Students of his campaigns declare him to be the first general of the modern type and, further, that he has never been equaled at his kind of warfare.
Some say he began life as a tailor in London, and one Italian historian calls him Granni della Ginglia (John of the Needle). The truth is that he was the second son of Gilbert de Hawkwood, a holder of land and a tanner at Hedingham Sibil in Essex.
Entering the army under John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, he came to the attention of the Black Prince and was knighted. When the truce had been made after the capture of the French king at Poictiers, Hawkwood turned his eye to personal gain and became the leader of a body of Free Companions. France was the sorriest land in all Christendom, for even the French soldiers turned to freebooting and the rape of their own home. Hawkwood seems to have been the most successful of all, even though he often acted on the principles imputed to Robin Hood. Certainly he was the first to see that France had been bled white and that the return of the plague, which was beginning again, would complete the work the Free Companies had begun.
He was a handsome man, above the average in height, with the shoulders of a woodsman and the deep chest of a runner. His eye was that of a born leader, keen, luminous, firm. Because of the confidence he inspired among Englishmen who were at loose ends in France, he got the very best of them. He could pick and choose, and his picking and choosing were so expert that he gradually gathered about him a band of superlative strength known as the White Company. Some writers think the name arose from the splendor of equipment they used, but there must have been some more tangible reason. They may have worn cloaks of white, or at least of light gray, or perhaps they had white cockades in their riding hats. It might even have been that the baldrics they wore crosswise on their chests were of that color. Whatever the reason, the White Company, or the Compagnia Bianca as it was called in Italy, became the most talked about and the most feared of the Free Companies.
Hawkwood trained his men with a thoroughness equal to that of Oliver Cromwell in a later century and in accordance with his own theories. The company consisted of a thousand lances, a misleading count which came of considering three mounted men as one lance; a thoroughly trained man-at-arms, a squire, and a page, the latter having to be content with riding a palfrey. Both the man-at-arms and the squire rode heavily armed. Their chief weapon was a long lance of such weight that it took two men to handle it. The lance, however, was only for use when fighting on foot, when the stout companions would form themselves into a square or circle and receive the enemy on the lance points. For use in the saddle, they had heavy swords and daggers. Five lances constituted a company, five companies a troop.
With the thousand lances were two thousand foot soldiers, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call them bowmen. Most of them had carried a longbow on the fields of Crécy and Poictiers and they were supremely expert with it. In fact, they had learned a better way of handling that deadly weapon. They would place one end in the ground, which kept the bow firmer and made a steadier aim possible. It may be taken for granted that Hawkwood placed his greatest reliance on his bowmen; having nothing of the Bourbon in him and being quick to learn. These strong-limbed sons of Albion could make twenty miles a day and would be in camp before the weary horses, with their heavy loads, hobbled in on stiff limbs.
Well, here was a France as bare as a bone on a dust heap. And here was the White Company, fit to battle any force in Christendom and avid for spoils. And here was John Hawkwood, the best leader in all the armies. What to do?
Hawkwood knew what to do.
Over the mountainous barrier between France and Italy lay the Lombardy plains, bounteous and fertile and dotted with cities fairly bursting with wealth; all of them fighting with bitter jealousy among themselves. In Lombardy, moreover, was the great family of the Visconti, the dukes and absolute rulers of Milan. The present head of this great family was the ambitious Bernabò Visconti, who was determined to get all of the plain under his rule and to oust the Avignon popes at the same time. Hawkwood decided that the White Company would have a fine future in this warm and luscious land. After capturing the city of Pau as a final gesture (and robbing only the clergy), he made an arrangement with another band of freebooters under the command of Bernard de Salle by which the newcomers enrolled themselves in the company.
Hawkwood spent the rest of his life in Italy, thirty years of almost continuous fighting. To tell the whole story of those sanguinary years while the White Company marched and countermarched across the rich plains would fill a long volume. Hawkwood, whose word was law, changed sides often, sometimes fighting for the Visconti, sometimes against them, at intervals in the employ of the Pope, as often against him. Once he received 180,000 florins as ransom for the Count of Savoy. The city of Pisa paid the company as high as 23,000 florins a month. Sometimes he lost a battle (when pitted against heavy odds), but generally he was the victor. The warring cities bid against each other for his services. When the second son of Edward of England, Prince Lionel, the handsome young giant who stood nearly seven feet in his harlots (as the pointed dress shoes of the period were called), arrived to marry a daughter of Bernabò’s, Hawkwood took his band back into the Milanese service and was rewarded by being made, by the left hand, a brother-in-law of the English prince. At least Bernabò gave him in marriage the handsome Donnina, one of his illegitimate daughters. It is not known if the Englishman made this a condition of his services, but it is certain that it was a love match. Bernabò was at war at this particular moment with Pope Urban V, who had braved the wrath of the French cardinals by taking the papal court back to Rome. Perhaps the pontiff began to show signs of weakening and thus stirred the ire of the Milanese ruler. Whatever the cause, the Englishman found himself chasing the Pope out of Montefiascone and all the way to Viterbo.
The largest amount Hawkwood was ever paid was 220,000 gold florins from a combination of five of the richest cities to leave them alone for five years. Once, when fighting for Rome, the name of the band was changed to the Holy Company, a misnomer which the realistic leader accepted with a wry smile.
The fame of this truly remarkable man as a general rests largely on the campaign he fought on the side of Florence against the almost overpowering strength of Milan. By this time his original company had changed in personnel. Thirty years of continuous fighting had thinned out the Englishmen in the ranks, although a few of the original members were still in harness; the toughest and bravest of the lot, bronzed beyond recognition and still capable of shooting off the finial on a stone gate at a distance of a hundred yards. The armies of Milan, under the command of the Count of Virtue (so called because he was a most villainous fellow), a nephew who had murdered Bernabò, were large and powerful. As commander-in-chief of the forces of Florence, the Englishman won an initial victory. When a second Florentine army, which was supposed to attack Milan from the west, failed to move, Hawkwood found himself alone against the Visconti might. He had less faith in his band now, having no archers save crossbowmen (what a step down from the longbowmen of Crécy!), and he had to stage a quick retreat. The Florentine historian Bracciolini calls his generalship in this extremity the equal of anything in the annals of Roman history. He crossed the Oglio and the Mincio and then had to get his troops across an inundated area caused by the breaking of the ditches on the Adige, a feat of the utmost daring. In the meantime the second Florentine army had been soundly beaten and Hawkwood found himself alone to face the strength of the Visconti.
By the use of brilliant hit-and-run strategy he kept the Milanese armies from uniting and finally succeeded in hammering their main force so resoundingly that they all turned back and sought sanctuary in Liguria. Milan was happy to make an honorable peace with Florence on the strength of this.
During the rest of his life, four brief years, Hawkwood lived in peace in Florence in a fine house called Polverosa in the suburb of San Donato de Torre. He was regarded as the savior of the city and was cheered whenever he appeared on the str
eets. Knowing that he had little time left, he transferred all his castles and holdings to the government of Florence for sums of money, intending to return to England. His beloved Donnina was still alive and his three daughters were married to high-ranking captains in the Florentine armies; but he longed for the cool breezes and the green fields of his native land. Death forestalled him and the grateful republic did honor to his memory with a magnificent funeral.
The one anecdote about him which seems to have survived is that he encountered one day at Montecchio two wandering friars and was accorded the customary greeting of “God give you peace.” The leader of the White Company stared at them in silence for a moment before responding, “May God take your alms away!” The poor friars stammered in surprise and had nothing more to say. “You come to me,” declared Hawkwood, “and pray that God will make me die of hunger. Do you not know that I live by war and that peace would undo me?”
He had indeed lived by war, but the brief peace which came to him in his final years did not undo him. He left a comfortable fortune to his family when the grateful republic laid his body in a splendid tomb in the choir of the Duomo. His one son had returned to England and later saw to it that the bones of the old warrior were brought home and buried at Hedingham Sibil in a chantry which friends had raised to his memory.
CHAPTER XVII
Some Incidental Achievements in the Course of a Long Reign
1
THE reign of Edward III can be divided into two periods, the days of national glory and the days of decline. Most of the incidental achievements, which may now be briefly mentioned, came in the second period, when the gray goose no longer flew high in the sky. They had no bearing on military matters and so provide a welcome change.
It was at this time that English became the accepted language of the nation, ushering in what may reasonably be termed the birth of English literature. Edward III either initiated the movement or at least gave it his sanction. One of the many churchmen who served for brief periods as chancellor during the reign, William de Edington, introduced into Parliament the famous statute which provided that all proceedings before the courts of Westminster, the judgments as well as the pleadings, must be expressed in English. The statute went further and stipulated that schoolmasters must teach their pupils to construe in the English tongue. This was a radical measure, for Norman-French had been the official language since the days of the Conquest. It took a long time for the enactment to be fully accepted.
Edward had been fortunate in his tutor, a learned and witty churchman named Richard de Bury, who later became Bishop of Durham. It was in his last years that he wrote his famous book Philobiblon, which was in a sense an autobiography although it was devoted largely to books and book lovers, a rare class, it must be agreed, in those days. It was written in bad Latin, say scholars, but when translated into English was found to be most beguiling and witty. He was perhaps the first, and most certainly the most active, of book collectors in England, rummaging in the dust heaps of abbey and cathedral archives and rescuing the volumes which made his personal library larger than those of all other bishops combined.
This period produced five rather remarkable writers of widely different gifts. The first, of course, was Geoffrey Chaucer. Born in 1340, he did not achieve any prominence in letters until near the close of the reign. His youth was spent in the Vintry, where his somewhat wealthy citizen father had a house of two cellars, a hall, a parlor, a solar bedroom with a chimney and a privy, a kitchen and larder and chambers in the garret. From this substantial home could be heard very distinctly the deep bass notes of the bells of St. Martin-le-Grand tolling the curfew. Here an observant eye could see enough of life to prepare him for the writing of the wonderful tales he later produced in the native tongue. The productive period of the poet coincided with the closing of the deep shadows about the senile king.
John Gower, called the prince of poets, was born in 1325 but did not produce his serious work until he had reached his mature years. One of his major works, Confessio Amantis, was written in the English tongue and was a monumental effort of thirty thousand rhymed lines.
Little is known about Will Langland except that his long narrative poem, Piers Plowman, was the most noteworthy single effort in the native tongue at this period. In this passionate picture of the life of the common people, he not only displayed intense feeling and power but won himself recognition later as the spokesman of the lower classes.
Jean Froissart came to England bearing letters of commendation to Queen Philippa. He served for a time as secretary to the queen and was given every opportunity to observe and set down the things which transpired. He was born for the life of courts, having a fanatical enthusiasm for knights who lived by the code and who spent their days in the pleasing occupation of snipping, slashing, shearing, mutilating, and disemboweling each other. If he had been content to remain permanently in England on the fat pension that the lavish Edward would have provided for him, he would undoubtedly have produced a great mass of biased but readable and useful history in his Chronicles. Many incidents which are no more than a scratch on a page of history would have come to life in some form or other if Messire Jean had been on hand to track them down and present them in his pleasant but irresponsible prose. What stories he might have told! Of the great John Hawkwood who formed the White Company; of the Lady Joan de Clisson whose bitter grief over the unjust execution of her husband by the French king led her into piracy in the English Channel; of the long and silent conspiracy of the villeins of England which culminated when John Ball had “rungen their bell”; of the real story of Dick Whittington with his cat and tie voices he heard in the bells!
But Froissart went later to France and transferred his enthusiasm to the exploits of French knights.
The most important of this first school of writers from one standpoint was a strange young character who became known as the Hermit of Hampole. His name was Richard Rolle. Feeling the desire to live a detached life, he took two kirtles of his sister’s, one white and one gray, and a rain hood of his father’s, and in this patched-up costume lived in the woods near his home in solitary contemplation. Later he went farther afield and first attracted wide attention when he entered a church at Dalton, put on a surplice, and delivered a sermon of passionate fervor. The rest of his life was spent in a cave at Hampole near the Cistercian nunnery of St. Mary and was devoted to writing messages on spiritual and inspirational questions in the vigorous but little-known dialect of Northumberland. He preached a gospel of hope and joy in a period given over to gloom and despair. The nuns aided him by preserving copies of his work in his own hand in their choir bonds. He was carried off in 1349 by the Black Death, which seemingly could penetrate into dense forests and the deepest caves.
Richard Rolle has been called the father of English prose because he was the first to give written form to what had only been spoken before, an amalgam of Old English, Norman-French, and Latin, the basis of the present tongue. His fame did not penetrate the closed circle known as the court, however, except perhaps as an amusing anecdote about an unhinged recluse.
2
The one branch of the arts in which it may reasonably be claimed for Edward that he led the way was architecture and building; and in this field his contribution was largely administrative.
The last quarter of the century saw the change from the Curvilinear style to the glories of the Perpendicular. This was, in a sense, a revolt from the great elaboration of the Curvilinear period, when beauty in tracery was eagerly sought and other elements were sometimes neglected. The Perpendicular was manifested in a preference for straight lines rather than flowing, a demand for the sterner and more dignified aspects of simplicity.
Edward was wise enough, and sufficiently discerning in taste, to accept the change and put all his power behind it. A Royal School was founded with headquarters at Westminster in the great administrative building over against the abbey. Here the many ventures in renovation and addition were discusse
d and planned. It is doubtful that Edward took an active part in the purely technical discussions as his ancestor, Henry III, undoubtedly had done. He was always too busy for that, and his departures from the kingdom were so frequent and so prolonged that he had no time left for such lesser labors. It is certain, however, that he always knew in a general way what the master masons were going to do. The costs were tremendous and so the great Plantagenet king, who was always shivering on the brink of bankruptcy, would have to know what his responsibility would be.
Edward’s activities in building centered at Windsor and Westminster, but his lead was being followed elsewhere. Richard of Farleigh was at work in the west, his chief contribution being the truly beautiful steeple of Salisbury Cathedral. The erection of Salisbury had been a major triumph for England a century before; a rarely fine building, designed, planned, and raised by Englishmen in the record-breaking space of forty years instead of the centuries which more leisurely races allowed. It had always presented one lack, a suitable main tower. Richard of Farleigh proceeded to supply this.
After completing their work at Windsor, William of Wykeham and his right-hand man, William of Wynford, moved on to Winchester and began their memorable contribution there. William Joy transformed Wells Cathedral and John Clyve designed the chastely lovely tower of Worcester. In addition to these major accomplishments, there were native artists, unsung geniuses of the chisel and the mallet, at work on churches throughout the country. It is in the rare artistry of her small churches that England has always excelled.
The spearheading of this change in architectural design in England is said in some quarters to have been the contribution of Robert de Bury, the wise and witty Bishop of Durham. He was above all others the one who might have felt the need for change, but the evidence available is not tangible or convincing. He went, on one of the many continental missions which were entrusted to him because of his suavity and culture, to visit Pope John XXII, who also has had his place in these pages. John was more concerned in the practical and administrative aspects of the papacy but at the same time he was deep in the evolution of the Palace of the Popes at Avignon. This brought many great architect-masons to the spot, and it is conceivable that the urbane Richard would be a welcome visitor in all cultivated circles and that he would come to know in what direction the thought of the great continental leaders was trending.
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