The Monks of War (3 page)

What finally made Edward go to war? Some modern commentators credit him with an excessively sophisticated policy, that of a holding operation; they assume that by attacking France he hoped for no more than to deflect the attention of the French from Guyenne. But this ‘maintenance of the
status quo’
interpretation is a little too subtle. Personal motives still seem more plausible. Probably Edward really did feel cheated of his rightful inheritance and had every intention of reconquering France if it was possible; at the least he was determined to hold Guyenne against the Valois.

Edward III was one of England’s most formidable kings, somewhere between Edward I and Henry VIII. Nobody will ever know what drove him—a father complex or simple megalomania—but for over thirty years he showed a demonic energy. After dispossessing Mortimer, he swiftly established his authority over the barons, and by his mid-twenties he had reached the height of his powers. In person he was an immensely tall, strikingly handsome young man with a pointed yellow beard and long drooping moustaches, his features ‘like the face of a god’ according to a contemporary. He had abundant dignity and charm, speaking English as well as he spoke French, in a caressing voice. (He also spoke and wrote Latin and seems to have understood German and Flemish.) His esoteric cult of chivalry, so much admired in his day, has obscured the man beneath, yet a personality nevertheless emerges—extravagantly elegant, warm in friendship, mercilessly cruel and hardhearted in enmity. He was at the same time self-indulgent, a relentless womanizer, who eventually ruined his health. One can only guess at what must have been a Napoleonic confidence in himself and an oddly self-conscious determination to be a hero-king. With all this he was also realistic—his motto was ‘It is as it is’.

Edward’s glittering court, a constant round of banquets and jousting, provided him with an excellent general staff. His friends, professional soldiers by virtue of their birth and class, knew how his mind worked and had been tested by him on the Scottish campaigns. Although the old feudal structure was dissolving, society was still a military hierarchy and great lords were
ex-officio
generals. It is significant that in 1338, preparing for a campaign, the King created six new earls. But not all Edward’s commanders were earls. There were men like Sir John Chandos, a poor knight from Derby-shire ; and Sir Thomas Dagworth, ‘a bold professional soldier’, did not come from anything like a noble background, belonging to a family of small Norfolk squires. The Belgian—as we would now term him—Sir Walter Manny (born Gauthier de Masny), who had come from Hainault with Edward’s Queen Philippa and remained as her carver, was another commander of comparatively humble origins.

One of the more striking foreign ornaments of Edward’s court was the ill-famed Robert of Artois, a French Prince of the Blood who was King Philip’s brother-in-law and ‘his chief and special companion’. According to Jean le Bel, he had done a great deal to obtain the crown for Philip. But in 1330 Robert tried to gain possession of Artois, which had been inherited by his aunt, through forged documents and his fraud was discovered. Two years later the aunt died, supposedly poisoned. Robert was found guilty of her murder, condemned to death and ‘chased out of the realm of France’ as Froissart puts it ; there were allegations, probably justified, of witchcraft. He came to England in 1336, to be warmly welcomed by Edward who made him Earl of Richmond and presented him with three castles and a pension despite Philip’s threat that he was the enemy of anyone who sheltered Robert. The exile is said to have fanned Edward’s growing enmity towards Philip into white heat; ‘He was ever about King Edward and always he counselled him to defy the French King who kept his heritage from him wrongfully.’ It was Robert who, in 1338, stage-managed the Oath of the Heron during a banquet at Windsor, when the entire English court swore to do deeds of valour to help their King regain the crown which three of his uncles had worn. Robert was also a most useful contact with disaffected noblemen in northern France. Years later, Froissart heard how King Edward had had the greatest confidence in ‘Sir Robert’.

Edward’s Queen was of considerable value as a contact in the Low Countries. Philippa of Hainault had fallen in love with the King when she was only twelve and he fourteen, and they had been married in 1328 ; two years later she bore him the first of their many sons, the future Black Prince. A tall Belgian beauty with a retroussé nose, dark-brown eyes and hair and a winning nature, she remained devoted to her husband despite his many infidelities. Shrewd and sensible, her only faults were a certain extravagance and a taste for over-dressing. As the daughter of William the Good, Count of Hainault, of Holland and of Zeeland, she provided Edward with some extremely useful relations.

The English saw Flanders much as the French saw Scotland—an ally in the event of war. Edward sent letters to the Imperial nobles of the adjoining Low Countries at the end of 1336, complaining of the French King’s injustice and of his ‘great plot’ against him and his intention of stealing Guyenne. But many of these lords remained faithful friends of Philip VI, so in the spring of 1337 Edward sent carefully chosen envoys to Hainault—sixty knights led by the Earls of Salisbury and Huntingdon and the Bishop of Lincoln. They soon found that ready money could buy allies against France, including the Counts of Guelders, Juliers and Limbourg ; they actually paid the Duke of Brabant £60,000, a sum equal to the combined revenues of England and Guyenne for an entire year. They also offered to install the Staple (the official depot where England’s raw wool was stored and marketed) at Antwerp.

Edward was a skilful exponent of the trade embargo. The Flemish were the cloth-makers of Europe and depended on English wool. The Count of Flanders, the unpopular Louis de Nevers, stayed obstinately loyal to Philip and arrested English merchants in his territory. So in August 1336 Edward forbade the export of raw wool—of which England enjoyed a near-monopoly—to Flanders ; neighbouring centres of cloth-manufacture like Brabant were only allowed English wool on condition that it did not go to Flanders. Soon starving Flemish weavers were begging all over the countryside and in all the towns of northern France. City patricians and cloth-workers were united by the threat of utter ruin. In January 1338 the men of Ghent elected Jacob van Artevelde, a rich merchant and brewer of mead, to be their
Hooftman
(Captain), and he quickly took control of Bruges and Ypres as well; according to Froissart, Jacob had soldiers in every town and fortress of Flanders who were in his pay and acted as both spies and hatchet men—‘he put to death anyone who opposed him’. In 1339 Count Louis and his family were forced to flee from Flanders which was then ruled by the three towns as a kind of republic; in December of the same year Edward agreed to allow exports of wool to Flanders and to transfer the Staple to Bruges, in return for a military alliance with Jacob van Artevelde and his pikemen—‘good men and expert in arms’ as even Froissart admits.

Wool was ‘the sovereign merchandise and jewel of this realm of England’, and the best part of the kingdom’s wealth. Since the country was already overtaxed as a result of his Scottish campaigns, Edward decided to plunder the wool trade. At Nottingham in 1336 he obtained a loan on every sack produced, which he hoped would bring him in £70,000 per annum. The King also negotiated a somewhat dubious bargain with a group of wealthy English merchants, who were to buy, export and sell sacks of wool for him in return for a monopoly in exporting wool; to obtain the sacks, he arbitrarily requisitioned the stock at Dordrecht, the unwilling owners being compensated by bonds which exempted them from the
maletote
or export duty. (A wool-sack, which was of the sort on which the Lord Chancellor still sits, was then worth about £10.) The scheme was expected to bring in at least £200,000, but in the event it proved a costly failure.

In borrowing, Edward III resorted to even more dubious expedients. He raised vast loans from Lombard bankers—the Bardi, the Frescobaldi and the Peruzzi—from merchants in the Netherlands, from English wool merchants, pledging either English wool or the duties on Guyennois wine as security. Almost everyone who lent him money went bankrupt. The only thing that mattered to Edward III was to obtain sufficient funds to wage war. It is astonishing that he ever hoped to find it. In fairness, it has to be admitted that he did at least consult his subjects before taxing them. The troubles of Edward I, and his own father’s ruin, had shown him the need for such consultation. Time and again he explained his needs to both Council and Parliament, often to some effect; in 1343 one of his ministers was able to remind Parliament that the War had been ‘undertaken by the joint assent of bishops, lords and commons’. Edward even went so far as to explain himself at local level; in the autumn of 1337 a royal proclamation was read in every English county court, telling how ‘the King of the French, hardened in his malice, would assent to no peace or treaty’. But all these explanations did little to make anyone readier to pay more taxes.

Another of Edward’s difficulties was mobilization. The old system of feudal military service had practically disappeared and Edward had to use the ‘indenture’ method, hiring leaders who, by the terms of a carefully drawn up contract, raised a given number of troops of a specified type to serve for a fixed period and for a fixed scale of pay. However, to begin with, his infantry—whether Welsh knifemen or English archers—were conscripted by the traditional ‘commissions of array’. The commissioner, usually a local gentleman with military experience, chose what in theory were the most likely-looking men among the population between sixteen and sixty, who were called together by the constables and bailiffs of the district. In practice these included a very dubious element—It has been estimated that as many as 12 per cent of Edward III’s troops were outlaws, most of whom were condemned murderers serving in hope of a ‘charter of pardon’. Even these conscripts had to be clothed, equipped and paid by the King.

In theory Philip VI should have had no financial worries. But though France was rich, it was none the less extremely difficult for her rulers to tap her wealth. Unlike England there was no single tax system and no single consultative assembly. The centralization of the previous century, which had taken over the powers of the dukes and counts, had left largely intact the local fiscal systems and assemblies. In 1337 Philip actually found himself unable to pay his officials, partly because some local assemblies refused to pay as much as he had asked, partly because some of them refused to pay at all. Philip then instructed his officials to strike bargains, to restore old privileges and grant new ones, to promise future exemption, and to be ‘pleasing, gentle and meek’ when negotiating. He allowed provincial assemblies to become recognized ‘Estates’ of nobles, clergy and commons, permitting the growth of the idea that the Estates’ consent was necessary for any extraordinary taxation. Eventually he managed to impose and collect an adequate revenue from hearth taxes, from
maletotes
and other subsidies and—later in his reign—from the
gabelle
or duty on salt. On a number of occasions he also devalued the currency, calling in his silver
gros tournois
and reissuing them in debased metal. He extracted more money from the clergy by keeping benefices vacant and appropriating the income. After all these measures Philip still had to borrow a million gold florins from the Pope.

The French King needed every
sou
to pay his soldiers. The feudal system, of a lord holding land from the crown in return for military service, had been breaking down in France since the twelfth century; for generations many nobles had refused to go to the wars. Those who did come expected to be paid, while as in England troops were increasingly hired by
lettres de retenue
—indentures. But somehow Philip found the money to raise a mighty army. In 1340, for example, he had nearly 20,000 heavy cavalry on the borders of Guyenne and over 40,000 on those of Flanders. Indeed, possibly the real drama of the early stages of the Hundred Years War is the herculean effort of both protagonists to harness the resources of their bewilderingly ramshackle and unwieldy states for a confrontation.

Slowly France and England lumbered into war. On 24 May 1337 King Philip declared that Guyenne had been forfeited by Edward ‘because of the many excesses, rebellious and disobedient acts committed by the King of England against Us and Our Royal Majesty’, citing in particular Edward’s harbouring of the sorcerer Robert of Artois. This declaration is generally considered to be the beginning of the Hundred Years War. In October Edward responded with a formal letter of defiance to ‘Philip of Valois who calls himself King of France’, laying claim to the French throne.

Philip VI immediately began a formidable onslaught on Guyenne, which lasted for three years. In 1339 his troops took Blaye on the north bank of the Gironde estuary, threatening Bordeaux’s access to the sea, and in 1340 took Bourg at the mouth of the Dordogne. On the Garonne, La Réole was again captured by the French who then besieged Saint-Macaire nearer the ducal capital. Besides disrupting the main lines of transport and communication, they laid waste the rich vineyard country of Entre-Deux-Mers and Saint-Emilion and made a determined attempt to take Bordeaux itself. Guyenne only survived because after 1340 Philip was busy elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Edward encircled France with a string of alliances. In August 1337, with a massive bribe, he landed no less a catch than the Holy (though excommunicated) Roman Emperor Ludwig IV, who was Philippa’s brother-in-law. After establishing himself and his Queen at a splendid headquarters in Antwerp, Edward went with much pomp to meet Ludwig at Coblenz, where the Emperor promised to help him against Philip ‘for seven years’, making Edward Vicar-General (or Deputy) of the Empire with jurisdiction over all Imperial fiefs outside Germany. In theory Edward could now summon as his vassals all the lords of the Low Countries and even the Counts of Burgundy and Savoy; in practice the post gave him hardly more than a dubious prestige. Nevertheless Edward and Philippa returned to Antwerp to hold court in the winter of 1338-1339 and ‘kept their house right honourably all that winter, and caused money, gold and silver, to be made at Antwerp, great plenty’.