CHAPTER VI

The Failure of Diplomacy: The Threat at Sea 1335–1337

History has dealt harshly with the Avignon popes, and few things have aroused more controversy than their relations with France. It is true that the French kings, including Philip VI, frequently behaved as if the Pope were a spiritual arm of French foreign policy. It is also true that most of the fourteenth-century popes before the Great Schism of 1378 enjoyed closer relations with France than with any other country. This was not surprising. The popes were Frenchmen. Most of them, even if they were born in territory ruled by the dukes of Aquitaine, had been formed in the royalist tradition of the French Church. They lived at Avignon, in Imperial territory but under the shadow of the great tower of Philip the Fair at Villeneuve on the French side of the Rhône. Moreover, they had political concerns of their own which made them natural allies of France, the most powerful European country, whose protection and support were a factor in almost every political calculation which they were called upon to make. But these matters, important as they were, did not make the papacy a possession of France, and in dealing with the delicate subject of Anglo-French relations most of the Avignon popes were careful to preserve their neutrality. Indeed there were times when Philip VI, admittedly a neurotic and insecure ruler, believed that the papacy was in league with the English. Edward III was an important prince, as John XXII felt obliged to point out in response to one such accusation; his wishes could not be disregarded simply at the behest of the French government.¹

In 1335 the Pope was Benedict XII. Of all the Avignon popes he was the least sympathetic to French interests. He was a Cistercian, a theologian and a former Inquisitor, a man of austere life and rigorous intellect whose characteristic monument is the gaunt mass of the north court of the papal palace at Avignon. His words, a cardinal wrote, ‘carried no hint of human weakness.’ Such a man was not likely to feel the pull of French patriotic sentiment. Benedict ascended the papal throne in December 1334 and his relations with the French King were frigid from the start. He resented the high-handed manner of the French government and despised Philip VI for his naivety and want of judgement. He particularly disliked Mile de Noyers, who had once abused him to his face.²

When Benedict was informed, by a more ingratiating ambassador, of Philip’s intention to invade Scotland, he was not encouraging. He readily admitted that he had not studied the Scotch problem in any detail, but he had formed certain provisional views which were not welcome to the French government. In the first place, the Pope said, he did not agree that Philip VI was bound by treaty to go to the rescue of the Scots, and thought that he had not given enough thought to the consequences of his decision. Not only was it plain that the crusade would have to be cancelled if Philip invaded Scotland, but the mere attempt was bound to weaken the French King in his own realm and cost him more money than he had. Moreover, as Benedict delicately hinted, Edward III was likely to win in Scotland whatever Philip did. As to the proposal (which had already been made to the English) that Benedict and Philip should act as joint arbitrators, the Pope tartly told Philip that he was disqualified by his overt support for one of the protagonists. He proposed to undertake the work of mediation himself.³ These icy sentiments appear to have had some effect on Philip for he took no further steps to invade Scotland until April 1336. The intervening period was occupied by Benedict’s valiant but unavailing attempt to bring Edward III and David Bruce to terms.

The Pope appointed two mediators, ‘discreet and judicious men with great experience of difficult negotiations’. The description was just. Hugh d’Aimery, the senior of the two, was a Provençal bishop who had been employed for many years on delicate missions of conciliation. Indeed, between 1324 and 1326 he had spent frustrating months in England trying to reconcile Edward II and Charles IV in the aftermath of the incident at Saint-Sardos. On that occasion Hugh had demonstrated his instinct for the face-saving device and the large compromise which the parties and their legal advisers had been unable to suggest for themselves. But he had also demonstrated how short-lived such arrangements must be in the face of real grievances.⁴ Ten years older, he was now condemned to watch history repeating itself. He and his fellow mediator (a papal official) travelled to Paris where they collected the views of the French King, and then moved on to Amiens where they waited to be collected by an escort sent from England. They did not reach Newcastle until 1 November 1335. At the same time there arrived a French embassy, of no particular eminence, whose principal function seems to have been to watch for the interests of their own government and to act as a channel of communication with the Scots.

The negotiations which followed lasted for more than four months, in the course of which the Pope’s mediators earned their reputation for discretion. Only the distant outline of events is known. The mediators held a succession of interminable meetings at Newcastle and Berwick with the representatives of all three parties in an atmosphere of tension heightened by the pressure which Edward III applied to bring them to a quick decision. He conceded extensions of the truce with difficulty and for short periods. In the background was the bustle of preparations for fresh raids into Scotland which were being planned for the contingency of failure.⁵ On 26 January 1336, five days before the expiry of the current truce, a measure of agreement was finally reached. The threat of a new attack on Scotland was lifted. The truces were prolonged to the middle of April and in effect extended to the whole of Scotland. The Scots agreed to lift the sieges of Lochindorb and Cupar, the only significant military operations in progress in Balliol’s part of the country. For the longer term, a controversial draft treaty was drawn up. The central point of this document was that Edward Balliol, who was unmarried and entering middle age, was to be recognized as king of Scotland and David II would be recognized as his heir. It was also agreed that while David waited for his turn he would withdraw from the malign influence of France and would live in England. This ingenious solution seems to have been approved by the leaders of the Scots in Scotland including, presumably, Andrew Murray himself. But it required the consent of David II, who was still in Normandy, as well that of the English Parliament. A party of Scots crossed the Channel to put the proposal to David at Château-Gaillard. They were expected to return with his answer before Parliament met in March.⁶

The proposal was a failure. Parliament had been summoned to Westminster for 11 March 1336, but when it met the Scotch ambassadors failed to appear. They sent messengers of low status to announce that David II had rejected the draft agreement and was not interested in further truces. English public opinion, only indistinctly informed about the affair, turned quickly from optimism to indignation. A fresh subsidy was voted for the continuation of the war, and on 7 April 1336 Edward announced that as soon as the truces expired his troops would invade Scotland ‘in great numbers’. Most people blamed Philip of France for inducing David to reject the draft agreement. This was probably right. Philip had no more reason than did David himself to accept an arrangement so obviously in the interests of the King of England. The same messengers who brought Edward the news of the failure of his negotiations with the Scots also carried messages from Philip proposing a meeting of the two kings. But a meeting at such a level was bound to lead to loss of face if it failed to produce an agreement, and the prospect of agreement did not look good. Edward rejected it. The two papal emissaries told Benedict XII that there was nothing more to be done, and he recalled them.⁷

While the English Parliament was learning of the failure of the only serious attempt to date to compromise with Scotland, the French King was at Avignon experiencing disappointment of his own. Philip had a long secret audience with Benedict XII at the beginning of March 1336, from which all witnesses were excluded, a very unusual circumstance, frustrating for Edward III’s agents in the city. Benedict had now learned of the failure of Hugh d’Aimery’s mission, and in the course of the interview and the conferences which followed it he told the French King that he proposed to cancel the crusade. There were several reasons for the decision, some more candidly declared than others. The preparation of the venture was not going well. There had been disagreements about Philip’s powers as secular leader of the expedition. Recruitment had been poor. There were now, moreover, insuperable political difficulties which Benedict outlined in a tour d’horizon of European affairs. Germany and northern Italy, he said, were in turmoil. The Angevin kingdom of Naples was on the verge of war with the Aragonese in Sicily. Above all, Philip himself was embroiled in a war between England and Scotland. Within France the Pope knew that Philip had enemies who were waiting for their opportunity. The Pope’s reasoning was faultless, but the decision was a grave blow to Philip’s pride as well as to his very real hopes of liberating the Holy Land. For some months he clung to the hope that Benedict would relent, and that the cancellation might prove to be no more than a postponement. In mid-March 1336 he left Avignon to visit Marseille, where his personal galley was being prepared for the expedition. Here he was entertained by a mock battle in the roads in which ships bombarded each other with oranges. The Pope was more realistic. The decision, as he reminded Philip later in the year, had been taken after very careful thought and the King should reflect upon the reasons for it. Benedict had formed a firm view of Philip VI. He thought that the French King was a child.⁸

*

The cancellation of the crusade had much more serious consequences for Edward III than any injury to his pride or dreams of immortality. At one stroke, the Pope had deprived Edward of his most valuable diplomatic bargaining counter, namely the indistinct and probably dishonest promise that he would participate in it. At the same time French resources were liberated for aggressive ventures elsewhere. On his way north, Philip celebrated Easter at Lyon, where he was met by representatives of the Scots. They told him that the truces in Scotland had only five weeks to run, until 5 May 1336, and reminded him of his earlier promises of help. Philip repeated them.

In the previous winter the French royal Council had made contingency plans for a seaborne expedition to Scotland in the summer of 1336. A commander, the Count of Eu, had been appointed, and some supplies had been laid in. These plans were now dusted off and arrangements made to put them into effect. They were conceived on an ambitious scale. It was proposed to embark an army of 1,200 men-at-arms, 5,000 crossbowmen and 20,000 infantry on 200 transports. This great fleet, together with sixty fishing boats carrying victuals and an escort of thirty war galleys, was to proceed from the ports of Normandy and Flanders to the east coast of Scotland, there to restore David Bruce to his throne. The authors of the plan were well aware of the difficulties. It would have been the largest amphibious operation since the assault on the Nile Delta by the fifth crusade in 1218. Ships would be hard to find in sufficient quantities and would have to make several round trips in order to carry the whole of the army to its destination. The cost would be enormous. But they were not deterred.⁹

The naval tradition in France was short. Until the end of the thirteenth century the only significant naval forces deployed by France had been those required for occasional crusading expeditions in the Mediterranean. They had generally been acquired by hiring ships together with their crews in Italy, mainly from the republic of Genoa, which was then one of the principal maritime powers of the western Mediterranean. The first attempt to build a powerful French war fleet was not made until 1284, when Philip III decided to invade Aragon and Catalonia. To do this, he needed to supply his army, south of the Pyrenees, by sea in the face of the very strong navy of Aragon and its Sicilian allies. He embarked at breakneck speed on construction and purchase of a fleet of up to 100 galleys and some 200 large transports. Many of these ships were built at a royal arsenal which was specially created at Narbonne. The venture was a disaster. In two battles off the Mediterranean coast of Spain the new French fleet was almost entirely destroyed by the Aragonese. The arsenal of Narbonne was subsequently abandoned. But the idea of a permanent royal fleet survived. In 1293, Philip the Fair conceived the plan of building an Atlantic fleet to contest with England control of the Channel and the Bay of Biscay routes to Gascony. Philip’s most significant decision was the construction of a great naval arsenal, the Clos des Galées, in the Richebourg quarter of Rouen by the south end of the city bridge, the only establishment of its kind in northern Europe. The main purpose of the arsenal was the construction, storage and repair of war-galleys, vessels whose essential features barely changed from classical times to the eighteenth century: long, narrow, oared hulls with low freeboards, powered by a single tier of thirty oars on each side and carrying a crew of 180 rowers, three at each oar. The Genoese design, which the French adopted, also included a single mast with a lateen sail which provided the motive power when the vessel was cruising. The arsenal was not abandoned when Philip the Fair’s war with England came to an end in 1303. Instead it was retained on a care-and-maintenance basis throughout the reigns of his sons, and in times of tension would spring to life, as it did during the crises in Gascony and Flanders in the mid-1320s. Acres of timber would once more be requisitioned by royal officers in the Cotentin and bands of southerners speaking their own arcane dialect would pour into Rouen. The crews, like the builders, were generally Provençals or Narbonnais with Genoese officers, acknowledged experts in handling fighting galleys.

To these traditional warships others of a different kind, specially designed for Atlantic conditions, were added during the 1330s. They were clinker-built Norman barges with a rather higher freeboard, up to 90 feet long and powered by oars and a single square sail not unlike the old Viking barges of the ninth and tenth centuries. They carried timber castles fore and aft and a complement of between 100 and 200 men.¹⁰

Most of the thirty warships required for Philip VI’s Scotch expedition were already available, although they were in the wrong places. There were eight large newly constructed galleys at Rouen and La Rochelle, and five smaller ones. There were twelve large galleys in the Mediterranean, either at Marseille or in the last stages of construction at Beaucaire on the Rhône. All these ships, which had been intended for the crusading fleet, were now available for the Atlantic, and orders were given to bring them round to the Channel ports.¹¹

Transports, a more intractable problem, could be obtained only by requisitioning merchantmen. The French merchant marine had a number of advantages for this purpose. It was large. A high proportion of its ships were of the biggest kind with high freeboards for fighting at sea and ample deck space for carrying men and horses. A comparison with the English merchant marine is difficult to make, but a plausible guess based on the requisitioned fleets of the early part of the Hundred Years War suggests that, although the number of merchant ships available to each side was about the same, the average tonnage of French requisitioned merchantmen was greater. Moreover, the French merchant marine, unlike the English, was geographically concentrated. It was drawn almost entirely from the ports of Normandy, Picardy and the Boulonnais (Flanders and Brittany, being autonomous principalities, contributed nothing). Several of these ports, and in particular Calais, Boulogne and Dieppe, had long piratical traditions which proved invaluable in wartime. However, even this ample pool of shipping was incapable of carrying an army of more than 26,000 men with its equipment and horses across the North Sea. A survey of shipping in the Atlantic ports showed that there were thirty suitable vessels at Le Havre; twenty-four were in southern Normandy; twenty-four at Dieppe and sixteen scattered among the north-eastern harbours from Fécamp to Calais. It was less than half of what was needed. Even these were not easy to equip in the time available.¹²

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Edward III’s resources were stretched to the limit in 1336. Partly for that reason and partly because the English King’s attention was fixed on France, the Scotch campaign of 1336 was conceived as a swift punitive raid on a relatively modest scale. Edward decided not to take the command himself but appointed Henry of Lancaster, the son of the old Earl of Lancaster, in his place. He left for the north in the middle of May 1336 with a small force of about 500 men-at-arms and rather more than 600 infantry, almost all of them mounted men.¹³ The Scotch forces were divided. Murray was in the north near the Moray Firth, where he was maintaining a loose siege of the Castle of Lochindorb. The other Scotch leaders had resumed the siege of Cupar in Fife. In southern Scotland the opposition faded away as the English approached. The besiegers of Cupar were put to flight by a raiding party drawn from the garrison of Edinburgh, which secretly crossed the Forth and fell upon them without warning. Henry of Lancaster reached Perth early in June, having encountered very little resistance and waited there for supplies and reinforcements to come up from the south.¹⁴ His objective was almost certainly Aberdeen, which was one of the few ports of eastern Scotland by which supplies could reach Murray’s forces. One of Lancaster’s retainers, Sir Thomas Rosslyn, was given the task of establishing a secure forward base. Rosslyn sailed in eight ships from King’s Lynn to the ruined coastal castle of Dunnotar 15 miles south of Aberdeen with 160 men and horses and a corps of masons and carpenters to rebuild the fortifications. When he landed he encountered fierce resistance. His men were attacked on the beach and he himself was mortally wounded. But the Scots were unable to prevent them from seizing Dunnotar and fortifying it.¹⁵

News which was reaching Edward III in England was making Aberdeen and the south shore of the Moray Firth more than ever important. Already in the first week of May an English spy sent to Normandy and Flanders had brought back news of unusual activity in the Channel ports. During the first ten days of June 1336, the intelligence became even more alarming. Edward now learned about Philip VI’s meeting with the Scots at Lyon and received remarkably detailed information about the French King’s plans. According to his reports, Alexander Seton and Walter Twynham, two members of David II’s household at Château-Gaillard, had been instructed to proceed to Scotland to take command of the Scotch forces there. The French expeditionary force would land somewhat later, at a place north of the Forth which had yet to be decided. There they would join forces with the Scots and invade the northern counties of England. Edward’s informant gave graphic particulars of the preparations. Two thousand sailors and 300 transports were said to have gathered around Harfleur. There were also thirty ‘invincible’ galleys with copper-sheathed sides to protect them against burning projectiles. In the arsenal at Leure, at the mouth of the Seine, they were making crossbows and pavises, the huge shields which protected the bowman while he rearmed his weapon. Crossbow quarrels were being bought in bulk. There were 14,000 armoured jackets in store. Mercenaries were being hired in Genoa and Brabant. All this was too precise to have been discovered by conventional spying. Edward was either receiving information from someone well place in Philip’s service or had rifled the baggage of the Scotch or French diplomatic agent.¹⁶

This is to some extent confirmed by the fact that Edward’s information bore a much closer relation to Philip’s plans than to his achievements. The truth was that Philip had succeeded in sending a small advance guard to Scotland under the command of a young knight called Yon de Garencières. But the main force was nowhere near ready. The galleys based in the Mediterranean had not yet arrived. Those which had arrived from other Atlantic ports had not yet been equipped or fitted out. Transports were in short supply. The Count of Eu, who was supposed to be leading the expedition, was having misgivings on account of his lands in England and Ireland and shortly afterwards resigned his command. Other Frenchmen shared this nobleman’s ambivalent feelings about Philip’s enterprise. Was it not, as one Parisian chronicler thought, a breach of faith for the French King to be fighting against Edward III in his own country for the benefit of mere Scots?¹⁷

Behind these troubles lay the familiar difficulty of medieval governments in collecting taxes for purposes which were not obviously and directly related to the defence of the communities paying them. The state of Philip’s finances in the summer of 1336 was nothing less than disastrous. France had been enjoying several years of low taxation and in many regions no taxation at all. The last general subsidy which Philip had levied from his subjects had been collected in 1328 and 1329 on the occasion of his invasion of Flanders, a war which had been popular, at any rate with the nobility. Evidently Philip did not feel able to ask his subjects to pay another for the invasion of Scotland. This judgement was probably sound. Unfortunately the traditional alternative source of emergency finance, the manipulation of the coinage, was not available in 1336. Philip had carried out an ambitious revaluation in the first year of his reign in an attempt to restore the ‘strong money’ of St Louis after the repeated and unpopular devaluations of his predecessors. The result had been to aggravate an existing shortage of bullion and finally to force the closure of the royal mints in March 1335 for want of metal. At the beginning of 1336 there was a change of policy for the express purpose of financing the war which Philip expected to have to fight against England. The coinage was devalued once again in the hope of drawing bullion to the mints. The change was expected to make the King unpopular and did so. But it wholly failed to achieve its purpose. The mints remained closed. The French invasion plan was expected by its authors to cost 180,000 l.t., a considerable underestimate but even so a great deal more than Philip could afford. The government’s receipts in 1336 were less than half the average, by far the worst year of the reign. They amounted to little more than 260,000 l.t. In desperation Philip turned to the Church, asking the Pope’s permission to levy a tenth. Benedict not only refused; he addressed to the King a schoolmasterly lecture upon his fecklessness. The Scotch project had to be financed by scrapings from the barrel: local contributions negotiated with the communities affected, mainly the maritime areas of Normandy; loans from towns, individual noblemen and civil servants; the exiguous and overstretched resources of the royal domain. The French government’s use of credit was very primitive by comparison with English financial practice, and their short-term difficulties, essentially difficulties of cash flow, proved to be fatal.¹⁸

In June and July 1336 the French government was only beginning to understand the scale of what it had undertaken, when Edward III by a bold strategic stroke made its achievement all but impossible. The essential conditions for a successful French landing in Scotland were a friendly coast and adequate harbours where a large number of men could be disembarked with their horses and equipment. Moreover, unless the army was to be supplied through the autumn and winter months from Flanders, 700 miles across the North Sea, there would have to be food available for it locally. The only area where these conditions existed was the coastal plain along the south shore of the Moray Firth and between the Moray Firth and the Firth of Tay. Although there is no evidence that Aberdeen had been chosen for the landings, its position and its important harbour made it the obvious choice. Edward III evidently thought so, for Aberdeen and its hinterland were now to be methodically wasted. Edward abandoned a plan to preside over a Great Council of spiritual and temporal lords at Northampton. On 11 June he left in great haste for Newcastle where a small force was scratched together. It consisted of slightly more then 400 men drawn mainly from those of the royal household who happened to be at hand and from the retinue of William Montagu. A few others caught up and joined them at intervals as they marched through the lowlands. The garrisons of Stirling and Perth were astounded at the King’s arrival, and even more by the risk which he had taken in passing through hostile territory with so small a force. On 12 July, having added some 400 men to his strength from Henry of Lancaster’s troops, he moved north out of Perth.

The speed of his advance surprised the Scots as much as it did the English. Murray’s force, which was still in the region of Lochindorb a hundred miles north, narrowly escaped being caught. Inside Lochindorb castle, the Countess of Atholl and her ladies and soldiers were down to their last half quarter of rye when they were relieved. Edward now began the work for which he had come. All the animals which could be found were rounded up and slaughtered, more than 1,000 beasts on the first day alone. On 17 July 1336, the King reached the Moray Firth. The food stores of Kinloss Abbey were emptied. Forres was burned. Elgin’s famous church was spared, but nothing was left standing around it. The ripening crops were burned as far inland as Edward’s men could penetrate. On the night of the 21st, Edward reached Aberdeen from the north. The whole of the following day was passed in burning the town and demolishing what could not be burned. Edward stayed behind to satisfy himself by personal inspection that nothing remained above the ground. In spite of the modest size of the English force, the Scots offered no resistance. Murray withdrew south of the Forth with as many men as he could gather. The rest ‘secreted themselves in the marshes, mountains and woods’.¹⁹

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The Great Council which Edward had summoned before leaving for Scotland assembled at Northampton on 25 June 1336. The threat from France seems to have been the sole item of business. John Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Burghersh, Bishop of Lincoln, and Edward’s brother John of Eltham presided in the King’s absence. At this stage the government was asking for advice, not money, and seeking to commit the nobility to a policy which might ultimately prove expensive. Conscious perhaps of this the Council was cautious in its suggestions. They thought that a fresh embassy, the first important one for a year, should be sent to France to discover whether the French King’s plans were really as hostile as they appeared to be, and to propose a compromise. It is not clear what this compromise was, but it certainly involved David Bruce, for the Council suggested that the embassy should also be empowered to negotiate directly with him. This was itself a significant shift in English policy.²⁰

Both governments had now gone beyond the point at which a change of course could be negotiated. Events were moving too fast, and at distances too great for co-ordination. As the Council dispersed, John of Eltham went north to see to the collection of the levies from the northern counties. At the end of July 1336 he entered Scotland with several thousand men to carry the process of destruction into the south-west of the country. This force ravaged Carrick and the Clyde valley, burning, so the Scots said, whole congregations in the churches were they had fled for safety. In southern England, Edward’s diplomats proceeded on their mission of peace. The ambassadors, the bishops of Durham and Winchester and two others, were appointed on 7 July and embarked at Dover on the 24th as soon as their safe conducts had arrived from France. At about the same time, French galleys based in the Mediterranean at last arrived in the harbours of Normandy and Brittany to join the rest of Philip’s galley fleet. There were now twenty-six galleys, a creditable force only four short of what had been planned. The English government found out about their arrival in the last week of July, and by mid-August they knew the exact number.²¹

In the Mediterranean, fresh forces were being made ready to join Philip’s Channel fleet. The French King’s agents acquired several galleys in Genoa, which were in the last stages of fitting out; others were anchored in the ports of Philip’s enemy the King of Sicily, protected by the fiction that they were intended for the crusade. The contest between the two northern powers began to spill over into the politics of the Italian states. The English had little diplomatic experience in southern Europe and certainly could not match France’s long-standing influence in the Italian peninsula. But they did have good unofficial connections in Genoa. Edward II had given most of his financial business to Genoese bankers, and a significant Genoese community had grown up in London during his reign. Edward III had kept up the connections made by his father. Two London Genoese, the brothers Antonio and Niccolo Usomare, were responsible for the finances of Gascony for more than ten years between 1334 and 1345, and periodically took a hand in the King’s dealings with the Genoese republic. The English government’s main contacts with Genoa were through the Fieschi, the principal Guelph family of the city, who never in spite of successive revolutions and expulsions entirely lost their influence there. Carlo dei Fieschi, one of the Captains of Genoa, had been an honorary councillor of Edward II, and Francesco dei Fieschi, Count of Lavagna, had accepted the King’s livery during a visit to England in 1317. In the 1330s the tradition was continued by Nicolino dei Fieschi, who may have been the latter’s brother. This skilful and devious man was employed by the Genoese government in various diplomatic missions to England and France during the early 1330s. In the course of one of them he was taken into Edward’s service, and became the principal instrument of English intrigue in Italy and Provence. The first fruits of his work were impressive. Fieschi persuaded the government of his city to arrest and burn the ships that had been hired for Philip’s account. The price was high. Edward had to settle all outstanding claims of Genoese merchants against his subjects. This cost him 8,000 marks of silver. By comparison, the obstruction of Philip VI’s plans in Sicily was cheap. Fieschi had only to inform Frederick III of Sicily of the true destination of the French King’s ships there to procure their confiscation.²²

During August the bishops of Durham and Winchester had a series of meetings with Philip VI and his Council in Paris and at the royal residence in the Bois de Vincennes. Their discussions were extremely disagreeable. They came to an end on 20 August with the announcement in Paris of the French King’s ‘final answer’. Philip rejected the ambassadors’ proposals in their entirety. He said that he intended to assist the Scots by every means in his power. He had, he explained, recruited a large army both within France and elsewhere and had assembled a fleet of galleys and other ships. With these, he intended to invade both England and Scotland immediately. The ambassadors found Philip’s frankness startling, as indeed it was. They did not dare to write down what they had been told in case the paper should fall into the wrong hands. So they sent a clerk, William Tickhill, to warn the royal Council in England by word of mouth. Tickhill left Paris at once with a single squire, reached Dover on 23 August and rode through the night to arrive very late on the 24th at Northampton, where John Stratford and some senior royal councillors were lodging. Stratford, without waiting to consult the King or even hear the end of Tickhill’s message, had writs issued for another Great Council at Nottingham on 23September, the shortest possible interval. On this occasion, not only the prelates and barons were summoned, but also the representatives of the shires and boroughs. The exhausted Tickhill was then sent post haste to Scotland to report his news to Edward III and to pass on the Council’s urgent advice that the King should return straight away to England.²³

The fighting promised by Philip VI had already begun. On 22 August 1336, four French warships descended on the town of Orford. In Orford roads, they found a large requisitioned merchant ship, the Caterine. The few sailors on board were overcome and killed, and the ship carried off to Flanders. On the following day, the same force returned to the Suffolk coast and raided Walton roads, another vanished east-coast harbour now engulfed by the mess of Felixstowe. Here they took the Paternoster with a valuable cargo of cloth, dyes and wax. The raiders had letters of commission from Philip VI. They delivered half their spoils to his representative on their return. During the next ten days a much larger French squadron left the harbours of Normandy and Brittany. This force which consisted of both galleys and transports, made for the Isle of Wight, where several of the English King’s ships and some loaded merchantmen were anchored. There was no warning of their coming, and very little resistance. The ships were boarded and their crews knifed and drowned. Some were scuttled; others were carried off to Normandy to be sold as prize.²⁴

The attackers encountered virtually no resistance at sea. Edward III had appointed admirals to requisition ships in May, when the first rumours of French naval activity had reached the government. A small number had gathered at Portsmouth in June to prevent the very thing that happened. Unfortunately, in the last week of July these vessels had been dispersed to their home ports because of misleading information from the continent suggesting that the alarm was over. They were soon afterwards recalled to their stations, but the disruption occasioned by these orders and counter-orders left the south coast virtually undefended when the French ships arrived. The defensive measures of the English government, orderly at least in their conception, turned to panic after the return of William Tickhill from France and the news of the first attacks. The ships of the western Admiralty were ordered, too late, to collect in the Downs off Sandwich to intercept the enemy. Then, on 6 September, the combined fleets of the two Admiralties were told to attack the retreating French galleys, but by this time they had returned to their bases. It was a cruel mockery of the pretensions of the English King, who had declared less than a week before the French raids began that his forbears had ‘ever been sovereigns of the English seas on every side’; therefore, he added, ‘it would be a great grief to us and a slight to our royal honour if the defences of our realm against the assaults of the enemy should be weakened in our own day’.²⁵

Edward himself was still in Scotland, happily unaware of these events. William Tickhill, having ridden night and day through the Midlands and north of England, arrived at Berwick to find that the eastern lowlands were in turmoil as a result of the depredations of Douglas’s guerrilla bands. His bodyguard refused to take him further than Fife. There were no ships available to carry him round the coast. The Council’s message did not reach the King until the second week in September. When it did, it was acted upon with dispatch. Edward had been planning a campaign against Douglas in the lowlands. Instead, he hurried south, taking the principal magnates of the army with him but leaving the bulk of his forces behind. The knights and burgesses, and the remaining magnates were already gathering at Nottingham. Edward himself arrived there on 24 September 1336.²⁶

The Great Council opened on the following morning and received the sombre news of the outcome of the embassy to France and the raids in Suffolk and the Isle of Wight. As they deliberated, the atmosphere of crisis was heightened by the arrival of gobbets of news about French attacks on English shipping in the Channel and along the sea lanes of the Atlantic coast of France. Southern England was gripped by invasion fever. Since the middle of August, commissioners of array had been selecting men in the coastal towns and villages. Huge bonfires were being built on hill tops for the moment when the French should land. Wild and improbable rumours circulated of clandestine bands of Scots buying up supplies in England for their army, spying out the cities and plotting acts of sabotage. The assembly at Nottingham authorized the recruitment of an enormous defensive army. In every town and county community, up to four commissioners were to be appointed to summon every adult man to appear armed according to his station, with bow and knife, lance, halberd, stave, poleaxe or whatever other weapon he had to hand. From this motley mob they were to choose the best; the others were to contribute at their own expense one large cart from each community and victuals for at least three weeks. By this means it was believed that more than 80,000 men could be raised. No one ventured to suggest further negotiation with France. It was the point at which the English political community accepted that war with France was inevitable.²⁷

The English King was filling his war-chests. The assembly at Nottingham granted a tax of one tenth and fifteenth. The clergy conceded a tenth. A special levy on wool was authorized by the merchants. Fresh loans were raised from the Italians, this time not only from the Bardi but from the other great Florentine banking house of Peruzzi, who had not previously made large loans to Edward III. English merchants lent on a generous and, for them, unprecedented, scale. More than £100,000 was borrowed from bankers between the summer of 1336 and September 1337. Most of it was applied straight from hand to mouth in the struggle to keep up with the rapid increase of expenditure. In Bristol the ships requisitioned for defence were immobilized in the harbour because their crews were unpaid and without victuals. In Yorkshire there was a disturbing mutiny, almost certainly for the same reason, among the troops levied for service on the border. Like Philip VI, Edward applied to the Pope for permission to divert the wealth of the Church from the crusade to his own needs; but unlike Philip VI he did not take no for an answer. In October 1336, he seized the treasure which had been accumulated for the crusade in St Mary’s Abbey, York. Subsidiary crusade chests were taken from cathedrals throughout England by his officials. Only in the new mood of menace and national solidarity could this outrageous theft have occurred so easily. The clergy almost certainly connived in it.²⁸

In France, the King’s ministers had already begun to treat English merchants and travellers as enemies. During September they were arrested and their goods seized, certainly in the northern provinces and probably throughout the kingdom. In Flanders, where there was always a large number of English traders and seamen, very many of them were rounded up without warning and thrown in prison. The English, who learned about the arrests in Flanders in October, retaliated in kind.²⁹

*

After the Council of Nottingham had dispersed, Edward III and his friends returned to their uncompleted work in Scotland, now a wearing guerrilla war of sieges and ambushes, of castles in turn taken and repaired by the English, retaken and destroyed by the Scots. Time was short. Winter made movement difficult. On 18 October 1336 the English King marched to Bothwell, the partly dismantled fortress on the Clyde which had been his grandfather’s principal stronghold in the lowlands. Repairs were put in hand in harsh conditions. Winter had set in. Food and materials had to be brought under escort from Berwick. The guerrilla bands of William Douglas hovered at the edges of the English encampment attacking supply trains, killing stragglers and foragers. While Edward busied himself on the Clyde, his work was undone further north. In October, Andrew Murray captured and destroyed the isolated English strongholds of Dunnotar, Kynnef and Lauriston. The Guardian inaugurated a brutal campaign of devastation in his own territories, knowing that he had no other means of making them uninhabitable by English armies. Gowrie, Angus and Mearns were wasted in turn. The tragic consequences for the Scots themselves had to be tolerated:

                   In gret distres the comownys ware

                   Pynyde to dede in hungyre

                   For with his ost as he rade

                   Gret wastyng in the land he made.

Many more Scots died of famine and disease in these terrible years than had been killed by English soldiers.³⁰

In the south and east of England October 1336 was the high point of the invasion scare. Orders were given for the detention of every single ship in England, from which suitable vessels might be requisitioned with their crews to reinforce those already under the admirals’ command. Galleys were summoned to the Channel from Bayonne, and application was made to Genoa for more. Stores of victuals were accumulated near the coast to supply them. Arrows were ordered in thousands. One Nicholas ‘the Engineer’ was commissioned to make thirty springalds (large ship-mounted catapults). Home guards were recruited in all the maritime counties of southern England.³¹

At sea, the motley collection of requisitioned ships gathered in the Downs. Waiting was bad for discipline. There had already been a mutiny among the pressed crews of the King’s ship Christopher, a sign of difficulties to come. The men of Great Yarmouth were slipping away to pursue their ancient vendetta against the Cinque Ports, and other ships were reported to be attacking friendly merchantmen in the Channel. In spite of insistent reports that the French were planning another descent on the Solent, the admirals held the remaining ships of their fleet off the mouth of the Thames where they could protect the capital and pursue the enemy in whatever direction they went. It was an intelligent calculation. But nothing happened. Towards the end of October the English decided that the enemy had missed their moment. The larger ships were needed for the annual wine fleet from the Gironde. So on 22 October they disbanded the fleet of the western Admiralty; the northern fleet was dispersed four days later. On 8 November the mass recruitment of men in the coastal areas of England, which had been ordered by the Council of Nottingham, was cancelled.³²

The French government’s intentions defied analysis. Deprived of his reinforcements from the Mediterranean, lacking any suitable port of disembarkation and menaced by the onset of the northern winter, Philip VI at some point in the autumn abandoned his plan to land troops in Scotland. Instead, it was decided to concentrate the admirals’ efforts on naval raids on southern England which had originally been devised as mere diversions. In November, there was a destructive but strategically insignificant attack on the Channel Islands. Small groups of French ships and some Spanish privateers flying French ensigns cruised off the coast preying on English and Gascon shipping. The English avoided any serious losses by forming large armed convoys between Gascony and the Solent ports. Towards the end of the year the French campaign at sea faltered and then stopped.³³

*

As relations with France soured, the ‘Gascon Days’ of the Parlement of Paris became busier. By the late summer of 1336 the flurry of litigation was causing serious concern in England. It was becoming difficult to find French advocates capable of standing up to officially inspired pressure, and after a succession of timorous failures serious consideration was being given to disavowing all Edward’s standing counsel in Paris. In Gascony itself French royal officers were regularly reported to be entering towns and castles of the duchy to execute the orders of the King’s courts. If refused admission they sometimes attempted to take control by force. Behind these legal manoeuvres lay the jockeying for strategic advantage, preliminaries to a war that now seemed inevitable. Since the disintegration of the Anglo-French commission at Langon in 1334, the fortress at Blanquefort outside Bordeaux had been the subject of bitterly contested litigation in the Parlement. Philip deliberately raised the stakes at issue in this arcane testamentary dispute by buying the rights of the Count of Armagnac and then regranting them to one of his most loyal allies in the south-west. This man was promised the support of royal troops in the event of a war with Edward III. It was the most serious case but not an isolated one. On the other side of Bordeaux, the Abbot of La Sauve-Majeure had abstracted himself from Edward’s jurisdiction with the blessing of the Parlement and in spite of the protests of Edward’s counsel. Saintes, the northernmost of the major towns of the duchy, was the subject of an ancient lawsuit still very much alive. So were Blaye and Saint-Macaire, both important frontier towns. Some of Edward III’s principal allies among the Gascon nobility were reported to be failing before the judicial onslaught and on the point of transferring their allegiance to Philip VI.³⁴

Inevitably one of these cases would lead to a judgement which Edward would find it politically impossible to comply with. When it happened in July 1336, the occasion was characteristically obscure: an action involving one Garcie Arnaud, lord of Navailles, a troublesome and litigious baron of Béarn who claimed to be owed 30,000 florins by Edward III. Arnaud had been prosecuting his action in Paris without success for years. The Parle-ment had never decided on the merits because Edward’s lawyers had deployed a variety of technical devices for deferring the matter, and their arguments had always prevailed. However, on 11 July 1336 the technical arguments failed and Edward was declared to be in default. A large award of damages was made in Arnaud’s favour, which the Parlement ordered to be satisfied by seizures from Edward’s assets in Gascony. After a short period of agonizing in England the decision was made to defy the Parlement. It can only have been made by Edward himself. His advisers were in no doubt that it would eventually lead to the forfeiture of the duchy. The French tried to enforce Garcie Arnaud’s judgement around the new year. The place chosen was the bastide of Puymirol in the Agenais, an enclave of the duchy entirely surrounded by territory in the allegiance of the King of France. The town was badly designed for defence, its keep weakly sited in the shadow of the parish church. But Edward had to hold on to such places if his claim to recover the rest of the Agenais was to be taken seriously, and his officers were ready when the French arrived with their small escort. They were sent away with oaths ringing in their ears.³⁵

Preparation for the seizure of the whole duchy had already begun. A contract was made with the Count of Foix. He agreed in return for a lump sum to raise an army of 100 men-at-arms and 500 infantry on the southern march of the duchy by 24 November 1336. The Count’s orders were to be ready for a two-month campaign in Gascony as soon as war should break out. On the northern march, in Saintonge, a new seneschal was appointed and given the title of Captain of the King’s Wars there.³⁶ Edward III for his part began to take belated steps to strengthen the defences of his duchy. In the early autumn, the government in Bordeaux set about repairing and victualling, as far as their limited resources allowed, castles which had lain neglected for many years. In England, the first plans for reinforcing Gascony with English troops were drawn up by Edward’s ministers.³⁷

Early in the new year an attempt by the Pope to mediate was brushed aside without even the usual polite evasions. The quarrel, Philip told Benedict XII, was not between sovereign kings but between sovereign and vassal in a matter than went to the authority of the French Crown. In such circumstances, mediation was an impertinence. At the same time the French King set about raiding the coffers of the Church. He made no secret of the fact that his object was to finance a campaign in the spring. Benedict reacted with characteristic vigour. He refused to permit Philip to tax ecclesiastical property. In order to forestall any felonious intentions of the French government, he ordered the collectors of the crusading tenth to return the money collected to those who had paid it.³⁸

*

Philip now made a major issue of a grievance which had hitherto been no more than a minor irritant. This was the residence at the English court of his most persistent and venomous domestic enemy, Robert of Artois. Philip later declared the intrigues of this man to have been the main cause of the war, and his version of events, however disingenuous, found general acceptance in France. The truth was not as straightforward.

Robert of Artois, one of the pivotal figures of the opening years of the Hundred Years War, was Philip VI’s brother-in-law. He was a clever and personable man of fifty whose life was governed by a single overpowering obsession to which he devoted most of his energies, and which led ultimately to his death fighting in a foreign army against his own country. This was the acquisition of the county of Artois which by a quirk of the law of inheritance had passed from his father to his aunt at the end of the thirteenth century instead of to himself. He had prosecuted his claim at different times by litigation, by violence and by intrigue at court but always without success. When Philip VI became king of France Robert saw his opportunity. He became the King’s closest friend and adviser, his ‘chief and special companion and lover in all of his estates’ as Froissart put it; ‘and in the space of three years all that was done in the realm of France was done by his advice, and without him nothing was done’.³⁹ Within a few months, Robert had persuaded the King to take possession of the county in the name of the Crown while his claim was re-examined. The affair aroused extraordinary passions, divided Philip’s family and court, and raised a dangerous aristocratic coalition against him. Unfortunately for Robert, the ancient Countess of Artois died in November 1329 and by another quirk of inheritance was eventually succeeded in her rights by the Duchess of Burgundy. The Duke of Burgundy, her husband, as well as being one of the great territorial magnates of the kingdom, was another of Philip VI’s brothers-in-law. Robert had been trumped. In December 1330, the dispute abruptly ended. The documents which Robert had tendered in support of his claim were found to have been forged on his instructions. Philip dismissed him from his favour and allowed a criminal prosecution to be brought against him. But Robert declined to meet his judges. He fled to the Low Countries and began an errant life on the marches of France shifting from place to place as his presence brought embarrassment to his friends and hostility from his enemies. In April 1332 he was banished from France and all his possessions there were confiscated.

Philip VI’s relentless persecution of Robert of Artois long after the man had become a broken and impoverished exile is revealing of his character. No doubt much of the venom was due to the influence of the Queen (the Duke of Burgundy’s sister). Philip himself, although he was not by nature a vindictive man, was an extremely superstitious and unconfident one. He took most seriously the threats which Robert hurled at him from abroad to foment rebellion in France and to strike down his children by sorcery. For more than two years after Robert had left France, Philip sent spies to watch him and thugs to capture him. He had his confessor arrested when he was found in France, imprisoned his wife and family, prosecuted for treason those who spoke warmly of him and constructed warlike coalitions against neighbouring princes who sheltered him.⁴⁰

In the spring of 1334 Robert of Artois arrived heavily disguised in England and asked for asylum at the court of Edward III. He explained that he had been slandered by his enemies in France and intended to return there to justify himself as soon as he could safely do so. On this basis, Edward allowed him to remain. But he refused to give him any help against the French King. This is Edward’s own version of the facts prepared several years later when the decision had become controversial. It is almost certainly true, for nothing was heard of Robert for the next two years. The flow of threats and abuse directed at Philip VI and his family ceased, and Philip for his part, although he must have known where Robert was, said nothing about the matter in the course of his long negotiations with the English court. As long as Edward’s policy remained the appeasement of France the presence of Robert of Artois can only have been an embarrassment to Edward himself. But as relations with France became cold and then hostile, Robert moved into favour at the English court. In the autumn of 1336 he accompanied Edward III on his expedition to Scotland. He began to receive gifts of money and was allowed to live on a royal manor. Robert was colourful and charming, an excellent horseman and flatterer, the kind of man that Edward liked. However, what really commended him to the English King was the potential which he was thought to have for making trouble for the enemy. Robert of Artois claimed an extensive and useful network of friends in France. He also had relatives among the independent princes of the Low Countries on France’s northern border, a region where Edward was already in the autumn of 1336 hoping to construct a great offensive alliance. Robert exaggerated his own usefulness and Edward believed him.⁴¹

Philip VI was aware of the growing favour which Robert of Artois was enjoying in the English court, although he overstated its significance. At the end of 1336 he began to deliver formal complaints about Robert’s presence in England. Angry letters were sent. The Pope was invited to remonstrate with Edward and did so. The English King, Benedict wrote acutely, might care to recall some of the difficulties which foreign favourites had made for some of his predecessors. His messengers would be able to give the King some particulars of Robert’s past which it would be indelicate to commit to writing. On 26 December 1336, Philip VI formally demanded Robert’s extradition from England. The request was sent, not by diplomatic messenger to Edward himself, but to the English Seneschal in Gascony. The Seneschal was told that he should deal with the Master of the Royal Archers whom Philip was sending to Gascony for the purpose. The French government plainly intended to make this the occasion for the final breach.⁴²

Why they should have chosen for their casus belli the intrigues of an ageing émigré is an interesting question. In Philip’s own case, personal rancour may have had something to do with it, but his ministers, who were shrewd and calculating men, are unlikely to have been interested in personal considerations. There were sound political reasons for the decision. In the first place they must have known about the activities of English agents in the Low Countries which had now begun in earnest. They believed, unlike Edward III, that the English King’s connection with Robert of Artois would be a liability to him there. Philip VI had treaties with several of the more important princes of the Low Countries which bound them to assist him against Robert of Artois. These treaties had been made some years earlier and in rather different circumstances, but they were still in force and the French government correctly divined that the princes would be reluctant to break them too flagrantly. There were also considerations of domestic policy. To confiscate the duchy of Gascony, Philip needed the political support of the leaders of the French nobility. In strictly legal terms the conduct of Edward III in sheltering Robert of Artois in his own realm where he was a sovereign prince was not a ground for forfeiting his French duchy, but it counted for a great deal before the audience which mattered most. There were plenty of people in France, the dominant party among the nobility, the friends and relations of the Queen, her brother the Duke of Burgundy and their innumerable protégés in the higher reaches of the civil service who would feel threatened by an alliance of Edward III and Robert of Artois. Not all of them would have been eager to dispossess Edward of his duchy for a minor squabble in the Parlement of Paris of a kind which might well one day affect their own possessions.

The Master of the Royal Archers, a Savoyard called Etienne le Galois de la Baume, arrived in the south-west in February 1337. His instructions are not recorded and it is possible that he exceeded them. Shortly after his arrival he tried to take Saint-Macaire by surprise. Saint-Macaire was a small walled town on the north bank of the Garonne about 40 miles from Bordeaux which guarded the main point of entry into Edward III’s remaining territories in Aquitaine. Its loss at this point would have been a disaster. But it was not destined to be lost. The citizens closed their gates in time and Le Galois de la Baume had brought no siege equipment. He sent for some to Toulouse, but the arsenal there was empty. The French were obliged to withdraw. To forestall another fiasco of this kind Philip VI began to collect a siege train in readiness for the spring campaigning season. Equipment was taken out of store in the north for ‘certain secret purposes’ concealed even from his officials.⁴³

*

Notwithstanding the secrecy, Philip’s intentions were known, or accurately guessed, in England. The English King left Scotland in the middle of December 1336 and passed Christmas at Hatfield. From the beginning of the new year plans were in hand to defend the south and east coasts of England against the renascent navy of France and to send an expeditionary force across the Bay of Biscay to Gascony in time for the campaigning season.

Both plans called for great numbers of warships. Yet at a time when other western European powers, not only the Italian maritime cities but Aragon, Castile and France, were creating large permanent war fleets of ships built and crewed by the state, the kings of England scarcely possessed a ‘Royal Navy’. English efforts had depended for many years on improvisation and luck. The best fighting ships, and the only purpose-built fighting ships of the fourteenth century, were galleys and other large oared vessels. The Mediterranean galley, it is true, had some disadvantages in northern waters. But for offensive operations it was supreme. It was the only completely manoeuvrable ship, capable of very high maximum speeds, able to move regardless of the strength and direction of the wind and to disengage quickly from any fight on unfavourable terms. Its enormous complement (the oarsmen doubled as soldiers) made it extremely effective for mounting raids against undefended towns and villages of the English coast. Unfortunately for the English kings, the economic conditions which enabled the Italian city states to build up large fleets of these vessels did not exist in the Atlantic. In the Mediterranean, galleys had a commercial as well as a military use. For high-value cargoes such as spices and pilgrims calling for speed rather than space they were very profitable. But Atlantic ships depended on bulky cargoes of relatively low value: wool and cloth, salt, fish and wine. In the Atlantic, galleys were dead weight in the state’s accounts. Since they were very expensive to build and maintain and required expert handling by large specialist crews the possession of a galley fleet called for prodigious resources. How prodigious can be seen from a memorandum prepared for the King of France in about 1336. This indicated that it cost 800 l.t. to build a sixty-oar galley in Rouen which could be expected to last for only three years, an annual cost of 266 l.t. per year when depreciated on a straight-line basis. The crewing costs for a single eight-month season were more than ten times this amount: wages of 2,280 l.t. plus 180 l.t. to bring the men from Provence. When mobilization expenses, oars, cables, sails, armour and consumable stores were added in, the cost was at least 3,555 l.t. (about £760) per galley per year not including the considerable cost of maintaining the arsenal at Rouen.⁴⁴ Only the French Crown could afford to spend money on this scale, and then only in fat years. English opinion had never tolerated large expenditure on war materials in peacetime, and navies cannot be conjured suddenlyinto existence at the outbreak of war.

In spite of everything which England’s geographical position should have suggested, the onset of war generally found her government unprepared to fight at sea. For a long time this had not mattered very much. In the twelfth century the Angevin kings and their continental allies had controlled the whole of the Atlantic coast of France from the Channel to the Pyrenees. King John, the monarch who was principally responsible for the loss of his dynasty’s continental empire, was the first English King since the Norman Conquest to feel the need of a large Royal Navy. At one point he had fifty-two galleys under his control. His son, Henry III, maintained a fleet of galleys in the 1240s at a time when he was nursing large ambitions of continental conquest. But these were short-lived fleets acquired for special purposes. When the immediate need of them had passed they were allowed to rot. In the 1290s, when Philip the Fair created an Atlantic fleet, England faced its first serious challenge at sea since the days of Eustace the Monk, eighty years earlier. There was no naval tradition for the state to fall back on.⁴⁵

Edward I had galleys built in England at great speed to meet the crisis, but galley-construction was a specialized business and English shipwrights were no match for the Italians employed by Philip. Moreover, experienced galley crews were not available in England. These were some of the reasons why Edward I’s galleys achieved almost nothing in the 1290s, and specialized warships disappeared from fleets in the early fourteenth century. But a more important reason was the penury of Edward I in his last years and the improvidence of his successors. Edward II, when he needed galleys in 1317, had to hire them from the Genoese or call on a small number of commercial galleys which were available in Bayonne. The Bayonnais were sparing with their assistance. They needed the vessels for trade and for their own defence.⁴⁶

Edward III was in no better position than his father. The permanent fleet of the Crown consisted at this stage almost entirely of round-hulled sailing ships similar to those of his subjects. Even this fleet had been severely run down in the three decades before the beginning of the Hundred Years War. For the Bannockburn campaign of 1314, Edward II had deployed twenty-seven royal ships and a barge. For the next important Scotch campaign, in 1322, there were only eleven. At the end of Edward II’s reign, his ships had lain unmaintained and their keepers unpaid for several years. It was one policy of his father’s which Edward III did not reverse when he took control of his government. Several vessels were granted away or sold. Others were hired out for long terms to merchants, some of whom allowed them to rot.⁴⁷ At the beginning of 1336 Edward III owned three ships: a venerable old ship called the Christopher which was famous for its great height; and two cogs, the very large Cog Edward, which the King had bought from some merchants for the great sum of £450 in 1335, and a smaller vessel called the Rodecogge. These ships were fitted out for fighting. There was also a handful of small ships and barges which were used in carrying troops and supplies. The King’s ships usually had permanent masters, but there were no permanent crews. Seamen were pressed for service when they were required. For the many operations which required more seapower than this, Edward depended on the resources of his subjects.⁴⁸

The traditional providers of ships for wartime service were the Cinque Ports, an ancient federation of southern ports, then seven in number. In return for immunities from taxation and military service and a variety of other privileges, these ports were required to provide up to fifty-seven ships when required, for a period of fifteen days at their own charge. At some time in the fourteenth century this was increased to eighty ships for forty days. But the Cinque Ports had difficulty in providing even the original number. The siltation of their harbours had impoverished them. They were no longer the great maritime power which they had once been. Romney could support only one ship in 1341, and Hythe none at all. The others could produce some ships but not enough to make up theircontribution to the service of the federation, and most of these were fishing vessels. Since the last decade of the thirteenth century the Crown had increasingly relied on other maritime towns. By long tradition all of them were liable to have their ships and seamen pressed into the King’s service in return for compensation which was conventionally fixed at 3s.4d. per ton per quarter. One, Great Yarmouth, had by 1337 become the greatest naval port of England, far outstripping the Cinque Ports. Great Yarmouth contributed fifty-nine ships to Edward I’s Flemish expedition of 1297, only fourteen less than the Cinque Ports: their combined tonnage must have been much greater. For the first great maritime expedition of Edward III’s reign, in 1338, the contribution of the Cinque Ports had fallen to thirty-six, half of what they had furnished in 1297. Great Yarmouth by comparison produced sixty-four ships. Many of these were very large vessels, of between 100 and 300 tons carrying capacity, and one or two were monsters comparable to the largest ocean-going carracks of Castile.⁴⁹

The advantage of this system, and the only thing that commended it to the Crown, was that it cost almost nothing in peacetime. It had almost everything else against it. The process of requisitioning ships was so time-consuming and unpredictable that it was rarely possible for England to rise swiftly to any unexpected challenge at sea. The duty of transforming the assorted shipping of the English ports into a fleet of war was shared between two admirals. They were generally professional soldiers or important noblemen holding offices for the duration of a campaign. The Admiral of the north was responsible for all ports north of the Thames estuary, including the major shipping towns of Yarmouth and Lynn. He had not only to provide ships for service against France in the Channel and the North Sea, but also to maintain a continuous ferry service for transporting troops and victuals to the surviving English garrisons in eastern Scotland. The Admiral of the west was responsible for the Kent coast and the whole of southern and western England, an unmanageably large territory which sometimes had to be divided at the Solent and shared with a third admiral. The Cinque Ports organized their own affairs under the nominal supervision of the Warden (always a great nobleman). London, after being disputed for years between the admirals, was eventually placed under the immediate control of the King’s household staff. The requisitioning of merchantmen was carried out by royal clerks. They were overworked officials assigned from the Chancery or the Exchequer, who were employed year after year in this work and whose skills improved with experience. No amount of skill, however, could have made the system operate entirely smoothly. Plans for requisitioning ships had to be laid early in the year, in January or February if a fleet was required in the summer. Requisitioning officers had to travel from harbour to harbour when the weather was cold and wet and the going for their horses unspeakable. In each place, it was necessary to find out the names and number of ships, to survey them, to classify them according to their capacity, to arrange for the adaptation of the larger ones for fighting and to pay advances for the expenses of their masters. All this took time. So did the loading of victuals on the ships, the impressment of extra crew members, the discharge of previous cargoes (without docks or cranes), the manufacture of ramps to allow access for horses and hurdles to hold them safely on deck, and the ushering of the ships to their ports of assembly. The ships would be out of harbour when the requisitioning officers arrived, either because the news had got around or in the ordinary course of trading. Ships which had been duly requisitioned, and whose masters had received advances for their expenses, frequently made off before the campaign or on the way to the assembly point. The less crafty ships’ masters simply resisted the requisitioning officers by force. It is surprising how often the English government laid plans which depended entirely on perfect timekeeping. It rarely took less than six weeks to requisition a fleet even in optimum conditions, and another two to bring it together at the port of assembly. Six months was quite normal.

The dependence of the English government on requisitioned merchant shipping had other disadvantages inherent in the design of the ships themselves. They were short, tubby vessels, slow and unmanoeuvrable. Because of the shape of their hulls and their use of square sails few of them could tack closer than 80 degrees to the wind. They were therefore peculiarly dependent on the right conditions of wind and sea and could be immobilized for long periods. They had limited deck space and deep holds, ideal for bulk cargoes but less useful for carrying men and horses. They required large crews, doubled for war service, who took up most of the available space: one man for every two and a half tons carrying capacity was the rule of thumb.⁵⁰ As fighting ships, their main advantage was their height, an important consideration when the main weapons of marine warfare were bows and arrows, grappling irons and boarding parties. The larger English merchantmen were specially fitted out in time of war to increase this advantage: timber castles were constructed fore and aft and sometimes top-castles on the main masts. Ships large enough for this purpose were rare and greatly prized. One of the perennial naval problems of the English government was the relatively small size of English merchant ships. They were classified according to their carrying capacity (or ‘burden’) measured in ‘tuns’, the standard wine barrel of the Gascon trade weighing slightly less than one ton avoirdupois when full. Vessels suitable for fitting out as warships had to be of at least 60 tons burden and preferably more. Most English merchantmen were smaller. They seem to have had a carrying capacity of between 30 and 60 tons. It was only in the upper part of this range that a ship could carry horses or significant numbers of soldiers. The average number of fully equipped soldiers per ship which could be carried overseas was fairly constant over the years. It was about twelve. Only when the horses were left behind were any substantial improvements on this average achieved. An army of 6,000 was small by fourteenth-century standards, but it would have required no less than 500 ships to carry it overseas on one passage.

On 5 January 1337 representatives of the ports of the western and northern Admiralties assembled in London to hear from four of the King’s most senior councillors about Edward’s ambitious requirements for shipping in the coming year. What he wanted was nothing less than the services of his subjects and their ships for a period of three months without compensation. The ministers waxed eloquent upon the imminent threat to the land represented by the continued existence of a powerful Franco-Scotch fleet on the other side of the Channel. Their eloquence failed. The proposals were greeted with uproar and rejected out of hand. It was some measure of Edward’s growing confidence in himself, as well as his fear of imminent disaster in Gascony, that he proceeded at once to extremes. On the following day, 10 January 1337, he obtained the consent of a Council of magnates to the issue of writs requiring free service from the ports with or without the consent of the seamen. All ships of the two Admiralties were to assemble at Portsmouth on 15 March 1337 carrying double crews and stores for three months at own expense. The appointment of Robert Ufford and William Montagu, two of Edward’s closest confidants, as admirals followed within a few days.⁵¹ In the small harbours of the east coast of England a campaign of construction was put in hand, belated recognition of the damage done to Edward’s military strength by a decade of neglect of his ships. Most of the ships ordered were stout oared barges, transports for troops and horses. A galley was under construction at Lynn of sixty oars ‘or more’. At Hull, William Pole was building another. The government brooked no opposition. The Augustinian Prior of Heelaugh, who had refused to supply timber to the shipwrights, was made to watch as six of his largest oaks were felled.⁵²

Diligence turned to panic when the English government learned of demand for Robert of Artois’ extradition made of the Seneschal of Gascony. During February 1337 the fleet of the northern Admiralty was ordered to assemble a month before the day previously appointed, and to proceed at once to Orwell to await orders. The Admiral’s officers travelled up the coast from port to port, ordering out whatever ships they found. In the western Admiralty twenty ships which were already at Southampton were ordered to arm and leave immediately for Bordeaux.⁵³

*

Amid these alarums, Scotland was almost forgotten. At the beginning of February 1337, while Edward struggled to assemble a fleet for the defence of Gascony, Murray took Kinclaven Castle, north of Perth. Then, leaving a covering force to contain the garrison of Perth, he joined up with William Douglas’s lowland irregulars and invaded Fife. The English garrisons there had no hope of reinforcements. They were almost certainly low on supplies. The English government knew what was happening, but could do nothing. Edward told Percy and Nevill, his commanders in the north, that threats even graver than Andrew Murray’s army were detaining him in the south and ordered them to do the best they could. There is no evidence that they did anything at all. Falkland tower and Leuchars fell to the Scots almost at once. The walls of St Andrews were battered for three weeks by a great siege engine called ‘Buster’. On 28 February 1337 it surrendered. In March, Murray attacked Bothwell Castle, which the English had fortified so recently and at such expense. Its garrison surrendered on terms while they were still strong enough to exact any. At all of these strongholds the fortifications were razed to the ground as soon as the Scots had taken possession. The tower of Bothwell was ‘scattered from the foundations’. Before the traditional campaigning season had even begun, the Scots had resumed control of almost all Scotland north of the Forth, and undone more than a year of Edward III’s work. At the end of March the Scots had marched west across the lowlands and were wasting the lands of Edward Balliol and his supporters in Galloway. As the Scotch chronicler sang:

                      ‘It wes to Scotland a gud chance

                      That thai made thaim to werrey in France’⁵⁴

The English Parliament met on 3 March 1337 while Murray’s army was approaching Bothwell. Although it had originally been summoned to York, it met in the event at Westminster, a change itself symbolic of Edward’s new priorities. It was desirable, Edward explained, to sit closer to the perils which were threatening the realm. Unfortunately there is no record of its proceedings, but it is plain that the coming war against France was the main item of business. The government had to report reverses in Scotland, a menacing assembly of Scotch and French ships in the Channel and an overt threat to Gascony. To deal with the crisis, Edward proposed to recruit two armies, one of which would proceed at once to Gascony, the other at a ‘suitable time’ to Scotland. While these warlike preparations were in progress, a great embassy was to be sent to the continent. They were also to be provided with a draft treaty, in effect an ultimatum, to be submitted to the King of France. The Lords endorsed these plans in their entirety, and indeed contributed to the drafting of the terms to be presented to Philip VI. A subsidy was voted. It was only a beginning.⁵⁵

Even so, it was a reversal of the traditional suspicions of their class, suspicions of foreign adventures, of the King’s Gascon interests and of large expenditure for any purpose. The King himself was conscious of the change and largely responsible for it. The memoranda on foreign policy prepared for him at this time were sprinkled with warnings of the public opposition which had frustrated the continental enterprises of his forbears and with advice on how to prevent history from repeating itself. When Edward had wrested the government from his mother and Mortimer in 1330 he had proclaimed not only that he would govern according to ‘justice and reason’, a conventional enough sentiment, but that he would do so ‘according to the advice of the nobility and in no other way’.⁵⁶ He had in fact consulted them in Parliament and in successive Great Councils at every significant stage of the developing crisis with France and had almost always accepted their advice.

Edward worked hard to ensure that he got the advice that he wanted. There was more than one echo in the 1330s of the tradition of war propaganda inaugurated by his grandfather. Englishmen were persuadable. They lived in a relatively small, cohesive country and were susceptible to propaganda and shared emotions which would quickly have faded in the disparate vastness of France. Philip VI had come to seem to many Englishmen the main barrier to the successful occupation of Scotland, and Scotland was a real threat, profoundly hated. The limitations of French power in the 1330s were much less obvious to contemporary Englishmen than they are now. The gravity of England’s situation was one point on which the propagandists of Philip VI and those of Edward III could agree. Rumours spread freely in a society with no source of news that even purported to be authoritative. In 1337 it was being said that Englishmen were being massacred in France, that fifth columnists were aiding the Scots in the north of England and that forces of unspeakable strength were gathering for the annihilation of England. In this atmosphere accounts of the burning of fishing villages no doubt grew in the telling, and verisimilitude was given to them by the precautions which sent relays of villagers to the cliff tops to watch over unlit bonfires.

There was not only fear and anger but, among many of the nobility, actual relish at the prospect of fighting. War was heroic and ennobling. From the outset of his reign Edward III had encouraged the jousts and tournaments, ritual celebrations of battle which provided heavy cavalry with the closest substitute for war. They were also public ceremonies, elaborately stage-managed in accordance with conventions of growing formality, watched by large audiences. At the tournament in Cheapside in September 1331, when the King fought with Henry of Lancaster, William Montagu and some dozens more against all comers, the press was so great that the Queen’s grandstand collapsed.⁵⁷

Tournaments occupied uneasy ground between reality and pretence, dangerous without being earnest and popular with English noblemen long before war was. By 1337, however, there had been five years’ experience of war in Scotland, a war of unglamorous sieges and scorched earth, some major skirmishes and two pitched battles. The Scotch wars of the 1330s completed the military revolution in England which had begun in the time of Edward I half a century before. Edward III’s campaigns had been fought by highly mobile armies, composed of a practised elite of heavy cavalry, and of mounted archers and hobelars, moving rapidly through the country on horseback, but fighting on foot. In the army of 1335, the largest which Edward III ever sent into Scotland, more than half the archers were mounted. In the smaller raiding forces, like the one which attacked Aberdeen with such powerful effect in 1336, all the infantry were mounted archers or hobelars. The chevauchée, or large-scale mounted raid, which was to be the hallmark of English strategy in France in the 1340s and 1350s, had its origins in Edward’s early campaigns in Scotland, just as the classic elements of the battle plan of Crécy could be seen in operation at Dupplin Moor and Halidon Hill.⁵⁸

What was as remarkable as the composition and tactics of Edward’s armies in Scotland was the means by which they had been recruited. The feudal summons had been the main method of recruiting cavalry throughout the reigns of Edward’s father and grandfather, in spite of the determined attempt of both of them to impose a more rational system, better adapted to a war of prolonged, frequent and aggressive campaigns. No feudal summons was issued by Edward III after 1327. No one told him, as they had told Edward I and Edward II, that their military obligations were limited to the small numbers and short periods prescribed by custom. The whole army was paid wages, from the principal earls downwards. The royal household and the personal retinues of some three dozen noblemen (which they made available by contract to the King) furnished not only the entire cavalry but a good proportion of the mounted archers as well, about half in the army of 1335, rather more in the smaller and more specialized field forces of the following years. This was one reason for the noticeable improvement in the fighting quality of infantry as well as cavalry. These men had some of the strengths of standing armies. They fought together with their friends and neighbours, sometimes year after year in the same retinues. The hobelars and mounted archers of Cheshire, for example, followed Sir John Ward with the King’s household troops in three successive campaigns in Scotland and later in Flanders and Brittany as well.⁵⁹ The retainers of the nobility were no doubt less diligent, but it is clear that they contributed a great deal to the progressive militarization of English provincial life during the 1330s. War became another field for the elaborate web of interest and obligation which bound their world together.

In spite of the absence of any significant enemy field army, Scotland had had the reputation of a chivalrous battleground and had drawn volunteers from much of northern Europe. Hainaulters from the court of Queen Philippa’s father joined most of Edward’s armies there, including Walter Mauny, who stayed to become an adoptive Englishman, one of the great captains of the early years of the French war. Germans and Frenchmen arrived in small groups. The Count of Namur crossed the sea in 1335 with more than a hundred men to fight in Scotland. So did a persistent trickle of obscurer Dutchmen and Brabanters.⁶⁰ These men cannot have been drawn by booty or high pay, unless they were much deceived. The magnet was Edward’s personal reputation and the reputation of his court and army. Edward’s own participation in the campaigns, courageous at times to the point of recklessness, had forged bonds of comradeship with his knights and field commanders which explains more perfectly than careful political calculation could do why they supported his aggressive designs against France in 1337. The King, thought Jean le Bel, had ‘thrown the English into his campaigns and taught them to fight’. This worldly clergyman from Liège, who had accompanied the disorganized English expedition toScotland in 1327, could remember the armour of mail and leather in which its leaders had fought. When he next saw the English army, in the Low Countries in 1339, its leading members were resplendent in plate armour. Good armour was a revealing symbol, an expensive investment, voluntarily made. Henry of Lancaster cannot have been the only one among them who boasted of his equipment and stuck his feet out so that onlookers could admire his stirrups.⁶¹

How much cupidity contributed to the bellicose mood of 1337 is difficult to say. War could be profitable, particularly for the aggressor. Every battle was followed by the looting of horses, armour and tents from the defeated army, the fall of every town by the wholesale plundering of merchandise, jewellery and money. Ransoms, whose collection and distribution were governed by an increasingly elaborate code, became a major business whose most successful practitioners, such as Walter Mauny, made great fortunes. But, however attractive these prospects were, it is unlikely that at this early stage they were a significant inducement except for professional soldiers of fortune like Mauny. They had to be balanced against the risks, the possibility of defeat and ruin. It was not even clear in 1337 that England would be the aggressor. The invasion of France by the north was a paper project. The strategy of long-distance raids into the French provinces, which proved to be so remunerative in the 1340s and 1350s, was still years away. It was to take experience to whet the appetites of English leaders, and if they went to war for gain in 1337 it was the largesse of the Crown that was expected to supply it.

Characteristically, Edward chose the parliament of March 1337 as the occasion for marking in public the services of friends and servants. He created six new earls. That able and ambitious courtier William Montagu had already earned great rewards by planning the destruction of Mortimer, by his ready advice in a succession of diplomatic crises and by fighting in Scotland where his gallantry had lost him an eye. He now became Earl of Salisbury and was appointed to command the proposed expedition to Gascony. Two other courtiers, William Clinton and Robert Ufford, both of whom had participated with Montagu in the arrest of Mortimer, received earldoms. Henry of Lancaster, who had commanded the Scotch expeditionary force of the previous year, became Earl of Derby. Two earldoms were created for scions of families closely allied with the King’s. One of these, William Bohun, although only about twenty-five years old, was a veteran of the coup d’état of 1330 and of several Scotch campaigns. He became Earl of Northampton, and would become Constable of England in the following year. Edward’s six-year-old heir, the future Black Prince, became Duke of Cornwall, the first occasion on which this peculiarly French title had been conferred in England. Among the lesser men, twenty were knighted by the King in person. The new peers and some of the knights received generous money grants to enable them to maintain their new station. There were a few men, including that hard-bitten soldier Thomas Gray, who thought that Edward would have done better to spend his money on the recruitment and equipment of his army. But his was a minority view, and wrong even as a judgement of Edward’s interests. The King was doing what public opinion expected of a king, dispensing largesse to those who were its traditional recipients: his own family, the old aristocracy, and others who had earned their status by performing the services proper to a nobleman. The reversal of his grandfather’s guarded attitude to the nobility was quite deliberate. ‘We consider,’ Edward explained in the charter creating the new earls of Huntingdon and Gloucester, ‘that it is the chief mark of royalty that by a proper distribution of rank, honour and office it buttresses itself by wise counsel and powerful men. Yet this realm has long suffered a serious decline in names, honours and titles of nobility’. The motive was characteristic of him. So was the fact that he announced it.⁶²

Parliament closed on 16 March 1337 with the splendid ceremonies at court which properly followed so great a distribution of largesse. Philip VI cut the knot with lesser grandeur. The French King was at his hunting lodge at Saint-Christophe-de-Halate in the second half of March and passed the next month in the forests of the northern Ile de France. At the beginning of May, he came to Paris, where he presided over a meeting of his Great Council enlarged by the attendance of the principal members of the nobility. The ground had been well prepared. It was agreed that the duchy of Aquitaine should be taken into the King’s hands on the ground that Edward III in breach of his obligations as a vassal had sheltered the King’s ‘mortal enemy’ Robert of Artois, as well as for ‘certain other reasons’ on which it was decided not to enlarge. At the end of April, Philip was invited to receive ambassadors bearing the English King’s final proposals. He refused. The arrière-ban was proclaimed throughout the kingdom beginning on 30 April 1337.⁶³

NOTES

1 John XXII, Reg. (France), no. 4173.

2 Mollat, 77; Benedict XII, Reg. (France), nos 44, 103.

3 John XXII, Reg. (France), no. 90.

4 Benedict XII, Reg. (France), no. 89, Reg. (Autres pays), nos 467–73. Hugh: John XXII, Reg. (France), nos. 3934, 3939, 3989–90, 4238, 5503, 5519, 554–3; RF, ii, 601; WSS, 191–2, 197, 204–7; Cal. Pap. R. Letters, ii, 455, 462–7, 469–71, 474–9, 481–2 (he was bishop of Orange until 1328).

5 * Déprez (1), 118n; RF, ii, 925–6, 928, 930–1; RS, i, 390, 393, 394–5.

6 Chron. Lanercost, 284–5; Bridlington Chron., 127; Knighton, Chron., 477; Fordun, Chron., i, 360. Movements of negotiators: RS, i, 395–6, 397–8; RF, ii, 930.

7 RF, ii, 936, 1110; Benedict XII, Reg. (France), no. 167; Knighton, Chron., 477. Subsidy: Murimuth, Chron., 77.

8 Vitae paparum, i, 221; Ellis, Orig. Letters, i, 30; Benedict XII, Reg. (Autres pays), no. 786, Reg. (France), no. 210; Vat. Akten, no. 1812; Grandes Chron., ix, 153.

9 Ellis, Orig. Letters, i, 30; AN P2291, p. 219; AN JJ74/74; E. Petit, Rec. Anc. Mem., 204–10.

10 Roncière, i, 189–210, 333–63, 403–9; DCG, 27, 31–2 and nos 122, 124, 126.

11 Roncière, i, 390.

12 E. Petit, Rec. Anc. Mem., 204–10.

13 RF, ii, 936; BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fols 240–241, 259–260.

14 Chron. Lanercost, 285–6; BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fol. 276vo.

15 BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fol. 251; RS, i, 411, 414, 416, 417; Ellis, Orig. Letters, i, 33; Gray, Scalacronica, 166; Wyntoun, Cron., ii, 422–3.

16 BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fol. 276vo; RS, i, 420–5; Ellis, Orig. Letters, i, 30–2.

17 Actes normands, 142, 144, 146–51; ANJJ74/74; Chron. anon. Par., 165; RF, ii, 941; Exch. R. Scot, i, 451, 453, 454

18 Coinage: Ordonnances, ii, 42, vi, pp.* i-ii; Rec. doc. monnaies, i. 49, 219; Chron. anon. Par., 169. Benedict XII, Reg. (France), no. 240; Henneman, 111–2, 350–1

19 RF, ii, 940; BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fols 241–242vo, 243, 243vo–244, 259; Ellis, Orig. Letters, i, 34–8; Cal. doc. Scot., v, no. 758; Fordun, Chron., i, 360–1; Baker, Chron., 57; Chron. Lanercost, 286–7; Murimuth, Chron., 77; Gray, Scalacronica, 166; Wyntoun, Chron. ii, 428–31; Chron. mon. Melsa, ii, 377; Anonimalle Chron., 7; Knighton,Chron., i, 477.

20 RF, ii, 944–5.

21 Scotland: Ellis, Orig. Letters, 1, 38–9; BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fol. 240; Chron. Lanercost, 287; Fordun, Chron., i, 361. Embassy: RF, ii, 941–2; PRO E101/311/120. Galleys: RS, i, 438, 440–1, 442.

22 Usomare: CPR 1307–13, 378; Lodge, 230–1. Fieschi: CCR 1313–18, 589; CPR 1317–21, 10. Nicolino: AN J497/11; RF, ii, 937, 941, 947; CPR 1334–8, 328–9; CCR 1333–7, 733.

23 Chaplais, Dipl. Practice, 779–80; RF, ii, 944–5.

24 CCR 1337–9, 43–5; RS i, 450–1, 453.

25 PRO E372/184, m. 39 (Say); PRO E101/19/35; RS, i, 419, 427, 438, 440–1, 442, 446, 451.

26 Chaplais, Dipl. Practice, 780–1; BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fols 241–242vo.

27 RS, i, 443, 455, 459–60, 463.

28 Taxes: CCR 1337–9, 16–17, 118; Chron. Lanercost, 287; Knighton, Chron., i, 477. Loans: CCR 1337–9, 4, 9–10, 14; CPR 1334–8, 322, 332; E. Fryde (9), 48. Crews, levies: RS, i, 454–5. Crusade chests: Déprez (1), 131–2; Bridlington Chron., 128; Murimuth, Chron., 78.

29 Bautier, ‘Inventaires’, no. 202; RF, ii, 948.

30 Chron. Lanercost, 287–8; Gray, Scalacronica, 166–7; BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fol. 243; Fordun, Chron., i, 361–2, 363; Wyntoim, Chron., ii, 438–9.

31 RS, i, 455–6, 457, 466, 467; RF, ii, 946, 947; CCR 1333–7, 724–5.

32 RS, i, 442–3, 452, 457–8, 469–70; E372/184, m. 39 (Say); PRO E101/19/35.

33 RF, ii, 953; CIM, ii, no. 1588; RS, i, 467–8.

34 PRO C47/28/4(4, 6), C47/28/5(46), C47/3o/5(14, 17–9), C47/32/14. Blanquefort: RF, ii, 936; AHG, iv, 91–5. La Sauve: AP 1328–50, no. 1246. Saintes: PRO C61/48, m. 5. Blaye: PRO C61/46, m. 8, C61/47, m. 4; BN Coll. Moreau 649, fol. 67. St-Macaire: PRO C61/49, m. 40.

35 AP 1318–50, nos 915, 1699, 1709; PRO C47/28/4(8–11), C47/28/5(45–6), C47/30/5(1); Chron. Norm., 37–8; Chronographia, ii, 25–6.

36 Foix: AN J332/17; AD Pyr.-Atl. E392. Saintonge: Dupont-Ferrier, v, no. 20061.

37 PRO C61/48, m. 7; Gardelles, 42–3.

38 Benedict XII, Reg. (France), no. 240, 251–2, 260, 264, 280.

39 Chron., i, 100.

40 Nangis, Chron., ii, 111, 124, 126–30, 132–3; Grandes Chron., ix, 126–8, 132; Chron. anon. Par., 156–9; Chron. Norm., 37; Récits d’un bourgeois, 156; Cazelles (1), 75–90, 101–2; Lucas, 126–8.

41 Bel, Chron., i, 107–8; *KOF, ii, 523, xviii, 31; CPR 1334–8, 322, 327; CCR 1337–9, 24, 36, 42.

42 Benedict XII, Reg. (France), no. 242; *Déprez (1), 414–5.

43 RF, ii, 963; *HGL, x, 795–6; Chron. Lanercost, 288; LC, no. 69.

44 Jusselin, ‘Comment la France se préparait’, 234–6.

45 Brooks, 138–9, 148–53.

46 Prestwich (1), 138–9; RF, ii, 313.

47 RS, i, 115, 116–7; Nicholas, i, 339; CPR 1330–4, 258.

48 BL Cotton Nero C.VIII, fols 264–264vo; RS, i, 409, 424, 442; CCR 1333–7, 692. PRO E403/282, m. 14 (Cog Edward).

49 Cinque Ports: Brooks, 79–120; PRO SC1/40/89; CCR 1341–3, 263. And Yarmouth: Prestwich (1), 142–8; WBN, 366–8, 379–82; CIM, iii, no. 14.

50 CIM, iii, no. 14.

51 RS, i, 474–5, 476–8; CCR 1333–7, 737; RF, ii, 956.

52 RF, ii, 958; CPR 1334–8, 341; CCR 1337–9, 48; RS, i, 482, 483, 484.

53 RS, i, 482.

54 RS, i, 483, 485; Bridlington Chron., 128; Fordun, Chron., i, 362; Chron. Lanercost, 288; Chron. mon. Melsa, ii, 378; Wyntoun, Cron., ii, 435.

55 Subsidy: RDP, iv, 460–1; Chron. Lanercost, 288, 288–9; RS, i, 486–7. PRO C61/49, m. 22vo (terms); CCR 1337–9, 118.

56 RF, ii, 799–800.

57 Ann. Paulini, 354–5.

58 Willard and Morris, i, 341; Nicholson (1), 246–54; Morris (5), 93–4.

59 Morgan, 45.

60 Lucas, 182–3.

61 Bel, Chron., i, 155–6; Henry of Grosmont, Livre, 72, 77.

62 Chron. Lanercost, 288; Chron. mon. Melsa., ii, 379; Bridlington Chron., 128; Murimuth, Chron., 78; Ann. Paulini, 366; CPR 1334–8, 400, 416–8, 426; Tout (1), iii, 63n; Gray, Scalacronica, 167; RDP, v, 27–9 (quotation).

63 ‘Itin. Philippe VI’; RF, ii, 966, 995. Arrière-ban: *HGL, x, 764–5; Arch. admin. Reims, ii, 782.