A Great and Glorious Adventure (18 page)

The English army did not attempt to pursue the remnants of Philip’s host as it straggled away towards Amiens on the night of 26 August. They were exhausted and needed
time to rest and recuperate, and it was not until the following day, a Sunday, when the heralds had completed their grisly task of identifying the dead nobles, that they realized the extent of
their victory. At least two French contingents arriving to join their army and with no inkling that the battle was over were quickly seen off with more slaughter. However, true to the code of
behaviour between gentlemen, the body of John of Bohemia was washed and wrapped and sent back to Germany, while those of the princes and the more important nobles were transported to the monastery
of Maintenay, ten miles to the north. A truce of three days was announced to allow the locals to find the bodies of the common soldiery, which were stripped and buried in grave pits in the valley.
Spin is not only a twenty-first-century political ploy and a report of the battle was sent back to England by fast cutter. Embellished somewhat, the account, combined with a report of the capture
of Caen, was to be read out in every church, and in a very short space of time all over England there was genuine delight and pride in the great victory over a hated and feared enemy. Now
Parliament and the people might grumble at the prospects of more taxes to keep the war going, but they would pay up for what they could see was a continuing success.

Meanwhile, in Amiens the hunt for the guilty was on. The fault
lay with evil counsellors, corrupt officials, the weather or even the displeasure of the Almighty, and it
was always easy to blame the foreigners. The Genoese crossbowmen were all traitors and were to be hunted down and killed, and many of them were massacred before it was pointed out that they were
valuable assets who might be needed elsewhere, whereupon Philip rescinded his order. In any age, a military commander who cannot identify his mistakes is doomed to repeat them, and the French
refusal to face facts and recognize that their way of waging war was obsolete in the face of rapidly discharged missile weapons and professional dismounted infantry was to cost them dear in the
future. It was inconceivable that well-born French nobles could be defeated by low-born archers – ‘
gens de nulle valeur
’, people of no worth, as one French chronicler put
it. And in any case, by refusing to take prisoners for ransom the English were not playing fair, while the behaviour of the Welsh in despatching the wounded was very bad form indeed.

On 29 or 30 August, the English army set off again, burning and pillaging as it went. The areas around Hesdin, Saint-Josse and Étaples were all reduced to smouldering heaps of rubble,
while anything that looked like being properly defended was bypassed. The question was what to do next. Despite the capture of Caen and the great victory of Crécy, underneath the propaganda
and the jubilation there was not a great deal to show so far, at least nothing of any permanence. Despite Edward’s insistence that he had come to France to claim his own, French troops
relatively quickly reoccupied the areas that the
chevauchée
passed through, and stern punishment was meted out to those Normans who had thrown in their lot with Edward, including
the garrison of Caen, who were rounded up and executed. What was needed was a concrete and obvious advantage, something that could be held and shown to be a lasting gain from the war, and that
meant a city that was not part of the English lands in France. Edward would capture Calais and annex it to the English crown in perpetuity.

Calais, with a population of about 8,000, was not then a town of any great commercial significance. Its harbour was small and liable to silt up, and most travel between England and Europe was
through Wissant or Boulogne, both of which had much better and more easily navigable
approaches. For all that, it was the nearest French port to England and might be
developed, and it had for years been a scourge of English trade as a nest of piracy. From the French point of view, although it was only a minor trading post, the town was close to the border with
Flanders and important as a military base to guard against Flemish incursions, and it had been well garrisoned and stocked with enough provisions to withstand a long siege. Moving through
Neufchâtel and Wissant, the English army reached the heights of Sangatte on 3 September, from where they could see their objective.

It is unlikely that Edward ever thought that he could take Calais by a
coup de main
, for it was well sited for defence. To the north was the harbour and the open sea, to the west was a
river with only one bridge, the Neuillet bridge, and to the east and south was marshland criss-crossed by streams and rivulets that constantly changed their course. Within those natural defences
was a series of well-constructed walls, themselves protected by moats, and at the western end was the castle, with its own separate system of walls, towers and ditches. The English did not even
attempt to assault the walls, but instead prepared for a long siege. This was standard practice since, before the development of effective cannon, it was very unusual for a medieval castle or
fortified town to be taken by assault. Far more often it was starvation, disease or treachery that forced capitulation, and it was common for a besieged commander to agree with the besieger that,
if not relieved by a certain date, he would surrender the fortress. If, however, a castle or fortress had to be assaulted, there were three ways in: over the walls, through the walls or under the
walls.

Assault over the walls could be achieved by the use of belfries or scaling ladders, or both. The belfry was a three- or four-storey wooden tower on wheels or runners. Packed with archers and
men-at-arms, it would be pushed up close to the wall until the attackers could leap from the top storey onto the wall. It was a very old stratagem – the Romans had made frequent use of
belfries – and it took much time and labour to place them in position. Once packed with men, a belfry was very heavy and the ground had to be levelled and a road built to allow it to be
pushed along. All this preparation would be obvious to the defenders, who would try to set the belfry on fire with fire arrows or by throwing
burning balls of straw soaked
in pitch at it, and mass their own men on the walls as it approached. While the belfry was still theoretically on the equipment tables of a medieval siege train, it was hardly ever actually built
or used.
⁴²
Scaling ladders were easier to make and to conceal until the last minute, but, unless there were sufficient archers or crossbowmen to keep
the defenders away from the walls, this too was a dubious way of earning a living, particularly for the first man up the ladder.

Attacking through the walls meant creating a breach, and this could only be done with a battering ram or a bore, both of which were very slow and vulnerable to boulders and, once again,
fireballs hurled onto them from above. Going under the walls involved the use of miners. Rather than attempt to tunnel beneath the walls and then emerge inside the castle, like the demon king
popping up through a trapdoor in a pantomime, miners would try to collapse the walls. The mining team would tunnel under the wall, supporting the roof of the tunnel by wooden pit
props.
⁴³
The tunnel would then be packed with combustible materials (dead pigs, having lots of body fat, were a favourite) and ignited. Once the pit
props had burned through, the tunnel would collapse and the walls above with it.

There was a variety of machinery which could be used to hurl projectiles at the walls or into the besieged town. The mangonel relied on the energy of twisted ropes – human hair was
regarded as the best material for mangonel ropes – to hurl a stone or fireball from the end of a beam. The springal, little different from the Roman
ballista
, was a giant crossbow,
but, like its hand-held baby brother, it was slow to load and only effective if used in massed batteries. The trebuchet relied on a counterweight on a beam with a huge sling on its end and could
deliver seriously large stones against or over a wall, while the petrary was an enormous catapult. It was claimed that the mangonel could be used to
propel dead horses into
towns in an early version of biological warfare, and the chronicler Froissart avers that, when the French were besieging Auberoche in Aquitaine in 1345, they captured an English messenger sent out
to contact relieving forces, killed him and returned his body over the walls with a petrary – a somewhat unlikely tale. Edward may have had some early cannon in his siege train, and there is
some evidence that three may have been on the field at Crécy. Descriptions are vague: they may have fired stone balls or large darts, but, as the secret of casting gun barrels was as yet
unknown and the manufacture of gunpowder imprecise, they will have done little but frighten the horses and were probably more dangerous to the gunners who served them than to the enemy. If they did
exist, they seem to have played little part in the siege of Calais.

At Calais, going over or through the walls was not an option as the moats and ditches protected the approaches; mining was ruled out because the soil was waterlogged and siege engines were too
heavy to be moved over the marshy ground. Starvation was the only answer and the English were quite prepared to wait. At long last the requested reinforcements arrived from England and the fleet
under Sir John de Montgomery, Admiral of the South, hove to off Calais at around the same time as the army got there on land. The soldiers began to block off all roads and tracks running to and
from the town, and a vast camp was set up on the dry ground around the church of St Peter where the roads from Boulogne and Ardres crossed. The camp was intended to be in position for the long
term, and soon shops, armourers’ tents, quarters for the nobility, butts for the archers, paddocks for the horses, and all the facilities of a large town were in place or being constructed.
While the army was on the move, it could feed itself from the French countryside, but, now that it was static, the available food in the immediate area would soon be exhausted and provisions would
have to be brought in.

It is sad but perhaps inevitable that interest in military history is centred on the battles and those who fought them, and that most soldiers would rather be out killing people than in barracks
counting blankets. But the fact is that you can have the best soldiers in the world, superbly trained, highly motivated, brilliantly led and equipped with the best weapons that money can buy, but,
if you cannot feed them, house them, resupply them,
move them and tend them when they are sick or wounded, then you can do nothing. Administering an army is far more
difficult than commanding it in battle. The real heroes of most of England’s and Britain’s successful wars are the logisticians, and they get precious little recognition for it. For the
siege of Calais, government agents went out all over southern England to purchase foodstuffs and other supplies for the army. They had to be found, collected, paid for, moved to the ports, loaded
on ships – which themselves had to be impressed – and delivered to the army. The French scored a minor success when a fleet of galleys from the Seine intercepted one of the first supply
convoys and sank or burned most of the ships, killing the crews and dumping the cargoes. Future convoys would have men-at-arms or archers on board and the supply line was never broken again, but
the need to put soldiers on the ships did increase the expense of the logistic effort.

While arrangements for the siege of Calais were being put in place, and the king’s agents were scouring the southern and eastern counties for supplies, the Scots decided to take a hand.
After Crécy, frantic messages had gone from the French to the twenty-two-year-old Scottish king David II, son of Robert Bruce, who had been married to Edward III’s sister Joanna at the
age of four and had returned from exile in France in 1341, pleading with him to do something to distract the English. Assuming that all the English soldiers were safely out of the way in France,
David invaded England in early October 1346, a move generally popular with the Scottish magnates, who assumed that the north of England was ripe for the plucking. Storming down the Roman road and
pillaging as they went, they took the castle of Liddel Strength, eight miles north of Carlisle, and beheaded its captain, Sir Walter de Selby. At this point, David’s chief military adviser,
Sir William Douglas, the thirty-six-year-old Lord of Liddesdale, advised that enough was enough, they had done what they promised the French they would do, and it was now time to return over the
border before retribution arrived. David rejected this sound advice, claiming that there was no one to oppose them but ‘wretched monks, lewd priests, swineherds, cobblers and
skinners’.
²²
The raid continued and included the despoiling of the priory of Lanercost, which presumably accounts for the Lanercost
chronicler’s obvious hatred of the Scots, claiming as he does that King David and his men made a habit of defecating in the fonts of churches that they passed.
Given
that the Scots were almost as terrified of the wrath of God – as opposed to that of his earthly representatives – as everyone else, this charge seems unlikely.
⁴⁴

But David’s assumption that England had nothing with which to reply to a Scottish incursion was very wrong. Edward had not arrayed any troops north of the River Trent, and the defence of
the Scottish marches had been entrusted to the very capable hands of William de la Zouche, the fifty-two-year-old archbishop of York, Warden of the Marches and principal commissioner of array in
the north, who mustered an army at Barnard Castle on 15 October before moving north to Bishop Auckland, south of Durham, the following day. The army numbered around 1,000 men-at-arms, 2,000 archers
and 5,000 spearmen, against probably a similar or smaller number of Scots. The usual three divisions were commanded by the archbishop himself, Ralph, Lord Neville, and Henry, Lord Percy. The Scots
army was encamped in the priory grounds of Beaurepaire (which still exists but is now Bearpark), a few miles north of Durham, when on the morning of 17 October 1346 a foraging party of around 400
men under Douglas ran into the archbishop’s vanguard in a thick mist and got very much the worst of the encounter, with only Douglas and half his men getting back to raise the alarm.