The Hundred Years War (2 page)

On All Fool’s Day 1328 the widowed Queen gave birth to a posthumous daughter. Philip at once summoned a well-chosen assembly to Paris, who swiftly acknowledged him as their King—Philip VI. They did not know how much misery and destruction they had thereby brought upon France.

Across the Channel an even more dramatic scene took place two years later. Parliament had met at Nottingham in October 1330 and Isabel, the Queen Mother, and her lover Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, who was the real ruler of England, had taken up residence in the castle. On a dark night the eighteen-year-old King Edward III and a band of young lords entered the fortress through a secret passage and, after cutting down the guards, burst into the pregnant Queen Isabel’s bedchamber to seize Mortimer—Edward personally broke down the door with a battle-axe, though he tried to avoid being seen by his mother. Despite Isabel’s plea, ‘Fair son, fair son, have pity on gentle Mortimer,’ Roger was hanged, drawn and quartered on the Common Gallows at Tyburn. The young King had at last won control of his kingdom.

Edward had every reason to hate both Mortimer and his mother. The ‘She Wolf of France’ seems always to have despised her husband, Edward II—the loser at Bannockburn, a peculiarly inept ruler and a reputed homosexual. In 1326 she and Mortimer had forced Edward to abdicate, replacing him with his son as a puppet monarch; a year later the deposed King was horribly murdered, being buggered with a red-hot poker. Mortimer, perhaps the nastiest man ever to rule England, had governed by fear; not only had he killed Edward II but he had tricked his brother, the Earl of Kent, into a conspiracy and then legally murdered him. To cap everything he had got the Queen Mother with child. However, Edward was merciful to Isabel, allowing her to withdraw to a luxurious retirement at Castle Rising in Norfolk where he visited her once a year.

Isabel was the link between the Kings of England and France, for she was Philip VI’s first cousin. She was also the late King Charles’s sister and many thought that she or her son should have inherited the throne of France, and not the Valois. At this date there was no problem of nationality: Anglo-Norman French was still a living tongue, spoken and written by the English ruling class until the last quarter of the fourteenth century. It was the first language of Edward III and his sons, probably of his grandsons, and even perhaps of his great-grandsons ; Edward himself had to be taught English as part of his childhood education. Moreover, as Duke of Guyenne and Count of Ponthieu, Edward was one of the Twelve Peers of France and a French magnate.

During the assembly which Philip had summoned to Paris on the death of Charles IV, two English envoys had demanded the crown for Queen Isabel. There was only one instance in France of a female claim being set aside and that was very recent—when John I had died in 1316, after ten days of life and kingship, his sister had been excluded from the succession by an assembly. They were unable to produce any convincing legal argument in support of their decision, but the girl’s guardian conveniently renounced her claims on her behalf. The English spokesman, Bishop Adam Orleton of Worcester, argued a plausible case ; that the precedent of 1316 was no true precedent as no woman had ever been
legally
excluded from wearing the crown of France, even if there was no instance of a female sovereign in French history; and that it was undeniable that every feudal fief in the land, not excepting the mightest duchy, could be inherited by a woman. (The Salic Law of the ancient Franks, which forbade inheritance by a woman or through the female line, was not disinterred from the mists of time until much later.) But the assembly ‘put clean out’ Queen Isabel of England. According to Froissart they ‘maintained that the realm of France was of so great noblesse that it ought not by succession to fall into a woman’s hand’. They had had the opportunity to see Isabel and her appalling lover—with whom Orleton was known to be hand-in-glove—when they had visited the French court in 1326, and had no wish to be ruled by them.

When the young King of England won control of his kingdom, it was only as a leader of dissatisfied barons. He was far too weak to challenge Philip VI. Indeed, at this date Edward III merely hoped to retain his Duchy of Aquitaine (or Guyenne) which since 1259 the Kings of England had held as feudatories of the Kings of France. This last fragment of Henry II’s Angevin empire consisted of a long, narrow strip of coastal territory, stretching from just south of La Rochelle to Bayonne and the Pyrenees—the western parts of Guenne proper, the Saintonge and Gascony—defended by a string of frontier
bastides,
carefully sited and strongly fortified town colonies.

However, Guyenne was in no sense a colony. Though the highest administrative posts were usually held by Englishmen—those of the Seneschal of Guyenne, the Constable and Mayor of Bordeaux, and the Seneschal of the Saintonge ; and those of a number of under-seneschals and of the captains of most fortresses—in all these amounted to perhaps 200. The majority of officials were locally recruited. No Englishman was ever Archbishop of Bordeaux, and though there were plenty of English merchants there were few English landowners. All the important
seigneurs
were Guyennois, some of whom also had estates in England.

The duchy was an important source of income for Edward. There were royal toll-bridges along the entire Garonne which extracted a rich yield in taxes, for wine was to Guyenne what wool was to England; sometimes (as in 1306—1307) the revenue from Guyenne was larger than that from England. Bordeaux, the ducal capital with a population of 30,000, owed its prosperity to the English connection; wine flowed into England in such quantities as to make it cheap for all save the poorest—the fourteenth-century English drank several times more claret per head than they do today. Not only Bordeaux but Bayonne (which built the ships) and many other towns benefited from the wine trade, as did countless
seigneurs
who owned vineyards, for claret was then a blended wine which made use of such far-off vintages as those of Gaillac or Cahors. Indeed there was not a sufficient market at home for all their produce. On the other hand Guyenne depended on England for grain—in 1334 it took 50,000 quarters—and bought English wool, leather, resin and salt. The duchy’s language was not really French but Gascon, a form of Provençal. In fact it was a separate country of its own, whose inhabitants had few ties with the French Crown or the northern French. Many Guyennois found jobs in England, serving in the King’s armies during the Scottish campaigns or as merchants, especially in London; the Guyennois Henri le Waleys was Mayor of both Bordeaux and London. It was possible to appeal to England against a decision by a Guyennois court. The Plantagenets regarded Guyenne as a far more integral part of their domains than Wales or Ireland, and Froissart often refers to Guyennois as ‘the English’.

Nevertheless in 1329 Edward had to go to Amiens and pay homage to ‘our right dear cousin’, swearing in the cathedral to become ‘the King of France’s man for the Duchy of Guyenne’. He also did homage for his County of Ponthieu at the mouth of the Somme ; its capital was Abbeville and another of its towns was Crécy, of which more will be heard. After Mortimer’s fall, Edward had to agree in a document drawn up in March 1331 I ‘to bear faith and loyalty’ to the Valois. If he had refused, he might well have lost both Guyenne and Ponthieu. Since 1259 there had been incessant wrangling over the duchy’s boundaries and over the respective powers of the Duke-King and his overlord—whether the Plantagenets held Guyenne in full sovereignty or as tenants who must obey the King of France. From time to time fighting broke out. In 1325 the English Governor of Guyenne, the Earl of Kent, had been forced to surrender to Charles IV at the
bastide
of La Réole during the ‘War of Saint-Sardos’, which had been largely brought about by Edward II’s refusal to pay homage. King Charles had then contented himself with retaining the Agenais (the border area between the rivers Garonne and Dordogne), but Edward III must have recognized that the conquest of Guyenne was a logical step in the unification of France. In the latter part of 1331, disguised as a wool merchant, he again crossed the Channel to meet Philip secretly at Pont-Saint-Maxence and try to negotiate a lasting peace.

At that time the French monarchy appeared to be far stronger than the English. Matthew Paris, the famous thirteenth-century chronicler, wrote that: ‘The King of France is the King of all earthly Kings,’ and the French King was undoubtedly the first ruler in western Europe. He far outshone the Holy Roman Emperor and more or less controlled the Papacy which since 1309 had been established at Avignon—the French King being both the Pope’s protector and quasi-gaoler. And for over a century there had been no unruly nobles in France as there were in England, but a steady bringing to heel of the counts and barons. If Flanders and Brittany—and of course Guyenne—remained semi-autonomous, Philip VI none the less inherited direct control of more than three-quarters of his mighty realm.

Since the tenth century new agricultural techniques had enabled the peasants of north-western Europe to exploit their rich soil, bringing more and more forest land under the plough. Until the early fourteenth century the area under cultivation expanded every year, with an accompanying rise in the birthrate. Nowhere was this more evident than in France which in the 1330s had a population of perhaps 21 million—five times that of England. French merchants and artisans multiplied, creating the most beautiful cities and cathedrals this side of the Alps; Gothic Paris became the capital of northern Europe, with perhaps 150,000 inhabitants. Froissart, who travelled a good deal, comments: ‘One may well marvel at the noble realm of France, therein are so many towns and castles, both in the distant marches and in the heart of the realm.’

By contrast, medieval England was an underpopulated land, rather like modern Norway, with more forest and moor than arable; a poor little country whose wealth was its wool. London held some 30,000 souls. The King, unlike Philip in France, ruled with difficulty. Edward III was not the absolute monarch his grandfather had been—that had gone under Edward II. Edward III always had to take into careful account the wishes of his ‘Lords in Parliament’, about a hundred barons, bishops and abbots. Froissart observed: ‘Any man who is King of that country must conform to the will of the people and bow to many of their wishes. If he fails to do this, and misfortune comes to the country, he will be thrown over.’

The French knighthood—‘good chivalry, strong of limb and stout of heart, in great abundance’—was Philip’s most daunting asset. The man-at-arms and his giant warhorse (a particularly expensive item costing as much as £200 and trained to bite, kick and trample) constituted a unit of heavy armour which was the medieval equivalent of the tank: a massed formation of such units concentrated on a narrow front had a shattering impact. Their cult of chivalry, which has been likened to the bushido of the Japanese samurai—one should forget the fantasies of the
Morte d’Arthur—
made for excellent morale and a most formidable fighting spirit. For nearly three centuries heavy cavalrymen of this type had won almost every important victory in Christendom; they had even wrested Palestine from the infidel for a brief moment and had all but reconquered Spain from the Moors. During the last hundred years France had possessed an enormous knighthood for whom war—whether in the tournament, in the King’s host or as a mercenary—was a way of life. On at least one occasion it had broken an English army beyond recovery. In 1328 Philip VI and his men-at-arms had annihilated an army of Flemish pikemen at Cassel. In consequence Philip now enjoyed a reputation as a military leader comparable to that of Guderian and Patton at their zenith, besides commanding the largest, best equipped, most enthusiastic and most successful heavy armour in western Europe. During the early years of his reign he must have seemed invincible.

In contrast England had a dismal military record. The Earl of Kent’s poor showing in Gascony has already been mentioned. Still more serious were England’s repeated thrashings at the hands of the Scots. After Bannockburn in 1314 until a truce was negotiated in 1323, they frequently raided as far south as Yorkshire, inflicting widespread devastation. In 1327 young Edward was reduced to tears by a humiliatingly unfortunate campaign against them; the very peace he had to negotiate was called the ‘Shameful Peace of Northampton’. If only a poor and barbarous little country, Scotland nevertheless appeared to be a most effective ally against England at this time.

But, for all their undoubted fighting qualities, the Scots have been beaten more often than not by the English and in July 1333 at Halidon Hill, near Berwick, King Edward crushed them. Not only did he taste victory for the first time, but he saw what could be done by a combination of archers and dismounted cavalry defending a strong position—even though the Scots were only spearmen and light horse and not to be compared with the magnificent heavy cavalry of France. The King also systematically burnt and laid waste all Lowland Scotland—later his troops would employ the same vicious tactics in France. Jean le Bel, a chronicler who actually took part in the campaign, records the joy of the English at avenging Bannockburn and says that when Edward returned to his own country he received a triumphant reception, being ‘universally loved and honoured by high and low, as much for his noble words and deeds as for his greatness of heart and for the fair assemblies of ladies and maidens that he held, so much so that one and all said that he was King Arthur come again’.