How to conclude? After a long period of war, both England and France had to recover from the ordeal. In England it was the monarchy which was, to all appearances, the loser, its claim to rule France unceremoniously repelled. The contrast with the triumphant years of Edward III and Henry V could not have been greater, as anyone reading the very different accounts of events in London in 1415 and 1450 will quickly recognise. On the second of these occasions betrayal, as well as the bitter sense of defeat, hung heavily in the air. Englishmen who had lived, worked, or fought in Normandy felt let down. Even the pride of those who had never seen France had suffered as the result of recent reversals of fortune, for which Sir John Fastolf, who had left France ten years earlier, had to bear some of the odium of the Kentish rebels who attacked London in July 1450.
Before long, the losses in France would be turned to another purpose, a call to arms in support of the dynastic ambitions of Richard, duke of York, who had twice held high command in Normandy under Henry VI, during which time his eldest son Edward (who would assume the royal mantle in 1461) had been born in Rouen. The link between those who had been with York in France and those who supported him in his quarrel with Henry VI is not, in all cases, clear. But the fact remains that when conflict broke out in England in 1455, many of those who came out in York’s support had fought in France in the previous generation or so, and were ready to put their experience at his service.
Like a football pitch at the end of a long season, France needed much careful tending, in particular in certain areas of that pitch.
Quant Angloys furent dehors
Chascun se mist en ses efforts
De bastir et de marchander
Et en biens superabonder.1
(Once the English had gone
All tried very hard
To build and to trade
And to produce all manner
of goods again.)
By a happy coincidence, which probably had little to do with the ending of the war, the economy of France, which had seen so many crises in the past 150 years (and not least since 1430 or so), began to improve. The weather got better; the effects of recurring epidemics were diminished; and a measure of greater stability (the result of peace) returned to the country. Yet it would be wrong to imagine that all became normal again overnight; it did not. None the less, on a wider European level economic historians have observed a distinct move in the direction of recovery characteristic of the period c. 1450 to c. 1480. In this, an upsurge in commercial activity was to play an important part. Admittedly, trade between France and England, a pawn of politics, had come almost to a standstill in the 1450s; but in the 1460s, given official encouragement, it began to recover. The treaty of Picquigny of 1475 was to be dubbed the ‘merchants’ peace’ because of the positive help which it gave to international commerce, which itself reflected two factors in France’s recovery: confidence in the future which was seen in the capital invested in commerce and agriculture; and the greater security to be found on France’s roads and rivers, which made the conveying of goods a less risky undertaking. It was in these, much more favourable, economic and social conditions that the French population, which had fallen by about two-thirds in the past century and a half, began to mark a considerable rise.
The decade or so after 1450 also saw the resolution of another major problem, that of the restoration of property confiscated by the Lancastrian kings and given to their supporters who had, by now, largely left for England. By good management and the adoption of a flexible approach to the law (the matter was one which might have given rise to many disputes which both legal claims and emotional memories could easily have fuelled), this potential problem was soon defused, and a major step in the ‘re-establishment of social peace’ in a country so recently divided was successfully carried out.2
Linked to these steps to restore the economy and the social order were other developments, the products of a century or so, which were greatly to influence the future. One such was the evolution of the army, and its place within society. The Hundred Years War had been the cause of great developments in this regard, the most significant ones occurring in France. If, in 1350, the French army was, institutionally, less advanced than that of England, by 1450 the reverse was certainly the case. This was due to a number of factors. As events in 1449–50 showed, France’s ability to rid her territory of the enemy depended upon her army; England had never experienced this need, and had therefore not developed such a force which, in France, was an arm of the growing French state, under the control of the crown, benefitting from a primitive form of career structure. By the time the English came to be driven out, France had taken her first, active steps towards the creation of a permanent army which would exist in periods of both war and peace.
Nor was France alone. The dukes of Brittany employed soldiers on a permanent basis from the mid-fifteenth century, while in the 1470s a series of ordinances issued by Charles, duke of Burgundy, established in detail the organisation of the new permanent ducal army whose members, when not needed in war, could serve in garrisons and in the service of the developing artillery trains. By contrast, England had not yet advanced down the road towards the establishment of a permanent army; while Scotland had no paid contract armies at all, relying on the service of able-bodied men freely given in time of crisis.3
Costs of maintaining an army were high. Taxes went up by leaps and bounds, the taille increasing threefold between 1470 and 1484. There appeared to be good reasons for this. Wages had to be paid, and training cost money. Weapons had to be provided: cannon, which only the state could afford, had to be forged, and gunpowder manufactured. The army had to be fed and billeted, which meant the erection of new buildings or the modification of existing ones. These were only beginnings, yet they were expensive ones. And, as in all organisations, a bureaucracy had to be set up which, inevitably, contributed its share (some thought too great a share) towards the growing cost of employing a permanent army.
It was the lawyer, Sir John Fortescue, who emphasised the different styles of making laws and raising taxes which characterised France and England in the fifteenth century. France, he said, was ruled with regal authority (‘dominium regale’), England in a manner tempered by the consent of the ruled (‘dominium politicum et regale’). To what extent did these traditions affect another factor closely associated with war, the development of taxation?
Recent work has shown what was happening in England in the first half of the fourteenth century. Taxation to meet the needs of war had to be voted if the need were proved. That much was settled early in the period. Taxation was raised nationally, and it was spent as the king wished to spend it, although advice on the matter might be given. In the middle years of the century, in 1356, the wool subsidy was voted for the coming six years, the sum raised to be used for the defence and safeguard of trade. This vote was an important one, for it went beyond immediate needs, and showed that the representatives who met in Parliament were appreciative of developments which, before long, would make taxes permanent, albeit voted in Parliament.
It is important to stress that the demands of war did not always lead to a situation of ‘confrontation politics’ between king and people, even though Parliaments were frequently haunted by the problems arising out of the need to provide money for war. In practice, the nation’s peril was normally recognised and its obligation to respond in fiscal terms was met, something which was helped by the presence in Parliament of men who fought in the war and were able to give an active lead in the voting of taxes. It was only in other matters, those which concerned the country’s broader welfare, and which were dealt with after those of defence had been considered, that differences of opinion between king and people might arise. But serious bargaining, and the making of ‘political’ concessions by one side or the other over matters regarding war did not take place. Both king and Parliament, in their different ways, reflected the unity of the nation. If the unity were threatened, they acted in concert. The traditional English view of Parliament as a meeting place where the king struck deals with his people, who thereby forced him to rule with consent (the ‘constitutional’ argument) needs some modification.4
In France, by contrast, two different traditions had developed. One was the general manipulation of the coinage by the crown which enabled certain kings, notably Philip IV, Charles IV, Charles VI, and Charles VII to debase coinage in their favour. Such methods were unpopular; but for short periods they worked. The other traditon was that of raising taxes through the votes of assemblies, not, normally, assemblies on a national scale as was the custom in England, but meetings convened at provincial level, at which local interests often had the better of national ones. In contrast with the situation in England, the weakness of the French estates is well known, so that the monarchy found relatively little difficulty in obtaining the sums which it sought.5 When combined with the undoubted authority of the crown in the matter of money supply (what Richelieu would one day call ‘puissance du prince’) this made for a situation in which the effective power of the crown to obtain money for war, in particular in times of justifiable necessity, was very considerable.
Not surprisingly, then, although Philip IV once experienced opposition when taxes voted him for the needs of defence were not reimbursed when the necessity which had justified the royal demand had passed, some fifty years later the climate had so changed that taxation in France had become all but permanent. The causes of this development are not difficult to find: a state of almost continuous war had, as its corollary, permanent taxation, while the need to raise the ransom of King John II, and combat the routiers who threatened the internal stability of France (both evidence of grave necessity), led to regular taxation which few opposed. When, nearly a century later, Charles VII took the further step of creating a permanent army, at a time when the country was, once more, under threat from foot-loose soldiers, he did so knowing that, in an historical situation which had long been developing in favour of the monarchy, he could safely count on raising the money to support it. Jean Juvénal des Ursins might chide him for raising taxes ‘sans le consentement de vos trois estas’: but even des Ursins must have known that his protest would have no effect.
What such developments in France might lead to was a matter over which opinions differed. In the mind of Jean Juvénal des Ursins, they provoked a distinct sense of unease, although he conceded that an army might bring order to a divided society, with beneficial results to the economy. The cost, in financial terms, would be a high one. To Fortescue, an army of this kind could be an instrument of tyranny, both through the unbridled behaviour of the soldiery and the cost of taxation required to support them. Thomas Basin was inclined to agree; in his view the nobility itself provided the king with a sufficiently adequate army. As for Philippe de Commynes, he emphasised that what people had against the concept of the permanent army was not its permanence but its cost, which caused great hardship and a dramatic rise in the level of taxation in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Tyranny there might be; but it would be fiscal rather than military.
War and its needs – the judgement of historians is almost unanimous – made huge and ever-growing demands upon the finances of nations. Indeed, it may be argued that the development of public finance was to prove to have been one of the major changes caused by the Hundred Years War. But it had some unforeseen and undesirable results. Mézières and des Ursins were not alone in voicing their complaint that it was the extension of the state’s ability to tax, on the grounds of the needs of war, which led to the lavish patronage of the courts, royal and princely, to which men attached themselves in the hope of winning work, favour, and material rewards. As des Ursins told Charles VII, money raised to pay for the public good but then spent on other things, such as luxury goods, should rest uneasily on the royal conscience.
The Hundred Years War may have been neither a turning point nor a watershed, but it did have important effects upon the society of the time, not least in the social and economic fields. Those who have argued that the war was profitable to one side and loss-causing to the other have not gained much support. Certainly, individuals gained from war. But whole groups? That is far less evident. None the less, some historians have recently tended to the argument that war caused a ‘redistribution’ of wealth in France and England, in which, for instance, the clergy, bowing to pressure to contribute to the costs of war and, in particular, to those of local defence, found themselves paying very substantial sums in direct taxes, thereby placing their wealth at the disposal of the wider community.
Taxation, then, was a prime means of ‘redistribution’. In time of war, not only did royal taxation increase, but so, too, did royal expenditure. And since expenditure on war was very varied (involving, for instance, both the purchase of materials and food in large quantities, and the payment of wages on an even bigger scale), many came to benefit, in one way or another, from this increase in public spending. Because it gave the crowns of both France and England control of greatly increased sums of money, war also gave them more power and influence in the patronage which they could exercise. Having received money to meet a military emergency, kings had no formal legal obligation to account for it. None the less, this was a very sensitive matter and, in 1377, the Commons insisted on the appointment of two treasurers for war to help allay suspicion of mis-spending. In France, in the meanwhile, the criticisms made on how money was spent make it evident that there was much jockeying and in-fighting at the court to ensure that, however it was spent, whether on the financing of military expenditure or on the wages of the burgeoning number of administrators and office-holders, those with influence should get their share.
Money was power, and men struggled for possession of it, the courts of kings being the principal focal points of that struggle. The nobility, often in economic difficulty as a result of declining revenues and the high cost of going to war, turned to a new means of making ends meet, war in the service of the crown, with whom the nobility, particularly that of France, now entered a new relationship. Even in England members of the nobility were unlikely to protest too strongly against the taxes which both they and their tenants had to pay for war. For that very same war would ensure that money would come back to them, for some in larger sums than they had paid out in taxation.
War provided opportunities to the nobility of the two countries. There would be chances of winning booty, ransoms, and other material benefits. War gave members of the nobility the opportunity of achieving reputation, both among their equals and others. It presented them, too, with the chance of fulfilling one of the roles which justified their very existence and privileged position: the task of defending a people in time of imminent danger. And all this was to be done at the country’s expense, through taxation, much of which was received by the nobility in the form of wages or pensions for the fulfilment of military and administrative duties. One can understand why war might be popular among those who fought it under such conditions.
Equally, one can appreciate the disgust of those who felt let down (as many did in France in 1356) when the nobility, paid out of public funds, allowed itself to be defeated by the English. The widening gap, apparent in the social commentaries of the late fourteenth century, between the fighting nobility and the growing army of office-holders, on the one hand, and the ‘ordinary’ people, on the other, shows how war could become a divisive factor in late medieval society.
‘Redistribution’ and change did not stop at the level of the nobility. The increasingly wide involvement of many groups and occupations in war also meant that their members stood to lose and gain from war’s activities. We know that whole communities died, or at least declined, as the direct result of the effects of war upon their main, economic, activities, which might be trade or fishing. Others, including some large ones, had to redirect their commercial enterprise in response to political changes caused by war. For some years after 1453 the wine trade of Gascony was virtually denied to the English, so that a port such as Bristol began to seek other markets. Likewise the Gascons, still left with wines to sell, began to supply a wider market than before, to their evident advantage. There is good reason for thinking that war had a positive effect in broadening out the trading patterns of late medieval Europe.
War was also an opportunity to those who used the conditions arising out of war for their own profit. These were the early entrepreneurs, the purveyors who supplied the armies, or the builders who, like those who helped Edward I to construct his castles in north Wales, made considerable profits out of war and its needs. Others took advantage of depressed prices to buy up land. As France recovered in the years after the defeat of the English, royal employees living in Paris (they often had the money) bought up land and properties going at knock-down prices in some of the regions adjacent to the capital. These were the men who wanted to register their advancement by investing in land in the country, a phenomenon which has been noted as occurring in England as well, as the careers of several war captains, such as Sir John Fastolf and Sir William Oldhall, clearly show.
Finally, we may note that French historians of our time have increasingly emphasised the effects which war had upon the growth of the modern state. For France a convincing case can be made in this respect. There is no doubt that the period of conflict against England witnessed a growing awareness of what constituted ‘France’, her national identity, her growing territorial integrity, and the authority which her rulers could exercise over her. France was now a nation, whose king was no longer a feudal lord but the ruler of aregnum, with subjects rather than vassals. The requirements of national defence could now be imposed upon all Frenchmen, in whatever part of the kingdom they lived: so much was implied by the establishment of the francs-archers in 1448. The war against England had become a national war, directed by the state which became visible and personified in the men who, appointed by the king, institutionalised war by organising, co-ordinating, and channelling the nation’s effort.
Was the war as influential in this respect in England? As already suggested,6 there is good reason for saying that the administrative system which the English kings used to organise war against France was fundamentally the same as that created well before Edward I began his wars against the Welsh, the Scots, and the French in the late thirteenth century. What is important and impressive is how this system, based upon the Exchequer and the Wardrobe, was made to expand, but without its original character experiencing fundamental change. Equally, we must recognise that English society had a homogeneity which, because it can be dated to the legal and administrative developments of the twelfth century, already existed long before the Hundred Years War began. It is true that the growth of Parliament as an institution in the fourteenth century was accelerated by the opportunities which the war (in particular its mismanagement) presented. Yet little could have been achieved in this respect had the fundamental basis of parliamentary power and authority, the fact that, in some way, it represented the nation, not already been established in the reigns of Edward I and Edward II.
‘Whether one likes it or not, war has played for better or for worse a fundamental part in the whole process of historical change.’7 None would dispute the general validity of this opinion. But in comparing two societies, even two neighbouring societies, over a period of time, we must be ready to note not merely comparisons, but contrasts, too. History and geography both had a vital role in deciding how the kingdoms of France and England would develop. In more than one respect, in law and institutions, for example, England established a good lead over France. Even the developments which took place in thirteenth-century France were not effective enough, or of the kind needed, to counter the powerful English thrusts of the early phase of the Hundred Years War. France lacked that sense of unity which England, a smaller country, already possessed. She lacked the will to act as one, and, as a consequence, the machinery to do this in an emergency was lacking, too. It is to the credit of the French monarchy that, in the vital half-century spanning the years c. 1330 – c. 1380, the will to create a war machine with the ability to work both in low gear (without the need to be started ‘from cold’ every time war was undertaken) and in high became a reality. Originally at a disadvantage, the French nation joined with its monarchy to place itself on a war-footing. Since the conflict was settled largely in its territory, one may say that the French people had little choice but to react in this way. By contrast, the English employed more traditional methods to galvanise and organise themselves for war. Was it because the French moved more with the times and employed methods which looked more to the future that they had the last laugh? Perhaps so.
1 Cited by M. Mollai, Le commerce maritime normand à la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1952), p. 75
2 A. Bossuat ‘The re-establishment of peace in society during the reign of Charles VII’, The recovery of France in the fifteenth century, ed. P. S. Lewis (London, 1971), pp. 60–81.
3 M. Jones, ‘L’armée bretonne, 1449–1491: structures et carrières’, La France de la fin du xve siècle: renouveau et apogée, ed. B. Chevalier and P. Contamine (Paris, 1985), pp. 147–65; Vaughan, Charles the Bold, ch. 6; A. Grant, Independence and nationhood. Scotland, 1306–1469 (London, 1984), p. 34.
4 See the work of G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament and public finance in medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975), and his ‘War and the emergence of the English Parliament, 1297–1360’, J. Med. H., 2 (1976), 35–56. See also the appreciation by J.-P. Genet, ‘Les débuts de l’impôt national en Angleterre’, Annales, 34 (1979), 348–54.
5 P. S. Lewis, ‘The failure of the French medieval estates’, P&P, 23 (1962), 3–24; reprinted in the author’s Essays in later medieval French history (London, 1985), pp. 105–26. See also A. R. Myers, ‘The English Parliament and the French estates general in the middle ages’, Album Helen Maud Cam. Studies presented to the international commission for the history of representative and parliamentary institutions XXIV (Louvain: Paris, 1961), pp. 139–53
6 Ch. 4, pp. 108–9 above.
7 M. Howard, The causes of war and other essays (London, 1983), p. 151.