A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Edward III was fifteen years old when he ascended the throne in 1327, 25 when he embarked on war with France, and 34 at the time of the second attempt in 1346. Well built and vigorous with long-flowing golden hair, mustache, and beard, he was at the height of his energies, expansive and kingly, vain, gracious, willful, and no stranger to the worst in man. Having grown up under the vicious strife surrounding the murder of his father’s favorites, the deposition and murder of his father, and the overthrow and hanging of his mother’s lover, Mortimer, who had seized power, he seemed, as far as history knows, unscarred by the experience. He understood practical politics without possessing any larger sense of rulership. He had no great qualities apart from or ahead of his time, but shone in those qualities his time admired in a king: he loved pleasure, battle, glory, hunts and tournaments, and extravagant display. One analysis of his character contains the phrases “boyish charm” and “a certain youthful petulance,” suggesting that the King of England too showed signs of the characteristic medieval juvenility.

  When Edward launched his claim to be the rightful King of France, it is uncertain how seriously he took it, but as a device it was of incomparable value in giving him the appearance of a righteous cause. While desirable in any epoch, a “just war” in the 14th century was virtually a legal necessity as the basis for requisitioning feudal aids in men and money. It was equally essential for securing God on one’s side, for war was considered fundamentally an appeal to the arbitrament of God. A “just war” had to be one of public policy declared by the sovereign, and it had to be in a “just” cause—that is, directed against some “injustice” in the form of crime or fault on the part of the enemy. As formulated by the inescapable Thomas Aquinas, it required a third criterion: right intention on the part of the participants, but how this could be tested, the great expounder did not say. Even more convenient than the help of God was the “right of spoil”—in practice, pillage—that accompanied a just war. It rested on the theory that the enemy, being “unjust,” had no right to property, and that booty was the due reward for risk of life in a just cause.

  The claim to the French crown gave an excuse of legality to any vassal of France whom Edward could recruit as an ally. If he, not Philip, were the rightful King of France, a vassal could transfer his homage on the ground that it had simply been misplaced. Allegiance in the 14th century was still given to a person, not a nation, and the great territorial lords of duchies and counties felt themselves free to make alliances as if almost autonomous. The Harcourts of Normandy and the Duke and other lords of Brittany, for various reasons, did just that. Edward’s claim through his mother gave him the one thing that made his venture feasible—support within France and a friendly beachhead. He never had to fight his way in. In either Normandy or Brittany this situation was to last forty years, and at Calais, captured after the Battle of Crécy, it was to outlast the Middle Ages.

  In Brittany the war centered upon the relentless feud between two rival claimants to the dukedom and two parties of the population, one supported by France and the other by England. As a result, France was perpetually endangered by the access given to the enemy. The Breton seacoast was open to English ships, English garrisons were on Breton soil, Breton nobles were openly allied to Edward. Brittany was France’s Scotland, choleric, Celtic, stony, bred to opposition and resistance, and ready to use the English in its struggles against its overlord as the Scots used the French in theirs. Along its rockbound coast, in Michelet’s words, “two enemies, earth and sea, man and nature, meet in eternal conflict.” Storms throw up monstrous waves, fifty, sixty, eighty feet, whose foam flies as high as the church steeple. “Nature is atrocious here; so is man; they seem to understand each other.”

  The contestants for the dukedom were two relentless extremists, a man and a woman. In 1341 the last Duke had died, leaving a half-brother, Jean Comte de Montfort, and a niece, Jeanne de Penthièvre, as rival heirs. Montfort was the candidate and ally of England while Jeanne’s claim was assumed by her husband, Charles de Blois, a nephew of Philip VI, who became the French candidate for the dukedom.

  Given to the study of books as a child, Charles was an ascetic of exaggerated piety who sought spirituality by mortifying the flesh. Like Thomas à Becket, he wore unwashed clothes crawling with lice; he put pebbles in his shoes, slept on straw on the floor next to his wife’s bed, and after his death was found to have worn a coarse shirt of horsehair under his armor, and cords wound so tightly around his body that the knots dug into his flesh. By these practices a seeker of holiness expressed contempt for the world, self-abasement, and humility, although he often found himself guilty of a perverse pride in his excesses. Charles confessed every night so that he might not go to sleep in a state of sin. He fathered a bastard son called Jehan de Blois, but sins of the flesh did not have to be eschewed, only repented. He treated the humble with deference, it was said, met the complaints of the poor with goodness and justice, and refrained from too heavy taxes. Such was his reputation for saintliness that when he undertook to walk barefoot in the snow to a Breton shrine, the people covered his path with straw and blankets, but he took another way at a cost of bleeding and frozen feet, so that for weeks afterward he was unable to walk.

  His piety detracted not at all from his ferocious pursuit of the dukedom. He stated his claim below the walls of Nantes by having his siege engines hurl into the city the heads of thirty captured partisans of Montfort. His successful siege of Quimper was followed by a ruthless massacre of 2,000 civilian inhabitants of all ages and both sexes. According to then current laws of war, the besieged could make terms if they surrendered, but not if they forced a siege to its bitter end, so presumably Charles felt no compunctions. On this occasion, after he had chosen the place of assault, he was warned of rising flood waters, but refused to alter his decision, saying, “Does not God have empire over the waters?” When his men succeeded in taking the city before being trapped by the flood, the people took it for a miracle owed to Charles’s prayers.

  When Charles captured Jean de Montfort and sent him to Paris to be held prisoner by Philip VI, Montfort’s cause was taken up “with the courage of a man and the heart of a lion” by his remarkable wife. Riding from town to town, she rallied the allegiance of dispirited partisans to her three-year-old son, saying, “Ha, seigneurs, never mourn for my lord whom you have lost. He is but one man,” and promising that she had riches enough to maintain the cause. She provisioned and fortified garrisons, organized resistance, “paid largely and gave freely,” presided over councils, conducted diplomacy, and expressed herself in eloquent and graceful letters. When Charles de Blois besieged Hennebont, she led a heroic defense in full armor astride a war-horse in the streets, exhorting the soldiers under a hail of arrows and ordering women to cut short their skirts and carry stones and pots of boiling pitch to the walls to cast down upon the enemy. During a lull she led a party of knights out a secret gate, and galloped by a roundabout way to take the enemy camp in the rear, destroyed half their force, and defeated the siege. She devised feints and stratagems, wielded her sword in sea fights, and when her husband escaped from the Louvre in disguise only to die after reaching Brittany, she implacably continued the fight for her son.

  When in 1346, Charles de Blois was finally captured by the English party and taken to prison in England, his cause was pursued by his no less implacable wife, the crippled Jeanne de Penthièvre. The pitiless war went on. Its two chief protagonists met fates expressive of their time, insanity and sainthood. The blows and intrigues, privations and broken hopes of her life proved too much for the valiant Countess of Montfort, who went mad and was confined in England while Edward made himself guardian of her son. Shut up and forgotten in the castle of Tickhill, she was to live on for thirty years.

  Charles de Blois, after nine years as a prisoner, was to win his liberty for a ransom variously reported as 350,000, 400,000, or 700,000 écus. Although he was ready at last to come to terms, his wife refused to let him renounce her c
laim, so he renewed the struggle and was eventually killed in battle. Afterward he was canonized, but the process was nullified by Pope Gregory XI at the request of the younger Jean de Montfort, who feared that as conqueror of a saint he would be regarded by the Bretons as a usurper.

  While famous exploits and great reputations were made in Brittany, a different kind of struggle was fought for Flanders.

  Trade and geography made Flanders a crucial stake in the Anglo-French rivalry. Its towns were the leading commercial centers of 14th century Europe, where Italian merchant bankers and moneylenders made their northern headquarters, a sure sign of lucrative business. Wealth generated by the weaving industry enriched the magnates of the bourgeoisie, who enjoyed a luxury that had astonished Queen Jeanne, wife of Philip the Fair, when she visited Bruges. “I thought I would be the only queen here,” she said, “but I find six hundred others.”

  Though a fief of France, Flanders was tied to England by wool as Gascony was by wine. “All the nations of the world,” proudly wrote Matthew of Westminster, “are kept warm by the wool of England made into cloth by the men of Flanders.” Unexcelled in Europe for its quality and colors, including heavy cloth for common use, the cloth of Flanders was sold as far away as the Orient and had achieved an economic success that made Flanders vulnerable to the disadvantages of a one-industry economy. In that situation lay the source of all the turbulence and uprisings of the previous hundred years, and also the lever that both France and England used in their contest for control of the region.

  The Count of Flanders, Louis de Nevers, and the Flemish nobility were pro-French, while the merchants and working class and all who depended on the cloth industry were oriented toward England in self-interest if not sentiment. The feudal and natural tie with France predominated. Flemish cloth and French wine were exchanged in trade, the Count’s court was patterned on that of France, the nobility intermarried, French prelates held high offices in Flanders, use of the French language was spreading, Flemish students went to schools and colleges in Laon, Reims, and Paris.

  In Flanders at the beginning of the century, the despised commoners had inflicted upon French knighthood an unforgettable defeat. In 1302 the array of French chivalry in splendid armor rode north in support of Flemish urban magnates to crush a revolt of the workers of Bruges. In the clash at Courtrai, French foot soldiers and crossbowmen were about to overpower the Flemish workers—too soon. The knights, frantic for the charge and fearing to lose the honor of victory, ordered their own infantry to fall back, causing them to break ranks in confusion. Shouting their war cries and riding down their own men in wild disorder, the knights charged, ignoring the canals beneath their feet. Horses scrambled and fell, knights plunged into the water, a second wave piled upon the first. The Flemish infantry, armed with pikes, speared them like fish, and holding firm against all assault beat back the knights in a bloody massacre. Seven hundred gold spurs were stripped from knightly corpses after the battle and hung up in triumphant memorial in the church. The loss of so much French nobility caused royal commissioners afterward to scour the provinces for bourgeois and rich peasants prepared to pay for ennoblement.

  The knighthood of France was not daunted by Courtrai nor was its contempt for the commoner-in-arms in any way altered. The battle was considered an accident of circumstance and terrain unlikely to be repeated. In that sense the conclusion was right. In another revolt and another clash 25 years later, the knights inflicted a terrible revenge at the battle of Cassel, where they butchered Flemish workers and peasants by the thousands. Yet the lost spurs of Courtrai were a valid omen of the rise of the common soldier armed with pike and a motive, and an omen, too, for the knights, which they ignored.

  After the Count of Flanders had been re-established in power by French arms, Philip VI exerted pressure to tighten relations and isolate Flanders from England. Against this effort the industrial towns, led by Ghent, rose in revolt under Jacob van Artevelde, one of the most dynamic bourgeois figures of the 14th century. An ambitious merchant of the class that was pressing to take over political power from the nobility, he had noble pretensions of his own. His two sons called themselves messire and chevalier, and the oldest son and a daughter were married into the nobility. Gaining control of the insurrection, Artevelde defeated the Count’s forces and forced him to flee to France in 1339, leaving the country under Artevelde’s control.

  Meanwhile Edward, as the supplier of wool for Flemish industry, was exerting pressure for an alliance that would give him a base from which to attack France. The Flemish cloth manufacturers favored the English alliance and Artevelde attached his fortunes to it. The obstacle of French sovereignty over Flanders was overcome when Edward assumed the title of King of France. In that capacity he signed a treaty with Artevelde in 1340 after the victory of Sluys, but the device was hollow and lasted only long enough to give Edward a springboard before Artevelde’s ambition brought him down in ruin.

  Artevelde was a man of brutal action who once, when he and a Flemish knight disagreed, smote him to the ground with a blow of his fist under the eyes of the King of England. Besides using Flemish funds to finance Edward’s war, he violated Flemish sentiments of homage. He proposed that the King’s eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales, later known as the Black Prince, should supplant the Count of Flanders’ eldest son, Louis de Male, as heir and future ruler of Flanders. This was too much for the good Flemish towns. To disinherit their natural lord in favor of the English prince, they stoutly told Artevelde, was “a thing they would surely never agree unto.” Moreover the Pope, under King Philip’s pressure, had already excommunicated them for deserting their sovereign, causing much uneasiness and damage to business. Resentment rose against Artevelde, combined with suspicion that he had embezzled funds for his own use.

  “Then every man began to murmur against Jacques” (Jacob) and when he rode through Ghent, “trusting so much in his greatness that he thought soon to reduce them to his pleasure,” angry crowds followed him to his house, demanding an accounting for all the revenues of Flanders. Then he began to fear and on entering his house, closed fast the gates, doors, and windows against the mob shouting in the street. Coming to the window “in great humilitie,” Artevelde defended his nine years’ governorship and promised a full account next day if the crowd would disperse. “Then they all cryed with one voyse, Come down to us and preche not so hyghe, and gyve us an account of the great treasure of Flaunders!” Now in terror, Artevelde shut the window and attempted to escape out the back door to an adjoining church, but the mob of 400 men broke down the doors, seized and slew him on the spot. Thus in July 1345 Fortune’s Wheel brought down the great master of Flanders.

  Afterward representatives of the Flemish towns hurried to England to appease King Edward, who was in a great wrath at the event. Assuring him of the alliance, they suggested a way in which his line could still inherit Flanders without dispossessing the rightful lord. Let Edward’s eldest daughter, Isabella, then aged thirteen, marry the Count of Flanders’ fourteen-year-old son Louis, who was in the communes’ custody, “so that ever after the county of Flaunders shall be in the issue of your chylde.” Edward was much taken with the scheme, although the prospective bridegroom, out of loyalty to France, was not. When Edward tried to force the betrothal on him two years later, the Count’s escape, leaving behind an unwed princess, was to impinge indirectly but decisively on the life of Enguerrand de Coucy.

  To contemporaries the power of the King of England seemed puny compared with that of the King of France; Villani referred to him as “il piccolo re d’Inghilterra” (the little King of England). It is doubtful if he actually intended to conquer France. Medieval wars between Europeans were not aimed at strategic conquest but rather at seizure of dynastic rule at the top by inflicting enough damage to bring about downfall of the opponent. Something like this was probably Edward’s aim, and owing to his base in Guienne and his footholds in Flanders and northern France, it would not have seemed unrealizable.


  The first abortive phase had been so costly as to have been ruinous if Edward had absorbed the cost; instead, he passed on the ruin to others. He had financed the war through loans underwritten by the great Florentine banking firms of the Bardi and Peruzzi. The sums, according to Villani, amounted to between 600,000 and 900,000 gold florins owed to the Bardi and two-thirds as much to the Peruzzi, secured on expected revenue from the wool tax. When this brought in too little and Edward could not repay, the drain on the Italian companies bankrupted them. The Peruzzi failed in 1343, the Bardi suspended a year later, and their crash brought down a third firm, the Acciaiuioli. Capital vanished, stores and workshops closed, wages and purchases stopped. When, by the malignant chance that seemed to hound the 14th century, economic devastation in Florence and Siena was followed first by famine in 1347 and then by plague, it could not but seem to the unfortunate people that the anger of God had been loosed upon them.

  To raise an army for a second assault after being bankrupted by the first would have been impossible without the consent of the three estates represented in Parliament. Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself. The governing fact was that medieval organization by this time had passed to a predominantly money economy. Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal’s obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay. The added expense of a paid army raised the cost of war beyond the ordinary means of the sovereign. Without losing its appetite for war, the inchoate state had not yet devised a regular method to pay for it. When he overspent, the sovereign resorted to loans from bankers, towns, and businesses which he might not be able to repay, and to the even more disruptive measures of arbitrary taxation and devaluation of the coinage.