The Black Prince

by David Green

  However, for these and probably for Joan herself, there was a considerable ‘grey area’ on the margins between orthodoxy and Lollardy. Anti-papalism and what has been described as ‘a certain brand of alehouse anticlericalism’39 were not necessarily indicative of heretical attitudes to transubstantiation or other aspects of Wyclifite belief. Rather they may have been ‘attracted to the pietistic and moralistic attitudes of the early Lollards rather than to their more specifically antisacramental, antihierarchical and pacifist teachings’.40 In any case, the Lollard knights were almost all connected with either the short lived ‘dynasty’ of the prince of Wales: Edward himself, Joan of Kent, and Richard II or John of Gaunt, and they provided financial and political support allowing for the patronage of Wyclifite preachers and the ‘Lollard library’. The extent to which they shared religious attitudes, except in a broad sense is more difficult to determine.41

  One who was very much aware of the strains within the church and who wrote a great deal about its representatives was Geoffrey Chaucer. He had fought in the Reims campaign, possibly in the prince’s division, during which he was captured and later ransomed by the king. He was closely associated with Sir John Clanvowe, one of the most interesting of the Wyclifite circle since he was an author and wrote a clear statement of his views in a work entitled The Two Ways.42 The treatise was puritanical certainly, heretical probably, but not necessarily a direct statement of Lollard belief. In this he shared with a number of others, attitudes that were on or a little beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy in some ‘no man’s land’ before Lollardy. Other knights of the group have been identified through the language of their wills although there are clearly problems with such an analysis and many strictly orthodox individuals made wills that might be described as Lollard in tone or character. Similarly, such men as Clanvowe and William Neville indulged in such activities as crusading, and Lewis Clifford was a member of Philippe de Mézières’ Order of the Passion. Thomas Latimer, before Wyclif ‘s ideas became public, acquired a grant from the pope to have a portative altar, a personal confessor and have mass celebrated before daylight. While such attitudes clearly do not sit easily with Lollard antipapalism they do show a search for a means of salvation not entirely within the commonplace structure of the church.43 Latimer joined the prince in Aquitaine and may have seen service in Spain and in the rearguard action after 1369. In June 1385, he was one of a number of knights summoned to be in constant attendance on the king’s mother. The group also included Clifford and Stury although his links to Joan may have been through his wife, Anne, who attended the princess at Richard’s birth and brought news of the event to the prince.44 Latimer was also associated with one Robert Lychlade, who was expelled from Oxford in 1395 for holding heretical opinions. He became, by 1401, rector of Kemerton, Gloucestershire, of which Sir William Beauchamp, the probably Wyclifite knight was patron and in the following year he acted as an executor of the will of Anne Latimer, widow of Thomas Braybroke, a noted Lollard sympathiser. Another of the prince’s close associates, Gerard Braybroke, also had close links to the Lollard circle, but was never named as one himself. An overseer of the same will was Lewis Clifford. Clifford was forced in 1402 to recant his theological errors and offer public penance. Similarly, Richard Stury was ordered to abjure heresy or face execution.45

  It was a confused, conflicting and contentious childhood for Richard II. His father, who he only knew as old and ill, was remembered in the collective consciousness and by posterity as young and vigorous and chivalrous and successful. His grandfather, similarly, all but senile was the hero of Crécy, who had dragged England out of the mire of the reign of Edward II and the despotism of Mortimer and Isabella. It is a fascinating aside, and perhaps more than that being indicative of his own conception of his kingship, that Richard was at the forefront of a movement seeking the canonisation of his great-grandfather. His mother’s household revealed the dichotomies of ‘Lollardy’ and chivalry. The ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ in the court and the country showed conflicting attitudes to the war and later to Richard’s style of rule and eventually the king himself.

  The legacy of the Black Prince was, characteristically, ambivalent, opaque, conflicting and, to an extent, self-destructive, and as such it was completely representative of the forces at work in the period that we have chosen to call late medieval. It was a period in England that harkened back to the triumphs of the Angevin Empire and forward via the Wars of the Roses to the Yorkist kings and the authoritarianism of the Tudor monarchs. It was a period of bureaucracy and administration and parliament and high finance that was founded on spectacle and chivalry even when those same qualities were becoming increasingly outmoded, not to say undesirable on the battlefield where the final analysis of success and kingship were made.

  NOTES

  Preface

  1. Richard Barber, Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitaine:

  A Biography of the Black Prince, Woodbridge, 1978;

  Barbara Emerson, The Black Prince, London, 1976; J.

  Harvey, The Black Prince and his Age, London, 1976; H.

  Cole, The Black Prince, London, 1976; Micheline Dupuy,

  Le Prince Noir: Edouard seigneur d’Aquitaine, Paris, 1970.

  Chapter 1

  1. The Hundred Years War has been seen by some as part of a much broader conflict lasting certainly from the Treaty of Paris (1259) and probably with much deeper roots, perhaps stretching as far back as the Norman Conquest and not resolved until long after the fall of Bordeaux in 1453. See for example, Malcolm Vale, The Origins of the Hundred Years War: the Angevin Legacy, 1250–1340, Oxford, 1996.

  2. The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, iv, ed. L.T. Smith, London, 1909, 38.

  3. Ellen C. Caldwell, ‘The Hundred Years War and National Identity’, Inscribing the Hundred Years War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker, Albany, 2000, 239–40.

  4. Henry V, II. iv.

  5. Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272–1377, London, 1980, 96–9, 111–13.

  6. For a discussion of Froissart’s importance see for example Peter Ainsworth, ‘Froissardian Perspectives on Late Fourteenth Century Society’, Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Jeffrey Denton, Manchester, 1999, 56–73, esp. 58.

  7. Oeuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Brussels, 1867–77; Chroniques, ed. S. Luce, (SHF) Paris, 1869–; G. Brereton, Chronicles, Froissart, Harmondsworth, 1976. Richard Barber, Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince, Woodbridge, repr. 1986; Diana B. Tyson, La Vie du Prince Noir, Tübingen, 1975; M. Pope and E. Lodge, Life of the Black Prince by the Herald of Sir John Chandos, Oxford, 1910.

  8. Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis, The Royal Bastards of Medieval England, London, 1984, 143–6. Clarendon’s coat of arms: Or, on a bend sable, three ostrich feathers argent, the quills transfixed through as many escrolls gold. Summer Ferris, ‘Chronicle, Chivalric Biography and Family Tradition in Fourteenth Century England’, Chivalric Literature: Essays on Relations Between Literature and Life in the Later Middle Ages, ed. L. Benson, Michigan, 1980, 33–4. On Joan see Karl P. Wentersdorf, ‘The Clandestine Marriages of the Fair Maid of Kent’, Journal of Medieval History, 5 (1979), 203–31; N. Careyron, ‘De chronique en roman: l’étrange épopée amoreuse de la jolie fille de Kent’, Le Moyen Age, 5th ser., 8 (1994), 185–204.

  9. Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, ed. Pope and Lodge, 135.

  10. M.J. Bennett, ‘Courtly Literature and Northwest England in the Later Middle Ages’, Court and Poet, ed. Glyn S. Burgess, Liverpool, 1981, 72–3. See also T. Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival, Cambridge, 1977, 30, 38, 46–7.

  11. The poem continues with references to the fleur de lys of France, the leopards of England and how he was loved by one of the loveliest of ladies.

  Bot that that hillede the helme byhynde in the nekke

  Was casten full clenly in quarters foure:

  Two with flowres of Fraunce b
efore and behynde,

  And two out of Ynglonde with sex grym bestes,

  Thre leberdes one lofte and thre on lowe undir;

  At iche a cornere a knoppe of full clene perle,

  Tasselde of tuly silke, tuttynge out fayre.

  And by the cabane I knewe the knyghte that I see,

  And thoghte to wiete or I went wondres ynewe.

  And als I waytted withinn I was warre sone

  Of a comliche kynge crowned with golde,

  Sett one a silken bynche, with septure in honde,

  One of the lovelyeste ledis, whoso loveth hym in hert,

  That ever segge under sonn sawe with his eghne.

  12. Elizabeth Salter, ‘The Timeliness of Wynnere and Wastoure’, Medium Aevum, 43 (1977) 48–59.Thanks to Victoria Blashill for this reference.

  13. Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, rev. ed., London, 1994 and for comparison M. Keen, ‘Chaucer’s Knight, the English Aristocracy and the Crusade’, English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V.J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne, London, 1983, 45–60.

  14. See La guerre de Cent Ans. Textes: Les chroniques de Froissart, Journal des États généraux, Le traité de Brétigny, Complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers et Vues critiques sur la bataille de Poitiers, ed. S. Luce, Paris, 1972.

  15. J. Barnie, War in Medieval Society: Social Values and the Hundred Years War, 1337–99, London, 1974, 82.

  Chapter 2

  1. CPR, 1330–4, 74.

  2. Vie du Prince Noir, ed. Tyson, 50–1.

  3. Rymer, II, ii, 880, 1049, 1125, 1212; May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century: 1307–1399, Oxford, 1959, 159–60; M. Packe, King Edward III, ed. L.C.B. Seaman, London, 1983, 91; Margaret Sharpe, ‘The Administrative Chancery of the Black Prince Before 1362’, Essays in Medieval History Presented to T.F. Tout, Manchester, 1925, 321.

  4. Stretton may have been related to Robert Stratton, an auditor (auditores sacri apostolici palacii) and papal chaplain of the Rota, the central court of the papal curia from 1362–80. He died in the curia on 20 Oct. 1380, Margaret Harvey, The English in Rome, 1362–1420. Portrait of an Expatriate Community, Cambridge, 1999, 133–4 and n. 4.

  5. She was rewarded with a £20 annuity by the king on 10 Mar. 1351, CCR, 1349–54, 299.

  6. T.F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England. The Wardrobe, the Chamber and the Small Seal, Manchester, 1920–33, v, 319–20; Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530, London, 1984, 20–1.

  7. BL Cotton Galba E III f. 190; Barber, Edward, 19.

  8. Gervase Wilford, Ambrose Newburgh and Hugh Colewick, auditors of the duchy, were regularly employed by the prince, PRO E101/369/13 (all mss references hereafter will be to the Public Record Office unless stated otherwise).

  9. David S. Green, ‘The Household and Military Retinue of Edward the Black Prince’, Unpub. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 1998, Appendix.

  10. Thomas Gray, Scalachronica, ed. and trans. Herbert Maxwell, Glasgow, 1907, 104.

  11. Clifford J. Rogers, The Wars of Edward III: Sources and Interpretations, Woodbridge, 1999, 59–62; Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, i: Trial by Battle, London, 1990, 199, 241–2.

  12. Barber, Edward, 31.

  13. Jean Le Bel, Chronique, ed. J. Viard et E. Déprez, Paris, 1904, 168; trans. Rogers, Wars of Edward III, 79.

  14. Elizabeth Danbury, ‘English and French Propaganda During the Period of the Hundred Years War: Some Evidence from Royal Charters’, Power, Culture and Religion in France c.1350–c.1550, ed. C.T. Allmand, Woodbridge, 1989, 82, 94.

  15. Clifford J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp, Woodbridge, 2000, 196.

  16. Archives départementales de Lois-Atlantique, Natnes, E119 no. 5; Michael Jones, Ducal Brittany,1364–99, Oxford, 1970, 18–19, 45 and nn. 2–4.

  17. BL Harley 4304 ff. 16v.–20.

  Chapter 3

  1. Barber, Edward, 44–5.

  2. J. Viard, ‘La campagne de juillet-août 1346 et la bataille de Crécy’, Le Moyen Age, 2nd ser., xxvii (1926), 9; Léopold Delisle, Histoire du château et des sires de Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Valognes, 1867, 50–108.

  3. Jean-Yves Marin, ‘Geoffroy d’Harcourt: une ‘conscience normande”, La Normandie dans la guerre de Cent Ans, 1346–1450, ed Jean-Yves Marin, Caen, 1999, 147–9.

  4. Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1399, ed. G. Martin, Oxford, 1995, 58, 59; Barber, Edward, 47; McKisack, Fourteenth Century, 130, 133; Sumption, Hundred Years War, i, 498–9, 494, 497. For Hastings’ pay accounts see E371/191/49. For French preparations see Viard, ‘La campagne de juillet-août’, 3–4.

  5. Emerson, Black Prince, 26–7. This figure includes 5,113 Welsh troops as well as one chaplain, 1 medicus, 1 proclamator, 5 standard-bearers and 25 vintners: G. Wrottesley, Crécy and Calais (William Salt Archæological Society, 18), 1880, 193. The Brut roll for Crécy and Calais calculates the Welsh contingent as 600 in addition to 480 footmen and 69 archers also on foot, The Brut, ii, ed. F.W.D. Brie (Early English Texts Society), 1906, 538. For a full discussion of the problems with sources for the 1346–7 expedition see Andrew Ayton, ‘The English Army and the Normandy Campaign of 1346’, England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. David Bates and Anne Curry, London, 1994, 253–68.

  6. BPR, i, 5. See Wrottesley, Crécy and Calais, 74–6 for directions to wardens of maritime land to defend ports and coastal areas against invasion.

  7. Knighton’s Chronicle, ed. Martin, 58, 59; G.L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369, Oxford, 1975, 315–6; H.J. Hewitt, The Organisation of War under Edward III, Manchester, 1966, 1–27.

  8. Sumption, Hundred Years War, i, 495. On Dagworth’s expedition see E101/25/17, 18, 19; Michael Jones, ‘Sir Thomas Dagworth et la guerre civile en Bretagne au xiv e siècle: quelques documents inédits’, Annales de Bretagne, lxxxviii (1980), 627–30; A.E. Prince, ‘The Strength of English Armies in the Reign of Edward III’, EHR, xlvi (1931), 364–5. In Sept. 1348, Dagworth was assigned £4,900 by the king from a parliamentary subsidy. His squire, Colkyn Lovayn, received £2,166, for Charles de Blois who had been purchased from them, Harriss, King, Parliament ands Public Finance, 335.

  9. Sumption, Hundred Years War, i, 497–8. Loryng received letters of protection on 24 May, Wrottesley, Crécy and Calais, 92; Viard, ‘Campagne de juillet-août’, 11–12. For the career of Godfrey de Harcourt see Delisle, Histoire du château et des sires de Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, 50–108.

  10. See Sumption, Hundred Years War, i, 532–3 and for a contrary view of Edward’s intentions see Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp.

  11. Adam Murimuth, Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. E.M. Thompson, London, (Rolls Ser.), 1889, 200–2, cited by Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp, 242–3 and n. 25.

  12. ’Lanercost Chronicle’, ed. and trans. H. Maxwell, Scottish Historical Review, vi-x, 327; Barber, Edward, 49.

  13. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp, 240.

  14. André Plaisse, À travers le Cotentin: la grande chevauchée guerrière ‘Édouard III en 1346, Cherbourg, 1994, 18.

  15. Knighton’s Chronicle, ed. Martin, 56–9; Barber, Edward, 52; Rogers, War Sharp and Cruel, 245–6 and n. 45.

  16. Sumption, Hundred Years War, i, 520.

  17. Barber, Edward, 57.

  18. Chandos Herald, Vie du Prince Noir, ed. Tyson, ll. 215–18.

  19. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp, 258.

  20. Barber, Edward, 60. The location of the ford was provided either by: Gobin Agace; a squire in the retinue of Oliver Ghistels; a prisoner of war; or a Yorkshireman, from Rushton near Nafferton, living in the area.

  21. 25 Mar. 1348–27 Mar. 1350, G. Dupont-Ferrier, Gallia Regia, iii, Paris, 1947, i, 265.

  22. M. Bennett, ‘The Development of Battle Tactics in the Hundred Years War’, Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, ed. Anne Curry and M. Hughes, Woodbridge, 1994, 6–7; Clifford Rogers, ‘Edward III and the Dialectics of Strategy’, TRHS, 6th ser
., iv (1994), 90–9; Kenneth Fowler, ‘Letters and Dispatches of the Fourteenth Century’, Guerre et societé en France en Angleterre et en Bourgogne XIVe–XVe siècles, ed. Philippe Contamine, Charles Giry-Deloison et M. Keen, Lille, 199, 179; Barber, Edward, 62.

  23. Barber, Edward, 71; Rogers, ‘Edward III and the Dialectics of Strategy’, 93, 95, 99. See also Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance, 320–1. Edward had borrowed considerable sums from the Bardi to mount the campaign. The renewal of the parliamentary subsidy in Sept. 1346 was used as security for further loans. For further discussion of the use and control of war taxation and finance see ibid., 324–6.

  24. Knighton’s Chronicle, ed. Martin, 61, 63.

  25. Viard, ‘Le campagne de juillet-août’, 67, 70–1; Barber, Edward, 65. There is no consensus of the disposition of the leaders of the 3 ‘battles’, Viard states Northampton fought in the bishop of Durham’s division (the second ‘battle’) while the king was at the rear. He includes Mauny who was almost certainly with Lancaster. Other bannerets in the vanguard included James Audley of Stretton and Bartholomew Burghersh. Bachelors included Alexander Venables and Richard Baskerville, and Emerson includes Oxford, Warwick, Stafford, Harcourt, Thomas Holland, Burghersh and Chandos: Black Prince, 40. Knighton indicates the prince led the vanguard, with Arundel and Northampton in the second with the bishop of Durham subordinate, and the king in command of the third. Knighton states that the prince, Northampton and Warwick were ‘in the first line of battle’: Chronicle, ed. Martin, 63. Murimuth placed the prince, Northampton and Warwick in the vanguard: Chronicarum, 246. Froissart believed that the vanguard included; the prince, Warwick, Kent, Harcourt, Cobham, Holland, Richard Stafford, Mauny and de la Ware. Northampton and Arundel led the second division with Hereford, Roos, Percy and ‘Noefville’ [Robert Neufville]. The third battle was under the command of the king, Oeuvres, ed. Lettenhove, v, 33–4. See also Jean Le Bel, Chronique, ii, 105; Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Luce, iii, 169, 405, 407, 409.