The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain (15 page)

For several months king and archbishop were involved in a heated correspondence, which was highly abusive on Edward’s part. John stood his ground and demanded to be tried by his peers. This was the worst confrontation between king and archbishop since Henry II had fallen out with Becket, but John won the support of several barons, who persuaded Edward to issue a statute confirming the right of the leading men of the realm to be tried by their peers and not by the king’s justices. Edward was shaken by this display of solidarity, and in October 1341 he was reconciled to the Stratfords. Nevertheless, as soon as he had the opportunity he revoked the parliamentary statute concerning the judicial rights of the ruling class.

Meanwhile, the new Duke of Brittany, John de Montfort, who was eager to establish his independence from Philip VI, offered to do fealty to Edward. This gave the English king another valuable foothold on the continent and, over the next two years, he campaigned in northern France, although he was hampered by lack of funds from mounting a major expedition. His failure to service his debts had contributed to the bankruptcy of his Italian bankers, and his shoddy
treatment of parliament made it impossible to raise more taxes. When parliament was summoned in 1343, both Lords and Commons united to demand that statutes should not be unilaterally annulled by the king.

Determined to proceed with his military ambitions, in 1344 Edward organized a grand round table at Windsor. This magnificent festival emphasized the splendour of the monarchy and its spiritual identity with the Arthurian legends and the ideals of chivalry. All the leading nobles and knights of the realm were invited to take part in jousts and to display their combat prowess, and Edward vowed to found a military brotherhood or secular order of 300 knights, based on King Arthur’s fellowship of the Round Table.

Whatever romantic ideals the king may have espoused, his immediate political objective was to unite England’s military class behind him for the next projected stage of his war with Philip. He also made clever use of sermons and royal proclamations to draw attention to the perfidy of the French king in supporting David II and the threat to England’s legitimate interests in Gascony and Brittany. On a less elevated level the propaganda pointed out the rewards that soldiers could expect from looting the towns and villages of the lands they conquered and ransoming French knights. It worked: Edward received the sanction and support of parliament for a massive invasion of France in 1346.

A force had been despatched to Gascony the previous year, and in July 1346 Edward gathered an army of 4,000 men-at-arms, 10,000 archers and an unspecified number of Welsh and Irish infantry at Portsmouth for a cross-Channel thrust.
Despite his loud and frequently uttered claims to the French crown, Edward’s real aims were more immediate: he needed, by plunder, to replenish his coffers and he intended to frighten Philip into renouncing his claims in Aquitaine.

He landed on the Normandy coast and made for Caen. Froissart describes the impact made on the citizenry who had never seen such an invasion force before: ‘When the inhabitants saw the English battalions approaching in serried ranks, with all their banners and pennons flying in the breeze, and heard the archers roaring – for they had never heard or seen archers before – they were so terrified that nothing in this world could have prevented them from fleeing. They ran from the town in disorder … falling over each other in their haste.’
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They did well to flee, for those who stayed and tried to make a fight of it were slaughtered to a man. The English helped themselves to all the food they needed and sent wagon-loads of booty back home. They continued their marauding way through northern France, and it was not until they had crossed the Somme that news reached them that King Philip was approaching with a superior force. Edward had time to choose the ground for the coming battle and placed his men in defensive formation on rising ground overlooking the River Maie, close to the village of Crécy.

The course of the battle (on 26 August 1346) was largely determined by the contrasting tactical abilities of the generals. Edward had learned how to use longbowmen and dismounted knights. Philip not only relied on the traditional deployment of his resources, but he weakened them by poor
battlefield direction. His army arrived at the site after a long march, when his men were tired and the sun was low in the west and shining into their eyes. He first ordered his vanguard to charge, then decided that it would be better to wait until the next day. Receiving conflicting orders, some of his men turned back while others pressed on. Out of range of their targets and pierced by English arrows, the Genoese cross-bowmen fell back, throwing down their bows. The king, who on sighting the English changed colour ‘because he hated them’, lost control of the situation. Seeing the Genoese flee, either he or his brother, the Duke of Alençon, shouted, ‘Slay these rascals who get in our way!’ while his knights, ‘in haste and evil order’, slashed at the archers in their effort to cut a way through. Out of this terrible tangle in their own ranks, the French launched attack after attack on the enemy, but the disciplined line of England’s longbowmen, stiffened by the long practice their weapon required, held firm and sowed confusion and death by their missiles. Then English knights, led by the king’s son, Edward the Black Prince, advanced on foot, preceded by archers and supported by pikemen and murderous Welsh with long knives, who went among the fallen and slew them on the ground.
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The fighting went on almost until midnight, and mopping up operations continued the next day. While Edward lost probably fewer than a hundred men, French casualties were on a horrendous scale. It is estimated that some 13,000 to 14,000 of Philip’s troops and allies fell at Crécy, including the cream of French nobility.

News from home provided a further boost to English morale. In a battle at Neville’s Cross near Durham in October
the Scots were heavily defeated, and several of their leading men were taken prisoner. Among them was King David II, who was paraded through the streets of London on a large black charger on his way to the Tower. On the continent King Edward continued northwards and laid siege to the port of Calais, which would provide him with a useful base for further forays into France. The town resisted for almost a year, but Philip’s forces were so depleted and demoralized that they were unable to come to its defence, and Calais capitulated in August 1347. During this campaign Edward employed small cannon, and this is the first instance of the use of artillery in field operations, further evidence of Edward’s strategic and tactical creativity.

1348–56

King and nation were in exultant mood. The victories, proclaimed from market crosses and lauded from pulpits, fired the public imagination. Soldiers returned as heroes with tales to tell and money to spend. It was said that those who returned from this campaign brought with them so much booty that no woman in the realm lacked for some graceful gown or valuable trinket. Edward basked in the glory of having achieved the most spectacular military success of any English monarch, and he toured the country during the early months of 1348, staging a series of tournaments, and revived his grand design of founding an exclusive order of chivalry to reward those who had given outstanding service in the recent campaign.

Building at Windsor recommenced in order to provide the order with an impressive home, and an elaborate ceremonial was ordained to set the chosen members apart from other prominent men of the realm. Edward had a practical reason for this: he wanted to elevate men of real military talent above those who were merely prominent in his army by reason of noble birth. Several men of knightly rank were among the first members of the order, but they were not provided with lands or aristocratic titles. They formed a military elite under whom nobles would be prepared to serve because of their intimate connection with the king. Its emblem was a garter of gold embroidery on a blue ground to be affixed just below the knee (where it would be visible in battle) bearing the motto,
Honi soit qui mal y pense
(‘Evil be to anyone who despises it’). The colours – blue and gold – were those of the French royal arms, and it seems likely that their choice was closely bound up with Edward’s French claims. The motto defied anyone to hold those claims in scorn. The popular myth that a trivial incident gave rise to this grand and important order of chivalry may well have been started by the French to do precisely that – to ridicule Edward’s ambition. According to this story, the Countess of Salisbury (with whom Edward was reputed to be sexually involved) dropped her garter at a court function, and the king retrieved it to save her embarrassment. Why the emblem should have been a garter is not clear, and one suggestion is that the item of clothing in question was originally a belt. The Most Noble Order of the Garter was the first secular order of chivalry.

The celebrations and self-congratulation did not last long, however, and in the summer of 1348, at about the time that Edward was creating his martial brotherhood, one of the worst disasters (perhaps
the
worst disaster) ever to hit England struck – the Black Death.

The plague had taken less than two years to arrive from Asia, and within weeks it travelled from the south coast to London. Then it made its inexorable way along the nation’s highways and byways. Within a year there was no corner of the realm that was not affected: villages fell empty and silent, and town populations were decimated. By the end of 1349 between a third and a half of Edward’s subjects had been struck down. One chronicler recorded its coming ‘like black smoke’ or a ‘rootless phantom’, which was indiscriminate in destroying young and old, male and female. There were not enough living to bury the dead. Corpses lay in the streets – animal as well as human, because there were few left to care for flocks and herds. In London and other cities, where streets had become open sewers choked with bodies, rubbish and human and animal filth, other diseases thrived. The pestilence was carried by the bacterium
Yersinia pestis
, which lived in fleas feeding on black rats, and the crowded, unsanitary dwellings in which most people lived enabled it to spread with alarming rapidity.

The plague took two forms. Bubonic plague produced swellings or buboes in the groin or armpits, high fever and delirium, and it was extremely contagious. Those caring for victims were highly likely to contract the disease themselves as a result of direct contact. The worse manifestation
occurred once the lungs were infected. This produced pneumonic plague, which was highly infectious and could be caught by airborne droplets coughed up or sneezed by the sufferers.

The social and economic upheavals were devastating. Crops were not harvested. Fishing boats were laid up in harbour. Mining came to a standstill, and, because there was not enough metal to mint new coins, commerce and government expenditure could not be sustained. Deserted homes lay open to looters, and because the law courts did not sit regularly there was every incentive to turn to crime. Foreign trade came to a halt when ports were closed for fear of admitting new plague-bearing vessels. At a time when people were more than ever in need of the consolations of religion priests were not to be found, either because they had died or had fled from their afflicted flocks. More fundamentally, the feudal hierarchy based on land tenure in return for service broke down. Landowners in desperate need of labourers to till their fields were obliged to pay whatever money wages surviving workers demanded. In the early days of the pestilence a ploughman could receive 2 shillings a week; by 1350 this had risen to 10 shillings. Landowners who could not compete in the labour market staved off bankruptcy by selling chunks of their estates at knock-down prices. And beneath all the tragedy and turmoil lay the psychological impact of the Black Death, which profoundly changed people’s attitudes.

The royal court kept away from London and all major centres of contagion. The parliament summoned for 1349
was cancelled, and Edward and his council ruled by decree. In June 1349 they issued the Ordinance of Labourers, designed to protect the landowning class by pegging wages at their pre-plague levels and forbidding workers from travelling from their own villages to sell their labour to the highest bidder. Though reinforced by parliament in 1351, this decree was a dead letter – certainly as long as the crisis lasted – and it did not help when Edward ordered the mayor and corporation of London to clean up the capital. They would gladly have done so if they could have found enough labourers in a city that had lost 30,000 inhabitants.

Edward’s plans for the Order of the Garter went ahead regardless. It had its inaugural meeting, amid much festivity and splendour, on 23 April 1349, St George’s Day, but there was no enthusiasm for renewing the French war – both countries were preoccupied with minimizing the internal disruption caused by the plague. In August 1350 Philip VI died, leaving a country weakened by war and plague to his son John II, known as John the Good. In the same month another sea battle was fought in the Channel between the English and a fleet of merchant/pirate ships belonging to France’s Castilian allies. Edward again led his fleet, having brought his court to Winchelsea to witness the engagement. Froissart described the king as sitting on board his flagship wearing a velvet jacket and a beaver hat, listening to minstrels and singers. There was a strong aesthetic side to Edward’s nature, and he certainly understood the propaganda importance of sumptuous personal display. Losses were heavy on
both sides in what is known as the Battle of Les Espagnols sur Mer, but the king showed conspicuous bravery and several Castilian ships were captured.

Edward made several overtures to the new French king, but neither side could agree a compromise between the competing claims of the two monarchs, and war was resumed in earnest in 1355. Edward foiled an attempt by John to recapture Calais but then had to return home because the Scots had captured Berwick. In a winter campaign Edward regained the border town and went on a rampage through Lothian that was so severe it became known as the Burnt Candlemas. Meanwhile, the Black Prince had sailed for Bordeaux and launched a violent autumn campaign of plunder and destruction against the civilian population of southwest France.