The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (27 page)

The next morning among the many thousands slain were found to be the King of France’s brother, the Duke of Alençon, and the old blind King of Bohemia. The latter had insisted on joining the battle and had told his knights to lead him to the front line of the battle, ‘that I too may have a stroke at the English’. Edward III and the Black Prince found the sightless king’s body and the helmet surmounted with the Bohemian crest of three ostrich feathers which had rolled a little way away. The Black Prince was so moved by the blind king’s gallantry that he took the three ostrich feathers for his own crest, as well as the king’s motto ‘
Ich Dien
’ (German for ‘I serve’). Both crest and motto have been the Prince of Wales’s ever since. Crécy, as Edward III said, was the day that the Black Prince won his spurs.

Though war was cruel and ruthless its perpetrators considered it to be leavened by what is known as the spirit of chivalry. Deriving from the French word for ‘mounted knight’ and influenced by the Arab east, chivalry was a formal code that insisted on the protection of the weak and the victor’s honourable treatment of his defeated enemy. Some of our more humane instincts, such as the strict rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war laid down in the Geneva Convention, derive from this code.

To the barons and knights of the fourteenth century one of the most admired examples of the chivalric code in operation was exemplified by the conduct of all the chief participants in the siege of Calais. Five of the town’s leading burghers had offered their lives to Edward III if he would spare the rest of the citizens. Edward coldly sent a message that he would receive them only if they were naked but for their shirts and were holding the rope halters from which they would be hanged. His wife Queen Philippa was impressed by the nobility of the burghers, however, and begged him to spare them. Edward complied: the courtesy of deference to the weaker sex which was also part of the knightly code secured their lives.

On his return to England in 1348, Edward III celebrated Crécy by creating the Order of the Garter, made up of twenty-four knights and the king himself. Legend has it that its motto derives from the tie or garter used to hold up ladies’ stockings. One night at a ball held at Windsor, Edward is supposed to have wrapped round his arm a garter which had fallen from the leg of his dancing companion. When he saw the shocked faces of his guests the expansive king is said to have quipped, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘Shame to him who evil thinks’). Whatever its origins the Garter remains one of Britain’s highest honours, and continues to be in the personal gift of the sovereign. Every year in June a service to commemorate the order takes place at Windsor in the Chapel of St George, where it was founded.

During these years many an impoverished English knight took unofficial advantage of the English claim to the French throne by joining what were called the Free Companies. These were armed companies of Englishmen who roamed the continent ostensibly fighting for the English king but in fact making their fortune from plunder. Since the ideals of chivalry were at their height, to be a knight and relentlessly involved in warfare had the elements of a vocation; this was only encouraged by the king’s personal cult of the tournament.

The activities of these adventurers guaranteed that hostility between the two countries would flare up into war again. In September 1356 the Black Prince had led a small army of around 1,800 men from Bordeaux up the Garonne into central France, penetrating as far as the Loire Valley, and was returning to Gascony laden with his new war chest when the new King of France, Philip VI’s daring son John, cut him off with 8,000 troops at Poitiers. Though he was heavily outnumbered, the day was the Black Prince’s. The French fell into the same trap of setting their cavalry against the English longbow, and once more came to grief. In the heat of battle the impetuous and brave warrior King John was captured and was later taken to England in triumph to join the king of the Scots in captivity (David II had been taken at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346). It was a considerable humiliation for the French when their king, riding a cream charger, was led through the bunting-decorated streets of London. Because chivalry demanded that the French king be better horsed than the Black Prince, John’s conqueror trotted beside him on a small pony.

With the French king in his hands Edward III had the leverage in 1360 to negotiate the extremely advantageous Treaty of Brétigny. The whole of Aquitaine (including Poitou and the Limousin) was to be returned. Edward was also confirmed in possession of Ponthieu and Calais, as well as being granted a ransom in gold so enormous that it was never paid in full. In return he abandoned his claim to the French throne.

But this was the peak of English triumph. Hatred of the English, who for twenty years had ruined French agriculture with their wars, began to unite the whole of France behind the new king Charles V, and the ancient regional loyalties from which the English had benefited were further eroded when the desperate French were devastated by a new wave of the bubonic plague in 1362, and by the famine which followed in its wake. In 1369 Aquitaine revolted against the Black Prince.

Edward the Black Prince’s most recent adventure in Spain, to restore Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Castile, had been inconclusive and very expensive. When he attempted to pay for the expedition by new taxes on Aquitaine the magnates outside Gascony, who had become used to thinking of themselves as Frenchmen, seized their chance. They had not wished to be vassals of the fierce and warlike prince, as agreed by the Treaty of Brétigny. They called to Charles V for help. On the grounds that the treaty had not been completely implemented and that he was still the Aquitainians’ overlord, Charles summoned the Black Prince to answer the charges before the Parliament of Paris. When Prince Edward responded that he would debate with Parliament with a helmet on his head and 60,000 men the war began again.

This time, however, it was an even more pointless and destructive affair. The Black Prince had contracted a wasting disease on the Spanish campaign and was too ill to sit on a horse. Instead he was jolted in a litter from city to city, burning and plundering in the name of his father who had revived his claim to the French throne. In 1370 the sack of Limoges, capital of the Limousin which had revolted against him, blackened his reputation for ever. When he ordered every man, woman and child to be massacred by his soldiers in front of him, it gave the lie to the notion of war as a chivalrous pursuit.

For the rest of Edward III’s reign the French showed that they had learned their lesson. Under Charles V and his superb Breton commander Bertrand de Guesclin, they refused to meet the English in pitched battle and instead allowed them to wear out their strength in fruitless local campaigns–which just added to the bad feeling against the English. The Black Prince returned to England to die and was replaced by his younger brother, Edward III’s fourth surviving son John of Gaunt (for Ghent, where he was born), Duke of Lancaster.

But the trail of ruin John of Gaunt left as he marched in 1373 from Calais on the north-east coast down to Bordeaux in the south-west achieved nothing. It also killed half his soldiers, who succumbed to hunger and exposure. When the French seized control of the Channel with the help of the Castilian navy and prevented reinforcements reaching the English troops, the war petered out. By the time of Edward III’s death in 1377 the achievements of the great battles of the earlier part of his reign had been completely undone. For all the excitement of war, other than Calais the English possessions were less now than they had been under Isabella and Mortimer, consisting only of the few coastal towns of Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest and Cherbourg.

From the early 1370s on, Edward III declined into premature senility. The country was ruled meanwhile by the squabbling factions in the King’s Council–the supporters of John of Gaunt versus those of his elder brother, the dying Black Prince. Just as the main participants in the triumph of England were dead or decaying, the country itself was in crisis. Ever since the Black Death had killed a third of the population in the year 1348–9, chaos had prevailed at all levels of life. A series of droughts and poor harvests had reduced food supplies in England and Europe to dangerously low levels in any case, and even before the plague much of the European population had been suffering from malnutrition. So they were less able to resist the deadly disease, which began with black boils erupting from under the skin in the groin and armpits. In almost all cases it ended with death a few hours later.

But 1348–9 was not the end of the plague in England. In 1362 it returned, as it did in France and elsewhere, and again in 1369. The figures speak for themselves. Before the Black Death the English population is generally estimated to have been about five and half million. By the end of the fourteenth century there were two million fewer. The optimism which had accompanied the material prosperity of the years before 1348 was replaced by an anger and discontent that could not be assuaged by religion and would soon give rise to the Peasants’ Revolt. The flow of international trade which had been so profitable for everyone had already been faltering under the impact of the war. Now it fell to a trickle.

The natural order of centuries was overthrown when serfs and landowners were carried off so fast and in such numbers that there was no one left to remember the feudal arrangements, which had often been maintained by oral tradition. Attitudes to authority were changed too, as the English became less naturally deferential. When the response to the plague of wealthy bishops and barons was to shut themselves up in their castles or leave for the continent, they lost the instinctive respect of the locals. Even the parish priests no longer commanded much automatic obedience, though their behaviour during the Black Death had been exemplary. They had persistently nursed their highly contagious flocks after their families abandoned them, with the result that the death rate among priests was higher than among ordinary folk.

Such is the perversity of human nature that in an age before scientific medicine this was taken as a sign that priests were no holier than other men. Not only had they not been spared from what was commonly considered to be God’s vengeance on a wicked race but they were being singled out by him. By the late fourteenth century their self-sacrifice had produced a great shortage of priests to serve in parishes. Very few were left to preach against the dark pessimism and obsession with death seen in the paintings and poetry of the time.

Moreover, for some time in this country there had been a growing anti-clerical sentiment. Ever since 1309 when a French pope removed the Papal Court or Curia to Avignon in southern France, all the popes elected had been French, so that for the next sixty years until 1378 the papacy had come to be seen by the English government as an appendage of their enemy the French king. At Edward III’s behest the Statute of Provisors and the Statute of Praemunire asserted English independence from the pope over Church appointments and banned appeals to foreign courts. In 1366 Parliament itself demanded the revocation of King John’s agreement to be the pope’s vassal and put an end to the annual tax sent to Avignon instead of Rome.

In this feverish religious vacuum and unsettled atmosphere the stress on personal responsibility of a new group of preachers named the Lollards offered an attractive new direction for the disillusioned. The Lollards were followers of a radical Oxford theologian named John Wyclif, whose teachings anticipated many elements of the Reformation. Wyclif believed that the ultimate source of religious authority was not the priesthood but the Bible. With his regular denunciations of the clergy, he also provided a convenient weapon for John of Gaunt in the continued struggle for control of the King’s Council.

Thanks to his first marriage to the hugely wealthy northern heiress Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt was now the greatest magnate in the country. He was anyway a swaggering figure with a private life of such epic dimensions that it aroused the antagonism of the English bishops, who formed part of the Black Prince’s faction. Gaunt was therefore leader of the anti-clerical party. Using as intellectual justification Wyclif’s theory that priests should not be involved in politics, Gaunt got Alice Perrers, Edward III’s mistress, to dismiss most of the bishops who, following the long standing English custom, filled the government offices. William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and the rest of the clerical party were now at daggers drawn with John of Gaunt’s party.

In fact the real corruption at court, the bribes in return for favours, monopolies and offices, was the work of John of Gaunt and his accomplices–Alice Perrers, a London merchant named Richard Lyons, and Lord Latimer. Although he could control most of the government appointments, Gaunt could not control what was now known as the Commons, the elected members from the boroughs and shires, who from the 1330s were congregating apart from the Lords. And the Commons was hard to handle because it was there that the Black Prince’s supporters were especially strong. At last in 1376 the bishops and Commons together in what became known as the Good Parliament publicly attacked the court party of John of Gaunt. The Commons then elected what they called a Speaker (the first instance of this title being used), and the man they chose, Sir Peter de la Mare, launched the first case of impeachment in English history, against Gaunt’s leading accomplices. De la Mare himself acted as prosecuting counsel for the Commons, while the House of Lords took the part of judges–this remained the standard method of conducting a political trial until the eighteenth century. The Lords found Latimer and Lyons guilty of bribery and corruption, and Alice Perrers, who was also held to be guilty, was ordered to be removed from the king’s palace as an evil influence. Just before sentence was pronounced, the Commons’ greatest protector the Black Prince died. John of Gaunt was thus able to use his now completely unopposed influence in the country to call a new parliament, and abolished the acts passed by the Good Parliament.