A Distant Mirror (15 page)

If the fiction of chivalry molded outward behavior to some extent, it did not, any more than other models that man has made for himself, transform human nature. Joinville’s account of the crusaders at Damietta in 1249 shows the knights under St. Louis plunged in brutality, blasphemy, and debauchery. Teutonic knights in their annual forays against the unconverted natives of Lithuania conducted manhunts of the peasants for sport. Yet, if the code was but a veneer over violence, greed, and sensuality, it was nevertheless an ideal, as Christianity was an ideal, toward which man’s reach, as usual, exceeded his grasp.

Chapter 4

E
dward III’s first campaign in France, halted by the truce of 1342, had been inconclusive and without strategic result except for the naval battle fought off Sluys, the port of Bruges, in 1340. Here where the mouth of the Scheldt widens among protecting isles to form a great natural harbor, the French had assembled 200 ships from as far away as Genoa and the Levant for a projected invasion of England. The outcome of the battle was an English victory that destroyed the French fleet and for the time being gave England command of the Channel. It was won by virtue of a military innovation that was to become the nemesis of France.

This was the
longbow, derived from the Welsh and developed under Edward I for use against the Scots in the highlands. With a range reaching 300 yards and a rapidity, in skilled hands, of ten to twelve arrows a minute in comparison to the crossbow’s two, the longbow represented a revolutionary delivery of military force. Its arrow was three feet long, about half the length of the formidable six-foot bow, and at a range of 200 yards it was not supposed to miss its target. While at extreme range its penetrating power was less than that of the crossbow, the longbow’s fearful hail shattered and demoralized the enemy. Preparing for the challenge to France, Edward had to make up for the disparity in numbers by some superiority in weaponry or tactics. In 1337 he had prohibited on pain of death all sport except archery and canceled the debts of all workmen who manufactured the bows of yew and their arrows.

Another new weapon, the gun, entered history at this time, but meekly and tentatively and much less effectively than the longbow. Invented about 1325, the first
ribaud
or
pot de fer
, as the French called it, was a small iron cannon shaped like a bottle which fired an iron bolt with a triangular head. When a French raiding force at the opening of
the war sacked and burned Southampton in 1338, it brought along one
ribaud
furnished with three pounds of gunpowder and 48 bolts. In the next year the French manufactured more in the form of several tubes bound to a wheeled platform, with their touchholes aligned so that all could be fired at once. But they proved too small to fire a projectile with enough force to do serious damage. The English reportedly used some small cannon at Crécy without noticeable effect and definitely had them at the siege of Calais, where they proved powerless against the city’s stone walls. Later, when cast in brass or copper and enlarged in size, they were useful against bridges and city or castle gates or in defense of these, but stone walls withstood them for another hundred years. Difficulties in re-loading, ramming the powder, inserting the projectile, and containing the gas until it built up enough explosive force, frustrated effective firing throughout the 14th century.

In the sea fight at Sluys, with Edward in personal command, the longbowmen dominated the English armament, with one ship of men-at-arms placed between every two ships of archers, plus extra ships of archers for reinforcements if need arose. Not naval power but the strength of soldiers and archers on board ship determined sea battle in this era. They operated from high-decked cogs of 100 to 300 tons fitted with fighting platforms or “castles” for the archers. The battle was “fierce and terrible,” reports Froissart, “for battles on sea are more dangerous and fiercer than battles by land, for on the sea there is no recoiling or fleeing.” Under the archers’ attack the French were driven from their decks and, pursued by ill-luck and error, were engulfed in defeat.

No one dared tell the outcome of the battle to Philip VI until his jester was thrust forward and said, “
Oh, the cowardly English, the cowardly English!” arid on being asked why, replied, “They did not jump overboard like our brave Frenchmen.” The King evidently got the point. The fish drank so much French blood, it was said afterward, that if God had given them the power of speech they would have spoken in French.

The English victory led nowhere at the moment because Edward could not deliver sufficient force on land. His various allies from the Low Countries, acquired at great expense in subsidies, were slipping away, having no basic interest in his goal. Even his father-in-law, Count William of Hainault, returned to a more natural attachment to France. With his own forces inadequate and his finances bankrupt, Edward was forced to accept the Pope’s offer to arrange a truce. He withdrew, but only
pour mieux sauter
.

What was he really fighting for? What was the real cause of a war
that was to stretch beyond imagining halfway into the next century? As in most wars, the cause was a mixture of the political, economic, and psychological. Edward wanted to obtain the ultimate sovereignty of Guienne and Gascony, that lower western corner of France remaining from the Duchy of Aquitaine which the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought to his ancestor Henry II five generations before. The King of France still retained superior sovereignty under the formula of
superioritas et resortum
, which gave the inhabitants the right of appeal to the ultimate sovereign. Since his decisions were more than likely to go in their favor against their English overlord, and since the citizens, knowing this, exercised the right frequently, the situation was an endless source of conflict. To the English
superioritas et resortum
was politically and psychologically intolerable.

The situation was the more galling because of Guienne’s importance to the English economy. With its fertile valleys, long coast, and network of navigable rivers all leading to the main port of Bordeaux, it was the greatest wine-exporting region in the world. England imported the wine and other products and sent back wool and cloth, taking on every transaction a handsome revenue from export taxes at Bordeaux and import taxes at English ports. Between Bordeaux and Flanders the same flourishing commerce was exchanged, arousing the envy of central France. To the French monarchy the English foothold within the realm was unacceptable. Every French king for 200 years had tried by war, confiscation, or treaty to regain Aquitaine. The quarrel was old and deep and bound for war as the sparks fly upward.

Edward III was fifteen years old when he ascended the throne in 1327, 25 when he embarked on war with France, and 34 at the time of the second attempt in 1346. Well built and vigorous with long-flowing golden hair, mustache, and beard, he was at the height of his energies, expansive and kingly, vain, gracious, willful, and no stranger to the worst in man. Having grown up under the vicious strife surrounding the murder of his father’s favorites, the deposition and murder of his father, and the overthrow and hanging of his mother’s lover, Mortimer, who had seized power, he seemed, as far as history knows, unscarred by the experience. He understood practical politics without possessing any larger sense of rulership. He had no great qualities apart from or ahead of his time, but shone in those qualities his time admired in a king: he loved pleasure, battle, glory, hunts and tournaments, and extravagant display. One analysis of his character contains the phrases “boyish charm” and “a certain youthful petulance,” suggesting that
the King of England too showed signs of the characteristic medieval juvenility.

When Edward launched his claim to be the rightful King of France, it is uncertain how seriously he took it, but as a device it was of incomparable value in giving him the appearance of a righteous cause. While desirable in any epoch, a “just war” in the 14th century was virtually a legal necessity as the basis for requisitioning feudal aids in men and money. It was equally essential for securing God on one’s side, for war was considered fundamentally an appeal to the arbitrament of God. A “just war” had to be one of public policy declared by the sovereign, and it had to be in a “just” cause—that is, directed against some “injustice” in the form of crime or fault on the part of the enemy. As formulated by the inescapable Thomas Aquinas, it required a third criterion: right intention on the part of the participants, but how this could be tested, the great expounder did not say. Even more convenient than the help of God was the “right of spoil”—in practice, pillage—that accompanied a just war. It rested on the theory that the enemy, being “unjust,” had no right to property, and that booty was the due reward for risk of life in a just cause.

The claim to the French crown gave an excuse of legality to any vassal of France whom Edward could recruit as an ally. If he, not Philip, were the rightful King of France, a vassal could transfer his homage on the ground that it had simply been misplaced. Allegiance in the 14th century was still given to a person, not a nation, and the great territorial lords of duchies and counties felt themselves free to make alliances as if almost autonomous. The Harcourts of Normandy and the Duke and other lords of Brittany, for various reasons, did just that. Edward’s claim through his mother gave him the one thing that made his venture feasible—support within France and a friendly beachhead. He never had to fight his way in. In either Normandy or Brittany this situation was to last forty years, and at Calais, captured after the Battle of Crécy, it was to outlast the Middle Ages.

In Brittany the war centered upon the relentless feud between two rival claimants to the dukedom and two parties of the population, one supported by France and the other by England. As a result, France was perpetually endangered by the access given to the enemy. The Breton seacoast was open to English ships, English garrisons were on Breton soil, Breton nobles were openly allied to Edward. Brittany was France’s Scotland, choleric, Celtic, stony, bred to opposition and resistance, and ready to use the English in its struggles against its overlord as the Scots used the French in theirs. Along its rockbound coast, in Michelet’s words, “two enemies, earth and sea, man and nature, meet in
eternal conflict.” Storms throw up monstrous waves, fifty, sixty, eighty feet, whose foam flies as high as the church steeple. “Nature is atrocious here; so is man; they seem to understand each other.”

The contestants for the dukedom were two relentless extremists, a man and a woman. In 1341 the last Duke had died, leaving a half-brother, Jean Comte de Montfort, and a niece, Jeanne de Penthièvre, as rival heirs. Montfort was the candidate and ally of England while Jeanne’s claim was assumed by her husband, Charles de Blois, a nephew of Philip VI, who became the French candidate for the dukedom.

Given to the study of books as a child, Charles was an ascetic of exaggerated piety who sought spirituality by mortifying the flesh. Like Thomas à Becket, he wore unwashed clothes crawling with lice; he put pebbles in his shoes, slept on straw on the floor next to his wife’s bed, and after his death was found to have worn a coarse shirt of horsehair under his armor, and cords wound so tightly around his body that the knots dug into his flesh. By these practices a seeker of holiness expressed contempt for the world, self-abasement, and humility, although he often found himself guilty of a perverse pride in his excesses. Charles confessed every night so that he might not go to sleep in a state of sin. He fathered a bastard son called Jehan de Blois, but
sins
of the flesh did not have to be eschewed, only repented. He treated the humble with deference, it was said, met the complaints of the poor with goodness and justice, and refrained from too heavy taxes. Such was his reputation for saintliness that when he undertook to walk barefoot in the snow to a Breton shrine, the people covered his path with straw and blankets, but he took another way at a cost of bleeding and frozen feet, so that for weeks afterward he was unable to walk.

His piety detracted not at all from his ferocious pursuit of the dukedom. He stated his claim below the walls of Nantes by having his siege engines hurl into the city the heads of thirty captured partisans of Montfort. His successful siege of Quimper was followed by a ruthless massacre of 2,000 civilian inhabitants of all ages and both sexes. According to then current laws of war, the besieged could make terms if they surrendered, but not if they forced a siege to its bitter end, so presumably Charles felt no compunctions. On this occasion, after he had chosen the place of assault, he was warned of rising flood waters, but refused to alter his decision, saying, “Does not God have empire over the waters?” When his men succeeded in taking the city before being trapped by the flood, the people took it for a miracle owed to Charles’s prayers.

When Charles captured Jean de Montfort and sent him to Paris to be held prisoner by Philip VI, Montfort’s cause was taken up “with the
courage of a man and the heart of a lion” by his remarkable wife. Riding from town to town, she rallied the allegiance of dispirited partisans to her three-year-old son, saying, “Ha, seigneurs, never mourn for my lord whom you have lost. He is but one man,” and promising that she had riches enough to maintain the cause. She provisioned and fortified garrisons, organized resistance, “paid largely and gave freely,” presided over councils, conducted diplomacy, and expressed herself in eloquent and graceful letters. When Charles de Blois besieged Hennebont, she led a heroic defense in full armor astride a war-horse in the streets, exhorting the soldiers under a hail of arrows and ordering women to cut short their skirts and carry stones and pots of boiling pitch to the walls to cast down upon the enemy. During a lull she led a party of knights out a secret gate, and galloped by a roundabout way to take the enemy camp in the rear, destroyed half their force, and defeated the siege. She devised feints and stratagems, wielded her sword in sea fights, and when her husband escaped from the Louvre in disguise only to die after reaching Brittany, she implacably continued the fight for her son.