As dusk approached on the evening of 24 June 1340, six months after he had declared himself king of the best part of western Europe, Edward stood aboard his flagship, the cog Thomas – a cog was a type of large merchant vessel with a single square sail – and watched the sea offshore from Sluys, in Flanders, churn with the blood of tens of thousands of Frenchmen. He was wounded in the leg – but it was an injury that was worth the pain. He was watching as a fierce battle raged between the 213 French and Genoese ships of Philip VI’s Great Army of the Sea and around 120 and 160 English sails, which had left East Anglia under his own personal command two days previously. The English were murderously, brilliantly winning.
Edward had come across the Channel to put an army ashore in Flanders. It was a desperate military action dictated only by extreme circumstance. Two months earlier his friends and allies the earls of Salisbury and Suffolk had been captured during fighting outside the town of Lille. Flanders was overrun by the French, and Queen Philippa was a hostage in Ghent. The Channel was patrolled by French ships that threatened to ruin the English wool trade, and for two years the south coast of England had been plagued by French pirates, who had reduced the town of Southampton to little more than a smouldering shell.
Edward had been planning a large military invasion for some months. Inevitably, word of the preparations had reached Philip VI, and a huge French fleet, detailed to blockade the ports and prevent the English army from landing, had been gathered from the coasts of Normandy and Picardy. Now, as Edward looked towards the coast, he saw that the French were ordered in a tight position, their vessels anchored and chained together in three lines across the mouth of the river Zwin.
After a night spent anchored within sight of the intimidating masts and armoured prows of the French fleet, Edward had directed his ships to approach the mouth of the Zwin at around 3 p.m. They came up from the south-west, with the sun and the wind behind them. As he moved into view, Edward must have felt a pang of anxiety – even fear. He was about to fight one of the largest naval forces ever assembled in the Channel. Failure risked utter ruin.
As Edward’s ship approached the French, he had faced a formidable fleet. In the first line stood some of the largest ships ever launched into the Channel: cogs carrying hundreds of men, with crossbows bristling. They included the Christopher, a giant ship stolen from the English some months earlier. Behind the cogs bobbed the smaller ships; in the third line were merchant boats and the royal galleys.
The English attacking force at Sluys was composed of a ragtag of great powerful cogs, smaller galleys and an assortment of merchant ships pressed into military service from harbours around the English coast. They had sailed to France against the pleas and warnings of Edward III’s ministers, who had warned him that the size of the French fleet meant certain death and destruction to the smaller English armada. Edward, stubborn and determined, had set out from the Orwell leaving his advisers – led by Archbishop Stratford of Canterbury – stung by a harsh rebuke: ‘those who are afraid can stay at home’.
A medieval sea battle was much like a land battle. There was little manoeuvre or pursuit – when two navies came together it was a collision followed by boarding and a desperate, bloody fight at close quarters, in which much the same tactics as those used on a battlefield were employed on the wooden decks of ships. Although there were some large weapons carried on board, to hurl stones and giant crossbow bolts at the enemy, by and large it was bolts and arrows and the violent smash of men-at-arms’ maces and clubs that did the damage. ‘This great naval battle was so fearful,’ wrote the chronicler Geoffrey Baker, ‘that he would have been a fool who dared to watch it even from a distance.’
The French, commanded by Hugues Quiéret and Nicolas Béhuchet, were undone by their decision to shackle their ships together in three ranks across the mouth of the Zwin, thereby sacrificing all mobility for what seemed – but was not – the security of closely ranked numbers. The two rows of vessels behind the front line were barred from fighting by the ships in front of them, and as the English attacked the French found it impossible to evade a head-on assault.
Battle was given at close quarters and by deadly means. The air filled with the blast of trumpets, the throb of drums, the fizz of arrows and the splintering sound of huge ships smashing into others. The English fleet attacked the French in waves. Each ship rammed into an enemy vessel, attaching herself with hooks and grappling irons as English archers and French crossbowmen traded hailstorms of vicious arrows and bolts. The bowmen took up high vantage points, either on the raised endcastles of the boat or on the masts, and when they had killed enough of the defenders, men-at-arms clambered aboard the enemy ship to mete out death and destruction at close quarters.
The French were trapped and slaughtered. ‘It was indeed a bloody and murderous battle,’ wrote Froissart, the great French chronicler, who noted that ‘sea fights are always fiercer than fights on land because retreat and flight are impossible. Each man is obliged to hazard his life and hope for success, relying on his own personal bravery and skill.’ Between 16,000 and 18,000 French and Genoese were killed, either cut down on deck or drowned. Both French commanders died: Quiéret killed as his ship was boarded, Béhuchet hanged from the mast of his ship.
It was one of the greatest early naval victories in English history. The English and their Flemish allies cheered and celebrated the victory in disbelief. Almost the entire French fleet had been captured or destroyed, eliminating at a stroke much of the danger to English merchant ships in the Channel, and Philip’s ability to blockade the English from the continental coastline. The death toll alone on the French side was shocking. The chronicler Thomas of Burton wrote that ‘for three days after the battle in all the water of the Zwin … there seemed to be more blood than water. And there were so many dead and drowned French and Normans there that it was said, ridiculing them, that if God had given the fish the power of speech after they had devoured so many of the dead, they would thereafter have spoken fluent French.’
Centuries later, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans would think of Sluys as a historical precursor to the Spanish Armada. The sixteenth-century writer of the play Edward III (likely co-written by Shakespeare, although the following passage is not thought to be his) would imagine the aftermath thus:
Purple the sea, whose channel filled as fast
With streaming gore, that from the maimed fell,
As did her gushing moisture break into
The crannied cleftures of the through shot planks.
Here flew a head, dissevered from the trunk,
There mangled arms and legs were tossed aloft,
As when a whirlwind takes the summer dust
And scatters it in middle of the air.
Thus the battle of Sluys was later immortalized in English maritime history. But at the time, it was only one victory amidst a tide of discontent.
After three years of fighting, Edward’s war with France had put greater strain on English government and royal finance than any military project since the Third Crusade. Sluys was a great victory, no doubt. But it came at great cost.
Edward’s war was conceived on the grandest possible scale – way beyond the means even of a Plantagenet king who expected to incur massive debts in the course of his wars. The Lanercost chronicler estimated Edward’s payments to his Flemish and German allies in 1337–40 at ‘one thousand marks a day, according to others, two thousand’. This was an exaggeration – but not a wild one.
Even as he stood on the cog Thomas and watched French ships burn in 1340, Edward had already spent £400,000 on the war, much of it owed as debts to Italian banks – mainly the Bardi and the Peruzzi of Florence, although he also had substantial accounts with the Portinari of Florence and the Busdraghi of Lucca as well as with banks and merchants in the German Hanse and the Low Countries. At home, the northern merchant William de la Pole organized even greater loans from syndicates of merchants from London and York, who advanced hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Crown. Although usury was still forbidden, Christian banks and merchants employed a variety of ingenious book-keeping devices to hide the fact that interest on loans ran as high as 40 per cent. Royal crowns and jewels stood as collateral against the loans, as did vast amounts of plate forcibly borrowed from English religious houses. The large debts Edward had run up throughout Europe were already beginning to cause him some political difficulties. Exactly a month after the French fleet was destroyed, the earls of Northampton, Warwick and Derby were arrested in Brussels by creditors. They had stood guarantors of debts that were in default, and it was only with some difficulty that Edward had them released.
Back at home, England suffered for Edward’s new war. The effects were felt at every level of society. Taxation was levied heavily and often – tenths and fifteenths were imposed on the country every year between 1337 and 1339, and a general ninth followed in 1340. The hated practice of purveyance was rife. Efforts were made to rig the wool market, by selling monopoly on the trade to leading merchants, although the scheme eventually failed.
Popular protest songs captured the discontent of the poor in their struggle to cope with Crown demands that squeezed harder than any before them. One poem, now known as the Song against the King’s Taxes, complained that ‘such tribute can in no manner last long; Out of emptiness, who can give, or touch anything with his hands? People are reduced to such ill plight, that they can give no more; I fear, if they had a leader, they would rise in rebellion. Loss of property often makes people fools.’
A rural labourer born in 1300 would have been lucky to reach his fortieth birthday at the time of Sluys. Had he done so, he would have lived through near-constant war on two fronts, seven years of the Great Famine that coincided with a period of plummeting wages, and rates of taxation both onerous and incessant. Such a life, when contrasted with rumours that Edward III rather enjoyed his expensive campaigns in Flanders as an excuse to hold lavish, wasteful and costly tournaments, was not conducive to an orderly existence. England would not feel the fury of a popular rising for another forty years, but in 1340, Edward’s chronic need for cash had driven the country back into the sort of political crisis that had rocked his grandfather in 1297 and beset his father for the better part of his reign.