The Perfect King (47 page)

Edward destroyed all the manors of the king of France, even those within two miles of Paris, but he did not advance on the city itself. It is likely that he realised the risks were far too great, and the chances of bringing Philip to
battle
in favourable circumstances were far too small. He was still as determined as ever to fight, but to do so on his own terms required him to cross the Seine. He also knew that, before long, the duke of Normandy's army would trap him if he remained south of the river. So began a desperate chase along the river towards Paris to find a bridge. At Pont de l'Arche the local forces desperately fought off the English vanguard until the main French army arrived. The next bridges were at Vernon, Mantes and Meulan. At these places too the English found either the bridge in ruins, or defended by several thousand Frenchmen. Which left them no option but to press on to Poissy.

By
13
August, the situation
must have been beginning to rattl
e those around Edward, even if he himself remained calm. Yes, they were within twenty miles of Paris. Yes, they were feasting o
ff the king of France's own cattl
e and drinking his wine. But they were not safe. They had failed to engage the French army. Philip controlled the bridges, and by now his army was much larger than the force at Edward's disposal. Edward was stranded south of the Seine, with no way to go except back to Normandy, and that was unthinkable. There was an army of perhaps twenty-five thousand men between him and safety, and it was still growing in size. If Edward had lost only a thousand men in the campaign so far - and he had probably lost more - then he had about half this number. And a second French army was approaching from the south-east. His freedom was at stake, if not his life. Certainly his leadership was in question unless he made something happen soon. It was of paramount importance that he cross this river.

This was where Edward saw the return on the years and the money he had spent on encouraging chivalric pursuits. By promoting the cult of the knight, Edward had fostered men who saw opportunities for greatness and glory in fighting against odds of six to one. It was said in England that if a French army outnumbered an English one by three-to-one, it would be as fifteen lambs to five wolves. Sir Walter Manny and Sir Thomas Dagworth were not alone among Edward's men in showing outstanding courage and supreme fighting skills. Vignettes of an almost comic nature have come down to us, slipped as they were between the pages of the chronicles of enthralled contemporaries. When Sir Thomas Holland found the bridge at Rouen had been destroyed, dividing him from the French king, he was distraught. Having fought and killed the only two French knights he could find, he stood on the edge of the ruined bridge and repeatedly bellowed 'St George for King Edward!' at the concerned Frenchmen on the other side. Comic as such events may appear to us, Holland's shouting, Manny's extraordinary courage at Hennebont and Aiguillon, and even the wanton destruction of towns and villages by 'men of little conscience' are all indicative of a powerful collective will - one is tempted to say psychosis - to attack the enemy. Edward had encouraged a spirit to fight which was so strong that it was difficult to control. The upside of this was that he commanded a force which was undaunted by any task he set. That promise to follow him 'even to death', which the army had made on landing, was serious.

On
13
August the main army came to Poissy. The bridge itself was broken but, as the English looked at the remains, it seemed that the piles were still in place. Odd beams from the bridge floated here and there on the river's edge. Carpenters were called up. Could the bridge be repaired? It was possible, but if the French attacked in sufficient numbers, those first across would be massacred. Edward ordered the carpenters to begin work at once, and asked Northampton to stand by to defend them. Within a short while a single beam, one foot wide, was laid across the swift-moving river. As the last beam was secured, a French force of one thousand horsemen and two thousand inf
antry appeared on the far bank.
Had Edward's men had any doubt in his leadership, things might have been very different. But Northampton and two dozen knights did not hesitate for a moment. They rushed straight over the narrow crossing, one after the other, swords drawn, and engaged the French in bitter hand-to-hand combat, and held them back, as reinforcements crossed behind them. By the end of the day, between five and twelve hundred Frenchmen lay dead around the north side of die crossing The English too had lost many men. But Edward had his bridge.

The next day Philip learnt that Edward held the bridge at Poissy. His policy of entrapment had failed. He now had no option but to take positive action. He issued a public challenge, declaring that he would meet

Edward's army in the area south of Paris, or north of Poissy (north of the Seine), between
17
and
22
August. Edward told Philip's messenger that he would be delighted to fight Philip, but he would choose the time and place of the meeting himself. When asked where Philip could expect to find him, Edward told him to look for the smoke of burning towns, and promptly gave orders to burn eveiy place between Poissy and Paris, including Montjoye, the French king's favourite residence and the place which gave him his
battle
-cry ('St Denis et Montjoye').

Philip may have supposed that Edward d
id mean to fight him south of th
e capital, in the plains. Perhaps he believed
that
Edward was so eager to fight that he would rush into poorly defended ground, where his comparatively small army could be surrounded. But Edward was a better military leader than Philip, and a more competent strategist than Philip's advisers were prepared to admit to their king. The day after the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary
(15
August) - during which both sides observed an informal truce - the French army marched south, towards Paris. In so doing they opened the door for Edward to cross the Seine at Poissy and march north, escaping their entrapment on die south side of the river.

This move has led many subsequent writers to believe that Edward never really meant to do battle with the French at all, that he was running away. But it is one thing to escape a trap, seeking a more suitable
battle
-field, and quite another to run away. Edward was doing what the Scots had done to him in
1327,
what he had done on the way to La Flamengrie in
1339,
and what any skilful strategist would have done in the circumstances. He was searching for a more advantageous place to fight. He even put his plan into a formal letter to Philip on the
15th,
stating that his sole intention was 'to put an end to the war by battle', stating 'at whatever hour you approach you will find us ready to meet you in the field' and that 'we do not consider it advisable to be cut off by you, or to let you choose the time and place of
battle
'.

Having crossed the Seine on the
16th,
Edward had the Somme on his north, and he now learnt that Philip had dest
r
oyed all the undefended bridges over that river also. If he stopped on the south bank, the massive French army would advance on him there, and surround him. It seemed as though all France was one big spider's web full of rivers on which he could be caught, and the French army a big spider able to crawl towards his army wherever it was trapped. If he came to the Somme, and was cornered, Philip's army could hold back and devour him at its leisure, slowly, without a pitched
battle
, thereby avoiding the risk of attacking the mass of Edward's archers. The answer therefore was simply not to get trapped. And
that
meant crossing
Another
big river.

Philip could destroy bridges, but he could not destroy fords. There was only one crossing which would guarantee Edward safety from the French army. This was the ford called Blanchetaque, the 'white spot': a path across the Somme estuary marked with a white stone which was traversable on foot at low ride. At high tide merchants' ships could sail up the river to Abbeville, so there was only a narrow opportunity to cross. This was known to Philip, of course, so he had already despatched Godemar du Fay t
o oversee its defence, with an e
lite corps of five hundred men-at-arms and three tho
usand archers and footsoldiers.
This was more than enough to guarantee that it could not be crossed, so Edward sent Warwick to try to force the bridge at Pont-Remy. There Warwick encountered Sir John of Hainault and King John of Bohemia, who drove him back with heavy losses. Attempts to take the bridges at Longpre and Fontain
e-sur-Somme proved equally fruitl
ess. Edward's food supply was now beginning to run down, and Philip was just upstream with his army. Edward was once more vulnerable.

But Edward still had the chivalric fervour of his men on his side. When he needed men who were prepared to risk almost certain death in return for a chance of immortal glory, he had an abundance of volunteers. So, trusting in the valour of his men-at-arms, and the range of his archers, Edward selected the earl of Northampton and Sir Reginald Cobham to lead the perilous attack on Godemar du Fay at the ford.

What happened next was a testimony to how far the English had progressed since that day, nineteen years earlier, when Mortimer had held Edward back from attacking the Scots across the river at Stanhope Park. With incredible courage, Northampton and Cobham proved that it was possible to advance across a river facing large numbers of entrenched, well-armed forces, and drive them from their positions. With one hundred men-at-arms and one hundred archers, they waded into the water, twelve abreast. With the longbows' rapid fire pinning down the front ranks of the enemy, the first group of men-at-arms charged across the river and mounted the bank, despite the returning fire of the Genoese crossbows and the onslaught of the men-at-arms who defied the English longbows. In this way, despite heavy losses, they provided a place for the next hundred men-at-arms to run to, to take the place of the dead, dying and still-fighting first wave. And the archers moved slowly nearer and nearer to the far side, replenished from behind by the next hundred, and then the next hundred. This carried on until they had sufficient numbers to launch a full-scale onslaught on the men of Godemar du Fay. Before long the French men-at-arms realised that their advantage had been shot away by the English archers, and they fled, leaving their infantrymen to be rounded up and killed by the pursuing English knights who now rode freely across the ford. According to a contemporary newsletter, two thousand Frenchmen were killed in the forcing of the passage across the Somme.
Soon the English army was across. Not long after that, the tide came in. Philip was cut off from the English. The French were left staring across the river at their elusive quarry. It was not quite comparable to Moses and the parting of the Red Sea, but for the English on the morning of
24
August
1346,
it was another of those military miracles for which they were becoming famous.
Edward was the first to offer tha
nks to God.

Edward had escaped entrapment. He was still no nearer to victory but at least he could choose when and where he would fight the French king. At first he considered it to his advantage to engage Philip on the river bank at Blanchetaque, and to this end offered Philip an unimpeded crossing. But Philip refused, and returned to Abbeville, where the bridge still stood, held for him by another large force.

Edward was now on home soil, in a manner of speaking. He was in the county of Ponthieu, which was his mother's inheritance, given to him by his father more than twenty years earlier. Froissart specifically attributes the arrival of the army in Ponthieu as the reason Edward stopped near Crecy: to go further would have been to relinquish land he ri
ghtly
claimed as his own. This is probably correct; keeping the war on French soil was his highest priority. But it needs to be noted that Edward was on familiar ground. He had been here before, on his journey to see Philip in
1329.
He had almost certainly been along the road from Abbeville to Saint-Riquier before, and perhaps more than once, for he was in the vicinity in
1325-26
and
1331.
How well he could remember the land is another matter. In
1329
he had been a seventeen-year-old on his way to swear fealty to his cousin. Now things were very different. He was twice as old, and had about ten thousand tired men dependent on him; they were hungry, and their shoes were beginning to disintegrate after marching several hundred miles. And they were all about to be attacked by the largest and best-equipped army in Europe.

On Friday
25
August, Edward sent scouts towards Abbeville to find out whether Philip was going to attack that day. They returned to say they could see little sign of action. Sir Hugh Despenser had meanwhile attacked Le Crotoy and returned with plenty of victuals. Edward remained uneasy, concerned that Philip would attack that following night. He gave orders for the army to camp in the open, and to prepare a defensive formation. With still no sign of the French advance, he held a dinner for his nobles and captains. The men remained in their armour. Froissart states that when the lords had retired from the king's pavilion, the king spent several hours in a makeshift orator)', praying for victory, or at least honour. Without honour, he would be nothing, not even self-respecting. At around midnight he went to bed.