CHAPTER X

Sluys and Tournai: The War of the Albrets 1340

The main lines of English naval strategy in 1340 were laid down on 23 January at Westminster at a meeting between the royal Council and shipmasters from the main English ports. Unusually for an operational matter, they were approved by Parliament, which was then in session. Two, perhaps questionable, assumptions seem to have been made: first, that the French would spend their energy in raids on the English coast rather than try to contest the army’s passage of the North Sea; second, that because France no longer had the use of the Flemish ports only the south coast was really threatened. The ports of the West Country agreed to provide seventy large ships of 100 tons or more, contributing to the cost only what they could afford, which was unlikely to be much. The Cinque Ports agreed to provide twenty ships of the same size and London another nine, the cost of which would be shared equally between the local communities and the King. Except perhaps for the Londoners all the maritime communities had promised more large ships than they had. But the government took their promises seriously. On 12 February 1340 it ordered all of these vessels to assemble at Dartmouth and Winchelsea by 26 March 1340. Later, in April, both fleets were ordered to wait in Rye Bay, ready to intercept any armada coming from the French Channel ports. This left at Edward’s disposal for the crossing of the North Sea all the ocean-going ships, large or small, of the northern Admiralty and the smaller ships from the other parts of England. Orders were issued to requisition these on 6 March 1340. Most of them were only fit for service as transports. For fighting ships Edward counted on Yarmouth and on a small contingent furnished by the Flemings.¹

The English government made a determined attempt, yet again, to hire galleys in the Mediterranean. There was an application to the Venetian Republic for forty of them, the hire to be paid in bullion in advance. The Venetians returned an evasive answer. Nicolino Fieschi, now in semipermanent residence as Edward’s agent at the papal court in Avignon, was largely concerned with the hiring of warships in southern France and the obstruction of Philip VI’s attempts to do the same. Precisely what he achieved is not known but he was diligent enough to cause serious concern to French officials. They decided to baulk his plans by a bold and illegal move. One night in April some of them kidnapped him from his house in Avignon and dragged him half-dressed to Fort Saint-André, the huge castle at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon on the French side of the Rhône, a violation of his diplomatic immunity which resulted in a brief but serious rift between the papacy and the French government. The ambassador was released early in June, by which time it was too late to hire Mediterranean galleys for a summer campaign.²

There was, however, a consolation prize of immeasurable value. For in the first few months of the year 1340 the English succeeded by a succession of coups de main in depriving Philip VI of most of his own galley fleet.

In September 1339 there was a popular revolution in Genoa. The great patrician families, both Guelph and Ghibelline, were dislodged, and power fell into the hands of a skilful plebeian demagogue, Simon Boccanegra. It was an event of unexpected significance for the French government. The prime movers had been the disgruntled mariners of Ayton Doria’s galleys who had returned home after the mutiny at Boulogne. The new regime therefore had no reason to favour the French government or help them to replace the seamen that they had lost. The English moved quickly to exploit the rift. During the winter both governments had agents in Genoa intriguing on their behalf. The French agents succeeded in hiring some crossbowmen and a small number of galleys. But the shipmasters were bought off by the English, who paid them a total of 1,100 marks to do nothing. The money was obtained at short notice from the Bardi bank in Florence. This remarkable (and inexpensive) coup seems to have been the work of Niccolo Usomare, Edward’s Genoese Constable of Bordeaux, who passed many months in the city at this time, engaged in what the English government darkly called ‘great dangers, labours and expenses’.³

The French-built galley fleet at the beginning of 1340 numbered twenty-two vessels. They would usually have been laid up for the winter in the arsenal at Rouen. However, because they were required to escort a convoy to La Rochelle as soon as the weather permitted, they had been kept beached and ready for use.⁴ Early in January 1340 some English seamen of the Cinque Ports captured at sea a ship of Boulogne and took for ransom four merchants whom they found on board. When these men were interrogated in England they revealed that there were eighteen unmanned galleys beached in Boulogne harbour guarded by just six watchmen. On about 14 January 1340 the English raided Boulogne. A fleet of small vessels of the Cinque Ports approached the place under cover of a heavy mist. They were not seen by the guards until they were actually within the harbour. Complete surprise was achieved. The English took over the lower town while they destroyed the ships within the harbour and the buildings around. It took several hours for the French in the upper town to collect their forces and attack the raiders. After fierce fighting the English were expelled with heavy casualties. But by this time they had burned all eighteen galleys together with their entire equipment of oars, sails and weapons which had been stored in a warehouse nearby. Twenty-four merchantmen were also destroyed.⁵

The loss of these powerful ships and the impossibility of finding either ships or crews in Italy was a grave setback for the French. It left them with just four of their own galleys, which had been at Leure in the mouth of the Seine instead of at Boulogne. There were enough Italian oarsmen still in Philip’s service to crew two Genoese galleys. They were placed under the command of one of Doria’s captains, a colourful Mediterranean corsair called Pietro Barbavera whom the French commanders never entirely trusted. In addition there were twenty-two capacious but rather less powerful oared barges. Most of these were kept at Abbeville and Dieppe.⁶ This fleet was not negligible but it was not a fleet for offensive operations on a large scale. The direct result of the Boulogne raid was that the French lost the initiative in the Channel and North Sea for the first time since the outbreak of the war at sea in 1336. The English were able to mount cross-Channel raids with growing confidence. Dieppe was attacked at the end of January 1340. Le Tréport and Mers were raided (again) in May.⁷ Much more significant was the decision, which was forced on the French by the loss of the galleys, to fight a purely defensive battle against Edward III’s invasion fleet. Instead of seeking to blockade it in its home ports or attack it in mid-ocean it was resolved simply to obstruct its access to the mouths of the great rivers north of Flanders. Mobility was less important for this purpose. It could be done with armed merchantmen, the same kind of vessels as the English had been using as improvised warships for many years.

This decision, which led to the disaster at Sluys in June, appears to have been made in late January or early February 1340 and was put into effect with characteristic determination and bureaucratic competence. Philip decreed into being a Great Army of the Sea. It was to consist of 200 of the largest ships which could be found from his own resources or requisitioned in the ports of Picardy and Normandy. Unlike the English government the French paid prompt and reasonably generous compensation for requisitioning ships, including a month’s hire and wages in advance. The cost, which would be prodigious, was to be met by levying a heavy tax on the province of Normandy. It is some indication of the burden falling on a single region of France that the Crown expected to receive no less than 300,000 l.t. from this source in addition to the ships and crews (nearly three-quarters of the total) which the Norman maritime communities were contributing and the payments which many Norman towns and districts had had to make in lieu of military service in the land army. Nevertheless the Normans agreed. Collection began on 12 February 1340.⁸

Edward III was informed more or less accurately of the extent of the damage inflicted at Boulogne. But he failed to draw the conclusion that a powerful French descent on the south coast was now much less likely to occur. Moreover, although spies (generally Flemings) continued to be sent into France their reports were for some reason less informative in 1340 than they had been hitherto, and it was not until a surprisingly late stage that Edward realized what the French were planning to do. Consequently the arrangements made in January and February 1340, which involved the use of many of his largest vessels for the defence of the south coast, were left unchanged.

The transports to carry the army and its supplies were expected to be ready by Palm Sunday, 9 April 1340. Embarkation was to take place at two points, in the Pool of Orwell and in the Downs off Sandwich. Although Edward III was now for the first time imposing timetables which allowed for some slippage, the usual difficulties and delays were intensely frustrating against a background of rapid military movement on the continent. In early May 1340 the French softening-up raids on Hainault had begun and urgent appeals for help were arriving in England. One of the Count of Hainault’s knights had arrived to report on events. He entered upon a scene of depressing disorganization and unreadiness. The recruitment of troops was going badly. The Welsh arrived in London, to find no ships or victuals, and had to be sent home. Except for the fleets of Yarmouth and the Cinque Ports no ships had arrived at either of the two embarkation points. Embarkation was postponed on 4 May and again two days later. On 16 May 1340, just before the punctual departure of the Duke of Normandy’s army from Saint-Quentin, the English royal Council met in a mood of foreboding and gloom in the Carmelite convent of London to consider a further and longer postponement. By this time the formal deadline for the gathering of the ships had been put back to 12 June 1340, which would indicate a sailing date of about the 20th. Delay seemed inevitable but postponement was rejected.⁹

The pace of France’s naval preparations was dictated by the collection of money from the Normans. Their tax payments were delivered in specie by the provincial treasurers in Rouen and loaded directly on to pack animals for carriage to the ports. In the space of seven weeks, from 1 April to 20 May 1340, 61,000 l.t. were received and laid out in advances to shipmasters. The whole of the Norman fleet was crewed, equipped and paid by the last week of May 1340. On the 26th it sailed from Harfleur. The ships of Picardy waited in their ports and joined the Normans as they sailed past. It was an impressive feat of administration. There were 6 galleys, 22 oared barges, 7 royal sailing ships and 167 requisitioned merchantmen, making a total of 202 vessels. The fleet carried more than 19,000 men of the maritime towns. But there were very few experienced soldiers, less than 500 crossbowmen and about 150 men-at-arms.¹⁰

On 4 June 1340 the King of England met his Council again, this time at Ipswich, to review their progress. The delays of April and May were not being made up. It was now clear that the only way of keeping to the timetable which he had set for himself was to cross the sea with a small entourage, his household troops and the principal noblemen and their retinues in those ships which were ready, leaving the others to follow as soon as might be. There were forty ships in the Pool on which up to 600 men and their horses and equipment might be embarked. This was what they decided to do. They did not yet know about the scale of French naval preparations nor about the movements of the French fleet, which had just passed Calais.¹¹

The Great Army of the Sea appeared in the Hondt on 8 June 1340. They swiftly and brutally occupied the island of Cadzand and anchored in the mouth of the River Zwin opposite the harbour of Sluys. The news passed rapidly through the Low Countries, spreading panic in coastal towns and drawing a great crowd of gapers to the foreshore to watch the denouement. The news reached the English government on 10 June 1340 when Archbishop Stratford received at Ipswich a messenger of the Duke of Guelders. In Edward’s quarters there was a succession of acerbic exchanges between the King and his advisers. Archbishop Stratford insisted that the size and strength of the French fleet at Sluys made it impossible to proceed with the expedition. However grave the consequences of abandoning the coalition (whose army was just then gathering to march on Thun-l’Évêque) they were not as grave as the capture or death of the King. Edward replied that it was out of the question to cancel the expedition. Stratford then walked out of the meeting. Robert Morley and John Crabbe, the two men in charge of the shipping arrangements, were summoned. They expressed the same view as Stratford had. Edward, in a vile temper, accused them of settling their advice in advance with the Archbishop and announced that the expedition would sail as planned. ‘Those who are afraid can stay at home.’ The most that Edward could be persuaded to do was to postpone his departure for a few days to enable additional ships to be found and arrangements to be made fortransforming a fleet of transports into a battle fleet. The horses, which had already been embarked, were taken off in order to make room for more fighting men. Biting messages were sent to every port which could be reached in time demanding the provision at once of every ship of over 40 tons’ burden. The King’s officers were ordered to brook no argument. Edward personally confronted the mariners of Great Yarmouth, who had so far provided less than half the ships which they had found for his service in 1338. Robert Ufford, the Earl of Suffolk’s son, put to sea at once with a small squadron and 100 men-at-arms to reconnoitre the Flemish coast.¹²

The result of all this activity was truly remarkable. The nearby harbours were emptied of shipping. The ships assembling in the Downs and the fleet of the Cinque Ports were brought up to the Pool of Orwell. The large ships of the western Admiralty joined them. They were no longer needed for coastal defence now that the French fleet had passed into the North Sea. An invasion fleet had been assembled by 20 June 1340 whose size cannot be precisely known but which seems from contemporary estimates to have comprised between 120 and 160 ships complete with victuals, equipment and crews. Edward set up his quarters in the Cog Thomas. Archbishop Stratford havered and then resigned.¹³

The English fleet passed the point of Harwich at dawn on 22 June 1340, blown by a strong north-westerly breeze.¹⁴ Late on the afternoon of the 23rd they stood off the Flemish coast, west of the opening of the Zwin estuary. Within the estuary the mass of the French fleet could just be seen, their sides built up and their bows, poops and masts fortified with timberworks ‘like a row of castles’. Including allies (some Flemish ships loyal to the Crown and some Spanish auxiliaries) their strength now stood at 213 vessels. On board one of them the French commanders gathered in council. Barbavera, the most experienced sailor among them, was becoming concerned by the confined anchorage in which the French fleet was moored. There was not enough room in the estuary for such a huge fleet to manoeuvre. The wind was blowing into the mouth of the river. He insisted that the admirals, Hugh Quiéret and Nicholas Béhuchet, should take their fleet out into the open sea that evening and attack the English from the windward quarter when they tried to land their men. But Quiéret and Béhuchet were no more inclined to listen to old seadogs than Edward III was. They were concerned that if they left for the open sea the English might slip past them and land their army in Flanders before they could intervene. So they drew up the ships in three lines across the mouth of the estuary like an army on land. In the first line they placed nineteen of their largest vessels including the captured Christopher, which stood out like a monument from the surrounding mass of shipping. Each line was chained together to form an impassable barrier to the enemy.

The English held their council of war a little later than the French. Reginald Cobham and two knights had been put ashore at Blankenberg to spy out the Sluys anchorage. They presented a full report of the battle order of the French fleet. From their account the English could see for themselves the weakness of the French position of which Barbavera had warned his superiors. They decided to hold back until the following day when they could attack with both wind and tide behind them.

The estuary of the Zwin silted up at the end of the fifteenth century and today the site of England’s greatest medieval naval battle is covered by reclaimed agricultural land and sand dunes. In 1340 the estuary was a stretch of shallow water about 3 miles wide at the entrance and penetrating some 10 miles inland towards the city of Bruges. It was enclosed on the north-eastern side by the low-lying island of Cadzand and on the west by a long dyke on which a huge crowd of armed Flemings stood watching. Along the west side lay the out-harbours of Bruges: Sluys, Termuiden and Damme. Like the French the English drew up their fleet in three battle lines. In the early afternoon of 24 June 1340 they began to bear down from the north on the entrance to the Zwin.

Among the French ships all was not well. They had been too long at their battle stations and the chained lines of vessels, which originally extended across the breadth of the bay, had drifted eastward piling the ships up against each other on the Cadzand shore and reducing their searoom still further. The chains were useless in these conditions. The admirals in a moment of belated wisdom ordered them to be cast off. The French fleet then tried to edge back towards the west. A detached vessel of their front line, theRiche deLeure, got entangled with the first of the English ships. These two ships grappled together at the edge of the scene while the English front line crunched into the French one.

The two front lines included the largest ships on each side: on the English side the ships of Yarmouth and the larger vessels of the Cinque Ports, including Edward III’s flagship the Cog Thomas; on the French side the captured Christopher, the St Denis, amonster carrying 200 seamen, and other large cogs of the royal fleet and the Seine ports. The technique was for each ship to moor itself inseparably to an enemy with hooks and grappling irons, to shower arrows at the enemy’s decks from the endcastles and masts and then to board and cut down the survivors. Both sides also used small but cumbersome stone-throwers and giant crossbows known as ‘springalds’, but the role of these machines was more dramatic than useful. The decisive advantage of the English ships lay in their much larger complement of non-mariners, experienced and well-equipped men-at-arms and archers. The longbow once again proved to be greatly superior to the crossbow used by the French and their Italian auxiliaries. It was more accurate. It had a longer range. Above all it could be fired at a very rapid rate, the arrows falling down on the French crews ‘like hail in winter’, as a Londoner described it; whereas crossbows had to be lowered and steadied at the stirrup while the wire was strenuously levered back between every firing. As the day wore on the French bowmen suffered the added discomfort of having to aim into the blinding sun.

10 Sluys and the Zwin Estuary, 24 June 1340

The front lines were locked in battle from about three o’clock in the afternoon. By about seven o’clock it was clear to the French ships in the rear lines that there had been a terrible massacre of their fellows in the front. They were unable to join in the fight, for their own front line lay between themselves and the English and they lacked the searoom to tack round by the west. Their own turn came in the evening when the English, penetrating through the remnants of the French front line, fell upon them. Because the smaller French ships had been placed in the second line the English now had the additional advantage of greater height from which to fire their weapons. Seeing how the battle was going, the Flemings now poured out of Sluys and the other Zwin harbours in their own ships and joined in the fighting, attacking the French from behind as the English did so from the front. As night began to fall the third French line, which consisted of Norman merchantmen led by the ships of Dieppe and the King’s oared barges, tried to escape from the cul de sac. The battle opened out into a series of skirmishes as the English tried to block their path. At about ten o’clock at night the fighting died down. Two ships fought on throughout the night. The Saint-Jame, the largest of the ships of Dieppe, and a ship of Sandwich belonging to the Prior of Christchurch were unable to disentangle themselves: when the English finally boarded the Saint-Jame at dawn on the following day they counted 400 bodies of the enemy.

The French had suffered a naval catastrophe on a scale unequalled until modern times. Of the 213 French ships present at the battle the English captured 190, including the Christopher and the Cog Edward taken from them in 1338, and several other ships of the same size. The six galleys under Barbavera’s command made use of their speed and manoeuvrability to flee as soon as it became clear that the French front line was failing. Four of the six oared barges based at Dieppe also got away.¹⁵ Thirteen others made good their escape in the early hours of 25 June 1340, pursued without success by John Crabbe with the Yarmouth fleet. The crews and troops on board the ships which did not escape were killed almost to a man. No quarter was given once a ship was boarded, and those who threw themselves into the sea, as many did, were picked up by the Flemings on the foreshore and clubbed to death. Even Froissart, that romantic poet of battles, recoiled from this ‘ferocious and horrible’ encounter. ‘On the sea,’ he wrote, ‘there is no retreat and no flight, and no survival but by fighting and abiding the judgement of fortune.’¹⁶ Edward reported with satisfaction to his son that every tide deposited more corpses on the Flanders coast. Between 16,000 and 18,000 Frenchmen lost their lives, including both admirals. Quiéret was killed when his ship was boarded. Béhuchet was recognized and taken for ransom. But the conventions of aristocratic warfare were not thought to apply to the ravager of the English south coast. Edward III had him hanged from the mast of the ship which he had commanded.

The effect on the morale of the French was very serious. The captains of the ‘sea frontier’, who usually had pitifully small forces at their disposal, were suddenly reinforced to meet the danger of a subsidiary landing on the coast of Normandy. Thirteen hundred extra troops were sent to the Cotentin peninsula alone and one of the Marshals was placed in command of them.¹⁷ Philip’s court fell to bickering and recrimination. Barbavera, whose flight at the height of the battle was bitterly recalled by the Normans who survived, was ordered to be arrested for treason. He was not reconciled with the government until the following year when balanced reflection on the disaster suggested that the Normans would have done better to listen to his advice. Béhuchet was posthumously reviled for his low birth and accused of deliberately excluding men-at-arms from his ships in order to save money. Thus began the tendency of the French nobility, which grew more noticeable as the wretched 1340s continued, to blame all their misfortunes on the crudeness and cowardice of the lower orders: the school of thought which declared after the battle that France was better off without the unruly pirates of the Norman ports and that the saving of their wages was an uncovenanted boon to emerge from the carnage. Philip VI at least did not think so. He was profoundly affected by the fate of the communities of the Norman coast who had lost almost all of their merchant ships and many of their menfolk. Among the survivors, a few of whom continued to find their way home during the months of July and August 1340, there were many who were so mutilated by their injuries that they would never work again. In 1342 an institution was founded at Leure for some of these men, a flash of sympathy in an age which rarely thought about the welfare of soldiers and hardly ever about the welfare of defeated men who would never fight again.¹⁸

The reaction of the English was predictable:

                     This was the bataile that fell in the Swin

                     Where many Normands made mekill din;

                     Wale war thay armed up to the chin

                     But God and Sir Edward gert thair boste blin.

Even before Edward III’s victory dispatches reached London on 28 June the capital was filled with rumours about a great victory. It meant more than the satisfaction of national assertiveness and francophobe instincts. The prevailing opinion that it meant an end of the French threat to the south and east coasts, although it was wrong, made much of the hardship of the past two years seem bearable. It became, after the failures which followed, the only bright memory of these years, the occasion commemorated on Edward III’s famous gold florin minted in dismal circumstances three years later: ‘IHC TRANSIENS PER MEDIUM ILLORUM IBAT’: ‘Jesus passing through the midst of them went his way’ (Luke 4:30).¹⁹

*

The French defeat at Sluys coincided with unwelcome news from an unexpected direction. In the final stages of the preparation of the French campaign in the Scheldt valley, alarming reports had begun to arrive from the south-west. A quiet time there had been one of the premises of French strategic planning. But the reports became worse. For a few weeks between April and July the French position appeared to be collapsing not only in the areas which they had conquered since the outbreak of the war but further afield in places which they had securely held for many years.

The origin of these events lay in a radical shift in the alliances of the three great noble houses of the south-west, Armagnac, Albret and Foix. At the outset of the fighting in 1337 all three families had with varying degrees of firmness been allies of France. The counts of Armagnac and Foix had supplied a high proportion of the troops which had fought with the Constable in the campaign of 1337 and a smaller, but still significant part of the armies which had been deployed in the south-west in subsequent years.

The counts of Armagnac and Foix did not get on well with each other. Their families had competed for influence and territory for many years, and had fought periodic private wars since the middle of the thirteenth century. The war between England and France had embittered and intensified the competition. The main reason lay in the personality and ambitions of Gaston II, Count of Foix, a ruthless and self-serving warlord and an able commander whose domains could produce large bands of warriors at short notice. He had conducted a succession of independent campaigns on the southern march of the duchy, and in the process had extended his own power a long way north of its traditional base in Béarn. By the end of 1339 Gaston de Foix’s vassals and garrisons controlled land extending in speckles on the map right up to the Adour valley and beyond. In parts of this region, such as the upper Adour and the southern Landes around Mont-de-Marsan the speckles were coalescing into formidable territorial blocks. The territory of the Count of Armagnac was concentrated in two regions, in Quercy, Rouergue and Gévaudan, well east of the English duchy; and in the swathe of land immediately north of the upper Adour which included the county of Armagnac itself. It was in this second region that he came up against the voracious and expansive Gaston de Foix. There was a succession of abrasive incidents. As early as the winter of 1338–9, when both noblemen were fighting in the French royal armies, the Count of Armagnac was making plans and alliances for the day when the cessation of hostilities between England and France would enable him to commence them against the Count of Foix. In the event he did not even wait that long. At the end of 1339, shortly after his return from the campaign in the north, Armagnac attacked Miramont, a small town to which he laid claim but which was situated south of the Adour in territory dominated by Gaston’s soldiers. ‘Enormous excesses’ were committed in this short, violent private war. The place had to be taken into royal custody in order to separate the two combatants.²⁰

At almost the same time Oliver Ingham achieved the political coup which had been his ambition since 1337 by recruiting Bernard-Aiz, lord of Albret, to his master’s cause. Albret had so far played an extremely equivocal role in the war. He had been an ally of the French Crown ever since the war of Saint-Sardos, the result of a succession of bitter disputes with Edward II of England and some judicious patronage by Charles IV and Philip VI of France. But geography made of him a natural ally of the English, for his most important domains lay in the heart of the territory which they still controlled: in the Landes and in the lower valley of the Adour around Bayonne. Edward III and Oliver Ingham had mended many of Edward II’s quarrels in the course of the 1330s, and most of Albret’s family had rallied to the English Crown. His sister Mathe was an active ally of Edward III. At least two of his brothers had fought in Ingham’s armies and one of them had been captured defending Blaye against the troops of Philip VI. Bernard-Aiz himself resolved his difficult dilemma by taking almost no part in the war on either side, a remarkable feat which only a man of his influence and power could have achieved. When, in 1338, a powerful relief army had been expected to arrive from England, Ingham had felt strong enough to threaten Albret with the forcible occupation of his domains in the Landes if he did not commit himself. All of this came to nothing when the relief force was cancelled, but Albret was still visibly havering in the following year. In March and April 1339 an emissary of Philip VI made two journeys to the south to plead with him. He was promised the restoration of everything that he might lose to the English by holding to the French King’s cause. Potentates of the French King’s court wrote personal letters to win him over. ‘We know’, the Duke of Normandy wrote in his, ‘that you have it in your power to do more damage to our interests than any other man in those parts.’²¹

These entreaties, combined with the triumphs of French arms, kept Albret loyal for a few months longer, but in the autumn of 1339 he finally threw in his lot with Oliver Ingham. On the face of it the timing of the decision was odd. He made it at one of the lowest points of Ingham’s fortunes. Why? Some of his motives were very similar to those of the Count of Armagnac. Albret’s interests were also concentrated in the southern part of the duchy, and Gaston de Foix had been no more mindful of them than he had been of Armagnac’s. Bernard-Aiz was already spoken of as an ally of the Count of Armagnac in 1338. The two men were closely related by marriage and interest. At some point (which cannot be exactly known) they sealed a treaty of alliance which was expressly directed against Gaston. There is some evidence that in August 1339 the Count of Foix’s men occupied Tartas, a town of the Landes which although held by troops of the duchy (and therefore a fair target) belonged to Bernard-Aiz. This may have been the last straw. Evidently Albret would gain nothing if the English duchy disappeared only to be replaced in this sensitive region by a vastly extended principality of Foix-Béarn.²²

There was, however, another factor in Bernard-Aiz’s decision. He and his brothers, although they were on different sides of the conflict of England and France, had pursued for many years a single-minded endeavour to acquire a valuable group of lordships around Bergerac in southern Périgord, rich lands at a focal point of the road and river communications of south-western France. They had belonged to the ancient Rudel dynasty, the last of whom, a feckless simpleton, had died in 1334 leaving his inheritance to be disputed between two women, his widow and his sister. The sister was married to the Count of Périgord; the widow was Mathe d’Albret. Thus began the most venomous phase of another long-standing vendetta of the south-west, between the Albrets and the counts of Périgord, men who even a decade earlier had been called ‘capital enemies’. The matter was litigated at great length before the Parlement of Paris, but, long before that body had pronounced, both parties had taken the law into their own hands. The Count of Périgord had occupied Bergerac by force, holding a sword to the throat of the royal official who was guarding it. The Albrets had seized two important subsidiary castles at Montcuq and Montignac as well as some lesser places. They killed the Count in battle and continued to wage open war against his successor. When the war broke out between England and France, Bergerac and its region assumed great strategic importance. Philip VI evidently regarded the counts of Périgord as the more dependable friends and increasingly took their part. The Count justified Philip’s support. Unlike Bernard-Aiz he led his troops in French armies, and never tried to improve his position by manoeuvring between the two powers.

In May 1338 Mathe d’Albret, who had always been inclined to support the English side, sold her claims to most of the Rudel inheritance including Bergerac to Edward III, reserving to herself only the fragments of it which she was actually occupying. This act made the remaining proceedings of the Parlement almost irrelevant. In September 1338 Mathe died. Her rights over the fragments which she was holding passed to Bernard-Aiz. The lord of Albret and the King of England suddenly had a common interest. Philip VI responded swiftly. At the end of 1338 and during the first few months of 1339 his officers cited Bernard-Aiz to deliver up what he had of the Rudel inheritance. The ultimate object of royal policy was reasonably clear. It became clearer still at the beginning of the following year when Philip VI first recognized the claims of the Count of Périgord and then purchased them for himself. Bernard-Aiz found himself compelled to make the hard choice which he had so far successfully avoided. Sentiment was probably worth something in his calculations, but the chequer-board of his family’s landed interests in the south-west counted for much more.²³

The outcome was that Gaston de Foix was henceforth preoccupied with the defence of his own gains and ceased to make any very substantial contribution to the French war effort in the south. The Count of Armagnac became for all practical purposes a neutral in the southern war. In May 1340 both of them left Languedoc for the northern front, each no doubt reassured by the presence of the other far from home. Both of them periodically made overtures to Edward III’s representatives during the next five years.²⁴ As for Albret, he abandoned his former neutrality entirely, carrying over to the English side a formidable network of alliances, a personal retinue of some two or three hundred vassals who could produce an armed force of at least ten times that number, and a fortune from which he was more than once to save the delicate financial balance of the duchy in its dark hours. When Oliver Ingham marched into the south of the duchy and raided the Toulousain in the autumn of 1339, the lord of Albret marched with him.²⁵

The significance of these events was better understood at Antwerp than it was at Vincennes. The English King broke off at a delicate point of his discussions with the Flemings to receive the emissaries of Ingham and Albret. On 3 January 1340 (the day before he agreed to assume the Crown of France) Edward appointed two lieutenants to exercise in his name all his powers in the duchy. One of them was Albret himself. The other was Hugh of Geneva, a great Savoyard nobleman and soldier of fortune who had been retained for Edward’s service since 1337 and had fought with distinction in the campaign in the Thiérache. Like so many of the nobility of Savoy and the western Alps who embroiled themselves in the Hundred Years War he was a man of fierce courage whose most basic loyalty was to his reputation and to his pay. His kinsmen, the counts of Geneva and Savoy, fought for Philip VI.²⁶

The campaign of 1340 in Gascony was the most ambitious which the English had yet fought there, an achievement made possible for a bankrupt government only by Albret’s deep purse. He expended no less than 45,779 pounds of Bordeaux (£9,156) in cash, rather more than half of which was advanced to the Constable of Bordeaux, the rest paid out in wages and subsidies to his allies and retainers fighting in the army. This was about three-quarters of the ducal government’s receipts in a good year from all other sources combined. Albret also contributed his many friends and allies: the lord of Pons and Ribérac, one of the principal barons of Saintonge; the lord of Mussidan in Périgord; the Caumonts of Sainte-Bazeille and much of their extensive clan. These prominent and influential southern nobleman all had connections of their own to bring to Edward II’s cause. Indeed, Bernard-Aiz almost achieved the coup of capturing for the English King the allegiance of the Count of Armagnac. When Armagnac went to join Philip VI’s northern army in May 1340 he left Bernard-Aiz with the terms on which he would be willing to do homage to Edward II as King of France and serve Edward’s government in Gascony with 600 men-at-arms and 2,000 infantry. Bernard-Aiz sent the documents to London and had them sealed in Edward III’s name.²⁷

Hugh of Geneva arrived in Gascony at the beginning of March 1340. He took the field on the 27th with an army composed almost entirely of Gascons. At the same time there was a swift and well co-ordinated uprising of Albret’s friends and allies in the Garonne and Lot valleys. Villages and small towns, most of them ungarrisoned, silently followed the shift of their lords’ allegiances, denying entry to French officers and laying hands on French money and stores. In the larger garrisoned towns French troops had to keep within the walls for safety. In some cases they were hemmed in to the keep. The region principally affected was the western Agenais and the swathe of territory which extended from Sainte-Foy in the north, across the line of the Garonne and down into the Bazadais and the Condomois. This area included the two principal French garrisons in the south-west at Marmande and La Réole. It was crucial to the French network of road and river communications on which they depended for their ability to concentrate their dispersed forces in time of need. Albret’s interests were strong here but the dominant figure was one of his allies, Guillaume-Raymond, lord of Caumont, whose family were seigneurs or co-seigneurs of several important towns of the region: Sainte-Foy, Villeneuve-Sur-Lot, Sainte-Bazeille, La Réole, Bazas and Condom. His kinsman Alexander de Caumont was one of the commanders of Hugh of Geneva’s army, which now burst into the middle Garonne valley in support of the uprising. On 4 April 1340 it fell on Sainte-Bazeille, a small town on the Garonne mid-way between La Réole and Marmande. Sainte-Bazeille was defended by a Provençal knight with a small garrison. They fought and lost a pitched battle in front of the gates. There was a short siege. Then the place was stormed and taken with much destruction and bloodshed. Groups of Gascon soldiers spread out to overrun the western Agenais north of the river, mopping up compliant communities in their path.²⁸

11 Gascony: the war of the Albrets, March–August 1340

The French were caught on the wrong foot. The senior French officer in the region was another Savoyard, Pierre de la Palu. He was a man of modest rank and ability who had been appointed seneschal of Toulouse in the previous year and left to conduct a holding operation while the decisive events occurred in the north. At the beginning of April 1340 he had some 7,000 men at his disposal, most of them garrison troops scattered in penny packets across the vast area of his command. Reinforcing and concentrating these forces quickly was an almost impossible task. The occupation of large parts of the Agenais by rebels and enemies had completely dislocated his communications. The roads between the middle Garonne and the Dordogne valleys were impassable except to large bodies of armed men. Traffic between the mint at Domme and the war treasury at Agen was having to be rerouted to the east via Cahors and long delays were occurring. To add to La Palu’s misfortunes the spring rains had gorged the Garonne, making the fords impassable and washing away the three bridges of boats which had secured the crossings at La Réole, Marmande and Le Mas d’Agenais since the first campaigns of the war. Panic seized the French garrisons. At Agen influential men of the town were known to be sloping off to join the enemy. Citizens passing in and out of the gates were made to identify themselves; hostages were taken from the families of suspected traitors and locked up in the keep; in the candle-lit gloom of the Dominican church men filed past Pierre de la Palu’s commissioners to swear oaths of loyalty to the Crown. Yet Agen had a strong tradition of loyalty to the Crown. Conditions can hardly have been better in other places.²⁹

June 1340 was the most dangerous moment for the French. The rebellion began to spread beyond the Garonne valley. At the beginning of the month there was a powerful English offensive south of the Agenais in the Condomois and Gabardan. They were infertile, unpopulous regions of little strategic importance. The attack on them was probably connected with the covert negotiations which were in progress between the representatives of Edward III and the Count of Armagnac. He was not willing to declare for the King of England unless he was assured of substantial compensation for the territories which he would lose in France. The main compensation which he required was the delivery of Montréal, Mézin and Condom, the principal towns in the region between the Garonne and his own county of Fezensac. All of them were in territory held for the King of France. Montréal was the first to be attacked, probably early in June. The place was ungarrisoned. The inhabitants resisted with ferocity. But their town was captured.³⁰

Confronted with this new crisis Pierre de la Palu reacted with rather greater vigour than heretofore. By stripping the nearby garrisons to dangerously low levels and bringing in reinforcements from outside the province he was able to recapture Montréal, it seems in the second week of July.³¹ This briefly restored the position south of the Garonne but no sooner had it happened than the foundations of French power began to fail further north. Most of the troops with which La Palu had recaptured Montréal had been raised in Périgord, hitherto a province conspicuously loyal to the Crown. While their backs were turned there was a concerted series of rebellions there in the valleys of the Isle and the Dronne.

The leading light of the rising in Périgord was Raimond de Montaut, lord of Mussidan. At the time of the war of Saint-Sardos this man had been described to the King of England as ‘one of the worst enemies that you have in all your duchy’. Only the year before he had brought his retinue to the French army. But he was also Albret’s principal ally and protégé in the province, a venomous enemy of the Count of Périgord and a man with many disappointed claims. Albret promised him handsome territorial gains and compensation out of his own lands in Gascony for whatever he should lose by joining the rebellion. He was appointed joint captain of Périgord for Edward III. By the beginning of July 1340 southern Périgord was impassable to French officials. In August Raimond de Montaut’s bands were advancing along the River Isle. Saint-Astier was captured on 21 August with the assistance of its inhabitants. Early in September they had reached the suburbs of Périgueux.³²

La Palu marched north and recrossed the Garonne in the middle of July to attend to the new threat. As soon as he had done so the English struck again in the Condomois at Mézin, a small market town, the second of the places which it was hoped to deliver to the Count of Armagnac. Mézin was taken by storm on 23 July 1340. A week later the English appeared before Condom, the third of the places Armagnac coveted and the main market town of the region. The siege of Condom proved to be the principal military operation of the year on the southern front and the one which broke the enterprise of the ducal government after its promising beginning. The French had withdrawn their garrison from Condom in May for service elsewhere. But the English dawdled after their capture of Mézin and missed their opportunity. Bertrand de l’Isle, who was proving himself to be much the most energetic commander on the French side, put more than fifty men into the town on his own initiative on 30 July 1340 and assumed command of the defence. The English arrived on 1 or 2 August but not in sufficient strength to storm the place nor to invest it completely. Pierre de la Palu, who was at Agen, learned of the English attack on the 3rd and began to concentrate his troops from every part of Languedoc. The first reinforcements reached Bertrand de l’Isle in Condom on 9 August, penetrating the English lines, and thereafter men arrived daily. By 23 August there were no less than 1,365 French troops in Condom, in addition to many volunteers drawn from the population of the town. A larger relief force was on its way. The English recognized defeat and marched away.³³

12 A military occupation: French garrisons in the Garonne Valley and southern Périgord, August–September 1340

The French had by now recovered their balance and enormously increased their strength. The rebellions were methodically put down town by town in the course of August and September. But not every place occupied by the English was recovered. They retained Mézin in the Condomois. In Périgord although Raimond de Montaut’s offensive faltered  during September and most of his prizes were lost, the English remained in possession of Saint-Astier. Both sides had lost heavily. The English had demonstrated once again that they could achieve nothing permanent without a major infusion of manpower and money from England. The Count of Armagnac never in the event came into their camp and eventually obtained from Philip VI some of the benefits that he had been impotently offered by the English. For the French the suppression of the rebellion involved a prodigious expenditure of effort and money. They created more than seventy new garrisons in the course of the summer. The number of troops on their payroll rose to a peak of more than 20,000 at the end of September (including garrison troops). It was some indication of the gravity of the threat to their position that this was the largest number which they had yet deployed in the southern theatre, exceeding even the number which had taken part in the great offensive of 1338–9. It was not far short of the force which Philip VI was deploying at the same time to meet a much more dangerous threat to his security in the north. This substantial diversion of resources was the more serious because it was unexpected and unprovided for. Troops from Languedoc which had been intended to reinforce the northern army had to be reassigned by a succession of confused counter-orders to largely defensive operations in the Garonne valley. Raoul, Count of Eu, the most senior military officer of the French Crown, and Louis of Spain, one of its ablest captains, had to hurry south to Saintonge to hold the northern shore of the Gironde. They were still there when Edward III was landing his army in Flanders. An intolerable additional burden was thrown on to the stretched resources of the French Crown at a delicate point of the war. The correspondence of the war treasurers at Agen speaks for itself: anguished, frequently repeated demands for coin addressed to the principal mints at Domme andSaint-Pourcain; protests coming back that there was no bullion from which to make it; urgent appeals to the collectors and receivers of revenue; warnings to La Palu and the garrison commanders that their men’s advances could not be paid; calls on the resources of the treasury in Paris; silence in response.³⁴

*

Edward III, who had been wounded by an arrow in the thigh, remained on the Cog Thomas for two weeks after the battle of Sluys and conducted his councils in the aftercastle. Jacob van Artevelde and the leading men of Ghent came out by boat on 30 June and the main lines of the coming campaign were worked out between the English and the Flemings. Reliable figures do not exist for the size of the army at their disposal. The best estimate that can be made is that Edward had no more than about 2,000 English troops with him, of whom about two-thirds were archers. Horses, equipment and victuals were all in short supply and had to be ferried across the sea during the next few weeks. Some reinforcements arrived with them. The English King was counting on his allies. He expected to have at his disposal no less than 150,000 Flemings in addition to the armies of England and the princely states. These figures were a gross over-estimate, but their is no doubt that Edward did have a very large force under his command even if the bulk of it was hastily recruited in the streets of the industrial towns of Flanders, untrained, inexperienced and unmounted.

The main danger, as it seemed to the men gathered in the Cog Thomas, was that while they fought their way into France from town to town through the Scheldt valley the French army would come round their flank and overrun Flanders. Substance was given to this fear by the news that within a few days of the battle of Sluys very large French forces had begun to concentrate in Artois. It was therefore decided to divide the allied forces into two independent armies. The larger one under Edward’s personal command would march into the Scheldt valley and besiege Tournai in accordance with the plans laid in January. The second army would gather in southern Flanders and attack Saint-Omer at the western extremity of Artois. It is possible that this army if it had triumphed was intended to go on and capture Calais, a long-standing ambition of the Flemings and an obvious target for the English. As its commander Edward appointed Robert of Artois, a decision made at the last moment and unexpected even by Robert himself, who had left most of his horses, equipment and retainers behind in England. The reasons for the appointment were political. Edward was still persuaded that Robert had a large following in Artois which would rally to his cause. Nevertheless, it was an unfortunate decision. The truth was that Robert had no following at all in Artois. He was an old man, his mind filled with memories and illusions. As a military commander he was brave but incompetent. He was to have with him most of the English archers, all the contingents of the princes and 50,000 men from southern Flanders including the contingents of Bruges and Ypres. Edward himself prepared to enter the Tournaisis with the English men-at-arms, about 1,000 strong, and 100,000 men of Ghent and northern Flanders. On the northern as on the southern front, the English King had become the leading actor in French civil war.³⁵

Philip VI’s plan of campaign was intelligently conceived but poorly executed. As soon as he learned the outcome of the battle of Sluys he detached 4,000 men to cover the Cambrésis and continue the harassment of southern Hainault. The rest of the French army marched west into Artois. The arrière-ban was proclaimed throughout northern France on 4 July 1340. Every French community was called to send its men of fighting age to Arras by the end of the month or money in their place. On the 6th Philip himself entered Arras and set up his headquarters there. Arras was the hub of the road system of the north-west, from which the whole 80-mile stretch between Calais and Cambrai could be watched. The French defensive arrangements were formidable. Their field army, which had been fighting in Hainault and the Cambrésis since May, was already in being, encamped in the plain north of Arras along the Lens road under Vimy Ridge on what became one of the great battlefields of the First World War. Reinforcements increased its numbers to about 24,000 men in the course of July. Seven-eighths of these men were mounted men-at-arms, a remarkably high proportion which gave the French the advantage of mobility and training over their adversaries but made them a vulnerable and unbalanced force for the battlefield. Along the marches of Flanders and western Hainault strong garrisons were placed at Aire, Saint-Venant, Lille, Douai, Mortagne, Saint-Amand and Cambrai. In addition the Duke of Burgundy in his capacity as ruler of Artois maintained garrisons of his own in the western and coastal sector of the frontier.³⁶

The French had not expected an attack on Saint-Omer. But the lumbering progress of Edward III’s preparations gave them plenty of warning of what was afoot. On about 15 July the Duke of Burgundy entered the town with several thousand men-at-arms and began the work of demolishing the suburbs.³⁷ Robert of Artois was still 15 miles away at Cassel haggling with his own troops. There were not enough of them: perhaps 1,000 English archers commanded by Sir Thomas Oughtred and between 10,000 and 15,000 Flemings, less than a third of what had been expected. Their morale was low and their discipline poor. Most of them came from the smaller towns of southern Flanders and had no reason to share the political ambitions of Ghent and van Artevelde. They were more worried about the safety of their homes and not at all convinced that attack was the best form of defence. Robert cajoled them forward. He had friends, he said, who had sent him written promises of support. They would open the gates on his appearance. It would all be over very quickly. On about 16 July 1340 Robert’s army reached the muddy ditch between the Lys and the Aa which marked the border and crossed in ramshackle order into the county of Artois. Some pressed forward in small groups only to be cut off and killed by the French. Others dallied behind to loot and burn. The best part of a day was spent destroying the town of Arques while barely a mile away the Count of Armagnac led fresh troops into Saint-Omer to reinforce the Duke of Burgundy. During the next few days the Anglo-Flemish army spread itself out on the eastern side of Saint-Omer. The main body of Philip VI’s army began to move slowly up behind them from the south-east.

On 26 July 1340 Robert of Artois realized that he was in danger of being crushed between the French forces in Saint-Omer and the vastly superior army commanded by Philip VI. He offered battle to the garrison. In the early morning he carefully drew up his men in the open ground between Saint-Omer and the ruins of Arques. He placed the cream of his troops in the front line: the English men-at-arms and archers and the troops of Bruges. Behind them in three battalions stood the men of Ypres on the left, the men of Furnes and Berghes in the centre and on the right the contingent of the outlying territory of Bruges. The other Flemings remained at the rear to serve as a reserve and guard the camp. Across the front of the army and along its left flank Robert had constructed lines of ditches and outworks defended by anti-cavalry obstacles carefully camouflaged. Thus protected he waited for the enemy.

With a large French army on its way up the Arras road the Duke of Burgundy’s obvious course was to ignore Robert’s challenge and sit tight behind his walls. That was what the King had ordered him to do, but his subordinates took the decision out of his hands. At about mid-day, when Robert’s men had been standing at their stations for four hours, some hotheads burst out of the south-east gate of Saint-Omer leading most of the Duke’s retinue and a large body of local levies after them, and threw themselves against the defended outworks on the left flank of the Anglo-Flemish army. They were repulsed. Foolishly, however, the men of Ypres who were defending the barrier leaped over it and rushed into the open country in pursuit of their adversaries. They were followed by the whole of the rest of the second line. Seeing that the Flemings no longer had the protection of their outworks the French turned about and counter-attacked. A vicious fight began which continued for most of the afternoon. The Duke of Burgundy, who could see all this from the walls, could bear it no longer. He and the Count of Armagnac led their retinues, about 850 men, out of the town gates. This happened at the end of the afternoon. The Count of Armagnac and his men galloped round to the southern edge of the battlefield to join the mêlée which had been in progress since mid-day. The arrival of this force, which included 300 heavy cavalry, was decisive. The men of Ypres and the other Flemings who had once formed the second line of Robert of Artois’ army were driven back with heavy losses and eventually took to their heels. Fleeing through the open encampment of the Anglo-Flemish army they spread panic among the rearguard who were waiting there. The French crashed into the encampment after them and, trapping the fleeing Flemings in the bend of the River Aa, slaughtered many thousands of them.

13 The battle of Saint-Omer, 26 July 1340

While all this was happening an entirely independent battle was in progress elsewhere. The Duke of Burgundy did not accompany the Count of Armagnac to the battle on the southern flank. Instead he rode straight down the Arques road towards the front line of the Anglo-Flemish army. Here Robert of Artois with the English and Brugeois had stood all afternoon immobile behind their fieldworks. All of them were dismounted. When they saw the Duke of Burgundy’s banners approaching them they charged. The Duke’s horsemen were unprepared and were overwhelmed by the weight of numbers. They fell back into the south-eastern suburbs of Saint-Omer, where they found themselves jammed into narrow streets unable to escape and unable to retreat through their own closed gates. One of the most difficult operations of a medieval garrison was to hold open a gate for long enough to readmit a returning sortie party and then to close it against the pursuing enemy behind. The archers on the walls concentrated their fire against the pursuers while the Duke of Burgundy and his men slowly squeezed their way into the city and forced the gates closed behind them. In the falling light the Duke was welcomed through the streets with torches and cheers. But he had suffered heavy casualties and a humiliating tactical defeat.

Neither the Duke of Burgundy nor indeed Robert of Artois realized that a mile and a half away the bulk of the Anglo-Flemish army had been destroyed by the Count of Armagnac. There was a surreal encounter on the Arques road. Robert of Artois’ victorious troops marching east towards their camp came upon the Count of Armagnac’s victorious troops marching west towards Saint-Omer. Until they were a lance’s length away neither side recognized the other in the darkness. They passed each other by with only a few desultory and disorganized fights. Both parties were exhausted. Only when Robert reached the site of his encampment did he discover to his horror what had happened to the rest of his army. The camp was deserted, the tents empty and the horses unattended at their tethers. When dawn broke on 29 July the bodies of some 8,000 Flemings could be seen scattered across the country for several miles along the Cassel road. The Flemings with Robert did not wait for the French to return. They fled to Cassel and Ypres. Robert himself, after a moment’s hesitation, followed them. The French captured the Anglo-Flemish camp intact, taking many warhorses, 600 carts, all the tents, huge quantities of stores and most of the Flemish standards.

Edward III’s campaign of 1340 had begun badly. The loss of several thousand Flemings was bearable. The survivors, including almost all the precious English archers, did eventually rejoin him at Tournai. But the defeat had more serious strategic consequences. It exposed southern Flanders to the revenge of Philip VI. It enabled the French to concentrate their forces against the main army of the coalition in the Tournaisis. It dented the prestige of the coalition and undermined its cohesion. Within a few days of the the battle representatives of Ypres and Bruges and of van Artevelde’s enemies in Ghent made contact with the French court to find out on what terms they could be readmitted to the French King’s peace.³⁸

*

As Edward III’s first army marched to its defeat he struggled to bring together the second and larger force which was to attack Tournai. The English King disembarked from the Cog Thomas on 8 July 1340 and arrived in Ghent on the evening of the 10th. There he met for the first time in six months the princes of the coalition. The proceedings of this conference were not harmonious.³⁹ Edward’s decision to attack Saint-Omer was presented to them as a fait accompli. Their views about it can be inferred from the fact that none of them took up their appointed roles at Robert’s side. The Duke of Brabant had actually disbanded the army which he had assembled for the relief of Thun-l’Evêque three weeks before. His enthusiasm for the war had visibly diminished as Edward III had drawn closer to the Flemings. He disliked Jacob van Artevelde personally and cannot have thought highly of the communal governments of Flanders. His subjects were jealous of the economic strength of Flanders and resentful of the transfer of the English wool staple from Antwerp to Bruges. There was an unbridgeable gulf between those such as van Artevelde and (now) the Count of Hainault who had powerful political motives for prosecuting the campaign and the others, like the Duke of Brabant and some of the Germans, who needed to keep faith with their partners and preserve themselves from Philip’s wrath but no longer had anything to gain except money. Unless Edward III paid them they would not even have money.

Edward’s financial position at this stage was difficult and deteriorating. The collection of the Parliamentary subsidy had begun in April 1340. But it was to be assessed according to entirely new principles. A ninth of all grain, wool and lambs was to be collected in the counties, and a ninth of all movables in the towns. It was collected in kind and then sold for the government’s account. This unusual form of taxation was modelled on ecclesiastical tithes. It had been suggested to the government in Parliament (in place of the traditional tenths and fifteenths in cash) because of the severe agricultural depression which made goods hard to sell and cash hard to find. But for the same reason its yield was small and slow in coming in. Only £15,000 had been raised by November 1340. Thegovernment’s position would not have been much better even if the tax had fulfilled its hopes. They were expecting to raise £100,000 by 1 November 1340 and another £100,000 the following year. But in the six weeks before the King’s departure from England the whole of the first instalment and substantially all the second had had to be assigned to his principal bankers and the leaders of the English army in part payment of debts contracted in 1339. The result was that Edward arrived in the Low Countries quite penniless. He could not even pay the daily expenses of his household except by the indulgence of his creditors. On 24 July 1340 the earls of Northampton, Derby and Warwick, who had guaranteed some of the King’s past debts, were arrested in Brussels and taken to a debtors’ prison at Mechelen. They were only released to join the campaign in exchange for four knights apiece and firm promises to return to captivity later. Edward issued strident calls for money to his officials. He had a fixed conviction that money would somehow be found in England and put on the next ship. This was presumably what he told the princes at Ghent. But it was an illusion.⁴⁰

On 12 July 1340 while the princes were still in session in Ghent, Parliament assembled yet again in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster. There was a familiar tone in the Chancellor’s opening speech and the earnest entreaties which followed. Two earls and a knight of Edward’s household arrived on 15 July from Flanders to fan the assembly’s enthusiasm. They brought with them an official account of the battle of Sluys and a letter from Edward III explaining his military strategy for the summer campaign. They expounded the King’s case in what seemed at least to the King’s ministers who were present to be a most persuasive style. They dwelt upon the terrible dangers which the King was facing in Flanders and northern France and on the anguish which he was feeling together with his Queen and the noblemen of his army. But all this would go for nothing unless he could find some way of anticipating the collection of the last Parliamentary subsidy. Unless his allies were paid they would make a separate peace with Philip VI and Edward would be left at the mercy of his enemies. ‘I and my country, my children, the nobility and my whole people will be undone.’ What the government wanted was a forced loan in kind which would be repaid during 1341 from the second instalment of the subsidy. The Commons were not greatly impressed. It was only on 24 July 1340 after particularly long discussions that they agreed to a forced loan of 20,000 sacks of wool. Even then stringent terms were imposed designed to ensure that the money did not pass into the hands of the war financiers who had made off with the earlier levies. Reporting to the King, his ministers explained that it would be necessary to make elaborate administrative arrangements to collect the loan and that discussions with the wool merchants were in hand. The government did not intend themselves to set up as wool merchants as they had done with such disastrous results in the winter of 1337–8. Instead they dealt with a number of merchant syndicates who agreed to buy the wool and pay the money directly to Edward III’s war treasurer at Bruges. On 13 August 1340 the Council told the King that they expected very soon to be able to send him substantial sums. Edward took this promise seriously.⁴¹

Every day it became more difficult for ministers at Westminster to fulfil it. The first shock came in late July with a revival of French seapower which perhaps should have been anticipated. In spite of the victory of Sluys it was found that the French were still able to launch piratical raids on lone merchantmen in the North Sea, and even to ferry fresh men and supplies to Scotland. Occasional captures and shipwrecks on the east coast of England gave Edward’s ministers some idea of what was happening. Spies began to report renewed activity in the French Channel ports within ten days of the battle. The French government appointed Robert Houdetot, an energetic Norman knight, as admiral, to replace the ill-fated Quiéret and Béhuchet. He proceeded at once to the Seine ports and began to requisition ships and equipment. In the last week of July Houdetot was at sea with a small squadron: three galleys and seven armed barges, most of them survivors of Sluys; and an important contingent of armed Spanish merchantmen hired in the Biscay ports.⁴²

This happened at a delicate moment for the English government’s schemes. Believing that they had entirely eliminated the naval threat from France the English had stood down most of the ships of the western Admiralty to whom the task of coastal defence had previously been assigned. Shipments of victuals and equipment were passing unconvoyed across the North Sea as well as convoyed cargoes of wool belonging to the King’s bankers and the magnates of his army. In the Channel an important military enterprise had been on foot since the beginning of July when Sir Thomas Ferrers had embarked at Southampton for the reconquest of Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. Ferrers landed on Guernsey on 12 July 1340 and established control over all the undefended parts of the island. On the 17th he laid siege to Castle Cornet with a force of 330 men. The capture of the castle, without which the conquest of the rest of the island would be useless, required a steady flow of reinforcements and supplies from the south-coast ports.⁴³

Robert Houdetot irrupted into this scene on 26 July 1340. His squadron surprised an English convoy in the Channel and captured thirty merchantmen laden with wool. Their crews were slaughtered. Then turning westward he made for the Solent and landed his men on the Isle of Wight on about 1 August 1340. They were eventually driven back to their ships by the local militia but not before they had inflicted great damage on the island and heavy casualties on its defenders, including the commander Sir Theobald Russell, who was killed. Their next target was the Isle of Portland, which was wasted on the following day. Teignmouth was attacked without warning and burned. They tried to do the same at Plymouth, a day’s passage further west, but by this time they had lost the advantage of surprise. They burned a manor house and took some prisoners but failed to get into the town. By 5 August 1340 they were back in their bases revictualling and making plans for another descent on the Solent.⁴⁴

The English had been caught off balance. The fleet of the western Admiralty had to be called back into being by a fresh round of requisitions. The ships of London, Yarmouth and the Cinque Ports were hurriedly congregated in the Downs. Robert Morley was sent with other ships of the northern Admiralty to the Channel Islands to prevent the French from relieving Castle Cornet by sea. The coastguard militia was mobilized all along the south coast and the convoy system reintroduced for all outbound ships. These energetic but belated measures were enough to parry the threat from Houdetot’s small squadron. His second cruise, which began on 29 August, was a failure. By the time he left the Seine the English fleet had assembled in strength and was standing off Winchelsea. In September Morley’s fleet was able to take the offensive, cruising off the mouth of the Seine and the Channel Islands and mounting a devastating raid on Brest (a neutral port), where many laden merchantmen were sheltering from the rival fleets. The spoils included six merchant galleys from Genoa with their cargoes worth more than £10,000.⁴⁵

The renewed war at sea, although its outcome was reasonably satisfactory for the English, was expensive and disruptive and it coincided with other demands on the English government’s resources. In the lowlands of Scotland guerrillas had taken control of the open country and were making war ‘right up to the gates of the town’ according to the warden of Berwick. They were launching cattle-rustling raids deep into Northumberland. In mid-August 1340 the leaders of the Scots decided to undertake an autumn campaign against Stirling, now the northernmost outpost of English strength. This made it necessary for the Council to order the recruitment of a fresh army in the northern counties and to spend money in carrying victuals and reinforcements by sea to their isolated garrisons in central Scotland.⁴⁶

When the English government began to collect the forced loan of 20,000 sacks of wool in its discontented and insecure island, it encountered furious resistance. Quotas were assigned to each county at the end of July and values fixed according to the Nottingham scheme of 1337. County commissioners were appointed everywhere. But by 20 August 1340, when large quantities should have been in hand, they had collected almost nothing. On the 21st the wool merchants appeared before the Council in London to make arrangements for the purchase and disposal of the produce, but there was nothing for them to buy. Of the 20,000 sacks required, a mere 854 had been placed at the government’s disposal, two-thirds of which had been raised in London. Elsewhere the levy was a complete failure. The Council, who were receiving frequent and increasingly hysterical letters from the King at Tournai, thrashed about. They called the county officials to Westminster to account for themselves. They replaced some and threatened others with worse. The officials turned on the population. There were sporadic outbreaks of violence. In Lincolnshire wool was being removed into fortified stores to be defended from the collectors by main force. In Essex there was armed and organized resistance. In Somerset the collectors were assaulted and left for dead. The Council was losing control. They believed that these black incidents would coalesce into a general rebellion. Less than a month after they had told the King that he would soon be in funds, they were sending him the most alarming reports. ‘We dare not do more than we have,’ they said, ‘for we shall have a civil war on our hands; the population will fight us rather than give us their wool.’⁴⁷

*

The date appointed for the attack on Tournai was 29 July 1340. Edward himself left Ghent in good time on the 18th and proceeded slowly up the Scheldt valley accompanied by his own men-at-arms and by the Flemings under the command of van Artevelde. On 23 July they halted at Chin, a small village 3 miles north of Tournai where there was a bridge over the river. The Hainaulters and most of the Germans joined them in the course of the next week. Of the Duke of Brabant, who was contributing the major part of the cavalry, there was still no sign. On 26 July, without waiting for further reinforcements, Edward committed his reputation to the capture of the city. He issued a bombastic challenge proclaiming himself rightful king of France and offering ‘Philip de Valois’ trial by single combat or, if that were unfair to his corpulent and middle-aged adversary, a staged battle between 100 selected champions on each side. Otherwise, he said, he would recover his inheritance by overwhelming force. The French King returned a curt answer. He had, he said, seen a letter addressed to one ‘Philip de Valois’ but since it was evidently not intended for him he had given it no consideration. In due course he would throw Edward and his allies out of his kingdom. This message reached Edward III on 31 July 1340. On the same day the English King moved his host downstream from the bridge of Chin and invested Tournai.⁴⁸

Tournai was not a place of any particular strategic importance to Edward III.⁴⁹ Its capture would have extended the boundaries of Flanders but would not have opened up the gateway to France. Nevertheless its loss would have been a severe blow to Philip VI’s prestige. It was an important ecclesiastical and industrial city standing on both sides of the Scheldt in the angle of Flanders and Hainault. It controlled a rich entrepôt trade between France and the Low Countries as well as a modest cloth-making industry. It was famous throughout Europe for the production of marble carvings and metal armour. Although it was far from being in the same class as Paris or Ghent, its population was probably about 20,000 in 1340, which made it one of the larger provincial cities of France. Its walls, which in a few places still stand, were formidable. They were modern (begun in 1295) and complete. Their circuit, which roughly corresponded to the inner ring of boulevards around the modern city, was about 3 miles long and was defended by seventy-four towers.⁵⁰ In addition to the permanent garrison commanded by Godemar du Fay, the Constable and both Marshals of France were at Tournai with their contingents. On 23 July 1340, the day of Edward III’s arrival at Chin, the Count of Foix, who had been detached by Philip VI from the main body of his army outside Arras, entered the city with more than 3,000 soldiers. There were now almost 5,800 French troops in Tournai, two-thirds of them men-at-arms and the rest Pyrenean infantry of famous ferocity. The nominal commanders were the Constable of France by right of precedence and the captain of the town. But the directing mind was that of the Count of Foix. His powerful personality brooked no opposition. He was the ablest soldier there and most of the garrison were his men.

14 The siege of Tournai, July–September 1340

The King of England set up his tents by the western sector of the city walls. His own army consisted of the retinues of the English magnates and the bedraggled English and Flemish survivors of the battle of Saint-Omer, who had rejoined him at the end of July. They were spread out to cover the Lille and Douai roads by which any relieving army could be expected to come. On the other side of the river, against the northern sector of the walls, there was a vast open meadow known as the Pré-aux-Nonnains after a small convent church which lay in the middle of it. Jacob van Artevelde and the rest of the Flemings set up their headquarters here. From the belfry of the church they could observe the comings and goings of the garrison. The Count of Hainault and (when at last he arrived) the Duke of Brabant covered the south-eastern sector, including the Valenciennes gate. The rest of the walls on the right were invested by the German princes. To maintain communications between the allied camps and to seal off the approach by river into the town, wooden pontoon bridges were built over the Scheldt north and south of the city.

Where the ground rose away from the walls the allies sited their siege engines, immense mechanical slings mounted on wooden frames and assembled on site by specialist carpenters. Experiments conducted with reconstructed machines in the nineteenth century suggested that these devices could hurl a 25-pound stone stone ball nearly 200 yards to destroy the top work of walls and towers. Their noisy operations were good for the besiegers’ morale but otherwise achieved nothing. The walls of Tournai had been built to withstand them. From beginning to end of the siege they killed only six defenders, less than one for each machine. The Count of Hainault experimented with more elaborate devices which could hurl explosive bombs into the city, but he was even less successful. The engineer who was commissioned to construct the bombs made off with his advance and was never seen again.

Given the size of the garrison an assault on the walls would have been a costly and hazardous operation. Until the fourth week of the siege the allies did not attempt it. Instead they waited for Tournai to fall into their hands by treachery or famine or for their missiles to bring down a large enough section of the wall. They tried to draw the main French army to battle by the traditional method of wasting the territory around. They filled their camps with spoil and struck out around them settling scores for the Count of Hainault. The first victim of this brutal process was the town of Orchies, 12 miles down the Douai road. This place was attacked on 1 August 1340. The leading men of Orchies came out to parley but while the talks continued the army assaulted and sacked it. Great quantities of booty were found here, and the richest citizens were taken for ransom. Before dawn on 3 August the Count of Hainault led his men against Saint-Amand, 10 miles south on the border of his own dominions. An expedition from Valenciennes attacked simultaneously on the other side. Saint-Amand had a strong French garrison. They fought a protracted battle against their assailants outside the town, and when they were driven back they fought on from the walls. But they were overwhelmed. Many of them were killed and the rest captured. The Count utterly destroyed Saint-Amand. He threw down the walls and demolished the famous monastery, carrying off for ransom those citizens who had taken sanctuary inside it. The booty included a large quantity of gold and cattle and seventeen bells.⁵¹ Ten days later a detachment of the besieging army destroyed the great Benedictine abbey near Marchiennes and the small town around it. Fire took hold very quickly in the cramped alleyways and wooden buildings of which medieval towns and villages were made. For 15 miles about the walls of Tournai nothing was left standing. To the south-west the torch-bearers came within sight of the gates of Douai.

The garrison and citizens of Tournai conducted a spirited defence. From monastery gardens under the walls their own stone-throwers fired continuously but more or less at random into the enemy camps outside. They achieved rather more than the equipment of the allies did. One of their missiles destroyed the bell tower of the convent in the Pré-aux-Nonnains, thereby depriving the Flemings of their observation post. Another destroyed a Flemish siege engine within a few yards of Jacob van Artevelde’s tent. A third struck the Count of Hainault’s chief engineer and took his head off. The defence of the walls and gates was in the hands of the citizens, who distributed watches and stations among themselves. The garrison were kept in reserve for fighting off assaults and launching sorties from the gates. Small parties of volunteers crept out from the walls to fall upon isolated groups of the besiegers, to seize valuable commodities, and to capture cartloads of provisions. In one daring sortie a group of men led by a squire of Godemar du Fay succeeded in capturing part of the booty which the Count of Hainault was bringing back from his sack of Saint-Amand. Another sortie by sixty horsemen invaded the English camp and penetrated the tent of Bishop Burghersh while the Bishop was eating his dinner. A French knight set at him with his lance. He was saved only by the devotion of a squire who threw himself in the way of the assailant and took the blow himself. These adventures, although good for the spirits of the city, were very costly in men and horses and achieved nothing of real military significance. There was also a serious danger that the pursuing enemy would force their way through the gates as they opened to readmit the sortie party. This very nearly happened after the attack of Bishop Burghersh’s tent. Because of incidents like this the city authorities took firm measures to curtail unauthorized sorties. At one point they were confiscating the keys of over-enthusiastic gate crews.

The main danger facing the town was that they would run out of food. There had been no time to accumulate great stores, as the French had done at Cambrai in 1339. The defenders were already in difficulties at the outset of the siege. It was a hot airless summer. Food could not be preserved. Pasturage within the walls was quickly exhausted and cattle put out to graze at night were seized by the enemy and eaten. Grain was plentiful but there was a dire shortage of flour because the millers of Tournai were dependent on windmills in the suburbs which were in the hands of the enemy. The very size of the garrison, equal to a quarter of the population and accompanied by several thousand horses, added to the problems. At an early stage of the siege old men, women and children and the poor and weak, all ‘useless mouths’, were expelled. The price of food rose to astronomical heights. Curiously there was no attempt to create a ‘siege economy’. The garrison troops had to buy their provisions from the citizens out of their own pay at whatever was the going rate. In early September they were in the peculiar situation of having to arrange for groups of men-at-arms to bring supplies of money through the besieger’s lines at night at great danger to themselves in order to prevent their companions from starving.⁵² The Count of Foix, who at one point had sat down with his entire household to dine on one loaf and one fish, threatened to abandon the town and fight his way out through the lines if something was not done. He succeeded in obtaining from the city authorities an old and disused portable mill which his men repaired and set up in the buildings of St Martin’s Abbey. This brought some relief. But it was not until the very last days of the siege that the city fathers instituted strict controls over stocks and prices. The French garrison commanders must often have been tempted to take ruthless measures against the self-interested citizens whom they were supposed to be defending. They never did so. A city the size of Tournai could so easily be delivered up to the enemy by a handful of disaffected burghers, however large the garrison.

The besiegers had no difficulty in supplying themselves. Around them lay some of the most fertile agricultural regions of northern Europe. Barges laden with produce arrived regularly by river. But the armies of the coalition had other difficulties. A long siege is boring and demoralizing and subject to diminishing returns of plunder. In the third week of August there were signs of impatience and a change of policy among the besiegers. Instead of gradually starving the city into surrender, it was decided to assault it by force of arms. The first important attempt occurred on 26 August 1340. An assault force of 2,000 Flemings and an unknown number of Englishmen tried to scale the walls by the Porte Sainte-Fontaine at the northern extremity of the city. But they were repulsed with heavy losses. On 2 September 1340 another attempt was made at the same place. Great quantities of brushwood were sent against the wooden gates and lit. As the  gates burned the siege engines battered at them. The assault, when it came, lasted most of the day before it faltered and was broken off. For their gallantry the defenders of the Porte Sainte-Fontaine received a barrel of burgundy.

These attempts exacerbated the strains in the allied councils not only because they failed but also because it was only the English and Flemings who took part in them. The Hainaulters had done great deeds of their own at the other end of the town but the Germans and Brabanters had done nothing. This did not pass unnoticed. The Flemings openly accused the Brabanters of treachery. There was an ugly incident after a piper from the army of Brabant was caught in the English sector of the walls engaged in conversation with one of the defenders. Van Artevelde had him tortured to the point of death to make him say that he had been acting on the orders of his superiors.⁵³ A little later van Artevelde delivered a tirade against the cowardice and inactivity of the Duke of Brabant at a conference of the allied leaders in the King of England’s tent. One of the Duke’s knights told him to go back and brew beer in Ghent. Van Artevelde ran this man through with his sword. All of Edward’s diplomatic skills were required to prevent the Duke from leaving the army forthwith.

The Brabanters and the German princes had no reason to bring any enthusiasm to the fighting. The mercenaries would be worthy of their hire when they received it. Edward excused himself and pointed to the strenuous measures which his ministers were taking in England. But his thoughts were not as optimistic as his words. In the middle of August when the siege had been in progress for only two weeks he had already made the first tentative approaches to the French court. As September came and no money arrived from England, Edward had to pay 20 per cent interest to usurers for money to feed himself and his troops.⁵⁴ By the end of the first week of September 1340 it had become apparent that if negotiations failed there would be little time left in which to capture Tournai or force his adversaries to battle before his own army abandoned him.

*

Philip VI had as good an opportunity as he would ever have to destroy the English King’s pretensions in the summer of 1340. He had a large army under his command. The enemy’s forces, although more numerous than his own, included very few of the feared English archers and an unduly large proportion of raw Flemish townsmen. Philip’s indecisive manner and hesitant movements seemed incomprehensible. His army had remained encamped under Vimy Ridge until 22 or 23 July when it began to shuffle slowly off in the direction of Saint-Omer, arriving too late to take part in the battle. Philip himself followed in its tracks. On the evening of 29 July 1340 he came to Aire-sur-la-Lys on the Flemish border. A force of about 2,000 men was detached here, placed under the command of the Duke of Athens and sent off in pursuit of the remnant of Robert of Artois’ army. While this force failed to take Cassell and engaged in some desultory destruction in the Flemish borderlands, the rest of the army waited for its orders.

In St Andrew’s Priory outside Aire the French royal Council met. They had before them two Franciscan friars from Tournai who had made their way through the lines of the besiegers with letters from the garrison commander. He reported the complete investiture of the city and the grave shortages which existed within the walls. Two possible courses were discussed: the army could invade and sack Flanders, toppling van Artevelde’s regime and perhaps drawing off the Flemings from Tournai; or it could march to relieve Tournai. The decisive voice was that of the Count of Flanders. Louis of Nevers passionately opposed an invasion of his county, knowing that its destruction by a French army would ruin perhaps forever his chances of a reconciliation with his subjects. It was therefore decided to march on Tournai instead.

The two Franciscans hurried back with the news. Yet it took Philip no less than five weeks to reach Tournai. The delay was only partly explained by disorganization. At Béthune there were prolonged discussions with representatives of van Artevelde’s enemies from the three great towns of Flanders. This was too promising a sign of disintegration in the enemy camp to be spurned. But the discussions came to nothing and delayed Philip by a week. At Douai, where Philip arrived in the third week of August, there were other messages of peace, perhaps disingenuous, this time from Edward III himself. The French court seemed remarkably anxious to avoid the decisive battle. They remained for nearly two weeks in Douai. Within the walls of Tournai the slow progress of the French army added to the distress of the inhabitants and the garrison. On the night of 10 August 1340 two messengers were secreted out of the city to lay before the French King the state of their defences and supplies. He received them with ill-concealed irritation. Their function, he said, was to hold out. He would see to it that they were rewarded after the campaign.

The French army at last entered the Tournaisis on 7 September 1340 and pitched its tents at Bouvines, some 10 miles west of the city. Bouvines was an evocative place, the site of the great battle of 1214 in which Philip Augustus had defeated King John and his German allies, putting the seal on the destruction of the Angevin Empire. It was a tiny hamlet beside a narrow stone bridge over the River Marcq. The old Roman road from Tournai to Estaires stretched east and west. On either side the river broadened out into impassable marsh. Behind this natural barrier the French army waited. A few volunteers made their way across the marshes to the city walls, bringing bags of cheese, meat and other delicacies. Within the city the garrison was preparing itself for a great sortie at the decisive point of the forthcoming battle. The commanders sat down with the leading burgesses in the city hall. They wanted volunteers from among the citizens. The burgesses wanted undertakings that the sortie parties would pay their bills before they left and return to defend the town after the battle had ended. At nightfall criers passed through the streets calling men to arms.

15 Bouvines, September 1340

Edward III redisposed his forces about the city. Leaving only small covering forces by the gates, all the princely armies and most of the Flemings crossed to the western side of the Scheldt to stand between the city walls and the enemy. The Duke of Brabant held the southern flank in front of the village of Chercq; the Count of Hainault and his uncle stood to the north; Edward himself raised his standard in the centre. In front of them lay the great expanse of open, level ground into which the French army was expected to issue.

There was no battle. The French defended their positions, but they did not come out into the open fields where the enemy was waiting for them. Needling attacks on their flanks failed to draw them. Early on 8 September 1340 the Hainaulters and some volunteers from other contingents of the allied army carried out a reconnaissance in force towards the French encampment under the guidance of a local bandit who knew the ground. They collided in the dawn mist with a large foraging party from the contingent of the Prince–Bishop of Liège, who was fighting with the French army. There was a bloody skirmish along marshland paths south of the bridge before they were beaten off. A little later on the same day the Hainaulters tried to make their way round the north side of the French positions by the bridge over the Marcq at Tressin. Here there was another short, fierce fight in which the Hainaulters were worsted. It was a poor return for all their efforts.

Once the tension provoked by Philip VI’s arrival broke, the leaders of the allies fell to quarrelling noisily in their tents, and their army began to fall apart. The imminence of battle concentrated men’s minds on the absence of their pay. What were they to die for? The first murmurs of mutiny came not from the princes but from their men. In the army of the Duke of Brabant the lead was taken by the levies of Brussels, Louvain and Antwerp, which included most of the Duke’s infantry. They threatened to withdraw from the army ‘with or without leave’. There were influential men in the army of Hainault who were of the same mind. Within a few days of the arrival of the French at Bouvines exploratory talks were in progress between Edward’s allies and those of Philip VI. Edward was told about these discussions and permitted them. But he took no part. The point was not lost on the French negotiators. They reported to Philip that the enemy’s nerve was failing. Large concessions could probably be extracted.⁵⁵

The French King was changeable and irrational. He took the view, as he had done before La Capelle in the previous year, that a battle should be avoided. But he had a strong sense of personal grievance against Edward III, whom he regarded as a bumptious vassal, and he was reluctant to conduct formal negotiations on French territory with the representatives of the man who had invaded it. Nor would he countenance any dealings with the rebellious and excommunicated Flemings. It was not until 22 September 1340, by which time Philip had been at Bouvines for a fortnight, that he was persuaded to relent by his brother the Count of Alençon and his sister Jeanne de Valois, Abbess of Fontenelle and dowager Countess of Hainault. This forthright and censorious lady then crossed the marshes with a small escort at night and presented herself in the tent of her son-in-law, the King of England. She found Edward unmoved by her appeal to his finer moral sense, but interested in an accommodation with his enemy for more calculating reasons. He intensely desired to capture Tournai and save his honour, and he believed that the city was on the verge of surrender. Henry of Lancaster had captured a messenger passing between the walls and the French camp. This man had told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear, that the garrison was down to 200 men and had less than a fortnight’s food left. But Edward did not have a fortnight. He knew that most of his army would not fight and that his campaign was lost. He wanted only a dignified way out. The leaders of the coalition were called to his tent. Robert of Artois and Jacob van Artevelde were opposed to any suggestion of negotiation. Van Artevelde invoked the treaties of the coalition and the oaths of the men present. The Duke of Brabant spoke strongly in favour of compromise and the mood of the meeting was undoubtedly with him. Without the men of Brabant the prospects in a battle were not good. Van Artevelde reluctantly assented.

About halfway between the two armies, outside the hamlet of Esplechin, there was a small chapel. The plenipotentiaries met here on 23 September 1340: on the French side, John of Bohemia and the Bishop of Liège, the King’s brother the Count of Alençon, and the counts of Flanders and Armagnac; on the English side, Henry Burghersh and the four principal allies of England, the Duke of Brabant, John of Hainault, the Duke of Guelders and the Margrave of Juliers. The French had a strong hand and as the negotiations proceeded it became stronger. Everyone in the allied camp knew what was happening. It was difficult to maintain any enthusiasm for the prosecution of the siege which was now all but over. The Brabançon troops around Tournai faded away in the face of sorties from the town. The Flemings, who were afraid for their own future, were arriving in droves in the French camp to throw themselves humbly before Philip VI and beseech his pardon.⁵⁶ The French skilfully exploited the divisions among their enemies. By the end of 24 September 1340 agreement had been reached.

There was to be a truce of nine months until 24 June 1341 not only in northern France but in Scotland, in Gascony, at sea and in the Channel Islands. All parties were to hold their existing positions, however gained. All prisoners of war were to be released on parole, to return to captivity if hostilities were resumed. All of this was highly satisfactory to the allied princes. The truce would protect them from the vengeance of the French King for long enough to contrive a permanent agreement with him. Those who had made conquests (in practice only the Count of Hainault) could hold on to them for the time being. There were significant concessions for the Flemings. Philip undertook that for the duration of the truce he would prevent the return of the exiles who had fled from van Artevelde’s regime. He promised that he would arrange for the ecclesiastical penalties against Flanders to be lifted and that he would make no further use of the notorious papal privilege by which the kings of France were able to call down excommunication and interdict on the province. As for Edward III, it would not be right to say that he gained nothing from the truce of Esplechin. The huge army which Pierre de la Palu and Bertrand de l’lsle had now gathered in the south-west, which was poised to conquer what was left of the English positions in the Garonne valley, was halted and dispersed. The Scots cancelled their plans to attack Stirling, which they would probably have captured. But Edward’s eyes were fixed on the northern march of France, and his failure there was complete. All that he gained was a liberty to withdraw gracefully. On the following morning, 25 September 1340, the truce was formally sealed and the cessation of hostilities was proclaimed by the heralds in both camps.⁵⁷ The Brabanters had already gone. The princely armies vanished. The English and the Flemings spent two days packing up their belongings and then marched off northward.

Edward III was greatly embittered. He believed that he had been on the verge of a great victory when the ground was taken from under him. He did not blame his allies, as many of his followers and most of the chroniclers did. He was too embarrassed about his own broken promises to do that. He blamed his ministers in England, idle, incompetent, treacherous or disloyal, who had failed to send him money in his hour of need. ‘Truly,’ he wrote to them in October, ‘if we had had but a pittance at the right moment we could have accomplished our great enterprise and achieved renown above all other princes.’⁵⁸ This was unrealistic and absurd. Edward owed his allies so much that no amount of money which his ministers might have provided would have made them keen to continue a war from which they wanted only a safe and honourable escape. The garrison of Tournai was certainly in severe straits, but their position was not as hopeless as the exaggerated tales of the captured messenger suggested. Morale in the city was high and some of the problems of food distribution were being overcome. They could probably have held out for some weeks. And what if they had fallen? The city would have passed at least temporarily to Flanders and Edward would have been left to retreat northward or deploy unenthusiastic allies against a powerful French army. He would probably have been defeated. The question, however, was never put to the test, for Philip VI was safe behind the line of the Marcq and had no intention of risking in a battle what he could certainly have without one. It was an inglorious policy and a missed opportunity. But it achieved the essential object: the English coalition broke up and the English King departed.

*

Edward III arrived in Ghent on 28 September 1340 ostensibly as king of France, in fact as the hostage for his enormous debts. He jousted and feasted with the princes of the coalition and with the Count of Flanders, and exchanged splendid gifts with them while from all over the Low Countries and the German Rhineland his creditors gathered round to press their demands. The Council in England travailed with growing desperation and fear to satisfy them. At Westminster on 2 October 1340 there appeared before them in response to a peremptory summons a host of sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs and collectors to explain why no wool had been raised. They could only offer ‘frivolous excuses’, such as that all the wool had been secreted out of the county before the loan commissioners had arrived. This grim news was promptly brought to Edward in Flanders. He was unable to pay his daily living expenses in Ghent let alone his debts accumulated in the course of his campaigns. On his arrival there he had been able to borrow£100 to pay for his archers’ meals. Thereafter no tradesmen would extend him any credit at all. He could not even buy fodder for his horses and had to send most of them home to eat in England. His evident distress must have made it difficult to bluff his creditors. They were very insistent. The banking syndicates of Mechelen and Louvain were holding three earls as hostages. The Bardi and the Peruzzi bound themselves to pay off these debts not later than 12 November 1340 in return for an assignment of wool. But when no wool came the Italians defaulted. The Great Crown of England was in the mercenary hands of the Archbishop of Trier, who was threatening to break it up. This fate was averted by another syndicate of bankers who took over the pledge. But they too proposed to break it up if they were not paid within a year. Edward’s unpaid allies were angry and in some cases rude. The lord of Falkenburg wrote a ‘most acidic’ letter (Edward’s phrase). Impotence and frustration fed this German prince’s anger. Others were in a much stronger position. In August 1339 Edward had promised some of them including the Duke of Brabant that neither he nor the great men of his court would leave the Low Countries until such time as their debts had been entirely satisfied. At the end of October 1340 the English King confronted his princely creditors at a painful conference. He offered them in part payment 12,000 sacks of wool in two instalments, the equivalent of about £100,000 in a good market. But they insisted on cash.⁵⁹

From England there came no money but only news of bureaucratic inertia and incipient rebellion. At about this time Edward received an unidentified official from England who brought with him the most lurid account of conditions there. The Council, he said, far from suppressing opposition to the collection of the wool levy, were conniving with the opposition and contributing to the agitation by blaming Edward for the burdens of the nation. According to this source they were wilfully disregarding Edward’s instructions and taking the direction of policy into their own hands. It was pure malice. But it had a powerful effect on the English King and the small group of officials and commanders who were about him. Frustration turned to fear and anger. ‘I believe’, the King wrote to the Pope, ‘that the Archbishop wanted me for lack of money to be betrayed and killed.’ Some of Edward’s courtiers openly contemplated Stratford’s execution for treason.

During the first fortnight of November 1340 Edward succeeded by extraordinary efforts in borrowing about £9,000. He got £2,100 from Henry of Lancaster, who pawned his jewels; and 44,000 florins (£6,600) until the following April from a usurer who received personal guarantees from the Earl of Northampton, the Duke of Guelders and the Bardi and Peruzzi banks and took four knights and a partner of each bank as hostages. This was thought sufficient to secure repayment even from a bankrupt king. It enabled Edward to negotiate from the Duke of Brabant permission to return to England, where alone he could raise enough money to pay his debts. Even then leave was given grudgingly and on terms that hostages would have to be sent back in his place.⁶⁰ No such arrangement was made with the men of Ghent, in whose power Edward was. But early on the morning of 28 November 1340, Edward wrote them an apologetic letter, and then pretended to go riding in the suburbs of the city. He took with him eight companions, including the Earl of Northampton, Walter Mauny and his private secretary William Kilsby. When they were out of Ghent they belted for Sluys and embarked on a small boat for one of the Zeeland islands. There a ship was found to take them to England.

The royal party arrived in the Thames on 30 November 1340 and reached the water gate of the Tower of London at midnight. There had been no warning of his coming. The Constable of the Tower was out of town. The fortress was pitch dark. The King had to grope his way through the unguarded gate. His arrival was like a stroke of thunder. The Sub-Constable greeted him on his knees. Rooms were lit at once for his use. The Mayor of London, the principal war financiers and the councillors and higher officials of the government were summoned from their beds. The Chancellor (John Stratford’s brother Robert) and the Treasurer came at dawn. They were summarily dismissed. The others were detained as they arrived and shut up in separate rooms to be interrogated apart. In France the sensation caused by these events provided the first firm intelligence that Edward III had indeed left the continent. On 14 December 1340 a messenger arrived in Paris from Amiens with the news gleaned from a traveller that Edward was in London and had imprisoned most of his ministers. This was true. Almost all the principal home ministers and officials (except bishops), the financiers William and Richard Pole and John Pulteney, the Chief Justice and four puisne judges were incarcerated. Two of the judges had been seized while they were presiding at Cambridge assizes. The senior home officer of the chamber had broken jail and become an outlaw. John Stratford had taken sanctuary in his cathedral like a common criminal.⁶¹

*

On 2 December 1340 there died in Ghent, probably of dysentery contracted at Tournai, the two men who had been most closely associated with Edward III’s schemes in the Low Countries: Sir Geoffrey Scrope and Henry Burghersh, Bishop of Lincoln.⁶² Their plans had failed completely. They had failed, moreover, not by military defeat but by weaknesses of conception and entirely foreseeable weaknesses of execution. The disintegration of the coalition after November 1340 followed as a matter of course. From the Imperial alliance Edward III had gained nothing except legal sanction for his acts, a modest number of troops in 1339 and a decorated ceremonial chariot in 1340 which was captured by the French. The Emperor, who had never received all of his subsidy and had found in the alliance another obstacle to his reconciliation with Avignon, began to withdraw from it early in 1341. He patched up his quarrel with the King of France in March. In June 1341 he announced that Edward III’s powers as imperial Vicar were revoked. This was followed by the desertion of most of the German princes of the Rhineland.⁶³ In the Low Countries the English alliance continued to enjoy a faint life, acknowledged but not invoked for any practical purposes of war until the princes fell away between 1343 and 1347. Only Flanders remained. But although Flanders was a valuable thorn in the French flank, no significant English army was to fight there again until the 1380s.

Edward III’s three-year preoccupation with the Low Countries had caused him catastrophic territorial losses in every other theatre of war. Of his possessions in France he had lost the county of Ponthieu and much of the remnant of the duchy of Aquitaine which he had held in 1337. The whole of the duchy north of the Gironde had gone, leaving the northward route through Saintonge open to the enemy and Bordeaux a frontier city. The last strategic footholds in the Agenais had fallen. Almost everything south of the Adour was either wasted or in the tenacious hands of the Count of Foix. In the Channel Islands, Guernsey had been lost and although much of the island was reconquered by the English in 1340 the siege of Castle Cornet had to be abandoned on the news of the truce. Edward’s most serious losses, however, were in Scotland, where the work of the years 1333–6 was largely undone. At the beginning of the French war the English had controlled the whole of lowland Scotland south of the Forth together with Fife north of it. By the end of 1340 they held the border fortresses of Berwick, Roxburgh, Jedburgh and Lochmaben, and beyond the border only Stirling and Edinburgh. Neither was destined to remain very long in English hands. The guerrillas of William Douglas surprised Edinburgh in April 1341 and captured it. Early in June 1341 David II landed with his court and some French advisers at Inverbervie, bringing an end to a seven-year exile in Normandy.⁶⁴

The possibilities of recovery were limited by the English King’s bankruptcy. He had exhausted his credit and the financial capacity of his subjects. Edward’s two-year expedition to the Low Countries was by far the most costly military enterprise undertaken by any medieval English King. It had cost £386,546 up to the end of May 1340 (when the surviving accounts end) and probably approaching £500,000 altogether.⁶⁵ This was of course only part of the cost of government, as Edward’s officials in England had so often reminded him. In three years the King had borrowed some £400,000 and levied taxation on a scale so great as to bring parts of the country to the edge of rebellion. The financial history of the following years was a story of disorderly repayments to those of the creditors who were secured or too powerful to offend. The earls of Derby and Warwick remained in captivity at Mechelen until May 1341. The Great Crown of England was not redeemed until 1345. Some of Edward’s continental creditors, such as the Bartolomei bank in Lucca, were still being repaid in the 1360s. William Pole was never entirely repaid. As for the Bardi and the Peruzzi, who lent more to Edward III than anyone had, their debts after some initial hesitation were repudiated. The Peruzzi bank failed in 1343, the Bardi in 1346, the result, Giovanni Villani thought, of their ‘great greed and folly’. It was the end of the first great age of Florentine banking, and of an intimate association between the English Crown and Italian financiers which had lasted for seventy years.⁶⁶

Edward added self-inflicted wounds to his difficulties. He allowed his frustration and rage at the débâcle of Tournai to get the better of his political judgement, and provoked a brief but dangerous constitutional crisis which all but paralysed his government during the first four months of 1341. He was not content to purge the central administration of scapegoats. He took all the reins of government into his own hands and those of a small clique of advisers who had been with him on the continent in 1340 and had shared the worst of his humiliations there. Instructions were given to collect all the unpaid arrears of the ninth of 1340, and to impose it illegally on the clergy, who had granted their own distinct subsidy and in many cases paid it. A vindictive and indiscriminate campaign of retribution was begun against provincial officials, down to the humblest local bailiffs, customs officers, arrayers and foresters, and even their clerks and servants. Commissioners of ‘trailbaston’ toured the counties inflicting summary trials and large fines not only on errant officials for their laxness, but on the population at large for ancient breaches of the peace and trivial peccadilloes. A sober chronicler reported that no one brought before the tribunals escaped unpunished, however impeccable his conduct; all had to pay stiff fines to stay out of prison. There was ‘grand duresse’ throughout England, said another. In London there were riots on Tower Hill. Archbishop Stratford, whom Edward and his friends had singled out as the object of their special vengeance, took advantage of the intensifying discontent to launch a sustained assault on the government from the sanctuary of Canterbury cathedral. As God had punished Henry II for his persecution of Becket by depriving him of most of his continental dominions, Stratford said, so would Edward III suffer the loss of the rest of them unless he mended his ways. The Archbishop poured forth sermons and pamphlets whose barbs against arbitrary power, excessive taxation and royal favourites were carefully calculated to arouse all the emotions which had set the English political community against the Crown during the crises of the last three reigns. Although Edward retained the loyalty of most of the aristocracy, Stratford’s radicalism provoked a strong enough response to show how close those emotions still were to the surface of English political life fifteen years after the deposition of Edward II. Earl Warenne dismissed Stratford’s enemies on the royal Council, men like William Kilsby and the King’s Chamberlain Sir John Darcy, as stooges: ‘those who should be foremost among them are shut out,’ he told Edward III to his face, ‘while such men as these fill the seats which belong by right to the lords of the land who alone can sustain you in your great enterprise.’⁶⁷

*

The situation of the French Crown was not much better, although its weaknesses were less obvious and its quarrels less public. Philip VI was not bankrupt. He had repelled the invasion in the north. He had gained territory in the south-west. By rights his government should have looked confidently forward. It did not.

The major loss was Flanders, which had in effect seceded from the French kingdom. The concessions which he made to the Flemings at Esplechin left the city governments in effective control of the province and promised the lifting of the papal interdict. The future political allegiance of Flanders was not mentioned. Philip probably thought that he would be able to restore his influence in the aftermath of Edward III’s defeat. This tactful compromise, however, was frustrated by the obstinacy of Benedict XII. The Pope was irritated by the overtly political use which was being made of ecclesiastical censures, and when the delegates of the Flemings presented themselves at Avignon to discuss their reconciliation they were told that they would have to swear to remain faithful subjects of the Count and the King. Since they would not, the censures remained in force. Philip VI protested loudly. At a stroke Benedict had removed his one bargaining counter, alienated the Flemings from the Crown and made him appear to dishonour his promises. In the Flemish towns Philip’s enemies, shaken by the failure of the Tournai campaign, recovered their balance and their grip on the territory. The Count, Louis of Nevers, remained in exile until his death at Crécy in 1346 and Flanders remained in the political orbit of England until the 1360s. This meant the loss of France’s richest province and a considerable added burden on French defences. Large garrisons now had to be kept in readiness on the north-western border even when the English threat lay elsewhere.⁶⁸

Internally France was as much strained by the first four years of the war as England was. Defensive warfare is costly. Only the aggressor can choose his time and place. The French government had laid out much more in resisting Edward III than Edward had in attacking them. They had maintained armies and fleets several times as large as Edward’s for longer periods. The burden of taxation was heavier in 1339 and 1340 than in any other year of Philip VI’s reign. In 1340 the northern provinces of France were simultaneously paying large lump sums for commuting the arrière-ban, a sales tax of four pennies in the pound, a levy of 2 per cent on the assets of the nobility and an income tax of a tenth on the domains of the Church. In addition to these overt taxes there were the covert ones: the forced loans, the arbitrary requisitioning of supplies and the manipulation of the coinage. The silver coinage was devalued in February 1337 and December 1338 and three times in 1340, representing a total reduction of 60 per cent of its nominal value. The monnayage (the proportion of the silver value which was taken by the King as a coinage fee) rose to 25 per cent in the spring of 1340.⁶⁹

Requisitions, it is true, were not carried out in France with the same regularity nor on the same scale as they were in England, and payment was usually made more promptly and generously. They did not therefore arouse the same generalized and ferocious resistance. But when the army was in the field the effect could be devastating in the districts through which it passed. Enormous numbers of carts were required, traditionally one for every fifty soldiers; wheels, tools and beasts of burden, the means of earning their owners’ living, could be peremptorily removed in exchange for an IOU; barns and stores were stripped of fodder and victuals. The Cluniac Prior of Elincourt and his party were dragged from their horses while travelling on the road to Paris in order to supply the retinue of the Count of Alençon. He embarked on a campaign of litigation. Not everyone was as well placed to complain.⁷⁰

The burden of the French King’s demands fell unevenly on different provinces and with crushing intensity on some. The war, a source of terror in the north and parts of the south-west, was still a matter of relative indifference in the east and centre. Its onset exaggerated the fissiparous tendencies of France and the inward-looking habits of provinces remote from the clash of arms. The invasion was not the unifying experience for the French which the coastal raids had been for the English, none of whom lived very far from the sea. The provinces worst affected were Normandy, which supported the ‘Great Army of the Sea’ with men and money; the large and populous royal bailiwicks of Amiens, Vermandois and Senlis and the duchy of Artois, comprising the belt of northern France which lay across the invasion routes and paid proportionately the largest share of taxation. The same provinces bore the brunt of war damage and requisitioning, and of the huge expenditure on war works, principally fortification.

It was these provinces which contained the ‘silken thread’ of fortified towns which the cardinals had told Edward III in 1339 could not be broken. They were much less strong than the cardinals implied. The region had not been threatened by an invader since the Flemish crisis of the 1290s, which was the last occasion on which systematic attention had been given to its defences. Events followed much the same course at the start of the war as they did in England, although the scale was magnified. A general survey of French fortresses was undertaken in 1335 and proceeded rather slowly. The results were not encouraging, but very little was done about them until the crisis broke. Philip VI was appalled when passing through Noyon during the campaign of 1339 to observe the lamentable condition of the walls and ditches. Saint-Quentin and Reims were both open to the country at one side, the result of the premature abandonment of work undertaken in the thirteenth century. The arrival of Edward III at Antwerp in 1338 had had the same catalytic effect as the sack of Southampton had in England. There was a panic-stricken programme of works, not well co-ordinated, not well executed and still incomplete in almost every case when the truce of Esplechin brought another excuse for relaxation. In the province of Artois alone major works were undertaken in at least seven towns and castles between 1337 and 1340. Some of them were very extensive. The burden of these works fell heavily and suddenly on those who had to pay for them, generally the lord of the town (if there was one), the bishop, the citizens and the outlying villages in proportions which were uncertainly prescribed by tradition and productive of bitter dispute and litigation. The works at Reims between 1337 and 1340, unsatisfactory as they were, cost 10,000 l.t.Arras in the same period carried out heavy repairs at seven gates, recut the town ditch and built fortified outworks on one side at a total cost of 1,900 l.t. Expenditure on this scale represented an enormous public investment. What it meant at Arras can be seen from the fact that a tax of 25 per cent on income from property raised little more than half of what was required to pay the bills. The rest had to be raised by a variety of financial expedients such as the sale of annuities, which burdened the inhabitants for a generation. Some towns were financially crippled. The walls of Saint-Quentin, which were largely financed by annuities, brought such ‘grands oppressions de dettes’ upon its citizens that the central government’s taxes could not be collected from them for four years in the mid-1340s.⁷¹

On top of this came the direct damage done by troops. The horrifying wastage of the Thiérache by Edward III in the autumn of 1339 and by John of Hainault in the following spring had a profound impact. The scale and system of these destructive expeditions was relatively new to western European warfare. In the summer of 1340 the province of Artois lost two border towns, Aire and Arques, both razed to the ground by Flemish armies. Three substantial towns of the Tournaisis were wiped out during the seven-week siege of Tournai, one of them (Saint-Amand) for a recognizable political object, the others for loot and entertainment. These places were at the epicentre of the earthquake. Lesser tremors spread outward over long distances: from the carnage of Sluys to Dieppe and other Norman towns which lost many of their adult menfolk: from Aubenton, which was destroyed by the Hainaulters in April 1340, to Reims and other northern cities where the news of the event brought panic, disorder and flight; from La Capelle, burned by the English in 1339, to the accounts office of the Abbey of Saint-Denis which owned it. Not all of the destruction was the work of the enemy. Towns like Saint-Omer, Aire and Lille had to destroy their own suburbs on the approach of the enemy. They were often the newest and richest districts. When the King of England landed at Antwerp in 1338 orders went out to all French officials to break every river bridge and causeway in the frontier provinces by which the invaders might pass.⁷²

In the mood provoked by these events Philip VI’s policy of avoiding battle, however sound strategically, was a grave political error. It seriously diminished his prestige, which was the main political asset of any French king and the one unifying factor among the diverse provinces of France. Moreover, it made royal taxation and the purposes for which it was raised seem irrelevant, a wasteful diversion of resources from the defence of every man’s own community. When the royal army, the only national instrument of defence, appeared to be doing nothing, why should men not think in local terms? To the knights and noblemen who marched with the army the King’s inactivity was a betrayal of instincts which made the pitched battle the highest form of warfare and its avoidance tantamount to defeat. Each of these men took back to his home his own kind of camp-fire dissidence and gossip. We cannot know how many men agreed with the squire from the Orléanais who had joined the army in every year from 1337 and told his friends that Philip had been too frightened to attack Edward III at Tournai. Edward may have suffered a strategic reverse but to this man he was ‘the most valiant of Christian kings’. Edward’s boldness won him other admirers whose help was more effective. The French castellan of Estambourc not only surrendered the place to the English on their march to Tournai but joined Edward III’s army. These were minor figures, although their outspokenness is revealing. There is no doubt that some greater but more discreet men took the same view. John, Count of Armagnac, one of the plenipotentiaries who concluded the truce of Esplechin on Philip’s behalf, had secretly offered his homage to Edward III only four months earlier. The Countess of Hainault told Philip VI in his tents at Bouvines that there were many princes of his court who would cheerfully betray him to the King of England. Many? No doubt the statement was hyperbole. But Philip, whose fear of treachery was obsessive, took it seriously enough to lose his temper.

                   Ne croi pas tout ce qu’on te dit

                   Partout a fraude et tricherie

a versifier had once written to the French King. He did not feel like a victor.⁷³

NOTES

1 Cal. Letter Books, F, 41; RP, ii, 107(5), 108(11–13); PRO C76/15, mm. 32, 31, 29, 28, 27; WBN, 297–8.

2 Venice: Cal. State Papers Venice, 1202–1509, ed. R. Brown (1864), 8–9. Fieschi: RF, ii, III, 1126; Benedict XII, Reg. (France), nos 715, 720–2, 727–8, 730, 734; Vitae Paparum, i, 205–6, 213–14.

3 Doc. Monaco, i, 270–1; AN P2291, pp. 549–52; Bock, Quellen, no. 282; CCR 1339–41, 410, 431.

4 DCG, nos 278, XXVII (331–3, 468, 503).

5 Chron. mon. Melsa, iii, 43; Murimuth, Chron., 103–4; Baker, Chron., 67; Nangis, Chron., ii, 165; Grandes Chron., ix, 174; BN Fr. 2598, fol. 51; DCG, no. XXVII (502–3).

6 DCG, no. XXVII (329, 331–3, 394–401, 423, 432–3, 441–2, 468, 473, 475, 477).

7 BN Fr. 2598, fol. 51; Cart. S.-Michel du Tréport, pp. l–li.

8 DCG, no. XXVII (12, 647); Actes Normands, 264–8; Ordonnances, vi, 549.

9 PRO C76/15, mm. 29, 29d, 28d, 26, 25d, 23, C62/117, m. 6, E101/22/25. Hainault knight: WBN 266.

10 DCG, no. XXVII (12–20, 166–505, 617–41); BN Fr. 2598, fol. 51vo.

11 Murimuth, Chron., 105; Avesbury, G. Edwardi, 310.

12 Avesbury, G. Edwardi, 310–2; Walsingham, Hist. Angl., i, 226–7; Gray, Scalacronica, 170; RF, ii, 1130; PRO C76/15, mm. 22, 19.

13 Avesbury, G. Edwardi, 311; RF, ii, 1129.

14 Sluys: (a) Edward III’s letters, RF, ii, 1129, 1130, *KOF, xviii, 166–7; (b) English chronicles, Murimuth, Chron., 105–7, 109, Baker, Chron., 68–9, Avesbury, G. Edwardi, 312, Knighton, Chron., ii, 17–8, French Chron. London, 76–7, Chron. mon. Melsa, iii, 45, Chron. Lanercost, 333–4; (c) continental chronicles, Chronographia, ii, 121–4, Nangis, Chron., ii, 168–70, Grandes Chron., ix, 180–4, Chron. Quatre Valois, 10–11, BN Fr. 2598, fol. 51vo, Chron. Norm., 44–5, Villani, Hist., XI. 109, cols 836–7. French fleet: Edward III’s figures after the battle were 190 captured and 23 escaped, *KOF, xviii, 167; compare 202 in pay of French war treasurers, DCG, no XXVII (166–449); the difference probably represents French allies rather than miscounting; for these, see Murimuth, Chron., 106 (Spanish), and PRO C76/15, m. 10d (Flemish).

15 French survivors: DCG, no. XXVII (331–5, 394, 397–8, 401, 468, 525–9, 531, 534, 536–8).

16 Froissart, Chron., ii, 37.

17 BN Fr. 9501, fols 153–154vo, Fr.n.a. 7413, fols 296–302, Fr. 32510, fols 178–178vo; AN K43/14bis.

18 Actes Normands, 268; AN JJ74/694, JJ81/202; Froissart, Chron., ii, 226.

19 Minot, Poems, 17; Avesbury, G. Edwardi, 312; Raine, N. Reg., 379–80. Coin: Chron. mon. Melsa, iii, 45; C. Oman, The Coinage of England (1931), 170–2.

20 BN Coll. Doat 186, fols 248–50 (alliances); BN PO 1839 (Marchi, 2); *HGL, x, 896–7; AP 1328–50, no. 2330.

21 AHG, ii, 126–7 (misdated); BN Coll. Doat 186, fols 251–4; Marquette, 479.

22 BN Coll. Doat, 186, fols 248–250, 187, fols 114–115. Tartas: Marquette, 487–8.

23 Marquette, 281–327, 485–6; AD Pyr.–Atl. E799 (‘capital enemies’); BN Coll. Doat 243, fols 75–76vo (lèse-majesté pardoned).

24 BN Fr.n.a. 9239, fols 228, 231. Overtures: Armagnac: BN Coll. Doat 187, fols 194– 195vo (1340), 114 (1341); Foix: PRO E101/167/3, m.6 (1342).

25 Knighton, Chron., ii, 13–4.

26 Knighton, Chron., ii, 13; WBN, 265; RF, ii, 1105. Hugh: RF, ii, 975; WBN, 315, 328–9; P. Duparc, Le comté de Genève (1955), 279–81.

27 Money: PRO SC1/38/73, E101/166/12, mm. 2d, 3, 6. Allies: Marquette, 490–1. Armagnac: BN Coll. Doat 187, fols 194–195vo.

28 PRO E101/166/12, mm. 9d, 12. Caumont: BN Fr.n.a. 9237, p. 792, Ste-Bazeille: AN JJ73/51; BN Fr.n.a. 9237, pp. 587, 763–4. Gontaut: AN JJ74/683; BN Fr.n.a. 9237, PP.576–7. Monségur: AN JJ71/374, JJ73/203.

29 Communications: BN Fr.n.a. 9237, pp. 772–3, 782–3. Agen: ibid., pp. 765, 766, 778, 779.

30 BN Coll. Doat 187, fols 194–195vo. Montréal: AN JJ73/171, 294, JJ74/183.

31 BN Fr.n.a. 9237, P. 468; HGL, ix, 523.

32 AN JJ73/234–5; BN Fr.n.a. 9237, P. 701. Raymond: WSS, 220; BN Fr.n.a. 9237, p. 451; AD Pyr.-Atl. E626; BN Coll. Périgord 10, fol. 39vo; PRO C61/55, m. 5, SC1/38/73.

33 Mézin: *Lacabane (2), 120–2, 124. Condom: AD Herault A4/110–1; BN Fr.n.a. 9237, pp. 772, 818–21; AN JJ73/190, 212.

34 Armagnac: Auvillar, Lectoure and Lomagne promised by Edward III (BN Coll. Doat, fols 194–195vo) and granted by Philip VI (AN J293/12). Garrisons, troops: BN Fr.n.a. 9237, pp. 528–705; Contamine (2), 68–9. Languedoc diversions: *HGL, x, 864–6. Eu: BN Fr.n.a. 9237, p. 796, Fr.n.a. 7413, fols 248–249vo. Louis: BN Clairambault 43/3235, 97/7549. Correspondence: BN Fr.n.a. 9237, pp. 772–3, 812, 815.

35 *Lescot, Chron., 207; RSG, i, 422. RF, ii, 1130; PRO C76/15, m. 17; Grandes Chron., ix, 185–6; Chronographia, ii, 124–5.

36 Chron. Norm., 45–6; ‘Itin. Philippe VI’; Arch. S.-Quentin, ii, 141. Numbers: Contamine (2), 69.

37 A. Giry, ‘Registre’, 250–1. Campaign of S.-Omer; Grandes Chron., ix, 187–97; Chronographia, ii, 127–35; Gray, Scalacronica, 171; Murimuth, Chron., 108; Bel, Chron., i, 188–90; BN Fr.n.a. 9239, fol. 274 (Ch. des Comptes, abstract of correspondence).

38 BN Fr.n.a. 9239, fol. 274; G. Canestrini, ‘Alcuni documenti’, Archivio Storico ltaliano, series I, vii, 358.

39 Grandes Chron., ix, 185; Récits d’un bourgeois, 183.

40 RP, ii, 103–4 (4); E. Fryde (9), 146–7; Harriss, 276–8. Penniless: *KOF, xxv, 343–4.

41 RP, ii, 117–22.

42 N. Sea: CR 1339–41, 560, 629. Houdetot; DCG, nos XIX, XXVII (133, 138, 140–65, 525–47, 604, 609, 635, 650); CPR 1340–3, 476; PRO C76/15, mm. 17, 10d.

43 N. Seas: CCR 1339–41, 503–4. Ch. Islands: PRO E372/191, m. 52 (Ferrers); CCR 1339–41, 499; CPR 1340–3, 20.

44 BN Fr.n.a. 9239, fol. 274; PRO C76/15, mm 10d, 9, 8, 7d; Baker, Chron., 70; Murimuth, Chron., 109n; CCR 1339–41, 637, 641.

45 PRO C76/15, mm. 17, 10d, 9, 8, 7, 7d, 6, 6d; RF, ii, 1133, 1156, 1185, iii, 1; DCG, no. XXVII (140).

46 Cal. doc. Scot., iii, no. 1338, v, no. 809; RS, i, 600–2.

47 PRO C76/15, mm. 16, 15, 14, 14d, 13; RP, ii, 120(18); Lloyd, 157–8. Enforcement: Harriss, 279–81; CRP 1340–3, 96; CCR 1339–41, 532, 536; French Chron. London, 83 (quotation).

48 Récits d’un bourgeois, 183; *Lescot, Chron., 207; *KOF, xxv, 344; RSG, i, 502–5, ii, 87–8. Challenge: RF, ii, 1131.

49 Siege of Tournai: (a) two chronicles of Tournai in *KOF, xxv, 344–65; (b) other continental chronicles, Muisit, Chron., 127–36, Bel, Chron., i, 191–212, Chronographia, ii, 135–62, Grandes Chron., ix, 200–11, Récits d’un bourgeois, 181–5, Hocsem, Chron., 295–6; (c) English chronicles (less well informed), French Chron. London, 77–82, Baker, Chron., 70–1, Murimuth, Chron., 109–16, Avesbury, G. Edwardi, 314–7; (d) Ch. des Comptes, abstract of correspondence at BN Fr.n.a. 9239, fol. 274–274vo. Philip’s movements: ‘Itin. Philippe VI’. Numbers: Contamine (2) 69 (French Army); BN Fr.n.a. 9238–9, fols 44–77vo, 127vo–177vo, 211–4, 231vo, 232vo (Tournai garrison).

50 *KOF, xxv, 365.

51 Suppliques Clément VI, no. 1016; AN JJ72/178, JJ73/189, 327.

52 BN Fr.n.a. 9238, fol. 140.

53 Cart. des Artevelde, 235–8.

54 PRO C81/269/13359; Fowler, 35.

55 BN Fr.n.a. 9239, fol. 274vo; Benedict XII, Reg. (Autres pays), no. 2926.

56 Bock, Quellen, no. 603.

57 RF, ii, 1135–7, *KOF, xviii, 176–7.

58 Déprez (1), 356.

59 Jousts: Grandes Chron., ix, 209. Council: CCR 1339–41, 625–7; PRO C76/15, m. 6. Distress: Déprez (1), 355n, 357. Borrowing: Fowler, 35–7; CCR 1339–41, 639–40; E. Fryde (6), 1165–6. Falkenburg: Déprez (1), 357n. Ghent conference: ibid., 356.

60 *Varenbergh, 346–7; French Chron. London, 83–6. Stratford: Benedict XII, Reg. (Autres pays), no. 2981; Vitae Arch. Cantaur., 20. Borrowing: CCR 1339–41, 649; CCR 1341–3, 225, 231, 286–7. D. of Brabant: *KOF, xx, 56–7.

61 RF, ii, 1141; French Chron. London, 83–6; Murimuth, Chron., 116; Avesbury, G. Edwardi, 323–4; CPR 1340–3, 110–1; BN Fr.n.a. 9239, fol. 274vo (French report).

62 Vitae Arch, Cantaur., 21.

63 Chronographia, ii, 155–6; *KOF, xviii, 186–8; Actes intérressant la Belgique, 146–8; RF, ii, 1166, 1167; Trautz, 313.

64 Ch. Islands: PRO E372/191, m. 52 (Ferrers). Scots: Fordun, Chron., i, 365; BL Add. Chart. 4147.

65 Tout (1), iv, 104–9; the charges of the allies must be added to Cusance’s account of 1340–1.

66 E. Fryde (6), 1142,1165–6 and Table B; E. Fryde (4), 23; Villani, Hist., XI: 88.

67 French Chron. London, 84–90; Murimuth, Chron., 118–9; Vitae Arch. Cantaur., 20–38.

68 Benedict XII, Reg. (France), nos 830, 843–4, 852.

69 Henneman, 339–40.

70 Timbal, Registres, pp. 73–4, 81–6, 89–103.

71 Surveys: AN P2291, p. 767; BN PO 2525 (de Rogne, 2); Arch. admin. Reims, iii, 246. Noyon: Timbal, Registres, 175–9. Reims: Desportes, 528–9, 540–1. St-Quentin: Arch. S.-Quentin, ii, 99–104, 117,122–4, 138–40, 142–3, 192. Artois: Inventaire AD Pas-de-Calais, i, 111, 111–12, ii, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31.

72 Desportes, 539–40 (Aubenton); BN Fr.n.a. 2598, fol. 50vo (La Capelle); Giry, ‘Registre’, 250–1 (S.-Omer); Timbal, Régistres, 185–8 (Lille); Inventaire AD P.-de-Calais, ii, 29 (Aire); ibid., ii, 24 (bridges).

73 AN JJ73/145 (squire); *KOF, xxv, 346 (castellan); Chronographia, ii, 158 (temper); Coville (2), 265 (verse).