Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

The strategy that Henry Beaumont employed that day became the basic principle of modern warfare. You do not wait to engage enemy troops in hand-to-hand combat; you shoot them before they get close enough to bash you over the head or stab you in the guts. The key element in this strategy is the massed use of projectile weapons, which produces much the same effect as a machine gun. A few dozen archers might have broken up a schiltrom but only the coordinated bowmanship of a thousand could stop the charge of well-equipped cavalry. Although a longbow was only accurate over a distance of about 200 yards, and could only penetrate armour within about half of that, the tactic of bringing down the leading enemy riders when they were nearly upon you meant that all your targets became stationary directly in front of you, in the killing zone. Each archer could shoot an arrow every five seconds; at Dupplin Moor, this meant a deadly onslaught of 12,000 arrows per minute. It did not matter that they were not all directly aimed; it amounted to a storm of arrows concentrated on the ground about a hundred yards ahead of the English lines. No army could advance in the face of such a deadly attack. We do not know whether Henry Beaumont had all this planned out in advance or whether it was luck. Either way, within a matter of days, news of his victory had reached the ears of Edward III of England.

  At Edward’s birth it had been prophesied that he would be victorious in war: the news from Dupplin Moor gave him the blueprint for fulfilling this prediction.13 Within a year, at the age of just 20, he led a modest but well-equipped English army against the Scots at Halidon Hill and took revenge for Bannockburn. That was just the start. In the late 1330s, as the French sided with the Scots in the developing war, he used longbows to defeat them at sea and on land. Most famously of all, in 1346, in response to the exhortations of Parliament, he set sail with about 15,000 men, landed in France and marched on Paris. It was unthinkable that the king of a small country like England could take on the military might of France, the most powerful kingdom in Christendom. But at Crécy, on 26 August 1346, Edward lured the French to attack him. The arrows of his 5,000 archers first ripped through the enemy crossbowmen and then massacred the French knights and men-at-arms. The guns he had hauled across the uneven roads of Normandy opened fire on the enemy’s men and horses, shooting bolts and cannonballs into their ranks. The French fought bravely but were annihilated. Crécy demonstrated to an international audience the effectiveness of the strategy employed at Dupplin Moor and Halidon Hill: if you equip your soldiers to shoot projectile weapons, you can defeat a large army with a smaller one. Moreover, you can do so again and again because your soldiers carry comparatively less risk of being injured. For better or for worse, a new chapter in the military history of the world had opened.

  Edward III’s greatest stroke of luck was that his kingdom was full of good bowmen. The regular Scottish incursions had led to a concentration of trained archers in the north of the country.14 In addition, the partial breakdown of law and order around 1290–1320, as the famines took effect, caused many men to take action to defend their communities. In the north of England and the Welsh Marches there developed a very positive tradition of them doing so with longbows, which they had learned to shoot from boyhood. Whereas in other countries an archer was a man of low status, in England he was respected. This strong culture of archery also meant that large supplies of arrows were available. Edward III could simply place an order for three million arrows to be gathered; he did not have to wait for them all to be specially made. Bowmen, shooting rapidly together as a unit, proved to be his trump card in any battle.

  Edward was not the sort of man simply to take this piece of good fortune for granted. He realised that what he could do with bows could also be done with guns, which had arrived from China a few decades earlier. In the 1340s, he ordered the production and stockpiling of gunpowder at the Tower of London; by 1346, he was producing two tons of gunpowder per year. His short, bulbous cannon had a range of at least three quarters of a mile. He also developed ribalds that contained multiple gun barrels. At the siege of Calais, in 1347, he used cannon to bombard the walls. Later in his long reign, at Dover Castle, Calais, and Queenborough, he built the earliest artillery fortifications and equipped them with cannon to guard the sea. By the end of the century, England and France were both using guns in their war against one another. Most other European countries did likewise. You can see the Loshult Gun, dating from the early fourteenth century, and the Mörkö Gun, from about 1390, in the Statens Historika Museum in Stockholm. Other fourteenth-century guns are in museums in Cologne and Nuremburg in Germany, Paris and Provins in France, Milan in Italy and Berne in Switzerland.

  Despite the later superiority of guns over bows, it is important not to exaggerate their effectiveness in the fourteenth century. At that time, their main value lay in siege warfare. In 1405, Warkworth Castle capitulated after seven shots were fired at it from a large gun. Shortly afterwards, a single shot from a large cannon brought down the Constable Tower at Berwick, forcing the Scots to surrender. Thus cannon were just another type of siege engine: Christendom was no stranger to trebuchets and other machines that could fling heavy stones at a castle and bring down the walls. But they were slow, heavy and inaccurate: a thousand longbows were far easier to produce, maintain, transport and shoot. It was principally longbows, therefore, that marked the major change in warfare. When Henry V attempted to emulate his famous great-grandfather and engage the French in battle on their own soil, he used cannon in the siege of Harfleur but relied on longbows to defeat the French cavalry at Agincourt in 1415.

  Once Edward III had demonstrated the effectiveness of massed longbows, he imbued his archers with the confidence to carry their own battles further afield. Companies of English mercenaries and renegades were to be found in France in the 1350s and 1360s. Others, like Sir John Hawkwood, took their skills to Italy and made fortunes fighting in the wars there. At the battle of Aljubarotta in 1385, a small group of English archers helped the Portuguese to defeat the French cavalry. In England itself, all men were now compelled every week to shoot at the butts, to preserve this military advantage. Only in the sixteenth century did the technology of muskets, arquebuses and handguns finally make longbows redundant – with the exception of ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, the eccentric English officer who still fought with a longbow in the Second World War. The fundamental principle of one army systematically attacking another from a distance rather than engaging in hand-to-hand combat has never gone away, however. It could be described as one of the most significant dividing lines between the ancient world and the modern.

  Nationalism

  Most of us, including most historians, associate nationalism with the modern world – largely because of its contemporary relevance and its role as a motivating factor in some of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities. It is normally said that medieval monarchs reigned over kingdoms, not nations. Yet the roots of our concept of nationalism lie in the Middle Ages, and it emerges forcefully in the fourteenth century. To be more specific, nationalism appeared in three forms at that time. First it was an expression of identity, in the way people described themselves as a group when they were away from home or among people from different countries. In an ecclesiastical sense, the term ‘nation’ denoted a group of prelates from a certain part of Christendom. And in a political context, the term began to be used when a king and his people were united in pursuing interests that they had in common, rather than objectives that were purely local, aristocratic or royal. These three types of nationalism collectively represent a powerful force that arguably has continued to shape the world ever since.

  From the thirteenth century, the greater regularity of travel and the increase in international trade meant that there were more people living abroad. Understandably, they wanted to surround themselves with people who spoke the same language, shared the same bonds of loyalty, and understood their customs (and jokes). When merchants of the Hanseatic League, the confederacy of German and Baltic trading cities, established an enclave in a foreign port, they b
anded together and were referred to as a ‘nation’. Similarly, university students from the same country flocked together at the most popular international universities. In the early fourteenth century, the University of Paris had four recognised ‘nations’: French, Norman, Picard and English. In certain border towns, people of one kingdom used the word ‘nation’ to divide themselves and their friends from those belonging to the other kingdom. In 1305, for instance, the townsmen of the English ‘nation’ resident in the border town of Berwick submitted a petition to Edward I to banish those townsmen in Berwick who belonged to the Scottish ‘nation. Nationhood was thus used to define not only friends but, by implication, foes too.

  From 1274, the many archbishops and bishops who attended the Church’s ecumenical councils also gathered together in ‘nations’ to discuss and vote on motions. At the council of Vienne (1311–12), they divided themselves into eight nations: Germans, Spaniards, Danes, Italians, English, French, Irish and Scots. These ecclesiastical nations did not relate directly to political realms: there was no such thing as a kingdom of Spain in 1311, and the German nation similarly included prelates from many separate states. The concept of nationhood in this context had more to do with common culture, common language and travelling together than with loyalty to a secular monarch. In 1336, Pope Benedict XII reduced the number of ecclesiastical nations to just four: the French, Italians, Spaniards and Germans (with the English being placed with the Germans).15 The rise of England’s international standing after Edward III’s victories over France put an end to it being subsumed in the German nation, however, and at the Council of Pisa (1409), the prelates acknowledged five nations: English, Germans, French, Italians and the absent Spaniards. At the Council of Constance (1415), the question of what constituted a nation was hotly debated. The French insisted that, as the Czechs and Hungarians were part of the German nation, the English should again be subsumed within that grouping. The English stood firm for their independence, telling the most outrageous lies to bolster their case. They declared, for instance, that the British Isles contained 110 dioceses, and that the Orkneys (which were ruled by Norway but were ecclesiastically part of the English nation), numbered 60 islands that were collectively bigger than France.16

  The reason why ecclesiastical nationalism had become such a heated point of discussion was because it had taken on a political dimension. The kings of England, Scotland and France increasingly needed to widen their base of supporters, and every sort of allegiance was valuable to them. For example, in 1302, the argument between Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII led to the pope issuing the bull Unam Sanctam and threatening to make himself ruler of all Christendom in temporal as well as religious matters. In response, Philip decided to summon the Estates General of France for the first time. Representatives of the lords, clergy and principal towns came from the whole ecclesiastical nation of France, regardless of whether they owed allegiance directly to the king of France or were vassals of the semi-autonomous dukes of Brittany and Burgundy. If the whole ecclesiastical nation could be enlisted to support the king’s cause, it hugely bolstered his authority. In a similar vein, if the English representatives at a Church council were recognised as a nation in their own right, they had an equal voice to that of the French and could resist their traditional foe’s initiatives.

  In England, Edward III employed national interests for a wide variety of domestic and international purposes. He realised that it was in the national interest to maintain a constant war with Scotland, and later with France, for by doing so, he stopped his most powerful lords fighting among themselves. Thus he delivered several decades of uninterrupted domestic peace in England. Parliament approved of the policy and supported the king in his war in France, even though it incurred extra taxation. Through promoting a sense of nationhood, kings were able to foster a sense of unity: those who paid their taxes at one end of the country did so in order to defend those at the other. No matter which locality they were from, Englishmen were defined by their enmity of the French and Scots and their loyalty to all things culturally and geographically English, not just their king. Frenchmen and Scotsmen were similarly defined as nations by their opposition to the English.

  Political nationalism was also affected by relations between kings and popes. In 1305, Philip IV engineered the election to the papacy of a Frenchman, who took the papal throne as Clement V Following considerable hostility to his appointment in Rome, Clement moved the papal curia to Avignon in 1309. Thus the papacy came to be practically a French institution: all six of Clement’s successors and III of the 134 cardinals created before 1378 were French. Inevitably the Church became drawn into the politics of the conflict between France and England. One scornful English joke after Edward III’s run of victories over the French went: ‘Now the pope has become French and Jesus has become English; soon we’ll see who will do more: the pope or Jesus.’17 Edward further undermined the authority of the pope by introducing legislation to restrict papal appointments and income in England. He also confiscated the revenues of monasteries that had French mother houses. English poets started to write vituperative lyrics against the French, such as the following lines by Laurence Minot, from the 1330s: ‘France, womanish, pharisaic, embodiment of might, lynx-like, viperish, foxy, wolfish, a Medea, cunning, a siren, cruel, bitter, haughty: you are full of bile.’18

  This is a long way from the days when magnates would regularly travel between their manors in England and France. It is also a long way from the idea of the pope being St Peter’s successor as the bishop of Rome. National tensions arising from the papacy worsened in 1378, when Pope Gregory XI moved the Holy See back to Rome. When he died shortly afterwards and an Italian was elected to succeed him, a rival French pope was chosen by the French cardinals who remained at Avignon. Two popes now reigned over the various nations of Christendom. The English, Germans and Italians looked to the pope in Rome; the French and Spanish nations, together with Scotland, supported his French counterpart at Avignon. It was hardly surprising that the Council of Constance, which gathered in 1415 to end this schism, spent almost as much time arguing over what constituted a nation as it did matters of religion.

  Elsewhere, there were varying loyalties to national interests. In Germany, the role and power of the Holy Roman Emperor implied a higher layer of duty to the empire. In reality, however, men’s allegiance to their own lord or monarch took precedence. In the Iberian peninsula, cultural differences meant that allegiance to one’s corte or cort highlighted the sharp distinctions between the kingdoms of Portugal, Castile-León and Aragon. The Scandinavian realms co-existed peacefully within a trading alliance, the Kalmar Union, which was made up of the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden (which included Finland) and Norway (which included Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes, the Shetlands and the Orkneys). In such places, nationhood implied fraternity, not bitter rivalry with a neighbouring power. Of course, things were different in Italy. Italian cities and nobles had been divided since the twelfth century into two factions, Guelphs and Ghibellines, with the former supporting the pope and the latter the Holy Roman Emperor. In the fourteenth century, after the defeat of the Ghibellines, the Guelphs had divided into Black Guelphs and White Guelphs to fight among each other. Ultimately the loyalty of Italian men was not to Italy as a whole but to their city state or the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, and beyond that to their Guelph or Ghibelline cause. Italian nationalism would not become a major force until the nineteenth century.

  Despite these different shades and degrees of nationalism, it was in the fourteenth century that national interests became overtly more important than the unity of Christendom or the authority of the papacy. In 1300, men of substance were loyal to their lord in secular matters, and to their local bishop – and ultimately the pope – in religious ones. By 1400, things were no longer that simple. Loyalties were both locally and nationally aligned. Religious orthodoxy, taxation, parliamentary representation, language, laws and customs were all subsumed in the concept of
nationhood. Hence you could oppose your king and still be loyal to your nation. Indeed, national priorities saw two English kings deposed by their parliaments in the course of the century: Edward II in 1327 and Richard II in 1399. There was even talk at the end of his long life of deposing Edward III, and early in the next century, there was an attempt to depose Henry IV too. Although it was not unusual before 1300 for European monarchs to lose their throne to a rival, it was very rare for a hereditary monarch to be deposed by his own people for failing to act in the national interest (the deposition of Sancho II of Portugal in 1247 was one of the very few examples). The fourteenth century changed that. As for loyalty to the pope, by 1400, national interest required people to be sceptical of the authority of one of the two popes, if not both of them. The English theologian John Wycliffe duly pondered on the weakness of the whole Church hierarchy and advocated obedience not to the pope but directly to Christ. It was a remarkable change from the previous century, when Innocent III’s voice had thundered out across Christendom, and even kings quailed.

  Vernacular languages

  We tend to think that within our own lifetime things have changed faster than ever before. While this is perhaps true with respect to our use of electronic devices, the way we speak and write has changed slowly in recent times. In the English-speaking world today, millions of people can read Jane Austen and enjoy the language, which has hardly altered over the last two hundred years. Shakespeare’s works are for the most part intelligible to us after more than four hundred years, even if a few words here and there have shifted their meaning and some of the grammar is difficult. In the Middle Ages, however, language changed rapidly. You may understand a good chunk of Geoffrey Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales, but it is unlikely that you will comprehend much of the Middle English verse written by his predecessors a century earlier. The same thing can be said for French, which saw a rapid development in the early fourteenth century from Old French (or langue d’oil) to Middle French, as the language lost its declension system. German also saw considerable development, as Middle High German shifted into the modern language. Later on, printing would stabilise words and syntax and set a standard for each language, but before print became common in the sixteenth century, there were no linguistic anchors, so languages changed with every generation. The truism here is that if things can be standardised, they have a much better chance of lasting for centuries – whether they are units of measurement or the words we use.