5

PEACE AND WAR, 1360–77

By 1360 war had become a way of life for many. The routiers who pillaged the French countryside, the captains who hoped to profit from ransoms, the knights who hoped to win glory through great feats of arms: such men had little to gain from the peace which so many others desired to see. While England and France were temporarily at peace, other disputes offered employment to those eager to exercise their military skills. There was little sign of war-weariness.

For many in France, the peace agreed at Brétigny ushered in worse times. It was not simply that the payment of King John’s huge ransom necessitated the payment of highly unpopular taxes every year. Much of central France could make no contribution to the ransom, because of the costs of local defence and the payment of protection money. Many English captains, such as James Pipe and Mathew Gournay, continued their operations, pillaging, burning and taking ransoms from villages. There were Gascon, Navarrese, Breton and German companies causing chaos, particularly in central France. In 1360 many of these bands came together in the Great Company, and in 1362 they combined with yet other groups and defeated a royal army in the Battle of Brignais, near Lyon. A surprise attack won the day. The Archpriest was on the losing side, but promptly turned his coat following the defeat. The routiers, however, soon broke apart, to continue to terrorize the populace in individual bands. Some leaders, such as the notable John Hawkwood, were tempted away from France by the wealth and wars of Italy.

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Fig. 5: A knight bearing Bertrand du Guesclin’s arms

Almost inevitably, the perennial troublemaker Charles of Navarre caused renewed disturbance in France. He had a claim to the duchy of Burgundy, which was dismissed in 1361. In retaliation, he planned a rising in Normandy, with the tacit support of the English. The Dauphin’s forces pre-empted him, moving against the Navarrese supporters in the spring of 1364. Disaster came when Charles’s ally, Jean de Grailly, marched north from Gascony, joined forces with some English soldiers of fortune, and was engaged in battle at Cocherel. The French army, led by Bertrand du Guesclin and including the Archpriest, was victorious in a hard, brutal fight. The Anglo-Navarrese army was outflanked and attacked from front and rear. Casualties were high on both sides. Even this defeat did not end Charles of Navarre’s ambitions in Normandy, but events soon meant that he had to direct his attentions to his Pyrenean kingdom.

There was also war in Brittany, where the Montfort cause had not been forgotten. John de Montfort, whose claim Edward III had backed earlier in the war, had died in 1345. His son, also John, was brought up in the English court. In 1362 he returned to Brittany, to challenge Jeanne de Penthièvre and her husband Charles of Blois. In 1364, after diplomacy had failed, Montfort laid siege to the little port of Auray. On 29 September Charles of Blois arrived to relieve the place, and the two sides engaged in a fierce battle. Many of the great names of the war were involved. John Chandos commanded the Montfortian army; Hugh Calveley, Robert Knollys and Eustace d’Auberchicourt served under him, Calveley unwillingly taking charge of the rearguard. Olivier de Clisson, future brother-in-arms of Bertrand du Guesclin, armed with an axe, fought with the English (and lost an eye). Bertrand himself was with Charles of Blois. The English archers did not have their normal success against the French, who were armed with lances cut down to five feet, and battle-axes. By forming up tightly, and interlocking their shields, they were able to prevent the hail of arrows from doing much damage. However, after fierce hand-to-hand combat, the French broke. The discipline of the Anglo-Breton army was an important factor, while Calveley’s division, held on the flank, played a vital role in the final stages. Charles of Blois himself was killed, and a host of prisoners, including du Guesclin, was taken. The Breton civil war had come to an end.

SPAIN

In the 1360s the war spilled over into Spain. Dynastic issues, with disputes for the Castilian throne, were one reason for this. The English were also concerned by Castilian naval strength, while it was important to secure Gascony’s southern border. The history of the Castilian monarchy at this time is an extraordinary one of intrigue, betrayals, executions and assassinations. In 1350 Alfonso XI of Castile died, to be succeeded by his son, Pedro the Cruel. Alfonso also had illegitimate twin sons, Enrique of Trastamara and Fadrique, by his mistress, Leonor de Guzmán. She was executed in 1351, and Fadrique was assassinated in 1358. Enrique had designs on the throne, and found backing from the French and the routier companies. Pedro turned to the English for support, concluding an alliance in 1362.

In December 1365 a huge routier force advanced into Spain. It was headed by du Guesclin, whose ransom after his capture at Auray had been paid with money from the Pope, the King of Aragon and Enrique himself. Anglo-French rivalries were set aside, for alongside du Guesclin was Hugh Calveley; the two men entered into a contract to be brothers-in-arms. Matthew Gournay and Eustace d’Auberchicourt were also in the company. King Pedro put up little resistance, and fled by sea to Gascony. Enrique was crowned in his place.

In 1362 the Black Prince had been granted Aquitaine (which included Gascony) as a principality. After Enrique’s seizure of the Castilian throne, it made sense for him to intervene to restore Pedro’s rule. Negotiations with the ever-unreliable Charles of Navarre were successfully concluded; the Prince would have safe passage across the Pyrenees. In February 1267 his army arrived in Pamplona, and then marched to Castile. The usual challenges to battle took place, but Enrique’s French advisors recommended caution. On 2 April at Nájera the armies faced each other. There are no pay records to reveal the size of either army, but the chronicler Ayala was clear that the ‘flower of Christian cavalry’ were in the Prince’s army, which totalled 10,000 men-at-arms, whereas Enrique’s army was no more than 4,500 strong.1 The Black Prince’s army surprised Enrique by advancing early in the morning, taking a route which brought it round to attack from a flank. As usual, the English dismounted, and the archers loosed ‘volleys thicker than rain ever fell’, to devastating effect. ‘They killed and wounded a large number of horses, despite their armour, and King Enrique and his men fell back.’2 The Prince’s army was victorious. The rout saw the enemy chased to the river Ebro; more were drowned than were killed in the battle.

Nájera, like Poitiers, saw an exceptional number of prisoners taken; in a letter to his wife, the Black Prince overstated their number at 10,000 men of quality. The unpleasant King Pedro wished to see his opponents executed; the Black Prince would not allow this save in isolated cases. Arguments over the captives show how the laws and conventions of war operated. There was much argument over Arnoul d’Audrehem, Marshal of France, who had fought with Enrique. The Black Prince was furious that he had been in the battle, for as his ransom agreed after Poitiers had not all been paid, it was dishonourable that he had fought. Arnoul argued that ‘I did not take up arms against you, but against King Don Pedro, who is the chief captain of your party.’3 The case was put to a commission of twelve, which decided in Arnoul’s favour. In the case of the Count of Denia, the issue of who should receive his ransom of about £29,000 led to complex litigation which continued into the next century.

Though Nájera was a clear-cut victory, the battle was far from decisive. Pedro could not pay the Prince the huge sums demanded for his services. Disease took its toll; the Prince returned to Gascony, his health broken. Enrique began to recover his position in Castile. In 1369, after victory in the Battle of Montiel, he murdered his half-brother King Pedro and so secured his position on the Castilian throne. The foray into Spain had proved disastrous for the English; it would not, however, end their ambitions in the Peninsula.

TOWARDS REOPENING THE WAR

The routiers continued to cause problems. Following the Battle of Nájera, most of them returned to France. They caused havoc as they pillaged their way northwards towards Burgundy, and on to Champagne and elsewhere. Many were English and Gascons who had fought with the Black Prince; whether they had his tacit consent is open to question. One English band even reached Normandy, capturing the town of Vire by subterfuge. Some routiers came close to Paris; others brought their savage brand of warfare to Anjou and the Loire valley. The bands eventually broke up, after demonstrating that although this was may have been a period of peace between England and France in formal terms, in reality these were years of continued war.

In Gascony the financial position was becoming more difficult. The Black Prince met the estates, and it was agreed that he should levy a hearth tax for five years, and in return maintain the currency, both silver and gold, without any devaluation for the same period. A long list of concessions, reminiscent in some ways of Magna Carta, made it clear that traditional rights and liberties would be respected. The Count of Armagnac bluntly refused to pay the tax; he was impoverished by war, and had a daughter to marry off. He appealed to Edward III, and without waiting for an answer, also appealed to the French king. Armagnac’s nephew Amanieu d’Albret also acknowledged Charles V as his liege lord.

English attempts to negotiate with the French came to nothing. King John had been committed to the peace agreed at Brétigny; his son Charles V was not. Physically unimpressive, Charles suffered from ill health. Froissart implausibly attributed this to poison administered in his youth by Charles of Navarre, which had caused his hair and nails to fall out, and rendered him dry as a stick. The weakness of his left arm is documented; though he was no inactive invalid, he was a man incapable of feats of arms. A cultured king, Charles possessed a huge library. His military strategy was a cautious one, in which the English were not to be engaged in battle as they had been under Philip VI and John. This approach yielded rich dividends.

The French had not formally conceded sovereignty over Aquitaine, though they had not attempted to exercise it since the Brétigny agreement. In 1369 legal opinions, carefully harvested, favoured Charles V’s claims over the duchy. The Black Prince was summoned to appear before the parlement of Paris in May. He did not attend, and was declared to be a contumacious vassal. In northern France, French troops began to move into Ponthieu. Plans for the renewal of war were discussed in the English parliament, and Edward III resumed use of the title of king of France.

THE FRENCH RECOVERY

This renewed war, which lasted from 1369 to 1380, was very different from the earlier conflicts. The English were now on the defensive. In the small and ugly Bertrand du Guesclin, the French possessed an experienced and charismatic commander. Du Guesclin’s family was of the petty nobility. Warlike even as a child, Bertrand was said to have led a gang of marauding boys, who he persuaded to hold mock tournaments. He had to make his own way as a soldier, learning in the tough school of Breton warfare. Another Breton was du Guesclin’s close associate Olivier de Clisson. He had been brought up in England, and probably fought with the English at Poitiers. He certainly did so at Auray, but by 1370 he had joined the French cause. He had full knowledge of English tactics, and knew how important archers were, for when he was setting out from England for Brittany in 1358, he was supplied with 500 bows, 1,500 bowstrings and 100 sheaves of arrows.4 Well aware of the disasters caused by French eagerness to fight, he was influential in persuading them to adopt defensive methods, avoiding the risks of pitched battle. As for the English themselves, Edward III’s energies in the bedroom were not matched by his campaigning efforts; from 1372 he withdrew from active warfare. The Black Prince was in no fit state to lead expeditions. Men such as Robert Knollys and Hugh Calveley had vast experience, but lacked the flexibility of mind to manage the new situation. Even the English belief that they controlled the seas proved to be a fiction; this was a period when naval warfare gained a new importance, as invasion threatened.

Froissart recorded a meeting of Charles V’s council in 1373. Du Guesclin was asked for his advice. ‘Sire, all those who talk of fighting the English do not think of the dangers which will come of it. I am not saying that they should not be fought, but rather that this should be to our advantage.’ He reminded Charles of the defeats suffered at the hands of the English, ‘which have gravely damaged your kingdom and the nobles present at them’.5 The French campaigns were characterized by sieges, skirmishes and ambushes, by swift surrenders and remarkable success. English chevauchées were countered by emptying the land before them.

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Fig. 6: An imaginative interpretation of the death of John Chandos, 1369

In 1369 there was no resistance when the French took Ponthieu, and under the Duke of Anjou they recovered much territory in the south-west. The king’s son John of Gaunt, in his first independent command, took a force from Calais into Picardy and Normandy and back. At one point the English and French armies faced each other for a week. Discussions took place as to where a battle might be fought. This, however, was one of the many occasions when caution won. At the turn of the year John Chandos, recently appointed seneschal of Poitou and arguably the best English commander, was killed in a skirmish, slipping on icy ground. In 1370 the English countered continued French advances in traditional manner: Robert Knollys led a chevauchée from Calais to Poitou. His own retinue contained at least 1,400 men-at-arms and a similar number of archers. The financial arrangements were unusual: the crown was to pay for the first three months, and thereafter the expedition was intended to be self-financing. In the event, it cost the English government over £38,000. The raid went badly: no towns or castles were taken. Knollys drew up his men in order of battle outside Paris, but the French were not to be tempted into an engagement. The expedition concluded in complete disarray, with John Minsterworth (who would later turn traitor) in particular challenging Knollys’ leadership in a rare example of mutiny. The dispirited remains of the force were finally crushed at Pontvillain by Bertrand du Guesclin. The defeat was disastrous, leading to the disillusionment and desertion from their cause of Charles of Navarre, who was reconciled with Charles V in the following year.

In September 1370 the Black Prince, ailing and carried in a litter, led an army to recapture Limoges, recently taken by the Duke of Berry. The sack of the city has been described as ‘one of the worst atrocities in medieval European warfare’.6 However, it was justified according to the laws of war, for it was taken by storm, rather than a negotiated surrender. The scale of the massacre there is open to question. Froissart made much of it, but his rhetoric did not match the reality. It was only the part of Limoges controlled by the bishop that was stormed; the other section, the Chatèu, was loyal to the Prince, who had made a number of important grants to it in the early days of his rule in Aquitaine. The number of those slain was probably around 300, a tenth of Froissart’s figure.

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Fig. 7: The Black Prince, lying sick in his litter, at the sack of Limoges, 1370

The English regarded themselves as masters of the sea, but this conceit took a hard blow in 1372. The Earl of Pembroke sailed with a small flotilla of some 20 ships to take up his recently appointed post as royal lieutenant in Aquitaine. A Castilian fleet prevented their entry to La Rochelle, and was victorious in the ensuing battle. The use of fire was particularly terrifying at sea, and oil sprayed onto the English ships proved to be a decisive weapon. The horses panicked, breaking up the ships’ timbers. ‘It was horrible to hear the din of the fire and the noise made by the horses burning in the ships’ holds.’7 Though the numbers of men and ships involved were small, the defeat struck home hard. Edward III’s response was to attempt a large-scale demonstration of naval power. In late August he boarded his flagship at Sandwich. As the winds were contrary, the fleet could do no more that crawl along the coast, reaching no further than Winchelsea before the expedition was abandoned. This fiasco was Edward’s final campaign, a miserable contrast to the glories of the 1340s. As for Pembroke, he was harshly treated in prison in Spain before being sold to du Guesclin. He promised to pay him a huge ransom of 120,000 gold francs, but he died in France before he was released. The war was going increasingly well for the French. In 1372 the Duke of Brittany, John de Montfort, took refuge in England. The French took over his duchy with little resistance; only Brest remained in English hands. In the following year, plans to send John of Gaunt to Brittany were abandoned. Instead, he determined to reach Gascony overland, and led a chevauchée from Calais to Bordeaux. This took from August to December. Though the English drew up their troops outside Troyes for battle, the French stuck to their policy of avoiding a major confrontation. Later in the campaign, Olivier de Clisson slew an estimated 600 men in an ambush. Far more considerable losses came through the hardships of the journey, particularly during the crossing of the Massif Central. Contemporaries, French and English, saw the expedition as a failure, but it can be argued that Gaunt showed considerable qualities of leadership in keeping his force together on such an arduous expedition. However, the fact remains that the chevauchée achieved nothing.

The French were clearly in the ascendant. In 1375 the important castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy was surrendered after a lengthy siege, in return for substantial payments of 40,000 francs to the garrison, and 12,000 to its captain. Cognac in the south-west was lost, besieged by du Guesclin. Pope Gregory XI had been attempting to negotiate peace since 1370, and in 1375 it was agreed to hold a conference at Bruges. A truce, brokered by the papacy and negotiated at Bruges, finally came into effect in June. It was later extended for a further year.

In 1376 one of the great figures of the war, the Black Prince, died. He had shown his mettle as a young man, fighting at Crécy in the midst of the mêlée. His victories at Poitiers and Nájera had demonstrated his qualities as a commander. Importantly, he was consistently loyal to his father; there was no question of his adopting opposing policies in the way that Henry V would do before his accession to the throne. Nonetheless, there have to be some doubts about the Black Prince’s potential as a ruler: his rule in Aquitaine created more problems than it solved. The introduction of a new central administration was resented by the Gascon nobility, and financial difficulties became increasingly acute. As a commander and a warrior, however, the Prince was peerless.

Edward III did not survive his eldest son for long. He died in 1377. The St Albans chronicler imagined a deathbed scene in which the king’s mistress, Alice Perrers, ‘furtively removed from his hands the rings that the king wore on his fingers as part of his royal dignity’.8 Deserted by his courtiers, a single priest oversaw the king’s final moments. Edward had been astonishingly successful. He was an inspirational leader in war, and was well served by able commanders. Council documents show how he was involved in the detailed planning of campaigns, with a close attention to detail. There may be some question marks over his strategic vision, particularly as to whether the way he conducted the war was ever likely to achieve his ultimate ambitions. The grand alliance of the initial phase of the war was far too expensive, and the subsequent chevauchées, successful as they were, were never likely to result in conquest, much less the acquisition of the French throne. Yet he displayed flexibility, taking advantage of new opportunities as they arose. By 1360 it appeared that he had succeeded in greatly extending English possessions in France, holding them freely, without doing homage to the French king. In his final years, after the renewal of the war in 1369, Edward lost his touch; he did not relate to a new generation of soldiers in the way he had to their predecessors in his days of glory.