A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

  Above all, war was made to pay for itself through pillage. Booty and ransom were not just a bonus, but a necessity to take the place of arrears in pay and to induce enlistment. The taking of prisoners for ransom became a commercial enterprise. Since kings could rarely raise sufficient funds in advance, and collection of taxes was slow, troops in the field were always ahead of their pay. Loot on campaign took the place of the paymaster. Chivalric war, like chivalric love, was, as Michelet said of the whole epoch, double et louche (a provocative phrase which could mean “double and squinting” or “equivocal” or “shady” in the sense of disreputable). The aim was one thing and the practice another. Knights pursued war for glory and practiced it for gain.

  In 1344 the three estates in Parliament were informed by Edward of a breach of the truce by the King of France and asked to “show their opinion.” The advice of Lords and Commons was “to end the war either by battle or honorable peace,” and, once attempted, not to abandon the effort at letters or requests of the Pope or anyone else, “but to end the same by dint of the Sword.” Clergy and Commons voted subsidies, and in 1345 Parliament authorized the King to require all landowners to serve in person or supply a substitute or a monetary equivalent. A man with £5 of income from land or rents was to supply an archer, a £10 income supplied a mounted spearman, £20 supplied two of these, income over £25 supplied a man-at-arms, meaning usually a squire or knight. Towns and shires were required to raise a given number of archers, and the system as a whole was to be administered by sheriffs and county officials.

  Ships had to be requisitioned to carry men and horses and initial food for both. They also carried millstones and bake ovens, armorers and their forges, and extra materials to keep the bowmen supplied with arrows. Most ships were small, averaging 30 to 50 tons, with one large mast and a rectangular sail, although some ranged up to 200 tons. A medium-sized ship carried 100 to 200 men and 80 to 100 horses.

  To fill out the ranks of “arrayed” or drafted foot soldiers, men were recruited by promise of loot, by pardons of those under sentence of outlawry, and by promoting anti-French feeling already aroused by French raids on Southampton, Portsmouth, and other south-coast towns. King Edward’s assumption of the title of King of France was proclaimed to the people along with his messages on the justice of his cause and the wickedness of France. Under the ever-present fear of French invasion, warning beacons were planted along the coast, bodies of armed men and horses stationed at intervals, stores laid by, and small ships drawn close in to land or onto the beach—not without economic disruption.

  In July 1346 the King was ready for his renewed attempt. Accompanied by his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, he set sail for Normandy with 4,000 men-at-arms and 10,000 archers plus a number of Irish and Welsh foot soldiers. (Another force, sent earlier on the longer voyage to Bordeaux, had already engaged French forces along the frontiers of Guienne.) Guided by Godefrey d’Harcourt, who had been banished from France, the King’s expeditionary force landed on the Cotentin Peninsula, where Harcourt promised rich opportunities for loot in the prosperous unwalled towns of his province. Although Edward “desired nothing so much as deeds of arms,” according to Froissart, he also, in another case of medieval squinting, apparently welcomed Harcourt’s promise that he would meet no resistance because the Duke of Normandy and his knights were fighting the English in Guienne and the people of Normandy were not used to war.

  So fruitful proved Normandy that the English needed to make no further provision for their host, and so unwarlike that the inhabitants fled, leaving their houses “well-stuffed and granges full of corn for they wist not how to save and keep it.… Before that time they had never seen men of war nor they wist not what war or battle meant.” At prosperous Caen, which was unwalled, the townspeople and a force of knights sent to the defense under the Constable, Comte d’Eu, offered a vigorous defense, but the English, drawing on prepared reinforcements, prevailed. The Constable was captured and, along with many other prisoners and wagons full of booty, was sent back to England to be held for a great ransom that was to have tragic consequences. “Burning, plundering and laying waste,” the English advanced from town to town, gathering up rich draperies, jewels, plate, merchandise, livestock, and men and women as captives.

  The sack of Normandy by an army led by the King of England himself was the prototype of all that was to follow. Organized in three corps or “battles,” the invaders “overran, spoiled and robbed without mercy,” finding so much booty that they “rode but small journeys and every day took their lodgings between noon and three of the clock.” The soldiers “made no count to the King or his officers of what they did get; they kept that to themselves.” While they moved along one side of the Seine toward Paris, King Philip, who had been at Rouen without taking action, followed them along the other side and reentered Paris as Edward reached Poissy, twenty miles west of the city. Here, while the King of England kept the Feast of Our Lady in mid-August in robes of scarlet furred in ermine, his army burned and plundered surrounding villages. The flames at their gates struck the citizens of Paris with “stupefied amazement,” wrote Jean de Venette, “and I who have written this saw all these deeds, for they could be seen from Paris by anyone who would ascend a turret.”

  Philip VI had meanwhile issued the arrière-ban or general summons to all capable of bearing arms in the war area. Based on the principle that all subjects owed their lives to “defense of country and crown,” the general summons was supposed to be used only when the call to nobles had not or would not suffice to repel the enemy. It was issued, like all public announcements, by “public cry”—that is, by heralds riding forth to proclaim the order aloud in market place and village square. Individual letters also went to towns and abbeys, requisitioning the customary subsidies. Some towns still paid their service in bodies of foot soldiers, hastily assembled, untrained, and virtually useless; others paid in money, which permitted the hiring of more effective mercenaries.

  Non-noble military contingents were furnished by towns and districts according to number of hearths and the relative prosperity or poverty of the community. In some regions every 100 hearths were obligated to pay for one soldier for one year. In poorer districts the obligation might be one soldier for every 200 or 300 hearths. The number of effectives raised at this rate was not large: in 1337, for example, Rouen supplied 200 men, Narbonne 150 crossbowmen, Nîmes 95 men-at-arms. In the light of these figures, the chroniclers’ buxom references to tens of thousands shrivel to a more modest reality. Each levy from town, district, fief, or area of special status had to be negotiated separately at a different rate, for a different duration, and on the basis of different rights and privileges, causing endless disputes in the process. Lords of duchies and counties and great baronies like Coucy paid their own men through their own treasurer, although as the war stretched on they had to be recompensed by the King.

  Knights and squires of noble estate received fixed rates of pay like other men. For banneret (a lord who led other knights under his banner), bachelor knight, and mounted squire the standard rate in the 1340s was respectively 20, 10, and 6 to 7 sous a day. A persistent problem was the need to make sure that a ruler was getting the count and quality he paid for. To this end a montre or review was held periodically, generally every month, by officials with watchful eye to see that a valet was not counted as a gentilhomme, that sound horses were not substituted for nags during the review and then withdrawn, and that pay was honestly distributed in coin and not in kind. In a loosely structured army, hierarchy of command was lacking. Apart from the King, who led in person, the permanent officials were the Constable, a kind of administrative chief of armed forces, and two Marshals of indeterminate function; otherwise, military decisions seem to have been reached by group council among the leaders.

  Because of the necessity of donning armor with all its straps and buckles, battle was a more or less fixed engagement, arranged by the logic of approaching positions. The invention
of plate armor early in the 14th century now supplemented chain mail, which was penetrable by the crossbow. While styles of armor varied and changed from one decade to the next, the basics were a suit of plate armor consisting of a chest piece, a skirt of linked hoops, and arm and leg pieces, all worn over a hauberk or shirt of chain mail and a leather or padded tunic, or a tight-fitting surcoat. Over the plate was worn a sleeveless jerkin embroidered with the coat-of-arms identifying the wearer. Chain mail covered the neck, elbows, and other joints; gauntlets of linked plates protected the hands. The helmet, formerly open over the face, now had the added protection of a visor hinged by removable pins at the brow or on the side. Weighing seven to eleven pounds, it was dark and stuffy inside, despite eye slits and ventilation holes. The weight of all the added protection was somewhat compensated by a smaller shield that allowed greater freedom of action.

  “A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse’s backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons. He began battle with the lance used for unhorsing the enemy, while from his belt hung a two-handed sword at one side and an eighteen-inch dagger on the other. He also had available, either attached to his saddle or carried by his squire, a longer sword for thrusting like a lance, a battle-ax fitted with a spike behind the curved blade, and a club-headed mace with sharpened, ridged edges, a weapon favored by martial bishops and abbots on the theory that it did not come under the rule forbidding clerics “to smite with the edge of the sword.” The war-horse carrying this burden was itself armored by plates protecting nose, chest, and rump and caparisoned with draperies that got in the way of its legs. When his horse was felled, the knight, weighed down by his armor and tangled in weapons, shield, and spurs, was likely to be captured before he could manage to rise.

  Tactics on the continent were simply the cavalry charge of knights followed by hand-to-hand fighting on foot, sometimes preceded or supplemented by archers and infantry, both of which the knights despised. In the Scottish wars, however, the English had found that foot soldiers equipped with the longbow and trained to keep a disciplined line could, by aiming at the horses, throw back a charge of mounted knights. A really useful discovery of this kind will take precedence over class disdain. Given the constant intercourse between France and England, the French must have seen the longbow in use, evidently without giving thought to its implications for themselves. French chivalry refused to concede a serious role in war to the non-noble, even though the Normans had once captured England by virtue of the archer who shot Harold through his eye.

  The French too used archers and crossbowmen, usually hired companies of Genoese who made the crossbow a specialty, but when their blood was up, they hated to give the crossbow the scope for action that would take the edge off the clash of knights. Chivalry maintained that the combat of warriors must be personal and bodily; missiles that permitted combat at a distance were held in scorn. The first archer, according to a 12th century song, was “a coward who dared not come close to his foe.” Nevertheless, when it came to fighting commoners as at Cassel in 1328, the French had given their crossbowmen the tactical scope that accounted for that victory.

  The crossbow, made of wood, steel, and sinew, and pulled by aid of the archer’s foot in a stirrup and a hook or winding handle attached to his belt, or by a complicated arrangement of winches and pulleys, shot a bolt of great penetrating power, but the bow was slow and cumbersome to wield and heavy to carry. The crossbowman usually carried about fifty bolts with him into action, and his equipment en route had to be transported by wagon. Owing to the long wind-up, the crossbow was in fact more useful in static situations such as clearing ramparts in sieges than in open battle. A charge of knights willing to take some losses could generally shatter the crossbowmen’s line. Although its mechanical power when first invented had been frightening so that it was banned by the Church in 1139, the crossbow had continued in use for 200 years without threatening the knights’ mailed dominion.

  Protected by plate armor and the pride of chivalry, the noble felt himself invulnerable and invincible and became increasingly contemptuous of the foot soldier. He believed that commoners, being excluded from chivalry, could never be relied upon in war. As grooms, baggage attendants, foragers, and road-builders—the equivalent of engineer corps—they were necessary, but as soldiers in leather jerkins armed with pikes and billhooks, they were considered an encumbrance who in a sharp fight would “melt away like snow in sunshine.” This was not simple snobbism but a reflection of experience in the absence of training. The Middle Ages had no equivalent of the Roman legion. Towns maintained trained bands of municipal police, but they tended to fill up their contingents for national defense with riff-raff good for nothing else. Abbeys had better use for their peasants than to employ their time in military drill. In any epoch the difference between a rabble and an army is training, which was not bestowed on foot soldiers called up by the arrière-ban. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.

  On August 26, 1346, the English and French armies met at Crécy in Picardy 30 miles inland from the coast. Like the clash in another August in 1914, the battle opened an era of augmenting violence and disintegrating control. It had not been planned by the victors. Informed of the great host that was gathering around the French King in answer to his summons, Edward showed no desire for a confrontation, or at least not without first securing his retreat. Turning away from Paris, he marched northwestward toward the Channel coast, presumably making for Flanders, where he could be sure of ships. If that was his objective, it was not likely to make him King of France.

  The French army by forced marches caught up with the English before they could reach the sea, but not before Edward, realizing he would have to fight, took up a good defensive position on a broad hill above the village of Crécy. So confident were the French nobles before the battle that they talked of whom they would take prisoner among their opponents, whose repute and combat records they knew from tournaments. Only King Philip was irresolute. “Mournful and anxious,” he seemed to fear some further treason after the defections of Brittany and Harcourt, or some other hidden peril.

  Camping too far from the enemy on the night before combat, his troops did not reach the battlefield until four P.M., with the sun in their faces and at the enemy’s back. The crossbowmen were tired and complaining after the long march, and their bowstrings were wet from a sudden storm, whereas the English archers had protected their bowstrings by rolling them up under their helmets. What followed on the French side was a chaos of mindless audacity, bad luck, mistakes, indiscipline, and the knights’ chronic disease of bravado, intent on proving valor devoid of tactical sense or organized plan.

  Seized by last-minute advice to postpone action until the next day, Philip issued orders for the vanguard to turn back and the rear guard to halt, but he was not obeyed. Without giving the crossbowmen a chance to soften the English line, the forward knights plunged uphill against the enemy. Out of range of their targets and pierced by English arrows, the Genoese crossbowmen fell back, throwing down their bows. The King, who on sighting the English changed color “because he hated them,” lost control of the situation. Seeing the Genoese flee, either he or his brother, the Count d’Alençon, shouted, “Slay these rascals who get in our way!” while his knights “in haste and evil order” slashed at the archers in their effort to cut a way through. Out of this terrible tangle in their own ranks, the French launched attack after attack upon the enemy but the disciplined line of England’s longbowmen, stiffened by the long practice their weapon required, held firm and sowed confusion and death by their missiles. Then English knights advanced on foot, preceded by archers and supported by pikemen and murderous Welsh with long knives who went among the fallen and slew them on the ground. The Prince of W
ales fought at the head of one battle group while King Edward retained command from a windmill on the hilltop. Through the failing light and on through darkness until midnight the melee continued until King Philip, wounded, was led away by the Count of Hainault, who said to him, “Sire, lose not yourself willfully” and, taking his horse’s bridle, pulled him from the field. With no more than five companions, the King rode through the night to a castle whose seneschal, summoned to open his gate, demanded the name of the summoner. “Open your gate quickly,” said the King, “for this is the fortune of France.”

  Dead upon the field lay some 4,000 of the French army, perhaps including Enguerrand de Coucy VI. Among the fallen were the greatest names of French and allied chivalry: the Count d’Alençon, brother of the King, Count Louis de Nevers of Flanders, the Counts of St. Pol and Sancerre, the Duke of Lorraine, the King of Majorca, and, most renowned of all, King John the Blind of Bohemia, whose crest of three ostrich feathers with the motto “Ich dien” was taken by the Prince of Wales and attached to his title thereafter. Charles of Bohemia, the blind King’s son and future Emperor, less rash than his father, saw what was coming and escaped.

  It was no lack of prowess that defeated the French and allied knights. They fought as valiantly as the English, for knights were much the same in all countries. England’s advantage lay in combining the use of those excluded from chivalry—the Welsh knifemen, the pikemen, and, above all, the trained yeomen who pulled the longbow—with the action of the armored knight. So long as one side in the contest made use of this advantage while the other side did not, the fortunes of war were to remain unbalanced.