2

THE FIRST PHASE, 1337–45

The English plan for the war was clear. There would be defensive operations in Gascony, while the main campaign against the French would be launched in the Low Countries, where they would have allies, bought by subsidies. This was similar to the strategy that had failed King John in 1214, and which ran out of momentum in 1297. Even in Edward III’s capable hands it had little success, leading as it did to political crisis and virtual bankruptcy.

The alliance was, at least on parchment, impressive. The counts of Hainault and Guelders, the Margrave of Jülich, the Duke of Brabant, the Count Palatine of the Rhine and the German emperor, Ludwig IV of Bavaria, were all brought into Edward’s complicated and extremely expensive web. By the end of 1337, Edward had promised at least £124,000 to the allies. Eventually Edward’s obligations probably totalled some £225,000. The French countered the English efforts. They had the support of the Count of Flanders and the Bishop of Liège, and bought that of the King of Bohemia and of the Duke of Lower Saxony. The problems for Edward were how to pay the bills, and how to swing the grand coalition into action. The Earl of Salisbury, one of his most important councillors, argued that the alliance ‘did not seem to be drawing to a profitable conclusion, and that the king would not have the resources to bear the costs’.¹

THE LOW COUNTRIES

Edward’s hopes of leading an expedition to the Low Countries in 1337 were in vain. Recruitment was slow, and many troops had to be diverted to deal with Scottish attacks. The only action in the Low Countries was led by Walter Mauny, a Hainaulter, who had come to England in 1327 as a squire to Queen Philippa, and who served with distinction in the Scottish campaigns of the 1330s. The king ‘loved him greatly, for he served him in many dangerous exploits’.² Mauny commanded a fleet which attacked the island of Cadzand, close to Sluys, in November. His troops cleared the island with brutal use of bow, sword and fire. Guy, bastard half-brother of the Count of Flanders, was captured, and subsequently sold by Mauny to the king for £8,000. Even at this stage, the incident demonstrated some important characteristics of the war as it would develop. English archery was highly effective; there was also extensive destruction, and significant financial profit.

The English king eventually sailed for the continent in July 1338, landing at Antwerp. His force numbered no more than about 5,000, yet it had taken a huge effort to take this small army across the sea. Some 400 ships, manned by about 13,000 sailors, were needed to transport the soldiers, their horses and the necessary supplies. Costs were high; Edward had promised his men double wages as an inducement to serve. No fighting took place. The king went to the Rhineland to meet the German emperor Ludwig IV to finalize the agreement with him; Ludwig agreed to appoint Edward as his imperial vicar in the Low Countries. A bizarre incident took place when a man known as William le Waleys appeared at Cologne, ‘who asserted that he was the father of the lord king’.³ It is barely conceivable that Edward II had escaped from his imprisonment at Berkeley Castle, rather than being murdered there in a most unpleasant manner, and there is no indication that Edward III was particularly concerned by Waleys’ claim. According to the chronicler Thomas Gray, Edward spent his time at Antwerp ‘jousting and leading a high life’, rather than fighting.⁴ The stay was not happy for all. There were troubles within Edward’s own household; a group of soldiers murdered the son of the seneschal of Gascony, Oliver Ingham.

The French failed to take advantage of Edward’s weak position in 1338. Philip VI ordered a muster at Amiens, but this was repeatedly postponed, and he made no attempt to bring the English to battle. Plans were drafted for an invasion of England, but nothing was done to put them into effect. It was in only a small way that the war was taken to England, with raids on ports on the south coast. Portsmouth was attacked and burned, and Southampton was sacked in a larger and more destructive raid. Two of the king’s greatest ships were captured. Plymouth was attacked in 1339, but the French were driven off. They had more success at Hastings, but there was no realistic threat of full-scale invasion.

Edward III’s campaign in the Low Countries finally began in late September 1339, when he and his allies laid siege to Cambrai. Savage destruction of French territory followed. This was war on a new scale. Villages and their crops were set ablaze. In a newsletter Edward III announced that ‘the land is completely destroyed, grain, animals and other goods’.⁵ The English hoped that this would put pressure on Philip VI, and bring him to battle. This hope appeared to be realized when the English faced the French near Buironfosse on 23 October. Edward III ‘made all his people dismount, on foot, and he arrayed his men, the archers flanking the men-at-arms and the Welsh with their spears next to them’.⁶ This surprised his allies, but it was a method which had proved its worth in the wars against the Scots, notably at Dupplin Moor and Halidon Hill. However, it was a defensive formation, and Edward had no means of goading his rival, Philip VI, to fight. ‘We waited all day on foot, in battle array, until towards Vespers it seemed to our allies that we had remained there long enough.’⁷ At night, the allied army slunk away. The French view had been that they had far more to lose than did the allies, and so caution, not gallantry, won the day.

GASCONY

In Gascony the English barely held their own. The position of the English administrators was extremely difficult. Promised troops never arrived from England, as preference was given to the campaigns in the Low Countries. Financial resources were also inadequate. In July 1337 the Count of Eu led a full-scale French invasion. Three castles and some minor fortifications were taken. A raid along the Garonne caused much damage, though no major towns or castles fell. The English managed to send out a small force which arrived in September. The French abandoned their campaign and the English soon recaptured almost all the places they had lost. In November they even conducted a successful raid into Saintonge. Early in the following year they invaded the Agenais. However, from the autumn of 1338 the war in the south-west went well for the French. Bourg and Blaye, which commanded the route by river to Bordeaux, fell in April 1339. Elsewhere many towns and castles were surrendered to the French. Oliver Ingham, the English commander, was in a desperate plight, with few troops and no money. Yet the pendulum swung again, and in July 1339 Ingham’s troops compelled the French to abandon an attack on Bordeaux, and in the autumn the English made an important gain, when they won over an important magnate, the lord of Albret.

FINANCING THE WAR

The French planned their military efforts with care. An estimate of troop numbers and their cost, produced in 1339, predicted a considerable financial shortfall, and suggested that new taxes should be negotiated on a local basis. One agreement, with Vermandois and Beauvaisis, specified that the grant made should not form a precedent, and that the money raised should all be spent on the payment of troops.⁸ There were particular difficulties with southern towns, and objections from the nobility, many of whom obtained exemptions from payment. Among the varied fiscal burdens, there were hearth taxes, sales taxes, export taxes, and levies on Italian merchants. As early as 1337 the crown began to alter the coinage, reducing the silver content and profiting from the recoinage. Though there was considerable hostility to the new taxes demanded by Philip VI, this was on a local basis, and the French king did not face a political crisis such as Edward III had to deal with.⁹

The financial situation in England was more difficult than that in France. By 1339 the crown’s finances were in a mess. Plans, such as they were, were grossly overoptimistic. In particular, hopes of raising large sums through manipulation of the wool trade proved a fiasco. In 1337 the English wool merchants agreed that the government would collect 30,000 sacks of wool. These would be sold overseas, and the operation would yield about £200,000. In the event, far less wool was collected than had been anticipated. Some was exported to Dordrecht, and when the merchants refused to advance £276,000 to the king, the wool was taken over by royal officials in exchange for bonds. The Italian merchant bankers, the Bardi and Peruzzi, were increasingly unwilling to lend to the king; their advances up to Michaelmas 1338 totalled about £70,000. Edward was angry and frustrated with what he saw as the failure of the administration in England to provide him with the funds he needed. A scheme, the Walton Ordinances, drawn up before the king left for the Low Countries in 1338, aimed to provide ways of controlling the administration from abroad, but this proved impracticable. In the autumn of 1339 the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Stratford, became chief councillor to the king’s son, who was the nominal regent. His task was impossible; he explained in parliament that the king was £300,000 in debt.

On 26 January 1340, Edward was proclaimed king of France, in Ghent. There was an immediate reason for this: his allies in the Low Countries would be in a far stronger moral position supporting a king with a strong claim to the French throne, than they were as rebels against Philip VI. Of particular importance was Jacob van Artevelde, who led the Flemish towns. In December 1337 there had been a popular revolution in Ghent; an English embargo on trade with Flanders had contributed to anger against the count. Van Artevelde had emerged as the leader of the movement; his initial policy was one of neutrality, but by late 1339 he sought an alliance with the English, and with it, a massive subsidy of £140,000. Edward’s financial obligations were rising to unacceptable levels.

When Edward returned from the Low Countries in February 1340 a grant of a new tax was made, in return for reform. Payment would not be in coin, but in kind, with people handing over a ninth of their produce for sale by royal officials. The plan was a failure. In part this was because there was a serious shortage of coin in the realm; this shortage meant that people could not buy the produce at the expected prices. By June 1340, payment of about £190,000 had been promised out of the tax, which by November yielded no more than about £15,000.

Inevitably, there was popular anger at what was taking place. The indirect impact of war, through taxation and demands for foodstuffs and wool, was extensive. A change in taxation methods meant that the poorest no longer had any exemption. Until 1334, each tax had been based on individual assessments of the value of people’s movable goods. Thereafter, local communities paid a standard sum, which meant that far more people contributed to the taxes. The position was made much worse by the shortage of coin in England. A contemporary poet complained that ‘half of what is raised in the kingdom does not come to the king’, and that men could give no more.¹⁰ The compulsory levies of wool, and the forced purveyance of foodstuffs for the army, added to the burdens. The quantities of foodstuffs collected were not as great as in Edward I’s reign, but records show that the process was riddled with violence and corruption. Rather than make the sheriffs responsible, as in the past, merchants and others were given commissions to collect supplies. Some undertook this task responsibly; others, notably the king’s outrageously corrupt purveyor, William Wallingford, did not. Inquisitions into the tax of a ninth suggested that as a result of taxation much land had been abandoned, completely lost to cultivation.

THE BATTLE OF SLUYS AND ITS AFTERMATH

Matters did not go well for the English in the Low Countries while the king was in England from February to June 1340. Two of the earls, Salisbury and Suffolk, were captured during an ill-considered raid near Lille. John, duke of Normandy conducted a savage campaign of destruction in Hainault, in which some 50 towns and villages were burned. Edward was needed in the Low Countries, and despite his domestic difficulties, he left England on 22 June. On the next day his fleet was at the Zwin estuary, within sight of the French ships moored at Sluys. On 24 June, with wind and sun behind them, the English attacked. Most of Edward’s fleet, probably numbering some 160 ships, was made up of merchant vessels, some converted for war by the addition of ‘castles’ fore and aft. Archers did some damage as the English closed in on the French fleet, which lay at anchor, the ships chained together. When the English pretended to be about to turn and flee, the French released the chains, opening up their formations. Ships were grappled and boarded, and fierce hand-to-hand fighting followed. One squadron under the command of the Genoese admiral Barbavera managed to escape. The English, with their archers and men-at-arms, were a far more formidable force than the French sailors, but the fight was a long one. By evening, the French had lost most of their 200 ships, and about 15,000 men, mostly through drowning. There is no evidence that the English took any prisoners. This was probably because there were few nobles or knights among the French who would have been worth ransoming.

The victory at Sluys was important in putting an end to any French hopes of mounting an invasion of England, and it put a halt for many years to French attacks on the south coast. However, the English were unable to follow up their success at sea with victories on land. Robert of Artois was defeated in battle outside St Omer. Edward and his allies besieged Tournai. The siege lasted almost two months, and went badly for the English; all they achieved was the destruction of the surrounding countryside. Edward’s ally the Count of Hainault burned the monastery of Saint-Amand, and ravaged its lands. Its losses were later put at 20 hamlets and 32 farms and granges. Bombardment by siege engines achieved little; the defenders were able to answer in kind. However, Philip VI was too cautious to risk battle when he led his army close to the besieged town. Even though those who could not contribute to the defence had been expelled from Tournai, supplies in the town were nearly exhausted, but Edward’s allies had no enthusiasm for continuing, and English funds had run out. A truce was negotiated at Esplechin on 25 September. The English strategy had collapsed, and with it much of Edward’s reputation. The defence of Tournai demonstrated how difficult it was to take a large town by a lengthy siege, and presaged future failures, such as that at Reims in 1359. The capture of Calais in 1347 and of Rouen in 1419 were rare successes.

In November 1340, Edward suddenly left the Low Countries with a small number of his closest associates. He arrived at the Tower of London completely unexpectedly, and embarked on a major purge of a government which he considered had completely failed him. His quarrel was especially bitter with John Stratford, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had led the government when the king was in the Low Countries. The political crisis was acute, but the parliament that began in April 1341 eventually saw concessions made and compromises achieved. There was even agreement to collect a new tax on wool. A new expedition was carefully planned. The army would number about 13,500, and 12,000 sailors would man the transport fleet. The leaders of retinues were not to be paid in the normal way, but were to be assigned wool to cover their wages for the 40 days the campaign was expected to last. The document detailing the plans did not reveal where the force was to go; it was characteristic of Edward to keep this secret. It is likely, however, that the Low Countries were once again the intended destination. In the event, the expedition was cancelled, as Edward’s allies wanted to extend the truce with France. It was clear that the expensive strategy that had shuddered to a halt in the autumn of 1340 could not be revived. The war would have to take a new course.

BRITTANY

That new direction of the war was prompted by the death of Duke John III of Brittany in May 1341. The succession was disputed between his half-brother, John de Montfort, and his niece Jeanne de Penthièvre, who was married to Charles of Blois, the French king’s nephew. In the autumn of 1341, Edward agreed to support Montfort’s cause. However, a swift French campaign saw Montfort surrender Nantes to his rival. He was then imprisoned in Paris. By early in 1342 virtually all of Brittany was in Charles of Blois’s hands, though Montfort’s courageous countess, Jeanne of Flanders, continued to resist, holding out at the siege of Hennebont. There she rode through the streets, fully armed and mounted on a warhorse, encouraging the women of the town to take stones to the walls, and to hurl them at the besiegers. Initially she received scant help from the English. A small mounted force under Walter Mauny achieved little, though when he and his followers attacked the besiegers, the countess kissed him, and all the others, two or three times, on their return. ‘You could well say that this was a valiant lady.’¹¹ An expedition under the Earl of Northampton landed in August and laid siege to Morlaix. When Charles of Blois attempted to relieve the garrison there, the English drew up their troops in a defensive formation, protected by pits and ditches which they covered with brushwood. Accounts of the battle are brief, but it is clear that the French cavalry were unable to break the English line. The fighting was exceptionally fierce. Edward III landed in Brittany at the end of October, with a small army of some 3,800 men. He had great initial success, as towns and castles were surrendered. However, he was halted at Vannes, and in mid-December a French offensive began. Winter was not suitable for campaigning, and though the French recaptured some places which had fallen to the English earlier, they avoided battle. They were clearly unaware of the small size of the English army, and the army was suffering from disease and the cold. In January 1343 the Truce of Malestroit was agreed. Hostilities were to cease for three years. Each side was to keep the territory it held, though Vannes was handed to the papacy.

The Countess Jeanne was the heroine of the war, one of the very few women to take up arms. After the truce was agreed, this Amazonian sailed for England with the English king. Soon afterward she was confined, on royal orders, in Tickhill Castle. It may be that she had become insane, and that the stresses and trauma of war contributed to her condition. Alternatively, it may be that she was an inconvenient obstacle to Edward III’s ambition to control Brittany. She lived on in captivity until 1374.

The Truce of Malestroit provided an opportunity for peace negotiations, though the English were not enthusiastic participants in them. In 1343 Edward did all he could to delay sending his ambassadors to Avignon, where talks took place under papal supervision. They ended without agreement early in 1345, largely thanks to the obduracy of the English negotiators. Papal attempts to find common ground between the two sets of negotiators failed. In England, parliament was told that the French had executed prisoners savagely, and that:

the said enemy, in every way he knows or can, strives to take and occupy all the lands and possessions which our said lord the king has overseas, and to remove his allies from our lord the king, in Brabant and Flanders as well as in Germany; and thus he firmly intends, as our lord the king and his council fully comprehend, to destroy the English language and to occupy the land of England, which God forbid, if forcible remedy is not provided against his malice.¹²

Edward III was determined to take the war further, and the truce ended a year early.

Given the very limited English successes in these years, it was not easy to build support for the war. Edward was very aware of the difficulties involved in persuading his subjects to fight in France, as the decision to pay double wages shows. In 1337 bishops, earls and important barons had been appointed to meet county communities, to explain the decisions that had been taken and to set out the king’s plans. In the next year, ‘all men of religion and women’ were requested to pray ‘for a safe journey for the king in his expedition beyond the sea’.¹³ This was no doubt expected to yield divine assistance for the king, but also to help build up popular support for the war. The bishops were sent an explanation of the origins of the war, which stressed the generous offers made by the English, and the unreasonable attitude of the French, who aimed to conquer not just Gascony, but all of Edward III’s lands. The French had committed ‘arson, homicides, robberies and other horriblenesses’.¹⁴ Not everyone was persuaded by such propaganda. There were inevitable criticisms. A poem explained that it was wrong for ‘The king should not go to make war outside the realm, unless the community of his land is prepared to consent.’ It went on to condemn the taxes and seizures of wool, blaming not the king, ‘a young bachelor’, but his councillors.¹⁵

This first phase of the war, up to the Truce of Malestroit, was indecisive for both English and the French. Philip VI’s troops had not gained control of Gascony, while Edward and his allies had achieved virtually nothing in the Low Countries. Some French territory had suffered appalling destruction, and some English south-coast ports were damaged. The siege of Tournai had demonstrated the difficulties that armies faced when confronted by stone fortifications. In Brittany, it had not proved possible to follow up the initial English successes. The costs of war had proved unmanageable for the English: Edward III even had to pawn his own great crown.¹⁶ The credit mechanisms provided by the Italian bankers had not been sufficient, and, for a range of reasons, the two great companies of the Bardi and Peruzzi were approaching bankruptcy. The political crises had meant that Edward was compelled to make unwelcome concessions.