Yet there was no good reason why it should not recover. The treaty of Brétigny brought a measure of peace to both England and France. Open hostilities, at least, were at an end. But there were problems to be resolved. One was that, arising from the transfer of lands from one allegiance to the other, many found themselves under a new lord; and some did not like it. A more serious problem was what to do with the soldiers who, now accustomed to fighting and to war’s many attractions, were finding themselves without an occupation. The 1350s had seen relatively little fighting at an ‘official’ level, but the decade had witnessed the growth, in both numbers and size, of bodies of soldiers who, although sometimes finding local employment, more often than not roamed the countryside in search of adventure and the easy pickings of war. Peace made it more likely that their number would increase. Certainly, returning soldiers gave the authorities in England many a headache, the country’s justices being ordered in 1360 to see that the peace was not broken. Many Englishmen remained in France and joined the bands of soldiers who made their services available to whoever would lead or employ them. The significance of the danger which they constituted soon became apparent. On 6 April 1362 these routiersmet and defeated a royal army at Brignais, in the Rhône valley. Some, too, entered the services of Charles of Navarre and helped to spread disorder in Normandy and the surrounding areas. On 16 May 1364, however, another army under Bertrand du Guesclin, a Breton who had himself led such troops before entering the king’s service, defeated the Navarrese army, helped by some English, at Cocherel, in south-eastern Normandy. The event was significant, for it followed hard upon the death in April of King John II in England, where he was still a prisoner. Cocherel witnessed an important blow struck for royal authority by an army under a commander of undoubted skill and experience. With the defeat at Brignais avenged, Charles V, who had just succeeded his father as king, could go to his coronation a satisfied man.
Cocherel was a move in the right direction. But it was soon partly cancelled by the victory of the English-backed Montfortists at the battle of Auray, in southern Brittany, on 29 September 1364, at which Charles de Blois was killed and du Guesclin, not for the last time, was taken prisoner. This event led to a formal settlement of the Breton succession after more than twenty years of intermittent war. It also released more soldiers who were free to seek a living by fighting elsewhere. However, some sort of a solution to what was becoming an endemic problem was soon found. At the request of Henry of Trastamara, then seeking to wrest the succession of the kingdom of Castile from his half-brother, Peter, known as ‘the Cruel’, French troops, under du Guesclin, recently ransomed, crossed over into Spain to help bring about the defeat of Peter. Feeling himself threatened, Peter appealed for help to Edward III who authorised the Black Prince, since 1362 prince (and effective ruler) of Aquitaine, to intervene. The threat of alliance between the king of France and an unfriendly ruler of northern Spain was one which must have worried the English in Bordeaux. There was, in addition, an important prize at stake, the use of the Castilian galley fleet, perhaps the finest in Europe, with which the French, in particular, could give a much-needed boost to their war efforts at sea. This was something which the English would do their utmost to prevent happening. Responding to the call, the Black Prince raised a force, and, in the early spring of 1367, crossed into northern Spain through Navarre, whose king, Charles, had only recently received English help in Normandy. On 3 April his army, linked to that of King Peter, met the French and Henry of Trastamara’s force at Nájera (Fr. Navarrette). For a second time du Guesclin found himself a prisoner of the English, who routed his army. The Black Prince had just achieved the third, and final, great victory of his career.
Contrary to what some historians have thought, the campaign in Spain was not a mere side issue.5 It reflected the growing problem of how to deal with surplus manpower once peace had been made in a major theatre of war. It also served to show that the Hundred Years War was no longer simply a conflict between England and France: others were being caught up in it, too. But although it brought victory to the Black Prince, the battle of Nájera was to be the cause of the renewal of the war which had been halted in 1360. The English had agreed to fight in Spain if paid to do so. Yet the money had never come. Nor did Peter regain effective control of his kingdom as Henry, although defeated at Nájera, staged a political comeback. In March 1369, the armies of the two men met at Montiel, where that of Peter was defeated and the king himself was murdered by his half-brother and rival.
By this time, however, the Black Prince was in difficulties. Heavily in debt to certain members of his nobility and to routier captains, and let down by his Castilian ally, he had had to seek the financial resources with which to pay for his Spanish expedition. His requests for money in Aquitaine met with resistance, for in a real sense the expedition had brought little or no advantage to the duchy. Jean d’Armagnac, following on the reluctance of the estates, meeting at Angouleme, to contribute their share of a tax, refused to allow it to be collected in his lands, pleading ancient privileges which had always been enjoyed locally. When the Black Prince announced measures against him, Armagnac first appealed to Edward III; on receiving an unfavourable response, he took the matter further and appealed to the king of France, Charles V. In this he was joined by his nephew, the lord of Albret, who lodged a similar grievance against the Black Prince.
Charles V could scarcely avoid having to respond to the appeals lodged by Albret and Armagnac. In legal terms it seemed that he was free to intervene; his claim to exercise sovereignty in Aquitaine had not been renounced in 1360. Anxious to do things properly, however, Charles sought the best specialist advice which he could get; he found it by consulting eminent jurists of the legal centres of Bologna, Montpellier, Orléans, and Toulouse. Their opinion was that Charles was entitled to receive the appeals made to him. In December 1368 he announced that he would do this. In June 1369, in retaliation, Edward III resumed the use of the title ‘king of France’. Towards the end of the year, in November, the French king confiscated Aquitaine. The two kingdoms were once more at war.
The nature of the conflict fought in the 1370s was to be very different from that of earlier decades, and its effects more dramatic. The French were not unprepared, and almost immediately took the offensive. A glance at the map on p. xii will show that the enlarged Aquitaine which the English had to defend had very long frontiers, vulnerable to small mobile forces which the French now used to excellent effect. In 1371 the Black Prince, a sick man, retired from the thankless task of ruling Aquitaine, and the English command now became fragmented. Nor did English forces, when sent to France, properly encounter the enemy. The use of Fabian tactics by the French frustrated the English who spent large sums on the war, but to little purpose. The 1370s saw England neglect the serious implications of this essentially defensive war, so that the chevauchées led by Sir Robert Knolles in 1370 and John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third surviving son, in 1373 achieved little military advantage. The days of Crécy and Poitiers were over.
Little by little, the French initiative paid off, as their armies ‘reoccupied’ first those parts ceded by treaty and then much of the duchy of Aquitaine itself In 1371, Charles V and Charles of Navarre came to terms. In Brittany, in spite of the English success of Auray, opponents drove out Duke John IV from his duchy. At sea, the Franco-Castilian alliance, which had sprung from the events in Spain between 1366 and 1369, began to have effect. In the summer of 1372 an English fleet was defeated by Castilian galleys off the port of La Rochelle, and many Englishmen were taken as prisoners to Spain. For some, the war was brought much nearer home when the French (with their Castilian allies) began once again to attack and plunder towns and villages on the south coast of England, the legitimate activities of English fishermen being among those which suffered from such raids. Not surprisingly, this lack of success provoked an outcry in England, accustomed more to victory than defeat. Protests in 1371 were followed by further outbursts in 1376 in the so-called ‘Good Parliament’, whose members suspected that the search for personal profit had, in some cases, taken precedence over the pursuit of the national advantage. In the midst of these events, in June 1376, the Black Prince died. A year later his father followed him to the grave.
As contemporary writing testifies, it was the sad end of a glorious period in English history. In view of the lack of English success in the past years, the war was now being discussed in terms which suited the French, the emphasis being on the feudal interpretation of the treaty of Brétigny. Once again, papal envoys took a leading part in the proceedings and, on this occasion, a possible way out was found. John of Gaunt, it was proposed, would become a French prince and, through him, the link with England and its royal family would be maintained while at the same time the fundamental English objection that their king should not be a vassal of the king of France would be met. If the plan failed, it was because of Gaunt’s personal ambitions in Spain, rather than because of any objection of principle to the scheme. For the while the war went on.6
Other issues and events now came to complicate events. In England the death of Edward III placed his grandson, Richard II, the surviving son of the Black Prince, upon the throne. Richard was to prove one of the most enigmatic of kings. Two factors about him concern this story. He was young, only ten years old, when he came to the throne. Further, as a result of his youth, he had not known the great days of English victories in France, although these had been concerned with the activities of his father, and he himself had been born in Bordeaux not long before his father had crossed to Spain to win his final victory. The effect was to make Richard more inclined to peace than to war: war, he was to tell Parliament in 1397, caused great harm and unnecessary destruction to both kingdoms,7 a view almost certainly shared by his near contemporary, Charles VI, who had succeeded his father in 1380, a year which also witnessed the death of du Guesclin. Both kings came to be surrounded by uncles who sought to further war for their own ends. Each, in his own way, reacted against avuncular pressure. Both came to favour peace.
It is evident that many had come to feel like them. Late in the 1370s and early in the 1380s the world order, already upset by long war, seemed set to suffer yet further disruption. In 1378 a schism, occasioned by a double election to the papacy, split the western Church. There were now not only two popes but two centres of papal authority, Rome and Avignon. What was worse, England and France supported opposing sides on this issue, so that the Schism, one of the most important factors dividing western Christianity in the years 1378–1417, also accentuated the existing political divisions between the two countries. It is open to debate whether the Hundred Years War helped to prolong the Schism within the Church, but that the Schism hardened the attitudes of the French and English nations to each other is undoubted. The church councils which were called in the first three decades of the fifteenth century gave each side reason and opportunity to seek support for its own attitude to the war before the remainder of Christendom. The Schism, we may say, tragically helped to polarise increasingly strong nationalist attitudes towards the war.
Domestic troubles also occurred. The summer of 1381 saw the outbreak of the Peasants’ Revolt in England, an uprising against the government of the day, to whose causes the financial demands of war and the inability (or unwillingness?) of the royal administration to defend adequately the coast of southern England against French and Castilian incursions of increasing frequency and intensity certainly contributed. In June 1382 troubles in Rouen, caused partly by a reaction to the French crown’s fiscal demands, were suppressed with some vigour; the events may have lost Charles VI friends and supporters in Normandy, still an area to be tended with attention by the royal authority in Paris. In 1380 it had been the turn of Thomas, earl of Buckingham, uncle of Richard II, to lead what would prove to be the last English expedition to France in the fourteenth century, while in 1383 the religious divisions of Europe were underlined by the sending of a force led by Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, into Flanders under the guise of a crusade.8 Neither produced any effects. In 1386 England was fortunate not to experience invasion from France, planned by the king’s uncle, Philip, duke of Burgundy, with support not only from Brittany and Flanders but from much of the kingdom of France itself.
Yet, in spite of the aggressive spirit found among many of the nobility on both sides of the Channel, and of Richard II’s personal participation in an expedition in 1385 against the Scots, at that moment in receipt of French assistance, the idea of peace was now increasingly in the air. In England the criticism of continued military activity by John Wyclif, the opposition to war expressed by men of Lollard sympathies such as William Swynderby, the lassitude provoked by so many years of conflict, mirrored in some of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Go wer,9 are indicative both of people’s reflection regarding the morality of war and the ways in which it was being fought, and of the apparent futility of allowing it to continue along its present drift, no real advantage accruing to either side in spite of the great cost, both human and financial, to all. This kind of sentiment was reflected in France, where the influential courtier, Philippe de Mézières, in works of a semipolemical nature (one of them an open letter on peace addressed to Richard II) asked whether the long war should continue.
Other factors seemed to encourage a movement towards peace with which both kings appeared to sympathise. For all its successes, the French military effort of the 1370s and 1380s had failed to dislodge the English hold in France, particularly in the south-west. True, by the time that Edward III’s long reign ended, only Bordeaux, Bayonne, and a coastal strip in that region could be controlled effectively by the English administration. None the less the fact was that the English had hung on, and there seemed little chance that they would be dislodged.
So peace was formally sought. The possible way forward, ‘the separation of England and Aquitaine and the creation of a separate English dynasty in the duchy’, had already been proposed in 1377. In 1383, the proposal got as far as a draft. Seven years later, in 1390, Richard created his uncle, John of Gaunt, duke of Aquitaine for life, an act of good intent, and a step in the right direction. Then, in 1393, a provisional agreement was reached giving the English Calais (which they already held) and that part of Aquitaine south of the river Charente (much of south-west France which was largely out of their hands at this time), all this to be alienated to Gaunt in the near future. Yet whatever the hopes of kings and their legal advisers, they were not shared by the people themselves. In April 1394 the population of much of the area rose in support of its attachment to the crown of England. In spite of all efforts, the well-intentioned plan of the negotiators was spoiled by the people themselves.10
The agreement had involved some radical thinking regarding the historic and legal legacy of Aquitaine. A way of circumventing various objections had been found without offending too many interests. Peace was clearly desired, and if it could not be arranged on these agreed terms, it must be found by other means. Between 1394 and 1396 negotiations continued, and in March 1396 the two sides agreed to a truce of twenty-eight years and the marriage of Richard II to one of Charles VI’s daughters, Isabella, who was to bring with her a large dowry. Once again, even if the main points at issue had been side-stepped, the two countries were at peace, and had agreed to be so for a whole generation.