Great Tales From English History (22 page)

Her cries went unheeded, and the raiding party hustled the ‘sweet’ earl back down through the secret passage below the rocks, leaving his archers none the wiser up on the battlements. Next day Edward III proclaimed himself fully king and started off back to London, where Mortimer was found guilty on a string of charges that included the murder of Edward II. On 29 November the earl was hanged as a common criminal beneath the elms at Tyburn, having been spared the more hideous penalties of ‘drawing’ (disembowelling) and quartering that were prescribed by law for treason. Edward also showed restraint towards his mother Isabella, despatching her to comfortable retirement at Castle Rising in Norfolk and sending her, the royal accounts reveal, a steady flow of treats - a wild boar for roasting, a pair of lovebirds which she fed on hemp seeds, and generous quantities of wine from Gascony.

Decisiveness and generosity, delivered in style, were the hallmarks of the reign of Edward III. He was one of England’s most dynamic monarchs, and much of his energy was devoted to war - specifically the conflict which history textbooks would later call the ‘Hundred Years War’. In reality, this was a series of wars that lasted more than a hundred years, growing out of England’s claims to lands in France - and at this moment in the 1330s, from a dispute over the rich territory of Gascony which Henry II had acquired nearly two centuries earlier through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Nestling in the south-west of France, just above the Pyrenees, Gascony was a prosperous region that produced revenue for the English king, largely on the strength of its subtle and cheering red
vin claret
(‘clear wine’). In the fourteenth century the English drank more claret from the Gascon vineyards of Bordeaux than we do today, per head of the population, and the Gascons, who spoke their own language, liked their profitable relationship with England. Its distant kings threatened less interference than did the French kings in Paris, who had pushed the English out of Normandy and Anjou and were now nibbling away at the English holdings in south-west France. There had been a series of skirmishes involving the
bastides
, the walled towns along Gascony’s borders, and in May 1337 King Philip VI went the whole hog. He announced that he was confiscating all Gascon territories - to which Edward III responded by restating his claim to the French throne itself through his mother Isabella.

Edward had enjoyed remarkable military success since seizing power in 1330. He was a charismatic leader, strikingly handsome with a pointed yellow beard - he had ‘the face of a God’, according to one contemporary. A fan of jousting, he was constantly honing his own warlike skills in tournaments, along with those of the men around him, who came to form the tough core of his military campaigns. Starting in Scotland, he had reversed the inept record of his father with a spectacular victory at Halidon Hill, near Berwick on the banks of the Tweed, where the firestorm of arrows from the English and Welsh longbowmen shattered the Scots.

The two-metre longbow, both longer and heavier than the bows that had been used at Hastings, was to revolutionise military tactics in the fourteenth century. The English encountered it when fighting the Welsh, whose capacity to pierce chain mail and even a thick oak door with their iron-tipped arrows had been mightily impressive. In his enthusiasm, Edward I had called for villagers to practise archery every Sunday and holy day, and Parliament passed laws forbidding tennis, dice and cock-fighting as well as various forms of cricket and hockey (described as ‘club-ball’) because they diverted men from their target practice. Football was particularly disapproved of, as leading to hooliganism and riots.

In contrast, French laws prohibited peasants from possessing any arms at all. French military tactics still centred on the mounted knight, and the difference showed when the French and English armies met on the battlefield of Crécy near the French Channel coast in 1346. The French far outnumbered the English, by nearly thirty thousand to ten or fifteen thousand according to one estimate, with the French forces including some six thousand Genoese mercenaries wielding crossbows. A formidable weapon made of wood banded with iron - almost a machine - the crossbow fired a lethal bolt with great velocity and had a greater range than the longbow. But while a crossbow archer could load and trigger off only four bolts in a minute, the much more flexible longbowman could fire eight or even ten arrows in the same time. The French knights, furthermore, despised the foreign mercenaries that their King had engaged, and even rode down their own crossbowmen at one stage in the battle.

The entire outcome of Crécy seems to have been determined by the arrogance of the French horsemen. The ‘flower of France’, as the knights liked to call themselves, arrived in front of the English position on the hill of Crécy on the evening of 26 August 1346. Raring for battle, they ignored their king’s orders to halt and make camp for the night. The sun was setting as they charged up the hill, and under their onslaught the English archers wasted not a single arrow. If they did not strike riders, they struck horses, wreaking havoc. According to Jean le Bel, one of the chroniclers of the battle, the dead and wounded horses piled on top of one another ‘like a litter of piglets’.

As the French recoiled in confusion, they were struck by another of Edward III’s secret weapons - Welsh and Cornish knifemen, armed only with daggers. Their speciality was to creep under the enemy’s horses and cut open their bellies, and they took advantage of the dusk to slink up and ‘murder many [men] as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights and squires’.

It was not till the sun rose the next morning that the English realised what a massive victory they had achieved. Edward III sent out his heralds - the clerks who were experts in coats of arms - and, picking their way through the corpses on the battlefield, they identified more than fifteen hundred slain lords and knights, in addition, perhaps, to some ten thousand enemy footsoldiers and crossbowmen, who, unlike the knights, were not counted. Among the dead lay John, the blind King of Bohemia, who had brought his troops to support the French and had ordered his knights to lead him forward, ‘so that I may strike one stroke with my sword’. The discovery of his corpse, still tied to the bodies of his knights by their reins, became one of the legends of the victory.

The other concerned Edward’s son, the sixteen-year-old Edward Prince of Wales, said to have worn black armour. Thrown to the ground by the French charge, the ‘Black Prince’ was rescued by his standard-bearer, who covered his body with the banner of Wales. Messengers asking for help were sent post-haste to Edward, who had set up his headquarters in a windmill overlooking the field, but the King refused. ‘Let the boy win his spurs,’ he said, ‘for I want him, please God, to have all the glory.’

When help did reach the prince, they found him with his standard-bearer and companions ‘leaning on lances and swords, taking breath and resting quietly on long mounds of corpses, waiting for the enemy who had withdrawn’. Someone had brought from the battlefield the crest of the King of Bohemia, three tall white ostrich plumes, and the prince took them as his badge there and then. He also adopted the blind hero’s motto, which Princes of Wales bear to this day -
Ich Dien
, ‘I serve.’

AD 1347

T
HE ENGLISH VICTORY AT CRéCY ASTONISHED
Europe. ‘Nobody thought much of the English, nobody spoke of their prowess or courage,’ wrote the chronicler Jean le Bel. ‘Now, in the time of the noble Edward, who has often put them to the test, they are the finest and most daring warriors known to man.’

It was less, in truth, a matter of personalities than of military technology. The light, mobile bowmen of England and Wales, trained on their village greens and selected at archery contests, had challenged the superiority of the mounted knight - and, fortunately for England, it took the French a remarkably long time to work it out. Edward III, by contrast, was a canny leader, and he proved it after Crécy when he decided to head north towards Calais.

The English king understood that, if he was to maintain his position in France, he needed a secure deep-water port on the French side of the Channel. Visible from Dover on a clear day, Calais would give him a stranglehold on the sea-lanes, with a chance of controlling both trade and the growing problem of freelance piracy. Edward knew marching from Crécy to Paris to besiege the French capital would have been a step too far, whereas making Calais an English port would yield a solid dividend from his victory.

Calais, however, was not going to give in without a struggle. The port had strong natural defences of sand dunes and marshes, and as a walled town it was not just a centre of trade but had a semi-military status. It was customary for medieval rulers to provide incentives for communities to live in strategic fortresses on the understanding that they would make it their job to defend the fortress when it was attacked. This meant, in turn, that the men, women and children of a fortress town like Calais were treated as combatants if an enemy besieged them. They could expect no mercy if their resistance was breached.

Edward settled down for a long siege. Gunpowder was just making its appearance in European warfare, but the primitive cannon of the time had neither the range nor the power to demolish town walls. Out of range of the defenders’ crossbow fire, Edward now built his own settlement of wooden huts, and to brighten up the winter he brought over his wife and the ladies of the court. The English king enjoyed female company, and he had encouraged his men to bring their wives, too. In addition, merchants came twice a week from Flanders to hold markets in the English camp.

Inside Calais itself, however, life was not so comfortable. In the early months of the siege, the inhabitants succeeded in smuggling in supplies by sea. But Edward was able to blockade the harbour mouth, and in late June 1347, nearly a year after the siege had begun, the English defeated a French convoy that had tried to break through with supplies. In the wreckage was found an axe head that had been thrown overboard to avoid capture. Attached to it was a desperate message that the town’s governor, Sir John de Vienne, had intended for the King of France:

Know, dread Sir, that your people in Calais have eaten their horses, dogs, and rats, and nothing remains for them to live upon unless they eat one another. Wherefore, most honourable Sir if we have not speedy succour, the town is lost!

Edward III read the document, sealed it with his own seal and sent it on to its destination.

When, four weeks later, King Philip of France finally appeared with his army on the sand dunes within sight of Calais, cheers and sounding trumpets were heard from inside the town. The King’s banner with the fleur-de-lis was run up on the castle tower, and the famished inhabitants lit a great fire. But on the second night the fire was somewhat less, and on the third night, after no rescue, it was just a flicker. Wails and groans were heard from inside the walls.

The French king had camped at Sangatte, notorious at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the site from which thousands of foreign immigrants smuggled themselves illegally into Britain - but Philip did not have their appetite for penetrating the English defences. After taking a good look at Edward’s impressive encampment and the rested, well supplied English troops, he decided to retreat.

The following day Sir John de Vienne appeared on the battlements offering to negotiate, and shortly afterwards, barely able to hold himself erect, he rode out of the gates on a starving, wasted horse, to surrender his sword and the keys of the city. Round his neck the governor wore a rope, offering himself up to be hanged; and behind, roped to him, straggled a bizarre procession - the leading knights and burghers of the town, emaciated and in tatters, offering their own lives so that those of their fellow-citizens might be saved.

Edward acted mercifully - up to a point. One chronicler says that it was his wife, Philippa of Hainault, who persuaded him to spare the burghers of Calais. But on 4 August 1347 the English king entered the town with his soldiers and ordered the evacuation of virtually all the inhabitants, whose property he confiscated. To replace them, he shipped a colony of settlers over from England and built a ring of forts around the town. Calais would remain English for more than two hundred years.

AD 1347-9