The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (26 page)

Edward III would rule England for fifty years, but he is most remembered as the great warrior who with his son the Black Prince led the English to victory after victory in the Hundred Years War. The Battle of Agincourt won by Edward III’s great-grandson Henry V was an apparent vindication of this protracted attempt to claim the French throne. It enabled Henry to marry the French king’s daughter Katharine, and his infant son Henry VI was briefly both King of England and King of France. Moreover, Edward III’s victories secured Aquitaine for England and thus almost a quarter of the territory of today’s France, as well as gaining the important French Channel port of Calais. The immense popularity the war brought him meant that the crown’s authority was never in doubt for much of his reign, and the barons’ energies were taken up by the French campaign. At the king’s extended Gothic castle at Windsor countless great feasts and tournaments took place which appealed to the spirit of the age, modelled on the hundred-year-old cult of King Arthur, the Dark Age chieftain who had been transformed by the courtly romances into a perfect gentle knight and the summit of the chivalric ideal.

The booty from the Hundred Years War paid for an ambitious and popular royal building programme which reinforced the sense of Englishness reviving across the country. Edward III’s age marks the beginning of the peculiarly English style of late-Gothic architecture named Perpendicular. In contrast to the flowing lines of the contemporary Gothic style prevailing on the continent, English building whether at Gloucester Cathedral, St George’s Chapel Windsor or Winchester Cathedral, is constructed on sterner, more geometric lines. From 1362 onwards English officially replaced Latin as the language of the English law courts. One of England’s greatest writers, Geoffrey Chaucer, was born around 1344. A member of a well-to-do family of wine merchants, Chaucer had a cosmopolitan upbringing and spoke at least four languages. His fascination with French poetry and with the writings of Dante and Boccaccio was intensified by a career as a diplomat in the royal service. So influential were his own works, such as
The Book of the Duchess
(which marks the death of John of Gaunt’s wife Blanche of Lancaster) and ultimately
The Canterbury Tales
, that by the end of the fourteenth century English had permanently replaced Latin and French as the language of England’s literature. William Langland’s
Piers Plowman
and the anonymous
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
also testify to the new creative spirit abroad.

Despite the era’s military glory and the king’s personal popularity, Edward III’s reign was also a time of considerable social misery. In 1348 the bubonic plague known as the Black Death arrived to wreak havoc on the population of England as it did in the rest of Europe. Carried by the black rat on Genoese ships, this curse of God (or so it seemed to contemporary observers) had originated in Asia, where the Republic of Genoa’s vast trading operation had its most extensive dealings. In England it killed an astonishing one-fifth of the population within the year, ultimately being responsible for the deaths of one-third of the population. In France and Italy half the population died. The pessimism that this brought to the succeeding European generation was similar to that experienced after the First World War. The death of labourers able to produce food ensured that the English population declined for almost a century. It would not be until the mid-fifteenth century that numbers began to increase again.

The shortage of labour undermined the system of serfdom or villeinage introduced by the Normans which forbade families to move from their local lords’ domain. So many landowners were desperate for men to work their fields that a ‘no questions asked’ policy towards runaway serfs was widely operated, and by the end of the fourteenth century the institution was in tatters. But attempts on the part of agricultural workers to better themselves by demanding a living wage were met by swingeing government legislation. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 kept wages down to the level prevailing before the inflation prompted by the Black Death. Many landowners took the decision to turn their fields over to sheep runs because grazing required little labour. Former serfs were grateful if they could find any work at all. This discontent was mirrored in risings or
jacqueries
all over western Europe, and is reflected in
Piers Plowman
.

For numerous landowners sheep-farming was a swift route to profit. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the high point of English wool export, and by Edward III’s reign woollen textile manufacture was replacing raw wool as England’s chief export or staple. East Anglia did not have the hills and rushing streams that would see the thirteenth-century invention of water-powered mills make areas like the Yorkshire and Lancashire Pennines, and the west country, centres of woollen manufacture for hundreds of years. But the region’s soft water (integral to the textile production process) and the fine wool from its native sheep resulted in a much admired material known as worsted after the Norfolk village of that name–a direct result of Edward encouraging Flemish weavers in 1331 to initiate the English into the secrets of fine cloth. The immense personal riches of individual clothiers who controlled the wool staple, the customs entrepôts of the export wool trade, enabled them to take over the Jewish community’s position as moneylenders to the king.

The first three years of Edward’s kingship were dominated by the regency of his mother Isabella and Roger Mortimer. But their hold on power was not to last. Mortimer’s greed, his open attempt to make himself the overlord of Wales where the Mortimer estates were based and the irregularity of the couple’s union soon made them extremely unpopular. Their failure to prevent the French king Charles IV seizing most of Gascony added to a feeling of disorder and betrayal. Though Bordeaux and Bayonne remained, the important and historic English wine trade–at a time when wine was the equivalent of clean water for drinking–was dramatically curtailed.

In 1330 Edward seized power. He had just fathered his first child, the warrior known as the Black Prince, and was far more confident and able to stand up for himself. While Isabella and Mortimer slept at Nottingham Castle, the young king–accompanied by a band of armed soldiers–stole in through an underground passage and dragged Mortimer from his bed, closing his ears to his mother’s cries for mercy. Mortimer was hung at Tyburn Tree, the gallows for common criminals which until the late eighteenth century stood at the junction of Edgware Road and Marble Arch. Queen Isabella was exiled to the manor of Castle Rising, where she lived on for another thirty years.

Almost immediately the young king was hurled into war. On the death of Robert the Bruce his son David had become King of Scotland, but by 1332 King David lost his throne to John Balliol’s son Edward. The following year Edward III recaptured Berwick-on-Tweed from the Scots at the Battle of Halidon Hill and made the border town permanently part of England. But on the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, once the bulk of Edward III’s soldiers were across the Channel, David returned and was recognized once more as king of the Scots.

In many ways the Hundred Years War was simply a continuation of earlier wars between France and England over the remains of the Angevin Empire on French soil, such as the conflict recently lost by Isabella and Mortimer. Pride and the wine trade made it impossible for Edward III to put up with the continuous attacks on the French kings on Gascony. Likewise the French kings could not abandon their longstanding policy of uniting all the territories on the French continent under the French crown. The diplomatic situation was made more volatile by the threat of the French king’s support for the Bruce cause. But a freshly complicating factor was the struggle for mastery over France’s north-east neighbour, Flanders–England’s biggest trading partner.

The immensely lucrative clothing trade of Flanders was run by powerful, independently minded merchants. They had little use for their impoverished count, whose feudal rights over them seemed irrelevant relics of an almost forgotten age. Their interests were with England, whose wool had made them rich. But the Count of Flanders, who remained nominally their overlord, was the vassal of the French king. For some time there had been disagreements between the Flemish burghers or clothing-town leaders and the count over their liberties and powers. When the count opted to settle them by force with the aid of French troops, the Flemish burghers’ leader James van Artevelde declared independence and in 1338 made a separate alliance with Edward III. The vigorous English king would give the Flemish clothing towns and their trade the protection they needed.

The Battle of Sluys, which is said to be the first naval battle in English history, is generally accepted as the beginning of the Hundred Years War. In 1340 a large French fleet of over 200 men-of-war (including warships from the Norman and Genoese navies) crowded the sea at the port of Sluys to block all English ships reaching Flanders for the war effort. Against the advice of his Great Council the king sailed up in person to attack it. He had gathered a smaller fleet in the Orwell Estuary made up in a more haphazard fashion, from every ship he could find at anchor in the southern ports of England. The chance of ridding the country of the French naval menace was too good to miss.

The battle secured the freedom of the Channel for the next thirty years. It was the first occasion when the French got a taste of the longbow, the weapon which (though developed by the Welsh) would make the English armies invincible in pitched battle for the best part of a century. No contemporary weapon had the same capacity for rapid fire, and in the hands of a master it defeated the more technologically advanced crossbow.

The longbow was so difficult to use that archers had to be brought up practising the art from boyhood to develop the muscles in the arm required for the enormously heavy weapon. At six feet long and three feet broad when drawn back to the ear, the longbow was taller that most Welsh and Englishmen. Lacking the craft traditions which could transform a piece of elm into a perfectly balanced bow, and which had made archery a national sport in England, the French army was never able to master the longbow. Once this became clear, in order to secure a continuous supply of longbowmen Edward III forbade all sports other than archery on the village green.

At Sluys the hail of English arrows drove so many Frenchmen to jump overboard or dive for cover that all 200 ships were captured. So embarrassing was this episode for France’s naval prestige that her commanders did not dare tell Philip VI. It was left to his jester to inform him. ‘The English are cowards,’ he told his royal master as he waited for news of the battle; ‘they did not have the courage to jump into the sea like the French and the Normans.’

With the Channel secured, Edward III could afford to make a truce with the French, though he returned to England to raise more money for a new land campaign against them. The war meanwhile had shifted into a game with higher stakes. Through his mother Isabella, Edward III had a strong claim to the French throne since Isabella’s brother King Charles IV had died without male heirs. The French crown therefore passed to the head of the more distant Valois branch of the family, who ascended the throne as Philip VI. But it was arguable that Edward, as the former king’s nephew, had a nearer claim.

In 1340 Edward III had revived his claim to be King of France. This was partly to please the Flemings, who did not like being seen to rebel against their feudal overlord. If Edward III was their overlord, their rebellion was given legitimacy. But pride also convinced Edward that the war could not be dropped as long as his claim existed. For the next century the English and French were in a state of constant warfare. Indeed, it would not be until the nineteenth century that the English crown abandoned its claim to the throne of France. Until that date in the King of England’s coat of arms the fleur-de-lis or lilies of France are to be seen side by side with the lions rampant of England.

In 1346 Philip VI’s forces launched such a fierce attack on Edward’s garrison in Gascony that the English seemed in danger of being expelled from the continent for ever. As a diversionary tactic Edward invaded northern France on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy. At first he was successful. Philip abandoned the Gascon campaign to counter the English army, which was sweeping through Normandy under the command of the English king. With him was his son, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, whose black armour earned him the nickname the Black Prince. Laying waste to the country, they moved up the Seine until they were in sight of the French king’s capital of Paris. But Philip VI now rallied. Edward was forced to turn north-east towards the coast and the friendly Flemish frontier, with the French armies in hot pursuit. Beating off the French cavalry which guarded the ford that emerged at Blanche Taque at low tide, Edward crossed the Somme. Then he decided he could flee no longer. He must stand and fight. He took his stand at the little village of Crécy in his hereditary county of Ponthieu.

The Battle of Crécy made Edward III’s reputation on the European continent. His men were outnumbered by over two to one, yet by clever positioning and the use of the longbow alongside the infantry the French army was destroyed. Crécy established the superiority of English tactics to the French cavalry charge. Thanks to this great victory, Edward was able to secure the strategically crucial port of Calais to the east. This became a pivotal English stronghold as both entrepôt and garrison. It was not until 1558 that the town which gave England command of the Channel was returned to its rightful owners.

Choosing where to give battle gave Edward III an extra edge at Crécy. He elected to do so on ground that sloped up to a windmill, from where he himself watched the battle. The Welsh and English archers were drawn up in a pattern like a chevron so that those behind could fire over and at the same time cover their colleagues below. The cavalry on whom the French were relying for victory would have to charge uphill–no easy task for warhorses with knights in armour on their backs. Try as they might, charge as they might, in the way that had made them famous, the French cavalry were mown down in mid-gallop by the English archers. Fifteen times they started out again, fifteen times they were forced back by the longbowmen under the command of the Black Prince.