1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Fired up with pride, shoved in the back by the arriving mob, and urged on by tuneless music, the French knights just kept on coming. In complete disarray they rode or marched into the hailstorm of arrows, which, according to the chronicler Froissart, was so dense that it blacked out the evening sun.

  Edward and his army must have wondered what was going on. At least the townspeople of Caen had thrown a few stones and rooftiles at them. These knights, the ‘flower of France’, were simply queuing up to be slaughtered.

  The Black Prince and some white feathers

  One of the most famous stories to emerge from the battle tells of a blind knight who insisted on charging to his death. King John of Bohemia, an ally of Philippe, had lost his sight owing to an eye infection caught while fighting in Lithuania, but didn’t want to miss out on the excitement at Crécy. So he ordered his men to tie his horse’s reins to theirs and pull him in the direction of the English lines. What he hoped to do if he got there is anyone’s guess – ask the archers to shout out and give him a sporting chance of hitting them, perhaps. In any case, John’s group somehow made it to the top of the slope, where they were all cut down by English men-at-arms.

  The French charged up that hill over a dozen times, and even their own chronicler, Froissart, remarks on their total lack of discipline. Only when darkness fell did Philippe accept defeat and, sporting a wound that some sources place on his neck, others on his thigh (cou and cuisse are fairly similar words, after all), rode away to a nearby chateau, where he called out for the gateman to open up to the ‘unfortunate King of France’. This, believe it or not, was a joke, because up until then he had been known as Philippe the Fortunate. Like his jester six years earlier, Philippe probably didn’t get a laugh.

  Medieval illustrators were never very reliable on exact troop numbers or perspective, but the general gist is right: British archers start wreaking havoc at Crécy in 1346.

  It wasn’t until the following morning that the English discovered the full extent of their victory. Exhausted, they had slept in their battle formations, and awoke to find the whole valley full of fog. It can’t have been a silent night – the wounded men and horses must have been groaning pretty loudly – but even Edward was shocked when his scouts reported back that the field was a huge mass of dead Frenchmen (with some Genoese at the bottom of the pile).

  Edward quickly sent out more men to identify the dead. This was the cue for the knifemen to make sure that anyone not rich enough to hold for ransom, or too severely wounded to be taken prisoner, was actually dead. To do this, they used a long, thin blade called a misericorde or ‘mercy-giver’, which could be thrust between armour plates, into unprotected armpits or through visor slits, to pierce a knight’s heart or brain.

  The Black Prince went to view the carnage after his first battle, and was shown blind King John and the clutch of Bohemian bodies, still bound together in death. He was so moved that he stole (or perhaps should one say adopted) John’s three-white-feather crest and his motto, ‘Ich dien’ – ‘I serve’.*

  By the end of the body count, the English had tallied up 1,542 dead French noblemen and an estimated 10,000 other ranks.

  The 10,000 didn’t bother the French so much, but the list of defunct aristocrats included various Henris and Louis and Charles, who were the crème de la crème de la crème of France. And the most shocking thing to the French was that almost all of them had been killed by archers or knifemen, what one chronicler bluntly calls ‘gent de nulle valeur’ – people of nil value. It was as if the French rugby fifteen had just lost to half a dozen boozed-up Big Issue sellers. Predictably, everyone blamed the team coach, Philippe VI. And his disastrous season was only just beginning …

  A quick stop for some burghers

  Whatever their name might suggest, the Burghers of Calais are not items on a cross-Channel ferry menu. They are French heroes, created just after Crécy. However, as with so many of France’s heroes, including the soon-to-appear Joan of Arc, there is a French version of the story, and a true one.

  The French version is that in 1347 these six citizens of Calais saved their town from the English. The truth is that they lost it.

  The French would also have us believe that the burghers offered themselves up to Edward III for execution in exchange for a promise that the town would be spared. What no one mentions is that these same burghers, rich representatives of Calais’s upper classes, had already sacrificed hundreds of the town’s poor to try and save themselves.

  At the risk of annoying French readers of this book, let’s take a look at the facts.

  After Crécy, Edward III decided not to capitalize on his victory by marching on Paris. He didn’t have enough men to mount a full-scale occupation of even the northwest of France. So he headed for the coast, and reached the nearest port, Calais, a week after the battle.

  He hoped to capture the town easily, but it was well fortified and protected by marshland. All attempts to breach the outer walls failed. Edward duly laid siege, and even built a large, covered camp that gradually turned into a town, with a market where the locals could sell the produce that the English hadn’t already plundered.

  So determined was Edward to win the strategic harbour that he concentrated all his efforts on it, persuading Parliament to give him more money to fund reinforcements. By the spring of 1347, he had some 30,000 men camped around Calais, and had even constructed a line of fortifications facing outwards in case Philippe VI mustered enough troops to come and save the town.

  An English fleet was moored offshore to prevent supplies coming in by sea, and by June the citizens of Calais were starving. In desperation, the community leaders, including the famous burghers, took the decision to expel 500 citizens who were considered lost causes. Most of these were the elderly and children, and inevitably all of them were poor. In a siege, what food there is gravitates upwards through the social classes to the people who can pay for it, so paupers are the first to suffer.

  Until then, King Edward had been lenient, and had let non-combatants through his lines to avoid starvation, but by this time, nine months into the siege, his attitude had hardened, and he refused to let the 500 escape – he demanded total surrender or nothing at all. The townspeople wouldn’t allow the 500 back in, so they were left to starve outside the town walls, watched, no doubt, by the six burghers as they chewed on slices of sautéed poodle.

  In July, King Philippe VI of France finally decided that it might be a good idea to relieve his strategic port, so he marched an army to within a mile of the English fortifications, and challenged Edward to come out and fight. However, Edward knew that he was in a far stronger position, and that the town could not hold out much longer. So he simply dared Philippe to attack.

  True to form, Philippe ordered his men to withdraw and, it is said, blocked his ears to the cries of the townspeople as he abandoned them to their fate. The surviving troops in the town took down the French flag – Philippe’s personal coat of arms – and threw it over the wall in disgust.

  The very next day, the commander of the Calais garrison, a knight called Jean de Vienne, shouted out a message that he was ready to surrender. Edward agreed, but warned that prisoners would be ransomed or killed, just as they were in battle. That is, the rich would survive and the poor would be slaughtered. Finally, an English knight called Sir Walter Mauny persuaded Edward to accept the lives of just six burghers.

  One of the town’s oldest and richest citizens, Eustache de Saint-Pierre, offered himself first, and was followed by five more volunteers. Obeying King Edward’s instructions, they removed their fine clothing and came out of the town wearing only shirt and breeches (that is, in their underwear), and with a noose hanging from their neck. This is how they are depicted in the famous group statue by the nineteenth-century sculptor Auguste Rodin – as emaciated, haunted victims bravely going out to meet their deaths. And it is true that having heard of the chevauchées, the burghers no doubt expected to die, their only hope being that their v
alue as hostages might just save their lives.

  Most versions of the story say that Edward’s Queen, Philippa, who was pregnant, begged him not to kill the burghers and bring bad luck on their unborn child. It is also said that Sir Walter Mauny warned him that the cold-blooded execution of rich prisoners who would otherwise have been kept alive as hostages would set a bad precedent, and might lead to future English deaths.

  Either way, Edward did not carry out his threat. He banished all the town’s wealthy citizens, and gave their houses and positions of power to Englishmen whom he summoned across the Channel. All of which goes to show that, however determined the French are to regard their Burghers of Calais as patriotic heroes, the truth is that they were part of a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the English, and that they only became symbols of self-sacrifice after trying to save themselves by kicking the poor out to die.

  Rodin seemed to understand something of this. When the town of Calais commissioned the statue in 1884 he broke with tradition and instead of portraying the burghers in heroic pose, showed them in defeat. He also decreed that his statue should stand at ground level and not be elevated on a plinth. Needless to say, Calais ignored this demand, and erected the sculpture in front of its town hall on an ornate stone base.

  The English, though, had the last laugh. In 1911, the British government bought one of the twelve casts of Rodin’s statue and erected it in Victoria Tower Gardens in London, close to the Houses of Parliament. To this day, any British parliamentarian who goes out for a breath of fresh air in the park will come face to face with an image of abject French submission.

  The Black Death – not such a bad thing for England (in the long run)

  As if things weren’t already bad enough for Philippe VI, in 1348 the Black Death arrived in France.

  This Asian disease entered the country via Italy, and spread north, being hailed as yet another sign that God had turned against the French. The death toll in Avignon was so high that the Pope (who was based there, not in Rome) consecrated the river Rhone so that corpses could be flung into the water instead of being buried, and allowed people to give their last confessions to non-clergymen and ‘even to a woman’. Extreme measures indeed.

  To try and halt the plague’s progress through France, King Philippe imposed harsh punishments for blasphemy. First-time offenders would lose a lip, and repeat offences would cost them the second lip and then their tongue. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Strasbourg blamed the Jews and massacred the city’s 2,000-strong community. None of this cured the disease, of course, and within a year the whole of France was infected.

  Quite naturally the English felt pretty smug that God was putting the boot in on their enemies – until, that is, the pestilence crossed the Channel.

  Population estimates in the fourteenth century tend to be very approximate, but it is thought that around one in three Western Europeans died in the space of three years. Densely populated cities suffered worst, and around half of London’s 70,000 inhabitants died. In the similarly sized city of Paris, the death toll was 50,000 or so.

  Chroniclers of the time on both sides of the Channel talk about abandoned villages, silenced cities, and (something that would have alarmed modern-day Brits) a slump in property prices – no one needed to buy because survivors could just move into an abandoned house. Meanwhile, previously valuable buildings like windmills were worth almost nothing because there was no grain to grind, and no city dwellers wanting to turn them into weekend homes.

  In short, it was a disaster for all humankind, in which everyone suffered equally. Except that, by a quirk of fate, the Black Death worked in England’s favour against the French. Or to be more accurate, it worked in English’s favour against French, because the epidemic sounded the (black) death knell for the Norman language in England.

  There were various reasons for this. First, with the population decimated, the feudal system in England was doomed. There were villages without lords, and lords without serfs, meaning that the workmen who had survived were in such high demand that they could abscond and find work elsewhere as free men. Parliament tried to impose wage caps and forbid emancipation of the serfs, but this only led to open revolt. The landowning Anglo-Norman nobility’s glass ceiling of wealth, power and privilege wasn’t yet smashed, but it was showing deep cracks, as the formerly downtrodden Anglo-Saxon underclass expanded upwards as a real middle class. And as they travelled, they imposed their language – the bastardized mingling of Anglo-Saxon and Norman that we call English – throughout the nation.

  This linguistic trend was intensified because the Anglo-Norman monks, who had formerly lived like lords of the manor in their monasteries, died out in massive numbers during the plague, having been inadvertently targeted by victims who came to them in hope of a miracle, or at least to receive the last rites. Now these Norman- and Latin-speaking monks were replaced by English-speakers, who were much humbler than their predecessors, and undertook an educational mission, teaching ordinary folk to read and write – in English.

  All of which explains why the period just after the Black Death marks the final triumph of English in England. In 1362, Parliament was opened for the first time with a speech in English. In the same year, it was decreed that court cases should be heard in English because Norman French was no longer understood by enough people. This was apparently an overstatement, but such pro-English exaggerations were obviously in fashion, because two English diplomats of the time were reported to have refused to speak French on the grounds that it was ‘as unintelligible to them as Hebrew’.

  English, with its Anglo-Saxon roots and its hybrid Anglo-Saxon–Norman grammar, which had been growing like a fungus beneath the boots of the Anglo-Norman nobles, was finally gaining respect as more than a crude dialect used by peasants to grunt at each other. By 1385, the scholar John Trevisa was writing that ‘in alle the gramere scoles of Engelond, children leveth Frensche and lerneth in Englische.’ (Note the similarity of his spelling to that of modern English schoolchildren.) He even went so far as so say that English children knew as much French ‘as their left heel’. (Again, just like modern kids.)

  As we saw above, King Edward III knew English, and everyone was pleasantly surprised that he spoke it so fluently – he was apparently very good at swearing, having discovered right from the start that English was a much better language than French for cussing. By tacking on the Anglo-Saxon preposition ‘off’, English can turn pretty well any aggressive or rude-sounding word into an insult, and has both (harsh-sounding) Anglo-Saxon and (usually corrupted) Norman-French words to play with. French is just too Latin-based and grammatically prudish to achieve this.

  Edward might have been fluent in English, but he had learned it as a second language, and his first language was a French quite similar to that spoken by his enemy King Philippe. It was also still the chic way to express oneself at court, as Edward demonstrated with the famous ‘dropped garter’ incident in 1348.

  During a ball at Windsor, the Countess of Salisbury’s garter fell off while she was dancing with King Edward. He picked it up and attached it to his own leg, lapsing into French when he saw his courtiers raising an eyebrow – ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ he blurted out, which might be roughly translated as ‘Shame on anyone who thinks I did that because I’m after a bit of nookie.’ The phrase was adopted as the motto for his newly founded Order of the Garter, and now figures on the British monarch’s coat of arms, above ‘Dieu et mon droit’.

  However, by the time Henry V was giving his rousing speech before the Battle of Agincourt only sixty-seven years later, English would be the King’s first language, and no translations of his pronouncements would be necessary.

  In short, the tiny fleas that brought the Black Death to Europe also released England from the stranglehold of its foreign official language. Appropriate, really, because ‘flea’ is an Anglo-Saxon word.

  War delayed owing to sudden illness

  Naturally enough, the Black Death put somethin
g of a damper on the Hundred Years War. Ambitious conquest plans were shelved, and the action during the plague consisted mainly of sorties by enterprising English knights who took small armies on cross-Channel chevauchées to see if there was anything left to steal.

  Edward III himself had also started something of a stock market for hostages, and anyone returning from France with a valuable prisoner stood a good chance of selling him (or her – the French were outraged that abbesses were also being kidnapped) to the King. Edward would then contact the relatives of the rich captive and extort the full price.

  Meanwhile, bands of English deserters took the concept of the chevauchée one step further by occupying French castles. Here they started extortion rackets, forcing everyone in the area to pay for ‘protection’ in wine, livestock or money, and bringing complete terror to the already desolate French countryside.

  These bands of robbers gave themselves the innocent-sounding name of routiers,* or ‘road travellers’, and their idea was taken up with gusto by other mercenaries. Soon, gangs of deserters from Gascony, Brittany, Spain and Germany were adding to the chaos. Interestingly, though, the French didn’t care which nationality was persecuting them – they referred to all the routiers as ‘anglais’. They also called the English ‘les goddams’, presumably because of their shocking habit of swearing while massacring people.

  Henry V, much more than a funny haircut

  The war was dragging its heels when Edward III died at the ripe old age of sixty-four in 1377, and was only kept going because so many Englishmen wanted the chance to hop across the Channel and make their fortune. Soldiering was as profitable a profession as modern-day football, with the added advantage that the opponents were likely to be hopelessly unfit peasants.