A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  The Battle of Crécy

  It was Philip VI who now changed the pace of war. Pursuing Edward and his army across the Somme, on 26 August 1346, Philip forced the English to take up a defensive position on high ground, on the right bank of the river Maie, just outside the village of Crécy. Here an undisciplined charge by the French cavalry broke upon the ranks of dismounted English infantry supported by archers, a formation that had become classic English style. The dukes of Alençon and Lorraine were killed in the attack, as was the blind King of Bohemia, who had insisted on being led into battle. Although he had fought against the English, his emblem of an ostrich feather was now appropriated by Prince Edward (later known as the ‘Black Prince’), son of Edward III, destined, in a design of three ostrich feathers with the Flemish motto ‘Ich dene’ (‘I serve’), to become the symbol of all future princes of Wales: African wildlife, Bohemian chivalry, Dutch courage and Welsh pride combined in a most improbable way.

  Another of the badges of modern monarchy, the motto ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘Shame upon him who thinks ill of it’) was first adopted for Edward’s new Order of the Garter, intended to honour the chief captains who had fought alongside the King at Crécy. Like the order’s blue robes, themselves borrowed from the colours of the Capetian kings of France and ultimately from the blue mantle of the Virgin Mary, France’s chief protector, Edward’s motto was a deliberately Francophile gesture, intended both to justify and symbolize his claims to the French throne. Chivalry, as such incidents reveal, was a matter of conduct and appearances, not at all of the sort of patriotic or nationalistic anti-French sentiment that was to become a feature of later Anglo-French wars. War itself was a means by which the King could display himself to the maximum number of his subjects, no longer locked away in the semi-seclusion of his palaces or Parliaments, but parading through the streets or at the head of his armies, dressed in the most gaudy colours, with Edward himself the proudest peacock in the flock.

  Siege of Calais

  Victorious, with God’s verdict now cast decisively in his favour and with the heraldic surcoats of 2,200 French knights captured in the battle piled up as booty in his pavilion, Edward III now lay siege to Calais. It fell after nearly a year, in September 1347. Thereafter, it was to remain as the chief port of access to England on the continent, its merchant company recognized after 1363 as the only ‘staple’ (from ‘stapler’, the trade of sorting wool according to its quality) at which English wool merchants could sell their products overseas. Calais, administered from the 1370s in ecclesiastical terms as part of the archdiocese of Canterbury, was destined to return members to the English parliament throughout the 1530s and 40s. In contrast, Manchester had no member of Parliament until the 1650s, Birmingham until 1832. Throughout the Middle Ages, as ‘palatinate’ jurisdictions standing apart from the ordinary counties of England, neither Chester nor Durham sent representatives to the Commons.

  Meanwhile, in October 1346, within three months of Crécy, the Scots were defeated at Nevilles Cross near Durham and their King, David II, taken prisoner. Not since 1174 and the crushing defeats inflicted upon the enemies of King Henry II in Scotland and France had an English King enjoyed such extraordinary fortune in war.

  Capture of the French King

  Despite the vast cost of these campaigns, Edward III’s winning streak was to be continued into the 1350s. From 1349 to 1360, Edward fought off a threat to Calais, obtained yet another naval victory at the Battle of Les Espagnols, and in 1355 launched a two pronged attack via Calais and Gascony culminating when Prince Edward once again inflicted a crushing defeat on the French at Nouaillé five miles south of Poitiers. This Battle of Poitiers, of September 1356, led not only to the destruction of yet another French army, in circumstances similar to those at Crécy, but to the capture, in the midst of the fighting, of the French King, Jean II. When the Black Prince returned with his prisoners in the following year, the gutters of London ran with wine as part of the victory celebrations, something not reported since 1220 when a similar display, to mark the translation of the relics of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, had plunged the monks of Canterbury into fifty years of financial hardship.

  Kings’ Ransoms and Recovered Lands in France

  With both the Scots and the French Kings in English custody, and following a final expedition to France in 1359 in which his plans to have himself crowned in Rheims Cathedral, the traditional coronation church of the French, devolved into yet another ‘chevauchée’, this time through Burgundy, Edward III was able to negotiate treaties, allowing for the ransom of David II of Scotland for 100,000 marks, and, under the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny, eventually ratified in 1361, the ransom of Jean II for £500,000. Edward renounced his claims to be recognized as King of France and, in return, the French abandoned any claim to sovereignty over Aquitaine and the English possessions in France. Edward III now held a position across the Channel stronger than that enjoyed by any previous ruler of England up to and including the legendary King Arthur. This triumph seemed to be cemented in the early 1360s by a series of marriages arranged for Edward’s sons and daughters, by which the earldoms of Pembroke, March, Lancaster, the duchy of Brittany and the counties of Flanders and Burgundy seemed all to have been brought within the royal family’s orbit.

  Economic Costs

  Superficially at least, Edward’s combination of warfare and diplomacy rode high. Beneath the surface, however, lurked deep gulfs of economic and strategic miscalculation. The cost of maintaining garrisons at Calais, in Gascony and on the borders with Scotland were themselves crippling, let alone the costs of mounting expeditions from these redoubts. Edward had perhaps already spent even more on his naval forces than on his land army. On the one hand, this suggests a new bid for sovereignty of the seas, the first occasion since the reign of King John when the English had effectively sought mastery of the Channel: an important contribution towards the pride and reputation of the later royal navy. Edward had new gold coins minted, including the ‘noble’, worth 6s 8d (half a ‘mark’), intended for high value payments in trade and diplomacy: precisely the sort of coin that was needed in an era of massive taxation and no less massive ransom payments. They were stamped with a portrait of the King standing crowned and armed on board a great vessel of war, emblazoned with the heraldic symbols of England and France, the reverse bearing an inscription comparing Edward III with Christ himself passing through the midst of his enemies (‘Jesus passing through the midst of them, went his way’, Luke 4:30). Yet such empty boasting was small recompense for the costs of Edward’s naval operations. Far from the English gaining supremacy over the seas, the Channel itself became a vector of warfare, with French, Genoese and Spanish ships raiding along the southern English coast. Portsmouth was burned in 1338 and 1342, Plymouth was attacked in 1340, Winchelsea in 1356. For the first time in recorded history, English merchant shipping had to travel in convoy. The trade which such shipping carried and the English political classes who profited from it were taxed and taxed again. Meanwhile, the strategy behind Edward’s continental campaigns remained simplistic to the point of idiocy.

  The more defeats inflicted upon the French, the more noblemen captured, the more territory ravaged, the greater the proof of God’s favour and the higher the potential profit to the English King. Yet no manner of victory, not even such victories as Crécy or Poitiers, could alter the fact that the English lands in France remained open to counterattack and to essentially French cultural and economic influences, that the ransoms demanded from noble prisoners were often impossible to enforce, and that, even after the Treaty of Brétigny, the French subjects of Aquitaine and the south continued to look to French royal justice and to the French Parlement in much the same way that Capetian influence had been intruded into Plantagenet Gascony in the years after 1259. The basic problems of English rule in France remained unresolved.

  Whether Edward or his advisers had any real idea of the broader strategy of their war, as opposed to the potential
glory of its individual episodes, remains unclear. Perhaps they pursued a conscious policy of inviting the French to pitched battle which the English believed they could win. Perhaps like one of the war’s chief chroniclers, the French poet Jean Froissart, they were inclined to confound romance with history and to mingle fiction with fact. In the long winter evenings, Froissart had alternated writing his Chronicle with reciting long passages from his epic romance Meliador, in which damsels in distress, wild bears and shipwrecks on an Isle of Man implausibly peopled by the ancient Hebrews rubbed shoulders with more ‘realistic’ events. The Treaty of Brétigny was stored by the English in a special box, the ‘Calais Chest’ (still in the Public Record Office), an exquisite symbol of chivalry and diplomacy, emblazoned with the arms of the Kings and their ministers who had negotiated peace. Its terms, meanwhile, were a dead letter almost from the moment that it was consigned to its magnificent casket.

  King Jean of France died in English captivity with the bulk of his ransom still unpaid. The costs of maintaining peace as of waging war mounted beyond all control. The Black Prince’s expedition into northern Spain in 1367, intended merely (and in the final resort unsuccessfully) to ensure a continued alliance with the King of Castile, inflicted a great victory at Nájera but nonetheless cost nearly 3 million gold florins for no tangible economic or strategic return. Strategy was sacrificed to chivalry and common sense to the pursuit of glory, in a way more reminiscent of the posturings of a Napoleon than of the caution and parsimony normally associated with English warfare. The Spanish Armada of 1588 was, in this reading, merely Spain’s belated response to an even more pointless and vindictive English aggression. Long before the Peninsular War of the early nineteenth century, the armies of the Black Prince had trudged through the future battlefields of Vitoria and Burgos in pursuit of their own small measure of fame.

  The Black Death

  The Great Pestilence or ‘Black Death’ of the 1340s has traditionally been identified with the disease today known as Bubonic Plague or ‘Yersinia pestis’, named after the Swiss bacteriologist, Alexandre Yersin, who in 1894 first isolated the plague bacillus during an outbreak in Hong Kong. The disease itself travels via animal hosts, especially rats, the ultimate agent (or ‘vector’) of transmission being fleas whose digestive tracts become congested with plague bacilli, exciting the fleas into a frenzy of biting and repeated vomiting in their attempts to ingest blood, thereby spreading infected blood, and hence the disease itself, all the more speedily from one flea-bitten victim to another. The fleas themselves travel in the fur of rats, and can on occasion survive, even without an animal host, in the grain or grain debris which is the rat’s preferred environment. Symptoms of infection amongst humans include painfully sensitive ‘buboes’ or swellings, varying from the size of a pea to that of an egg, generally located in the lymph nodes nearest to the point of infection, most often in the groin or armpits, although sometimes in the neck or behind the ears. Infection occurs as, or more, easily in villages and the countryside than it does in towns, perhaps because the ratio of rats to humans in a village is higher than would be the case in urban areas with a denser population of humans.

  There are problems in identifying the Black Death as Yersinia pestis. Diseases, like people, change over time. The pathology of bubonic plague as experienced in China or India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will not necessarily assist us towards an understanding of plague in the 1340s. Although fourteenth-century writers describe symptoms, including the painful buboes, that seem consistent with plague, there are other features to the disease – its apparent failure to observe the seasonal life-cycle of the plague flea, the speed both of its distribution and the resulting mortality – which suggest that some other cause should be sought, a pneumonic form of plague perhaps, anthrax, influenza or some other pestilence that may itself have died out or mutated to such a degree that it can no longer be identified with any particular modern virus or bacterium. None of this should be allowed to detract either from the terror of the Black Death or the human suffering that it caused.

  To a human population already weakened by the famine and disease that had characterized the period after 1315, living on the thin edge between starvation and survival, the pestilence of 1348–9 brought disaster on a unprecedented scale. From Weymouth the pestilence spread to the West Country, reaching Bristol by August 1348. Probably via multiple points of entry, it infected East Anglia and by the autumn was threatening London. Its causes – a great rain of worms and serpents in China? A foul miasma spread through the air? God’s vengeance? – were as poorly understood as the precautions that might be taken against it. The English had never liked foreigners. In an essentially rural society of villages and villagers, in which everyone knew everyone else’s business, Christ’s injunctions to feed the hungry and shelter the stranger (Matthew 25:35) were answered as much in the breach as the observance. There had always been a tension between the urge to charity towards groups such as lepers, and the law’s insistence that other outcast communities be hunted down and destroyed. Now, in the 1340s, townsfolk in places such as Gloucester tried vainly to stem the progress of pestilence by closing their gates to outsiders. The attempt, needless to say, proved merely that death knows no bounds.

  The actual rate of mortality from the plague will never be known. The evidence upon which we rely here, chiefly manorial court records and bishops’ registers, tells us only about the death rates amongst certain sorts of priests and peasants. But did all priests seek to bring comfort to the sick, in which case we might extrapolate statistics from the number of priests recorded as dying, or did they instead send auxiliaries, in which case the records will supply no reliable gauge? Three archbishops of Canterbury in succession died during the course of 1348–9, two of them certainly from the pestilence. Of the forty-two monks and seven lay brothers at Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire, thirty-two are said to have died. Plague killed all of the friars living in the house of Our Lady at Norwich, and only three of the twenty-six monks of Newenham in Devon survived. Yet at Canterbury Cathedral, out of a community of more than a hundred monks, there were only four deaths. How are we to extrapolate national trends from such figures?

  Modern estimates suggest that anything between a third and two-thirds of the population died as a result of the outbreak of 1348–9, but there is an enormous difference here between the upper and lower ends of this range, and it would be unsafe merely to opt for a median figure of fifty per cent. The poor, infants, the old and those least likely to find a place in the surviving records will clearly have died in greater numbers than the rich and the well-fed, or those able to run for their lives, as appears to have been the case for the King, who throughout the winter of 1349–50 assiduously avoided London, spending Christmas at Otford in Kent, and then moving by easy stages to Woodstock. Any attempt to convene Parliament was abandoned. Even then, the King did not entirely escape the disease which seems to have caused the death of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Joan, at Bordeaux in September 1348. Another of the King’s children, William of Windsor, apparently born in 1348, seems to have died in infancy, perhaps again as a result of pestilence. Even so, no earls died of the plague, and in 1348 the death rate amongst the peerage seems to have run at less than one in twenty, lower than in an average year, rising only to one in eight in 1349.

  So great are the possibilities here for statistical analysis, number-crunching and the reduction of human history to a series of graphs and diagrams, that social and economic historians have gone wild in their pursuit of plague as a factor in England’s history. The Black Death has been presented as the wellspring of virtually everything that happened thereafter: social unrest provoked by a labour shortage, followed by rising wages, followed by a transformation in rural society; increased legal regulation and the rise of the modern ‘state’, as kings, from Edward III onwards, issued legislation intended to freeze social relations in their pre-plague state, to guarantee deference to the great and servility amongst the many, co
ercing every group within society, from bishops to blacksmiths, to stand by their obligations one to another; an upsurge in piety, as humanity petitioned God to remove the scourge of plague, or alternatively a rise in anticlericalism, as men cursed God and his ministers for their failure to prevent the pestilence; the encouragement of such phenomena as prostitution previously regarded as sins, as young men were encouraged to procreate to relieve the population shortage; a recourse to increasing extremes in war and pleasure, as life was counted cheap and to be lived to the full before the inevitable snuffing out; growing fatalism and a fascination with death and decay, seen, for example, in the ‘transi’ tombs of fifteenth-century England, in which bishops such as Richard Fleming at Lincoln or Henry Chichele at Canterbury were shown both robed and magnificent in life, and rotted and cadaverous in death; or a rising tide of optimism and a determination to master nature via medicine and science, leading not just to the rediscovery but to the surpassing of classical knowledge, and hence to the origins of the European Renaissance. Virtually everything, black or white, positive or negative, can and has been traced back from the fifteenth century to the pestilence of the 1340s.