by Sean McGlynn
Everyone tried himself to live
As long as he could last.
Love and kindness both were past.
As the siege wore on, the garrison leader, Guy le Bouteiller, evicted the useless mouths. Henry refused to let them through his lines and they were left to die in the ditch before the walls. Despite this, Page still considered Henry ‘the royallest prince in Christendom’. After all, it was the garrison commander who had sent out these people. Besides, the magnanimous and compassionate Henry even had some food passed to the useless mouths on Christmas Day to celebrate the Nativity. The calculated callousness of medieval commanders in pursuing the military imperative is daunting and unnerving. Would not a quick death by the sword have been more merciful for these wretches? Ironically, that would have been harder to justify. Whether by sword, by fire or by famine, the consequences were equally inevitable, as Page movingly describes:
There men might see a great pity,
A child of two years or three
Go about and beg his bread,
For father and mother both were dead.
…
Some had starved in that place to death,
And some had stopped by eyes and breath,
And some were crooked in their knees,
And were now as lean as any trees.
You saw a woman hold in her arm
Her own dead child, with nothing warm,
And babies sucking on the pap
Within a dead woman’s lap.
There might find it last arrive
That twelve were dead to one alive.
And the dead knew nought of death
So secretly they gave up their breath
Without a noise or any cry,
So if they slept, so did they die.77
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CAMPAIGNS
After battles, captive soldiers who became non-combatants by virtue of their prisoner status were nonetheless commonly killed. Sieges witnessed the deaths of many civilians as they became inadvertently caught up in wars and the line between belligerent and non-belligerent became blurred (sometimes conveniently or deliberately so). But in most campaigns, there was no ambiguity whatsoever: the civilian population became a clearly defined target. This did not necessarily mean that other military objectives were any less important – strategy still ultimately centred on castles and towns – but that taking war to the civilian populations beyond the protective walls of towns was an essential part of the war-making process. While some communities could escape the ravages of war untouched, others were, quite literally, devastated by them. The frequency of wars and their geographical extent could make them hard to avoid.
CAMPAIGNS IN MEDIEVAL WARFARE
Contrary to received wisdom, campaigning was not exclusively a seasonal occupation between spring (post-Easter) and harvest. The psycho-belligerent Bertran de Born would yearn for springtime not for the colourful flowers popping up everywhere, but for the colourful war banners being raised and unfurled. For some expeditions, weather and the agricultural cycle were indeed limiting factors, but for others they were not major considerations. Many campaigns started in November and January (as we shall see in the cases investigated below). A familiar pattern is drawn out by Count Philip of Flanders’ invasion of Picardy at the end of November, 1181, while Philip Augustus was campaigning in Champagne; following a Christmas truce, Franco-Flemish hostilities resumed in mid-January.
The launching of military operations at these times probably reflects a last push for gains and a strengthening of hands in the traditional Christmas round of peace talks and armistices, or an early start to the new campaign season to make gains before Easter. (Not that either Christmas or even Easter, the holiest time of the year, could guarantee a temporary cessation of military operations, as the devoutly bellicose Simon de Montfort displayed at Rochester in 1264.) Winter conditions could obviously be detrimental to expeditions, but summer campaigning was not ideal either: it ensured better food supplies and greater damage against the enemy, but also brought with it water shortages, dehydration and heat exhaustion. When Louis VI prepared his army for battle at Reims in August 1124, he formed wagons into circles where his men could retire from combat for water and rest.
As noted in the previous chapter, to follow a campaign is to follow the progress of an army from town to town, and from castle to castle. As always, there are exceptions to the rule, but these usually serve to highlight them. Smaller twelfth-century castles in northern England were frequently abandoned in advance of Scottish invasions through lack of preparation or relative weakness against opposition forces that were considered too strong for the castle’s defences; the result was an operational focus on the more significant fortresses. The grand chevauchées (literally ‘rides’) of the English during the Hundred Years War were not sustained, despite their early successes; instead, the end of the conflict was heralded from the 1430s when stronghold after stronghold fell to the French as they picked them off one by one; such was the momentum gained that by the last French campaign of 1449–50, most fortresses simply submitted without resistance. Only a relatively few major sieges made medieval warfare periodically static; in reality, progress from one enemy stronghold to another could be very rapid.
The movement of one army necessitated counter-movements by its enemy, thus the warfare of the time could be extremely fluid, with armies always on the march. In 1216, King John employed diversionary tactics throughout eastern and southern England to draw enemy forces away from besieging his royal castles at Dover and Windsor. The rebels responded to this by attempting to cut off the King’s retreat as he progressed along the Suffolk coast; they marched towards Cambridge to effect this, but John, on receiving intelligence, withdrew to Stamford. Here he heard that Lincoln was under siege and marched north to its relief; the rebels there moved on. Meanwhile, the rebel force that had failed to catch up with the King returned to London with the booty from their campaign. From here they proceeded to help their forces at Dover. And so it went on. The focus on strongholds actually made medieval warfare extremely dynamic. This combination of rapid and frequent movement of armies with year-round warfare meant that rural populations often found themselves in the path of the Mars juggernaut.
For the peasantry and inhabitants of undefended towns that lay in the way of armies as they moved from one theatre of war to another, there was good reason for trepidation. Even a small army on the move was an impressive sight, but a larger one was an enormous undertaking entailing a huge allocation of finance and resources, brought together through complex organization. For England in the Wars of the Roses, one historian has assessed that ‘an army of 10,000 combatants plus several thousand non-combatants would be like one of the kingdom’s major cities on the move’.1 Even if a reasonably disciplined army were marching in peacetime, as through Europe on the way to the crusades, then the impact of such a large force on the rural community of villages and hamlets along its route would be enormous. This impact could be either relatively positive, through the market for food and goods, or negative, should military requisitioning be onerous and appropriating (medieval sources attest to loud complaints against princes’ itinerant courts); but in a time of war and exigency, the swamping of an area with soldiers geared to combat brought with it justifiable fear and apprehension. These emotions escalated to terror when the soldiers served under the flags of opposing powers.
RAVAGING
What scared non-belligerents most was ravaging and its consequences: fear of death by the sword; fear of starvation from destroyed or seized crops; fear of captivity and ransom; fear of impoverishment from the destruction of their homes and their belongings being stolen. In other words, they shared the same dread as the inhabitants of a besieged town. A brief look at two campaigns reveals how ravaging was integral to an army on the march in contested territory.
During the dying days of Henry II’s reign, Anglo-French conflict entered another phase. In July 1188, Henry crossed to Normandy with a large nu
mber of men. Philip Augustus dismissed the demands of high-level ambassadors sent by Henry and prepared for war. Philip’s first action was to unleash a series of independent plundering expeditions into enemy territory. Bishop Philip of Beauvais, the French King’s cousin, entered Normandy, where he burnt Aumale and ‘other castles and towns, killed many men, and seized booty’.2 Philip led his forces to Vendôme, which he captured, and marched towards Le Mans, torching villages along the way. Angevin forces under Duke Richard regained some land; by mid-August he had retaken Vendôme and razed it. Henry’s contribution was to march along the border to Gisors, burning all in his path. Peace talks at Gisors failed and the war continued.
The first campaign of substance in the Hundred Years War was led by Edward III in 1339. It started with the failure to take Cambrai in northern France: logistical problems and the city’s strength forced the English to lift the siege after nearly three weeks. Adopting an alternative strategy, they went on a cavalcade (chevauchée) across the region, incendiaries destroying something approaching two hundred villages and towns. Edward was attempting to goad the French into battle, but Philip VI of France refused to pick up the gauntlet. Instead, his forces prevented supplies reaching Edward’s men while at the same time devastating his own lands in a deliberate scorched-earth policy, so as to deny the English resources from the land. As the leading authority on Edwardian warfare has noted, ‘The campaign simply fizzled out. Philip had suffered a severe blow to his reputation, but Edward had expended a huge fortune and a full campaigning season without making any concrete gains’.3
Campaigns, especially when smaller in scale, took on the nature more of raids than of military expeditions. Yet, as the chevauchées of the Black Prince show, raiding and campaigning were often synonymous; it was a rare expedition indeed that did not embark upon widespread ravaging or take on the characteristics of raiding. Contemporary writings on war are replete with the advice that the successful waging of war relied upon ravaging. In the late twelfth century, Jordan Fantosme has the veteran warrior Count Philip recommending to King Louis VII of France that his ally, King William of Scotland, should invade England in the following way: ‘Let him destroy your enemy and lay waste their land: let it all be consumed in fire and flames! Let him not leave them, outside their castles, in wood or meadow, as much as will furnish them a meal on the morrow. Then let him assemble his men and lay siege to their castles … This is the way to fight them, to my way of thinking: first lay waste the land, then destroy one’s enemies.’4
As Fantosme makes clear earlier in his chronicle, this was exactly how Count Philip waged his own wars, and to great effect. A military treatise written by Pierre Dubois in 1300, the Doctrine of Successful Expeditions and Shortened Wars, advocated complete abstention from sieges and battles, and instead the undertaking of a policy of sustained depredation in the countryside.
The consequences of ravaging to the rural population could be calamitous, as contemporary observers attest, especially the devastation wrought during the Hundred Years War. In the early fifteenth century, Thomas Basin wrote: ‘From the Loire to the Seine the peasants have been slain or put to flight. We ourselves have seen vast empty plains absolutely deserted, uncultivated, abandoned, empty of inhabitants, covered with bushes and bramble.’5
These examples come from a period when the English were implementing a scorched-earth policy against a resurgent enemy. Yet the scenes they describe were repeated throughout the entire Middle Ages and are recorded in contemporary accounts in strikingly familiar terms, for ravaging was a constant of warfare. Over two centuries earlier, the Chansons des Lorrains vividly captured in words the incursion of a foreign army and how it affected non-combatants:
They start to march. The scouts and incendiaries lead; after them come the foragers who are to gather the spoils and carry them in the great baggage train. The tumult begins. The peasants, having just come out to the fields, turn back, uttering loud cries; the shepherds gather their flocks and drive them towards the neighbouring woods in the hope of saving them. The incendiaries set the villages on fire, and the foragers visit and sack them; the terrified inhabitants are burnt or led apart with their hands tied to be held for ransom. Everywhere alarm bells ring, fear spreads from side to side and becomes widespread. On all sides one sees helmets shining, pennons floating, and horsemen covering the plain. Here hands are laid on money; there cattle, donkeys and flocks are seized. The smoke spreads, the flames rise, and the peasants and shepherds flee in panic in all directions.6
The association of armies with such wanton destruction has helped to perpetuate Charles Oman’s view that medieval ‘strategy – the higher branch of the military art – was absolutely nonexistent. An invading army moved into hostile territory, not in order to strike at some great strategical point, but merely to burn and harry the land’ (my emphasis).7 Yet the details in the above passages adumbrate a military logic behind the ravaging that belies the oversimplified image of blundering, plundering armies staggering incontinently across the land. When the smoke clears, the reasons behind the fires manifest themselves.
William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North, 1069–70
William the Conqueror was one of the most successful – and ruthless – military commanders of the Middle Ages. With daring and great tactical skill, and also with masterly logistical organization, he won the Crown of England in that most famous of years, 1066. Winning the kingdom itself took somewhat longer, and involved a number of major campaigns across the length and breadth of a recalcitrant England as he fought to impose his authority on his conquest. This was ‘government by punitive expedition’. 8 The most punishing of these was his operation in Northumbria and beyond over the winter of 1069–70. An Anglo-Saxon historian has noted: ‘The Harrying of the North is perhaps the best known incident of William I’s reign after the battle of Hastings itself. It received almost universal condemnation, at the time and later, but its actual effects are difficult to gauge.’9
William was kept busy by troubles in his duchy of Normandy, by the Welsh, by the Scots, by the English resistance and by the Danes, who felt that England was their rightful inheritance. Semi-independent and secessionist by nature, the North posed real difficulties for William and occupied much of his time. The great threat was the potential for northern discontents to ally with the Danes: a formidable challenge in its own right, but one heightened by the inevitable rebellions it would ignite around the country, leaving the Normans exposed and fighting on all fronts. This was the reality facing William in the late summer of 1069, when King Sven of Denmark launched a major expeditionary force to England, consisting of 240 ships under his sons and brother. Starting with Kent, the fleet made its way up to the Humber, raiding the east coast along its way. When there, it formed a base, probably in readiness for further Danish troops and a full-scale invasion, and precipitated a widespread uprising in Yorkshire. An Anglo-Danish force marched on York and took the city on 20 September, with few from the Norman garrison surviving the encounter. This was a major setback for William, ‘the heaviest defeat which the Normans ever suffered in England’,10 and it represented the greatest emergency of his short reign so far. Revolts broke out across England, especially in the West and North-West, with Yorkshire being the political epicentre. There was a real possibility of a separate, hostile kingdom establishing itself in the North. ‘The magnitude of the crisis indicates the importance of the ensuing campaign, and explains (though it does not excuse) its terrible sequel.’11 William led a forced march north, causing the Anglo-Danish forces to retreat back to the Humber. He then headed west to deal with the uprising in Staffordshire while Norman divisions remaining in Lincoln decisively repulsed a move southwards by the leading Anglo-Saxon noble, Edgar the Atheling. Contained in the North, the Danes exploited William’s absence to reoccupy York. William was by now in Nottingham, where he heard news of Danish preparations for York. Fighting his way across the Aire, he made for the city, by now in Danish hands, and ‘plundered and u
tterly lay waste’ the regions he passed through, effectively marking the start of the Harrying of the North.12
Instead of assaulting York, William repeated the successful strategy he had employed to bring London under subjugation in 1066: he ravaged the territory around the city, especially to the north and west. By so doing, he isolated York and limited the supplies that would reach its garrison and the Danish army in general. Pressures of time and manpower in the face of great unrest across the country denied William the option of a thorough investment of the city; besides, the presence of a large enemy force in the region would have made a siege a risky enterprise. The Danes withdrew to their base and William spent Christmas in the burned-out city, which had been torched in September. In an act designed to symbolize his regal authority, he had his royal paraphernalia brought up from Winchester so that the resplendent display would make an important political statement. Norman messengers sent by William to the Danish leadership offered an officially sanctioned bribe and liberty to forage along the coastline on condition that the army remained in the same area until the better weather of spring permitted a safe sea journey home. The offer was accepted (but not honoured when winter had finished). This temporary truce freed William to deal once again with a resurgence of resistance in Chester, the hardest part of which was a gruelling but impressive march across the Pennines in the heart of winter. The forces he left behind in Yorkshire executed his explicit and chilling orders to devastate the North.
The Danes agreed to the terms, as they were running desperately short of provisions on the Humber. Not only had the depredations of the Normans greatly aggravated their situation, but the region was still reeling from William’s ravages at the beginning of the year, when he had laid waste the area in response to another rising in which Durham had been temporarily lost and some of his leading magnates killed. There is much to recommend the accepted sequence of events related in the above paragraph, but David Douglas’s alternative timing is also worthy of consideration: that the Danes agreed to being bought off after William had subdued the Chester rebellion, as they saw their last English allies succumb to the Conqueror. This possibility should be born in mind when we consider the reason for William’s savage destruction of the northern countryside.
