The Knight in History (27 page)

Over the next several years Charles’s tactic, applied by Du Guesclin, reaped remarkable results. Town after town, castle after castle, fell to siege, assault, mine, ruse, or merely to Du Guesclin’s persuasive oratory, in which a mixture of threats, promises, and appeals to loyalty was bellowed up at the battlements. When in 1372 Edward III dispatched a large expedition under the earl of Pembroke to reinforce Aquitaine, the Castilian enterprise of the previous decade paid a handsome dividend. A fleet of galleys sent by Henry of Trastamare, making an early use of gunpowder at sea, routed the English ships off La Rochelle and took Pembroke prisoner. Du Guesclin traded his Spanish estates to Henry for the person of the earl, whose ransom of 130,000 pounds Edward III undertook to raise with the aid of the town council of Bruges, capital of his Flemish ally. A legal complication arose when Pembroke died in captivity and the councillors of Bruges stopped payment, and in the end Charles V paid the remainder of the sum owing Du Guesclin.
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The French offensive on land continued. At Moncontour, northwest of Poitiers, an English captain who claimed that Du Guesclin had defaulted on a debt contracted in Spain hung Du Guesclin’s coat of arms upside down on a gibbet over the town gate. Du Guesclin furiously pressed the siege until the town surrendered and the captain could be hung in the same place.
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Receiving news that a pro-French faction in Poitiers was ready to open the city gates, he raced thither just in time to forestall Sir Thomas Percy with an English relief army. Independent-minded La Rochelle, isolated on the sea coast by the English naval defeat, got rid of its English garrison by a ruse and agreed to liberal terms.

Edward III prepared another large expeditionary force “to reconquer all he had lost, or lose all that remained,” but contrary winds foiled the king, and Surgères, the stronghold it was intended to relieve, surrendered to Du Guesclin. On December II the constable, with the royal princes and other captains, made another solemn entry into Paris with prisoners, who included, besides the earl of Pembroke, Sir Thomas Percy and the Captal de Buch, for whom Charles V refused to name a ransom and who languished in Paris until his death.

Back in Aquitaine in 1373 Du Guesclin besieged Chizé, southwest of Poitiers, trapped a relief army and forced its surrender, and followed up by capture of both Chizé and the larger town of Niort.
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Edward III again had recourse to the
chevauchée
. This one was led by the duke of Lancaster, accompanied by Jean de Montfort, the Breton duke who had again allied himself with the English. Lancaster pillaged and burned a broad path from Calais to the Loire. Once again castles and towns held out, and once again Charles vetoed the clamor to fight a battle. Du Guesclin stoutly seconded the king. Froissart reports that he told the Great Council, “I don’t say we should never fight them, but I want [the situation] to be to our advantage.”
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King and constable were vindicated when Lancaster’s army found itself stranded in the most barren part of France as winter set in, and limped into Bordeaux with half its men and three quarters of its horses missing, and nothing to show for its effort.

Du Guesclin’s public glory was marred for him by private grief when Tiphaine died at the age of forty-four. Two years later (1374), at the entreaty of Charles, he married Jeanne de Laval-Tinteniac, who like Tiphaine was a Breton and a daughter of one of the champions of the Battle of the Thirty. His second marriage like his first remained childless. Reports of illegitimate children seem to be belied by his failure to include them in his will.
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In the later 1370s, while the liberation and conquest of lands in the southwest continued, Brittany and Normandy again became scenes of warfare. Charles the Bad of Navarre once more joined Jean de Montfort of Brittany in allying with the English, and Du Guesclin was ordered to deal with both. The campaigns proved easy, but that in Brittany had a bitter outcome. Perhaps misled by the welcome widely bestowed on Du Guesclin, Charles the Wise made his only unwise move when he decided to annex this historically autonomous province to the crown (December 1378). The Bretons, who liked the king of France as an ally, had no use for him as a sovereign. A confederation for the defense of Breton independence was formed at Rennes, and Jean de Montfort, until now unpopular, was invited back from England, whither Du Guesclin had driven him. Even Jeanne, the widow of Charles de Blois, gave Montfort her support. Du Guesclin and other loyal Bretons urged Charles to give in, but the king insisted on a march on Rennes. For once the constable was unable to carry out the king’s command, as his Bretons deserted by the hundreds. He ended by returning to Pontorson to renew his pleas for peace. In Paris he became the object of abusive criticism from royal officials who had advocated the annexation. In angry reply he offered to surrender his constable’s sword to the king and go back to Castile. Charles prevailed upon him to go instead to Languedoc, whither a number of brigand bands, loosed by a papal-negotiated truce in the Aquitaine fighting, had roamed. Charles pointedly excluded Bretons from the force placed under Du Guesclin’s orders, stirring him to an eloquent protest:

“Sire, I have fought often in France, in Spain, in battles, assaults, encounters, and sieges of cities…. Many good captains…have greatly aided me. Now that you have sent them away, I feel that I am losing much of my strength…. I beseech you most humbly, sire, to make peace with the duke of Brittany, for the men of war of that country have helped you very ably in all your conquests.”
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Joining the duke de Berry, he helped take the Anglo-Gascon brigand stronghold of Chaliers, after whose fall he besieged Château-neuf-de-Randon, between Mende and Le Puy. There he fell ill with the “fever” that commonly afflicted the medieval military camp. Feeling his life nearing its end he dictated his will, remembering numerous old servitors and providing for prayers for his soul. He requested that he be buried at the church of the Jacobins at Dinan, where Tiphaine lay. The next day he had his constable’s sword brought, saying, “Others, perhaps, would have made better use of it. Tell the king I am grieved not to have served him longer, but more faithfully I could not have.”
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On the morning of July 13, 1380, he summoned the knights from the siege lines to bid them farewell: “I am very sorry to go without having…told the king of the merits of each of you.” He added a last injunction: “Remember that your business is only with those who bear arms. The churchmen, the poor, the women and children are not your enemies.”
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Shortly after he had died, with the crucifix clasped in both hands, the English captain came to surrender the town, kneeling to place the keys to the fortress on the dead man’s shroud.

Du Guesclin’s body was embalmed at nearby Puy-en-Velay, where his entrails were preserved while the body was carried to Brittany. Cities along the route rendered homage, people falling to their knees as the catafalque passed. Rites were performed in hundreds of towns and villages, those in the great cathedrals of Le Mans and Chartres rivaling the obsequies of kings. Charles decreed that Dinan should have only the hero’s heart, and the funeral journey was completed in Paris, where the body was buried at St. Denis with the kings of France. The epitaph reads: “Here lies the noble man, Messire Bertrand du Guesclin, count of Longueville and constable of France, who died at the castle of Randon in Givaudan, in the seneschalry of Beaucaire, on July 13 MCCCLXXX. Pray to God for him.”
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Three months later Charles V also died. All the territory lost by his father and grandfather had been recovered save Calais, and in addition the ancient English provinces of Gascony and Guienne had been reduced to the enclaves of Bayonne and Bordeaux. Brittany again drew close to France, and though no official end was made to the war with England, Wat Tyler’s rebellion, provoked by a heavy war tax, signaled a cessation of hostilities until the next century.

Bertrand du Guesclin was perhaps as true a knight as a real-life man of the fourteenth century could be. His extraordinary popularity attests to his reputation for being “the most courteous” and “the least covetous” knight as well as a terrific fighter and born leader. He himself is reputed to have offered this self-evaluation: “A poor man who had riches and provinces pass through his hands and kept nothing, but gave all to the cause which he served.”

His long career illuminates important developments that altered both the character of warfare and the institution of knighthood in the fourteenth century. In marked contrast to earlier practice he was knighted only at the age of thirty-four, and only following conspicuous service on the battlefield. No longer serving in response to the traditional summons of lord to vassal, he drew regular pay, fixed by law and contract, as a professional soldier, and dispensed it as a captain of mercenaries. The bands of disciplined “brigands” he led were the forerunners of the professional standing armies of the following centuries.

Within the cohort of the “men-at-arms”—the armored, mounted hand-to-hand fighters—the knights still held their elite status, but they were now heavily outnumbered by the squires, who were similarly equipped and cost half as much. In addition, the long-range fighters, the archers and crossbowmen, had become more serious competitors, now wearing their own, somewhat lighter armor, and while still fighting on foot, moving to battle and siege on horseback. Whereas at the beginning of the century the archer or foot soldier had been regarded as militarily worth only a tenth as much as a mounted knight (the popular saying was that a hundred knights were worth a thousand foot soldiers), the mounted crossbowmen of Du Guesclin’s campaigns in Aquitaine drew pay amounting to a third or half that of a knight, and nearly equivalent to that of a squire. The true foot soldier was for the time eclipsed.
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The emergence of gunpowder artillery added a still small but potent new element of military and social change. The brass, bronze, and iron cannon were made by common craftsmen who also took charge of their operation, serving directly under royal authority and separating the new arm from the traditional military class of knights and nobles.

On the other side of the coin, Du Guesclin’s career shows how the leveling forces that were depriving the knight of his once unique military role were opening the way for those of exceptional ability to rise to the highest military offices (and civilian offices as well).

Finally, in Du Guesclin’s appeals to incipient patriotism, appeals echoed by his contemporaries, both English and French, may be seen the beginning of the national consciousness that provided the psychological foundation for the modern European state, a trend that pointed toward the inevitable sunset of the age of chivalry.

8

English Knights of the Fifteenth Century: Sir John Fastolf and the Pastons

IN THESE DAYS WE SEE OPENLY HOW MANY POOR MEN THROUGH THEIR SERVICE IN THE FRENCH WARS HAVE BECOME NOBLE, SOME BY THEIR PRUDENCE, SOME BY THEIR ENERGY, SOME BY THEIR VALOUR, AND SOME BY OTHER VIRTUES WHICH…ENNOBLE MEN
.

—Nicholas Upton,
De Studio Militari

AND NOWADAYS…THE MAN WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO SET PLACES ON FIRE, TO ROB CHURCHES AND USURP THEIR RIGHTS AND TO IMPRISON THE PRIESTS, IS NOT FIT TO CARRY ON WAR. AND FOR THESE REASONS THE KNIGHTS OF TODAY HAVE NOT THE GLORY AND THE PRAISE OF THE OLD CHAMPIONS OF FORMER TIMES, AND THEIR DEEDS CAN NEVER COME TO GREAT PERFECTION OF VIRTUE
.

—Honoré Bouvet,
Tree of Battles

SIR JOHN FASTOLF, WHO WAS CONSIDERED A VERY WISE AND VALIANT KNIGHT
….

—Jean Wavrin du Forestal,
Anciennes cbroniques d’Angleterre

T
HE NAME OF Sir John Fastolf is known to us for a number of disparate reasons: as the skillful commander in a minor English victory in the Hundred Years War known as the “Battle of the Herrings” and a captain in a major defeat, the battle of Patay; as the author of a famous report to his government outlining a “scorched earth” policy; as a correspondent and protagonist in the Paston letters; and as the caricatured prototype of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. His career may be seen as a continuation of Du Guesclin’s in illustrating the evolution of warfare toward the professional army and toward the eclipse of the medieval knight.

Although an able and courageous soldier, Fastolf lacked the romantic appeal of William Marshal or Du Guesclin to inspire poets and biographers, and a record of his “Acts” composed by his secretary has disappeared. Nevertheless, thanks to the growth in literacy and documentation of the later Middle Ages, much significant biographical information can be gleaned from legal documents, letters, and references in chronicles.

Fastolf differed from most earlier knights in that he evidently was of middle-class origin—not unheard of by the fifteenth century. His ancestors were wealthy merchants in the Norfolk port of Great Yarmouth; his grandfather, Alexander Fastolf, was a shipowner. His father, John Fastolf, married into the lesser nobility, taking as wife a woman who was the daughter of one country gentleman and the widow of another. The elder John Fastolf became a squire in the household of King Edward III; in other words, a second-level member of a retinue composed of knights, squires, and sergeants.
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From his father, John Fastolf the elder inherited manors in Norfolk, notably that of Caister, forty miles east of Norwich.
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