by Ed West
In 1333, Edward received his first experience of war, against the Scots at Haildon Hill, where afterwards the field was filled with the Scottish dead, hands sawn off for their rings. Meanwhile the tension in Gascony continued to smolder. Edward, as Duke of Guyenne, was a vassal to the king of France, and so could not take up arms against him without risking excommunication from the pope. Frustrated with continual French aggression, in 1339 Edward instead declared himself king of France, through his mother, a claim that would prove a curse, drawing the English into a war lasting over a century.
George R.R. Martin has spoken of the influence of this conflict on his story, saying in one interview that the armor of the Hundred Years’ War was the model for that used in Game of Thrones, although “Westerosi armor tends to ‘later’ styles as you go south. Plate is more common in the Reach say, while mail is more the rule in the North, and beyond the Wall the wildlings have very crude primitive stuff.”4 This would tally with real life, with fifteenth century Scotland being considerably more backwards than France.
At first the English won many victories, a triumph of the king’s organizational genius and charisma, and at Sluys in 1340 they defeated a French navy twice as large, with up to twenty thousand Frenchmen left dead after an attack on their fleet in the Flemish port. The sea was choked with corpses.
Edward’s biggest logistical problem was that Gascony was very far away, and involved a long risky voyage around Brittany, the western peninsula of France that jutted out into the Atlantic. Brittany had been under the dominance of France for many centuries, but it retained some degree of independence, and had its own Celtic language, brought over by Britons fleeing the Saxons in the fifth century.5 And yet the following year an opportunity presented itself when Brittany plunged into civil war following the dead of its duke, Jean III. King Philippe supported his niece Jeanne as heir, and so the late duke’s half-brother Jean de Montfort called for English assistance.
In November, Jeanne besieged the city of Nantes, and catapulted the heads of thirty knights over the wall, after which the town immediately surrendered. Jean de Montfort was invited to Paris to plead his case, but when he got there, despite promises of safe conduct, Philippe had him arrested and placed in the Louvre. In his place his wife Joanna of Flanders led a rebellion “with the courage of a man and the heart of a lion.”6 Joanna soon found her home of Hennebont besieged by Charles’s forces and, dressed in armor, she conducted the town’s defenses, urging women to “cut their skirts and take their safety in their own hands.” Seeing that the enemy camp was unguarded, she led a force of three hundred men, burning down the French tents and destroying their supplies, eventually securing the town and the nearby city of Brest. A long siege followed, and with morale running low, they finally spied the English fleet in the distance.
But Joanna was not the only ferocious female warrior of this conflict. Yara Greyjoy,* was a sort of pirate queen who commanded a longship called the Black Wind and took Deepwood Motte, a castle in the north. Afterwards she made a claim to the throne, but her cheerfully psychotic uncle Euron beats her to it. However, there was one prominent female pirate in the middle ages every bit as brave.
Nobleman Olivier de Clisson had been among the French soldiers captured when the English besieged the Breton city of Vannes in 1342. Afterward, de Clisson had been the only Frenchman released, in exchange for an English earl, with a very low sum offered as a ransom—and this led the French to suspect he was a traitor. And so in 1343, during a truce, Olivier and fifteen other Breton lords were invited to a tournament where they were arrested, taken to Paris, and after a brief trial beheaded at Les Halles, after being dragged naked to his execution.
De Clisson’s widow Jeanne, it was said, carried her loved one’s head all the way from Paris to Brittany, where she displayed it before her seven-year-old son and swore revenge, as well as her eternal hatred for the kingdom of France.
Born in 1300 in the Vendée, on Brittany’s southern border, Jeanne had already given her first husband two children when she was widowed at twenty-five; she birthed another five by the time her second husband Olivier de Clisson was slain. Fuelled by the thought of vengeance, she set out as a pirate on her ship My Revenge where she would capture French crews, sparing only one sailor on each ship to pass on the message. Over a decade, Clisson and her Black Fleet became notorious and feared, earning her the nickname the Lioness of Brittany. Like Greyjoy, she also took an enemy castle, massacring its garrison, in revenge for the violence inflicted on her family. Unusually, de Clisson seems to have retired peacefully, and her story later inspired nineteenth century novels—although later her son played a prominent and particularly horrific part in the war. The Lioness of Brittany also helped to supply the English army for Edward’s greatest victory, at Crecy.
A STORM OF ARROWS
In July 1346, the English landed in Normandy and sacked Caen, killing most of the people. Some eight thousand men, half of them archers, had sailed from Portsmouth, marching through Normandy on their way to Paris. North of the capital they turned around to join their Flemish allies, and the French king Philippe VI trudged across the Somme to catch them.
Vegetius’s fourth century treatise Epitoma Rei Militaris, then the most popular book on warfare, discouraged pitch battles in favor of sieges, arguing that anything was better than battle because so much was down to luck. King Philippe was certainly in agreement, avoiding battle with his young enemy, although partly on the advice of his cousin, the King of Sicily—“a great astronomer and full of great science.” In the summer of 1346, however, he chose to take on his young enemy.
It goes without saying that medieval battle would have been a terrifying experience, a sensory overload, the sounds of horns calling men to formation, drums, the rallying cries, the thundering of horses’ hooves, the clash of steel on steel, and most of all screams and shouts. But a dominant feature from this point would have been the wussssshhhh of thousands of arrows arching menacingly into the air before coming down at lethal, high velocity. And at Crecy-en-Ponthieu on August 26, 1346, the piercing sound of metal in flight would have been relentless and dreadful, with as many as twenty-five thousand arrows in the air at one point, coming down “so thickly and evenly that they fell like snow.”
During his invasion of Wales, Edward I had discovered a weapon used by the natives which was to revolutionize war, not just in Britain, but across Europe. The longbow weighed between sixty and ninety pounds and could launch twelve arrows per minute, compared to the crossbow’s two, with a high rate of accuracy up to 220 yards; if elevated it could go even further, but was less likely to kill. It was lethally effective, able to penetrate a church door at close range and armor far further, and so after crushing the Welsh, Edward had recruited many of their bowmen into his army. At Crecy six thousand English and Welsh longbowmen fired as many as half a million arrows over the day, a mass of lethal weaponry weighing twenty tons lying on the dead and dying. Against them the French cavalry, and their Genoese crossbowmen, stood no chance.
Crossbows had been first recorded in northern France in the tenth century, but did not become widespread until the twelfth, partly replacing the short bow. Byzantine princess Anna Comnena described this “barbarian bow . . . so hateful to God”7 and crossbows were considered so morally appalling that—like snipers in twentieth century wars—their users were treated as pariahs and outside the normal rules of war. When Rochester castle surrendered to King John in 1215, everyone was ransomed except the crossbowmen who were hanged. Because of this they were well paid, earning twice as much as ordinary foot soldiers.
Crossbows had great force, and corpses found on the site of the Battle of Visby in what is now Sweden, fought in 1361 between Danes and Gotlanders, found skulls with up to six crossbow bolts that had fully penetrated both their helmets and bone. Against this, mail coats were completely ineffective. Yet the Welsh longbow, although in appearance more primitive, had huge advantages, and its impact was horrifying. During the campai
gn against the Welsh, one Englishman was shot “right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron mail . . . and then through the skirt of his leather tunic”, finally penetrating right through the saddle and fatally wounding his horse.”8 Indeed, they were so effective that Edward I had to have forests cleared for a hundred yards either side of Welsh roads because of sniping. And even if an arrow didn’t penetrate armor it still wore down the enemy, both physically and mentally, and disrupted their formation.
As offensive weaponry got more lethal, the armor of the period changed with it. The gambeson, the dog-handler style of jacket, was going out of fashion, which is just as well as it could be unbearably hot. The upper legs were still protected by a cuissart, armor made of padded leather with strips of steel, and on top of armor knights wore the jupon, a sleeveless garment sometimes padded and finished with expensive cloth—silk or velvet—and embroidered with heraldic arms (this is why it became called a “Coat of Arms”). However, around this time the conical bascinet came into use, the helmet with a snout at the front that one normally associates with medieval jousters, and suits of mail were also augmented with riveted steel plates to protect against armor piercing arrows, the first entire plate suit of arms appearing around 1380.
Crecy also saw one of the first uses of cannon and gunpowder in Christian Europe, which the French had acquired from Italy; originally used by the Chinese in the eighth century, this was to alter a European hierarchy based around the castle, impenetrable fortresses that could withstand rebellions or invading armies, but were powerless against the new technology. Gunpowder had been used in Spain during the siege of Algeciras from 1342-1344 and had now come north.
And yet that day the French were destroyed, impetuously riding into battle in the afternoon sun rather than resting the night. They were confident; after all, even their twelve thousand Genoese crossbowmen outnumbered the English armies put together, most of whom were on foot. Yet faced with the storm of arrows, the Genoese ran away and so Philippe called out for his men to attack them: “Quick now, kill all that rabble, they are only in our way.”9 Thousands of Frenchmen were cut down in a storm of arrows, and at the end of the day 1,500 French noblemen and 10,000 soldiers lay dead.
It was an unnatural type of war for the aristocrats of northern France. “For the French, a new era had dawned; for the first time the nobleman on his horse could be struck down by the common man on his feet.”10 This killing was done without crossing swords and so a nobleman wouldn’t even know who had hit him, a blow to the traditional ethos of chivalry.
Yet the day is still best remembered for the actions of one man that epitomized chivalry and romance. Among the kings of France’s allies was Blind King John of Bohemia, who, despite having lost his eyesight on crusade, insisted on taking part, asking that twelve of his knights tie their horses together so that they might lead him into battle. All but two were killed, and needless to say John did not survive.
Such acts of bravado epitomized the spirit of the age: Eight years earlier some forty English bachelors (the lowest class of knight) had fought at Valenciennes, each with one eye covered with silk, “because, so it was said, they had made a vow among the ladies of their own country that they would not see with more than one eye until they had some deeds of arms in France,” as Froissart recorded in his Chronicles. Most were killed, unsurprisingly.
After the battle, the pursuit would normally end at the baggage train, which provided the best opportunity for looting. Metal would be stripped from the corpses while the ransomed prisoners were led away; those who were injured most likely faced agonizing death if they were not despatched out of mercy. Some camp followers knew about ointments and balms, and certainly nuns and monks did, but only the richest men could afford surgeons and doctors. There were now medical schools at Oxford and St Barts in London, as well as Bologna, Florence, Paris, and Montpellier, but it was centuries before serious advances were made in treating battlefield wounds. The biggest killer was infected blood and flesh, which is why the most urgent matter was to cut off an infected limb and cauterize the area with fire.
On the same day as Crecy, the English beat the Scots at Neville Cross, and their king David II was captured by John Coupland, a Northumbrian squire. Coupland was made a knight-banneret and given an annuity of five hundred pounds, some manors, and the wardenship of Roxburgh, and was also pardoned for various “homicides and felonies” he had committed. He was also an occasional jailer, as well as murderer, and yet many similar members of his class were basically thugs who had been raised to the gentry by proving themselves in war. In 1332, with the Scottish and English armies waiting to fight, “a gigantic Scottish ruffian” called Turnbull had challenged any Englishman to fight him so Sir Robert Benhale, a Norfolk knight, went up to him, “sliced his black mastiff dog in half, then lopped off his left hand and head.”11 He would end up as Lord Benhale. Criminality was no bar to office either; Sir John Hawley, eighteen times mayor of Dartmouth and Member of Parliament until his death in 1408, was a pirate.
On the other hand, fortune was fickle, and Coupland’s luck ran out in 1363 when he was murdered by jealous neighbors.
The victories in France were celebrated back home with the minting of coins celebrating the great warrior king, but in reality the crown was building up huge debts with the real iron banks, all of them based in Italian city-states. His mother had run overdrafts with the Bardis of Florence, perhaps Europe’s largest bank, and Edward had borrowed another 900,000 florins from the family, along with 600,000 from another bank, the Peruzzis. In 1345, the king had defaulted, causing Europe’s first ever banking crisis, but then the mundane business of finance never did interest the king.
Edward celebrated the victories at Crecy and Calais by founding an order of knights, the Garter, on St George’s Day, 1348, inviting twenty-four leading men to become part of a brotherhood. According to one theory, the order had begun as an in-joke between Edward and one of his oldest friends; from his earliest days, including the daring raid to capture Mortimer, Edward had established a band of close friends and the “garter” may have been a reference to their wild and care-free younger days of womanizing. (In A Game of Thrones, Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark recall their youth fighting and wistfully reflect that such times are gone.)
Perhaps the most celebrated knight among Edward’s band was his second cousin, Henry Grosmont. Thomas of Lancaster’s title had passed to his brother Henry, and although he helped in the overthrow of Despenser, he was by then going blind and increasingly withdrawn. His son, the “wiry, tight-lipped, high-cheekboned” Henry, had first seen action in Scotland in 1333, and successfully led the Anglo-Gascon forces in 1345. While on campaign, he learned that his father had died, making him earl. And for the next thirty years he took part in almost every war in Europe, often taking leave when there was peace in France to head as far as Lithuania, Greece, Cyprus, and the Middle East. He never missed a war if he could help it, and attracted an entourage of aristocratic followers, the sons of lords from across France and Germany who served under him. When he went to Avignon in 1354 to visit the pope he was mobbed by crowds.
Lancaster in many ways epitomized the medieval thirst for life, in spite of—or because of—the horrors around it. He took pleasure in hunting, feasting, and seducing peasant girls, but it was also said that he “loves the song of the nightingale and the scents of roses, musk, violets and lily of the valley.”12 A heroic figure admired across Europe, in 1350 he rescued the Black Prince and his ten-year-old brother John of Gaunt at the Battle of Winchelsea, when he rammed a Castilian ship closing in on them. Young John went on to marry Grosmont’s daughter Blanche.
In 1351, Edward made Henry duke, only the second in the country, giving him palatinate control over Lancashire in the north-west, allowing him to rule like a small kingdom in its own right. He went on crusade to Prussia that winter, but fell out with his fellow crusader, Otto, and they had a duel in Paris, in which his rival
lost his nerve and humiliatingly shrunk in terror. Lancaster also wrote a racy book, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, about his own personal failings, which detailed his fondness of busty peasant girls, despite finding the poor malodorous.
A Knight of the Garter wore lace on his left shoulder until he had earned the right, by his deed, to remove it, adding further kudos. The aim of the order was to glorify and honor the cult of chivalry and war, at a time when a man’s sword and his ability to wield it was almost everything. That this life offered death, injury and misery only added to the attraction, for as Sir Geoffroi de Charny wrote in 1352 as advice to young knights: “You will have to put up with great labour before you achieve honor from this employ: heat, cold, fasting, hard work, little sleep and long watches, and always exhaustion.”13 When battle comes, de Charny wrote: “You will needs be afraid often when you see your enemies bearing down on you . . . and you do not know best how to protect your body. Now you see men slaughtering one another . . . and your friends dead whose corpses lie before you. But your horses are not killed, you could well get away . . . If you stay, you will have honor ever after: if you flee you dishonor yourself. Is this not a great martyrdom?”14
And yet chivalry was four-fifths illusion, in the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, for what mattered ultimately was strength, the ability to fight wearing fifty-five pounds of steel armor, crashing full gallop into the enemy, giving blows with swords or axe and taking them.15 Or as Sandor Clegane puts it: “A knight’s a sword with a horse. The rest, the vows and the sacred oils and the lady’s favors, they’re silk ribbons tied round the sword. Maybe the swords are prettier with ribbons hanging off it, but it will kill you just as dead.”16
