A Great and Glorious Adventure

by Gordon Corrigan

  For days, refugees had been pouring into Caen, and by the time the English army had reached Fontenay-le-Pesnel, just east of Tilly-sur-Seulles – about twelve miles from Caen and on a ridge that would become frustratingly familiar to another British army during the Normandy campaign of 1944 – the constable of Caen, the garrison commander, knew that death and destruction was coming his way, and coming soon. He had perhaps 1,200 soldiers, men-at-arms and mercenary crossbowmen recruited from Genoa, and decided to hold only the castle and the Île Saint-Jean. To abandon the old city was sensible enough – its walls would not have withstood an assault even if he had had sufficient men to cover all the approaches, which he did not – and, while both abbeys were stoutly walled, he considered that he could not afford to attempt to hold them. The bishop of Bayeux, with around 200 men-at-arms and 100 crossbowmen, was placed in the castle, while the remainder of the garrison withdrew to the Île and prepared to defend it with the help of those citizens who could bear arms. As the bridge at the Porte Saint-Pierre had been designed to defend against an assault coming towards the castle from the south-east, not away from the castle from the north-west, a barricade of upturned farm carts, church benches and blocks of stone from building sites was constructed on the north bank to prevent the English from crossing the bridge, and barges were moored along the bank of the Odon with crossbowmen on the decks and in the fore and stern castles. That night, an English friar and professor of theology, the Augustinian Geoffrey of Maldon, arrived at the old walls with a letter from Edward. In it the king promised to spare the lives and goods of the citizens if the city would surrender to him. The council of Caen rejected the demand, the bishop of Bayeux tore up the letter, and the wretched Geoffrey was flung into the castle jail.

  The English army, divided as was customary into three divisions or batailles (literally, ‘battles’), marched at first light and drew near to Caen at mid-morning. The vanguard, commanded in theory by the Prince of Wales, took possession of the Abbaye aux Dames to the north-east, while the main body, commanded by the king, formed up around the Abbaye aux Hommes, with the third division somewhere north of the castle. Edward was preparing to reconnoitre the city prior to formulating a plan for its capture, when events overtook him. Some soldiers of the Prince of Wales’s division saw an undefended gate in the eastern walls of the old city, made a rush for it and, having got there, realized that beyond it the city itself was deserted, all the garrison and most of the occupants having decamped to the Île Saint-Jean. The earl of Warwick, supposedly the Prince of Wales’s adviser but in reality the commander of the division, led more troops into the old city and was unable to prevent the men from beginning to loot the empty houses and setting on fire those that did not look as if they offered rich pickings. As they advanced further within the old walls, the leading soldiers spotted the French men-at-arms manning the barricade on the north side of the Porte Saint-Pierre and a scuffle developed. At this point, the king, watching from the Abbaye aux Hommes, realized what was happening and sent an aide to tell the earl of Warwick to pull back until a coordinated attack could be mounted. The earl duly had his trumpeter sound the retreat, and, when that was ignored, the earl, on the principle that, if you can’t stop them, you might as well join them, threw himself wholeheartedly into the battle for the bridge.

  What had begun as an accidental encounter now developed into a full-scale assault. As the Odon was low at that time of year, archers and Welsh spearmen began to wade across the river and attack the crossbowmen on the barges moored on the opposite bank. That line of defence gave way, the English infantry were in, and the French defenders of the bridge, realizing that they were about to be cut off and attacked from the rear, abandoned the bridge and withdrew back into the Île. Now the slaughter began. Once the bridge was open, the English men-at-arms and spearmen swarmed across and began killing anyone they met, soldier or civilian. The fighting was particularly brutal in the narrow streets and inside houses, and, while the men-at-arms would accept the surrender of a nobleman or an obviously prosperous civilian, the archers and spearmen were in a bloodlust and killed indiscriminately. French knights, conspicuous by their armour and rich trappings, would seek out an English knight to surrender to, knowing that only then would their lives be assured.

  The castle was never captured and simply ignored, and by late afternoon it was all over and the looting began. The chronicles differ widely over the casualty list. It was said that 5,000 French were killed; that 2,500 French bodies lay on the streets and in the houses, stripped and disfigured so that they were unrecognizable; that 500 bodies were buried in a mass grave in the grounds of the church of Saint Jean; that 250 knights and esquires and a large number of rich merchants were taken prisoner; and that only one English esquire died of wounds some days later.17 The figure of the French dead is almost certainly too high, although the sources do agree on the number of prisoners taken. The number of English dead is similarly almost certainly too low; there must have been losses among the archers and spearmen who waded across the Odon to get at the crossbowmen on the boats, and the Lanercost Chronicle tells of civilians hurling stones and beams on the advancing English from the upper storeys of their houses.

  The English stayed at Caen for five days. Once the army was back under control, after an initial orgy of plunder and rape, it could replenish its baggage train, collect the valuables of Caen, tend to its wounded, bury the dead, and – an opportunity of interest to those of a less rapacious nature – go and gaze at the tomb of the Conqueror. English and later British armies would gain a reputation for misbehaviour on capturing a town – a reputation that would last well into the nineteenth century – but, as English soldiers tended to look for alcohol first and women second, the incidence of rape was generally less than that practised by other nationalities; it was hangovers, rather than the threat of the hangman, that usually brought soldiers back to their allegiance relatively quickly. While pausing at Caen, Edward sent orders back to England for the arraying of 1,200 archers, mainly from East Anglia, and directed that contracts should be placed for 2,450 bows and 6,300 sheaves of arrows. Not all the men and equipment would have been replacements for losses in battle, but some of them surely were.

  At the same time, 100 ships were to be impressed to replace those that had deserted, and the prisoners were sent off to England from Ustrem under the guard of the earl of Huntingdon and a detachment of archers. Prisoners of rank were an important asset in medieval warfare and, like the prizes taken by the Royal Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gave the captor the chance of making a great deal of money. A man who could afford it was held for ransom and not released until his family or his subjects had paid up. While the practice of holding men for ransom was a very old one, neither the Welsh nor the Scottish wars had produced very much profit for those taking a prisoner – blood and stones, feathers and frogs spring to mind – but the Hundred Years War was a very different matter. Rich burgesses who had little money could buy their freedom with furs, jewels or plate, rich knights could do so with money, poorer ones with horses or armour or land, and knights with nothing at all might actually agree to serve their captor for an agreed period of time. Arrangements for the allocation of ransom money were usually specified in the indentures, and could range from one-third to one-half payable to the man’s lord. In the contract companies, the rule was that the man handed over one-third to his captain, who in turn handed over one-third of his accrued takings to whomsoever he was contracted to (usually the king). Prisoners could also be sold on by a captor who wanted instant cash or who did not want to be responsible for looking after the prisoner through the often years-long process of extracting the ransom. Some of the ransoms demanded, and paid, were very high indeed. At Caen, the constable, the count of Eu, surrendered to Sir Thomas Holland, who then sold his prisoner to the king for £12,000, who ultimately extracted a lot more than that for the release of the count. Sir Thomas Daniel, who took the surrender of the count of Tancarville, the chamberlai
n of Caen, was less fortunate: as he was a member of the Prince of Wales’s retinue, he had to hand his prisoner over and be content with £666 down and a pension of £26.13.4 (twenty-six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence) per annum for life – not bad, but hardly beyond the dreams of avarice. The prince eventually received £6,000 to release Tancarville.18

  The army was now ready to move on. Edward ordered that the recently impressed 100 ships and archer reinforcements were to rendezvous with him at the port of Le Crotoy, in Ponthieu, which gave him the option of taking the army off should the situation warrant, but Le Crotoy was a good 140 miles away, and first he would have to cross the River Seine, a far greater obstacle than any encountered so far. He might, of course, have moved parallel to the coast, keeping in touch with the fleet, which could have transported the army across the mouth of the Seine to Le Havre (this town posed no threat, its resident warships and the town itself having already been burned by the fleet). But Edward wished to strike inland, to show the French that the Valois usurper could not protect them, so the army marched east, burning and looting as it went. The next obvious target would have been Évreux, but that town had a strongly fortified castle with a garrison and the king did not want to get tied down in siege operations at this stage – he had to keep moving, and so he next took the unfortified but prosperous cloth-making town of Louviers. From here both Froissart and Northburg list the towns on the English army’s route,19 but in an order which makes little sense, involving as it would have done a great deal of doubling back to no discernible purpose.

  After Louviers, the intention seems to have been to cross the Seine at Pont-de-l’Arche and to advance on Rouen, then, as now, a major Norman city. Intelligence soon informed Edward that Rouen was well garrisoned by a substantial body of men-at-arms under the count of Harcourt (whose brother, Sir Godfrey Harcourt, was serving in Edward’s army) and the count of Dreux, with a sizeable outpost in Pont-de-l’Arche, and in any case the bridge over the river at Pont-de-l’Arche had been pulled down. The army now moved along the left (south) bank of the Seine, heading for Vernon, looking for a crossing point and moving ever closer to Paris, while a scratch French force (which for a time at least included Philip VI) moved along the north bank destroying the bridges. Vernon was well fortified and, although the English took the fortress of Longueville on the approaches to it, they could not take the town itself and without the town the bridge could not be reached.

  The only success to be plucked from the search for a bridge so far was a totally pointless but rather gallant little venture by the thirty-six-year-old Sir Robert de Ferrers, a Staffordshire landowner whose command consisted of one banneret, three knights, twenty-five esquires, thirty-two mounted archers and three foot archers. Ferrers, or some of his men, found a boat on the south side of the Seine. Ferrers packed as many men as he could into it, crossed the river and approached the castle of La Roche-Guyon on the north side of the river. The defence works of the castle were (and are) formidable and Ferrers could not possibly have taken it with the few men he had with him. The commander of the garrison, however, panicked, thought that Ferrers’s little band was the vanguard of the whole English army, and instead of withdrawing into the keep, where he could have held out for months against any attacking force, surrendered the castle and its inhabitants. The only English casualty was Sir Edward Atte Wode, who was killed by a stone thrown from the castle walls. Ferrers agreed not to take the captured nobles prisoner in exchange for a promise that they would pay their ransoms later, recrossed the river and rejoined the army. His escapade was of no military significance whatsoever, but it demonstrated yet again the inability of Philip VI to defend his subjects on his own territory, something that had already been made clear south of the Seine.

  Philip had already made a half-hearted attempt to negotiate when a French bishop was sent to offer Edward the county of Ponthieu and the confiscated parts of Aquitaine, provided that he would hold them as a vassal of the (Valois) king of France. This was, of course, quite unacceptable. From Vernon, the English army moved off to the next possible crossing, at Mantes, but having got there they very sensibly ignored the sizeable body of French men-at-arms drawn up outside its walls and continued along the river, bypassing any town or castle that was defended, while razing to the ground anything that was not. The next bridge was at Poissy, only twenty miles from Paris, and Edward got there on the evening of 12 August. That same day, Philip VI ordered the bridge to be broken and left a few soldiers to watch the site, while the main French army marched round the bend of the Seine to the last bridge before the city, at Saint-Cloud. Although the bridge at Poissy had been torn down, the piles were still in place, and Edward ordered the engineers to bridge the river using the piles. While timber was cut and hauled to the river, strong patrols were sent off to lay waste the various palaces and hunting lodges that were scattered among the Parisian suburbs to the south of the river. Within two days there was a whole line of destruction running all the way from Saint-Germain-en-Laye south-east to Boulogne on the outskirts of the city. Inside the capital there was panic, with citizens being formed into hastily organized parties to build barricades across the streets and troops deployed to restore order.

  Philip, meanwhile, was at Saint-Denis, the burial place of French kings to the north of the city, where he was assailed by differing advice on what to do next. The tactic of avoiding battle until the English ran out of money or men was not working; the opportunity to cross the Seine and defeat the English south of the river had been missed, another front had just been opened from Flanders, Aquitaine was not subdued, and Philip could never afford to neglect what might be happening in Brittany. Orders were sent out to the cities and towns to send all available troops to Paris, as Edward’s army crossed the Seine by the reconstructed bridge at Poissy and marched north. Its advance guard, commanded by Sir Godfrey Harcourt with 500 men-at-arms and 1,200 archers, all of them mounted, ran into a French army marching south. These were the troops provided by the city of Amiens marching to Paris as ordered, and, although they put up a stout defence, they were no match for the now battle-hardened, or at least massacre-hardened, Englishmen. Many of the Amiens burgesses were killed or taken for eventual ransom, but of more importance was the capture of their baggage train, which was well stocked with rations, wine and clothing.

  The next stop for Edward’s army was Beauvais, where the usual looting and burning was entered into with gusto. The Abbey of Saint-Lucien was set on fire – whether deliberately or accidentally is not known, although the former seems more likely – and, as Edward had issued orders that no church buildings were to be damaged, he was not pleased. He ordered the hanging of those responsible, said to number twenty but in all probability a lot less than that – soldiers were expensive assets and could not easily be replaced. It is likely that the punishment was dealt out to one or two known trouble-makers as a warning that, while plundering and burning was officially encouraged, discipline was still required and men were not to overstep the mark.

  The army moved on, through Milly (probably Marseilles-en-Beauvais) and Grandvilliers to Poix, taking the lightly held castle at Dargies on the way. At Poix they found not one castle but two, neither garrisoned, and when a deputation of the town’s inhabitants appeared and offered to pay a large sum of money, to be collected and delivered in the morning, if the town was spared being put to the torch, Edward agreed. Alas, when the army moved off the next day leaving a small party behind to collect the ransom, the locals decided not to pay after all and a fight developed. The English were getting the worst of it when a messenger on a fast horse caught up with Edward and recalled the army. Now the town was looted and burned, and those who had taken up arms were hanged.

  Edward’s next halt was at Airaines, about three miles from the River Somme, which he would have to cross before he could make contact with the fleet. Here, not only did it seem that all the bridges had again been destroyed, but it was reported that Philip had now assembled an army considerably
bigger than Edward’s, had left Paris and by a series of forced marches of up to twenty-five miles a day was close behind. By now, most of Edward’s foot-soldiers were mounted on captured horses, but even so the constant halts to plunder, and the need to forage far and wide for food for the men and fodder for the horses, slowed the English down. It was now imperative to get across the Somme and either join with the fleet or head for Flanders, where an allied army had just taken the town of Béthune. The major bridges were in Amiens and Abbeville, however, both of which were strongly held by French troops, and the main French army commanded by Philip was moving into Amiens.

  In just over six weeks, the English army had covered 400 miles – considerably more for the foragers and looters – and was now tired, short of provisions, and for the first time in the campaign beginning to encounter partisans. Civilians, emboldened by the knowledge that the Valois army was closing up, began to ambush small foraging parties and kill any soldier foolish enough to leave the line of march on his own. Like their successors almost six centuries later, during the German occupation, these members of the resistance made little difference to the course of the war, but they were a nuisance and meant that sentries had to be doubled and the size of patrols increased.