A Great and Glorious Adventure (20 page)

The Garter was not the first such order of chivalry. There was already one in Hungary and another in Castile, but both are now long gone and in any case were not as exclusive. Much speculation
surrounds the origin of the name, mostly centring around a garter supposedly dropped by the countess of Salisbury at a post-siege celebratory party at Calais and picked up by the king with the
words ‘
Honi soit qui mal y pense
’, which can be translated ‘Evil to him who thinks evil’. There are, however, a number of candidates for the countess. It is
unlikely to be Katherine Montagu, countess of Salisbury, as she would have been getting on for fifty in 1347; it just might be Joan, the daughter of the earl of Kent executed by Queen
Isabella’s Mortimer, who had a racy past;
⁴⁹
and legend also cites a mysterious Alice of Salisbury, who by some accounts was a mistress of the king
and by others a victim of rape by him. We shall never know, but a more likely, albeit mundane, explanation is that the badge of the order had to be something that could be worn over armour,
so the order might just as easily have been the Order of the Armband. (Similarly, the motto could equally well be translated ‘Shame on him who thinks badly of
it’ – ‘it’ referring to Edward’s claim to the French throne.) Now the Garter is the oldest order of chivalry in the world, and, while the twelve priests did not
survive the Reformation, the twenty-six knights live on. Retired service officers, they are no longer necessarily poor, very few are knights and their appellation was changed by William IV to the
Military Knights of Windsor.

At this time, Europe was struck by a catastrophe so appalling that it made any major military endeavour impossible until it had run its immediate course. Sometime in the winter of 1347, a
terrible sickness arrived in Sicily, supposedly on a ship from either the Black Sea or the Middle East, and was carried on to Marseilles, from where it spread rapidly throughout Europe. While today
we refer to it as bubonic plague, because of the buboes that appeared as symptoms, modern medical science still does not know exactly what it was, although it is believed that it was some form of
virus spread by fleas that live on rats and mice. In the unhygienic conditions of the time it was almost impossible to prevent it spreading, particularly in towns where people lived close together
and sanitation was poor, and the mortality rate was very high indeed. In August 1348, it arrived in England, either on a ship from Bordeaux carrying wine or on one from the supply run to Calais
landing at Weymouth, from where it spread inexorably through Dorset, Somerset and Devon and then to London, where it was first reported in November. The symptoms were swellings (buboes) in the
groin and armpits, black blotches on the skin, a fever and death within four days.

France, already reeling from military defeat and without a strong central administration, suffered appallingly. Crops went unharvested and fields untilled; fodder that would have gone to
warhorses went to animals that were of greater agricultural value; and knights who found their incomes gone took to brigandage. As the population shrank, so did state revenues, and the currency was
devalued. The court and government fled Paris, with Philip wandering around the borders of Normandy with a handful of clerks and personal servants. To many of the French, this was God’s
punishment, although witchcraft and sorcerers of various hues were also blamed. So, too, was the practice of
blasphemy, which was now to be punished by the removal of the
tongue for persistent offenders; and, inevitably, the Jews, who came in for even more persecution than usual.

In England the effects were less, but still serious. The death rate was particularly high among the clergy, who, if they were doing their job properly, were in constant contact with victims; in
the dioceses of York and Lincoln 44 per cent of the beneficed clergy died, while in Exeter, Winchester, Norwich and Ely it was 50 per cent.
²³
For
long it has been generally accepted that up to a third of the population died in that first visitation, which by 1350 had largely run its course and was now in Scotland, but some modern authorities
think that the figure may have been much higher. Dislocation was far less in England than in France, largely for the reason that the former had both a more efficient central government which
controlled the whole country and a popular king, while the latter had to make do with various semi-independent feuding magnates and a failed and unpopular king. In England this first outbreak
tended to hit the poor and undernourished, while the nobility, who lived in a (relatively) cleaner environment, were less severely affected – unlike their counterparts in France, where the
queen, the duchess of Normandy and the Chancellor all died, as did many of the aristocracy.
⁵⁰
With the reduction in the labour pool, English
agricultural workers were no longer so closely tied to their lords and could demand higher wages. Various strictures emerged from Westminster exhorting labourers to claim no more than they had
before the plague, and lords who paid over the odds were to be fined. (The French took a rather different view and there labourers who would not work for the old rates were branded.) While in
France law and order and government did break down for a time, in England, despite rising crime and economic problems, the authorities never lost control. Recent excavation of a so-called plague
pit in East Smithfield, London, has revealed that, far from being tipped higgledy-piggledy into a hole in the manner of Belsen, the bodies were buried in neat rows, each body in its own grave,
albeit not in a coffin.

While neither side could embark on any large-scale operations of war, the fighting did not die down completely. In 1349, there was an attempt to bribe a Genoese mercenary
commander in Calais to leave the gate open and the drawbridge down one night to allow a French raiding party to recapture the town. The man took the money, agreed to betray the town on 31 December,
and sent a fast galley to report the bribe to King Edward. The king crossed to France with personal retainers and archers and ambushed the raiders as they crept through the gate. The Genoese kept
the bribe. Then Philip persuaded the Castilians, who since the death of Joan Plantagenet had thought better of their alliance with the English, to send a fleet into the Channel, presumably to
disrupt the wine trade from Bordeaux, the supply convoys to Calais, or both. English intelligence gave early warning, and on 29 August 1350 off Winchelsea at the Battle of Les Espagnols sur Mer,
the English fleet, with King Edward, the Prince of Wales and the ten-year-old John of Gaunt aboard, won a great victory over a smaller fleet but one composed of much higher (and thus more difficult
to board) Spanish ships. Edward was now thirty-seven and this was the last time he engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, but by now his prestige was such that he did not have to.

Then, in August 1350, just as France was recovering from the Black Death, Philip VI died, to be succeeded by his thirty-one-year-old son, Jean II. Jean is known in French history as Jean le Bon
– John the Good – the myth-makers having taken note of his undoubted personal courage and love of tournaments, while quietly ignoring that he was vicious, irrational, unjust, militarily
incompetent and stupid (which, in the pantheon of French royalty, means that he was very stupid indeed). He is described as being handsome and with a fine red beard, although in his portrait in the
Louvre it looks more like designer stubble that has got out of control. He too founded an order of chivalry, the Chevaliers de l’Étoile (Knights of the Star), whose members had to
swear an oath never to leave a battle alive, which largely explains why the order no longer exists. What particularly annoyed the English, and reinforced the existing antipathy to the papacy that
would eventually find expression in the Reformation, was the creation by the pope of twelve cardinals to mark the crowning of Jean II – eight Frenchmen, three Spaniards and an Italian,
completely ignoring the English candidates.

Jean was, however, in no position to renew the war just yet, although he did start to gather the funds for it, largely by imposing even more oppressive taxes and debasing
the currency – minting more of it while reducing the silver content. Despite the truce of Calais, the skirmishing in Aquitaine and Brittany had never died down, and in Brittany on 20 July
1350 the great Sir Thomas Dagworth was treacherously ambushed and killed, having fought furiously to the end. The following year, Henry of Lancaster led a short but devastating
chevauchée
through Artois and Picardy, and in Brittany the Battle of the Thirty was perhaps one of the last hurrahs of chivalric warfare. A French force commanded by Jean de
Beaumanoir sallied out of the castle of Josselin and arrived outside the walls of Ploermel eight miles away. Rather than undergo a siege, the English garrison commander, Robert of Bamborough,
agreed that thirty men-at-arms from each side would fight a decider on foot. Rules were agreed, stipulating which weapons could be used and when there would be breaks for refreshment and the
dressing of wounds, and the location was to be midway between the two castles. On 13 March 1351, the encounter duly took place, and the English lost, although they accused the French of
cheating.

Dagworth’s successor as theatre commander in Brittany was Sir Walter Bentley, a hard professional from a Staffordshire family that had often in the past been in opposition to, and in
trouble with, the king. Edward III was not, though, a man to hold grudges against those who could be useful to him and who were prepared to serve him loyally – the fact that he did not
believe in the inheritance of the sins of the fathers is shown by the inclusion among his senior commanders of a Hugh Despenser and a Roger Mortimer, both sons of men whose execution Edward had
ordered or been associated with.

On 14 August 1352, Bentley, with a small force of perhaps only 200 men-at-arms and 300 archers, beat a far larger French force at Mauron, midway between Rennes and Ploermel. In accordance with
English tactical doctrine, he placed his men on a slope with a hedge in front, men-at-arms on foot and archers on the flanks. The French had learned a little from Crécy, and their commander,
Guy de Nesle, ordered the majority of his men to dismount while several hundred mounted men were ordered to ride down the English archers. Had the attack been properly coordinated and commanded, it
might have worked. As it was, the French mounted knights did disperse the archers on the English right, but, instead of then
wheeling round and attacking the English line in
rear, they carried on to plunder Bentley’s (sparse) baggage convoy. On the English left the archers repulsed the cavalry, but in doing so they were unable to deliver the usual arrow storm on
the advancing French infantry, and de Nesle did get his infantry line to close. However, after a march uphill in layers of clothing worn both under and over their armour, these men were in no shape
for pitched hand-to-hand fighting and were seen off by the English men-at-arms. As usual, casualties are hugely over- or understated. According to the chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, the French
dead included ten great lords, 640 knights and noblemen, and a number of ‘common people not counted’, while 140 knights and nobles were taken prisoner.
²⁴
A more recent source claims eighty nobles and 500 men-at-arms were killed and 160 knights taken prisoner.
²⁵
The real
figure is probably 200 or so French killed (many of whom were Knights of the Star), while the prisoner figure seems credible. Neither source makes any mention of English casualties, and yet there
must have been some among the archers on the English right. Le Baker says that Bentley had twenty archers executed on the spot for running away when the French cavalry attacked, but this is most
unlikely – although he may well have had one of the captains or vintenars executed as a warning to others.

Although England’s economy had recovered more quickly from the plague than that of France (wages had gone up, but prices had too, so the lords could retain almost the same income as
before), Edward was quite happy to negotiate while still preparing for a renewal of the war. Desultory negotiations had been going on since the capture of Calais, but always foundered on Philip
VI’s refusal to restore the English lands other than as fiefs of the Valois, which was quite unacceptable to the English. Things had changed by 1353, as not only had Philip been succeeded by
Jean but also Pope Clement VI had died and Innocent VI was elected to replace him. Innocent was even more pro-French than his predecessor, but he did see the need to end the war in a Europe still
trying to recover from the ravages of the plague.

Serious deliberations began in the castle of Guînes, five miles south of Calais, which had been taken, in breach of the truce, by a
coup de main
led by John Dancaster, a squire
stationed in Calais. Bored by garrison duty there, he had collected a few soldiers, taken them over the Guînes wall by
night with blackened faces, and seized the
castle. The go-between, moving between Avignon, Paris and Guînes, was Cardinal Guy of Boulogne, and the result, arrived at in April 1354, was the Treaty of Guînes, by which, in return
for giving up his claim to the French throne, Edward was to receive Aquitaine, Normandy, Touraine, Poitou and the town and surrounding area of Calais in full sovereignty. It would bring the war
finally to an end, give the English what was rightfully theirs, and allow Jean to retain part of his kingdom rather than lose all of it. The treaty was to be ratified by the pope at Avignon. It did
not happen. Jean thought better of it, his magnates were against it, and Guy of Boulogne was in any case out of favour. King Edward was angry and frustrated with the collapse of the negotiations,
particularly as he had assured Parliament in Westminster that a permanent peace had been obtained and that there need no longer be increased taxation to support the war.

The French king must be made to see the error of his ways and this time there would be no compromise. The plan for 1355 was to attack France from three directions: the king himself would strike
inland from Calais, Henry of Lancaster, now a duke, from Normandy, and the Black Prince (as the Prince of Wales was known after Crécy) from Aquitaine. There were problems with the weather
and with finding enough soldiers, but in October 1355 Edward landed at Calais with perhaps 8,000 men and moved inland towards Amiens, where Jean of Valois had assembled a much greater French army.
Then, bad news arrived from England: the Scots were on the rampage again, had invaded England on 6 November and were laying siege to Berwick Castle. They were perfectly accustomed to coping without
a king (David was still a prisoner in England) and claimed that they were bound by treaty to attack England if France was invaded. When the Scots last invaded, in 1346, there had been sufficient
troops in the north to deal with them, but the need to raise three armies in 1355 and the reduction in the population caused by the plague had forced the king to array men from the north, and there
were very few left in the border counties. Edward had no choice but to reverse his progress into France, return to Calais and re-embark.