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The History of England from the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377)
The Early Campaigns Of The Hundred Years' War
by Tout, T.F. (M.A.)
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In the late summer of 1339 Edward III. was at last able to take the
offensive against France. During the negotiations England strained
every effort to provide her absent sovereign with men and money, but
neither the troops nor the supplies were adequate. The army which
assembled in September in the neighbourhood of Brussels consisted
largely of imperial vassals, hired by the English King, and clamorous
for the regular payment of their wages. Already Edward told his
ministers that, had not "a good friend in Flanders" advanced him a
large sum, he would have been obliged to return with shame to England.
As it was, enough was raised to set the unwieldy host in motion, and on
September 20 he marched from Valenciennes, and thence advanced into the
bishopric of Cambrai, whose lord, though an imperial vassal, had
declared for France and the papacy.
The rolling uplands of the Cambrésis were devastated with fire and
sword. One night an English baron took the Cardinal Bertrand, who with
his comrade Peter still accompanied Edward's host, to the summit of a
high tower, whence they could witness the flaming homesteads and
villages of the fertile and populous district. In that woeful spectacle
the churchman saw the futility of his last two years of constant
labour, and fell in a swoon to the ground. But the confederates could
do little more than devastate the open country. Cambrai itself was
besieged to no purpose, and Edward pressed on to the invasion of
France. On October g he spent his first night on French soil at the
abbey of Mont Saint-Martin. He learnt how slender was the tie which
bound his foreign allies to him, for his brother-in-law, William of
Hainault, refused to serve, except on imperial soil, against his uncle
Philip VI. Consoled for this defection by the arrival of the sluggish
Duke of Brabant and of the Elector of Brandenburg, the eldest son of
the emperor, Edward marched through the Vermandois, the Soissonais, and
the Laonnais, burning and devastating, without meeting any serious
resistance. Philip of Valois timidly held aloof in the neighbourhood of
Péronne.
By the middle of October, when Edward was near St. Quentin on the Oise,
the Duke of Brabant suggested the expediency of seeking out winter
quarters. The slow-moving host was almost in mutiny, when the master
crossbowman of the King of France brought a challenge from his lord.
"Let the King of England," ran the message, "seek out a field
favourable for a pitched battle, where there is neither wood, nor
marsh, nor river." Edward cheerfully accepted a day for the combat, and
chose his ground higher up the Oise valley, among the green meadowlands
and hedgerows of the Thiérache. The appointed day passed by, and the
French came not. At last, when Edward almost despaired of a meeting, he
was told that the French were arrayed at Buironfosse, on the plateau
between the Oise and the upper Sambre, and that Philip was ready to
fight the next day, Saturday, October 23. Edward once more chose a
suitable field of action in a plain between La Flamangrie and
Buironfosse, a league and a half from the French. "On the Saturday,"
wrote Edward to his son in England, "we were in the field, a full
quarter of an hour before dawn, and took up our position in a fitting
place to fight. In the early morning some of the enemy's scouts were
taken, and they told us that his advanced guard was in battle array and
coming out towards us. The news having come to our host, our allies,
though they had hitherto borne themselves somewhat sluggishly, were in
truth of such loyal intent that never were folk of such goodwill to
fight. In the meantime one of our scouts, a knight of Germany, was
taken, and he showed all our array to the enemy. Thereupon the foe
withdrew his van, gave orders to encamp, made trenches around him, and
cut down large trees in order to prevent us from approaching him. We
tarried all day on foot in order of battle, until towards evening it
seemed to our allies that we had waited long enough. And at vespers we
mounted our horses and went near to Avesnes, and made him to know that
we would await him there all the Sunday. On the Monday morning we had
news that the lord Philip had withdrawn. And so would our allies no
longer afterwards abide."
Thus ended the inglorious campaign of the Thiérache. Edward returned to
Brussels "like a fox to his hole," and each side denounced the other
for failing to keep the appointed tryst. The chivalry of the fourteenth
century saw something ignoble in the sluggishness of Philip; but no
modern soldier would blame him for his inactivity. Without striking a
blow, he obtained the object of his campaign, for the enemy abandoned
French territory. Had Edward been fully confident of victory, he could
easily have forced a battle by advancing on Buironfosse; but he
preferred to run the risk of a fiasco rather than abandon the defensive
tactics on which he relied. Thus, even from the chivalrous point of
view, he was by no means blameless. From the material standpoint, his
first French campaign was a failure. It left its only mark on the
devastated countryside, the beggared peasantry, the desolated churches
and monasteries, the farmsteads and villages burnt to ashes.
Edward seemed ruined both in reputation and purse. He had exhausted his
resources in meeting the extravagant demands of his allies, and their
help had profited him nothing at all. Yet his inexhaustible energy
opened up a surer means of foreign assistance than had been supplied by
the unruly vassals of Louis of Bavaria. At the moment when the imperial
alliance was tried and found wanting, the way was opened up for close
friendship between Edward and the Flemish cities. In earlier years the
chivalrous devotion of Louis of Nevers to his overlord had secured the
political dependence of Flanders upon the King of France. If the action
of their count made the Flemings the tools of French policy, their
commercial necessities bound them to England by chains forged by nature
itself. Alone of the lands of northern and western Europe, Flanders was
not a self-sufficing economic community.1 Its great ports and weaving
towns depended for their customers on foreign markets, and the raw
material of their staple manufacture was mainly derived from England.
When in 1337 Edward prohibited the export of wool to Flanders, his
action at once brought about the same result that the cessation of the
supplies of American cotton would cause in the manufacturing districts
of Lancashire. A wool famine, like the Lancashire cotton famine of
1862-65, plunged Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges into grievous distress. The
starving weavers wandered through the farms begging their bread, and,
when charity at home proved inadequate, they exposed their rags and
their misery in the chief cities of northern France. Even wealthy
merchants felt the pinch of the crisis which ruined the small craftsmen.
1 See for this Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, vols. i. and
ii., and Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, iii., 304-324, and
iv., 134-142.
A common desire to avoid calamity bound together the warring classes
and rival districts of Flanders, as they had never been united before.
Bruges and Ypres had borne the brunt of earlier struggles, and had not
even yet recovered from the exhaustion of the wars of the early years
of the century. Their exhaustion left the way open to Ghent, where the
old patricians and the rich merchants, the weavers and the fullers,
forgot their ancient rivalries and worked together to remedy the
crisis. A wealthy landholder and merchant-prince of Ghent, James van
Artevelde, made himself the spokesman of all classes of that great
manufacturing city. He was no demagogue nor artisan, though his
eloquence and force had wonderful power over the impressionable
craftsmen of the trading guilds. He was no Netherlandish patriot, as
some moderns have imagined, though he was anxious to unite Flanders
with her neighbour states, on the broad basis of their identity of
economic and political interests. A man of Ghent, above all things, his
policy was to save the imperilled industries of his native town, and to
make it the centre of a new movement for the vindication of commercial
liberty against feudal domination. By the winter of 1337 this rich
capitalist allied himself with the turbulent democracy of the weavers'
guilds, and put himself at the head of affairs. Early in 1338 he began
to negotiate with Edward III., and his loans to the distressed monarch
had the result of removing the embargo on English wool. The famished
craftsmen hailed the enemy of their class as a god who had come down
from heaven for their salvation.
Louis of Nevers and Philip of Valois took the alarm. Seeing in the
ascendency of Artevelde the certainty that Flanders would join the
English alliance, they left no stone unturned to avoid so dire a
calamity. Artevelde, conscious of the narrow basis of his own
authority, was prudent enough to be moderate. Instead of pressing the
English alliance to a conclusion, he accepted the suggestion of Philip
VI., that Flanders should remain neutral. Louis of Nevers hated the
notion; but in June, 1338, Edward and Philip agreed to recognise
Flemish neutrality, and he was forced to acquiesce in it. Both monarchs
promised to avoid Flemish territory, and offered free commercial
relations between Flanders and their respective dominions.
Artevelde and the men of Ghent were the real masters of Flanders. They
kept their count in scarcely veiled captivity, forcing him to wear the
Flemish colours and to profess acceptance of the policy that he
disliked. In such circumstances the neutrality of Flanders could not
last long. Both Edward and Artevelde regarded it simply as a step
towards a declared alliance. Before long Philip became uneasy, and
lavished concession on concession to keep the dominant party true to
its promises. He gave up the degrading conditions which since the
treaty of Athis had secured the subjection of Flanders. But Edward
could offer more than his rival. He proposed to the count and the "good
towns" of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres that, in return for their alliance,
he would aid them to win back the towns of Lille, Douai, Béthune, and
Tournai, which the French king had usurped from the Flemings, as well
as the county of Artois, which had been separated from Flanders since
the days of Philip Augustus. He also offered ample commercial
privileges, the establishment of the staple of wool at Bruges as well
as at Antwerp, free trade for Flemish cloth with the English markets,
and a good and fixed money which was to be legal tender in Flanders,
Brabant, France, and England. The Flemings demanded in return that
Edward, by formally assuming the title of King of France, should stand
to them as their liege lord, and thus free themselves and their count
from the ecclesiastical penalties and dishonour involved in their
waging war against a king of France. Late in 1339, these terms were
mutually accepted, and Count Louis avoided further humiliations by
flight into France.
In January, 1340, Edward entered Flemish territory and was
magnificently entertained in the abbey of Saint Bavon at Ghent. "The
three towns of Flanders," declared Artevelde to his guest, "are ready
to recognise you as their sovereign lord, provided that you engage
yourself to defend them." The deputies of the three towns took oaths to
Edward as their suzerain, and thereupon Edward was proclaimed King of
France with much ceremony in the Friday market of Ghent. A new great
seal was fashioned and new royal arms assumed, in which the lilies of
France were quartered with the leopards of England. The new regnal year
of Edward, which began on January 25, was styled the fourteenth of his
reign in England, and the first of his reign in France. Urgent affairs
called Edward back to his kingdom, but his debts to the Flemings were
already so heavy that they only consented to his departure on his
pledging himself to return before Michaelmas day, and on his leaving as
hostages his queen, his two sons, and two earls. At last, on February
20, he crossed over from Sluys to Orwell. He had been absent from home
for nearly a year and a half.
From February 21 to June 22, 1340, Edward remained in England. During
that period, formal treaties with the Flemings confirmed the hasty
negotiations of Ghent. Benedict XII, still pursued Edward with
remonstrances. He warned the English king to have no trust in allies
like the Flemings, who had shamefully driven away their natural lords
and whose faithlessness and inconstancy were by-words. He told him that
his strength was not enough to conquer France, and reproached him with
calling himself king of a land of which he possessed nothing. Somewhat
inconsistently, he offered his mediation between Edward and Philip. But
Philip was only less weary than Edward of the self-seeking pontiff.
Benedict was forced to drink the cup of humiliation, for after the
rejection of his mediation, he was confronted with a proposal that the
schismatic Bavarian should arbitrate between the two crowns. Meanwhile,
after many delays, Edward embarked a gallant army on a fleet of 200
ships, and on June 22 a favourable west wind bore them from the Orwell
towards Flanders. On arriving next day off Blankenberghe, he learned
that a formidable French squadron was anchored in the mouth of the
Zwyn, and that he could only land in Flanders as the reward of victory.
From the outbreak of hostilities in 1337, there had been a good deal of
fighting by sea, and in the first stages of warfare the advantage lay
with the French. Since the days of Edward I., and Philip the Fair, the
maritime energies of the two countries had developed at an almost equal
rate, and the parallel growth had been marked by bitter rivalry between
the seamen of the two nations. The Normans had taken the leading share
in this expansion of the French navy.1 They welcomed the outbreak of
war with enthusiasm, as giving them a chance of measuring their forces
with their hated foes. Alone among the provinces of France, Normandy
seems already to have experienced that intense national bitterness
against the English which was soon to spread to all the rest of the
country. Not content with the vigorous war of corsairs which had
inflicted so much mischief on our southern coast and on English
shipping, the Normans formed bold designs of a new Norman Conquest of
England, and in return for the permanent establishment of the local
estates of Normandy, agreed with Philip and his son John, who bore the
title of Duke of Normandy, to equip a large fleet and army, with which
England was to be invaded in the summer of 1339. Normandy, which
monopolised the glory, was to monopolise the spoil. If England were
conquered, Duke John, like Duke William before him, was to be King of
England as well as Duke of Normandy. Thus the aggressions of Edward in
France were to be answered by Norman aggressions in England.2
1 C. de la Roncière, Hist, de la Marine Française; of.
Nicolas, Hist, of the Royal Navy.
2 See on this subject A. Coville, Les États de Normandie,
pp. 41-52 (1894).
Nothing came of this grandiose project, though the burning ruins of
Southampton, the capture of the great Christopher, which had borne
Edward in 1338 to Antwerp, and the occupation of the Channel
Islands--the last remnants of the old duchy still under English
rule--showed that the Normans were in earnest. The chief result of their
energy was the equipment of the strongest French fleet that had ever
been seen in the Channel. Though a few Genoese galleys under Barbavera
and a few great Spanish ships swelled the number of the armada, 160 of
the 200 ships that formed the fleet were Norman.1 Of the two Frenchmen
in command, one, Hugh Quièret, was a Picard knight, but the other, the
more popular, was Nicholas Béhuchet, a Norman of humble birth, then a
knight and the chief confidant of Philip VI. Quièret and Béhuchet had
long challenged the command of the narrow seas. But for their error of
dividing their forces and preferring a piratical war of reprisals, they
might have cut off communications between England and the Netherlands.
They had learnt wisdom by experience, and their ships were massed in
Zwyn harbour to prevent the passage of Edward to his new allies.
1 S. Luce, La Marine normande à l'Écluse, in La France
pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans, 3-31.
The coast-line between Blankenberghe and the mouth of the Scheldt was
strangely different in the fourteenth century from what it is at
present.1 The sandy flats, through which the Zwyn now trickles to the
sea, formed a large open harbour, accessible to the biggest ships then
known. It was protected on the north by the island of Cadzand, the scene
of Manny's exploit in 1337, while at its head stood the town of Sluys,
so called from the locks, or sluices, that regulated the waters of the
ship canal, which bore to the great mart of Bruges the merchantmen of
every land. It was in this harbour that Edward, on arriving off
Blankenberghe, first spied the fleet of Quièret and Béhuchet. He
anchored at sea for the night, and on the afternoon of June 24, the
anniversary of Bannockburn, he bore down on the French, having the sun,
the tide, and the wind in his favour. On his approach Barbavera urged
that the French should take to the open sea; but Quièret and Béhuchet
preferred to fight in the harbour. As an unsatisfactory compromise,
however, the French moved a mile or so towards the enemy. Then they
lashed their ships together and awaited attack.
1 For this see Professor Tait's inset map of the district in
Oxford Historical Atlas, plate lvi.
The English, unable to break the serried mass of their enemies, feigned
a retreat, whereupon the Normans unlashed their ships and hurried in
pursuit into the open water. At once the English turned and met them.
The battle began when the English admiral, Robert Morley, lay alongside
the Christopher, which, after its capture, had been taken into the
enemy's service. Soon the ships of both fleets were closely grappled
together in a fierce hand-to-hand fight which lasted until after
nightfall. The desperate eagerness of the combatants strangely
contrasted with the slackness of the campaign in the Thiérache. "This
battle," says Froissart, "was right fierce and horrible, for battles by
sea are more dangerous and fiercer than battles by land, for at sea
there is no retreat nor fleeing; there is no remedy but to fight and
abide fortune, and every man to show his prowess." In the end the
English won an overwhelming victory, which was completed next morning
after more hard fighting. During the night Barbavera and his Genoese put
to sea and escaped, but the magnificent Norman fleet was in the hands of
the victor. The English loss was small, though it included Thomas of
Monthermer, a son of Joan of Acre, and Edward himself was wounded in the
thigh. The Norman force was almost annihilated. Quièret fell mortally
wounded into Edward's hands; Béhuchet was captured unhurt. A later
Norman legend tells how Béhuchet, when brought before the English king,
answered some taunt by boxing the king's ears, whereupon the angry
monarch hanged him forthwith from the mast of his ship.1 But the
tradition is unsupported by English authorities, and, with all his
faults, Edward was not the man to deal thus with a captive knight who
had fought his best. Master at last of the sea, Edward landed at Sluys
amidst the rejoicings of the Flemings, and made his way to Ghent, where
he greeted his wife, and first saw his infant son John, born during his
absence, to whom Artevelde stood as godfather.
1 Luce, Le Soufflet de l'Écluse, in La Frame pendant la
Guerre de Cent Ans, 2nd série, pp. 3-15.
Edward's military fame was established over all Europe, and, says the
Flemish writer, John van Klerk, "all who spoke the German tongue
rejoiced at the defeat of the French". Yet the victory at Sluys was the
prelude to a land campaign as ineffective as the raid into the
Thiérache. Eager to restore their lost lands to the Flemings, Edward
made the mistake of dividing his army. He sent Robert of Artois to
effect the reconquest of Artois, while he himself besieged Tournai,
which was then in French hands. Robert's attempt to win back the lands
of his ancestors was a sorry failure. Defeated outside Saint Omer, he
was unable even to invest that town. Almost equally unsuccessful was
Edward's siege of Tournai, which resisted with such energy that he was
soon at the end of his resources. At last, in despair, Edward
challenged Philip VI. to decide their claim to France by single combat.
The Valois answered that he would gladly do so if, in the event of his
winning, he might obtain Edward's kingdom. In the same spirit of
caution, Philip tarried half-way between Saint Omer and Tournai,
watching both armies and afraid to strike at either. The armies wore
themselves out in this game of waiting until the widowed Countess of
Hainault, then abbess of the Cistercian nuns of Fontenelles, was moved
by the desolation of the country to intervene between the two kings.
The mother of the Queen of England and the sister of the King of
France, she succeeded not only by reason of her prayers, but through
the refusal of the Duke of Brabant, the Count of Hainault, and the
other imperial vassals to remain longer at the war. On September 25,
1340, a truce was signed at the solitary chapel of Esplechin, situated
in the open country a little south of Tournai. By it hostilities
between both kings and their respective allies were suspended, until
midsummer day, 1341. Each king was to enjoy the lands actually in his
possession, and commerce was to be carried on as if peace had been
made. The most significant clause of the truce was that by which both
kings pledged themselves that they "procure not that any innovation be
done by the Church of Rome, or by others of Holy Church on either of
the said kings. And if our most holy father the pope will do that, the
two kings shall prevent it, so far as in them lies."
The truce of Esplechin, renewed until 1345, put an end to the first, or
Netherlandish, period of the Hundred Years' War. The imperial alliance,
which had failed Edward, was soon to be solemnly dissolved. Early in
1341, Louis of Bavaria revoked Edward's vicariate, and announced his
intention of becoming henceforth the friend of his uncle, the King of
France. This alliance between Philip and Louis completed the
discomfiture of Benedict XII. In 1342 he died, and his successor was
Peter Roger, the sometime Archbishop of Rouen, who assumed the title of
Clement VI. By persuading Brabant and Hainault to be neutral between
France and England, the new pontiff broke up the last remnant of the
Anglo-imperial alliance. Even Flanders and England became estranged.
Artevelde, who found it a hard matter to govern Flanders after the
truce, would willingly have supported Edward. But Edward had henceforth
less need of Artevelde than Artevelde had of him. In 1345 Edward again
appeared at Sluys and had an interview with him, and then returned to
his own country without setting foot on Flemish soil. Artevelde soon
afterwards met his death in a popular tumult. His family fled to
England, where they lived on a pension from Edward. This was the end
of the Anglo-Flemish alliance.
After the treaty of Esplechin, Edward returned to Ghent. The conclusion
of military operations was a signal to all his creditors to clamour for
immediate settlement of their debts. Neither subsidies nor wool came
from England, though the king wrote in piteous terms to his council.
Edward was convinced that the real cause of his failure was the
remissness of the home government, and resolved to wreak his vengeance
on his ministers. He was encouraged to this effect by Bishop Burghersh,
who still remembered his old feuds with Archbishop Stratford, and may
well have believed that the archbishop, who had a financier's dread of
war, had wilfully ruined his rival's diplomacy. But Edward dared not
openly return to England, for his Flemish creditors regarded his
personal presence as the best security for his debts. He was therefore
reduced to the pitiful expedient of running away from them. One day he
rode out of Ghent on the pretext of taking exercise, and hurried
secretly and without escort to Sluys. Thence he took ship for England,
and, after a tempestuous voyage of three days and nights, sailed up the
Thames, and landed at the Tower on November 30, 1340, after nightfall.
At cockcrow next morning, he summoned his ministers before him,
denounced them as false traitors and drove them all from office. The
judges were thrown into prison, and with them some of the leading
merchants, including William de la Pole of Hull. A special commission,
like that of 1289, scrutinised the acts of the royal officials
throughout the kingdom, and exacted heavy fines from the many who were
found wanting. Nothing but fear of provoking the wrath of the Church
prevented Edward from consigning to prison the dismissed chancellor,
Robert Stratford, Bishop of Chichester, and the late treasurer, Roger
Northburgh, Bishop of Coventry. Their successors were lay knights, the
new chancellor, Sir Robert Bourchier, being the first keeper of the
great seal who was not a clerk.
Earlier in the year the king had quarrelled with Archbishop Stratford,
who resigned the chancellorship. But before Edward sailed from Orwell
in June there had been a partial reconciliation, and the king left
Stratford president of the council during his absence. When his brother
and colleagues were dismissed, the archbishop was at Charing. Conscious
that he was the chief object of Edward's vengeance, he at once took
sanctuary with the monks of his cathedral. Every effort was made to
drag him from his refuge. Some Louvain merchants, to whom he had bound
himself for the king's debts, demanded that he should be surrendered to
their custody until the money was paid. He was summoned to court and
afterwards to parliament. But he prudently remained safe within the
walls of Christ Church, and preached a course of sermons to the monks,
in which he compared himself to St. Thomas of Canterbury, and hinted at
the danger of his incurring his prototype's fate. Edward replied to
this challenge by a lengthy pamphlet, called the libellus famosus.
The violence and unmeasured terms of the tractate suggest the hand of
Bishop Orleton, Stratford's lifelong foe, who had by Burghersh's recent
death become the most prominent of the courtly prelates. The archbishop
was declared to be the sole cause of the king's failures. He had left
Edward without funds, and in trusting to him the king had leant on a
broken reed. Stratford justified himself in another sermon in which he
invited inquiry and demanded trial by his peers.
Edward so far relented as to issue letters of safe-conduct enabling the
archbishop to attend the parliament summoned for April 23, 1341. But
when Stratford took his place, the king refused to meet him, and
ordered him to answer in the exchequer the complaints brought against
him. The lords upheld the primate's cause, and declared that in no
circumstances could a peer of parliament be brought to trial elsewhere
than in full parliament. Edward's fury abated when he saw that he would
get no grant unless he gave way. He restored Stratford to his favour,
and acceded to his request that he should answer in parliament and not
in the exchequer. The childish controversy ended with the personal
victory of the primate and the formal re-assertion of the important
principle of trial by peers. But not even then was Edward able to get a
subsidy. He was further forced to embody in the statute of the year the
doctrines that auditors of the accounts of the royal officers should be
elected in parliament, and that all ministers should be chosen by the
king, after consultation with his estates, and should resign their
offices at each meeting of parliament and be prepared to answer all
complaints before it.
Thus the fallen minister brought the estates the greatest triumph over
the prerogative won during Edward's reign. Before long Edward was
magnanimous enough to resume friendly relations with him, but he was
never suffered to take a prominent part in politics. He died in 1348,
after spending his later years in the business of his see. It was a
strange irony of fate that this worldly and politic ecclesiastic should
have perforce become the champion of the rights of the Church and the
liberties of the nation. His victory established a remarkable
solidarity between the high ecclesiastical party and the popular
opposition, which was to last nearly as long as the century. Disgust at
this alliance moved Edward to take up the anti-clerical attitude which
henceforth marks the policy of the crown until the accession of the
house of Lancaster.
The victory of the estates of 1341 was too complete to last. For a
medieval king to hand over the business of government to a nominated
ministry was in substance a return to the state of things in 1258 or
1312. Edward was not the sort of man to endure the thraldom that his
father and great-grandfather had both found intolerable. Even at the
moment of sealing the statute, he and his ministers protested that they
were not bound to observe laws contrary to the constitution of the
realm. Five months later, on October 1, 1341, the king issued letters,
revoking the laws of the previous session. "We have never," he
impudently declared, "really given our consent to the aforesaid
pretended statute. But inasmuch as our rejecting it would have
dissolved parliament in confusion, without any business having been
transacted, and so all our affairs would have been ruined, we
dissembled, as was our duty, and allowed the pretended statute to be
sealed." For more than two years he did not venture to face a
parliament, but the next gathering of the estates in April, 1343,
repealed the offensive acts of 1341. Parliament was so reluctant to
ratify the king's high-handed action, that he did not venture to ask it
for any extraordinary grant of money. The only other important act of
this parliament was a petition from lords and commons, urging the king
to check the claims of a French pope, friendly to the "tyrant of
France," to exercise ever-increasing rights of patronage over English
benefices. The anti-clerical tide was still flowing.
Before parliament met in 1343, the French war had been renewed on
another pretext. A new source of trouble arose in a disputed succession
to the duchy of Brittany. The duke John III., the grandson of John II.
and Edward I.'s sister Beatrice, died in April, 1341. He left no
legitimate children, and his succession was claimed by his half-brother,
John of Montfort, and his niece Joan of Penthièvre. Montfort, the son of
Duke Arthur II. by his second wife, had inherited from his mother the
Norman county of Montfort l'Amaury, which became her possession as the
representative on the spindle side of the line of Simon de Montfort the
Albigensian crusader. Joan was the daughter of Guy, John III.'s brother
of the full blood, in whose favour the great county of
Penthièvre-Tréguier, including the whole of the north coast of the duchy
from the river of Morlaix to within a few miles of the Rance, had been
dissociated from the demesne and reconstituted as an appanage.1 The
heiress of Penthièvre thus ruled directly over nearly a sixth of
Brittany, and her power was further strengthened by her marriage with
Charles of Blois, who, though a younger son, enjoyed great influence as
the sister's son of Philip VI., and also by reason of his simple,
saintly, honourable, and martial character. The house of Penthièvre not
only stood to Brittany as the house of Lancaster stood to England, as
the natural head of the higher nobility; it also enjoyed the favour and
protection of the French king, who was ever anxious to find friends
among the chief sub-tenants of his great vassals. Against so formidable
an opponent John of Montfort could only secure his rights by
promptitude. Accordingly he made his way to Nantes and, receiving a warm
welcome from his burgesses, proclaimed himself duke. Very few of the
great feudatories threw in their lot with him. His strength was in the
petty noblesse, the townsmen, and the enthusiasm of the Celtic
population of La Brétagne bretonnante, which made Léon, Cornouailles,
and Vannes the strongholds of his cause. Yet the Penthièvre influence
took with it the Breton-speaking inhabitants of the diocese of Tréguier,
and the piety of Charles made the clergy, and especially the friars,
devoted to him.
1 On the importance of Penthièvre, see A. de la Borderie, La
Géographie feodale de la Brétagne (1889), pp. 60-65.
The fight was not waged in Brittany only. Montfort had to contend
against the general sentiment of the French nobility and the strong
interest and affection which bound Philip VI. to uphold the claims of
Charles of Blois. After a few months the parliament of Paris decided in
favour of the king's nephew against Montfort. Charles's wife was the
nearest heir of the deceased duke, and had therefore a prior claim over
her uncle. Montfort urged in vain that the superior rights of the male,
which had made the Count of Valois King of France, equally gave the
Count of Montfort the duchy of Brittany. He had to fight for his duchy.
John, Duke of Normandy, the heir of France, marched to Brittany with a
strong force, to secure the establishment of his cousin in accordance
with the decree of parliament. The union of the royal troops, with the
levies of Penthièvre and the great feudatories of Brittany, was too
powerful a combination to withstand. Montfort was shut up in Nantes,
was forced to capitulate, and sent prisoner to Paris. His place was
taken by his wife, Joan of Flanders, a daughter of Louis of Nevers.
This lady shewed "the heart of a man and of a lion," as Froissart says.
Her efforts, however, did not prevail against her formidable enemies.
Bit by bit she was driven from one stronghold to another, until at last
she was closely besieged in Hennebont by Charles of Blois. Before that,
she had recognised Edward as King of France, and offered him the homage
of her husband and son. Edward III. readily took up the cause of
Montfort. He recked little of the inconsistency involved in the prince,
who claimed France through his mother, supporting in Brittany a duke,
whose pretensions were based upon grounds similar to the claim advanced
by Philip of Valois on the French throne. As in Flanders, he found two
rival nations contending in the bosom of a single French fief. He at
once supported the Celtic party in Brittany as he had supported the
Flemish party in Flanders. Both his allies had the same enemies in
feudalism, the French monarchy, and the pretensions of high
clericalism. Afraid to renew the attack in France without allies,
Edward welcomed the support of the Montfort party, as giving him a
chance of renewing his assaults on his adversary of Valois. He invested
Montfort with the earldom of Richmond, of which John III had died
possessed. He sent Sir Walter Manny with a force sufficient to raise
the siege of Hennebont. The heroic Joan of Flanders was almost at the
end of her resources, when on an early June morning, in 1342, she
espied the white sails of Manny's fleet working its way from the sea up
the estuary of the Blavet, which bathes the walls of Hennebont. After
the arrival of the English, Charles of Blois abandoned the siege in
despair. For the rest of the year the war was waged on a more equal
footing. In August Edward sent to Brest an additional force under
William Bohun, Earl of Northampton, who attempted, though with little
success, to invade the domains of the house of Penthièvre. A hard-won
victory against great odds near Morlaix was made memorable by
Northampton's first applying the tactics of Halidon Hill to a pitched
battle on the continent.1 But the earl's troops were so few that
they were forced to withdraw after their success into more friendly
regions. Leon and Cornouailles then resumed allegiance to the house of
Montfort. In the midst of the struggle Robert of Artois received a
wound which soon ended his tempestuous career.
1 Baker, p.76, gives the place, Knighton, ii., 25, the
details. See also my note in Engl. Hist. Review, xix. (1904),
713-15.
Edward was eager to enter the field in person. Since his return to
England in 1340, his only military experience had been a luckless
winter campaign in the Lothians against King David. In October, 1342,
he left the Duke of Cornwall as warden of England during his absence,
and took ship at Sandwich for Brittany. He remained in the country
until the early months of 1343, raiding the land from end to end,
receiving many of the greater barons into his obedience, and striving
in particular to conquer the regions included in the modern department
of the Morbihan. There he besieged Vannes, the strongest and largest
city of Brittany, says Froissart, after Nantes. The triumphs of his
rival at last brought Philip VI. into Brittany. While Edward
laboriously pursued the siege of Vannes, amidst the hardships of a wet
and stormy winter, Philip watched his enemy from Ploermel, a few miles
to the north. For a third time the situation of Buironfosse and Tournai
was renewed. The rivals were within striking distance, but once more
both Edward and Philip were afraid to strike. History still further
repeated itself; for the cardinal-bishops of Palestrina and Frascati,
sent by Clement VI. to end the struggle, travelled from camp to camp
with talk of peace. The sufferings of both armies gave the kings a
powerful reason for listening to their advances. At last, on January
19, 1343, a truce for nearly four years was signed at Malestroit,
midway between Ploermel and Vannes, "in reverence of mother church, for
the honour of the cardinals, and that the parties shall be able to
declare their reasons before the pope, not for the purpose of rendering
a judicial decision, but in order to make a better peace and treaty".
Scotland and the Netherlands were included in the truce, and it was
agreed that each belligerent should continue in the enjoyment of the
territories which he held at the moment. Vannes, the immediate apple of
discord, was put into the hands of the pope.
The spring of 1343 saw Edward back in England. The scene of interest
shifted to the papal court at Avignon, where ambassadors from Edward
and Philip appeared to declare their masters' rights. The protracted
negotiations were lacking in reality. The English, distrusting Clement
as a French partisan, did their best to complicate the situation by
complaints against papal provisions in favour of aliens "not having
knowledge of the tongue nor condition of those whose governance and
care should belong to them". English indignation rose higher when,
despite the terms of the truce and the promise of the cardinals,
Montfort remained immured in his French prison, while Breton nobles of
his faction were kidnapped and put to death by Philip. Clement declared
himself against Edward's claims to the French throne, and, long before
the negotiations had reached a formal conclusion, it was clear that
nothing would come of them. At last in 1345 the English King denounced
the truce and prepared to renew the war. His first concern was,
necessarily finance, and he had already exhausted all his resources as
a borrower. The financial difficulties, which had stayed his career in
the Netherlands five years before, had reached their culmination.
Stratford was avenged for the outrages of 1340, for Edward was in worse
embarrassments than on that winter night when the glare of torches
illuminated the sovereign's sudden return to the Tower. The king's
Netherlandish, Rhenish, and Italian creditors would trust him no longer
and vainly clamoured for the repayment of their advances. "We grieve,"
he was forced to reply to the Cologne magistrates, "nay, we blush, that
we are unable to meet our obligations at the due time." Edward's
anxiety to prepare for fresh campaigns made him careless as to his
former obligations. His wholesale neglect to repay his debts drove the
great banking houses of the Bardi and the Peruzzi into bankruptcy, and
the failure of the English king's creditors plunged all Florence into
deep distress. One good result came from the king's dishonour. The
foreign sources of supply having dried up, Edward was forced to lean
more exclusively upon his English subjects. A wealthy family of Hull
merchants, recently transferred to London, became very flourishing. Its
head, William de la Pole, who had financed every government scheme
since the days of Mortimer, became a knight, a judge, a territorial
magnate, and the first English merchant to found a baronial house. And
as the credit of the English merchants was limited, Edward was forced
more and more to rely upon parliamentary grants. The memory of the
king's want of faith to the estates of 1341 had died away, and a
parliament, which met in 1344, once more made Edward liberal
contributions. Secure of his subjects' support, the frivolous king
largely employed his resources in the chivalrous pageantry which
stirred up the martial ardour of his barons and made the war popular.
It was then that he resolved to set up a "round table" at Windsor after
the fabled fashion of King Arthur. From this came the foundation of the
Round Tower which Edward was to erect in his favourite abode, and the
organised chivalry that was soon to culminate in the Order of the
Garter. In the summer of 1345 Edward made that journey to Sluys, which
has already been noted, and he held on ship-board his last interview
with James van Artevelde. His immediate return to England showed that
he had no mind to renew his Flemish alliances. In the same year the
death of the queen's brother, William of Avesnes, established the rule
of Louis of Bavaria in the three counties of Holland, Zealand, and
Hainault in the right of his wife, Philippa's elder sister. Edward put
in a claim on behalf of his queen, which further embittered his already
uneasy relations with Louis, and led him to seek his field of combat
anywhere rather than in the Netherlands. In Brittany the murder of the
nobles of Montfort's faction had given an excuse for the renewal of
partisan warfare as early as 1343, but Montfort was still under
surveillance in France, even after his release from Philip's prison,
and Joan of Flanders, the heroic defender of Hennebont, was hopelessly
insane in England. At last in 1345 Montfort ventured to flee from
France to England, where he did homage to Edward as King of France for
the duchy which he claimed. He then went to Brittany, and there shortly
afterwards died. The new Duke of Brittany, also named John, was a mere
boy when he was thus robbed of both his parents' care, and his cause
languished for want of a head. Edward took upon himself the whole
direction of Brittany as tutor of the little duke. Northampton was once
more sent thither, but for a time the war degenerated into sieges of
castles and petty conflicts.
While action was thus impracticable in the Netherlands, and ineffective
in Brittany, Gascony became, for the first time during the struggle, the
scene of military operations of the first rank. The storm of warfare had
hitherto almost spared the patrimony of the English king in southern
France. No great effort was made either by the French to capture the
last bulwarks of the Aquitanian inheritance, or by Edward to extend his
duchy to its ancient limits. Cut off from other fields of expansion,
Edward threw his chief energies into the enlargement of his power in
southern France. He won over many of those Gascon nobles, including the
powerful lord of Albret, who had been alienated by his former
indifference. All was ready for action, and in June, 1345, Henry of
Grosmont, Earl of Derby, the eldest son of Henry of Lancaster, landed at
Bayonne with a sufficient English force to encourage the lords of
Gascony to rally round the ducal banner. Soon after his landing, the
death of his blind father made Derby Earl of Lancaster. During the next
eighteen months, the earl successfully led three raids into the heart of
the enemies' territory.1 The first, begun very soon after his landing,
occupied the summer of 1345. Advancing from Libourne, the limit of the
Anglo-Gascon power, Henry made his way up the Dordogne, a fleet of boats
co-operating with his land forces. He took the important town of
Bergerac, and thence, mounting the stream as far as Lalinde, he crossed
the hills separating the Dordogne from the Isle, and unsuccessfully
assaulted Périgueux. Thence he advanced still further, and captured the
stronghold of Auberoche, dominating the rocky valley of the Auvézère.
Leaving a garrison at Auberoche, Henry returned to his base, but upon
his withdrawal the French closely besieged his conquest, and the earl
made a sudden move to its relief. On October 21 he won a brisk battle
outside the walls of Auberoche before the more sluggish part of his army
had time to reach the scene of action. This famous exploit again
established the Gascon duke in Périgord.
1 For these campaigns, see Ribadieu, Les Campagnes du Comté
de Derby en Guyenne, Saintonge et Poitou (1865).
Early in 1346 the victor of Auberoche led his forces up the Garonne
valley. La Réole, lost since 1325, was taken in January, and thence
Earl Henry marched to the capture of many a town and fortress on the
Garonne and the lower Lot. His most important acquisition was
Aiguillon, commanding the junction of the Lot and the Garonne, for its
possession opened up the way for the reconquest of the Agenais, the
rich fruit of the last campaign of Charles of Valois. Duke John of
Normandy then appeared upon the scene, and Henry of Lancaster withdrew
before him to the line of the Dordogne. Aiguillon stood a siege from
April to August, when the Duke of Normandy, then at the end of his
resources, solicited a truce. News having come to Lancaster at Bergerac
that Edward had begun his memorable invasion of Normandy, he
contemptuously rejected the proposal. Before long, Duke John raised the
siege and hurried to his father's assistance. Thereupon Lancaster
returned to the Garonne and revictualled Aiguillon. Immediately after
he started on his third raid. This time he bent his steps northwards,
and late in September was at Châteauneuf on the Charente, whence he
threatened Angoulême, and finally obtained its surrender. Crossing the
Charente, he entered French Saintonge, where the important town of
Saint-Jean-d'Angely opened its gates and took oaths to Edward as duke
and king. Then he boldly dashed into the heart of Poitou, marching by
Lusignan to Poitiers. "We rode before the city," wrote Lancaster, "and
summoned it, but they would do nothing. Thereupon on the Wednesday
after Michaelmas we stormed the city, and all those within were taken
or slain. And the lords that were within fled away on the other side,
and we tarried full eight days. Thus we have made a fair raid, God be
thanked, and are come again to Saint-Jean, whence we propose to return
to Bordeaux." This exploit ended Lancaster's Gascon career. In January,
1347, he was back in England, having restored the reputation of his
king in Gascony, and set an example of heroism soon to be emulated by
his cousin, the Black Prince.
Edward resolved to take the field in person in the summer of 1346.
Special efforts were made to equip the army, and lovers of ancient
precedent were dismayed when the king called upon all men of property to
equip archers, hobblers, or men-at-arms, according to their substance,
that they might serve abroad at the king's wages. But the nation
responded to the king's call, and a host of some 2,400 cavalry and
10,000 archers and other infantry collected at Portsmouth between Easter
and the early summer.1 There were the usual delays of a medieval
muster, and it was not until July was well begun that Edward, having
constituted his second son Lionel of Antwerp, a boy of six, as regent,
took ship at Portsmouth with his eldest son, then sixteen years of age,
and, since 1343, Prince of Wales as well as Duke of Cornwall. The
destination of the army was a secret, but Edward's original idea seems
to have been to join Henry of Lancaster in Gascony, though we may well
believe that the resources of medieval transport were hardly adequate to
convey so large a force for so great a distance. Moreover, a persistent
series of south-westerly winds prohibited all attempts to round the
Breton peninsula, while Godfrey of Harcourt, a Norman lord who had
incurred the wrath of Philip VI. and had been driven into exile,
persistently urged on Edward the superior attractions of his native
coast. When the fleet set sail from Portsmouth, it was directed to
follow in the admiral's track; and as soon as the open sea was gained,
the ships were instructed to make their way to the Côtentin. On July 12
the English army reached Saint-Vaast de la Hougue, and spent five days
in disembarking and ravaging the neighbourhood.2 Immediately on
landing, Edward dubbed the Prince of Wales a knight, along with other
young nobles, one of whom was Roger Mortimer, the grandson and heir of
the traitor Earl of March. At last, on July 18, the English army began
to move by slow stages to the south. It met with little resistance, and
plundered and burnt the rich countryside at its discretion. The English
marvelled at the fertility of the country and the size and wealth of its
towns. Barfleur was as big as Sandwich, Carentan reminded them of
Leicester, Saint-Lo was the size of Lincoln, and Caen was more populous
than any English city save London.
1 On the details of this force, see Wrottesley, Crecy and
Calais, in Collections for a History of Staffordshire, vol.
xviii. (1897); cf. J.E. Morris in Engl. Hist. Review, xiv.,
766-69.
2 Besides the sources for this campaign mentioned in Sir E.M.
Thompson, Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, pp. 252-57, the
disregarded Acta bellicosa Edwardi, etc., published in
Moisant, Le Prince Noir en Aquitaine, pp. 157-74, from a
Corpus Christi Coll. Cambridge MS., should be mentioned. It has
first been utilised in H. Pientout's valuable paper, La prise
de Caen par Édouard III. en 1346, in Mémoires de l'Académie de
Caen (1904).
It was only at Caen that any real resistance was encountered. On July
26 Edward's soldiers entered the northern quarter of the town without
opposition, to find the fortified enclosures of the two great abbeys of
William the Conqueror and his queen undefended and desolate, the grand
bourg, the populous quarter round the church of St. Peter open to
them, and only the castle in the extreme north garrisoned. Caen was not
a walled town, and the defenders preferred to limit themselves to
holding the southern quarter, the Ile Saint-Jean, which lay between
the district of St. Peter's and the river Orne, but was cut off from
the rest by a branch of the Orne that ran just south of St. Peter's
church. There was sharp fighting at the bridge which commanded access
to the island; but the English archers prepared the way, and then the
men-at-arms completed the work. After a determined conflict, the Island
of St. John was captured, and its chief defenders, the Count of Eu,
Constable of France, and the lord of Tancarville, the chamberlain, were
taken prisoners. Meanwhile the English fleet, which had devastated the
whole coast from Cherbourg to Ouistreham, arrived off the mouth of the
Orne, laden with plunder and eager to get back home with its spoils.
Edward thought it prudent to avoid a threatened mutiny by ordering the
ships to recross the Channel, and take with them the captives and the
loot which he had amassed at Caen. During a halt of five days at Caen,
Edward discovered a copy of the agreement made between the Normans and
King Philip for the invasion of England eight years before. This also
he despatched to England, where it was read before the Londoners by the
Archbishop of Canterbury in order to show that the aggression was not
all on one side.
On July 31, Edward resumed his eastward march. At Lisieux, the next
important stage, came the inevitable two cardinals with their
inevitable proposals of mediation, which Edward put aside with scant
civility. The army was soon once more on the move, and on August 7
struck the Seine at Elbeuf, a few miles higher up the river than Rouen.
Here Edward was at last in touch with his enemy. During the English
march through lower Normandy, Philip VI. had assembled a considerable
army, with which he occupied the Norman capital. Nothing but the Seine
and a few miles of country separated the two forces. But as at
Buironfosse, at Tournai, and at Vannes, the French declined to attack,
and Edward would not depart from his tradition of acting on the
defensive. The English slowly made their way up the left bank of the
Seine, avoiding the stronger castles and walled towns, and devastating
the open country. The French followed them on the right bank, carefully
watching their movements, and breaking all the bridges. So things went
until, on August 13, Edward reached Poissy, a town within fifteen miles
of the capital.
The English advanced troops plundered up to the walls of Paris, whose
citizens, watching in terror the flames that made lurid the western
sky, implored their king to come to their help. From Saint-Denis Philip
issued a challenge to Edward to meet him in the open field on a fixed
day, Edward, however, was not to be tempted by such appeals to his
chivalry. The day after Philip's message was sent, he repaired the
bridge at Poissy, crossed the Seine, sent a stinging reply to Philip's
letter, and moved rapidly northwards. Avoiding Pontoise, Beauvais, and
other towns, he was soon within a few miles of the Somme. Long marching
had fatigued his army, and he resolved to retreat to the Flemish
frontier. The French soon followed him by a route some miles further
towards the east. They reached the Somme earlier than the English, and
were pouring into Amiens and Abbeville, while Edward's scouts were
vainly seeking for an unguarded passage over the river. If the Somme
could not be crossed, there was every chance of Edward's war-worn army
being driven into a corner at Saint-Valery, between the broad and sandy
estuary of the Somme and the open sea. When affairs had become thus
critical, local guides revealed to the English a way across the
estuary, where a white band of chalk, called the Blanche taque,
cropping out of the sandy river bed, forms a hard, practicable ford
from one bank of the river to the other. "Then," writes an official
reporter, "the King of England and his host took that water of the
Somme, where never man passed before without loss, and fought their
enemies, and chased them right up to the gate of Abbeville." That night
Edward and his troops slept on the outskirts of the forest of Crecy.
After traversing this, they took up a strong position on the northern
side of the wood on Saturday, August 26. There, in the heart of his
grandmother's inheritance of Ponthieu, Edward elected to make a stand,
and, for the first time in all their campaigning, Philip felt
sufficient confidence to engage in an offensive battle against his
rival.
Ponthieu is a land of low chalk downs, open fields, and dense woods,
broken by valleys, through which the small streams that water it
trickle down to the sea, and by the waterless depressions
characteristic of a chalk country. The village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu is
situated on the north bank of the little river Maye. Immediately to the
east of the village, a lateral depression, running north and south,
called the Vallée aux Clercs, falls down into the Maye valley, and is
flanked with rolling downs, perhaps 150 to 200 feet in height. On the
summit of the western slopes of this valley, Edward stationed his army.
Its right was held by the first of the three traditional "battles,"
under the personal command of the young Prince of Wales. Its front and
right flank were protected by the hill, while still further to the
right lay Crecy village embowered in its trees, beyond which the dense
forest formed an excellent protection from attack. The second of the
English battles, under the Earls' of Northampton and Arundel, held the
less formidable slopes of the upper portion of the Vallée aux Clercs,
their left resting on the enclosures and woods of the village of
Wadicourt. The third battle, commanded by the king himself, and
stationed in the rear as a reserve, held the rolling upland plain, on
the highest point of which was a windmill, commanding the whole field,
in which Edward took up his quarters. The English men-at-arms left
their horses in the rear. The archers of each of the two forward
battles were thrown out at an angle on the flanks, so that the enemy,
on approaching the serried mass of men-at-arms, had to encounter a
severe discharge of arrows both from the right and the left. It was the
tactics of Halidon hill, perfected by experience and for the first time
applied on a large scale against a continental enemy. The credit of it
may well be assigned to Northampton, fresh from the fight at Morlaix,
where similar tactics had already won the day.
The English were in position early in the morning of Saturday, August
26, and employed their leisure in further strengthening their lines by
digging shallow holes, like the pits at Bannockburn, in the hope of
ensnaring the French cavalry, if they came to close quarters with the
dismounted men-at-arms. The summer day had almost ended its course
before the French army appeared. Philip and his men had passed the
previous night at Abbeville, and had not only performed the long march
from the capital of Ponthieu, but many of them, misled by bad
information as to Edward's position, had made a weary detour to the
north-west. It was not until the hour of vespers that the mass of the
French host was marshalled in front of the village of Estrées on the
eastward plateau beyond the Vallée aux Clercs. John of Hainault, who
had become a thorough-going French partisan, advised Philip to delay
battle until the following day. The French were tired; all the army had
not yet come up; night would soon put an end to the combat; the evening
sun, shining brightly after a violent summer storm, was blazing
directly in the faces of the assailants. But the French nobles demanded
an immediate advance. Confident in their numbers and prowess, they had
already assured themselves of victory, and were quarrelling about the
division of the captives they would make. Philip, too sympathetic with
the feudal point of view to oppose his friends, ordered the advance.
The battle began by the French sending forward a strong force of
Genoese crossbowmen, to prepare the way for the cavalry charge. But the
long bows of the English outshot the obsolete and cumbrous weapons of
the Genoese, whose strings had been wetted by the recent storm. The
Italians descended into the valley, but were soon demoralised by seeing
their comrades fall all round them, while their own bolts failed to
reach the enemy. They were already in full retreat back up the slope,
when the impatience of the French horsemen burst all bounds. The
reckless cavalry charge swept right through the disordered ranks of the
crossbowmen, whose groans and cries as they were trampled underfoot by
the mail-clad steeds, inspired the rear ranks of the French with the
vain belief that the English were hard pressed, and made them eager to
join the fray. The charge, as disorderly and as badly directed as the
fatal attack of Bannockburn, never reached the English ranks. Shot down
right and left by archers, terrified by the fearful booming of three
small cannon that the English had dragged about during their
wanderings, the French line soon became a confused mob of furious
horsemen on panic-stricken horses. With gallantry even more conspicuous
than their want of discipline, the French made no less than fifteen
attempts to penetrate the enemies' lines. At one point only did they
get near their goal, and that was on the right battle where the Prince
of Wales himself was in command. A timely reinforcement sent by King
Edward relieved the pressure, and the French were soon in full retreat,
protected, as the English boasted, from further attack by the rampart
of dead that they left behind them. The darkness, which ended the
struggle, forbade all pursuit. Next day the fight was renewed by fresh
French forces, but a fog hampered their movements, and they fell easy
victims to the English. Then the defeated force retreated to Abbeville.
The English loss was insignificant, but the field was covered with the
bravest and noblest of the French. Among those who perished on the side
of Philip were Louis of Nevers, the chivalrous Count of Flanders, who
had sacrificed everything save his honour on the altar of feudal duty,
and the blind King John of Bohemia, whose end was as romantic and
futile as his life. Both these princes left as their successors sons of
very different stamp in Louis de Male, and Charles of Moravia. Charles,
who had recently been set up as King of the Romans by the clerical
party against Louis of Bavaria, was present at Crecy, but a prudent
retreat saved him from his father's fate.
In the midst of the Norman campaign, Philip urgently besought David,
King of Scots, to make a diversion in his favour. Since 1341 David,
then a youth of seventeen, had been back in Scotland. Prolonged truces
gave him little opportunity of trying his skill as a soldier, and his
domestic rule was not particularly successful. The full effects of the
Franco-Scottish alliance were revealed when, early in October, the
Scottish king invaded the north of England, confident that, as all the
fighting-men were in France, he would meet no more formidable opponents
than monks, peasants, and shepherds. The five days' resistance of Lord
Wake's border peel of Castleton in Liddesdale showed the baselessness
of this imagination. At its capture on October 10, David put to death
its gallant captain, a knight named Walter Selby. Then the Scots
streamed over the hills into Upper Tynedale, and soon devastated
Durham. Such of the border lords as were not with the king in France
had now prepared for resistance. Beside the Nevilles, Percys, and other
great houses of the north, the Archbishop of York, William de la Zouch,
took a vigorous part in organising the local levies, and in a very
short space of time a sufficient army assembled to make head against
the invaders. From their muster at Richmond, the northern barons
marched into the land of St. Cuthbert, many priests following their
archbishop as of old their predecessors had followed Melton or
Thurstan. On October 17 the forces joined battle at Neville's Cross, a
wayside landmark on the Red hills, a rough and broken region sloping
down to the Wear, immediately to the west of the city of Durham.
Neither host was large in size, and each stood facing the other, with
the archers at either wing, after the fashion that had become Scottish
as well as English. For a time neither army was willing to begin. At
last the English archers, irritated at the delay, advanced upon the
Scots with showers of missiles. Then the struggle grew general and
after a fierce hand-to-hand fight the English prevailed. David was
taken prisoner and was lodged in the Tower, and many of the noblest of
the Scots lay dead on the field. The diversion was a failure; the local
levies had proved amply sufficient to cope with the enemy. In thus
playing the game of the French king, David began a policy which, from
Neville's Cross to Flodden, brought embarrassment to England and
desolation to Scotland. It was the inevitable penalty of two
independent and hostile states existing in one little island.
So war-worn were the victors of Crecy that all the profit they could
win from the battle was the power to continue their march undisturbed
to the sea coast. On September 4, Edward reached the walls of Calais,
the last French town on the frontiers of Flanders, and the port whose
corsairs had inflicted exceptional damage on English shipping during
the whole of the war. With a keen eye to the military importance of the
place, the King abandoned the easy course of returning with his troops
to England, and at once sat down before Calais. It was an arduous and
prolonged siege. Calais was girt by double walls and ditches of
exceptional strength and was bravely defended by John de Vienne and a
numerous garrison. Moreover the yielding soil of the sands and marshes
around the town made it impossible for Edward to erect against the
fortifications the cumbrous machines by which engineers then sought to
batter down the walls of towns. The only method of taking the place was
by starvation. At first Edward was not able to block every avenue of
access to the beleaguered fortress. Winter came on; the troops demanded
permission to go home; the sailors threatened mutiny, and the French
were actively on the watch.
Amidst these troubles, Edward III showed a persistence worthy of his
grandfather. He remained at the seat of war, transacting much of the
business of government in the town of wooden huts which, growing up
round the besiegers' lines, made the winter siege endurable. In the
worst period of the year sufficient forces to man the trenches could
only be secured by wholesale charters of pardon to felonious and
offending soldiers, on condition that they did not withdraw from service
without the king's licence, so long as Edward himself remained beyond
the seas.1 A parliament of magnates met in March, 1347, and granted an
aid. Instead of summoning the commons, Edward preferred to raise his
chief supplies by another loan of 20,000 sacks of wool from the
merchants, by additional customs dues voted by a merchant assembly, and
by considerable loans from ecclesiastics and religious houses. In April
and May all England was alive with martial preparation, and gradually a
force far transcending the Crecy army was gathered round the walls of
Calais, while a great fleet held the sea and prohibited the access of
French ships to the doomed garrison. Northampton, ever fertile in
expedients, discovered that, even after the high seas were blocked,
boats still crept into Calais port by hugging the shallow shore. He ran
long jetties of piles from the coast line into deep water, and thus cut
off the last means of communication and of supplies. By June the town
was suffering severely from famine.
1 See for this, Rotulus Normannice in Cal. Patent Rolls,
1345-48, especially PP. 473-526. For the vast force gathered
later, see Wrottesley and Morris, U.S.
The French made a great effort, both by sea and land, to relieve
Calais. On June 25 Northampton went out with his ships as far as the
mouth of the Somme, where off Le Crotoy he won a naval victory which
made the English command of the sea absolutely secure. A month later
Philip, at the head of the land army, looked down upon the lines of
Calais from the heights of Guînes. The two cardinals made their usual
efforts for a truce, but the English would not allow their prey to be
snatched from them at the eleventh hour. Then Philip challenged the
enemy to a pitched battle, and four knights on each side were appointed
to select the place of combat. The French, however, were of no mind to
risk another Crecy, and on the morning of July 31 the smoke of their
burning camp told the English that once more Philip had shrunk from a
meeting. Then at last the garrison opened its gates on August 3, 1347.
The defenders were treated chivalrously by the victor, who admired
their courage and endurance. But the mass of the population were
removed from their homes, and numerous grants of houses and property
made to Englishmen. Edward resolved to make his conquest an English
town, and, from that time onwards, it became the fortress through which
an English army might at any time be poured into France, and the
warehouse from which the spinners and weavers of Flanders were to draw
their supplies of raw wool. For more than two hundred years, English
Calais retained all its military and most of its commercial importance.
Later conquests enabled a ring of forts to be erected round it which
strengthened its natural advantages.
Crecy, Neville's Cross, Aiguillon, and Calais did not exhaust the
glories of this strenuous time. The war of the Breton succession, which
Northampton had waged since 1345, was continued in 1346 by Thomas
Dagworth, a knight appointed as his lieutenant on his withdrawal to
join the army of Crecy and Calais. The Montfort star was still in the
ascendant, and even the hereditary dominions of Joan of Penthièvre were
assailed. An English garrison was established at La Roche Derien,
situated some four miles higher up the river Jaudy than the little open
episcopal city of Tréguier, and communicating by the river with the sea
and with England. So troublesome did Montfort's garrison at La Roche
become to the vassals of Penthièvre, that in the summer of 1347 Charles
of Blois collected an army, wherein nearly all the greatest feudal
houses of Brittany were strongly represented, and sat down before La
Roche. Dagworth, one of the ablest of English soldiers, was at Carhaix,
in the heart of the central uplands, when he heard of the danger of the
single English post within the lands of Penthièvre. He at once hurried
northwards, and on the night of June 19 rested at the abbey of Bégard,
about ten miles to the south of La Roche. From Bégard two roads led to
La Roche, one on each bank of the Jaudy. Thinking that Dagworth would
pursue the shorter road on the left bank, Charles of Blois stationed a
portion of his army at some distance from La Roche on that side of the
Jaudy, while the rest remained with himself on the right bank before
the walls of the town. Dagworth, however, chose the longer route, and
before daybreak, on the morning of June 20, fell suddenly upon Charles.
A fierce fight in the dark was ended after dawn in favour of Montfort
by a timely sally of the beleaguered garrison. In the confusion Charles
forgot to recall the division uselessly stationed beyond the Jaudy, and
this error completed his ruin. Charles fought like a hero, and, after
receiving seventeen wounds, yielded up his sword to a Breton lord
rather than to the English commander. When his wounds were healed,
Charles was sent to London, where he joined David of Scotland, the
Count of Eu, and the Lord of Tancarville. It looked as if Montfort's
triumph was secured.
In the midst of his successes Edward made a truce, yielding to the
earnest request of the cardinals, "through his reverence to the
apostolic see". The truce of Calais was signed on September 28, and
included Scotland and Brittany as well as France within its scope. On
October 12 Edward returned to his kingdom. Financial exhaustion, the
need of repose, the unwillingness of his subjects to continue the
combat, and the failure of the Flemish and Netherlandish alliances
sufficiently explain this halt in the midst of victory. Yet from the
military standpoint Edward's action, harmful everywhere to his
partisans, was particularly fatal in Brittany, where most of Penthièvre
and nearly all upper Brittany were still obedient to Charles of
Blois.1 But Edward had embarked upon a course infinitely beyond his
material resources. When a special effort could only give him the one
town of Calais, how could he ever conquer all France?
1 See on this A. de la Borderie, Hist. de Brétagne, iii.,
507, et seq.
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