Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  As the French recoiled in confusion, they were struck by another of Edward III’s secret weapons - Welsh and Cornish knifemen, armed only with daggers. Their speciality was to creep under the enemy’s horses and cut open their bellies, and they took advantage of the dusk to slink up and ‘murder many [men] as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights and squires’.

  It was not till the sun rose the next morning that the English realised what a massive victory they had achieved. Edward III sent out his heralds - the clerks who were experts in coats of arms - and, picking their way through the corpses on the battlefield, they identified more than fifteen hundred slain lords and knights, in addition, perhaps, to some ten thousand enemy footsoldiers and crossbowmen, who, unlike the knights, were not counted. Among the dead lay John, the blind King of Bohemia, who had brought his troops to support the French and had ordered his knights to lead him forward, ‘so that I may strike one stroke with my sword’. The discovery of his corpse, still tied to the bodies of his knights by their reins, became one of the legends of the victory.

  The other concerned Edward’s son, the sixteen-year-old Edward Prince of Wales, said to have worn black armour. Thrown to the ground by the French charge, the ‘Black Prince’ was rescued by his standard-bearer, who covered his body with the banner of Wales. Messengers asking for help were sent post-haste to Edward, who had set up his headquarters in a windmill overlooking the field, but the King refused. ‘Let the boy win his spurs,’ he said, ‘for I want him, please God, to have all the glory.’

  When help did reach the prince, they found him with his standard-bearer and companions ‘leaning on lances and swords, taking breath and resting quietly on long mounds of corpses, waiting for the enemy who had withdrawn’. Someone had brought from the battlefield the crest of the King of Bohemia, three tall white ostrich plumes, and the prince took them as his badge there and then. He also adopted the blind hero’s motto, which Princes of Wales bear to this day - Ich Dien, ‘I serve.’

  THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS

  AD 1347

  THE ENGLISH VICTORY AT CRéCY ASTONISHED Europe. ‘Nobody thought much of the English, nobody spoke of their prowess or courage,’ wrote the chronicler Jean le Bel. ‘Now, in the time of the noble Edward, who has often put them to the test, they are the finest and most daring warriors known to man.’

  It was less, in truth, a matter of personalities than of military technology. The light, mobile bowmen of England and Wales, trained on their village greens and selected at archery contests, had challenged the superiority of the mounted knight - and, fortunately for England, it took the French a remarkably long time to work it out. Edward III, by contrast, was a canny leader, and he proved it after Crécy when he decided to head north towards Calais.

  The English king understood that, if he was to maintain his position in France, he needed a secure deep-water port on the French side of the Channel. Visible from Dover on a clear day, Calais would give him a stranglehold on the sea-lanes, with a chance of controlling both trade and the growing problem of freelance piracy. Edward knew marching from Crécy to Paris to besiege the French capital would have been a step too far, whereas making Calais an English port would yield a solid dividend from his victory.

  Calais, however, was not going to give in without a struggle. The port had strong natural defences of sand dunes and marshes, and as a walled town it was not just a centre of trade but had a semi-military status. It was customary for medieval rulers to provide incentives for communities to live in strategic fortresses on the understanding that they would make it their job to defend the fortress when it was attacked. This meant, in turn, that the men, women and children of a fortress town like Calais were treated as combatants if an enemy besieged them. They could expect no mercy if their resistance was breached.

  Edward settled down for a long siege. Gunpowder was just making its appearance in European warfare, but the primitive cannon of the time had neither the range nor the power to demolish town walls. Out of range of the defenders’ crossbow fire, Edward now built his own settlement of wooden huts, and to brighten up the winter he brought over his wife and the ladies of the court. The English king enjoyed female company, and he had encouraged his men to bring their wives, too. In addition, merchants came twice a week from Flanders to hold markets in the English camp.

  Inside Calais itself, however, life was not so comfortable. In the early months of the siege, the inhabitants succeeded in smuggling in supplies by sea. But Edward was able to blockade the harbour mouth, and in late June 1347, nearly a year after the siege had begun, the English defeated a French convoy that had tried to break through with supplies. In the wreckage was found an axe head that had been thrown overboard to avoid capture. Attached to it was a desperate message that the town’s governor, Sir John de Vienne, had intended for the King of France:

  Know, dread Sir, that your people in Calais have eaten their horses, dogs, and rats, and nothing remains for them to live upon unless they eat one another. Wherefore, most honourable Sir if we have not speedy succour, the town is lost!

  Edward III read the document, sealed it with his own seal and sent it on to its destination.

  When, four weeks later, King Philip of France finally appeared with his army on the sand dunes within sight of Calais, cheers and sounding trumpets were heard from inside the town. The King’s banner with the fleur-de-lis was run up on the castle tower, and the famished inhabitants lit a great fire. But on the second night the fire was somewhat less, and on the third night, after no rescue, it was just a flicker. Wails and groans were heard from inside the walls.

  The French king had camped at Sangatte, notorious at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the site from which thousands of foreign immigrants smuggled themselves illegally into Britain - but Philip did not have their appetite for penetrating the English defences. After taking a good look at Edward’s impressive encampment and the rested, well supplied English troops, he decided to retreat.

  The following day Sir John de Vienne appeared on the battlements offering to negotiate, and shortly afterwards, barely able to hold himself erect, he rode out of the gates on a starving, wasted horse, to surrender his sword and the keys of the city. Round his neck the governor wore a rope, offering himself up to be hanged; and behind, roped to him, straggled a bizarre procession - the leading knights and burghers of the town, emaciated and in tatters, offering their own lives so that those of their fellow-citizens might be saved.

  Edward acted mercifully - up to a point. One chronicler says that it was his wife, Philippa of Hainault, who persuaded him to spare the burghers of Calais. But on 4 August 1347 the English king entered the town with his soldiers and ordered the evacuation of virtually all the inhabitants, whose property he confiscated. To replace them, he shipped a colony of settlers over from England and built a ring of forts around the town. Calais would remain English for more than two hundred years.

  THE FAIR MAID OF KENT AND THE ORDER OF THE GARTER

  AD 1347-9

  SEEKING DIVERSION DURING THE ELEVEN long months that he was camped outside Calais, King Edward III held a grand ball to celebrate the victory at Crécy. The ladies of the court were decked out in all their finery, but as they danced, one of them lost her garter, the elegant circlet of blue silk that was holding up one of her stockings. It fell to the floor, and the King, in expansive mood, picked it up and tied it round his own well shaped leg.

  Edward III’s flamboyant gesture has gone down in history, though it was only recorded a century later. If the lady in question had been his wife, there would have been no special reason for comment. But Queen Philippa was pregnant at the time. She may not have been at the ball or she may have been sitting out the dancing. What is certain is that the soldier king had an eye for the ladies, and in 1347, according to some historians, his fancy had alighted on the great beauty of the day, Joan of Kent, wife of the Earl of Salisbury.

  Although she was only nineteen, this remarkable young woman ha
d already managed to acquire two husbands at once. This same year the ‘Fair Maid of Kent’ was embroiled in a bigamy case, and was faced with having to explain to the Pope how and why she had married an earl when she was already married to a knight. The Pope’s judgement was that she should return to her first husband, Sir Thomas Holland, and Joan seems to have made the best of it. She had five children with Holland before he died in 1360. The next year, she and the Black Prince, then thirty-one, fell in love and married (and had two children of their own, one of them the future King Richard II). The ‘Fair Maid of Kent’ would be the first beautiful and controversial Princess of Wales.

  In 1347 much of this lay in the future, but the lady whose blue silk garter the king had snaffled was clearly a figure of such interest that eyebrows were raised - and Edward must have felt that some comment was required. ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ he declared in his medieval French, which is usually translated as ‘Shame on him who thinks shameful thoughts.’ But the message could be simply interpreted - ‘No sniggering, please.’

  Back at Windsor the following year, Edward III made the blue silk garter the focus of an extraordinary ceremony, when he founded an order of chivalry - the Order of the Garter - a brotherhood of just twenty-four knights who would serve the King as a veritable Round Table. Four years earlier Edward had staged a Round Table dinner at Windsor, and now he formalised the idea of himself as a latter-day King Arthur, who was firmly established by this date as an English folk hero.

  The myth of Arthur had been extensively popularised over the previous two hundred years by the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welsh priest living in Oxford whose Historia Regum Britanniae, ‘History of the Kings of Britain’, became the bestselling English history book of the Middle Ages. No less than 220 handwritten copies survive to this day. Geoffrey incorporated the Welsh traditions of Merlin the Magician into the Arthur legend, setting it within the mainstream of Britain’s story and going back to the days of Albion when the island, he claimed, was inhabited by giants.

  Geoffrey’s fanciful stories were denounced in his lifetime by more orthodox chroniclers as ‘shameless and impudent lies’, and there were a good number of those, starting with the giants. But his history was rather like a modern television docudrama, weaving facts with fantasy. His fables of the legendary British kings Lear (probably derived from a folk tale) and Cymbeline (based on a pre-Roman British chieftain Cunobelinus) were to inspire William Shakespeare, and Geoffrey’s entire saga caught the imagination of a community growing conscious of itself and searching for a sense of national purpose and identity.

  This was exactly what Edward III wished to harness with his Order of the Garter. In the months after his return from Crécy, he took his Round Table show on the road in a series of tournaments held at Windsor, Reading, Eltham, Canterbury, Bury and Lichfield. Here was all the fun of the fair, with tents and flags and trampled grass, stalls laden with food and drink, lords and ladies showing off and the populace watching and cheering. The tournaments were a travelling victory celebration for the stunning conquests in France - national morale-boosters to get people smiling for when the tax collectors next came knocking.

  The King added one extra touch: in 1349 he held the first formal meeting of his new order on 23 April, St George’s Day, adopting the dragon-slaying saint brought back by the crusaders. The pious and anaemic St Edward the Confessor, a reasonably genuine Englishman, continued to preside at Westminster Abbey, but out at Windsor the chapel of the Garter brotherhood was dedicated to George, the warrior Turk. Edward called his knights ‘The Fraternity of St George’, and it is from this date that people started thinking of St George as the patron saint of England.

  Edward’s knightly fraternity, England’s first gentlemen’s club, was copied across Europe. France tried the short-lived Order of the Star, the Dukes of Burgundy the more durable Order of the Golden Fleece, and today there is not a country in the world, whether republic or monarchy, without its medal-and-ribbon-bedecked honours system. The Order of Lenin, the Order of the Chrysanthemum, the Order of the Elephant - all are solemn and thoroughly self-important institutions. How very English of Edward III to apply a name that injected humour, with a touch of scandal, into the country’s ultimate social distinction. You might even imagine, as the King’s eyes twinkled across the dance floor at the Fair Maid of Kent, that he was making fun of the whole ridiculous business.

  THE GREAT MORTALITY

  AD 1348-9

  AS ENGLAND CELEBRATED ALL THROUGH the heady victory summer of 1348, a merchant ship from Gascony was docking in the port of Melcombe in Weymouth Bay. It was 23 June, the eve of St John, celebrated across the country as a fertility festival, when the village maidens dressed in their finery and bonfires were lit. But, disembarking from the vessel with the crew, to be borne along the drovers’ paths and through the marketplaces of the ripening Dorset countryside, were the germs of an island-wide disaster.

  In later centuries it was called the Black Death. At the time people talked of ‘the Pestilence’ or ‘the Great Mortality’. Either way, the imagery was dark enough. ‘We see death coming into our midst like black smoke,’ wrote the Welsh poet Euan Gethin, ‘a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phenomenon which has no mercy for fair countenance.’

  Gethin himself was laid low by the infection, like one third of the five million or so other inhabitants of England and Wales, and he described the ghastly symptoms:

  Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit. It is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no one. Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of an ashy colour.

  It would be more than five centuries before the plague bacillus was isolated and identified by the French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin in 1894 - hence its name, Yersinia pestis. But its contagious nature was recognised from the start. In 1346 Mongol forces besieging the Black Sea port of Caffa lobbed the bodies of their plague victims over the walls into the city - an early example of biological warfare. It was trade that had brought the infection from the East, and in at least two varieties. Pneumonic plague was spread on the breath from contaminated lungs, and resulted in a ghastly choking death, with bloody froth bubbling at the mouth. Bubonic plague was spread by fleas and by the black rat, Rattus rattus, an agile creature that could run up and down the mooring ropes of ships. One symptom of the disease was ravening hunger in both flea and rat, which made them the more likely to bite. As the rats scurried along the rafters and through the thatched roofs of fourteenth-century England, the infected fleas would drop down off their backs on to the humans below.

  The symptoms of plague were swollen lymph nodes in the armpits and groin known as buboes - Euan Gethin’s apples and onions - and death followed within hours, or a few days at most. Victims suffered from bad breath - ‘a loathsome, cadaverous stink from within’, according to one contemporary, and other symptoms included high fever, acute stomach pains and bluish-black spots on the body.

  ‘The sick are served by their kinsfolk as dogs would be,’ wrote one chronicler. ‘Food is put near the bed for the sick to eat or drink, after which all fly.’ Another related how ‘fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs’.

  It was not surprising that such a trauma induced agonised soul-searching across the whole of Europe. When King Philip VI of France demanded an official explanation from the medical faculty of the University of Paris, he was told that God, in his anger, had ordained a fatal conjunction of the planets. This had sucked up the waters of the sea, creating an invisible but lethal ‘miasma’ (from the Greek word for ‘pollution’ or ‘defilement’), a poisonous cloud that infected all who inhaled it.

  Divine retribution also figured heavily in England’s diagnosis, with the monkish chroniclers pointing a finger at the deb
auchery that went on at the royal tournaments. Between jousts the crowds would be entertained by female cheerleaders, some of them dressed like men in tight-fitting costumes that showed off their figures.

  ‘We are not constant in faith,’ complained Thomas Brinton, the great preacher who thundered his denunciations from the pulpit of Rochester Cathedral in Kent in the 1370s and ’80s. ‘We are not honourable in the eyes of the world.’

  Not even the King himself was spared. Edward III’s second daughter Joan, barely thirteen years old, was struck down in Bordeaux that September. She was on her way to Spain to marry Pedro, the heir to the kingdom of Castile, and had been travelling with her dowry, which included her own huge red silk marriage bed.

  ‘No fellow human being could be surprised,’ wrote Edward to King Alfonso, as one father to another, ‘if we were inwardly desolated by the sting of this bitter grief, for we are human too.’

  After the initial attack of 1348 and 1349, the plague returned to England five more times before the century was out - in 1361, 1368, 1374, 1379 and 1390. The fall-out was catastrophic, seeping into every aspect of life, from the way the land was farmed, after a third - or even a half - of the workforce had been smitten, to the relaxation of regulations governing feudal service and marriage: fewer tenants, fewer spouses, fewer rules. Grasping at the notion that the plague was an airborne ‘miasma’, more houses were now fitted with closed windows, shutters and heavy tapestries, while frequent bathing went out of fashion: the hot water was thought to open the pores to airborne infection.