It has become increasingly accepted over recent years that the economic effects of war upon European society may only be seen in their true perspective when studied in the context of the long-term developments of the late Middle Ages. This approach to history sees the thirteenth century as a period of fairly general expansion and prosperity, when populations grew and the land needed to sustain them was developed. Although in many places both population and prosperity had ceased to grow by the last years of the century, the rapid decline which occurred in much of Europe in the first half of the fourteenth century shocked contemporaries. It must have seemed that nature (or was it God manipulating nature?) had turned on man to punish him.
Between 1315 and 1317 prolonged rains and unseasonal weather in many parts of northern Europe lead to dearth, lack of seed corn, a shortage of salt (which could not be properly dried when the sun failed to show itself for long periods), followed by epidemics of murrain among sheep and cattle. These years of famine which, in some places, recurred in 1321 and 1322, are now regarded by many historians as the turning point in the history of the period. For these disturbed years led to greater numbers living on the poverty line, to an increase in crime, a further decline in population (that of Flanders had decreased by 10 per cent in 1315–16), uncertainty in England about the wool trade and, very important, a marked rise in the surrender of land holdings, clear indications of a crisis and of little hope being placed in the immediate future. In France, bad and irregular harvests in the decade 1340–50 were to have considerable effects upon production. No wonder that the weather appeared as a recurring theme in the brief record of these years given inLa petite chronique de Guyenne.
Then, in 1348 (following severe flooding in south-west France in the previous year) there came the plague, which hit much of Europe and never completely disappeared, recurring again, in England for example, in 1361, 1369, and 1375. The effects were sudden and catastrophic. Mortality rates ranged from about one-eighth to two-thirds, with longterm adverse results. Prices rose, as did wages, when less land came under cultivation. Populations became more mobile. For the landowning classes such devastation could be disastrous. If some large estates survived and, in a few cases, became even larger by the purchase of surplus land, the troubles were to affect more modest landowners, especially those whose estates lay in sparsely populated and already less prosperous regions.
Other kinds of changes were taking place elsewhere. By the end of the thirteenth century the economy of Flanders was on the downward slope, affected by the commercial enterprise of Italy, the development of the cloth-making industry in England, the need to import large quantities of cereal, mainly from the Baltic, to feed a dense population, and by selfinflicted wounds of political rivalry and war with France. Flemish manufacturing and trade patterns were changing, and with these so did those of other countries, notably England. It is against such a background of change that war and its effects can be seen.
How did such factors affect those who lived in urban communities? Plague hit towns more dramatically than it did the countryside. Furthermore, in time of war, townsfolk were in an unenviable situation. Without walls they were defenceless, at the mercy of even relatively small forces of soldiers or freelance troops. Not unnaturally, many towns chose to build walls, but in so doing involved themselves in cruel expense: Rouen spent about a quarter of its municipal budget on the building and maintenance of its defences during these years. Once built, it might be thought, walls provided security for those living within them. Yet they proved a powerful attraction to refugees fleeing before armies, whilst the changed character of the war meant that they attracted those whose aim was not merely raiding, but conquest.
The close link between town and countryside was evident both in military terms (the town was both a refuge and a place where a garrison, intended to protect the surrounding ‘plat pays’, was stationed) and in economic ones. The countryside might rely on urban-based industries for certain of its needs; but more so the town depended upon the rural population to provide it with some of the basic necessities of everyday life, notably the bulk of its food. One has only to read the account given by the ‘Bourgeois de Paris’ of fresh food arriving in Paris, often by river, to appreciate the significance to the town-dweller of having ready and easy access to regular supplies, sometimes from nearby, sometimes from far away. The Parisians counted upon peace in Normandy for fish from the Channel ports, particularly Dieppe; and when Chartres, some fifty miles from the capital as the crow flies, fell to the forces of Charles VII in April 1432, the immediate effect was a sharp rise in the price of bread in Paris, since much of the corn required was grown in an area now vulnerable to the attention of enemy soldiers. The bitter language used by the ‘Bourgeois’ against those (usually Armagnacs) who deliberately destroyed Paris’s sources of supply shows how far towns were reliant upon the countryside for many of their everyday needs, and how true was the saying that the quickest way to take a town was to ravage the country round about.
Trade and commerce were among the first to feel the effects of war. At Caen, in Normandy, the amount paid for the right to farm taxes in the port in 1326 was 2,800 livres; by 1368 it had fallen to 1,650 livres, while by 1413 it had sunk to a mere 1,100 livres. The trade of the town was clearly contracting. In England, the decline of Winchelsea, in Sussex, was finally settled by the French raid of 1380, from which the town never recovered; Yarmouth was to feel the effects of war at sea and increasing competition from Flanders in the second half of the fourteenth century; while on the Dorset coast Melcombe Regis, which had once been a centre of shipping and had contributed vessels to the fleet, but had twice been burned in the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, was in rapid decline by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the customs post being discontinued in 1433.
Yet if many small ports suffered from the effects of war, large ones did not necessarily do so. The hegemony of London among English ports and towns continued. So did the prosperity of Bristol, even though its imports of wine from Gascony were never to be higher than they had been in the time of Edward I. So even Bristol’s trade was to change. It depended for much of its wealth upon the link with Bordeaux, to which went cloth and other everyday commodities in exchange for wine. The availability of that wine depended upon political and military good fortune, especially in the ‘Haut Pays’, Bordeaux’s hinterland. In the years of active war in Aquitaine the volume of trade declined, only to rise again when military activity ceased. The commerce in wine, therefore, was closely linked to conditions in south-western France: the relatively low years of 1348–9, 1355–6, 1369–70, and 1374–6 coincided with years of plague and war. After the French reconquest of Aquitaine in 1453 the wine trade with Bristol suffered a sharp decline. Although it was to be revived some years later, Bristol had already learned the vital lesson. Like other ports, it was to diversify its activity to trade with Spain and Portugal; and, as the author of the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye wrote c. 1437, Bristol was one of the ports from which the fishing trade with Iceland was to be carried out.
The conveyance of produce was as much a part of commerce as was its manufacture, since it generated wealth for others than producers or growers. War had the effect of dislocating maritime activity. We have seen how merchant ships were regularly requisitioned for the transport of men, horses, and armaments for war across the sea. The long list of Norman ports from which ships came to join the French navy at Sluys in the spring of 1340 suggests that there must have been a major effect on commercial activity in the Channel, normally vital to local prosperity, during those months which the losses in both men and vessels, suffered at the hands of the English in the battle, can only have compounded. Piracy, sometimes carried out under the guise of war (the opposite was also true) made further inroads upon trade. It was war and piracy which forced up the costs of wine by compelling merchants to add significant freight charges, which rose from 8 shillings a tun in 1300 to 12 or 13 shillings in 1350, for wine being carried from Bordeaux to England, those sums helping to pay for protection at sea; in 1372–3 the Bristol Gracedieu carried a crew of fifty instead of twenty-six precisely for that purpose.1 The admiration of the author of the Libelle for Edward III was largely based upon the measures which that king had taken for the protection of English trade against Bretons, ‘the gretteste rovers and the gretteste thevys that have bene in the see many a yere’.
How was the countryside affected by war? Its importance in the life of France was well understood by contemporaries. ‘If the countryside is destroyed’, wrote Jean de Courtecuisse in 1413, ‘all the estates of the kingdom will experience poverty.’ Such was the opinion of one sensitive and careful observer, an opinion which has received much support from the recent study on the subject. Armies, with the insecurity which their presence all too easily implied, often did little good to rural economies. Being what they were, military tactics meant that the most vulnerable targets were the sources of production in the countryside: the mill, the barn (preferably full as it would be in the summer), the field of uncut corn (how far was it appreciated that a burned crop could fertilise the earth?), the fruit trees in an orchard, the vineyard on a valley side. All these could be destroyed quickly and with little cost or risk to the soldiery, for most were difficult to defend, although villages, churches, farm buildings, and even mills could be fortified, albeit at some expense. Yet if the land’s produce could be reaped but not sold, and as a consequence rent could not be paid, both lord and tenant would suffer. The tenant would be the first to have to act. Having exhausted his seed-corn to feed his family, it would not be long before he was forced to restrict cultivation to only a part of his holding, the remainder becoming ‘marginal’: the final step was to abandon the land altogether, so that it soon fell out of cultivable use. In such conditions, those who normally made their living from land either moved to a nearby town in order to eke out an existence as best they could or, in times of active war and maximum insecurity, joined that desperate class of persons who took to the woods and added their own element of fear and insecurity to a society already suffering at the hands of the national enemy. ‘See if your woes are equal to mine, you who live in towns and castles’, wrote Hugh, prior of a religious house destroyed by the English in 1358. He was only expressing what defenceless men and women all over France must have been feeling at that time.
Armies destroyed property; they also frightened people. In 1418, on the approach of the English, the family of Thomas Basin, the future bishop and chronicler, left its home in Caudebec, near Rouen, and, after some wanderings, settled briefly in Brittany, whence it returned once the treaty of Troyes had restored a measure of stability to Normandy. Others from the duchy moved further southwards: a group found itself in Poitiers where it chose to live in the obedience of the dauphin, Charles. The lands and properties belonging to such people, confiscated by the Lancastrian kings, were regranted to those, both French and English, who supported the invader. In later years it would take time to resolve the legal problems arising from attempts to restore to their original owners the lands which they had abandoned in the face of the enemy.
The picture which emerges is of French rural society affected by natural disasters and, in many places, notably the Ile de France, Normandy, Champagne, Auvergne, and the Rhône Valley, much troubled at certain times by war. It should be stressed, however, that the effects of war were irregular both in time and extent. In the Ile de France, although there were bad years between 1337 and 1342, years affected by the beginnings of greatly increased royal taxation and the effects of debasement practised by the crown, the arrival of the English in 1346 brought the first active war to the area for almost 200 years. The years until 1365 were difficult, with not only the plague but political problems and the Companies never far away. The next two generations, between 1365 and 1410, saw peace in the region, but after that thirty years of calamities set in until 1441 so that, in all, in a period of just under a century, nearly half the years were free of war. In the Bordelais, too, the periods of war were limited: 1337–40, 1345–7, 1374–9, 1405–6, 1438, 1442, and 1449–53, a small total indeed for a period of well over a century. Normandy, on the other hand, experienced some periods of war in the fourteenth century and a period of over thirty years in the fifteenth century under English rule. It was during these years, after some revival at the end of the fourteenth century, that very adverse natural conditions and plague caused economic decline to set in. Between 1415 and 1422, it has been suggested, a crisis in food supplies, the recurrence of plague, and the flight of the population before the English army, conspired to halve the population of the duchy. After 1422 there came a period of relative political and military calm which helped to restore the demographic decline; but between 1436 and 1442 Normandy, along with much of north-western Europe, suffered again from bad weather and disease which killed about one-third of the population, an Hiroshima-like effect, as one writer has put it. The result was that, in Normandy, the values of rents received in certain parts of the duchy fell by about a half, in some places by more. By aggravating economic and social conditions already rendered difficult as the result of unfavourable natural conditions and disease, armed men in both large and small numbers brought tension, fear, and material destruction to the countryside. In time of war there was little confidence in the future, little incentive or money to rebuild or even repair property which had been damaged or destroyed.
The fiscal demands made by war came, in both England and France, at a time when they could only aggravate what were already difficult economic conditions, years of low production, unemployment, and generally declining revenues. In both countries it was the 1330s and 1340S which witnessed the formation of the war economy, when public expenditure suddenly increased and measures had to be taken to make the levying of indirect taxation possible. In France, greniers were built to house the salt which would be a source of taxation, while in England the system of ‘staples’, for the channeling of wool through certain ports, thus enabling the raising of dues by the customs services (themselves a product of late thirteenth-century beginnings being fully developed to meet rising needs), came into play.
On both sides of the Channel kings demanded money which, since it represented strength, they needed quickly. But in both kingdoms money was short, and the institutions for raising it, in particular in France, were only gradually coming into existence. So recourse had to be had to artful dodgery. When a military crisis occurred, the king would coax hoarded (and usually good) metal into circulation by demanding taxes and then, having reminted and, as happened in France more often than in England, possibly debased it, the metal would be issued again as coin at a lower value than before, the king pocketing the difference. It was such a need which compelled Edward III to play with fire in his unsuccessful venture of trying to obtain control of the entire export trade in wool in 1338–9, a venture which backfired and left him almost penniless in 1340. The king had been desperate to make a large profit in a short time, for he had foolishly spent £130,000 on continental allies in search of their help against France. But Edward soon found that neither the methods which he used, nor his association with speculators, Italian bankers and monopolists, nor the economic condition of the country, would allow him to make much progress.
In France, although there was no scandal of the kind which broke out in England, the early attempts by the crown to raise money for war met with resistance. It has been calculated that the subsidy demanded in Normandy in the winter of 1347–8 cost the agricultural worker, living on his modest smallholding in the countryside, the equivalent of about thirty days paid work. Not surprisingly, the tax imposed in 1348 in Rouen was cancelled after violent opposition had been expressed; in 1351 further anti-fiscal riots occurred, and in 1355 the people of the city refused to pay the subsidies demanded by the king. In February 1382 Rouen witnessed the rising known as the ‘Harelle’; among its numerous causes was a tactless attempt to raise a tax greater than that voted by the Norman estates. There can be no doubt, if one includes the notorious example of the English poll taxes raised at the end of the reign of Edward III and at the beginning of that of Richard II, that the needs of war were the cause of very considerable social unrest in these years, in England as well as in France.
Not least among those to suffer from the adverse economic effects of war were members of the landowning class. From the first decades of the fourteenth century, before the Anglo-French war had ever begun, the class had been feeling the pinch. Nature, in the form of adverse climatic conditions and disease, was causing perceptible decline in revenues derived from land. In the north of England the effects of Scottish raids (which led to the systematic levying of protection money to buy off the raiders) added to the toll of difficulties experienced by the landowners of the region in the late 1310s and 1320s. Vacancies in the North Riding occurred in greater number as a result of Scottish raids: men could no longer afford to pay their rents, and the less wealthy landlords, in particular, suffered from the troubles, a position not unknown to many French landowners in areas ravaged by war. In France, inflationary tendencies were reflected in monetary manipulations which, begun about 1290, continued, on and off, for years thereafter, so that the currency lost its accustomed stability. The effect of the bad weather on harvests also began to tell. On estates which depended largely upon the sale of cereal foods, the effects upon profits could be marked, the value of some leases falling by about half in the second and third decades of the fourteenth century. It is clear that the process of economic fluctuation, already referred to above, was having an adverse influence on seigneurial revenues by the time the war between France and England began, and that the pressure of taxation was very soon felt.
Because the records of some have survived, we can work out how the great institutional, and predominantly ecclesiastical, landlords faced their financial problems. We know less about the experiences of secular landlords, yet more than enough to know that, for many, entry into the service of the greatest of all employers, the crown, was the principal way by which they might save themselves from financial decline. Their service could take a number of forms but, in the circumstances, it was often connected with war. Employment in war had the advantage that it helped members of the traditional fighting caste to maintain their honour (by serving a war) and their rank (by making up for what was in many instances a rapidly dwindling income from land). Once in royal service, many received wages which compared favourably with their landed revenue, so that we need not be surprised, as some contemporaries were, at the willingness of the French nobility, for example, to join the king’s army for pay. War service under the crown enabled many of the seigneurial class to recoup in this way what their tenants had contributed in taxation.
There is much to be said, then, for the argument that economic factors encouraged the nobility to support their kings in active war. Military service in the age of the paid army gave many opportunities to those who chose to serve. Wages, even for those with large landed revenues, were reasonably generous. Other sources of rewards (or profit, in the more modern meaning of the word) were also open to the soldier; but these were rewards which were not continually available, and whose winning required initiative on his part. The possibility of making a financial ‘kill’ was an essential element in securing support for any military enterprise. At the top end of the scale, the sums involved could be huge. The ransom of John II was fixed at 3,000,000 gold crowns (£500,000 sterling) in 1360, some five or six times what the English crown might receive from its ordinary revenues, including the wool subsidy, together with the lay and clerical subsidies, a staggering sum even when we recognise that, in the end, less than half of it was paid. A ransom of this size was exceptional, as was that of 100,000 marks (£66,666. 135. 4d.) demanded (only some £13,333 of which was received) from the Scots for their king, David II, captured at Neville’s Cross, makes clear. Further down the scale, much more modest sums were demanded. Renaud le Vicomte, taken prisoner in 1358, ransomed himself for the value of two tuns of wine; while some knights, for example, Jean de Meudon, obtained licences from the crown giving them permission to trade so as to raise even the modest sums needed to pay their ransoms without losing their noble status.
In addition to prisoners, plunder and booty could be profitable. Evidence of the importance of such profits of war to the soldier comes to us in the manner in which the division of spoils was formalised. Armies and, as one English chronicler reports, even ships, had men (butiniers) specially appointed to collect and assess the value of booty taken in war. The purpose of this was to ensure an equitable, indeed a lawful, division of spoils. Inevitably, the matter raised the question of who was the ultimate owner of such spoils. At the end of the fourteenth century Honoré Bouvet argued that since an army was in the pay of its prince, all the booty should be his. Although a lawyer’s point of view, it did bear some resemblance to the reality of practice, since convention had it that a soldier ceded a third (in Castile, a fifth) of the value of his gains to his captain who, in his turn, gave a third of his gains, and a third of what had been passed on to him by his soldiers, to the king. The practice thus ensured a reasonably fair and widespread division of the profits of war; a certain rough justice appeared to have been done, and, what was more, successful expeditions went some way towards financing themselves.
With the fifteenth-century phase of the war, the profits available to Englishmen changed somewhat. Fighting there still was. But with the establishment of the land settlement and a permanent English presence in much of northern France, the nature of war altered perceptibly. Instead of active war, garrison duty became the main task of many Englishmen serving in France, a form of war which, while it lessened the risks of death or capture, also diminished the opportunities of making the traditional profits on campaign. The main sources of profit were now to be grants of land, the application of the feudal rights of lordship, and the remuneration due to the holder of office or other position in the royal or ducal household. Such ‘unmilitary’ sources of benefit confirmed another important factor, that the war waged by the English in France brought advantage to both the military class and to others, administrators and clergy, who followed in the wake of armies ready to serve in the newly-won territories.
Centuries later, we can still tell how important the profit motive was to those who, in one way or another, became involved in war. The opposition to the idea of peace expressed by Thomas, duke of Gloucester, about 1390 when faced with the problem of what to do with men who knew no way of life other than war, or by the lord of Albret who spoke of the restricted opportunities of plunder in peace time, is revealing. Even more so is the legal evidence of suits, civil and criminal, heard before courts in both England and France, in which we see litigants suing one another for what were very often the sources of monetary gain, stolen or confiscated by one side and reclaimed by the other. The dispute between John Hoton and John Shakell over the ransom of the count of Denia, a Spaniard, not only occupied the Court of Chivalry between the years 1390 and 1395 (it was not settled until well on into the next century) but had already proved to be a cause célèbre at the Gloucester Parliament in 1378, leading to the murder in sanctuary of Shakell’ s brother-in-arms, Robert Hawley. The record of this suit, and others, many heard before the Parlement of Paris, emphasises the long and frequent delays to which litigants were often subject, reminding us of the considerable expense which such suits could entail. The tenacity and hope with which some litigants pursued their ends emphasise the importance of titles, revenues, and, sometimes, a measure of local influence which the profits of war might bring to men who spent much of their lives at war, and for whose defence they were prepared to incur considerable costs and effort. Early in the fifteenth century the poet, John Lydgate, put it this way:
Now of days men
Yerne and desiren after muck so sore
That they good faime hav leyd…
To wynne worldly tresour and richesse.
Was it all worth it? Was it all gain? To a fortunate few, war became a source of personal wealth. Sir Robert Knolles, a valet who became an influential knight, made his fortune in France and Spain partly as a freelance soldier, partly in the service of the crown. At the time of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, he was reported by Froissart to have been in London ‘guarding his treasure with over six score fighting men all in readiness’, a fact confirmed by another chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, who described Knolles’s fortune as having reached almost royal proportions. In the fifteenth century Sir John Fastolf achieved fortune from war in France, whence he sent home money to be invested in land.2 Others made use of war’s opportunities in different ways. It was not only soldiers who did well. Sir John Pulteney, four times mayor of London, was not the only Englishman to benefit from his ability and willingness to advance money to Edward III. The recipient of grants of lands in a number of counties and of an annual sum of 100 marks for his better support in the order of knighthood to which he was raised in 1377, Pulteney died a rich man. The provision of money also advanced the Hull merchant, William de la Pole, whose family rose from commoner to duke in four generations, although, as the Paston family correspondence suggests, not all were impressed by this rapid promotion to nobility.
In France Jacques Coeur is the most famous instance of a man who attained great wealth as a supplier of arms to Charles VII, and who built what has been termed ‘virtually a palace’ at Bourges, still open to the visitor today. War also gave Pierre Bailie his opportunity; he rose from being a shoemaker’s assistant to the heights of fiscal administration as treasurer of Maine, and then of Normandy, for the English after 1436. The family of Perrote, who came from near Caen, constituted an example of a different kind, that of a family which made good by buying lands and rents cheaply from others who had fallen upon hard times. In 1460 Colin Perrote, recently ennobled, drew up a cartulary (or inventory) of copies of the documents which concerned the lands acquired by his family.3It is a modest, but significant, memorial to an achievement largely made possible by a state of war, an instance of persons with the ability of finding ready money to purchase a chance of advancement when it presented itself. By the same token we may see those whose lands they bought as examples of persons against whom the wheel of fortune, in the form of war, had turned.
If some gained, others lost, for confiscation of estates was the political and economic price which had to be paid for being on the wrong side. Worse (since it could mean long years of detention) was to fall into enemy hands, for the purchase of liberty could be ruinous, and involve others than the immediate family, as Guillaume de Châteauvillain and Jean de Rodemack discovered to their cost. Nor did the thousands of Englishmen who served in France during the war all return home much better off than when they left. Even the English crown, the largest owner of lands in France acquired by conquest and confiscation, found itself considerably in debt and having to borrow to pay for the war. On paper, the value of its lands looked impressive. In practice, these constituted a diminishing asset: revenues from mints were down; those from forests, now often under the control of enemies, were also down; tolls and fairs, because of the adverse effects of war conditions upon trade, were less than they should have been. There were no great riches to be made from these sources in such difficult times.
Such a view may appear pessimistic, to some, indeed, even partial. A generation ago a famous academic debate took place between two leading historians, K. B. McFarlane and M. M. Postan, over the question of who, if anybody, benefited from the Hundred Years War.4 McFarlane was of the opinion that, by and large, the English crown did well out of the war; he could point to the huge sums – at least £8,000,000–raised in taxation in England between 1336 and 1453, a large proportion of which, he argued, came from the pockets of foreigners in the form of indirect taxation on wool, fells and hides. For their part, too, ransoms were important in furnishing the king with large sums of money, for he was able to obtain those of the more important prisoners who had been obliged to pay high sums to secure their freedom. Certain members of the nobility, and others who served them, also did well out of English military enterprises in France.
So the argument ran. Yet it failed to convince Postan, and more recently views of the subject have, on the whole, not supported McFarlane. It is by no means certain that the high taxes on wool exports (so profitable to the English crown) were borne by foreign merchants who bought English wool; it seems more likely that the growers themselves paid in the form of lower prices obtained from the sale of their products. What of the other argument, that war brought in money from abroad and that the military effort was being subsidised by the enemy themselves? In this we may be more confidently assertive. While a case for this can be made for the first two or three decades of the war, McFarlane himself chose to base much of his argument upon the remarkably well-documented case of Sir John Fastolf. But the more we know about the fifteenth century, the better we recognise that Fastolf’s career was exceptional, if not unique. If we look at others whom Fastolf will have known in France (although few will have been there longer than he was) we do not find his story repeated. We must recognise Fastolf’s exceptional business acumen, as well as his military skill. The England of his day was not full of men like him, flaunting their wealth won the hard way in the war against France. On the contrary, most of the signs (admittedly they are seldom much more than that) suggest that few came back significantly richer than they went out. This being the case, France did not lose much bullion to departing Englishmen (if anything, the movement of cash, in the form of payments to armies, may have been the other way); nor was England notably enriched by the wealth entering from abroad. The financial advantages of war came irregularly; the few fortunes which war did provide for Englishmen (at the cost of the foreigner) were exceptional. That is not to say that they should be ignored; they should not be. It is a sense of proportion which is at issue.
Perhaps, indeed, in employing the word ‘profit’ when describing the motivation behind so much English military activity in France, historians have been using the wrong word, or have attributed too strong a meaning to it. Profit implies loss. When Sir Hugh Calveley came home with sufficient profit to build at Bunbury in Cheshire, or Fastolf to build at Caistor in Norfolk, they did so because they had, indeed, ‘robbed’ France of part of her wealth. But of the thousands of Englishmen who went to France in the fifteenth century, many were to remain there for years at a time, sometimes marrying, sometimes settling into local communities. The word which is more appropriate for them, one which they themselves used, was not ‘profit’ but ‘livelihood’, not the winning of moveable riches which could be taken away to England in an emergency, but the earning of everyday revenue which enabled them to live out their lives in new surroundings. It is the attitude of these people, now better understood, which should be appreciated. For they represent an attitude to war different to that of the soldier who set out in the hope of hitting the jackpot before returning home. In a very real sense these people represent war without the glitter. In practice their experience of war without what we would today term ‘capital gains’ was that shared by the majority of those who made their way to France in the hope, if not the expectation, that Dame Fortune would one day smile on them.
In short, we have to understand that the normal military career pursued by an Englishman in France was unlikely to lead to great wealth. Much of the war fought in the fifteenth century was, in fact, the guarding of towns, castles, and other strategic points. Contact with the enemy was, for long periods, limited; so, consequently, were the opportunities for sudden wealth. Not surprisingly many soldiers turned their attention to the robbing and ransoming of the civilian populations. Such activity might relieve frustration, but it did not lead to riches. It must be recognised that, other than on days of exceptional good fortune, war was little more profitable, and often a good deal more dangerous, than living at home.
Yet the sun did shine on some. In the structuring characteristic of medieval society, it was possible for men to move from one grade to another, to move up and, sometimes, down. They could improve their social and material standing in society through, for instance, education, connection and service. War was also an important way of achieving social distinction and advancement. If birth could make a man noble, so could war. In this process, reputation mattered a great deal. The desire to enhance his name in the eyes of society, and principally in those of his equals and superiors, gave an incentive to a soldier’s life. Honour, fame, and renown, the desire to shine, were all fundamental to the ethos of chivalry. Fighting in wars was clearly one way, perhaps the best, of earning respect and reputation. To merit a mention in Froissart’s chronicle was the equivalent of receiving a medal today. Jean de Bueil, over half a century after Froissart, wrote in a not dissimilar way – but with a difference. For him war was fought more explicitly for the public good. The soldier must not be afraid of the sweat and tears of war. If he had fighting skills which he developed and then used to good purpose, he would be among those ‘esteemed by both God and the world’. Knighthood exercised for the common good was one way to eternal salvation.
On this side of eternity, too, reputation could earn its rewards. But reputation had to be won, and this meant taking an active part in war. The more action, the greater the chance of renown. Acts of heroism abound in the ‘chivalric’ chronicles of the period. Sir Hugh Calveley’s refusal to take command of the rearguard at the battle of Auray in September 1364, and the duke of York’s request to Henry V to accord him the honour of leading the English vanguard against the enemy at Agincourt reflect the fact that it was better to be seen in the van than at the rear. York, one of a handful of Englishmen to lose his life in this battle, earned the commendations of the chroniclers for what he had done.
Reputation was one form of recognition for action in war. There were more tangible rewards to be won as well, although, as the poet Guillaume de Machaut wrote in the mid-fourteenth century, no amount of riches were the equal of honour. Yet Sir Eustache de Ribemont could feel well satisfied after his encounter with Edward III outside the walls of Calais in 1348, for it led to him being awarded a diadem of silver and pearls by the king in recognition of his praiseworthy conduct. The gallantry of Sir James Audley on the battlefield of Poitiers was brought to the notice of the Black Prince who made a point of visiting Audley, recovering from his wounds, to tell him of the honour which his conduct had brought him, and to inform him that he was retaining him ‘for ever to be my knight with 500 marks of yearly revenue’, which sum Audley, ‘with great nobleness’, immediately bequeathed to four esquires in his own service, the incident (recalled by Froissart) underlining both Audley’s generosity (an act of true nobility) and the fact that feats of war could lead to recognition expressed in material terms.
On the French side, where knights and esquires were sometimes given important military positions, it has been remarked that a career in arms in the second half of the fourteenth century most certainly encouraged, and indeed accelerated, social advance, so that esquires became knights-bachelor, and these rose to the rank of knights-banneret. The most famous instance of such advance is that of Bertrand du Guesclin, who bettered himself by receiving the county of Longueville from the hands of Charles V in 1364, that of Trastamara from Henry of Trastamara in the following year, and the duchy of Molina in 1368. His appointment as Constable of France in 1370, on an occasion when, according to Froissart, he expressed doubts regarding his worthiness to give commands to men of inherited nobility, was but the culmination of a career which had brought this man ‘de grant entreprise’ to the top of the command structure and to the level of nobility which all acknowledged. When du Guesclin died in 1380, he was honoured, as none had been before, by being buried at the abbey of Saint-Denis, the royal mausoleum, a sure sign of recognition that he had served his king and his country with success. It should be noted, however, that the astonishing social promotion of du Guesclin was entirely exceptional. Perhaps the nearest to him may have been John Hawkwood, whose career as a leader of mercenaries ended in the service of the Florentine republic and burial in a place of honour in the cathedral there.
Some Englishmen, too, did well out of military achievement. We have already noted Sir Robert Knolles and Sir John Fastolf. Sir John Chandos, knighted in 1339 and one of the original knights of the Garter, became lord of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy in 1360; Sir Hugh Calveley won both a wife and a castle in Spain, although neither, it must be said, brought him much comfort; while in the fifteenth century Walter, Lord Hungerford, liked to style himself ‘lord of Heytesbury and Homet’, the first title being English, the second French. All five were among those Englishmen who had privately-appointed heralds or pursuivants,5 a social phenomenon upon which Nicholas Upton commented in c. 1440 when he wrote of those who had become noble by virtue of their skill, hard work, and courage, as well as through other virtues which might ennoble a man.
Examples of individual advancement could be multiplied. Nobility, the highest social level to which a man might aspire, could be achieved in a number of ways, but in all an essential element was the approval of others. As has been well noted, the years at the end of the Hundred Years War formed a specially critical period when talent could more than make up for a lack of birth.6 Thus a number achieved advancement by merit and personal acceptance of the fact by their equals and superiors. Such was inherent in the very concept of advancement. Froissart recounts the telling story of Crockart, who came to France from Germany, and became the leader of a group of freelance soldiers. Having made much money from his activities of taking and ransoming towns in Brittany, he was offered a knighthood, a wife, and a pension by king John II, all of which he refused. Returning to the scenes of his early life, he flaunted the wealth which war had brought him. But, Froissart tells us with a sense of approval, the nobles whom he had once known were not impressed. Crockart failed to find acceptance from those whose ranks he had hoped to join. In his case, war had not won him what he most desired: advancement in the form of recognition that his activities and achievements merited admission to the rank of nobleman. The point should not be lost on us.7
1 On the commerce of Bristol, see A. Crawford, Bristol and the wine trade (Bristol, 1984).
2 K. B. McFarlane, ‘The investment of Sir John Fastolf’s profits of war’, T.R. Hist. S., fifth series, 7 (1957), 91–116.
3 Archives départementales du Calvados, Caen, F. 1650.
4 K. B. McFarlane, ‘War, the economy and social change. England and the Hundred Years War’, P&P, 22 (1962), 3–13; M. M. Postan, ‘The costs of the Hundred Years War’, P&P, 27 (1964), 34–53. To these may be added P. Contamine, ‘Le coût de la guerre de cent ans en Angleterre’, Annales, 20 (1965), 788–91; and A. R. Bridbury, ‘The Hundred Years War: costs and profits’, Trade, government, and economy in pre-industrial England. Essays presented to F.J. Fisher, ed. D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (London, 1976), pp. 80–95.
5 See the list in The complete peerage (London, 1949), XI, app. C.
6 Contamine, Guerre, état et société, p. 417.
7 Froissart, Chroniques, V, 227–9: Allmand, Society at war, pp. 88–9.