On 26–27 August 1346 at the Battle of Crécy, a tired and hungry army led by King Edward III of England destroyed a larger, fresher one commanded by Philippe VI of France. Even by fourteenth-century standards, the fighting was vicious. At least fifteen hundred French knights died. Many thousands more ordinary soldiers perished. ‘Never since the destruction of great Troy had there been such mourning,’ wrote one poet. Some of the cream of northern Europe’s nobility were among the fallen, including the blind crusading hero King John of Bohemia and Louis I, Count of Flanders.
The battle was a humiliating disaster for the French crown and a triumph for the English. It confirmed Edward III’s reputation as a bold commander whose cause was favoured by God. Even to get to Crécy, Edward had led his army on a perilous six-and-a-half-week march from the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy, deep into French territory. His army had sacked the cities of Saint-Lô and Caen, and forced crossings of the rivers Seine and Somme. They had burned villages and destroyed lives. They had suffered their own privations of heat, thirst, worn-out boots and the discomfort of life under canvas. Plenty of the fifteen thousand men who landed in France had not survived the course. Yet the battle had been won, against ridiculous odds. It looked like fortune was smiling on the English.
Despite all this, however, Crécy posed as many questions as it answered. Above all, King Edward had to decide: what next? His troops were exhausted, hungry, injured and diseased. The English parliament and people had been funding wars continuously for nearly a decade, and Edward had run up vast debts to domestic merchants and foreign bankers. The pretext for Edward’s war was his claim to be the rightful King of France. But despite the presence of another English army in the field in Gascony, marching on Paris to enforce that claim was out of the question. Philippe was beaten. But he was not broken. The war was not over. Indeed, it had barely even begun.
The day after the Battle of Crécy was one of prayer, plunder and housekeeping. Masses were sung. The dead were tallied, plundered, robbed, then buried or left where they lay. Survivors cut rings from dead men’s fingers and stripped bodies of arms and armour, much of which was burned to prevent it falling into enemy hands. Then Edward revealed his next move. He had decided to march his army to the north-east coast of France and take aim at a port city that might be seized and held as tangible reward for the blood spilled and costs incurred during the summer’s campaign. The place Edward had chosen was Calais.
Calais had many attractions. As the closest French port to the south-east coast of England, it was already connected to the commercially prosperous Cinque Ports of Kent and Sussex. It was highly defensible for whoever held it: equipped with a huge, complete circuit of stout stone walls, a castle and two deep moats. Beyond these, Calais was protected by the sea on one side and an expanse of marshland cut through with rivers and watercourses on the other. It had long been a haven for the pirates who were a bane of English mercantile shipping in the Channel; they could be cleared out if it were conquered. And it was near the cities of Flanders. Edward had gone to great trouble and expense during the first decade of his reign to convince the independent-minded urban oligarchs of Flanders that he alone could help them resist eventual absorption into the kingdom of France. He had encouraged and financed pro-English politicians in Flanders, such as Jacob van Artevelde, the so-called Brewer of Ghent, who was murdered by a mob in 1345. Taking Calais would be a fine restatement of Edward’s commitment to the Flemish cause. So it was to Calais that the English marched, stopping along the way to plunder and then burn cities such as Wissant, the better to keep their hand in.
Calais was, for some of the reasons already explained, a very ambitious target. It was so well defended that modern historians have debated whether Edward was really serious about taking it. On the day he arrived outside Calais, Edward wrote to England explaining that ‘our expedition has been very long and continuous. But we do not expect to depart the kingdom of France until we have made an end of our war, with the aid of God.’ What did he mean by this? Did ‘the end of the war’ imply actually seizing Calais? Did it mean a truce? Did it suggest Edward was trying to force Philippe into another battle, which, if won, would oblige the French king to resign his crown to Edward? Perhaps even the English king’s most senior advisors – such as the Constable of the Army, William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton – were asking themselves the same thing in the autumn of 1346. But if there was uncertainty or ambiguity about Edward’s war aims to begin with, it soon became clear the English were in for the long haul.
From the start of the siege of Calais in early September 1346, there were three main spheres of military operations.
The first was the city and its surrounding marshes. As has been mentioned, Calais was stiffly defended by walls and moats. The walls were almost impossible to scale, even when ladders balanced on barges were brought into the moats. Nor could they be battered down. The marshland around the city was too soft for large trebuchets and heavy siege engines to be very effective. Gunpowder-fired cannon, which had been deployed at Crécy and were also used outside Calais, made a lot of smoke and noise, and were good for maiming men and scaring horses. But fourteenth-century guns were not yet of sufficient quality to destroy stone walls.
A quick siege, then, was out of the question. Edward was obliged to keep a large army indefinitely outside the walls of Calais, or risk being driven away by an attack from Philippe. For tired, battle-drained men, this was not an ideal prospect. To make the experience a little more bearable, the English built a semi-permanent siege town of wooden dwellings, shops and civic buildings on the marsh. They dug a deep ditch around the perimeter. They called it Villeneuve la Hardie (Bold New Town) and supplied it with goods shipped in from England via friendly ports in Flanders.
Villeneuve was an extraordinary place. The chronicler Jean Froissart wrote that it comprised ‘houses of wood, laid out in streets, and thatched with straw or broom; and in this town . . . was everything necessary for an army . . . butcher’s meat and all other sorts of merchandise, cloth and bread . . . might be had there for money, as well as all comforts’ [my italics]. It was fitted with viewing galleries over Calais’ walls, where sporadic skirmishes could be watched by the non-combatant nobility, including Edward’s wife, Queen Philippa, who arrived in time for Christmas 1346. Its thousands of inhabitants could be fed, sheltered and occasionally entertained. All the same, the fact remained that their main job was to hunker down and wait for something to happen.
The second sphere of military operation was the towns around Calais. Here, English interests were entwined with those of their Flemish allies. While the Crécy campaign had been underway in summer 1346, a combined Anglo-Flemish army led by the vigorous East Anglian knight Sir Hugh Hastings[*] had been busy attacking border towns like Béthune. When Edward’s main army arrived at Calais, this campaign of piecemeal harassment in the Flemish marches could recommence.
The most famous escapade in this part of the struggle for Calais took place at Thérouanne, where a detachment of English archers and men-at-arms fell upon the city during market day in mid-September 1346. There was a battle around the gates. The English won. They sent the bishop who was commanding the town’s resistance running for his life, then plundered the market. They captured a high-ranking French knight called Sir Arnoul d’Audrehem, who had broken his leg. (Sir Arnoul later either paid his ransom or escaped imprisonment and found his way into Calais and helped organise the city’s defences.) And according to one chronicle, written in the nearby town of Saint-Omer, some very disgraceful deeds took place in Thérouanne’s cathedral: during the battle for the city, an archer shot the head off a statue of the Virgin Mary, and one vile individual desecrated the high altar by using it as a toilet.
Eventually, the English left and went to Villeneuve to join their comrades. For the sake of good order, Flemish troops were kept away from Villeneuve: the assumption was that English and Flemings didn’t mix. All the same, the English connection with Flemish affairs continued throughout the siege of Calais. One interesting subplot of the campaign was King Edward’s efforts to marry his daughter Isabel to the young Count of Flanders, Louis de Male, who had inherited his title after his father was killed at Crécy. Louis was strongly disinclined to marry Isabel and in the end he never did. In the spring of 1347, he managed to abscond from his pro-English attendants while out hunting with hawks. Louis fled to the French court, where he was safe. He eventually married one of Philippe VI’s cousins.
The third and final sphere of military operations at Calais was the sea. In 1340 Edward III had defeated and destroyed a French fleet at the Battle of Sluys. This, in theory, gave him the upper hand in the English Channel for years to come. In practice, however, his naval advantage was slender. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1346–7, the English found they could supply their army by sea, but they lacked the ships to enforce a full blockade of the coast. The French were even shorter on ships and early in the siege lost the use of several dozen hired Genoese galleys, whose crews refused to serve through the winter. However, the French were able to call on the considerable talents of their native pirates, most notably those led by a resourceful and ruthless privateer from Boulogne named Jean Marant.
Marant and his associates among the pirates of the English Channel were larger-than-life characters who frequented a tavern not far from Calais known as the Pot d’Étain (the Tin Jar). The line that divided respectable medieval merchants from corsairs was porous, but Marant and his friends were generally to be found on the wrong side of it. Nevertheless, during the siege of Calais they proved invaluable to the French cause. Early in the siege they helped sink and rob English supply convoys. Once winter set in, they switched their focus to keeping Calais fed and provisioned. Marant worked with the Admiral of France, Pierre de Revel (aka ‘Floton’), running major relief convoys from the cities of Dieppe and Saint-Valery into Calais. Even when the English began deliberately scuttling ships to block the approach to Calais’ harbour, Marant and the pirates managed to get supplies through.
In the winter of 1346–7, it became clear that the pirate convoys, and the Calaisiens’ own military resistance, organised under the command of the governor, Jean de Vienne, were the only things likely to keep Calais in French hands. Philippe VI was hamstrung by a lack of troops, money and political direction. Not until March 1347 did he take the sacred French battle flag known as the Oriflamme and start assembling a serious field army to try and drive the English off. And even then, he seemed curiously hesitant to deploy it.
All the while, the English were gaining in strength. With the king camped at Calais, his lieutenants in other theatres of the war won a series of stunning victories. In October 1346 English troops in Northumberland smashed a Scottish army at Neville’s Cross, capturing King David II. The same month, an army in south-west France sacked the great city of Poitiers. In June 1347, English troops in Brittany captured Charles of Blois, Duke of Brittany, at the Battle of La Roche Derrien.
At Calais itself, spring 1347 saw a huge surge of English troops and ships. Thousands more men were ferried from England to Villeneuve: some were experienced warriors, but most were simply criminals and roughnecks who served in exchange for immunity from prosecution for crimes they had committed, up to and including murder. Their arrival swelled the population of Villeneuve to more than twenty thousand – making it bigger than most English cities.
Even more useful to the English was the arrival in the waters outside Calais of hundreds of ships: enough, finally, to stop almost all of Marant’s pirate supply runs into Calais’ harbour. The last significant convoy came in around Easter. After, the seas swarmed with English ships, while the surge of troops meant that Edward could take command of a strip of land called the Risbank, which protected Calais’ harbour from the seas beyond. The English built a wooden fort at the tip of the Risbank, past which it was almost impossible for any large enemy ships to sail. From this point on, only two fates were possible for Calais: Philippe VI would come to relieve the citizens, or they would starve.
They starved. At least twice during the siege, Jean de Vienne and his fellow citizens tried to cut down the number of hungry mouths in the city by sending out refugees to find their way through the English lines. (On the first occasion, Edward let them pass; on the second, he left them trapped in no-man’s land to die.) But nothing could keep the city going forever. At the height of summer, Philippe finally brought an army close enough to Calais that they could see the English in Villeneuve, and watch the beacons lit by night on Calais’ walls by the increasingly desperate citizens. Jean de Vienne tried to smuggle a letter out to the king, advising him that conditions inside the city were bleak: the cats, dogs and horses were being eaten, he said; people would be next. But the message was intercepted by English sailors, who retrieved it after the panic-stricken messenger hurled it into the sea attached to an axe. So the letter never reached Philippe – and even if it had, it is not certain he could have done anything to help. In the last days of July 1347, the French king ordered his army to retreat. Seeing this, the garrison of Calais, now half-mad with hunger, bowed to the inevitable. They sent word to King Edward that they were ready to give up.
A famous sculpture by Auguste Rodin, which stands today in front of the town hall in Calais, brilliantly imagines the best-known historical vignette from the siege of Calais. It shows six ‘burghers’ (i.e. wealthy citizens) coming out of the city to surrender its keys and their lives to Edward. The six are dressed in their undershirts, and wear nooses around their necks, as Edward had commanded they should. The king made them plead for their own lives, which he had declared should be at his mercy if the rest of the emaciated citizens of Calais were to live. At first Edward insisted that they should die, but according to a number of chroniclers, his heart was softened by the pleas of his heavily pregnant queen. Edward relented and sent the Calaisiens on their way. Most of the merchants of the city were evicted, although an exception was made for one or two who seemed to have cut deals with the Crown to stay. The rest were packed off to Paris, and their homes, premises and commercial privileges in Calais were parcelled up between English businessmen who had financed Edward’s French campaigns, presumably in the hope of just such rich reward.
For the rest of the Middle Ages, Calais was an English possession, in the form of a ‘Pale’, comprising the city itself and a number of other fortresses dotted around the marshland where Villeneuve once stood. Together, these served as both an English military super-compound on the edge of north-west Europe and an economic ‘Staple’, which had a monopoly over tax collection and the cloth trade. Calais remained in English hands until it was reconquered for the French in 1558 during the reign of Mary Tudor, following a siege that lasted only a week.
Despite its exciting events and melodramatic conclusion, the 1346–7 siege of Calais is not very well known today to anyone but the most attentive medieval historians. The names of most of the thousands of people who fought or suffered in the siege – on both sides – have long been forgotten. That is a pity. In the summer of 2022, as I was beginning work on this book, I went to Calais and stood for an hour by Rodin’s sculpture of the burghers. It struck me that what is so moving about these six figures is that each of them seems to be experiencing proximity to death in his own unique way. This one crippled by grief, this one stoic; this one disbelieving, this one defiant. Rodin’s genius was to create a vision of individual humanity shining through the pity of war. That is a fine aim for any artist trying to reimagine an historical event, whatever their medium.