The Demon's Brood (23 page)

On progress he prayed at all England's holy places, not only Walsingham or Canterbury, but less familiar shrines – St John's at Beverley, St Cuthbert's at Durham and many others. He also founded two religious houses, a Dominican nunnery in Dartford and a Cistercian abbey near the Tower of London, St Mary Graces. But if deeply religious and a regular almsgiver, he was scarcely a spiritual man.

No intellectual, Edward revelled in hawking and hunting, and was fond of fishing with a rod and line. His mews were staffed by twenty falconers while his menagerie held lions and leopards. Jousting, in which he took part, was a regular feature of court life. Indoors, both he and the queen played chess and dice. Pageantry in any form was his greatest pleasure, and he enjoyed wearing dazzling jewels and a costly wardrobe.

Edward was lucky to find a chronicler, Jean Froissart (
c
.1337– 1410), who immortalized him. Born in Hainault, a French-speaking cleric, Froissart recorded with unflagging enthusiasm the battles of the Hundred Years War. Sometimes called the first war correspondent, no other fourteenth-century writer possessed such gifts for describing combat, analysing personality and using dialogue. Stubbs may argue that any admiration for the king derives from Froissart, but Froissart knew what he was writing about – he first visited Edward's court in 1361, when the king was still vigorous, and for earlier events used Jean le Bel's chronicle.

When Charles IV, Isabella's youngest brother, died in 1328, he left no sons and was succeeded by his cousin Philip of Valois, who descended in the male line from a brother of St Louis. Although Edward had been more closely related to Charles through his mother, he recognized Philip as King of France, paying ‘simple' homage to him for Gascony. He was ready to pay full homage on the right terms, which meant regaining the Agenais. Disguised as a merchant, he visited Philip VI secretly and they agreed to go on Crusade together if they did not solve the dispute. But his attitude changed when Philip showed that he intended to conquer the duchy.

In spring 1336 a fleet assembled at Marseilles for the Crusade was moved to Normandy, the Archbishop of Rouen announcing that Philip would send troops to help the Scots. In response, a great council at Nottingham granted war taxes of a ‘tenth' and a ‘fifteenth'. Although by now ‘Gascony' was merely the coast between the Charente and the Pyrenees, the Gascons still regarded Edward III as their natural ruler, heir to the old Dukes of Aquitaine. They were subjects whom he had a duty to protect.

In 1337, angered by Edward sheltering his brother-in-law, Robert of Artois, Philip declared that Gascony was forfeit. (After poisoning his mother-in-law, Robert had tried to kill Philip and his queen with sorcery.) Edward reacted by claiming the French crown. Next year, at Robert's suggestion his court swore to make him King of France in the ‘Vow of the Heron', during a banquet at Windsor at which herons were served as a dish. Meanwhile, England feared invasion after the French fleet arrived on the Norman coast, raiders burning Portsmouth and Southampton. Tension grew as privateers seized English ships, parading their captured crew at Calais minus ears and noses. The English retaliated in kind, burning Boulogne in 1339.

Halidon Hill had shown Edward he possessed a weapon that won battles, while he acquired allies on France's northern border – the Duke of Brabant, the Counts of Guelders, Hainault, Holland, Julich and Limbourg, even Emperor Louis IV. The Count of Flanders refused to join, so Edward banned the export of English wool to Flanders until the starving Flemish replaced the count with a leader who was an anti-French merchant. Money to subsidize these new friends came from heavy taxes and levies on wool that caused considerable resentment. In addition, the king borrowed from Lombard and Florentine bankers, from merchants in the Low Countries, from English woolmen and vintners. He even pawned his crown.

Edward finally invaded France in 1339, leading a
chevauchée
into Picardy of the sort he used in Scotland, burning and slaying. Philip intercepted him with 35,000 men, but refused to
give battle. Edward withdrew to Flanders after only a month, returning to England in February 1340. All he had achieved was to run up debts amounting to £300,000. He told parliament he ‘needed the help of a great aid (new tax) or he would be dishonoured for ever and his lands on both sides of the sea would be in peril – he would lose his allies and have to go back in person to Brussels and stay there as a prisoner until the sums he owed had been paid in full'.
¹⁰
Fearful of French invasion, parliament agreed to a ninth on agricultural produce and a ninth on townsmen's goods, while insisting he observe the provisions of Magna Carta and the Forest Charter, end the exorbitant ‘maletote' on wool and stop sheriffs from holding office for more than a year. This enabled him to equip an invasion fleet.

A French armada, including Castilian and Genoese vessels, assembled at Sluys on the Flemish coast, to intercept the king. In June 1340 he sailed from Orwell to attack it, despite Archbishop Stafford warning him he did not have enough men. Although the French fleet included so many vessels that their masts looked like a forest, Edward won a great victory. Directing his fleet from his flagship the
Thomas of Winchester
, he used wind and tide to defeat them, grouping his own ships in threes – one carrying men-at-arms flanked on each side by another with archers. Outshooting the enemy's crossbows, his longbowmen massacred the French before his men-at-arms boarded. He captured 166 vessels. The main English casualty was a cog carrying ladies of the court, which was sunk by gunfire, while the king himself was wounded by a bolt in the thigh. His campaign on land was less successful, Philip VI refusing to settle matters by a duel or a full-scale battle.

Shortage of cash forced Edward into a truce. Informed by an official in London that funds for his immediate needs were available at the Tower, he arrived there at midnight, having sailed up the Thames, so unexpectedly that the constable was away. He then sacked the chancellor, the treasurer and three senior judges, arresting leading merchants and legal officials for corruption.

He also tried to send the previous chancellor, Archbishop Stratford, to Flanders as security for his debts. Stratford, who saw himself as another Becket, compared the king to the evil Rehoboam of Scripture who had threatened to chastise his subjects with scorpions, whereupon Edward unfairly charged the primate of encouraging him to wage war without sufficient funds. In a letter to the pope, he claimed that Stratford had hoped lack of money would bring about his defeat and death, even accusing the saintly archbishop of lecherous designs on the queen. In the end Stratford escaped when parliament decided that a lord spiritual could only be tried by his peers.

Out of character, the king's behaviour can only be explained by stress. His debts amounted to five times his revenue and he had pawned his crown. His perseverance was astonishing, and so was his ability to extract taxes despite bad harvests. The victory at Sluys helped to some extent, most people realizing that it made a French invasion less likely. Even so, in 1341 he was forced to appoint ministers on the advice of his lords in parliament, just as the Ordinances had stipulated thirty years before, a concession Edward cancelled after extracting the money he needed.

When his Florentine bankers, the Bardi and Peruzzi, collapsed (from lending all over Europe rather than the king's default), he borrowed from wealthy English merchants and a single, exceptionally rich, nobleman, the Earl of Arundel. The country accepted it would have to give more towards the war effort, allowing the king to levy his hated taxes on wool. Why there was such hatred of the French in a period supposedly antedating nationalism may be hard for us to understand, yet it was there all right. Edward whipped up xenophobia to overcome the grumbles of magnates and commons.

He also adopted a cheaper strategy. The Duke of Brittany having died early in 1341, the Breton succession was disputed by his brother's daughter Jeanne, Countess of Blois, and his half-brother, John of Montfort. While Philip VI accepted Jeanne's claim, Edward recognized John as duke in return for homage
to him as King of France. Edward arrived in Brittany in 1342, besieging key cities, and when he went home left behind Sir Thomas Dagworth, an Essex man who although nearly seventy was an outstanding soldier. The Breton war enabled Edward to attack Philip on several fronts at once with small armies. In 1345 his cousin Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Lancaster regained the Agenais while Dagworth ravaged Brittany. Edward prepared an invasion.

He was a master of logistics. Commissions of array no longer summoned the old feudal muster but raised troops by indenture with young, energetic nobles and gentry, who each assembled a retinue – the indentures specifying number, type, period of service and rates of pay, which came from the Exchequer. Every town supplied a fixed quota of men, similarly paid, while a substantial number of archers were criminals recruited by free pardons. Horses, weapons, armour and victuals (salted and smoked meat, dried fish, cheese, flour and beans, ale) were gathered from all over England and stockpiled. The army was shipped across the sea with munitions and supplies in an armada of requisitioned ships.

In July 1346, instead of going to Flanders as the French expected, Edward landed in Normandy with 15,000 troops and sacked Caen, killing most of its population. Among the loot was a document containing Philip VI's plan to invade England in 1339, which the king sent home to be read out at St Paul's by the Archbishop of Canterbury – to show his subjects he had saved them from the miseries he was inflicting on the French. Burning and slaying, he marched to Paris where, since he was in no position to besiege it, he torched Saint-Germain and Saint-Cloud nearby. Having panicked Philip into recalling the troops sent to deal with Lancaster and Dagworth, Edward retreated northwards.

After a lengthy pursuit the enemy caught up with him near the little town of Crécy-en-Ponthieu, early in the evening of 26 August. The English, about 2,000 men-at-arms and 7,000
archers with 1,500 Welsh knifemen, occupied rising ground, one side of which was protected by a small river and the other by woods. Edward formed them up well before the battle. His cavalry were to fight dismounted, in three divisions six men deep, his archers on the flanks. After going among them, chatting and joking, he gave orders to sit down to eat and drink until the trumpets sounded, plenty of cattle and large supplies of wine having been found nearby. One reason for confidence was his archers' ability to shoot twelve arrows a minute, with a killing range of about 150 yards against unarmoured men and about 60 yards against men in armour. At most, the enemy's crossbows shot four bolts a minute.

The French army was three times larger, 10,000 men-at-arms (many from the upper nobility), with 6,000 mercenaries and 14,000 levies. Philip wanted to wait until the next day, but his nobles insisted on fighting immediately and, in their haste to get at the enemy, rode over their own crossbow men. Until after nightfall, in charge after charge French mailed cavalry were shot down by English archers, Philip being hit in the face by an arrow and having his horse killed under him before being led away. Over 1,500 French noblemen died, with 10,000 other troops, their corpses lying in heaps, while Edward lost only a hundred men.

Crécy was followed by other victories. In September Lancaster led a
chevauchée
that culminated in the capture of Poitiers, and regained four Gascon provinces. In October a raid across the border by the young King of Scots was defeated at Neville's Cross near Durham, David II being taken prisoner and brought in triumph to the Tower of London where he spent nine years. In May 1347 Sir Thomas Dagworth routed the pro-French Bretons at La Roche-Derrien, capturing their duke.

Only a month before La Roche-Derrien, Calais surrendered after an eleven-month siege that had begun after Crécy, during which the king housed his army in a town of wooden huts. A show trial of rich burghers, pardoned at Queen Philippa's
dramatic intervention, was staged to distract attention from other townsmen being evicted from their homes. They were replaced by settlers who made the port an English gateway into France for the next two centuries.

Although Edward's sole gain was Calais, the war was popular as a source of plunder and profit. In 1348 there were few women who did not own something from Caen, Calais or some other town over the seas, such as clothing, furs or cushions. French tablecloths were in everybody's houses, ladies wore French matrons' finery. The Parliament Roll records how lords and commons approved motions thanking God for their king's victories and agreeing that monies voted for him were well spent. He had finally united the magnates behind him. No one could have foreseen the calamity that stopped the war.

The Great Pestilence (later called the Black Death), which reached England in June 1348, combined bubonic and pneumonic plague with other diseases. It killed quickly and horribly, exterminating half of England's population within a few months. In September, on her way to marry the King of Castile's heir, Edward's daughter Joan was struck down at Bordeaux. ‘No fellow human being can be surprised that our very souls have been in torment from the sting of this bitter grief, for we are human too', wrote her father. ‘But we, who place our trust in God and our life in his hands . . . give thanks to Him that one of our family, free of all stain, whom we have loved with pure love, has gone before us to heaven.'
¹¹

Edward ordered public prayer, fasting and penance. Dead peasants could not work the land and, realizing they were indispensable, survivors demanded pay that threatened the entire economy. In June 1349 the king issued the Ordinance of Labourers, confirmed by parliament in 1351 – anyone asking higher wages would be imprisoned; everybody under sixty must work. Despite being proclaimed at the shire quarter-sessions by country gentlemen called justices of the peace, it had no effect. Yet the Ordinance at least showed awareness of the problem.