The Hundred Years War (13 page)

For the French of course it was a disaster. Edward’s triumph meant more than just ‘the abasement of the French monarchy’ and some lost battles. Prior Jean de Venette tells us what it meant to him. ‘The loss by fire of the village where I was born, Venette near Compiègne, is to be lamented, together with that of many others near by.’ He tells how there was no one to prune the vines or stop them rotting, no one to sow or plough the fields, no sheep or cattle even for the wolves, and how the roads were deserted. ‘Houses and churches no longer presented a smiling appearance with newly thatched roofs but rather the lamentable spectacle of scattered smoking ruins amid nettles and thistles springing up on every side. The pleasant sound of bells was heard indeed, not as a summons to divine worship but as a warning of hostile intention, so that men might seek out hiding places while the enemy were still on the way. What more can I say?’

4

Charles the Wise 1360-1380

The reign of Charles V is the story of the defeat of Edward III and the Black Prince. The English lost everything they had gained at Brétigny, though they retained Guyenne and Calais. For the first time the Plantagenets faced an enemy who was their superior.

Charles was one of the truly great French rulers. In appearance he was unprepossessing with a thin, bony face, which however had a certain wry humour. (For some years the Louvre
metro
was graced by a copy of a contemporary statue of Charles V in the guise of St Louis, portraying a man of considerable charm.) He had a wretchedly frail physique, being afflicted by ulcers and a poor circulation and debilitated by an undiagnosed disease which frequently sent him exhausted to his bed. Even had he wanted, he could never have been a man of action. In fact he was both pious and bookish with a keen interest in theology and history, a genuine intellectual of his time who amassed a library of nearly 1,200 chained books in a tower of the Louvre. Indeed the name
Carolus Sapiens
bestowed on him by chroniclers meant Charles the Erudite rather than the Wise. Although no less magnificent and grandiose in his concept of kingship than his father—he held a surprisingly splendid court—Charles V’s unusual talents combined to give him a curiously legal approach to matters of state; he had all the lawyer’s passion for correct procedure and care for detail.

The new King of France was not at first ready to confront the English or to overthrow the Brétigny settlement, which had at least bought him time. He had first to deal with four other problems—the war in Brittany, the King of Navarre, the Flemish succession, and the Free Companies (
routiers
)
.

After twenty years of bloody warfare the Montfort and Blois factions were still fighting for the Duchy of Brittany, a situation which the English continued to exploit with their accustomed rapacity. Duke John IV had returned to the land of his ancestors in 1362 and in September 1364 (under the able direction of Sir John Chandos and Sir Hugh Calveley) finally defeated and killed his rival, Charles of Blois, at Auray. Though the French candidate had lost, there was now at least peace and a stable situation, and Duke John paid homage to King Charles in 1365.

The King of Navarre was altogether a more serious matter, as his lands near Paris enabled him to blockade the capital. At the beginning of 1364 he had again risen in revolt, enraged by King John’s bestowal of the Duchy of Burgundy on his son Philip; Navarre had been deprived of yet another inheritance, for his claim to Burgundy through his grandmother was better than that of his Valois cousins. He raised his followers in Normandy and recruited men from the Free Companies together with Gascon mercenaries under the redoubtable Captal de Buch. However, the latter’s forces were completely routed at Cocherel in May 1364 and the French then thrust deep into Normandy, overrunning the Navarrese strongholds. Charles the Bad made peace the following year and surrendered all his estates near Paris. Henceforward, although still an irreconcilable enemy, he was no longer a real danger.

Flanders once again was threatening to fall under English control. Count Louis had decided that Margaret, his daughter and heiress, should marry an English prince, Edmund, Earl of Cambridge; and King Edward offered to endow his son with all his possessions in northern France. Charles V, much alarmed, managed to obtain a Papal ban on the projected marriage, on grounds of consanguinity; after years of diplomatic manoeuvre the French King finally succeeded in obtaining Margaret’s hand for his brother, Philip of Burgundy. If later the Valois were to regret bitterly this union of two vast fiefs, it was at least better than the establishment of a northern Guyenne.

The
routiers
of the Free Companies were the most difficult problem of all. There were so many of them, veteran soldiers who were unwilling to return to a life of poverty or even serfdom. Often they had served under the Black Prince and had taken to living off the country after being discharged. So professional were they that every company had a proper command structure with a staff which included secretaries and
butiniers
to collect and share out the loot; some had their own uniform, like the
bandes blanches
of the terrible Archpriest Arnaud de Cervole. Among them were Bretons, Spaniards, even Germans, and of course Englishmen, but the majority were Gascons. However, most of the captains were English, like Sir John Hawkwood, Sir Robert Knollys, Sir Hugh Calveley, Sir John Cresswell, and many more.

The
routiers
‘wasted all the country without cause, and robbed without sparing all that ever they could get, and violated and defiled women, old and young, without pity, and slew men, women and children without mercy’. Captives were tortured as a matter of routine, in the hope that they might reveal hoards of treasure, or even just grain. The
routiers’
lives were as uncertain as they were violent ; the Archpriest amassed a fortune but was lynched by his own troops, while a Gascon captain, Seguin de Badefol, accustomed to returning to Guyenne ‘with great pillage and treasure’, was poisoned by the King of Navarre for foolishly asking for arrears of pay. English captains seem to have been luckier though they were quite as rapacious, with a taste for monasteries with good cellars ; Sir John Harleston is said to have given a party to his
routiers
at which they drank out of a hundred chalices looted from the churches of Champagne. Significantly the French called all men of the Free Companies English, whatever their origin—Philippe de Mézières said that such Englishmen were the scourge of God.

Routiers
were much in evidence after Brétigny, ‘Englishmen, Gascons and Almains, who said they must needs live’ and refused to evacuate the fortresses from which they levied their protection rackets, moving on and seizing new castles when an area had been milked dry. They were simply practising those English inventions, the
chevauchée
and the
pâtis.
The companies became still more dangerous when they formed themselves into bigger units—the Grand Companies, in which they were grouped by nationality in
routes.
In 1361 I a Grand Company rode down the Rhône valley to Avignon and more or less held the Pope to ransom, while another peculiarly vicious band, the
Tard-Venus
or ‘Late-comers’ terrorized Lyons. In 1363, at Brignais, the Archpriest defeated a large army under the Duke of Bourbon, who died of his wounds.

Charles had neither the troops nor the money to exterminate these pests. Time and again local authorities had to buy them off. The King did at least try and persuade them to seek their fortunes elsewhere. He employed an obscure little Breton hedge-squire, the Sieur Bertrand du Guesclin, who had himself ridden with the
routiers,
to talk them into going on Crusade to help the Hungarians who were threatened by the Turks, but the plan failed. A golden opportunity came in 1365 when the Castilian pretender, Henry of Trastámara, asked Charles for help against his half-brother King Pedro the Cruel. A delighted Charles sent du Guesclin over the Pyrenees with every
routier
he could find. They met with gratifying success, establishing Henry on the throne of Castile, but two years later he was defeated at Nájera by the Black Prince and the
routiers
poured back into France.

Pedro the Cruel had sought the help of the Prince of Aquitaine as a fellow Biscayan ruler, offering lavish payment and the province of Guipuzcoa. The Prince responded enthusiastically, leading an army of English, Guyennois, Navarrese, exiled Castilians and ‘rutters’—the contemporary English term for
routiers-down
to the Ebro where on 2April 1367 he won his crushing victory at Najera—‘a marvellous dangerous battle and many a man slain and sore hurt’—and restored Pedro to his throne. It was more than just a chivalrous adventure: a friendly Castile would not allow France to use Castilian galleys against England. Unfortunately, true to his knight-errant’s code, the Prince refused to hand over to Pedro the key men of the Trastámara faction whom he had captured, and in 1369 Pedro was again overthrown and killed by his half-brother, who understandably was no friend to the English. Worst of all, Pedro had been unable to pay the Black Prince the 600,000 florins he had promised him and on which the latter was counting to pay for the campaign ; his principality would now have to foot the bill. (Prince Edward’s sole tangible gain was a great ‘ruby’—actually a garnet-once the property of the Sultan of Granada and still a famous English Crown Jewel.)

From the beginning the Black Prince’s reign in Aquitaine had not been altogether happy. He and his Princess held great state at Bordeaux and at Angouleme—‘so great, that in all Christendom was none like’. (He had made a love match in 1361 with his beautiful Plantagenet cousin, Joan of Kent, who was over thirty, twice married-one husband was still alive-and penniless. An annulment had been obtained from the Pope.) While an ecstatic Chandos herald might write that at Prince Edward’s court ‘there abode all nobleness, all joy and jollity, largesse, gentleness and honour, and all his subjects and all men loved him right dearly’, there was considerable local grumbling. Too many Englishmen had followed the Prince to Aquitaine and too many were given the best jobs. The Guyennois disliked having an energetic ruler of
‘si hauteyn et de si graunt port’
on the spot instead of far away over the sea, and were irritated by administrative reforms and a vastly increased bureaucracy. For the Guyennois the new administration took away the whole charm of English rule, which had been that they were left in peace. Worst of all were the new taxes. The Prince’s stately court, his feasting and his jousting, had to be paid for and three years running (in 1364, 1365 and 1366) he imposed a ferocious
fouage
or hearth tax throughout his domain. When King Pedro could not pay him he demanded yet another
fouage,
for five years. The English Chancellor of Aquitaine, John Harewell, persuaded most of the Aquitainian lords to agree to it at an assembly at Niort, though they did so with the utmost reluctance. Chandos warned the Prince to drop it but he would not, so Sir John retired to his Norman estates. Not only in the new territories but in the heart of English Guyenne men thought of transferring their allegiance.

In 1368 some of the highest lords of Guyenne, led by the Count of Armagnac (who in any case was on bad terms with the Prince) and Armand-Amanieu of Albret, refused to allow the hearth tax to be levied on their lands. Armagnac and Albret, who were in Paris for the latter’s wedding to the French King’s sister, suddenly decided to appeal to Charles V against the Prince’s excessive taxation. To allow their appeal would be to claim sovereignty over Aquitaine, a clear violation of the Treaty of Brétigny. But the French had never formally renounced suzerainty. Charles, who possessed such a taste for the law that Edward III sneered he was no better than a lawyer, at once realized that by a shrewd use of legal processes he could undermine the entire English position in France.

King Charles had been preparing for war for a long time. He had retained and extended the harsh consumer taxes—the
aide, taille
and
gabelle-imposed
for his father’s ransom, and while he still owed nearly half of the ransom, his war treasurers were seeing that his troops were paid more regularly than hitherto. No more ransom money was sent to the English, and the income from special taxes was ten times that from the irregular war taxation which the English Parliament allowed Edward III. Over a number of years the French King issued imaginative edicts dealing with military matters, and eventually he had a permanent force—it can hardly be called a standing army—of 3,000—6,000 men-at-arms and 800 crossbowmen, paid for by the new revenues. There were also attempts to impose a primitive command structure; men-at-arms were grouped in companies of a hundred under captains, who in turn were under lieutenants and marshals. The machinery of muster and review which controlled soldiers’ pay was tightened up to stop commanders claiming money for non-existent troops. Townsmen were ordered to practise archery so that they could help in defending their own walls, while château owners were commanded to keep their fortifications in good repair, the castles being regularly inspected and their lords being given money to maintain proper garrisons. Some frontier châteaux were taken over by the King and those which were indefensible were demolished. The arsenal at the Louvre was restocked. New warships were laid down in the Clos des Galées at Rouen.