CHAPTER III

Gascony

A ribbon of coastal territory never more than 50 miles wide, stretching from the mouth of the River Charente in the north to the Pyrenees in the south, was all that remained in 1328 of the great continental empire of the Angevins. Gascony had never been the most highly regarded part of the splendid dowry which Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought to Henry of Anjou on their marriage in 1152. Poitou had been the heart of Eleanor’s duchy, Poitiers its capital and La Rochelle its major port. The natural resources of Gascony seemed poor by comparison. Between the two major maritime cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne there stretched the bleak marshes of the Landes, occasionally relieved by patches of windswept grassland on which a sparse population eked out a living by growing millet and raising pigs. Between this sombre wasteland and the hills further east lay a flat, thickly wooded territory cultivated in irregular swatches marked out of the forest, by the broad river valleys, by a few roads of execrable quality and by the clearances of thebastides and greater monasteries.

The main source of its prosperity and the link which joined it to England for 350 years was wine. Until the thirteenth century Bordeaux had been only another local wine. The favourite wine of the English kings in the twelfth century was that of Poitou, which was shipped from La Rochelle. In this they shared the tastes of their subjects, for when King John attempted in 1199 to enforce maximum prices for all French wines sold in England, Poitou had pride of place and Bordeaux was not mentioned. The capture of Poitou and the fall of La Rochelle to the French in 1224 was therefore an event of central importance in the life of the region. It deprived Europe’s principal wine-importing nation of its main source of supply, and made the fortune of Bordelais. By the beginning of thefourteenth century more than 80,000 tons of wine were being exported every year from the ports of the Gironde. At least a quarter of this was landed in England, giving rise to complaints in Parliament that the country was being drained of gold to pay for it and invaded by Gascon merchants and usurers. The vineyards of Gascony ceaselessly expanded to meet the demand, filling the Graves south of the city of Bordeaux, spreading over the river into Entre-Deux-Mers and extending through the river valleys into the hinterland.¹

Aquitaine was a formless duchy whose inhabitants were conscious of the differences which separated them from other Frenchmen. But they were not unduly attached to old loyalties. They were fickle men, Froissart thought; ‘a very captious and unreliable people’ Edward I called them, whose promises should always be recorded in writing.² The unifying agents and the sources of English strength in the duchy through three centuries were the cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne, which stood at the estuaries of the two great river systems of south-western France and, although turbulent and independent-minded, remained fundamentally loyal to the English Crown until the end of the middle ages. This was particularly true of Bordeaux, which was the seat of the administration. The city inherited the mantle of Poitiers, decorating itself (as Poitiers had done two centuries earlier) with the grand architecture of a true capital. The nobility of the province established residences there, as other notables were doing in London and Paris. Fortified by a succession of charters of privilege, Bordeaux raised taxes, concluded treaties and issued bombastic statements sealed with its own seal. Its wealth had drawn a ceaseless flow of immigrants for most of the latter part of the thirteenth century, pushing out the crowded population into more than a dozen suburban parishes. A new line of ramparts, built at the beginning of the fourteenth century, enclosed three times the area of the old ones, themselves barely a century old.³

Bordeaux owed its political and economic importance chiefly to its incomparable position at the head of five river valleys. The inland towns depended for their trade on the passage of the rivers which joined up in the estuary of the Gironde. Bordeaux held them in a tight and much resented tutelage. No grower might sell his wine until the citizens of Bordeaux had first sold theirs. Growers and merchants bringing in wine from upriver towns found it difficult to sell except through Bordeaux merchants. The government of the duchy had their own reasons for conniving in this system. The duties which they levied on the traffic of the Gironde were a potent political weapon as well as a profitable source of revenue. Discounts were offered to loyal inland towns and to favoured communities in the neighbouring parts of the French King’s dominions, privileges far less extensive, it is true, than those of Bordeaux itself, but enough to give them the edge over their own neighbours. Saint-Macaire, La Réole and Agen on the Garonne, Moissac on the Tarn, and Cahors on the Lot were all the market towns of fertile wine-growing regions which had to send their goods past the walls of Bordeaux on the best terms which they could obtain. The wines of the Dordogne, which by-passed Bordeaux itself, were stopped and assessed to duty near the sea at the outpost of Castillon. Even the tiny village of Castelsagrat, situated on a barely navigable tributary of the Garonne more than a hundred miles from Bordeaux, did not dare to plant vines on the empty lots within its walls without petitioning Edward I for a discount on the customs of Bordeaux.⁴

Since the loss of Normandy at the beginning of the thirteenth century the English kings had rarely visited their continental dominions. Edward I visited Aquitaine twice. He spent two years there at the very beginning of his reign, and three years between 1286 and 1289, highly productive times during which he impressed his seal on the province in the businesslike manner which had become familiar to his English subjects. But although he lived until 1307 and his successors governed their duchy until the middle of the fifteenth century, no reigning King of England ever visited south-western France again. In spite of the distance from England (the journey was usually made overland to avoid the dangers of the Bay of Biscay) the government of Aquitaine was kept on a tight reign by its English master. Royal lieutenants with viceregal powers visited the province at fairly frequent intervals to make investigations or perform specific duties. At Westminster there grew up a group of record clerks and diplomatic officials, specialists in the affairs of south-western France, who were expert even when they were not wise. In Bordeaux, the government was carried on by a close group of officials in the Château de l’Ombrière. The Seneschal, usually an Englishman, was the chief military and administrative representative of the King–Duke. The Constable, notwithstanding his martial title, was usually a clergyman seconded from the English civil service to superintend the finances of the duchy. He was answerable directly to the Exchequer at Westminster. These two august personages controlled a surprisingly small bureaucracy, far smaller in relation to its burdens than the imposing bureaucratic machine which was growing up in England and in the provinces directly governed by the kings of France. In the outlying regions there was a small body of district officials, sub-seneschals, provosts and bailiffs, a few castellans and resident tax collectors. There were very few Englishmen. Almost all the subordinate officials of the duchy, and the great majority of the higher ones as well, were native Gascons. Except for the personal retainers of the Seneschal there were usually no English troops in Gascony, and even in moments of crisis military expeditions from England were small and infrequent. It was certainly not a colony.

There were good political reasons for the retentive interest which the English kings took in their continental dominions. Except in wartime, when it had to be expensively defended, Aquitaine had usually been an asset. Gascons were born fighters and skilled crossbowmen who commanded high wages as mercenaries. Large contingents of them had fought in the Welsh and Scottish wars of Edward I, swaggering intolerably as an English chronicler complained. The commissioners sent by Edward II in 1315 to assess the contribution which the duchy could make to his Scottish wars found that there were about 100,000 households (say half a million inhabitants) from which to draw recruits. There was no system of regular taxation in Gascony and very little in the way of ducal domain land, features of the duchy’s government which were to become a major source of weakness in wartime. But other revenues, the proceeds of the sale of offices, tolls and dues, and above all duties on river traffic, had traditionally made a large contribution to the budget of the English dynasty. In January 1324 a report presented to Edward II estimated his net receipts from the duchy at £13,000, which was roughly equal to the entire revenues of the English customs.⁵

Yet the retention of Aquitaine was more than a political calculation. The kings of England were French noblemen, sharing the tastes and conventions of the French aristocracy from which they had sprung. Aquitaine was part of their inheritance, the preservation of which was a duty owed to their family, part of the pietas of every medieval aristocrat. In the twelfth century, Henry II of England had ruled more of France than did the King of France. He had asked to be buried in an abbey in the Loire valley. His English subjects had been quite unable to converse with him without the assistance of an interpreter. Most of Henry’s empire had vanished, but French remained the first language of his descendants until the middle of the fourteenth century. Henry III and Edward I took most seriously their status as peers of France. It is true that their sense of being part of a common political community was badly dented in the Anglo-French wars of the 1290s, but it was many years after that before English kings stopped regarding themselves as princes of France, and a frustrated desire to be recognized as such was certainly one element of the bitterness which affected King Edward III’s relations with his second cousin Philip VI.

The peculiar status of the English kings in the French political order dated back to the treaty of Paris of 1259. Before that treaty the dukes of Aquitaine had acknowledged no superior on earth. They had performed no homage to the kings of France since the confiscation of their continental dominions had been proclaimed by Philip Augustus at the beginning of the thirteenth century, an act which they regarded as unlawful and which they refused to recognize. It was an unsatisfactory stalemate which the parties proceeded to replace in 1259 with an even more unsatisfactory compromise. The treaty doubled the size of the duchy, suddenly extending its boundaries from the coastal plain to the steep valleys of the interior and into regions which had not known English rule for half a century. But the surrender of these great territories was hedged about by qualifications and exceptions. The English dynasty recovered certain ill-defined rights in the ‘three bishoprics’ of Limoges, Périgueux and Cahors. Subject to equally ill-defined conditions, they were also promised the return of the diocese of Agen and parts of Saintonge and Quercy. There was no comprehensive territorial settlement of south-western France. All that was finally settled in Paris in 1259 was that the Duke held his lands there as the vassal of the King of France and owed him liege homage, the feudal bond to which all other loyalties yielded. On 4 December 1259 Henry III performed the act of homage in a fine ceremony in the garden of the royal palace in Paris, but what were the territories for which he was doing homage and what were his rights within them were questions which were left for his successors to argue out with increasing vehemence in the courts of successive French kings and finally on the battlefield. It was ‘a defiance of good sense’ as an Archbishop of Canterbury acidly observed twenty years later, and more than any other act it earned Henry his place in that region of Dante’s Purgatory reserved for children and negligent kings, ‘il re de la semplice vita’. Posterity has generally endorsed these verdicts, but neither of them is entirely fair to the ageing King who had greater problems both at home and abroad than the precise definition of indefinable rights. His intentions were defeated not only by casual draftsmanship but by two changes which occurred after the treaty was sealed and which he could scarcely have foreseen.⁶

The first was a sudden transformation in the political geography of France which resulted from the death in August 1271 of Alphonse of Poitiers followed within a few days by that of his wife. Alphonse, a younger brother of Louis IX, had ruled the whole of Saintonge, Poitou and the Rouergue as his appanage. His wife was the last representative of the house of Toulouse, whose territories included substantially the whole of Languedoc and the Agenais together with much of Quercy. Their marriage had been childless. The whole vast inheritance therefore fell to Philip III of France. Part of that inheritance, the Agenais, Quercy and the southern part of Saintonge, consisted of territories which had been somewhat indistinctly promised to Henry III in 1259. The Agenais in particular was much coveted by the English because it was essential to the successful defence of Gascony from the east. Probably for that reason Edward I, who succeeded his father in 1272, had the greatest difficulty in enforcing the promises of 1259 and recovered these territories only by several years of diplomacy, litigation and menaces of war. By the Treaty of Amiens in May 1279, Philip III surrendered the Agenais. After seven years of further disputation, Edward obtained southern Saintonge in a supplementary agreement signed in Paris in August 1286. Quercy was never recovered.⁷

These were substantial gains, but Edward’s secure possession of them was undermined by the far greater gains which the French Crown made by Alphonse’s death. By occupying Languedoc, the kings of France had turned the flank of the dukes of Aquitaine, completing a march on the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees which had begun with the Albigensian wars sixty years earlier. When Henry III of England had signed the treaty of Paris in 1259, his neighbour to the north and east had been an avaricious but unaggressive younger son of the French royal house, who could be expected to beget heirs and found an independent local dynasty. Whatever ambition the French monarchy might have to recover by stealth what it had yielded by treaty was restrained by distance and geography. Henry’s heirs were less comfortably placed. They had to assert their rights against a government whose officials were solidly installed in the neighbouring cities of Périgueux and Toulouse.

The ambitions which these officials nursed for the aggrandizement of their master’s domains was the second factor which Henry III could be forgiven for not foreseeing. Both the kings who signed the Treaty of Paris had been brought up in a world which had profoundly respected the feudal bond, more profoundly perhaps than its waning economic and military significance warranted in the thirteenth century. They felt no need or desire to see its legal effect defined with pedantic precision. ‘He was not my man before; now he has entered into my homage’, Louis IX told his confidant Joinville, who had ventured to criticize the treaty.⁸ While the personal relations of the English and French kings remained close, this was a good enough answer. But it was not good enough for the lawyers and civil servants of what, in the course of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, was becoming an increasingly impersonal monarchy. Their notion of royal sovereignty had little place for rights and obligations founded on the sentiment and tradition of an older governing class. In their hands the bond of personal homage lost much of its meaning as soon as the King of France and the Duke of Aquitaine made it the cornerstone of their relations.

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The extent of the English dynasty’s problems became apparent within a decade of Louis IX’s death, when it lost control of Limousin without a blow being struck for its retention. In Limoges, the capital of a region ceded to the English dynasty in 1259, the Bishop, the Viscount, the Abbot of St Martial and the citizenry were all local powers with independent minds and incompatible ambitions. The Bishop was the King’s man, in keeping with the royalist traditions of the French episcopacy. The Abbot had done homage to the Duke of Aquitaine in 1261, but his successor changed sides in the following year. The citizens were at war with the Viscount, the former looking to the King–Duke and the latter clinging to his allegiance to the Crown. Neither the King of France nor the Bordeaux government were manipulating their protégés. Indeed the King of France thought that Limoges ought to do homage to the King–Duke. But here, as elsewhere, they found themselves drawn into the quarrels of others, the rivalry of their officials lightly superimposed upon ancient grudges and jealousies in small self-sufficient communities. Treaties had little substance. Possession was not the gift of rulers but the prize of local politicians. In 1274 Edward abandoned the contest and Limoges became the fief of the French King’s nephew. It was a characteristic failure.⁹

The loss of Limoges was a severe blow to the Duke’s efforts to hold his own in the northernmost of the ‘three bishoprics’ which had been ceded in 1259. Less dramatic events were equally surely depriving him of what he had in the other two. Many of the French King’s vassals in the ‘three dioceses’ had privileges requiring their assent before their homage could be transferred to another, privileges of long standing in some cases but in others acquired in great haste on the very eve of the signature of the treaty. Their allegiance was not therefore in the gift of the French kings. They included some important territorial magnates: all three bishops, some of the largest lay and ecclesiastical lords and frontier towns such as Figeac, Brive, Périgueux and Sarlat. Few of them consented to the transfer of their homage. Their reasons were understandable. They wanted to be left alone, and preferred the more distant power. Those who did agree to the transfer of their homage often had to be bought by offers of privileges and immunities which made the Duke’s lordship in places little more than a nominal dignity. The Viscount of Turenne, one of the principal lords of Périgord, was brought into the Duke’s allegiance only by a handsome pension and a promise that the Duke would exercise only very limited jurisdiction in his lands. Another privileged vassal, the Count of Périgord, accepted the Duke’s lordship on restrictive terms in the 1260s and renounced it in the 1270s with the connivance of the Parlement of Paris.¹⁰

In southern Périgord, along the valley of the Dordogne and south of it, the English dynasty remained a powerful force until the 1320s, chiefly on account of the construction of the bastides. The more important of them were all foundations of the King–Duke and his officers: Puyguilhem, Fonroque, Beaulieu, Lalinde, Molières, Beaumont, Monpazier. The inhabitants of these places were men with no political past, colonists carving new land out of forest. They depended directly on the ducal government from whom their freedom and their privileges were derived. For much the same reasons, the English dynasty was able to hold its own in the Agenais, another territory heavily colonized by bastides. But elsewhere, in northern Périgord, in Limousin and in much of Saintonge, all of them regions controlled by ancient and powerful families and ecclesiastical corporations with penetrating networks of clients and dependants, the situation was very different. The ducal government faded away.

There was very little that could be done about the persistent erosion of the Duke’s jurisdiction even in the core territories of the duchy. A permanent and ubiquitous military occupation was out of the question. A limited military presence was possible, confined to the major strategic points, fords and bridges and the confluences of rivers. But even this was achieved with difficulty in a territory which until 1259 had extended no further than the coastal plain. The King–Duke had garrisoned citadels at Bordeaux, Bourg, Fronsac, Cubzac, Saint-Émilion, Pujols and La Réole, all in the old heartland of the duchy. There were also garrisons at Bayonne and Dax on the southern march. In the interior, military strongholds had to be acquired gradually and expensively over many years. Edward I devoted much thought and considerable resources to this task. He bought, built or restored a number of fortresses and acquired a share in others by private treaty. Some bastides were founded for specifically military purposes and were built with powerful walls. These acquisitions provided some sinew with which to control the more distant limbs of Edward I’s continental dominions. But even he never succeeded in controlling more than about one in six of the strongholds of his duchy.¹¹

There were regions where the Duke’s power was more noticeable than it was elsewhere. But nowhere was it possible to draw a line marking off the duchy from the outside world. Instead the changing fortunes of France and Aquitaine had in the course of two centuries left numberless scattered rights of the one to be surrounded by the territory of the other, like rock-pools after an ebb-tide. As one moved eastward from the Bordelais along the river valleys into the interior, the territory of the Duke merged imperceptibly with that of the King. There were islands of strength, the occasional privileged town or garrisoned fortress. There were periodical assizes, interruptions in the life of the small market towns at which itinerant officials did justice in the Duke’s name. There were obscure rights, often dormant, often contested, often ignored. Sovereignty was not power but a multitude of personal loyalties based on private bargains and the evanescent necessities of local politics.

It was probably true, as that shrewd old francophobe Boniface VIII told a French ambassador in 1298, that the Gascons would prefer to be ruled by the English dynasty than by the kings of France. But what they really wanted, he went on to say, was to have ‘a multitude of lords so that they may never be touched by any of them’.¹² The right of appeal from the King–Duke’s courts to the Parlement, which was firmly established by the 1270s, was the perfect instrument for their purpose and the source of most of the ducal government’s political difficulties. Appeals from the duchy to Paris were very numerous. They were also extremely slow. They were heard only on certain days of the year. Quite frequently the plaintiff was not ready on the appointed day or failed to appear, in which case, there was almost invariably an adjournment. During this time the appellant might continue to enjoy the protection of royal sergeants sent from Toulouse and Périgueux. The courts of the principality were paralysed and, in some cases, the government as well.

In these conditions malcontents appealed for great and small causes alike. A vigorous seneschal like Luke of Thanet, otherwise an able and energetic servant of the Duke, could provoke some thirty appeals in the course of a few years until the government at Westminster was obliged to recall him in 1278. The malcontents could not lose, even if they did not win. But very often they did win. The profound suspicion which the councillors of the Parlement felt for the authority of any prince but their own had more important consequences than the abrupt summonses served on local notaries whose deeds were dated after the regnal years of the King of England, or the petty complaints about the circulation of coins bearing Edward’s image. There was a time (it lasted barely three decades) when such difficulties could be resolved by tact on one side and restraint on the other. Edward I got on well with his cousin Philip III and at first with Philip the Fair, who succeeded him in 1285. While the Parlement was still feeling its way in matters of substance as well as procedure, important cases could be decided informally in the still open atmosphere of the French royal court. When the notaries of the Agenais were summoned to answer for the dating of their deeds, the Seneschal of Gascony could help them out by appearing before the court to claim responsibility, and then settling the matter behind the scenes with the more influential royal councillors. The most celebrated and dangerous appeal of Edward’s reign, which concerned his great Pyrenean vassal Gaston of Béarn, was never resolved judicially. Edward prevailed upon Philip III to bring pressure on Gaston. The appeal was ultimately withdrawn. The appellant was forced to surrender himself to his lord and passed some time in prison at Winchester.¹³

The development of French jurisprudence and the hardening policy of Philip the Fair made future disputes less easily resolved by those diplomatic pressures which Edward I’s government was so skilled in applying. In the mid-1270s Edward’s officers in the duchy endeavoured to discourage appeals by applying a variety of sanctions to appellants, and particularly to unsuccessful ones. In 1285, according to a decree of the Parlement denouncing the practice, the King–Duke’s officers were in the habit of seizing the property of litigants shortly before judgement was given in his courts, a measure designed to prevent a potential appellant from placing his domains under the protection of the King of France. The Duke did not need to go so far in order to make his displeasure felt. The many charters in which unsuccessful appellants were readmitted to the Duke’s favour on terms testify to the years of bureaucratic cold-shouldering which a litigant could expect if he appealed and failed. These sanctions became progressively more severe. In 1289 some citizens of Bordeaux appealed in the name of the city against the contempt of their privileges shown by Edward’s officers. Edward’s response on this occasion was to seize all cargoes of wine arriving in England which were not accompanied by a certificate attesting the loyalty of their owners. The appellants (who were probably in a minority in the city) resisted for eighteen months under the leadership of one Vidal Pansa, assisted by a commissioner appointed by the French King for their protection. But when resistance failed in 1291 the appeal was withdrawn, the commissioner was deported and Vidal Pansa drawn through the streets on a hurdle and hanged.¹⁴

Such quarrels were very damaging to the fabric of English government in Aquitaine and Edward attempted to avoid them by a careful observance of legal niceties which must itself have made the work of his officers more difficult. Increasingly, those officers tended to be lawyers. In Paris too Edward retained a permanent corps of lawyers and kept an office to deal with the steady flow of litigation involving the government of his southern dominions. In the spring of 1289, a few weeks before Edward’s return to England after a prolonged sojourn in Gascony, he issued a remarkable series of ordinances from the small town of Condom. In addition to formulating methodical regulations for the conduct of the government by his representatives, Edward required the appointment of regional officials whose business it was to attend the ducal courts and keep an eye out for the government’s interest in cases which might culminate in an appeal to the Parlement. In the same document, Edward took a number of measures designed to protect himself against the accusation of denying justice to his subjects and at the same time to make appeals to himself or his officers more congenial to local litigants. The greater part of the litigation of the duchy was assigned to professional judges (itself an innovation) sitting in various local centres, whose judgements might be challenged by appeal to a newly created Court of Appeals in Bordeaux.¹⁵

Whether this interesting experiment could have succeeded is a question which cannot now be answered. Probably no juridical reorganization could have stemmed the flow of appeals whose origins had always been more political than juridical. In the event it was not given time to succeed, for within five years the duchy was in the hands of the King of France. The sudden collapse of English government in Aquitaine in the 1290s bore out the worst of the gloomy prognostications which Edward had for some years been receiving from his most experienced Gascon counsellors.

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The origin of this disaster lay in a ferocious private war between the seamen of Bayonne and those of the ports of Normandy which, although it was begun without reference to either ruler gradually embroiled most of the maritime communities of England and France and eventually their governments also. In a manifesto directed at Edward I’s Gascon subjects, the French King accused them of insensate hatred of the French language and every man who spoke it. There is no doubt that at some times and places during 1292 and 1293 this extravagant accusation was justified. In Bordeaux and Bayonne lynch mobs had attacked every man of Norman origin whom they could find. At Fronsac on the Dordogne, four French customs officials had been lured on to a merchantman and murdered.

Philip the Fair had been looking for a quarrel with the King of England for at least a year. There was a powerful war party at his court, gathered round his brother Charles of Valois, an ambitious soldier who looked forward to a more decisive resolution of the tortuous disputes of twenty years of diplomacy and legal argument. On 4 May 1293, Philip sent his officers to proclaim the peace in the streets of Bordeaux and Bayonne. When this was followed, not long afterwards, by some particularly serious attacks on Philip’s subjects, the French King ordered the Seneschal of Gascony to deliver up the malefactors to his officers, including all the principal dignitaries of the city of Bayonne. The Seneschal refused. The case was brought before the Parlement of Paris, which pronounced the sequestration of the greater part of the duchy and sent a number of unarmed sergeants to take possession. They were curtly dismissed. Accordingly, on 27 October 1293, Edward I was summoned to appear before the Parlement to answer for the contumacy of his officials. A date was fixed in January 1294. ‘And we shall proceed against you as justice requires, whether you appear or not.’¹⁶

Edward I had not sought this crisis. His resources were heavily committed in his own kingdom and in Scotland. He was also genuinely willing to compromise. So he commanded his subjects to keep the peace with the Normans and declared himself ready to bring all the malefactors within his own dominions to justice if Philip would do likewise in his. Alternatively, Edward proposed arbitration. These offers Philip professed to find ‘dishonourable to himself and to his realm’. They would have required him to deal with Edward on terms of equality as between one monarch and another, whereas this was a matter which concerned the juridical rights of his Crown against a subject. He therefore proposed to decide it in his own courts. In the autumn of 1293 Edward sent his brother Edmund of Lancaster to negotiate with Philip in Paris. Edmund had many friends at Philip’s court. His wife (whom he brought with him) was the mother of the French Queen. But he was too trustful, and there is no doubt that he was elaborately duped. Philip told him that Edward was technically in contempt of the Parlement. He could not withdraw the citation without losing face before his more aggressive councillors. Therefore it would be necessary for Edward to suffer a short, nominal occupation of his French territories. A secret agreement was made. ‘One or two men’ of the King of France would be admitted to the principal strongholds of Aquitaine, but real control would remain with the existing garrisons. After a decent interval (forty days was suggested) there would be a formal treaty. Philip would withdraw the citation and graciously restore the duchy. Edmund agreed to this plan. In February 1294 a draft treaty was drawn up, and instructions were sent to the Seneschal of Gascony to admit the French officers. Over the weeks which followed ‘one or two men’ were joined by many more. In Paris, the English negotiators became anxious. In April they reminded Philip of his promises and received a soothing answer. There was some opposition among his councillors, Philip told them. If he seemed harsh in his public pronouncements it was only for their ears. Reassured by this, the English ambassadors listened with equanimity as the King told his council that the citation would not be withdrawn without their consent. But on 5 May 1294 Philip unexpectedly entered the chamber of the Parlement and had Edward’s name called. Edward’s retained lawyers scrambled to the front to discover what was happening and to seek an adjournment. It was refused and Edward was declared a defaulter. On 19 May the duchy was forfeited. In the south Philip’s officers closed their grip on the principal towns and castles.¹⁷

The French remained in Aquitaine for nine years. From the distance of his English capital Edward I discovered the strategic difficulties of fighting a war in the duchy against a power which was perpetually at its borders. A French army could be gathered in Périgord and Languedoc within a few weeks. The English response took much longer. Edward’s vassals were not obliged to serve him beyond the seas, and if they consented to do so at all they had to be well paid. Transports had to be requisitioned in the ports of southern England. Victuals had to found. The winds were not always favourable. It was a very slow and expensive process. The war in Gascony, although it was desultorily fought and lasted but four years, cost Edward I about £400,000, more than he had spent on the larger armies which he had raised to fight in Wales and Scotland, and much more than the same war cost Philip the Fair.¹⁸

In spite of his difficulties, Edward succeeded in dispatching a small army to Aquitaine in October 1294. It sailed up the Garonne under the command of John of Brittany and recaptured some important strongholds including Bourg, Blaye and Rions. Bayonne was recovered in January 1295 with the help of its citizens. By the spring, much of the southern part of the duchy was once again in English hands. But reinforcements were slow in coming. Pay fell into arrears. And supply presented formidable problems for an army which was fighting on the territory of friends and could not live off the land. John of Brittany was repulsed at Bordeaux, where there was a strong French garrison. In March 1295 Charles of Valois arrived in the duchy with a fresh French army. The English troops at Rions mutinied and Charles retook the town on Palm Sunday, ‘not processionally with palms but violently with lances’, says the chronicler. The French quickly re-established their position in the Garonne valley. Another English army, smaller than the first, arrived in 1296 under the command of Edmund of Lancaster, but he was no more able than his predecessor to capture Bordeaux. Within very few weeks of the army’s arrival, its funds were exhausted and its commander was dying. Edward had preserved a foothold in Aquitaine but little else had been achieved.¹⁹

From these humiliating events some interesting conclusions were drawn, the source of one of the great strategic orthodoxies of successive English governments during the fourteenth century. The fate of Aquitaine, according to this view, could be decided only in the north, the political heart of France where the French King was most vulnerable to pressure and where the English were best placed to apply it. Edward I’s first essay in this direction was an expensive failure but it became, nevertheless, the inspiration of his grandson’s strategy at the beginning of the Hundred Years War. During 1294 English agents had created a great alliance among the territorial princes of the German Empire whose lands bordered on France to the north and north-west. These men had grievances of their own against the acquisitive French monarchy and were readily persuaded to mount a co-ordinated invasion of northern France in return for the generous subsidies which Edward was offering. However, when the moment came none of them did anything except for Edward’s son-in-law the Count of Bar. He invaded Champagne in 1297 and suffered a convincing defeat. The German King, Adolf of Nassau, accepted the bribes of both sides.

Edward I found a somewhat better instrument for his purpose in the Count of Flanders, Guy of Dampierre, an impressionable vacillating man now in his seventies, not an ideal ally but a prince with a stronger vested interest than the Germans had in fighting Philip the Fair. In June 1296, the long litigation in the Parlement of Paris between Guy and the oligarchy of Ghent, which Philip had allowed to sleep for some years, had suddenly been revived. Philip had summoned his vassal before the tribunal and at the same time announced that he was taking the Flemish cities of Ghent, Bruges, Ypres and Lille under his protection. The sequence of events was uncannily similar to the one which had led to the forfeiture of the duchy of Aquitaine two years earlier. Unlike Edward I, however, the Count of Flanders appeared. The occasion was deeply humiliating for him. In front of the representatives of his subjects, he was made to submit to a fine and to surrender his territories into the King’s hands to receive them back out of grace. When he returned to Flanders in the autumn of 1296 he at once entered into negotiations with the King of England. A military alliance was concluded on 7 January 1297. Edward paid him £6,000 on account. Guy formally renounced his homage to the French King two days later.

The enterprise ended in disaster. Edward could not live up to his promises. At home his demands for money and men provoked open resistance and eventually a grave constitutional crisis. The French army invaded Flanders in June 1297, before the English forces could arrive, and when eventually they landed on 23 August the campaign had already been lost. The only fighting in which the English engaged was some rioting against their Flemish allies in Ghent. Edward hastily abandoned Flanders and when, in 1300, the French invaded what was left of Guy’s territory he left the Count to his fate. Philip’s armies occupied Flanders without difficulty. Guy was arrested and locked up in the castle of Compiègne.

The English King made a serious attempt to resolve the dispute by arbitration before the Pope. But these proceedings, like most litigation, served only to reveal the irreconcilable differences of the two protagonists. Edward’s plenipotentiaries boldly challenged the entire juridical basis on which Aquitaine had been held by the English dynasty since 1259. They argued that Gascony had always been held free of any feudal obligations; alternatively, if the Treaty of Paris was an answer to that, the French Crown had repudiated it and lost whatever rights it had once conferred on them.²⁰ The arguments deployed by the French have not survived, but they can readily be imagined. Boniface VIII, who scarcely troubled to conceal his dislike of the French, once asked the French Chancellor, Pierre Flote, whether it was not Philip’s real intention to drive the English dynasty out of Aquitaine as his ancestors had driven them out of Normandy. The Chancellor smiled: ‘Of course,’ he replied.²¹ Whether this really was Philip’s intention has sometimes been doubted, but there is scarcely room for doubt. The great noblemen of Philip’s court probably had some sympathy for Edward I. His problems were theirs writ large. But it was to Flote that the French King listened. The Pope was realistic enough to perceive this, and his award when it appeared was unexpectedly anodyne. He declared that Edward should do homage for such lands as Philip might be persuaded to restore to him. But Philip was not persuaded to restore any lands to Edward until 1302, and what persuaded him then was not the abstract reasoning which two very law-minded kings submitted to a lawyer–Pope. In May 1302 there was a popular revolution in Bruges. The French garrison there was massacred and with them many of Philip’s allies among the governing oligarchy of the city. On 11 June 1302 a hastily recruited army of fullers, weavers and peasants, poorly armed and without cavalry but ably led by a grandson of Guy of Dampierre, destroyed the French army beneath the walls of Courtrai. Some 20,000 Frenchmen were left dead on the field. Pierre Flote was one of them.

The battle of Courtrai created a considerable sensation in Europe. Boniface VIII’s attendants did well to wake him in the middle of the night to tell him the glad news. The French King’s authority never entirely recovered. The defeat also did great harm to Philip’s credit in an age when solvency was largely a matter of bluff. The second part of Philip’s reign was a story of successive financial crises. And not only financial crises. After the news had reached Bordeaux the citizens rose and expelled the French garrison. Without Bordeaux Philip could not hold Gascony. With his resources fully committed in the north he could not afford to allow Edward I to remain an enemy. So he made peace with him on 20 May 1303. Edward I got most of what he had fought for in vain in Flanders and in Aquitaine. He agreed to do homage for the duchy, and Philip restored it to him. Edward’s son, Edward of Caernarvon, was betrothed to Philip’s daughter Isabella, the origin of the disputed succession which justified a greater war a generation later.²²

A few days after the treaty had been sealed in Paris the representatives of Philip the Fair formally transferred possession of Aquitaine to the English commissioners before a crowd of lawyers, witnesses and onlookers assembled at Saint-Émilion. But Edward never fully recovered what he had lost in 1294. Some French officials in the remoter parts of the duchy were particularly tardy in leaving, and disputes on this score were to continue for many years. In the western foothills of the Pyrenees French troops hung on to the castle of Mauléon until 1307. The incoming officials of the King–Duke found their master’s affairs in a state of disarray which was still evident ten years later. Many of his rights had been sold off. Others were appropriated by powerful local interests who had taken advantage of the confusion to assert forgotten claims or invent new ones. Others were encumbered with debt and with the consequences of a decade of mismanagement. A number of Gascon noblemen had been bribed or coerced into declaring for Philip the Fair, including most of the dominant families in the south-east of the duchy bordering on Languedoc. The counts of Foix and Armagnac were among them. Freed of the heavy hand of Edward I and his officials, they had made the southern part of the duchy the theatre of a destructive private war. Elsewhere, in the valleys of the Dordogne and the Garonne whole districts were given over to anarchy and brigandage. In the Landes, the lord of Albret had usurped a variety of ducal prerogatives and had made his family almost immune from the government’s control. ‘There is no king in Gascony but he,’ one of Edward’s correspondents reported in 1305.²³

The most significant consequence of the war was the change wrought in the attitudes of those who made English policy. Before the war Edward I had taken issue with some of the more irritating manifestations of French royal policy, but he had never challenged his cousin’s sovereignty. He had sought to define the powers of the Parlement and if possible to limit them. But he had not denied that those powers existed. On 5 June 1286, when Edward I had performed his homage to Philip the Fair, his Chancellor Robert Burnell had delivered a speech in the great hall of the royal palace in Paris in which he had darkly referred to more abrasive possibilities. Edward, said Burnell, might well have chosen to contest the French King’s rights if he had not had confidence in his justice. There were ‘plusieurs de son conseil’ who would have supported such a move. The manner in which the French King and his Parlement had treated him in 1294 was a shock. Probably the ‘plusieurs’ became the majority. The ingenious arguments addressed to the Pope in 1298 may have been advanced as bargaining counters, but they were in the process of becoming principles of English policy. Towards the end of Edward’s reign his clerk, Philip Martel, an experienced diplomat who had borne the brunt of the negotiation of the treaty of 1303, recorded his thoughts in a confidential memorandum. In the immediate future the King–Duke should endeavour to recover what he had lost in three decades of French encroachment and one of open war. Islands of French jurisdiction within the duchy should be suppressed and the constant intervention of French courts brought to an end. Until these conditions were satisfied, Martel thought that Edward should refuse to do homage to the King of France. But he had met Philip the Fair. He could see that these were terms which would not be countenanced by any French king cast in Philip’s mould. They were but temporary expedients, the preliminaries of larger ambitions. The great object, Martel thought, was to enable the English King at a convenient moment to repudiate the Treaty of Paris ‘without untoward consequences and without dishonour in the eyes of God or man’. It was a reservation characteristic of this ageing ecclesiastical lawyer trained in the patient way of the English civil service who would not live to see his views applied by force of battle.²⁴

How far Edward I was privy to these thoughts is impossible to say, but it is hardly conceivable that Martel had not discussed them with him. By the terms of the treaty Edward was bound to do homage in person, and a date had been appointed for the purpose in September 1303. But the homage was never performed. A variety of excuses was offered. There is little doubt that the real reason was the Edward was not willing to do homage for Aquitaine until his rights within the duchy had been defined by treaty and those of the King of France reduced to nominal obeisances. Still less was Edward inclined to swear the traditional oath of fealty. Philip Martel said as much to the French King’s ministers in the course of a stormy interview at Vernon in February 1306.²⁵

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Certainly there were signs that Edward II, who succeeded his father in 1307, was impatient of the constraints which his feudal obligations to the French King placed upon him. On 31 December 1308 he did his homage in person at Boulogne. For a man who was king in his own land the ceremony was an uncomfortable humiliation and Edward II was unfortunate in the number of occasions on which he was called upon to repeat it. Philip the Fair died in 1314 and was succeeded by his three short-lived sons. Each of them required an act of homage, and one of them, Louis X, rubbed in the point by summoning Edward to sit as a judge in the court of peers and to perform military service in Flanders. Edward was able to resist all of Louis X’s demands until the latter died prematurely in 1316. Under Philip V the evil moment was put off for four years. Homage was eventually performed in Amiens cathedral in July 1320, but it was done with ill grace and without the oath of fealty. The ceremony was accompanied by a gratuitous lecture on French breaches of the treaty and was followed by a number of disputatious meetings in which the participants dispelled whatever goodwill the act of homage had created. When Edward II was next called upon to do homage by Charles IV in August 1323, he rudely dismissed the French ambassadors and informed his ‘dear and beloved brother’ by letter that he was too busy.²⁶

Edward II’s relations with the French court would have been better if he had been a more courteous diplomat and a more capable politician, but in the nature of things they would not have been close. Behind the posturing at Amiens there lay real grievances. In returning to his old dominions in 1303 Edward I had returned to his old problems, and these problems Edward II had now inherited. The mosaic pattern of competing jurisdictions was still there. The boundaries were not fixed. Ancient disputes were not resolved. In 1311 the English government made a determined attempt to define once for all the respective rights of the two kings in southern France. The device chosen was a standing commission to which each side would refer all outstanding grievances. It was a failure. Four English commissioners and three French ones met in January in the convent of the Franciscan friars in Périgueux. For five months they exchanged elaborate documents drafted by lawyers in which each side accused the other of misconstruing and disregarding the four treaties which their governments had made since 1259. There were articles of complaint tendered by the English, followed by the Responses of the French, the Replications of the English and the succession of statements and counter-statements borrowed from the elaborate procedure of the civil courts in which most of the participants had been trained. On 2 June 1311 the English walked out. ‘These proceedings’, they told the French commissioners, ‘clearly show that you have no intention of respecting the treaties and it is therefore quite useless for us to stay here.’ With goodwill and another procedure something might have been achieved. But the jurisdiction which French courts claimed in Aquitaine was a problem which could never have been resolved at the conference in Périgueux, for Philip the Fair had insisted on excluding it from the commissioners’ terms of reference. They were not proper matters for diplomacy, he said, for they concerned the relations between king and subject. In such matters Edward II was a subject.²⁷

French officials had already resumed the inexorable encroachment upon Edward II’s southern duchy after the ten-year interruption brought about by the war. There were renewed attempts to make notaries date their documents by the regnal years of the French kings. From time to time the French government attempted to legislate for Aquitaine, issuing commands to the government in Bordeaux now to expel Jews from the duchy, now to banish English coins from circulation, now to refrain from taxing the traffic of the Garonne. French sergeants were reported at one point to be touring Saintonge and the Agenais demanding to know of the inhabitants whether their allegiance was to the English or to the French King and uttering menaces if they received the wrong answer.²⁸

The weakness and incompetence of Edward II’s government, punctuated by its occasional outbursts of aggressive energy, offered an irresistible temptation to appeal to the Parlement in Paris. English officials complained that these appeals gravely aggravated their difficulties in imposing order on the duchy. Appellants committed every kind of crime while their appeals were proceeding, knowing that they were for all practical purposes immune from the jurisdiction of the Duke. Pope John XXII said much the same thing in the course of several thoughtful letters about the condition of the English duchy. It was true. In one notorious case the Parlement itself was constrained to agree that the lord of Navailles had prosecuted his appeal in the most dilatory fashion for eleven years while engaging in violence against his enemies ‘daily’. This was in June 1319. After passing judgement upon him the Parlement expressed its hope that the French Seneschals in Toulouse and Périgueux would suppress acts of theft, rape and murder among eleven other prominent Gascon noblemen who were ‘temporarily exempt from the Duke’s jurisdiction as appellants from the judgements of his officers’.²⁹

It is unlikely that this warning was heeded. When the French King’s relations with England were good he might listen with sympathy to his complaints. The practice of appealing directly to Paris without the preliminary formality of seeking redress in the ducal courts was unorthodox, Philip the Fair had agreed in 1310, and would have to stop. Further concessions had been made in 1313 when the two kings met at Boulogne. French officials in the south-west were ordered to restrain their enthusiasm, and a serious attempt was made to prevent abuses of the protection afforded to appellants. It was to be conferred only in urgent cases with Philip’s personal permission and then only on the appellants themselves and their immediate families, not on a host of followers and dependants.³⁰Nevertheless, these concessions were generally disregarded by the royal officers on the spot and they were forgotten by the kings themselves when their relations became less cordial. In 1324 there were some forty appeals pending in the Parlement involving several hundred separate disputes. Many of these appellants had been enjoying royal protection for years. On one occasion a liveried sergeant of the French King was arrested in Bordeaux, where he had apparently been distributing letters of protection freely to potential appellants. ‘The Court of France is encroaching on your jurisdiction day by day,’ the city Council observed when reporting this affair to the government at Westminster.³¹

For their part Edward II and his officials in the duchy resorted to increasingly high-handed measures against appellants. The King wrote to the Abbot of Cluny threatening to confiscate the possessions of the order in England if the Cluniac priory of St Eutrope in Saintes did not abandon a particularly embarrassing appeal. His officers in Saintes beat up members of the community. It was by no means the worst case. It was also entirely ineffective. The policy of bullying appellants provoked much more litigation in the Parlement than it prevented.³²

The causes célèbres of these years were the successive appeals of the lord of Albret between 1310 and 1324. His prolific family, the most powerful in Gascony, dominated the Landes south of Bordeaux and enjoyed influence and alliances penetrating throughout south-western France. There is little doubt about Albret’s motives. He wanted to pursue his ferocious vendettas against rival Gascon clans free of the inhibiting hand of the King–Duke’s judges and officials. Some of his quarrels with the English seneschals were provoked on trivial grounds for the deliberate purpose of exempting himself from their jurisdiction. Others arose directly from the attempts of the Bordeaux government to bring him to order. Albret’s appeals against the Seneschal in 1312 involved the protection of his dominions in the Landes by a small French army: in 1312 there were 50 cavalry and 200 infantry. Edward II was obliged to buy off the appeal in the following year for a large sum. But in spite of the settlement, and in spite of their situation in the heart of the duchy the Albrets continued to move away from the orbit of the kings of England and into that of the French.³³

Almost as serious as the defection of the lord of Albret was the secession of one of the other great noble families of the south-west, the house of Béarn. Béarn was a small territory on the north slopes of the Pyrenees around Oloron and Pau whose ambitious rulers were extending their influence and power down the river valleys into the lowlands of southern Gascony. It was one of those mountain regions at the periphery of the wars of the fourteenth century which were destined to play a central role in them: Béarn, Navarre, Savoy, Wales. They were all territories densely populated for their sparse resources by clans of farmers and mountain-dwellers who took naturally to war and to the wages and occasional fortunes as well as the violence which war offered. The viscounts of Béarn had for many years been vassals of the dukes of Aquitaine and their subjects were spread across the territories of the king–dukes, pasturing their sheep, serving as administrators, soldiers and captains, trading as moneylenders and merchants. But as the result of a marriage alliance and the extinction of the old line of viscounts, Béarn had been merged since 1290 with the county of Foix, which was a fief of the Crown of France. Thereafter its rulers had veered uneasily between England and France according to the fortunes of politics and war. It was in Edward II’s reign that Béarn was lost to the English dynasty and, apart from a short period in the middle of the century, finally lost. The circumstances are obscure, but the Parlement of Paris certainly played a crucial role. It began to assume jurisdiction in disputes between the viscounts and their vassals of Béarn, displacing the court of the dukes of Aquitaine at Saint-Séver. In the course of one such dispute, in 1318, the Parisian tribunal ordered the temporary confiscation of Béarn. Four years later, in 1322, the regent of Béarn herself invoked the jurisdiction of the Parlement against Edward II’s officers and brought in French troops to defend her territory while the litigation continued. When the young Count of Foix, Gaston II, came of age in 1323 there was no doubt about his allegiance. He never did homage to a king of England. Throughout his life, until perhaps the very end of it, he remained a firm supporter of the French dynasty, and a sharp thorn in the southern flank of the duchy.³⁴

Edward II was more vulnerable to this kind of problem than his father, and much less skilful in dealing with it. Preoccupied by constitutional crisis and civil war in England and constantly threatened by the renascent power of Robert Bruce’s Scotland, Edward’s government was of little account in his continental dominions. The revenues of the duchy were mortgaged first to an Italian banking house and then to the Pope. In the outlying districts seigneurial castles sprang up like mushrooms after rain, while the strongholds which Edward I had patiently and expensively acquired were allowed to fall into the hands of the local nobility or abandoned for want of money to garrison and repair them. It was a characteristic caution which moved the government, in 1320, to order that the garrison of Saint-Puy should be paid ‘as little as we can get away with’, although Saint-Puy was the only castle which Edward held in the territory of the powerful counts of Armagnac. Four years later its walls were reported to have collapsed in several places. At Blaye, the major fortress on the north shore of the Gironde, the roof work of the citadel had fallen in and squatters had built themselves houses in the main court. ‘And this’, said the official who reported it in 1324, ‘has happened for want of money.’³⁵

A bankrupt administration in Bordeaux watched impotently as Philip the Fair appointed commissioners to investigate ‘violence, looting, rapine and anarchy’ in Aquitaine. This was in 1313. Although Philip was certainly not averse to stirring that troubled pot no one doubted that the symptoms listed were real and not imagined. Pope John XXII, himself a native of Quercy, expressed himself in stronger terms. The ambush of a papal legate near Valence d’Agenais in 1318 provoked from him a jeremiad in which Edward’s Gascon subjects were berated for permitting every kind of atrocity. There was, he said, ‘no king, no law’ there. Private war between rival coalitions of noblemen, which had always been endemic in Gascony, now reached its most ferocious pitch. That nicely judged combination of bribery, bullying and tact by which Edward I had governed was beyond the resources of his son’s officials and beyond the ability of some of them. In the course of Edward’s reign there were no less than nineteen seneschals of Gascony in as many years, some scandalously insufficient or cynically self-interested. None had time to accumulate experience of an office which more than any other in Edward’s gift required experience. There was nothing surprising in the English government’s appointment of a commission in 1320 to investigate the corruption of Edward’s servants in the duchy; nor in the fact that another commission was charged with exactly the same duty only four years later.³⁶

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The failure of diplomacy left Edward’s officials in Aquitaine with no defence against the constant gnawing of their territory from outside, except a policy of reprisal. The danger of such a policy was not that it would lead to war: Edward’s advisers were resigned to that. It was that the war would come at a moment of the French King’s choosing. When it came, with the war of Saint-Sardos in 1324, the English were unprepared. Characteristically, Edward II was drawn into it by a local dispute which he had not desired and could not control.

Until 1322. Edward II had probably never heard of Saint-Sardos. It was a small village in the Agenais, situated in the wedge of territory in the angle of the Lot and the Garonne which was at once the most lawless part of the duchy and the key to its eastern defences. By the village there was a Benedictine priory. The priory was within the jurisdiction of the dukes of Aquitaine, but it was a daughter-house of the abbey of Sarlat, which was not. It was a lawyer’s delight. The Abbot of Sarlat had on several occasions petitioned the Parlement of Paris to declare that Saint-Sardos was exempt from the King-Duke’s jurisdiction. These proceedings had not been taken very seriously and they had always been inconclusive. The matter was mentioned and then forgotten at the conferences at Périgueux in 1311. In 1318 the Abbot renewed his attempt and endeavoured to interest Philip V in it by suggesting that if Saint-Sardos were exempt a royal bastide might be built there in partnership with the monks. Philip invited the Parlement to pronounce on the question, but did very little to push the proceedings on. Then, in December 1322, the Parlement pronounced in the Abbot’s favour. On 15 October 1323 a sergeant dispatched by the French Seneschal at Périgueux, arrived at Saint-Sardos and drove into the ground a stake bearing the arms of the King of France.³⁷

Edward was preoccupied by the problems of England in 1323, and he was in no position to do anything about it. But the Abbot’s plans had enemies closer at hand. The citizens of Agen believed that the privileges which were habitually granted to bastides would injure their trade. Local landowners feared that settlers would be drawn from their estates. One of them was Raymond-Bernard, lord of the castle of Montpezat, 3 miles away. Raymond-Bernard had himself, in his time, been a thorn in the flesh of the ducal government. He had had an appeal pending in the Parlement for the past five years. But necessity called for new alliances. On the night of 15 October 1323 he raided Saint-Sardos, burned the village, and hanged the French sergeant at the royal stake which he had just erected. The Seneschal of Gascony at this time was Ralph Basset, a Staffordshire knight hardened in the treacherous politics of England but without experience of Aquitaine. He had been in office for only four months. Unfortunately, he was staying in the vicinity when the incident occurred, and had conferred with Raymond-Bernard only two days earlier. The French believed that he was privy to the crime, and they were probably right. Suddenly Saint-Sardos was the centre of European affairs.³⁸

The news of the incident took more than five weeks to reach Edward II and it arrived at an unfortunate moment. Edward had just sent an embassy to France to make further excuses for his failure to do homage. He appreciated the significance of the incident even if his Seneschal in Gascony did not. A letter of abject apology was prepared, in which Edward assured the French King that he had had nothing to do with the incident and promised that if the rumours were true (‘which God forbid’) the malefactors would be found and punished. This letter was sent post haste after the ambassadors and reached them in Paris in only five days. The ambassadors had found the capital in a mood of great excitement. A commission had been appointed to investigate the facts and Ralph Basset had been summoned to appear before it at Bergerac. He had declined to attend, sending in his place some unconvincing excuses which, as English spies reported, were ‘ungraciously received’. Charles IV himself was not in the capital but at Tours, where he had held a meeting of the Great Council. Provisional arrangements had been made to assemble an army at Toulouse after Christmas. Anti-English feeling ran high. On 21 December 1323 Edward II’s chief advocate in the Parlement was abruptly seized in the precincts of the court and imprisoned in the Châtelet.³⁹

The English ambassadors caught up with the French King at Limoges, where he had spent Christmas. Charles was disposed to accept Edward’s personal excuses, but not those of Ralph Basset and Raymond-Bernard de Montpezat. Both of them were ordered to appear before the King at Toulouse on 23 January 1324 together with several other Gascon officials. Basset sent a message stating that the summons had been improperly made out, adding that in any event he was the representative of Edward II, who was a peer of France and could be tried only in Paris before the Great Chamber of the Parlement. The other officials claimed benefit of clergy. Raymond-Bernard said nothing. None of them appeared. In February they were outlawed and their property declared forfeited to the Crown. The French seneschals of Toulouse and Périgueux were ordered to enter the duchy and take possession of the castle of Montpezat by force. It was an order of doubtful legality and it proved to be impossible to carry out. Edward II ordered Raymond-Bernard to hold the castle in his name. Trenches were dug round the outer walls. Every Gascon of military age was summoned to arms. The officers sent to execute the judgement of the French court were turned away at the beginning of March by a garrison of 600 men. When the commander of the royal corps of archers attempted to read out the court’s judgement he was seized and held for ransom.⁴⁰

In England the conduct of affairs was in the hands of the Chamberlain, Hugh Despenser the Younger, Edward II’s ruthless and greedy favourite. Despenser was an able and clever man, and hard working, in these respects quite unlike Edward’s other favourites. But he lacked judgement. After the first robust response, English policy was lost in the confusion of conflicting decisions and uncertain intentions. In March 1324, Ralph Basset was recalled. On 7 March it was announced that the Archbishop of Dublin and the King’s brother Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, would lead a new embassy to the French court. Their instructions, however, were rambling and unclear. There was a number of appeals pending in the Parlement which they were to mention to the French King. As to the matter of Saint-Sardos, Edward II was willing in principle to make amends. They were to suggest that the incident called for a lengthy investigation and could perhaps more profitably be discussed when the two kings met on the occasion of Edward’s homage. However, the principal object which the ambassadors were to achieve was the postponement of that meeting at least until July, and if possible until the following year, to which end they were to employ ‘such subtle and clever devices as they could think of’. This was a serious misjudgement. The homage had already been repeatedly put off with excuses which Charles IV had declared to be inadequate, as indeed they were. Coming at such a time this request was bound to sow suspicion even in the mind of so correct and uncynical a ruler as Charles IV.⁴¹

Edward’s ambassadors performed their difficult duty with the greatest possible ineptitude. They sailed from Dover on 8 April 1324 and arrived in Paris a fortnight later. They were met there by Elias Joneston, an experienced professional diplomat who had been in the capital since December. It was already clear to him that the French government was about to confiscate the duchy. Charles, it appeared, had summoned his army to muster at Moissac on the confines of Aquitaine on 10 June 1324. Joneston was dispatched to carry this portentous news back to England. The Earl and the Archbishop went on to the royal manor of Vincennes, where the King was staying. They were received frostily in the presence of the whole royal Council. After they had spoken their piece they were banished to a waiting room while the matter was discussed, and when they were recalled it was to hear an angry harangue from the French Chancellor. Charles, he said, was astonished by their impertinence in proposing a compromise in the matter of Saint-Sardos as if a king could compromise with a subject about the performance of his public duties. The conduct of Edward’s Gascon officials and the incident at Montpezat were acts of treason and insulting to the Crown. They could not be overlooked without dishonour. So the Chancellor continued until the ambassadors at length endeavoured to adjourn the proceedings to the following day when tempers might perhaps have cooled. But the proceedings were not adjourned. Instead the ambassadors were required to promise at once that the contumacious officials of the duchy would be delivered up to the French government and the castle of Montpezat forthwith surrendered. The ambassadors asked for twenty days to take instructions from Edward II and beseeched the French King to postpone the muster due on 10 June. Both requests were refused. The muster would be brought forward unless an answer was forthcoming within four days. The ambassadors dispatched a messenger to England but before the answer could return they would have to choose between a declaration of war and a complete surrender. Edmund of Woodstock was not the man to wrestle with difficulties such as these. He was weak and malleable and awed by the French King. The news from the south-west was not encouraging. Letters received from the government in Bordeaux indicated that prominent vassals of the King–Duke could not be relied upon. None was in the mood for war. The ambassadors therefore gave Charles what he wanted. They promised that the guilty officials would be given up; Montpezat would be surrendered; and Edward would come to Amiens on 1 July to do homage. Then they hurriedly left for Bordeaux to see to the fulfilment of their agreement.⁴²

When they reached the duchy they found that support for Edward II was rather stronger than they had been led to believe. Charles IV’s conduct at Vincennes seemed to have aroused real indignation. The Earl recovered his courage among friends and when the French officials arrived to take possession of Montpezat they were told that this would be contrary to the customs of the duchy and the privileges of its inhabitants. They went away empty-handed.⁴³

In England Edward II’s advisers agonized. The King’s immediate reaction, when the news of the Vincennes agreement reached him in mid-May, was to disown his ambassadors. What they had done had been beyond their powers and extorted from them by duress. Then, at the beginning of June, Edward changed his mind. Yet more ambassadors were appointed, this time led by the Earl of Pembroke, a venerable elder statesman with good connections and many friends in France. His instructions were to persuade Charles IV to put off the homage and to this end he was to promise to surrender Montpezat until homage had been duly performed.

This new proposal came at a very late hour. The homage had been fixed for 1 July and the French court was already making its way to Amiens for the ceremony. Speed was of the essence, but the ambassadors did not leave before 20 June. Then, on the 23rd, while they were lodging near Saint-Riquier, the Earl of Pembroke had a sudden heart attack and died. The rest of the embassy, consisting of royal clerks, did not reach Amiens until 1 July. The King was not there. He had already declared the duchy forfeit a week earlier when it became clear that Edward II would not appear. After fours days the two royal clerks found him at Anet-sur-Marne. They arrived on his wedding day. Three days passed before they could obtain an audience and then it was a short one. The King told them that Edward had failed to punish the authors of the crime of Saint-Sardos and therefore he could not take seriously Edward’s protestations that he had had nothing to do with the incident. He then dismissed them. Edward did not give up. He appointed yet another embassy and wrote to Charles IV asking for the necessary letters of safe conduct. The ambassadors waited in vain at Dover for the safe conduct to arrive. No reply came from France.⁴⁴

In August 1324 the French King’s uncle, Charles of Valois, invaded Aquitaine for the second time in his long career.⁴⁵ In spite of the slow development of the crisis the ducal government was quite unprepared. Montpezat was fully garrisoned and victualled. So was Penne, the principal royal castle of the Agenais. There were also 200 men at Agen. But elsewhere the castles were well below their full strength and some important places were not garrisoned at all. No troops had arrived from England, although attempts were being made to assemble an expeditionary force at Portsmouth. In Bordeaux Edward’s administration had no resources and few friends. Some of the most prominent noblemen of the duchy had joined Charles of Valois. They included the Count of Foix, who had hurried to Paris at the outset of the dispute to promise his support, and the lord of Albret, who finally deserted the cause of the English dynasty. Those who remained loyal had good reason to feel betrayed by their leaders. The new Seneschal had fallen ill immediately after his arrival and his servants reported that he could not be moved. Edward’s senior representative in the duchy was his indecisive brother, the Earl of Kent, and the Earl’s fellow Ambassador Alexander Bicknor, Archbishop of Dublin. They shutthemselves up with an armed force in the fortress of La Réole at the eastern edge of the Bordelais and remained there until the campaign was over.

It was over in less than six weeks. The French army numbered about 7,000 men. It had no difficulty in overrunning the undefended valley of the Dordogne in Périgord. In the Agenais Penne held out, but Montpezat was captured in the first few days and razed to the ground. Agen surrendered without a blow, having first expelled its garrison. The citizens of numberless small walled towns took their cue from Agen. They wanted a quiet life, and the anarchy of the past twenty years had left them little reason to feel grateful to Edward II’s government. Charles of Valois was at La Réole by 25 August, the twelfth day of the campaign. In this great fortress on the Garonne, only 30 miles from Bordeaux, the Earl of Kent hoped to resist until help could arrive from England.

At first it seemed that he might succeed. Attempts to take the place by storm failed ingloriously and cost Charles of Valois the lives of several of his best commanders. But within the castle all was not well. It was not victualled for a long siege. Morale was low. The loyalty of the townsmen could not be counted on. The gates were in disrepair and in years of impecunious neglect the moats had been allowed to fill with debris. In England the promised reinforcements had assembled but they were bottled up in their ports by southerly winds. The garrison of La Réole felt that the government of the Despensers, Hugh the Younger and his father, had forgotten them. There were others who had more radical objections to this able but unscrupulous pair who monopolized power and favour under the benevolent eye of an incapable King. The Archbishop of Dublin was one of these. When recriminations were exchanged after the war, he was said to have preached against the wickedness of the royal favourites and to have declared himself ready to fight a duel with the younger Hugh had he not been restrained by the dignity of the cloth. Thus were the political squabbles of fifteen years of English civil wars revived within the close confines of a besieged castle in France. The Earl of Kent was still loyal to his brother, but he was a weak man, heavily reliant on the Archbishop’s advice. The Archbishop advised him that La Réole should be surrendered. On 22 September 1324, after only five weeks of the siege, the Earl surrendered and made a truce with the conquerors. Each party was to hold its present positions in the duchy for six months. For the English there were few positions to hold. They had lost everything except the districts of Bordeaux and Bayonne and the coastal strip in between, the city of Saintes and a few castles on the eastern marches of the duchy where garrisons isolated by the speed of the campaign looked out on hostile territory as far as the eye could see. In the occupied towns those who had demonstrated their loyalty to the English King were elbowed out of power and privilege by the many more who had been treacherous, cowardly or indifferent. ‘Nous sumes trays, nous sumes venduz,’ they complained to powerless officials in Bordeaux.

As the winter truce continued, the French made preparations for its expiry. In December the French army was ordered to assemble at Bergerac on 1 May 1325. A two-pronged attack was planned, one force invading Saintonge and capturing Saintes, while the other invested Bordeaux and the Gironde ports. A formidable siege-train was prepared at Toulouse and Moissac, and a fleet of barges was assembled to carry it downriver. All this activity suggested, at any rate to the beleaguered English representatives in the duchy, that a decision had been made to finish with the English presence in France.⁴⁶ There were plenty of Frenchmen who would have supported such a decision. There would be no hope of peace in France while the kings of England had a foothold there, one of them told Charles’s successor four years later. Let the sea mark the frontier:

                        Soit la mer borne et dessevrance

                        De l’Angleterre et de la France.⁴⁷

Yet the ambitions of Charles IV himself were not as straightforward as this. He was the son of Philip the Fair, but he did not have Philip’s ruthlessness or cynicism. His closest advisers were not lawyers and officials with their ambitious notions of French territorial sovereignty, but the princes of his family and in particular that conservative old war-horse Charles of Valois. They were men who shared with Edward II himself the outlook of great territorial magnates. Charles was no doubt glad to annex some of the frontier provinces of Aquitaine. But although he was attached to forms and stiff-necked in the defence of his prerogatives, he had no particular wish to exploit them for larger political ends.

Towards the end of the year, Charles IV let it be known to the Pope that if Edward would cede the Agenais to him and do homage for the rest of the duchy he would not insist upon enforcing the total forfeiture which had been pronounced in June. These hints were duly passed on to the English government. The Pope also passed on another hint which the French King had let drop. Charles, so it seemed, would be more easily persuaded if Edward appointed his Queen Isabella as his ambassador. It was a strange suggestion. This formidable and evil lady was twenty-nine years old in 1325. Since she was Charles IV’s sister she could claim some influence at the French court if any English ambassador could. But it was notorious that she hated and despised her husband and his homosexual friends. She had loathed Gaveston, and her loathing of the younger Hugh Despenser was scarcely less intense. Isabella had in the past engaged in some desultory intrigue of her own with Despenser’s many enemies. One of them was Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore, a political rival of long standing who, after a short spell of imprisonment in the Tower of London, had escaped in August 1323 and fled to France. He was now living at the French court and was rumoured to have offered his services to Charles IV for the invasion of Gascony. As a result, when the war broke out, Isabella was treated in England as an enemy alien. In September 1324 all her lands and castles were confiscated and her private household (most of which was French) was disbanded on Despenser’s instructions. Isabella’s final indignity was to be placed in the custody of Despenser’s wife, who confiscated her seal and censored her correspondence. This then was the suggested agent of reconciliation. The French King’s proposal was put to an assembly of magnates at Winchester at the beginning of March 1325. They had misgivings about it. But in the interests of peace they suggested that the Queen should be allowed to go on condition that Roger Mortimer was first extradited from France. In the event the condition was never satisfied, but the Queen went nonetheless. She departed on 9 March 1325.⁴⁸

For the first few weeks of her sojourn in France. Isabella worked under the careful eye of her husband’s ministers and officials, a substantial number of whom were now in almost permanent residence at the French court. In Aquitaine, the promised reinforcements from England had still not arrived and when they did so in the course of the negotiations they immediately mutinied for want of victuals and set fire to parts of Bordeaux.⁴⁹ In Paris the English made what they could of their declining bargaining power. But it was not much. A fresh truce was agreed on 31 March 1325 and a provisional agreement followed in May. According to this document, Charles IV was to be allowed to go into nominal occupation of what was left of the duchy of Aquitaine. French officials would be installed in the seaboard towns and by this means the French King’s honour would be saved. Real control would remain with Edward II’s garrisons. When Edward had done homage for the duchy those parts of it which he still held would be formally restored to him. But the parts which the French had conquered by force of arms in the previous year would not be restored until some outstanding disputes had been dealt with; and then only on payment of reparations for a war which the French government had found more costly than it had expected. These were severe terms. They involved the tacit recognition of the loss of most of the duchy, including substantially everything that the English had held in Périgord and the Agenais. Indeed, so severe were they that Edward attempted once again to disown his ambassadors. But the prelates and lay barons who were consulted on the point advised him in the clearest terms that the treaty was within the wide words of the ambassadors’ authority and was binding. Accordingly, Edward II was bound to ratify it and he reluctantly did so. Charles IV remained in possession of his conquests.⁵⁰ Whether he would ever voluntarily have surrendered them cannot now be known, for it shortly became unnecessary for him to do so. The humiliating conclusion of the war and the unexpected sequel of Isabella’s embassy destroyed Edward II’s government in England.

NOTES

1 Dion, 365–83; James, 9–10; RP, ii, 296.

2 Froissart, Chron., xii, 206; RF, i, 554.

3 Renouard (2), 225–8; Boutruche, 81n.

4 Dion, 380–4, 391–2; Renouard (2), 60–3; Champollion-Figeac, Lettres, i, 387–8.

5 Guisborough, Chron., 219; *Rôles Gascons 1307–17, 573; Harriss, 523.

6 TR, i, 37–40; Registrum epistolarum … Johannis Peckham, ed. C. T. Martin, i (1882), 5; Purgatorio, VII: 130–2.

7 RF, i, 571, 672.

8 Hist. de St. Louis, ed. N. de Wailly (1867), 678–9.

9 Trabut-Cussac, 32–4.

10 Gavrilovitch, 69–70, 78–82; Trabut-Cussac, pp. xxi, xxiv.

11 Gardelles, 28–30, 32 and Map II.

12 *Black, 523.

13 Trabut-Cussac, 42–4, 49–52; RF, i, 602–3 (notaries); Tucoo-Chala (2), 61–75.

14 Textes rél. à l’hist. du Parlement, 121, 145–9; Rôles Gascons, iii, pp. xxxii, lv; Renouard (2), 123–4.

15 Gascon Reg. A, 206–17.

16 Olim, ii, 3–19; RF, i, 800; J. Petit, 27–8.

17 RF, i. 794–5, 800; Champollion-Figeac, Lettres, i. 406–8, 424–9; Chaplais (2), 272; Rishanger, Chron., ed. H. T. Riley (1865), 137–8; Guisborough, Chron., 241–3.

18 Prestwich (1), 171–2.

19 Rôles Gascons, iii, pp. cxxxiii–clxvi.

20 Rothwell; *Chaplais (1), 210–1; G. Digard, *Philippe le Bel et le Saint-Siège, i (1936), 304–7.

21 *Black, 523.

22 Nangis, Chron., i, 324–5; RF, i, 952–3; Renouard (2), 206–7.

23 Trabut-Cussac, 111–2, 116–7. Mauléon: RF, ii, 4. Saintonge, Landes, Bordelais: Gascon Reg. A, 38–65, 245–67, 276–311. Defections: Rôles Gascons, iii, nos 4059–60. ‘No king’: PRO, SC1/55/23.

24 Burnell: RF, i, 665. Martel: Cuttino, ‘Memorandum Book’, 96–100.

25 Chaplais (4), 139–40.

26 TR, i, 166–7; *Déprez (1), 20n; Chaplais (4), 144–5,153–4.

27 Cuttino (2), 87–100; Chaplais (2), 280–4.

28 Chaplais (5), 454, 459–60, 465–6, *469; Gascon Reg. A, 679–80; Doc. rél. à l’Agenais, ed. E. Langlois (1890), 299–300.

29 Doc. Pontificaux, i, 207–11, 213–5; RF, ii, 176–7; AP 1254–1328, nos 5823–4, 7265; Textes rél. à l’hist. du Parlement, 187–98; Champollion-Figeac, Lettres, ii, 46–7.

30 Champollion-Figeac, Lettres, ii, 40, 54; Gavrilovitch, 102; RF, ii, 270.

31 WSS, 38–9; RF, ii, 334.

32 CCR 131–23, 715–6, 721, 722; AP 1254–1328, no. 6781.

33 Rôles Gascons 1307–17, nos 713–15, 734–5, 797–800, 1081, 1169, 1185; TR, i, n. 204–5; PRO SC8/9418, 11657, 11659; Marquette, 420–57.

34 Tucoo-Chala (2), 73–4, 159–60.

35 Gardelles, 217; WSS, 91–2, 149–50.

36 Rôles Gascons 1307–17, nos 1131–4; Doc. Pontificaux, i, 69–71, 119–20; RF, ii, 418, 547–8; Livre des Bouillons, 169–71. Seneschals: T. F. Tout, The Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History (1934), 394–6.

37 WSS, pp. x–xi, 253–6; AP 1254–1328, ii, nos 5466, 6498, 6980.

38 WSS, pp. xi, 1, 8, 36.

39 WSS, 3–6, 8, 9, 11–12.

40 WSS, 11, 15–17, 22–4, 26–38, 39–41, 186.

41 RF, ii, 547; WSS, 25, 181–4.

42 Cal. Pap. R. Letters, ii, 454; Cheyette, ‘Professional Papers’, 407–9; WSS, 184–7; RF, ii, 554–5.

43 WSS, 188n.

44 CPR 1321–4, 425, 426, 427; WSS, 189–92; Cheyette, ‘Professional Papers’, 410–11; Phillips, 233–4; RF, ii, 558–9, 563.

45 WSS, 5, 21–2, 49–52, 61–5, 81–2, 101, 153; RF, ii, 583–4, 600; Nangis, Chron., ii, 57–9; Chron. anon. Par., 94–6.

46 WSS, 131, 151, 154–5, 156–7, 160–2.

47 Coville (2), 266.

48 WSS, 195–6; Cal. Pap. R. Letters, ii, 463–4. On Isabella and Mortimer: RF, ii, 569; Baker, Chron., 15–16, 17; Fr. Chron. London, 48; Chron. Lanercost, 254; Vita Edwardi, 135.

49 WSS, 209–10, 222.

50 WSS, 202–3; CPR 1330–4, 91; RF, ii, 601–3.