We have seen that war leaders of the late Middle Ages sought the achievement of their military aims either through the devastation of the countryside or, in certain circumstances, by seeking to gain control of the towns and castles which dominated it. Because an army’s main aim may have been the devastation of land, the destruction of its produce, and the seizure of moveable property, there can be little doubt that war’s chief victims were those who, if they did not live within reasonable distance of a defended town or garrisoned castle, ran great risk to their personal safety. It is true that small local fortifications, sometimes churches adapted at great expense by the addition of towers, parapets, walls and even moats, might bring some measure of safety, at least against small bands of soldiers or evil-doers.10 Yet since these cannot have presented much of an obstacle, they were of little or no use against large and determined forces of men, against whom only walled towns and castles constituted reasonably sure places of safety.
We have also remarked how, at least in the fourteenth century, campaign leaders, often inadequately equipped as they were, commonly avoided attacking well-fortified towns and castles. In a short campaigning season curtailed by either seasonal or financial considerations, or by both, the advantage did not lie with the attacker who, if he began a siege, risked being caught between the place he was seeking to capture and (a constant fear) a force coming to relieve the besieged. Further, he would also require some very heavy and unwieldy equipment, including siege engines; even these might not bring the desired success. It might require a stroke of luck, such as a shortage of provisions or water among the besieged, or an act of treason, to deliver the well-defended place into enemy hands. In hostile territory a siege was not lightly undertaken; if certain reasonable precautions had been taken, those who sought refuge inside a town or castle could reasonably hope to survive, in particular if their refuge were a town which, with its generally greater size and more generous ameneties which favoured the defender, presented a besieger with a greater challenge than did even the best defended castle.
In France the escalation of war in the 1340s (after some four generations of relative peace) led to a number of significant developments. Before this time, as Froissart was to note and Edward III to experience, many towns had no proper defences other than what could be provided by ditches and water works, neither of which would cause a determined army much trouble. Nor was there proper central control over the building and maintenance of fortifications, many of which were sadly out-of-date or in bad need of repair by the time that the English began to invade France. But by galvanising men into action, the English invasions were to change all that. On royal orders, the towns were directed to see to their defences, and they had to do so by finding their own sources of finance through local effort. At first, much building was done on the cheap. Where possible, material which could be salvaged from old buildings or walls was recycled into the new fortifications, while in many places no indemnity was paid to those who were forced ‘pro bono publico’ to surrender property on which walls might be built or to provide the open ground, outside a wall, vital for effective defence. At the same time, it is evident that the bulk of the money needed to pay for urban defence had to be raised locally, although, from 1367 onwards, the king of France often allowed a quarter of the value of royal taxes raised in a town to be retained as a contribution towards it. Land was often acquired for little or nothing; in many places the citizens and those living within the jurisdiction of a town gave their services in the building of walls, the equivalent, it may be argued, of a tax intended to cover building expenses. Loans and gifts were sought as contributions. But the biggest and best-organised part of the exercise of fund-raising was undoubtedly the levy of an increasing number of local taxes on the trade of goods, including consumables, of which the most profitable were those imposed on drink, in particular on wine. Always done with royal approval, which was sought beforehand, the collection of such levies emphasised two factors: that the crown’s right to tax and to organise the general defence of France was recognised; equally, that, in practice, the responsibility for carrying out defensive projects was left to local initiative and energy. The result, it now appears, was that local administrators, with important defensive budgets to collect and administer, took advantage of the experience thus gained to develop their own powers in particular when, over a period of some decades, taxes originally levied for short periods came to be collected for longer and longer periods, until they became all but permanently established as part of the regular income of a town or city.
Towns, therefore, were coming to assume greater importance as places of defence and refuge for the surrounding countryside. At Reims, for instance, the process of fortification, begun early in the fourteenth century on the orders of Philip IV, was later abandoned, only to be reactivated after the English victory at Crécy. Between 1346 and 1348, and again, after the visitation of the Black Death, between 1356 and 1358, the people of Reims completed the construction of their city’s defence, with the gratifying effect that even the king of England, Edward III himself, could not force an entry in the early winter of 1359–60. Elsewhere, too, in different parts of France, this period witnessed much building of urban defences. The walls of Caen were constructed in the years following Edward III’s capture of the town in 1346; those of Rouen were begun at the same time on the orders of Philip VI, making the city one of the few properly defended towns, or ‘villes closes’ of upper Normandy; Avignon’s wall was started at the instigation of Pope Innocent VI about 1355; while the defences of Tours, in course of construction in 1356, were probably sufficiently advanced to deter the Black Prince from attacking the town on his chevauchée in the summer of that year.
Such building, multiplied many times over, provided France with a network of fortified towns (some of them very large by the standards of the day), impressive traces of which can still be seen today. From the middle years of the fourteenth century, such steps were sufficient to keep all but the most determined attackers at bay. Few commanders would have wished to expend the time and energy required to overcome places so heavily defended.
Change, however, was not far away. While the widespread building of town walls in the second half of the fourteenth century provided a measure of safety against marauding forces (even against the Companies), such fortifications could not be ignored by an enemy bent upon conquest. To the English, when they returned in the fifteenth century, fortified towns provided both a military threat and a challenge which they could not ignore. Paradoxically, therefore, instead of providing refuge for those fleeing from the countryside, the very existence of these fortified towns drew the attention of the invader to them. As the narratives of the siege of Rouen, pursued by Henry V between July 1418 and January 1419, underline, the results, both for the civilians who had sought safety there and for the garrison who had led the resistance, could be devastating.
The existence of walled towns and castles created two problems. Had the invader the means of taking these newly fortified places? Conversely, had the defenders the means of effective resistance? At the time when the Hundred Years war broke out, a defender had a more than even chance of beating off an attack. By the time the war ended, the reverse was probably true. This was in part due to changes and developments in weaponry. Against an immobile target, such as a wall, even the early cannon could inflict quite considerable damage. There are references to such ‘gonnes’ in accounts of the siege of Berwick as early as 1333, while it is likely that some form of artillery was brought across the sea by the English for the long siege of Calais of 1346–7. During the next generation both old and new siege weapons were to be used in tandem. In 1369 a trebuchet, used for slinging stones, was employed at the siege of La-Roche-sur-Yon, and in 1356–7 another was in evidence at the siege of Rennes; as late as 1378 another was in use before Cherbourg, having been brought there in pieces and assembled on the spot. Yet three years earlier, at the important siege of nearby Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, the French had used thirty-two cannons, gunstones for them having been conveyed there in carts and by packhorse. These years clearly constituted a period of transition.
The siege of Saint-Sauveur can be regarded as something of a landmark in the development of the practical use of artillery. When Henry V landed for the first time on French soil nearly forty years later, it was soon put beyond doubt that in his artillery he possessed a potential match-winner. While the accounts of the siege of Harfleur in the late summer of 1415 refer to the time-honoured methods of mining and blockade used by the English, pride of place for effectiveness is given to their artillery, which caused both fear and destruction to the beleaguered town. The siege had shown that, with artillery, Henry V had the capability of fulfilling his military ambition. Setting out for France again two years later, the king was described by the anonymous author of the Brut as leaving England with ‘ordynaunce gadred and welle stuffyd, as longyd to such a ryalle Kinge’.11Once again it was the towns and castles of Normandy which attracted Henry, bent, as he was, upon conquest. Yet again the chronicles emphasise the part played by the artillery in the capture of Caen and Falaise and, a little later, in that of Rouen. Thirty years later, the rapid reconquest of the duchy by the French owed much to the threat posed by the French king’s artillery against the defences of towns which preferred to surrender than to make a fight of it. Most, it had to be recognised, would have been unable to resist a heavy and sustained bombardment.
Could nothing be done to restore the traditional balance of advantage to the defender? Was there to be no resistance to this ‘new’ weapon? The suddenness of the increased use of artillery in the third quarter of the fourteenth century is evidenced by the fact that when Gaston Fébus, vicomte of Béarn in the Pyrenees, had a network of fortifications constructed between 1365 and 1380 (a period during which many castles were built in France) he must have been building some of the last fortifications to take no account of artillery, which was very soon to compel important developments in the art of defence. For cannons could be fired not only at fortifications but from them, too. As early as 1339, the town of Cambrai had begun to introduce firepower into its defensive system, an exceptionally early example of the use of such techniques. When Henry Yevele designed the west gate at Canterbury in 1378, he included round gunports on the drum towers, gunports having been introduced into England some years earlier. In the same year the town of Southampton, not infrequently threatened by attack from the sea, appointed Thomas Tredington, said to be ‘skilled with guns and artillery’, to take charge of the municipal armoury.12 Such examples are taken from the English scene: German towns could provide many more. But modern scholarship has made it clear that it was in France, more so than in England, that urban defensive requirements played a major part in securing the widespread acceptance of artillery as a means of deterring or countering a prospective enemy. All over France, from Lille and Dijon in the north and east to Bordeaux in the south-west, artillery became an essential and accepted part of the growing defensive system associateci with towns. Materials were collected in advance and stored in anticipation of their use; powder slowly got cheaper in the course of the fifteenth century; while many towns employed one or more men to supervise the effective use of artillery in case of attack. As Christine de Pisan was to show in the first quarter of the century, the use of artillery for defensive purposes was now regarded as necessary and normal.
However, resistance to the increasing employment of artillery in the capture of walled towns and castles would be even more effective if it stemmed from a reassessment of architectural design. Largely in the hope of preventing or deterring attempts at scaling, walls had traditionally been built high: thickness and solidity had been sacrificed to this need, for walls could not be both high and thick. Yet, with the advent of cannon, thickness was precisely the main characteristic which the defender demanded of the wall which protected him. The onus now lay upon the architect to come up with new designs and new ideas with which to counter the rapidly growing effectiveness of artillery aided, from about 1430, by the reversion to the use of cast-iron shot which, although more expensive than stone shot, did not shatter on impact, could be made more uniformly in greater quantities (the making of stone shot was, to say the least, laborious) and in smaller calibre, thereby increasing efficiency by reducing the need for very large and unwieldy cannon.
The architectural solution was ultimately to be found and perfected in Italy in the sixteenth century, but the contributions of English and French experience to these discoveries was not negligible.13 By lowering the height of the wall, and thereby enabling it to be built more thickly, it could be made more effective in both defence and counter-attack. To this could be added the possibility of building the towers only as high as the wall itself, thus enabling the cannon used for defence to be moved along its length (now on one level) to whichever part it was most needed. Furthermore, as Yevele had shown at Canterbury, the defensive value of the round tower was becoming better appreciated; even if it did not always deflect a cannon shot aimed at it, such a tower could withstand an impact better than could a straight-facing surface. In addition, the need to achieve both vertical and lateral defence was also dealt with. Machicolations, usually regarded as a sign of nobility, had their practical value in that they permitted vertical defence against those who might have reached the dead ground near a wall, and might be setting about digging or mining under it. At the same time the building of what were to become bastions, towers standing out from the line of the wall, enabled defenders to fire all round, and in particular laterally, against approaching men or machines, as the design for Bodiam Castle in Sussex, which, like Cooling Castle in Kent, was built at the time of the French invasion scares of the 1380s, clearly shows. The building, about 1440, at the Mont-Saint-Michel, of a form of bastion not dissimilar to that to be developed in Italy, underlines how this matter of overcoming the defensive problems created by the development of artillery was being dealt with. By the sixteenth century the initiative long held by the defender, surrendered in the late fourteenth century, had been largely regained.