has suffered also from the persistent vituperation to which he was subjected in his lifetime by the most eloquent chronicler of the period, Thomas Walsingham of St. Albans. The fact that Shakespeare gave him some of his greatest lines has only partly redeemed him. Gaunt deserved better. He had been born in Ghent in 1340, shortly after his father had assumed the title of King of France, and had passed his whole youth amid the clash of arms: at the sea fight off Winchelsea in 1350, in the abortive expedition to Normandy of 1355 and in the army of Reims in 1359–60. But he retained throughout his life a rare scepticism about what armed force could achieve and a clearer view than most of his contemporaries of the long-term interest of England. He owed his position in English public life to a number of factors: his unshakeable loyalty to the dynasty even in the darkest period of Edward III’s dotage and Richard II’s infancy; his intelligence, articulateness and relative freedom from received opinions; and a hot temper combined with an imposing physical presence which silenced dissent and made him both respected and hated. To these advantages he added the indispensable condition for all political power in the middle ages, a great personal fortune.
John of Gaunt had married in 1359 Blanche of Lancaster, one of the two surviving daughters of the great Henry of Lancaster and co-heiress to the immense properties of the palatinate of Lancaster and the earldoms of Leicester, Derby and Richmond. When Blanche’s sister died of plague in April 1362 the entire inheritance fell into Gaunt’s hands. He owned land in almost every county of England, producing a net income of between £8,000 and £10,000 a year.3 With wealth on this scale he could hold his own regardless of the transient phases of royal favour. He could put a military retinue into the field on a scale unequalled by any others apart from the King and the Prince of Wales. He could deploy influence and patronage not just at court but across much of provincial England. His wealth and power were highly visible: the great palace of Savoy on the Strand which symbolised the evils of the realm in the eyes of the rioters who destroyed it in 1381; the castle which he built at Kenilworth in Warwickshire whose splendid ruins can still be seen; the immense fortresses at Lancaster, Pontefract, Knaresborough, Tutbury, Leicester and some two dozen lesser strongholds; the resounding titles and clattering escorts of liveried retainers; the publicly flaunted mistress and bastards. John of Gaunt’s role as the main executant of England’s foreign policy in the last years of Edward III and for much of the reign of Richard II inevitably invited resentment and hostility when things went wrong.
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When Charles V repudiated the treaty of Brétigny in 1369 the English held about a quarter of the territory of the French kingdom. South of the Loire the treaties of Brétigny and Calais had created a vastly enlarged territory of Aquitaine which had been erected into an autonomous principality in 1363 and granted to the Prince of Wales. In normal times the Prince’s territory was financially and administratively self-sufficient and in the course of the 1360s it had acquired many of the trappings of a sovereign state. The Prince had his own Chancellor and Treasurer, his Constable and Marshal, his provincial seneschals and from 1370 his ‘Court of Sovereignty’ to hear appeals without recourse to Edward III in England. Many of these institutions were miniatures of the corresponding organs of the government of France. His officers controlled with greater or lesser degrees of tenacity the whole of the Atlantic coast of France from the Vendée to the Pyrenees, including the three major Atlantic ports of La Rochelle, Bordeaux and Bayonne. From the coast his territory extended inland through the basin of the Garonne and its tributaries beyond Montauban, Millau and Rodez, penetrating in long fingers across the map towards the Cevennes and the high plateau of Aubrac, and up the Dordogne valley to the foothills of the mountains of Auvergne. North of the Dordogne the Prince’s dominions embraced the whole of the marshy lowlands of Saintonge and the rich, undulating plains of Angoumois and Poitou. Further east, comparatively inaccessible from Bordeaux, lay the high, inhospitable Limousin plateau.4
North of the Loire England’s strength was concentrated in four areas: the fortress town of Calais, the county of Ponthieu at the mouth of the Somme, the castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy and the duchy of Brittany. These territories were less extensive than the holdings of the English royal house in the south-west but they represented a more formidable threat to the French monarchy.
Calais was the greatest strategic asset of the English in France. The town, only twenty miles by sea from the Kent coast, was protected by a powerful circuit of walls and ditches, by marshes which surrounded it on all sides and by a ring of outlying forts which pushed the border of the English pale out for ten miles into the hinterland. Its garrison had a normal wartime strength of about 1,200 professional soldiers and 300 armed citizens, which made it the largest permanent concentration of troops in Europe. The main problem about Calais was its dependence on England for supplies. In 1369 and for most of the following decade the garrison benefited from the benevolent neutrality of Louis de Mâle, Count of Flanders, who allowed his subjects to bring supplies to the town and to buy English goods there. But the Count was a fickle friend, whose support might be withdrawn at any moment. During the 1370s successive aggressive captains were able to replenish their stores by mounting powerful cattle-rustling raids far into northern France and driving the herds back to the town. But, as the neighbouring parts of Artois and Picardy were progressively impoverished and depopulated, the returns from these operations diminished and the burden of victualling the town mounted.
Economically Calais contributed little to its own survival. Its civilian population consisted of English colonists, who lived on the garrison, on passing travellers and on England’s export trades. A staple was established, or rather re-established, at Calais by royal ordinance in 1370. It was in theory the compulsory transit point of all English exports. But in practice the staple ordinances could never be rigorously enforced because Calais was a war zone. In the early 1370s less than half the trade which should have gone through Calais actually did so. The production of the Calaismint, usually a faithful barometer of economic activity there, fell to a historically low level. But, in spite of the high cost of maintaining Calais and the occasional misgivings expressed by English politicians, its possession was invaluable to the English. It provided them with a secure base on the coast of France. And the expense which it forced on France was at least as great as the cost to the English Exchequer. To contain the continual threat from the town the French kings were obliged to maintain what amounted to a standing army in Picardy and Artois, based on Boulogne and Saint-Omer and at least a dozen smaller places in between. There would never be peace, sang the French courtier-poet Eustache Deschamps, while the English held Calais.5
The county of Ponthieu had been inherited in 1279 by Edward I’s wife, Eleanor of Castile. Apart from more or less lengthy periods of confiscation, it had belonged to the kings of England ever since. The territory, standing at the mouth of the Somme less than ninety miles from Paris, might have been as significant as Calais if it had been better fortified and if Edward III’s officers had got on better with its inhabitants. The ford of Blanchetaque and the bridge at Abbeville were the only crossings of the Somme west of Amiens. Le Crotoy on the northern shore of the estuary was a walled harbour town with a powerful castle, which had been an important French naval base. During the 1360s Edward III had spent a great deal of money on the defences of these places and had considerably reinforced their garrisons as the diplomatic situation deteriorated.6
Saint-Sauveur by comparison was an anomaly. The great Norman fortress occupied a strong position in the centre of the Cotentin peninsula, dominating the road to Cherbourg at the point where it crossed the River Douve. It had belonged to that perennial rebel Godfrey of Harcourt who had bequeathed it to Edward III at his death in 1356. With the peace of 1360 the rest of the region moved into the obedience of the King of France. But Edward was allowed to retain Saint-Sauveur on condition that he granted it to a man of his choice. He chose Sir John Chandos, hero of the battles of Poitiers and Auray and the Prince’s Constable of Aquitaine. Chandos, although heavily engaged in the affairs of the Aquitaine, spent much of his time at Saint-Sauveur. He commissioned substantial works including the reconstruction of the keep and the strengthening of the curtain wall with new towers. As a result the fortress had become a serious menace. Its garrison had recently been strengthened and had begun to operate in concert with the last remnant of the English wing of the Great Company of 1367–8, which was based not far away at Château-Gontier in Maine. The Great Company, which was led by the experienced professional routier Sir John Cresswell, was at this stage probably about a thousand strong. Together, the garrisons of Saint-Sauveur and Château-Gontier represented a disciplined force of nearly 1,500 English soldiers standing across the main road communications of western France close to the great arteries of the Seine and the Loire.7
Brittany had for many years been regarded as a vital strategic interest of the English. It lay across their land and sea communications with Gascony. It provided a broad, accessible invasion route overland into Anjou, Maine and Lower Normandy. Brittany was one of the great fiefs of France, administratively autonomous and ruled by its own dukes. The current duke, John IV de Montfort, was a highly intelligent, ambitious young man who was determined to revive the ancient strength of his duchy and preserve its historic independence. In the long run that required an accommodation with the French Crown as John was well aware. But his hands were tied by his past. John owed his position to the armed intervention of England in the long civil war which had divided the province between 1341 and 1364. After the death of his father in 1345, when he was about five years old, John had been taken to England and brought up at Edward III’s court while the English fought their battles in Brittany in his name. He had married Edward’s daughter Mary and then, after her premature death, the Prince of Wales’s step-daughter Joan Holand. As Edward himself would declare in 1372, the Duke of Brittany was ‘doubly made our kinsman and not only strove continually to accommodate himself to our wishes but, even when he was far away and surrounded by enemies, never ceased to labour in our interest’. There was a fair measure of hyperbole in this statement. But the bond of sentiment undoubtedly existed and was acknowledged by John himself. As he once told the King of France, ‘if he surrounded himself with Englishmen it was because they had nourished him as a child and they are his servants and officers and those of his wife the duchess, who is herself English.’8
In his dealings with John de Montfort Edward III had some important bargaining counters in addition to kinship and affection. The honour of Richmond in Yorkshire, which the dukes of Brittany had held for most of the past three centuries, was sadly decayed, but had once yielded more than the entire revenues of Brittany. It was currently in Edward’s hands and occupied by John of Gaunt. Edward also had in his custody the two sons of John’s defeated rival Charles of Blois, who had been killed at the battle of Auray in 1364. They had been held in England since 1357 as security for their father’s unpaid ransom. They would have been natural figureheads for John’s many enemies in France and Brittany. The implicit threat to release them could be relied on to bring John to heel. In addition the English maintained an important military presence in the duchy. Edward III still controlled the great castle of Bécherel in eastern Brittany. Its large and unruly English garrison was answerable in practice to William Latimer who had been granted the captaincy of the place in June 1368. Sir Robert Knolles, the famous English routier, kept another powerful military establishment in his castle at Derval on the eastern march of the duchy. Other Englishmen controlled castles in the Duke’s name and farmed much of his revenue. They filled his household. A small group of them still sat in his council. The Duke’s English friends were too visible to be liked. They occupied honourable positions which might have gone to Bretons. They held land in the duchy whose former owners had not forgotten that it had once been theirs. English garrisons had pillaged and impoverished the duchy during the civil war and after it had ended they continued to do so. At Latimer’s impeachment in 1376 the Bretons alleged that his officers at Bécherel had taken £83,000 in four years from patis, as the protection money exacted from local communities was called. The figure is impossibly high, but even a modest fraction of it would have made Latimer an exceptionally rich man. John de Montfort’s dependence on the English was controversial among his subjects and he tried to reduce it. He pursued a deliberate policy of Bretonisation, edging Englishmen out of most government offices and the principal ducal fortresses. He protested with real anger at the incursions of the largely English bands occupying Château-Gontier and armed his subjects against the garrisons of Derval and Bécherel. But it would take him many years to shake off the tutelage of England entirely.9
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France had no strategic positions within the British Isles comparable to the great fortresses and provinces which the English controlled in France. The most serious threat to the English homeland came from Scotland. The long vendetta between the two kingdoms of the British Isles, which had begun with Edward I’s attempt to conquer the Scottish kingdom two generations before, was destined to continue until the sixteenth century and arguably until 1746. For most of this period the Scots were allies of France. The ‘auld alliance’ was of critical importance to the Scots, who regarded it as the main guarantee of their continuing independence. For years they had maintained a constant pressure on England’s northern border. They had mounted major invasions to coincide with English offensives on the continent. These offensives had never seriously threatened the political heart of England, which lay beyond the reach of Scottish armies. But they were nevertheless a serious problem for the English government. The security of the Scottish border had a big impact on English political sentiment. Scotland was an ancient enemy, far more intensely feared and hated than France. England’s continuing acceptance of Edward III’s heavy military expenditure on the continent always depended on his being able to persuade his subjects that the northern march of the kingdom was secure. This meant that when tensions between the two British realms were high it was necessary to divert a large part of the country’s military resources to the defence of the border. In the 1340s and 1350s and again in the 1380s virtually all the manpower and tax revenues of the counties north of the Trent had to be reserved for this purpose.
Recently relations between France and Scotland had been under strain. The defeat of John II at the battle of Poitiers in 1356 had seriously dented the Scots’ loyalty to the ‘auld alliance’. The treaty of Berwick of 1357, which was the direct result of the French defeat, was ostensibly no more than a ransom agreement for David II, held in England since the battle of Neville’s Cross. It did not resolve any of the secular issues between England and Scotland. But, by spreading the ransom of David II over ten years, during which by the law of arms David would not be at liberty to make war on his captor, the treaty ensured a long period of truce. In the event it proved to be even longer than ten years because of the difficulty that the Scots experienced in paying the ransom instalments from the meagre resources of their country. In 1365, when only a fifth of it had been paid, the Scots were obliged to agree to a substantial increase in order to be allowed to spread out the payments over twenty-five years. They also accepted a continuation of the truce until at least February 1370. These instruments made a legal obligation out of a policy which suited David II for other reasons: his troubled relations with leading Scottish nobles and the highlanders, the economic travails of his people in the face of the burden of taxation, and his own relations with the English court, a famous centre of European chivalry where the Scottish King felt at home. Charles V sent an embassy to Scotland in the spring of 1369. It landed at Aberdeen at about the end of April only to find that the Scottish King was in London with his principal advisers negotiating a reduction of the instalments of his ransom and a further fourteen-year truce with England, which was ultimately agreed in June.10
War and peace had always been relative concepts on the Scottish march. The heavily wooded hills of southern Scotland and the English border counties had been devastated by decades of warfare. A large proportion of the population on both sides lived at the margins of banditry and had come to depend on the traditional life of raids and counter-raids, cattle rustling, kidnapping and gang warfare across the border. These incidents constantly threatened to erupt into open war between the two countries. The difficulty of controlling the situation was increased by the fact that the fortunes of both kings were in the hands of local men with interests of their own in the wars of the border. The English government was obliged to delegate the day-to-day defence of the region to the leading families of the north, Percy and Neville in Northumberland, Clifford, Dacre and Lucy in Cumberland and Westmoreland. These were families which owed their wealth and influence to the border war. By 1369 they had built up great power-bases in the north which would eventually undermine the stability of the English government itself. The Percys, a Yorkshire family which had only established itself in Northumberland at the beginning of the fourteenth century, were by 1369 by far the most powerful lords of the north and virtually hereditary wardens of the east march. Their personal military following was among the largest in England. On the Scottish side very similar personal fiefdoms were being built up by the ambitious and aggressive lords of the house of Douglas and the Dunbar Earls of March. Their interests by now extended along the whole length of the border. Their relations with the English border lords were poisoned for much of this period by a growing and intensely personal animosity.
The instability of the border region was aggravated by its openness. The border was rarely marked or guarded. It was inhabited on both sides by people who shared a common language, culture and social attitude. There were English allies living among the Scots in parts of the Lowlands. There were Scottish sympathisers in Carlisle, Hexham and Newcastle. In 1369 there were still four important enclaves of English-held territory north of the border, which were to prove a constant irritant. Berwick, on the north shore of the Tweed estuary, was an important commercial town which contained the largest English garrison in Scotland. Roxburgh, at the junction of the Tweed and Teviot valleys, was a powerful garrisoned fortress, partially rebuilt by the English in the past decade. At Jedburgh in Teviotdale, a Percy lordship, an English garrison held out deep in Douglas territory. Finally there was the lordship of Annandale in Galloway, north of the Solway Firth. Almost inaccessible from England and serving no strategic purpose apart from its own defence, most of Annandale had been occupied by the English families of Bohun and Dacre in the early fourteenth century. Their territory had been much reduced by the encroachments of the Douglases. But the Bohuns still held and garrisoned the fortress of Lochmaben on the south-east side of the loch at the headwaters of the River Annan.11
Edward III was never willing to make the compromises that might have brought a permanent peace with Scotland. But he attached extreme importance to holding the truce on the march. He deprecated the tendency to retaliate unthinkingly for every Scottish border raid and did his best to impose a framework of law and diplomacy on the borderers’ violent instincts. A system of peacekeeping, originating in much older traditions of march law, had been developed since 1357 into one of the most elaborate of its kind on any of the march zones of western Europe. The wardens of the march, almost always now selected from the ranks of the great border families, were armed with power to suppress disorders and bring the perpetrators to justice. Regular ‘march days’ were held at points along the border, at which disputes were submitted to special tribunals and settled by joint juries of English and Scots. They were supplemented by ‘great days of the march’ at which the ambassadors of the two kings dealt with matters of national significance. These measures were remarkably successful. For nearly a decade after 1369 the perennial lawlessness of the border was prevented from erupting into open war. The disarming of Scotland, a relatively new element in the European strategic balance, was one of the main advantages that Edward III enjoyed when the war with France resumed in 1369.12
At the same time new threats were beginning to emerge from other parts of the British Isles. Nearly a century after Edward I had completed the conquest of Wales the country was entering upon a period of economic and political tension which would eventually explode in 1400 with the rebellion of Owen Glendower. The enforcement of seigneurial rights upon a resentful peasantry was a fertile source of violence and unrest in many parts of Europe. But the situation was aggravated in Wales by the fact that the English landowners who exercised them were almost all beneficiaries of the wholesale disinheritance of the native Welsh princes in the 1280s and the slow, persistent tide of forfeitures, purchases and exchanges which had followed ever since. The resentment which their officials, who were usually Englishmen, aroused was fortified by nostalgia and myth and by a powerful sense of collective identity among the native Welsh. To these were added the tensions arising from the plantation of fortified boroughs in the midst of a wholly rural society, governed and largely populated by English immigrants and enjoying monopolies extending well beyond their walls; and from the appointment of Englishmen to all the highest positions in the Welsh Church, which created a frustrated underclass of educated and half-educated Welsh clergymen with no prospects of advancement and every reason to share their frustrations with their flocks.
The English were well aware of the problems of Wales. Their officials in the principality had for many years been nervous about the threat of localised risings, and from time to time violent incidents occurred to remind them of it. The danger of a wider revolt had been contained mainly by the fragmented character of Welsh society and by its difficult geography, which made national movements of rebellion hard to organise and sustain. But it had been contained also by a measure of sensitivity on the part of the agents of the English government and the leading territorial magnates. There had been judicious patronage of influential Welshmen and opportunities for well-paid service and looting in the continental armies of Edward III. In the last years of Edward III, however, conditions became harsher. The decline of agricultural and pastoral incomes, a general phenomenon in late medieval Britain, was felt badly in Wales, much of which was infertile and far poorer than England. The progressive pressures on aristocratic incomes in the last three decades of the fourteenth century led everywhere to the more systematic enforcement of seigneurial rights. The disappearance of infantry from England’s continental armies deprived humbler men of many of the opportunities which their fathers and grandfathers had enjoyed.
The lordship of Ireland was an older and in some ways a more intractable problem, but an increasingly significant one. Ireland had its own administration, its own Chancery and Exchequer and its own courts. It had its own Parliament presided over by a Lieutenant sent out from England. The golden age of the English lordship had been the reign of Edward I at the end of the thirteenth century when the island had been relatively peaceful and had yielded substantial profits to the Anglo-Irish colonists and revenue surpluses to the Crown. The fourteenth century by comparison was a tale of continual decline. Devastating raids from Scotland in the early years of the century, plague and recession and the rise of the Gaelic chiefs, as well as persistent rebellions among sections of the Anglo-Irish themselves, had reduced much of the English lordship to an anarchic wasteland. Edward III’s preoccupation with Scotland and France had starved the Irish Lieutenants of attention and funds, and his reign witnessed a sharp deterioration in an already difficult situation. The revenues of the Irish lordship collapsed. Some of the Anglo-Irish sold up and withdrew to England. Others merged with the native Irish population. Ireland became a significant liability for the English Crown. In 1360 a Great Council at Kilkenny had presented Edward III with a catalogue of the ills of the country and a warning that, unless serious steps were taken to arrest the decline, the King’s lordship in Ireland would not survive.
Ireland was always a politically marginal factor in England’s relations with other European powers. The Gaelic Irish were never a threat to England itself. Nor was the island ever likely to be a back-door route for invasion, as Wales and Scotland were. Its significance was that it was an increasingly expensive distraction at a time when England’s resources were already tightly stretched. The petition of the Kilkenny Council marked a turning point in the relations of England and Ireland as the English kings started to invest substantial sums trying to re-establish their authority in Ireland. In June 1369, at the moment when the declarations in Paris and London completed the breach with France, the latest Lieutenant to be charged with the government of Ireland sailed for Dublin with more than 600 men.13 These men could not easily be spared.
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The final piece of the western European jigsaw was Flanders, which like Brittany occupied an ambiguous political position between the two main belligerents. Nominally a fief of France, Flanders had achieved practical independence under the rule of Louis de Mâle, the last and ablest of the Dampierre counts. Ill-tempered, autocratic, and unscrupulous, Louis de Mâle had governed the county ever since the death of his father on the battlefield of Crécy more than twenty years earlier. In that time he had transformed Flanders into the principal political and economic power of the Low Countries. In 1356 Louis had greatly increased his power by invading the Imperial duchy of Brabant, lying east of Flanders, traditionally the strongest principality of the German Low Countries. The result of this calculated act of violence was the treaty of Ath in the following year by which two of the principal cities of Brabant, Antwerp and Mechelen, were transferred to Flanders and Louis was recognised as heir to the rest. This consolidated block of territories would in due course fall to Louis’s sole heiress, Margaret. Twelve years after the treaty of Ath Louis achieved his greatest diplomatic coup when he recovered the three French-speaking castleries of Lille, Douai and Orchies, which had been annexed by France at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Their restitution was part of the terms which Louis exacted in return for agreeing to marry Margaret to Charles V’s brother Philip instead of to an English prince. The cession of the three castleries had caused great grief to Charles V. So much so that he had exacted a secret promise from his brother that he would sell them back to France after Louis de Mâle’s death. But Philip made an equally secret promise to his father-in-law on the eve of his wedding that he would never do it. Nor would he ever appoint any man to govern them but ‘Flamens flamengans nés de Flandre’ (‘Flemings, speaking Flemish and born of Flemish stock’). Louis was determined that Flanders would survive as a political force independent of France even after his domains had passed to a prince of the fleurs de lys.
The prosperity of Flanders after decades of destructive civil wars and foreign invasions was due in large part to the fact that Louis de Mâle had succeeded in staying out of the Anglo-French wars. Flanders was an infertile, densely populated land dominated by politically self-conscious industrial towns whose main trade was the manufacture of high-quality woollen cloth. They depended on France for a large part of the grain supplies which fed their populations and on England for their industry’s main raw material, wool. Flanders, said Froissart, ‘stands on the frontier of England and because of the great trade that its inhabitants do with England their hearts are more English than French.’ This was true, at least among the commercial oligarchies of the towns. In the 1330s and 1340s the determination of Louis’s father to cut off his subjects’ economic relations with England had led directly to his defeat and exile at the hands of the three ‘great towns’ of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres. Louis de Mâle never forgot this. When the war between England and France broke out afresh in 1369 he adopted a policy of neutrality, unacknowledged and often deviously pursued, but consistently observed in spite of his status as a vassal of France and his daughter’s marriage to the French King’s brother. Louis refused to distribute Charles V’s manifesto against England on the outbreak of war, observing disingenuously that his subjects were ‘simple fellows’ who would not understand such things. He declined to lend any military or naval assistance to France or even to let French diplomatic agents pass through his domains. He turned a blind eye to the activities of English agents who openly recruited troops, chartered ships and bought victuals and war materials in Flanders under the noses of his officials. This behaviour generated much ill-feeling between France and Flanders. For the time being, however, there was nothing that the French King’s ministers could do about it.14
*
France in 1369 remained the varied patchwork of regions which it had always been, a country of many languages, disparate laws and cultures and intense local patriotisms. In some ways the French nation remained an official abstraction, familiar to the kings, their servants and propagandists and a few churchmen. To most other people the very word ‘France’ meant no more than the Île de France, a region around Paris. With the accession of Charles V five years before, the monarchy had become once more an essentially Parisian power as it had been in the days of Louis IX and Philip the Fair. The vast royal palace on the Île de la Cité, overshadowed by memories of the revolution of 1358, was abandoned to lawyers and officials. The French war effort would be directed from the Hôtel Saint-Pol, a rambling mansion surrounded by gardens in eastern Paris, which Charles had rebuilt and extended during the 1360s; and from the principal royal mansions of the Île de France: Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Melun, Creil and Montargis. Charles’s methods marked in some ways a return to the secretive policy-making of his grandfather Philip VI, involving a small number of close relatives and trusted officers. His delicate health meant that he travelled little, never led his own armies and had a relatively short attention span when it came to public business. Meetings of his Council began at about 9.00 a.m. and were generally over by 10.00. These habits would have counted as defects in another ruler. But they were compensated in Charles’s case by an acute intelligence, an outstanding discernment in choice of subordinates and a facility with public opinion which deserted him only in the final months of his reign.
The French King was an enigma to the English as he was to many of his subjects. John of Gaunt had once dismissed Charles as ‘a lawyer’, a remark which was not intended to be flattering and caused much amusement when it was repeated to him. Ostensibly the French King’s war aim was to enforce the confiscation of the English domains in France which had been pronounced by his judges in June 1369. What he really hoped to achieve is less clear. For, if the ultimate fate of England’s French possessions has made their disappearance seem inevitable, Charles was a man of his time who did not necessarily see it that way. He certainly wished to reduce the extent of English holdings in western France, especially in Poitou with its great open frontier to the Loire provinces and its long-standing connections with the royal house, and in Artois where Calais was a constant threat to the security of his realm. He never shifted from the demand that whatever territory the English king held in France should be held as a vassal of the French Crown and not, as the treaty of Brétigny laid down, as part of an autonomous state. But he did not wish to condemn France to generations of attrition with her closest and most powerful neighbour, and throughout his reign proved willing to make large concessions of territory for the sake of peace.
Although virtually without military experience of his own, Charles took a personal interest in the prosecution of the war. Christine de Pisan called him ‘principal captain’ of his armies, observing that wars were ‘better fought by the power of the mind than by brute force of arms’. The King made some serious mistakes, especially in the first year of the war when he was too ambitious and hasty. But he learned quickly. Cunning, ruthless, highly intelligent, with the flexibility to respond to the changing military situation, he would not be rushed into decisions. He was very conscious of the military strength of England and had a good deal of respect for Edward III, whose portrait stared at him from a four-leaf panel hanging in his study in the Hôtel Saint-Pol. Charles appears to have been personally responsible for what remained the military orthodoxy of the next forty years, that the English were not to be confronted in battle unless it was on overwhelmingly favourable terms. The policy was more or less forced on him by his country’s failure to develop a strong indigenous tradition of military archery to match that of the English longbowmen. It remained an article of faith among his circle that Philip VI had gambled his crown by giving battle at Crécy and it was obvious that John II had done so at Poitiers. The King’s defensive response to successive English invasions was to prove politically controversial both among the nobility, whose aggressive instincts had to be contained, and among the mass of ordinary Frenchmen, who were obliged to flee to nearby refuges as the open country (plat pays) was systematically devastated by the enemy. But it ensured that the French were able to fight the kind of war at which they excelled: a war of sieges, surprises, and harassment, of persistent pressure on the marches which gradually wore the enemy down.15
A medieval ruler was expected to take counsel. It was what distinguished monarchy from despotism. Charles V’s principal advisers were his immediate family: his brothers the Dukes of Anjou, Berry and Burgundy, and his brother-in-law Louis, Duke of Bourbon. These were the same men who served as his lieutenants in the main theatres of the war and as executants of his decisions. With the possible exception of the Duke of Berry, they were all competent soldiers, skilful politicians and diplomats and, at least while Charles V was alive, loyal pillars of the revived monarchy. The most significant influence on the course of the war was undoubtedly Louis, Duke of Anjou. This able and ambitious but impulsive thirty-year-old, the second son of John II, had been royal Lieutenant in Languedoc since 1364. He had been the most vigorous advocate of war with England before 1369 and he probably entertained more radical ambitions than the King for expelling the English from France. He was also well placed to realise them since his lieutenancy gave him viceregal powers in all the provinces bordering on Aquitaine from the Dordogne to the Pyrenees, together with the complete disposition of the Crown’s revenues there. However, as well as being the most formidable adversary of the English in France, Louis of Anjou was also a perennial source of instability at the heart of royal policy-making. His personal appanage was limited to the small, war-damaged duchy of Anjou on the lower Loire, which brought him much less revenue than either of his younger brothers drew from their great domains. Anjou was always looking for a stage on which to cut a bigger figure. He was also jealous, quarrelsome and vindictive, allowing his actions to be influenced by personal vendettas, with Charles of Navarre and John de Montfort for example, which cut across royal policy towards these difficult but important vassals. Occasionally he conducted what amounted to a foreign policy of his own with the English, the Castilians and the Aragonese, and later the Italians.
Beneath the royal princes there was a large corps of ministers and administrators on whom the King depended for the ordinary functioning of his government and increasingly for advice on major issues of policy. Over the years its membership was remarkably stable. Almost all of them were men who had served Charles V’s father in the last years of his reign. The Archbishop of Sens, Guillaume de Melun, was a soldier-prelate who had led his retinue at the battle of Poitiers and shared John II’s captivity in England. He had sat on the French royal Council since 1351. John, Count of Sarrebruch, the Butler of France, was another prisoner of Poitiers who had acquired great influence with the old King during their exile in England and went on to serve on Charles V’s Council and in a succession of delicate diplomatic missions. Jean de Dormans, who became Bishop of Beauvais and ultimately a cardinal, had lived through the crisis of 1356–8 with Charles when he was Dauphin and then served both John II and his son as Chancellor. Bureau de la Rivière had begun his career as the Dauphin’s squire and trencherman in 1358 when he must have been in his late teens and held the King in his arms as he died, twenty-two years later. This shadowy but influential individual, who became Charles V’s principal chamberlain in about 1372, was virtually first minister at the end of the reign. Between them these men brought a remarkable continuity to the conduct of affairs in France at a time when England was riven by political crises and undermined by constant changes of personnel. Their personal opinions on policy are rarely recorded. But their experience of the long political crisis of the 1350s had made them share both the King’s ambition to undo the effects of defeat and his willingness to compromise with the enemy when the occasion arose.16
Notes
1 Mézières, Songe, i, 395–8.
2 Wykeham: Anonimalle, 97. Latimer: GEC, vii, 470–2; Jones (1970), 17–18, 50–2; CPR 1367–70, 187.
3 McFarlane (1972), 14; McFarlane (1973), 134–5; Goodman (1992), 341–9.
4 Chaplais (1957), 85–9; Chaplais (1989), 147–50; Bériac; cf. list of officers in Chandos Herald, Prince Noir, ll. 4189–4252.
5 Garrison strength: 1,132 in 1371–2 (Compte Gunthorp, 20–5); 1,162 in 1373 (PRO E101/179/12, mm. 4–5vo); 1,220 in 1375–6 (E101/180/4, mm. 4vo–8vo). Townsmen: Parl. Rolls, v, 381 (209). Economy: Holmes (1975), 81; Lloyd (1973), 240–1. French forces: Rey (1965), ii, 375–7. Deschamps, Oeuvres, iii, 93–5.
6 Storey-Challenger, 169–87, 196–9, *275–83, *288–307; PRO C36/79, pp. 547–52.
7 Foed., iii, 491; CPR 1358–61, 329. Defences: Mesqui (1997), 336. Supply: e.g., PRO E101/31/6 (Feb. 1370), C76/56, m. 14 (July 1373); *Delisle, ii, 263–4. Great company: Sumption, ii, 566–7; Gr. chron., ii, 134.
8 GEC, x, 823–4; Froissart, Chron. (SHF), viii, 125. Morice, Preuves, ii, 34; *Lobineau, ii, 580.
9 Garrisons: CPR 1367–70, 123; Parl. Rolls, v, 302–3, 304–6 (21, 27); Morice, Preuves, ii, 34; Morice, Preuves, ii, 36–7; Jean IV, Actes, no. 152. Court: Jones (1970), 17–18, 39–51. Richmond: Jones (1970), 174–6.
10 Rot. Scot., i, 811–14, 894–5; Acts Parl. Scot., i, 518–21, xii, 12–13. Diplomacy: Exch. R. Scotland, ii, 328, 348; Foed., iii, 862–3, 873, 878; Cal. Doc. Scot., iv, no. 154; David II, Acts, no. 441.
11 Rot. Scot., i, 955, 965; Foed., iii, 3–4, 20; Parl. Rolls, v, 369 (177).
12 Neville, Ch. 3 (a valuable work).
13 Parls. & Councils, i, 19–22. 1369: PRO E101/30/1, 2, E101/31/25.
14 *Vernier, 130–1 (‘Flamens’); Froissart, Chron. (KL), xv, 185, *xviii, 491.
15 Christine de Pisan, Livre des fais, i, 44, 80, 118, 132–3, 185, ii, 50–2. Crécy: Mézières, Songe, ii, 382. Portrait: Inv. mobilier Charles V, no. 2217.
16 Cazelles (1982), 308–9, 366, 402–10, 424, 461–2, 473–5, 482, 545–7; Notices et extraits BN, i, 344.