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History of the English People - Book IV The Parliament--1307-1461
Edward the Third 1327-1347
by Green, John Richard (M.A.)
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Estate of the Commons
The deposition of Edward the Second proclaimed to the world the power which
the English Parliament had gained. In thirty years from their first
assembly at Westminster the Estates had wrested from the Crown the last
relic of arbitrary taxation, had forced on it new ministers and a new
system of government, had claimed a right of confirming the choice of its
councillors and of punishing their misconduct, and had established the
principle that redress of grievances precedes a grant of supply. Nor had
the time been less important in the internal growth of Parliament. Step by
step the practical sense of the Houses themselves completed the work of
Edward by bringing about change after change in its composition. The very
division into a House of Lords and a House of Commons formed no part of the
original plan of Edward the First; in the earlier Parliaments each of the
four orders of clergy, barons, knights, and burgesses met, deliberated, and
made their grants apart from each other. This isolation however of the
Estates soon showed signs of breaking down. Though the clergy held steadily
aloof from any real union with its fellow-orders, the knights of the shire
were drawn by the similarity of their social position into a close
connexion with the lords. They seem in fact to have been soon admitted by
the baronage to an almost equal position with themselves, whether as
legislators or counsellors of the Crown. The burgesses on the other hand
took little part at first in Parliamentary proceedings, save in those which
related to the taxation of their class. But their position was raised by
the strifes of the reign of Edward the Second when their aid was needed by
the baronage in its struggle with the Crown; and their right to share fully
in all legislative action was asserted in the statute of 1322. From this
moment no proceedings can have been considered as formally legislative save
those conducted in full Parliament of all the estates. In subjects of
public policy however the barons were still regarded as the sole advisers
of the Crown, though the knights of the shire were sometimes consulted with
them. But the barons and knighthood were not fated to be drawn into a
single body whose weight would have given an aristocratic impress to the
constitution. Gradually, through causes with which we are imperfectly
acquainted, the knights of the shire drifted from their older connexion
with the baronage into so close and intimate a union with the
representatives of the towns that at the opening of the reign of Edward the
Third the two orders are found grouped formally together, under the name of
"The Commons." It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this
change. Had Parliament remained broken up into its four orders of clergy,
barons, knights, and citizens, its power would have been neutralized at
every great crisis by the jealousies and difficulty of co-operation among
its component parts. A permanent union of the knighthood and the baronage
on the other hand would have converted Parliament into the mere
representative of an aristocratic caste, and would have robbed it of the
strength which it has drawn from its connexion with the great body of the
commercial classes. The new attitude of the knighthood, their social
connexion as landed gentry with the baronage, their political union with
the burgesses, really welded the three orders into one, and gave that unity
of feeling and action to our Parliament on which its power has ever since
mainly depended.
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Scotch War
The weight of the two Houses was seen in their settlement of the new
government by the nomination of a Council with Earl Henry of Lancaster at
its head. The Council had at once to meet fresh difficulties in the North.
The truce so recently made ceased legally with Edward's deposition; and the
withdrawal of his royal title in further offers of peace warned Bruce of
the new temper of the English rulers. Troops gathered on either side, and
the English Council sought to pave the way for an attack by dividing
Scotland against itself. Edward Balliol, a son of the former king John, was
solemnly received as a vassal-king of Scotland at the English court. Robert
was disabled by leprosy from taking the field in person, but the insult
roused him to hurl his marauders again over the border under Douglas and
Sir Thomas Randolph. The Scotch army has been painted for us by an
eye-witness whose description is embodied in the work of Jehan le Bel. "It
consisted of four thousand men-at-arms, knights, and esquires, well
mounted, besides twenty thousand men bold and hardy, armed after the manner
of their country, and mounted upon little hackneys that are never tied up
or dressed, but turned immediately after the day's march to pasture on the
heath or in the fields.... They bring no carriages with them on account of
the mountains they have to pass in Northumberland, neither do they carry
with them any provisions of bread or wine, for their habits of sobriety are
such in time of war that they will live for a long time on flesh
half-sodden without bread, and drink the river water without wine. They
have therefore no occasion for pots or pans, for they dress the flesh of
the cattle in their skins after they have flayed them, and being sure to
find plenty of them in the country which they invade they carry none with
them. Under the flaps of his saddle each man carries a broad piece of
metal, behind him a little bag of oatmeal: when they have eaten too much of
the sodden flesh and their stomach appears weak and empty, they set this
plate over the fire, knead the meal with water, and when the plate is hot
put a little of the paste upon it in a thin cake like a biscuit, which they
eat to warm their stomachs. It is therefore no wonder that they perform a
longer day's march than other soldiers." Though twenty thousand horsemen
and forty thousand foot marched under their boy-king to protect the border,
the English troops were utterly helpless against such a foe as this. At one
time the whole army lost its way in the border wastes: at another all
traces of the enemy disappeared, and an offer of knighthood and a hundred
marks was made to any who could tell where the Scots were encamped. But
when they were found their position behind the Wear proved unassailable,
and after a bold sally on the English camp Douglas foiled an attempt at
intercepting him by a clever retreat. The English levies broke hopelessly
up, and a fresh foray into Northumberland forced the English Court in 1328
to submit to peace. By the treaty of Northampton which was solemnly
confirmed by Parliament in September the independence of Scotland was
recognized, and Robert Bruce owned as its king. Edward formally abandoned
his claim of feudal superiority over Scotland; while Bruce promised to make
compensation for the damage done in the North, to marry his son David to
Edward's sister Joan, and to restore their forfeited estates to those
nobles who had sided with the English king.
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Fall of Mortimer
But the pride of England had been too much roused by the struggle with the
Scots to bear this defeat easily, and the first result of the treaty of
Northampton was the overthrow of the government which concluded it. This
result was hastened by the pride of Roger Mortimer, who was now created
Earl of March, and who had made himself supreme through his influence over
Isabella and his exclusion of the rest of the nobles from all practical
share in the administration of the realm. The first efforts to shake
Roger's power were unsuccessful. The Earl of Lancaster stood, like his
brother, at the head of the baronage; the parliamentary settlement at
Edward's accession had placed him first in the royal Council; and it was to
him that the task of defying Mortimer naturally fell. At the close of 1328
therefore Earl Henry formed a league with the Archbishop of Canterbury and
with the young king's uncles, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent, to bring
Mortimer to account for the peace with Scotland and the usurpation of the
government as well as for the late king's murder, a murder which had been
the work of his private partizans and which had profoundly shocked the
general conscience. But the young king clave firmly to his mother, the
Earls of Norfolk and Kent deserted to Mortimer, and powerful as it seemed
the league broke up without result. A feeling of insecurity however spurred
the Earl of March to a bold stroke at his opponents. The Earl of Kent, who
was persuaded that his brother, Edward the Second, still lived a prisoner
in Corfe Castle, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to restore him to
the throne, tried before a Parliament filled with Mortimer's adherents, and
sent to the block. But the death of a prince of the royal blood roused the
young king to resentment at the greed and arrogance of a minister who
treated Edward himself as little more than a state-prisoner. A few months
after his uncle's execution the king entered the Council chamber in
Nottingham Castle with a force which he had introduced through a secret
passage in the rock on which it stands, and arrested Mortimer with his own
hands. A Parliament which was at once summoned condemned the Earl of March
to a traitor's death, and in November 1330 he was beheaded at Tyburn, while
the queen-mother was sent for the rest of her life into confinement at
Castle Rising.
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Edward and France
Young as he was, and he had only reached his eighteenth year, Edward at
once assumed the control of affairs. His first care was to restore good
order throughout the country, which under the late government had fallen
into ruin, and to free his hands by a peace with France for further
enterprises in the North. A formal peace had been concluded by Isabella
after her husband's fall; but the death of Charles the Fourth soon brought
about new jealousies between the two courts. The three sons of Philip the
Fair had followed him on the throne in succession, but all had now died
without male issue, and Isabella, as Philip's daughter, claimed the crown
for her son. The claim in any case was a hard one to make out. Though her
brothers had left no sons, they had left daughters, and if female
succession were admitted these daughters of Philip's sons would precede a
son of Philip's daughter. Isabella met this difficulty by a contention that
though females could transmit the right of succession they could not
themselves possess it, and that her son, as the nearest living male
descendant of Philip the Fair, and born in the lifetime of the king from
whom he claimed, could claim in preference to females who were related to
Philip in as near a degree. But the bulk of French jurists asserted that
only male succession gave right to the French throne. On such a theory the
right inheritable from Philip the Fair was exhausted; and the crown passed
to the son of Philip's younger brother, Charles of Valois, who in fact
peacefully mounted the throne as Philip the Sixth. Purely formal as the
claim which Isabella advanced seems to have been, it revived the irritation
between the two courts, and though Edward's obedience to a summons which
Philip addressed to him to do homage for Aquitaine brought about an
agreement that both parties should restore the gains they had made since
the last treaty the agreement was never carried out. Fresh threats of war
ended in the conclusion of a new treaty of peace, but the question whether
liege or simple homage was due for the duchies remained unsettled when the
fall of Mortimer gave the young king full mastery of affairs. His action
was rapid and decisive. Clad as a merchant, and with but fifteen horsemen
at his back, Edward suddenly made his appearance in 1331 at the French
court and did homage as fully as Philip required. The question of the
Agénois remained unsettled, though the English Parliament insisted that its
decision should rest with negotiation and not with war, but on all other
points a complete peace was made; and the young king rode back with his
hands free for an attack which he was planning on the North.
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New Scotch War
The provisions of the Treaty of Northampton for the restitution of estates
had never been fully carried out. Till this was done the English court held
that the rights of feudal superiority over Scotland which it had yielded in
the treaty remained in force; and at this moment an opening seemed to
present itself for again asserting these rights with success. Fortune
seemed at last to have veered to the English side. The death of Robert
Bruce only a year after the Treaty of Northampton left the Scottish throne
to his son David, a child of but eight years old. The death of the king was
followed by the loss of Randolph and Douglas; and the internal difficulties
of the realm broke out in civil strife. To the great barons on either side
the border the late peace involved serious losses, for many of the Scotch
houses held large estates in England as many of the English lords held
large estates in Scotland, and although the treaty had provided for their
claims they had in each case been practically set aside. It is this
discontent of the barons at the new settlement which explains the sudden
success of Edward Balliol in a snatch which he made at the Scottish throne.
Balliol's design was known at the English court, where he had found shelter
for some years; and Edward, whether sincerely or no, forbade his barons
from joining him and posted troops on the border to hinder his crossing it.
But Balliol found little difficulty in making his attack by sea. He sailed
from England at the head of a body of nobles who claimed estates in the
North, landed in August 1332 on the shores of Fife, and after repulsing
with immense loss an army which attacked him near Perth was crowned at
Scone two months after his landing, while David Bruce fled helplessly to
France. Edward had given no open aid to this enterprise, but the crisis
tempted his ambition, and he demanded and obtained from Balliol an
acknowledgement of the English suzerainty. The acknowledgement however was
fatal to Balliol himself. Surprised at Annan by a party of Scottish nobles,
their sudden attack drove him in December over the border after a reign of
but five months; and Berwick, which he had agreed to surrender to Edward,
was strongly garrisoned against an English attack. The sudden breakdown of
his vassal-king left Edward face to face with a new Scotch war. The
Parliament which he summoned to advise on the enforcement of his claim
showed no wish to plunge again into the contest and met him only with
evasions and delays. But Edward had gone too far to withdraw. In March 1333
he appeared before Berwick, and besieged the town. A Scotch army under the
regent, Sir Archibald Douglas, brother to the famous Sir James, advanced to
its relief in July and attacked a covering force which was encamped on the
strong position of Halidon Hill. The English bowmen however vindicated the
fame they had first won at Falkirk and were soon to crown in the victory of
Crécy. The Scotch only struggled through the marsh which covered the
English front to be riddled with a storm of arrows and to break in utter
rout. The battle decided the fate of Berwick. From that time the town has
remained English territory. It was in fact the one part of Edward's
conquests which was preserved in the end by the English crown. But fragment
as it was, it was always viewed legally as representing the realm of which
it once formed a part. As Scotland, it had its chancellor, chamberlain, and
other officers of State: and the peculiar heading of Acts of Parliament
enacted for England "and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed" still preserves
the memory of its peculiar position. But the victory did more than give
Berwick to England. The defeat of Douglas was followed by the submission of
a large part of the Scotch nobles, by the flight of the boy-king David, and
by the return of Balliol unopposed to the throne. Edward exacted a heavy
price for his aid. All Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was ceded to
England, and Balliol did homage as vassal-king for the rest.
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Scotland freed
It was at the moment of this submission that the young king reached the
climax of his success. A king at fourteen, a father at seventeen, he had
carried out at eighteen a political revolution in the overthrow of
Mortimer, and restored at twenty-two the ruined work of his grandfather.
The northern frontier was carried to its old line under the Northumbrian
kings. His kingdom within was peaceful and orderly; and the strife with
France seemed at an end. During the next three years Edward persisted in
the line of policy he had adopted, retaining his hold over Southern
Scotland, aiding his sub-king Balliol in campaign after campaign against
the despairing efforts of the nobles who still adhered to the house of
Bruce, a party who were now headed by Robert the Steward of Scotland and by
Earl Randolph of Moray. His perseverance was all but crowned with success,
when Scotland was again saved by the intervention of France. The successes
of Edward roused anew the jealousy of the French court. David Bruce found a
refuge with Philip; French ships appeared off the Scotch coast and brought
aid to the patriot nobles; and the old legal questions about the Agénois
and Aquitaine were mooted afresh by the French council. For a time Edward
staved off the contest by repeated embassies; but his refusal to accept
Philip as a mediator between England and the Scots stirred France to
threats of war. In 1335 fleets gathered on its coast; descents were made on
the English shores; and troops and galleys were hired in Italy and the
north for an invasion of England. The mere threat of war saved Scotland.
Edward's forces there were drawn to the south to meet the looked-for attack
from across the Channel; and the patriot party freed from their pressure at
once drew together again. The actual declaration of war against France at
the close of 1337 was the knell of Balliol's greatness; he found himself
without an adherent and withdrew two years later to the court of Edward,
while David returned to his kingdom in 1342 and won back the chief
fastnesses of the Lowlands. From that moment the freedom of Scotland was
secured. From a war of conquest and patriotic resistance the struggle died
into a petty strife between two angry neighbours, which became a mere
episode in the larger contest which it had stirred between England and
France.
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The Hundred Years War
Whether in its national or in its European bearings it is difficult to
overestimate the importance of the contest which was now to open between
these two nations. To England it brought a social, a religious, and in the
end a political revolution. The Peasant Revolt, Lollardry, and the New
Monarchy were direct issues of the Hundred Years War. With it began the
military renown of England; with it opened her struggle for the mastery of
the seas. The pride begotten by great victories and a sudden revelation of
warlike prowess roused the country not only to a new ambition, a new
resolve to assert itself as a European power, but to a repudiation of the
claims of the Papacy and an assertion of the ecclesiastical independence
both of Church and Crown which paved the way for and gave its ultimate form
to the English Reformation. The peculiar shape which English warfare
assumed, the triumph of the yeoman and archer over noble and knight, gave
new force to the political advance of the Commons. On the other hand the
misery of the war produced the first great open feud between labour and
capital. The glory of Crécy or Poitiers was dearly bought by the upgrowth
of English pauperism. The warlike temper nursed on foreign fields begot at
home a new turbulence and scorn of law, woke a new feudal spirit in the
baronage, and sowed in the revolution which placed a new house on the
throne the seeds of that fatal strife over the succession which troubled
England to the days of Elizabeth. Nor was the contest of less import in the
history of France. If it struck her for the moment from her height of
pride, it raised her in the end to the front rank among the states of
Europe. It carried her boundaries to the Rhone and the Pyrenees. It wrecked
alike the feudal power of her noblesse and the hopes of constitutional
liberty which might have sprung from the emancipation of the peasant or the
action of the burgher. It founded a royal despotism which reached its
height in Richelieu and finally plunged France into the gulf of the
Revolution.
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The Imperial Alliance
Of these mighty issues little could be foreseen at the moment when Philip
and Edward declared war. But from the very first the war took European
dimensions. The young king saw clearly the greater strength of France. The
weakness of the Empire, the captivity of the Papacy at Avignon, left her
without a rival among European powers. The French chivalry was the envy of
the world, and its military fame had just been heightened by a victory over
the Flemish communes at Cassel. In numbers, in wealth, the French people
far surpassed their neighbours over the Channel. England can hardly have
counted more than four millions of inhabitants, France boasted of twenty.
The clinging of our kings to their foreign dominions is explained by the
fact that their subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have
equalled in number their subjects in England. There was the same
disproportion in the wealth of the two countries and, as men held then, in
their military resources. Edward could bring only eight thousand
men-at-arms to the field. Philip, while a third of his force was busy
elsewhere, could appear at the head of forty thousand. Of the revolution in
warfare which was to reverse this superiority, to make the footman rather
than the horseman the strength of an army, the world and even the English
king, in spite of Falkirk and Halidon, as yet recked little. Edward's whole
energy was bent on meeting the strength of France by a coalition of powers
against her, and his plans were helped by the dread which the great
feudatories of the empire who lay nearest to him, the Duke of Brabant, the
Counts of Hainault and Gelders, the Markgrave of Juliers, felt of French
annexation. They listened willingly enough to his offers. Sixty thousand
crowns purchased the alliance of Brabant. Lesser subsidies bought that of
the two counts and the Markgrave. The king's work was helped indeed by his
domestic relations. The Count of Hainault was Edward's father-in-law; he
was also the father-in-law of the Count of Gelders. But the marriage of a
third of the Count's daughters brought the English king a more important
ally. She was wedded to the Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, and the connexion
that thus existed between the English and Imperial Courts facilitated the
negotiations which ended in a formal alliance.
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Its Relation to the Papacy
But the league had a more solid ground. The Emperor, like Edward, had his
strife with France. His strife sprang from the new position of the Papacy.
The removal of the Popes to Avignon which followed on the quarrel of
Boniface the Eighth with Philip le Bel and the subjection to the French
court which resulted from it affected the whole state of European politics.
In the ever-recurring contest between the Papacy and the Empire France had
of old been the lieutenant of the Roman See. But with the settlement at
Avignon the relation changed, and the Pope became the lieutenant of France.
Instead of the Papacy using the French kings in its war of ideas against
the Empire the French kings used the Papacy as an instrument in their
political rivalry with the Emperors. But if the position of the Pope drew
Lewis to the side of England, it had much to do with drawing Edward to the
side of Lewis. It was this that made the alliance, fruitless as it proved
in a military sense, so memorable in its religious results. Hitherto
England had been mainly on the side of the Popes in their strife against
the Emperors. Now that the Pope had become a tool in the hands of a power
which was to be its great enemy, the country was driven to close alliances
with the Empire and to an evergrowing alienation from the Roman See. In
Scotch affairs the hostility of the Popes had been steady and vexatious
ever since Edward the First's time, and from the moment that this fresh
struggle commenced they again showed their French partizanship. When Lewis
made a last appeal for peace, Philip of Valois made Benedict XII. lay down
as a condition that the Emperor should form no alliance with an enemy of
France. The quarrel of both England and Germany with the Papacy at once
grew ripe. The German Diet met to declare that the Imperial power came from
God alone, and that the choice of an Emperor needed no Papal confirmation,
while Benedict replied by a formal excommunication of Lewis. England on the
other hand entered on a religious revolution when she stood hand in hand
with an excommunicated power. It was significant that though worship ceased
in Flanders on the Pope's interdict, the English priests who were brought
over set the interdict at nought.
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Failure of the Alliance
The negotiation of this alliance occupied the whole of 1337; it ended in a
promise of the Emperor on payment of 3000 gold florins to furnish two
thousand men-at-arms. In the opening of 1338 an attack of Philip on the
Agénois forced Edward into open war. His profuse expenditure however
brought little fruit. Though Edward crossed to Antwerp in the summer, the
year was spent in negotiations with the princes of the Lower Rhine and in
an interview with the Emperor at Coblentz, where Lewis appointed him
Vicar-General of the Emperor for all territories on the left bank of the
Rhine. The occupation of Cambray, an Imperial fief, by the French king gave
a formal ground for calling the princes of this district to Edward's
standard. But already the great alliance showed signs of yielding. Edward,
uneasy at his connexion with an Emperor under the ban of the Church and
harassed by vehement remonstrances from the Pope, entered again into
negotiations with France in the winter of 1338; and Lewis, alarmed in his
turn, listened to fresh overtures from Benedict, who held out vague hopes
of reconciliation while he threatened a renewed excommunication if Lewis
persisted in invading France. The non-arrival of the English subsidy
decided the Emperor to take no personal part in the war, and the attitude
of Lewis told on the temper of Edward's German allies. Though all joined
him in the summer of 1339 on his formal summons of them as Vicar-General of
the Empire, and his army when it appeared before Cambray numbered forty
thousand men, their ardour cooled as the town held out. Philip approached
it from the south, and on Edward's announcing his resolve to cross the
river and attack him he was at once deserted by the two border princes who
had most to lose from a contest with France, the Counts of Hainault and
Namur. But the king was still full of hope. He pushed forward to the
country round St. Quentin between the head waters of the Somme and the Oise
with the purpose of forcing a decisive engagement. But he found Philip
strongly encamped, and declaring their supplies exhausted his allies at
once called for a retreat. It was in vain that Edward moved slowly for a
week along the French border. Philip's position was too strongly guarded by
marshes and entrenchments to be attacked, and at last the allies would stay
no longer. At the news that the French king had withdrawn to the south the
whole army in turn fell back upon Brussels.
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England and the Papacy
The failure of the campaign dispelled the hopes which Edward had drawn from
his alliance with the Empire. With the exhaustion of his subsidies the
princes of the Low Countries became inactive. The Duke of Brabant became
cooler in his friendship. The Emperor himself, still looking to an
accommodation with the Pope and justly jealous of Edward's own intrigues at
Avignon, wavered and at last fell away. But though the alliance ended in
disappointment it had given a new impulse to the grudge against the Papacy
which began with its extortions in the reign of Henry the Third. The hold
of Rome on the loyalty of England was sensibly weakening. Their transfer
from the Eternal City to Avignon robbed the Popes of half the awe which
they had inspired among Englishmen. Not only did it bring them nearer and
more into the light of common day, but it dwarfed them into mere agents of
French policy. The old bitterness at their exactions was revived by the
greed to which they were driven through their costly efforts to impose a
French and Papal Emperor on Germany as well as to secure themselves in
their new capital on the Rhone. The mighty building, half fortress, half
palace, which still awes the traveller at Avignon has played its part in
our history. Its erection was to the rise of Lollardry what the erection of
St. Peter's was to the rise of Lutheranism. Its massive walls, its stately
chapel, its chambers glowing with the frescoes of Simone Memmi, the garden
which covered its roof with a strange verdure, called year by year for
fresh supplies of gold; and for this as for the wider and costlier schemes
of Papal policy gold could be got only by pressing harder and harder on the
national churches the worst claims of the Papal court, by demands of
first-fruits and annates from rectory and bishoprick, by pretensions to the
right of bestowing all benefices which were in ecclesiastical patronage and
by the sale of these presentations, by the direct taxation of the clergy,
by the intrusion of foreign priests into English livings, by opening a mart
for the disposal of pardons, dispensations, and indulgences, and by
encouraging appeals from every ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the Papal
court. No grievance was more bitterly felt than this grievance of appeals.
Cases of the most trifling importance were called for decision out of the
realm to a tribunal whose delays were proverbial and whose fees were
enormous. The envoy of an Oxford College which sought only a formal licence
to turn a vicarage into a rectory had not only to bear the expense and toil
of a journey which then occupied some eighteen days but was kept dangling
at Avignon for three-and-twenty weeks. Humiliating and vexatious however as
these appeals were, they were but one among the means of extortion which
the Papal court multiplied as its needs grew greater. The protest of a
later Parliament, exaggerated as its statements no doubt are, shows the
extent of the national irritation, if not of the grievances which produced
it. It asserted that the taxes levied by the Pope amounted to five times
the amount of those levied by the king; that by reservations during the
life of actual holders the Pope disposed of the same bishoprick four or
five times over, receiving each time the first-fruits. "The brokers of the
sinful city of Rome promote for money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to
benefices to the value of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned
hardly obtain one of twenty. So decays sound learning. They present aliens
who neither see nor care to see their parishioners, despise God's services,
convey away the treasure of the realm, and are worse than Jews or Saracens.
The Pope's revenue from England alone is larger than that of any prince in
Christendom. God gave his sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and
shorn." At the close of this reign indeed the deaneries of Lichfield,
Salisbury, and York, the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which was reputed the
wealthiest English benefice, together with a host of prebends and
preferments, were held by Italian cardinals and priests, while the Pope's
collector from his office in London sent twenty thousand marks a year to
the Papal treasury.
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Protest of the Parliament
But the greed of the Popes was no new grievance, though the increase of
these exactions since the removal to Avignon gave it a new force. What
alienated England most was their connexion with and dependence on France.
From the first outset of the troubles in the North their attitude had been
one of hostility to the English projects. France was too useful a supporter
of the Papal court to find much difficulty in inducing it to aid in
hampering the growth of English greatness. Boniface the Eighth released
Balliol from his oath of fealty, and forbade Edward to attack Scotland on
the ground that it was a fief of the Roman See. His intervention was met by
a solemn and emphatic protest from the English Parliament; but it none the
less formed a terrible obstacle in Edward's way. The obstacle was at last
removed by the quarrel of Boniface with Philip the Fair; but the end of
this quarrel only threw the Papacy more completely into the hands of
France. Though Avignon remained imperial soil, the removal of the Popes to
this city on the verge of their dominions made them mere tools of the
French kings. Much no doubt of the endless negotiation which the Papal
court carried on with Edward the Third in his strife with Philip of Valois
was an honest struggle for peace. But to England it seemed the mere
interference of a dependant on behalf of "our enemy of France." The people
scorned a "French Pope," and threatened Papal legates with stoning when
they landed on English shores. The alliance of Edward with an
excommunicated Emperor, the bold defiance with which English priests said
mass in Flanders when an interdict reduced the Flemish priests to silence,
were significant tokens of the new attitude which England was taking up in
the face of Popes who were leagued with its enemy. The old quarrel over
ecclesiastical wrongs was renewed in a formal and decisive way. In 1343 the
Commons petitioned for the redress of the grievance of Papal appointments
to vacant livings in despite of the rights of patrons or the Crown; and
Edward formally complained to the Pope of his appointing "foreigners, most
of them suspicious persons, who do not reside on their benefices, who do
not know the faces of the flocks entrusted to them, who do not understand
their language, but, neglecting the cure of souls, seek as hirelings only
their worldly hire." In yet sharper words the king rebuked the Papal greed.
"The successor of the Apostles was set over the Lord's sheep to feed and
not to shear them." The Parliament declared "that they neither could nor
would tolerate such things any longer"; and the general irritation moved
slowly towards those statutes of Provisors and Praemunire which heralded
the policy of Henry the Eighth.
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Flanders
But for the moment the strife with the Papacy was set aside in the efforts
which were needed for a new struggle with France. The campaign of 1339 had
not only ended in failure, it had dispelled the trust of Edward in an
Imperial alliance. But as this hope faded away a fresh hope dawned on the
king from another quarter. Flanders, still bleeding from the defeat of its
burghers by the French knighthood, was his natural ally. England was the
great wool-producing country of the west, but few woollen fabrics were
woven in England. The number of weavers' gilds shows that the trade was
gradually extending, and at the very outset of his reign Edward had taken
steps for its encouragement. He invited Flemish weavers to settle in his
country, and took the new immigrants, who chose the eastern counties for
the seat of their trade, under his royal protection. But English
manufactures were still in their infancy and nine-tenths of the English
wool went to the looms of Bruges or of Ghent. We may see the rapid growth
of this export trade in the fact that the king received in a single year
more than £30,000 from duties levied on wool alone. The woolsack which
forms the Chancellor's seat in the House of Lords is said to witness to the
importance which the government attached to this new source of wealth. A
stoppage of this export threw half the population of the great Flemish
towns out of work, and the irritation caused in Flanders by the
interruption which this trade sustained through the piracies that Philip's
ships were carrying on in the Channel showed how effective the threat of
such a stoppage would be in securing their alliance. Nor was this the only
ground for hoping for aid from the Flemish towns. Their democratic spirit
jostled roughly with the feudalism of France. If their counts clung to the
French monarchy, the towns themselves, proud of their immense population,
their thriving industry, their vast wealth, drew more and more to
independence. Jacques van Arteveldt, a great brewer of Ghent, wielded the
chief influence in their councils, and his aim was to build up a
confederacy which might hold France in check along her northern border.
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The Flemish Alliance
His plans had as yet brought no help from the Flemish towns, but at the
close of 1339 they set aside their neutrality for open aid. The great plan
of Federation which Van Arteveldt had been devising as a check on the
aggression of France was carried out in a treaty concluded between Edward,
the Duke of Brabant, the cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Louvain, Ghent,
Bruges, Ypres, and seven others. By this remarkable treaty it was provided
that war should be begun and ended only by mutual consent, free commerce be
encouraged between Flanders and Brabant, and no change made in their
commercial arrangements save with the consent of the whole league. By a
subsequent treaty the Flemish towns owned Edward as King of France, and
declared war against Philip of Valois. But their voice was decisive on the
course of the campaign which opened in 1340. As Philip held the Upper
Scheldt by the occupation of Cambray, so he held the Lower Scheldt by that
of Tournay, a fortress which broke the line of commerce between Flanders
and Brabant. It was a condition of the Flemish alliance therefore that the
war should open with the capture of Tournay. It was only at the cost of a
fight however that Edward could now cross the Channel to undertake the
siege. France was as superior in force at sea as on land; and a fleet of
two hundred vessels gathered at Sluys to intercept him. But the fine
seamanship of the English sailors justified the courage of their king in
attacking this fleet with far smaller forces; the French ships were utterly
destroyed and twenty thousand Frenchmen slain in the encounter. It was with
the lustre of this great victory about him that Edward marched upon
Tournay. Its siege however proved as fruitless as that of Cambray in the
preceding year, and after two months of investment his vast army of one
hundred thousand men broke up without either capturing the town or bringing
Philip when he approached it to an engagement. Want of money forced Edward
to a truce for a year, and he returned beggared and embittered to England.
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Edward's distress
He had been worsted in war as in diplomacy. One naval victory alone
redeemed years of failure and expense. Guienne was all but lost, England
was suffering from the terrible taxation, from the ruin of commerce, from
the ravages of her coast. Five years of constant reverses were hard blows
for a king of twenty-eight who had been glorious and successful at
twenty-three. His financial difficulties indeed were enormous. It was in
vain that, availing himself of an Act which forbade the exportation of wool
"till by the King and his Council it is otherwise provided," he turned for
the time the wool-trade into a royal monopoly and became the sole wool
exporter, buying at £3 and selling at £20 the sack. The campaign of 1339
brought with it a crushing debt: that of 1340 proved yet more costly.
Edward attributed his failure to the slackness of his ministers in sending
money and supplies, and this to their silent opposition to the war. But
wroth as he was on his return, a short struggle between the ministers and
the king ended in a reconciliation, and preparations for renewed
hostilities went on. Abroad indeed nothing could be done. The Emperor
finally withdrew from Edward's friendship. A new Pope, Clement the Sixth,
proved even more French in sentiment than his predecessor. Flanders alone
held true of all England's foreign allies. Edward was powerless to attack
Philip in the realm he claimed for his own; what strength he could gather
was needed to prevent the utter ruin of the English cause in Scotland on
the return of David Bruce. Edward's soldiers had been driven from the open
country and confined to the fortresses of the Lowlands. Even these were at
last reft away. Perth was taken by siege, and the king was too late to
prevent the surrender of Stirling. Edinburgh was captured by a stratagem.
Only Roxburgh and Berwick were saved by a truce which Edward was driven to
conclude with the Scots.
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Progress of Parliament
But with the difficulties of the Crown the weight of the two Houses made
itself more and more sensibly felt. The almost incessant warfare which had
gone on since the accession of Edward the Third consolidated and developed
the power which they had gained from the dissensions of his father's reign.
The need of continual grants brought about an assembly of Parliament year
by year, and the subsidies that were accorded to the king showed the
potency of the financial engine which the Crown could now bring into play.
In a single year the Parliament granted twenty thousand sacks, or half the
wool of the realm. Two years later the Commons voted an aid of thirty
thousand sacks. In 1339 the barons granted the tenth sheep and fleece and
lamb. The clergy granted two tenths in one year, and a tenth for three
years in the next. But with each supply some step was made to greater
political influence. In his earlier years Edward showed no jealousy of the
Parliament. His policy was to make the struggle with France a national one
by winning for it the sympathy of the people at large; and with this view
he not only published in the County Courts the efforts he had made for
peace, but appealed again and again for the sanction and advice of
Parliament in his enterprise. In 1331 he asked the Estates whether they
would prefer negotiation or war: in 1338 he declared that his expedition to
Flanders was made by the assent of the Lords and at the prayer of the
Commons. The part of the last in public affairs grew greater in spite of
their own efforts to remain obscure. From the opening of the reign a crowd
of enactments for the regulation of trade, whether wise or unwise, shows
the influence of the burgesses. But the final division of Parliament into
two Houses, a change which was completed by 1341, necessarily increased the
weight of the Commons. The humble trader who shrank from counselling the
Crown in great matters of policy gathered courage as he found himself
sitting side by side with the knights of the shire. It was at the moment
when this great change was being brought about that the disasters of the
war spurred the Parliament to greater activity. The enormous grants of 1340
were bought by the king's assent to statutes which provided remedies for
grievances of which the Commons complained. The most important of these put
an end to the attempts which Edward had made like his grandfather to deal
with the merchant class apart from the Houses. No charge or aid was
henceforth to be made save by the common assent of the Estates assembled in
Parliament. The progress of the next year was yet more important. The
strife of the king with his ministers, the foremost of whom was Archbishop
Stratford, ended in the Primate's refusal to make answer to the royal
charges save in full Parliament, and in the assent of the king to a
resolution of the Lords that none of their number, whether ministers of the
Crown or no, should be brought to trial elsewhere than before his peers.
The Commons demanded and obtained the appointment of commissioners elected
in Parliament to audit the grants already made. Finally it was enacted that
at each Parliament the ministers should hold themselves accountable for all
grievances; that on any vacancy the king should take counsel with his lords
as to the choice of the new minister; and that, when chosen, each minister
should be sworn in Parliament.
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Close of the truce
At the moment which we have reached therefore the position of the
Parliament had become far more important than at Edward's accession. Its
form was settled. The third estate had gained a fuller parliamentary power.
The principle of ministerial responsibility to the Houses had been
established by formal statute. But the jealousy of Edward was at last
completely roused, and from this moment he looked on the new power as a
rival to his own. The Parliament of 1341 had no sooner broken up than he
revoked by Letters Patent the statutes it had passed as done in prejudice
of his prerogative and only assented to for the time to prevent worse
confusion. The regular assembly of the estates was suddenly interrupted,
and two years passed without a Parliament. It was only the continual
presence of war which from this time drove Edward to summon the Houses at
all. Though the truce still held good between England and France a quarrel
of succession to the Duchy of Britanny which broke out in 1341 and called
Philip to the support of one claimant, his cousin Charles of Blois, and
Edward to the support of a rival claimant, John of Montfort, dragged on
year after year. In Flanders things went ill for the English cause. The
dissensions between the great and the smaller towns, and in the greater
towns themselves between the weavers and fullers, dissensions which had
taxed the genius of Van Arteveldt through the nine years of his wonderful
rule, broke out in 1345 into a revolt at Ghent in which the great statesman
was slain. With him fell a design for the deposition of the Count of
Flanders and the reception of the Prince of Wales in his stead which he was
ardently pressing, and whose political results might have been immense.
Deputies were at once sent to England to excuse Van Arteveldt's murder and
to promise loyalty to Edward; but the king's difficulties had now reached
their height. His loans from the Florentine bankers amounted to half a
million. His claim on the French crown found not a single adherent save
among the burghers of the Flemish towns. The overtures which he made for
peace were contemptuously rejected, and the expiration of the truce in 1345
found him again face to face with France.
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Edward marches on Paris
But it was perhaps this breakdown of all foreign hope that contributed to
Edward's success in the fresh outbreak of war. The war opened in Guienne,
and Henry of Lancaster, who was now known as the Earl of Derby, and who
with the Hainaulter Sir Walter Maunay took the command in that quarter, at
once showed the abilities of a great general. The course of the Garonne was
cleared by his capture of La Réole and Aiguillon, that of the Dordogne by
the reduction of Bergerac, and a way opened for the reconquest of Poitou by
the capture of Angoulême. These unexpected successes roused Philip to
strenuous efforts, and a hundred thousand men gathered under his son, John,
Duke of Normandy, for the subjugation of the South. Angoulême was won back,
and Aiguillon besieged when Edward sailed to the aid of his hard-pressed
lieutenant. It was with an army of thirty thousand men, half English, half
Irish and Welsh, that he commenced a march which was to change the whole
face of the war. His aim was simple. Flanders was still true to Edward's
cause, and while Derby was pressing on in the south a Flemish army besieged
Bouvines and threatened France from the north. The king had at first
proposed to land in Guienne and relieve the forces in the south; but
suddenly changing his design he disembarked at La Hogue and advanced
through Normandy. By this skilful movement Edward not only relieved Derby
but threatened Paris, and left himself able to co-operate with either his
own army in the south or the Flemings in the north. Normandy was totally
without defence, and after the sack of Caen, which was then one of the
wealthiest towns in France, Edward marched upon the Seine. His march
threatened Rouen and Paris, and its strategical value was seen by the
sudden panic of the French king. Philip was wholly taken by surprise. He
attempted to arrest Edward's march by an offer to restore the Duchy of
Aquitaine as Edward the Second had held it, but the offer was fruitless.
Philip was forced to call his son to the rescue. John at once raised the
siege of Aiguillon, and the French army moved rapidly to the north, its
withdrawal enabling Derby to capture Poitiers and make himself thorough
master of the south. But John was too distant from Paris for his forces to
avail Philip in his emergency, for Edward, finding the bridges on the Lower
Seine broken, pushed straight on Paris, rebuilt the bridge of Poissy, and
threatened the capital.
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Crécy
At this crisis however France found an unexpected help in a body of German
knights. The long strife between Lewis of Bavaria and the Papacy had ended
at last in Clement's carrying out his sentence of deposition by the
nomination and coronation as emperor of Charles of Luxemburg, a son of King
John of Bohemia, the well-known Charles IV. of the Golden Bull. But against
this Papal assumption of a right to bestow the German Crown Germany rose as
one man. Not a town opened its gates to the Papal claimant, and driven to
seek help and refuge from Philip of Valois he found himself at this moment
on the eastern frontier of France with his father and 500 knights. Hurrying
to Paris this German force formed the nucleus of an army which assembled at
St. Denys; and which was soon reinforced by 15,000 Genoese cross-bowmen who
had been hired from among the soldiers of the Lord of Monaco on the sunny
Riviera and arrived at this hour of need. With this host rapidly gathering
in his front Edward abandoned his march on Paris, which had already served
its purpose in relieving Derby, and threw himself across the Seine to carry
out the second part of his programme by a junction with the Flemings at
Gravelines and a campaign in the north. But the rivers in his path were
carefully guarded, and it was only by surprising the ford of Blanche-Taque
on the Somme that the king escaped the necessity of surrendering to the
vast host which was now hastening in pursuit. His communications however
were no sooner secured than he halted on the twenty-sixth of August at the
little village of Crécy in Ponthieu and resolved to give battle. Half of
his army, which had been greatly reduced in strength by his rapid marches,
consisted of light-armed footmen from Ireland and Wales; the bulk of the
remainder was composed of English bowmen. The king ordered his men-at-arms
to dismount, and drew up his forces on a low rise sloping gently to the
south-east, with a deep ditch covering its front, and its flanks protected
by woods and a little brook. From a windmill on the summit of this rise
Edward could overlook the whole field of battle. Immediately beneath him
lay his reserve, while at the base of the slope was placed the main body of
the army in two divisions, that to the right commanded by the young Prince
of Wales, Edward "the Black Prince," as he was called, that to the left by
the Earl of Northampton. A small ditch protected the English front, and
behind it the bowmen were drawn up "in the form of a harrow" with small
bombards between them "which with fire threw little iron balls to frighten
the horses," the first instance known of the use of artillery in
field-warfare.
The halt of the English army took Philip by surprise, and he attempted for
a time to check the advance of his army. But the attempt was fruitless and
the disorderly host rolled on to the English front. The sight of his
enemies indeed stirred Philip's own blood to fury, "for he hated them." The
fight began at vespers. The Genoese cross-bowmen were ordered to open the
attack, but the men were weary with their march, a sudden storm wetted and
rendered useless their bowstrings, and the loud shouts with which they
leapt forward to the encounter were met with dogged silence in the English
ranks. Their first arrow-flight however brought a terrible reply. So rapid
was the English shot "that it seemed as if it snowed." "Kill me these
scoundrels," shouted Philip, as the Genoese fell back; and his men-at-arms
plunged butchering into their broken ranks while the Counts of Aleniçon and
Flanders at the head of the French knighthood fell hotly on the Prince's
line. For an instant his small force seemed lost, and he called his father
to support him. But Edward refused to send him aid. "Is he dead, or
unhorsed, or so wounded that he cannot help himself?" he asked the envoy.
"No, sir," was the reply, "but he is in a hard passage of arms, and sorely
needs your help." "Return to those that sent you," said the king, "and bid
them not send to me again so long as my son lives! Let the boy win his
spurs, for, if God so order it, I will that the day may be his and that the
honour may be with him and them to whom I have given it in charge." Edward
could see in fact from his higher ground that all went well. The English
bowmen and men-at-arms held their ground stoutly while the Welshmen stabbed
the French horses in the melly and brought knight after knight to the
ground. Soon the French host was wavering in a fatal confusion. "You are my
vassals, my friends," cried the blind John of Bohemia to the German nobles
around him, "I pray and beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that I
may strike one good blow with this sword of mine!" Linking their bridles
together, the little company plunged into the thick of the combat to fall
as their fellows were falling. The battle went steadily against the French.
At last Philip himself hurried from the field, and the defeat became a
rout. Twelve hundred knights and thirty thousand foot-men--a number equal
to the whole English force--lay dead upon the ground.
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The Yeoman
"God has punished us for our sins," cries the chronicler of St. Denys in a
passion of bewildered grief as he tells the rout of the great host which he
had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls. But the fall of France was
hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at a single blow of a
system of warfare, and with it of the political and social fabric which had
risen out of that system. Feudalism rested on the superiority of the
horseman to the footman, of the mounted noble to the unmounted churl. The
real fighting power of a feudal army lay in its knighthood, in the baronage
and landowners who took the field, each with his group of esquires and
mounted men-at-arms. A host of footmen followed them, but they were ill
armed, ill disciplined, and seldom called on to play any decisive part on
the actual battle-field. In France, and especially at the moment we have
reached, the contrast between the efficiency of these two elements of
warfare was more striking than elsewhere. Nowhere was the chivalry so
splendid, nowhere was the general misery and oppression of the poor more
terribly expressed in the worthlessness of the mob of footmen who were
driven by their lords to the camp. In England, on the other hand, the
failure of feudalism to win a complete hold on the country was seen in the
persistence of the older national institutions which based its defence on
the general levy of its freemen. If the foreign kings added to this a
system of warlike organization grounded on the service due from its
military tenants to the Crown, they were far from regarding this as
superseding the national "fyrd." The Assize of Arms, the Statute of
Winchester, show with what care the fyrd was held in a state of efficiency.
Its force indeed as an engine of war was fast rising between the age of
Henry the Second and that of Edward the Third. The social changes on which
we have already dwelt, the facilities given to alienation and the
subdivision of lands, the transition of the serf into a copyholder and of
the copyholder by redemption of his services into a freeholder, the rise of
a new class of "farmers" as the lords ceased to till their demesne by means
of bailiffs and adopted the practice of leasing it at a rent or "farm" to
one of the customary tenants, the general increase of wealth which was
telling on the social position even of those who still remained in
villenage, undid more and more the earlier process which had degraded the
free ceorl of the English Conquest into the villein of the Norman Conquest,
and covered the land with a population of yeomen, some freeholders, some
with services that every day became less weighty and already left them
virtually free.
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The Bow
Such men, proud of their right to justice and an equal law, called by
attendance in the county court to a share in the judicial, the financial,
and the political life of the realm, were of a temper to make soldiers of a
different sort from the wretched serfs who followed the feudal lords of the
Continent; and they were equipped with a weapon which as they wielded it
was enough of itself to make a revolution in the art of war. The bow,
identified as it became with English warfare, was the weapon not of
Englishmen but of their Norman conquerors. It was the Norman arrow-flight
that decided the day of Senlac. But in the organization of the national
army it had been assigned as the weapon of the poorer freeholders who were
liable to serve at the king's summons; and we see how closely it had become
associated with them in the picture of Chaucer's yeoman. "In his hand he
bore a mighty bow." Its might lay not only in the range of the heavy
war-shaft, a range we are told of four hundred yards, but in its force. The
English archer, taught from very childhood "how to draw, how to lay his
body to the bow," his skill quickened by incessant practice and constant
rivalry with his fellows, raised the bow into a terrible engine of war.
Thrown out along the front in a loose order that alone showed their vigour
and self-dependence, the bowmen faced and riddled the splendid line of
knighthood as it charged upon them. The galled horses "reeled right
rudely." Their riders found even the steel of Milan a poor defence against
the grey-goose shaft. Gradually the bow dictated the very tactics of an
English battle. If the mass of cavalry still plunged forward, the screen of
archers broke to right and left and the men-at-arms who lay in reserve
behind them made short work of the broken and disordered horsemen, while
the light troops from Wales and Ireland flinging themselves into the melly
with their long knives and darts brought steed after steed to the ground.
It was this new military engine that Edward the Third carried to the fields
of France. His armies were practically bodies of hired soldiery, for the
short period of feudal service was insufficient for foreign campaigns, and
yeoman and baron were alike drawn by a high rate of pay. An archer's daily
wages equalled some five shillings of our present money. Such payment when
coupled with the hope of plunder was enough to draw yeomen from thorpe and
farm; and though the royal treasury was drained as it had never been
drained before the English king saw himself after the day of Crécy the
master of a force without rival in the stress of war.
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Siege of Calais
To England her success was the beginning of a career of military glory,
which fatal as it was destined to prove to the higher sentiments and
interests of the nation gave it a warlike energy such as it had never known
before. Victory followed victory. A few months after Crécy a Scotch army
marched over the border and faced on the seventeenth of October an English
force at Neville's Cross. But it was soon broken by the arrow-flight of the
English archers, and the Scotch king David Bruce was taken prisoner. The
withdrawal of the French from the Garonne enabled Henry of Derby to recover
Poitou. Edward meanwhile with a decision which marks his military capacity
marched from the field of Crécy to form the siege of Calais. No measure
could have been more popular with the English merchant class, for Calais
was a great pirate-haven and in a single year twenty-two privateers from
its port had swept the Channel. But Edward was guided by weightier
considerations than this. In spite of his victory at Sluys the superiority
of France at sea had been a constant embarrassment. From this difficulty
the capture of Calais would do much to deliver him, for Dover and Calais
together bridled the Channel. Nor was this all. Not only would the
possession of the town give Edward a base of operations against France, but
it afforded an easy means of communication with the only sure allies of
England, the towns of Flanders. Flanders seemed at this moment to be
wavering. Its Count had fallen at Crécy, but his son Lewis le Mâle, though
his sympathies were as French as his father's, was received in November by
his subjects with the invariable loyalty which they showed to their rulers;
and his own efforts to detach them from England were seconded by the
influence of the Duke of Brabant. But with Edward close at hand beneath the
walls of Calais the Flemish towns stood true. They prayed the young Count
to marry Edward's daughter, imprisoned him on his refusal, and on his
escape to the French Court in the spring of 1347 they threw themselves
heartily into the English cause. A hundred thousand Flemings advanced to
Cassel and ravaged the French frontier.
The danger of Calais roused Philip from the panic which had followed his
defeat, and with a vast army he advanced to the north. But Edward's lines
were impregnable. The French king failed in another attempt to dislodge the
Flemings, and was at last driven to retreat without a blow. Hopeless of
further succour, the town after a year's siege was starved into surrender
in August 1347. Mercy was granted to the garrison and the people on
condition that six of the citizens gave themselves into the English king's
hands. "On them," said Edward with a burst of bitter hatred, "I will do my
will." At the sound of the town bell, Jehan le Bel tells us, the folk of
Calais gathered round the bearer of these terms, "desiring to hear their
good news, for they were all mad with hunger. When the said knight told
them his news, then began they to weep and cry so loudly that it was great
pity. Then stood up the wealthiest burgess of the town, Master Eustache de
St. Pierre by name, and spake thus before all: 'My masters, great grief and
mishap it were for all to leave such a people as this is to die by famine
or otherwise; and great charity and grace would he win from our Lord who
could defend them from dying. For me, I have great hope in the Lord that if
I can save this people by my death I shall have pardon for my faults,
wherefore will I be the first of the six, and of my own will put myself
barefoot in my shirt and with a halter round my neck in the mercy of King
Edward.'" The list of devoted men was soon made up, and the victims were
led before the king. "All the host assembled together; there was great
press, and many bade hang them openly, and many wept for pity. The noble
King came with his train of counts and barons to the place, and the Queen
followed him, though great with child, to see what there would be. The six
citizens knelt down at once before the King, and Master Eustache spake
thus:--'Gentle King, here we be six who have been of the old bourgeoisie of
Calais and great merchants; we bring you the keys of the town and castle of
Calais, and render them to you at your pleasure. We set ourselves in such
wise as you see purely at your will, to save the remnant of the people that
has suffered much pain. So may you have pity and mercy on us for your high
nobleness' sake.' Certes there was then in that place neither lord nor
knight that wept not for pity, nor who could speak for pity; but the King
had his heart so hardened by wrath that for a long while he could not
reply; than he commanded to cut off their heads. All the knights and lords
prayed him with tears, as much as they could, to have pity on them, but he
would not hear. Then spoke the gentle knight, Master Walter de Maunay, and
said, 'Ha, gentle sire! bridle your wrath; you have the renown and good
fame of all gentleness; do not a thing whereby men can speak any villany of
you! If you have no pity, all men will say that you have a heart full of
all cruelty to put these good citizens to death that of their own will are
come to render themselves to you to save the remnant of the people.' At
this point the King changed countenance with wrath, and said 'Hold your
peace, Master Walter! it shall be none otherwise. Call the headsman. They
of Calais have made so many of my men die, that they must die themselves!'
Then did the noble Queen of England a deed of noble lowliness, seeing she
was great with child, and wept so tenderly for pity that she could no
longer stand upright; therefore she cast herself on her knees before her
lord the King and spake on this wise: 'Ah, gentle sire, from the day that I
passed over sea in great peril, as you know, I have asked for nothing: now
pray I and beseech you, with folded hands, for the love of our Lady's Son
to have mercy upon them.' The gentle King waited a while before speaking,
and looked on the Queen as she knelt before him bitterly weeping. Then
began his heart to soften a little, and he said, 'Lady, I would rather you
had been otherwhere; you pray so tenderly that I dare not refuse you; and
though I do it against my will, nevertheless take them, I give them to
you.' Then took he the six citizens by the halters and delivered them to
the Queen, and released from death all those of Calais for the love of her;
and the good lady bade them clothe the six burgesses and make them good
cheer."
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