This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  This was the war made memorable by Crécy, Agincourt and the Maid of Orléans, Joan of Arc. Less often told is the story of the Battle of Sluys. It took place on 24 June 1340. It is thought by many military historians to have been the grizzliest battle of the whole Hundred Years War. It certainly was the main naval engagement and, importantly, it was commanded by the king himself. Edward sailed from the River Orwell on 22 June with 200 vessels and was reinforced by Admiral Sir Robert Morley’s squadrons of about fifty ships. Within the king’s squadron was his wife, Philippa of Hainault and her ladies-in-waiting, one of whom was killed in the battle. From a letter to his son, Edward the Black Prince, the King believed the French had 190 sailing ships in company with mercenary Genoese galleys when the two fleets formed up in the estuary inlet between Flanders and Zeeland before the town of Sluys. The French fleet was in the defensive position and so, with the naval tactics of the day, lay their ships chained together in three (or perhaps four) lines. Remember, this was not Trafalgar. There were no seventy-four pounders to fire broadsides in 1340. Edward sailed with the sun behind him and his bowmen fired salvo after salvo into the French fleet – jammed to the gunwales with fighting men. This was a battle of arrows and uncompromising, hand-to-hand combat. The Chronicle of Geoffrey le Barker, a friar at Osney Priory, tells us:

  An iron shower of quarrels from crossbows and arrows from longbows brought death to thousands . . . Stones hurled from the turrets of masts dashed out the brains of many . . . In the morning, the Normans were defeated . . . the number of the enemy killed and drowned exceeded 25,000. Of the English, 4,000 were slain.

  It was a terrible triumph and perhaps its awesome spectacle was one of the reasons Edward III failed to capitalize on the victory by immediately taking the war ashore. If he had, the English may never have been driven from France, as indeed they were, and the war would not have dragged itself through decades and changing crowns.

  When the land war did commence the English reached the walls of Paris on 12 July 1346. Philip of France, perhaps thinking that Edward intended to by-pass Paris and head on to Gascony, had an uncertain start, but he had superior forces and the English withdrew. The war then continued in country which became grimly familiar in the early years of the twentieth century – Amiens, the Somme, Picardy, Abbeville – until the two armies fought themselves to a standstill, with the English lucky to escape defeat. But they still could not get back to the Channel coast without another fight on 26 August: Crécy.

  On the French side, which included kings and princes, the blind King of Bohemia claimed the right to command the first division and even prophesied that he would be killed in battle. He was. The King of Majorca, so confident of victory for the French, claimed that when the battle was over, he had the right to have Edward III as his prisoner. But when others took up this demand for selective prisoners, Philip of France was worried that they were over-confident. He ordered that the great banner of Oriflamme should be flown. This was the banner of St Denis, traditionally blessed by the Abbot of St Denis before a war. Once flown, no prisoners were to be taken. Edward responded by unfurling his banner of the Dragon to remind everyone, especially the French, that the English under his command would give no quarter.

  About sundown, the first charge was made by the French with resounding trumpets, drums and kettle-drums with strident clarions; and with shouting almost like thunder, the cross-bow men of the French advanced, but none of their quarrels reached the English. At the tremendous clamour of the cross-bow men, the English archers were called forth and riddled their adversaries with arrows. When they saw their cross-bow men were not harming the English, the French men-at-arms mounted on warhorses, rode down the cross-bow men, standing to the number of 7000 between them and the English, crushing them under the feet of their horses, rushing forward to show . . . how brave they were. So anguished were the cries of pain from the trampled that those in the rear of the French thought it was the English who were being slain. Upon hearing all this, the French pressed forward on the heels of those in front; in this ill-considered ardour, the most conspicuous were raw young knights, in whom the army abounded, all panting for the honour of capturing the King of England.20

  Edward was not going to make the same mistake as the French. His archers, superior to the French crossbow-men, were set along the flanks so that they shot across from the sides of his army. And perhaps remembering the experience of the Scottish campaigns, when English knights tumbled and were slain in pits, the English now quickly dug holes in front of their positions.

  The French became confused, fighting with the English men-at-arms, they were beaten down with battle-axes, lances and swords, and in the middle many Frenchmen were crushed to death without any wound but by the weight of the numbers. In such a woeful encounter, Edward of Woodstock [Black Prince] the King’s eldest son, being then sixteen years old, showed his valour to the French, piercing horses, laying low the riders, shattering helmets and breaking spears, helping his men, and showing an example to all. The French repeatedly changed their front line, bring up fresh hordes. These continual accessions of strength kept the Prince and his companions so closely engaged that the great mass of the enemy compelled him to fight on his knees. Then someone rode to the King, his father, imploring help. He was sent with twenty knights to help the Prince, and found him and his men leaning on spears and swords, and taking breath and resting quietly on long mounds of corpses . . . the total number of knights and men of superior dignity killed in this battle exceeded 4000.21

  No one counted the lesser people slain. Geoffrey le Baker’s account, written three decades after the event, is based on a description given him by Thomas de la More, a knight at Crécy. How accurate it is, we cannot tell for certain, but contemporary notes suggest the terrible battle was no less horrific than he described.

  In the morning King Philip of France and a small retinue escaped to Amiens. They left behind them the bodies of the King of Bohemia, the Counts of Blois, Flanders, Alençon, Harcourt, Auxerre, Aumale, Savoy, Moreuil, Nevers and many more. And Geoffrey le Baker recounts, if his word can be relied upon, that only forty English died in the two days of fighting. Edward reached Calais by the beginning of September and laid siege to the city for nearly a year. No matter the effort, the siege came near to failure and, in the winter, his soldiers wanted the warmth of their homes not the continually bitter wet lowland of northern France. But Edward held fast and starved the people of Calais into submission.

  When Edward returned from France, he officially founded what has been called the ‘most brilliant inspiration of the Age of Chivalry’, the Order of the Garter. The idea seems to have come to him at the end of a grand tournament at Windsor in 1344, two years before Crécy. He is said to have been so inspired by the occasion that he swore to set up if not a new Camelot, then his own Round Table of his closest knights. How the garter became a symbol of this order is disputed, but it may well have had something to do with the Countess of Salisbury and the siege of Calais. Edward was in love with the countess and, at a celebration ball at the end of the siege of Calais, the countess is said to have dropped her garter. The King picked it up and bound it to his knee. The whole court knew of his love for the countess and there was much ‘sniggering and tittering’. The King is said to have rebuked them with ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. The Garter became the symbol, the French became the motto.

  The Order of the Garter was dedicated to St George, who replaced Edward the Confessor as patron saint of England in 1348, but no saint could protect the people from a catastrophe in that same year.

  The Black Death infiltrated England and for twenty or so years: it came, went, returned, retreated, returned again and went. It was terrible. Between 1348 and 1350, the plague killed one-and-a-half million people of a total population of four million. Between one-quarter and one-third of the population of Europe perished in those two years of shrouds.

  The England to which the plague arrived was a changing but not always happy land. It
was a land of wood, corn and beasts. Wood was used as the main source of fuel, building and manufacturing. There were great hardwood forests throughout the kingdom and there were corn belts in East Anglia and the south Midlands even then. There were large herds and flocks of livestock. Large beasts were needed to cart goods and to plough. Dairy farming was increasing and sheep, apart from their value in the lucrative wool trade, were invaluable as a source of manure for grain cultivation. But this was not an idyllic rural England. Floods, which had covered much of Europe, brought famine to a peasantry already weakened by indifferent nutrition and the demands of war. Sheep were drowned in their thousands. Crops, in spite of efforts to improve yields, were often poorly grown and disappeared. Prices dropped.

  One result was that big landlords rented off parcels of farms, therefore tenant farming increased even if it was at subsistence level. The people lived in small groupings. Towns were small. Probably only London and York had populations of more than 10,000. Yet hamlets and villages were so well established that most of the rural communities that exist today existed in the fourteenth century.

  The conditions in which people lived, their general constitution, their ignorance of preventative medicine, the entire lack of antidotes and, most of all, the viciousness of the plague all meant that life for many in the middle of the fourteenth century was miserable. The effects of the plague were devastating and the consequences far reaching. In some places, there were too few to bury the many dead. Fields were piled with dead livestock and a yeoman could die within a week of catching the disease. None was invulnerable. One of the grander victims was Edward III’s wife, Philippa. She died in 1369 in what would have been the third of the plagues. Half the clergy in Winchester, Norwich, Ely and Exeter died. Many of the houses and mansions of England became uninhabited and fell into ruin. Villages emptied. Labourers and servants, those most vulnerable to the plague, died in such great numbers that the estates could not be worked. Landlords had to give up rents from tenants and waive penalties for non-payment. There was no one to pay. There was also a feeling among the people that their Church and their God had betrayed them. Thus covens and sects emerged to blame and purge their fellows and the institutions – the Church certainly – that had claimed their allegiance in return for sure protection. People stricken to the last ounce of living felt betrayed and needed a reason why. None could give it. But if nearly a third perished, then two-thirds survived. Survivors married, some for a second time, and they had children. But, in 1360, when the plague returned – albeit in a weaker form – those very children would have been the most vulnerable. Indeed, this plague’s main victims appear to have been children. Eight years later there was a further outbreak, and a decade later yet another, this time mainly in the north of the country.

  It is hopeful proposition that calamity makes men see reason. Yet history records that man rarely has enough death. It should not surprise us therefore that in spite of the seeping calamity of the plague, by 1355 the war with France was back in full and bloody swing. The Black Prince defeated the French at Poitiers the following year, and captured a rather foolhardy John II of France. In 1357, the King of Scotland, David II, who had been under arrest in the Tower for ten years, was released. The inspirations of the times are revealed by Piers Plowman, written around 1362 by Long Will, or William Langland as he was also known. It is full of high towers of truth, dungeons of wrong, bribery, reason and conscience. It was, probably, an accurate reflection of fourteenth-century England: a people intermittently at war – from lowly Welsh archer to the highest born including the dear sons of Edward’s queen, the often forgotten Philippa.

  Philippa had been brought from Hainault and married off to Prince Edward in 1328, when he was barely sixteen and she was just a child. His bride grew into a loving and loyal regal figure who was committed to her husband and the family. She bore Edward fourteen children, two of whom died in infancy. The seven surviving sons and five daughters were married off, and well. The sons were seemingly as warlike and sporting as their father, most famously Edward the Black Prince, who had commanded with such distinction at Crécy, and John, Earl of Leicester, Lincoln and Derby, and Duke of Lancaster. He was born in Ghent and thus known as John of Gaunt (1340–99).

  When the Hundred Years War resumed, it was no surprise to find these two princes in the line, but not always in the same one, as in the late summer of 1356 when John of Gaunt was fighting the King of France, John II in Normandy. There had been a master plan that the two brothers, one from the south and one from the north, would meet on the Loire. John of Gaunt was facing the King of France in the north at the time that Edward the Black Prince was advancing from Aquitaine. Edward’s soldiers, including the Gascons, burned and pillaged as far as the Loire at Tours. He tried to take the great castle of Tours, but it did not fall to siege. King John II, by then at Chartres, advanced as fast as his depleted army could to meet the Black Prince, perhaps wishing to avenge the terrible defeat at Crécy. Edward wisely withdrew, but not fast enough. John II, having abandoned his slowest moving infantry, caught up with the Prince southwest of Poitiers. Edward relied on the defensive tactics that had been so successful at Crécy – but this time with the addition of a wood and a brook as natural defence obstacles. He also deployed his baggage train as a further obstacle to a direct enemy charge. On his flanks, Edward set his longbowmen. The French sent knights, cavalry and pikemen in the belief they could destroy Edward’s archers. When the French charged, the archers fired. Down went French chivalry. Their infantry followed on. The fog of war is nothing to the uncertainty and panic in battle where few well laid plans survive the first fifteen minutes. So it was at Poitiers. When Edward’s reserve cavalry attacked the French from behind, uncertainty and the jumble of death caused immovable panic.

  The French were devastated, then defeated and John II was captured. The price for his return was yet another king’s ransom, three million gold crowns, said to have been twice France’s annual income. John II was released to return to France from London but gave his honour to return if he could not encourage his exchequer and his aristocracy to raise the bail. He did find a third of the ransom and to help pay it a new French coin was minted: the franc. On this reduced payment, John II was released from London but had to give two of his sons, various aristocrats and people of some importance from each of the main towns of France as hostages in London. When one of the sons, the Duke of Anjou, decided he could no longer be doing with the indignity of being a hostage and escaped, John returned to England and that’s where he died, in 1364.

  The Battle of Poitiers was in 1356. Four years on, 8 May 1360 the two sides signed the Treaty of Brétigny. It was a treaty of peace like so many of the period. It was really a truce, albeit one that lasted nine years. Within the treaty, Edward gave up his claim to the throne of France and the Duchies of Touraine and Normandy, the latter of particular significance since 1066. On the other hand, Edward achieved a surer footing in Aquitaine. Edward III had probably expected the French Crown for himself, and although he still had the French King in the Tower, he could no longer bargain from such strength as he once thought.

  Moreover, constant war meant the monarch had to repeatedly ask for money to fight those battles, most of which achieved very little for the English. Worse still for the king, if he wanted money then he had to listen to the demands of petitioners. There was a system of petitioning that allowed even a minor matter to come before the monarch, but the monarch might also be a petitioner, particularly in the most constant of regal grievances: money, or lack of it. If the King wanted to go to war, then he had to call Parliament together to hear his petition. Parliament did not sit as it does in the twenty-first century, only gathering when the monarch called it. The more the King was at war, the more Parliament had to be called together. Therefore, there was in theory more opportunity for the common petitions to be heard; they were often made in the hope that the Crown through Parliament would compensate for grievances or, better still, right the appar
ent wrongs that had cause grievance. The common people held similar grievances and so collective petitioning became the style of the day and the commoners could petition as a formal and, to some extent under Edward III, influential collective body and voice. The two groups, the aristocrats (the Lords) and the ordinary people (the Commoners) remained quite separate and clearly the upper house retained the upper hand and would do so for five centuries. It is from this period, the fourteenth century, that we can see the real distinctions between the Houses of Parliament, the Lords and Commons, and many of the offices of State that were formed then are recognizable today.

  Of all today’s positions of dignity with origins in the fourteenth century, there came the single most important office in the country after the monarch: in 1377 Sir Thomas Hungerford became the first Speaker designate. Yet, we should not get the idea that the rule of Edward III meant a rush for democracy nor Parliamentary debate. The Parliament met relatively rarely and it certainly did not have to meet in London, and frequently did not. Furthermore, for its members and interested parties it was an expensive and elaborate business to attend Parliament. Eyre and Spottiswoode’s English Historical Documents includes a record of the expenses of four representatives who travelled from London to a Parliament at Cambridge. It details the sorts of comforts politicians of the day expected:

  Expenses incurred in attending Parliament by Adam Bamme, Henry Vanner, William Tonge, and John Clenhound:

  In the first place: for timber and carpentry, tillers and daubers, in preparing the house for their lodging, as well as the chambers in the hall, buttery, kitchens and stables; and for making stools and forms throughout, and for carting out the rubbish, such house being quite ruinous; for payment made good to the man of the house for the said lodging, six pounds nine shillings.