A Great and Glorious Adventure (15 page)

The English stayed at Caen for five days. Once the army was back under control, after an initial orgy of plunder and rape, it could replenish its baggage train, collect the valuables of Caen,
tend to its wounded, bury the dead, and – an opportunity of interest to those of a less rapacious nature – go and gaze at the tomb of the Conqueror. English and later British armies
would gain a reputation for misbehaviour on capturing a town – a reputation that would last well into the nineteenth century – but, as English soldiers tended to look for alcohol first
and women second, the incidence of rape was generally less than that practised by other nationalities; it was hangovers, rather than the threat of the hangman, that usually brought soldiers back to
their allegiance relatively quickly. While pausing at Caen, Edward sent orders back to England for the arraying of 1,200 archers, mainly from East Anglia, and directed that contracts should be
placed for 2,450 bows and 6,300 sheaves of arrows. Not all the men and equipment would have been replacements for losses in battle, but some of them surely were.

At the same time, 100 ships were to be impressed to replace those that had deserted, and the prisoners were sent off to England from Ustrem under the guard of the earl of Huntingdon and a
detachment of archers.
Prisoners of rank were an important asset in medieval warfare and, like the prizes taken by the Royal Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
gave the captor the chance of making a great deal of money. A man who could afford it was held for ransom and not released until his family or his subjects had paid up. While the practice of
holding men for ransom was a very old one, neither the Welsh nor the Scottish wars had produced very much profit for those taking a prisoner – blood and stones, feathers and frogs spring to
mind – but the Hundred Years War was a very different matter. Rich burgesses who had little money could buy their freedom with furs, jewels or plate, rich knights could do so with money,
poorer ones with horses or armour or land, and knights with nothing at all might actually agree to serve their captor for an agreed period of time. Arrangements for the allocation of ransom money
were usually specified in the indentures, and could range from one-third to one-half payable to the man’s lord. In the contract companies, the rule was that the man handed over one-third to
his captain, who in turn handed over one-third of his accrued takings to whomsoever he was contracted to (usually the king). Prisoners could also be sold on by a captor who wanted instant cash or
who did not want to be responsible for looking after the prisoner through the often years-long process of extracting the ransom. Some of the ransoms demanded, and paid, were very high indeed. At
Caen, the constable, the count of Eu, surrendered to Sir Thomas Holland, who then sold his prisoner to the king for £12,000, who ultimately extracted a lot more than that for the release of
the count. Sir Thomas Daniel, who took the surrender of the count of Tancarville, the chamberlain of Caen, was less fortunate: as he was a member of the Prince of Wales’s retinue, he had to
hand his prisoner over and be content with £666 down and a pension of £26.13.4 (twenty-six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence) per annum for life – not bad, but hardly
beyond the dreams of avarice. The prince eventually received £6,000 to release Tancarville.
¹⁸

The army was now ready to move on. Edward ordered that the recently impressed 100 ships and archer reinforcements were to rendezvous with him at the port of Le Crotoy, in Ponthieu, which gave
him the option of taking the army off should the situation warrant, but Le Crotoy was a good 140 miles away, and first he would have to cross the River Seine, a far greater obstacle than any
encountered so far. He might, of course, have
moved parallel to the coast, keeping in touch with the fleet, which could have transported the army across the mouth of the
Seine to Le Havre (this town posed no threat, its resident warships and the town itself having already been burned by the fleet). But Edward wished to strike inland, to show the French that the
Valois usurper could not protect them, so the army marched east, burning and looting as it went. The next obvious target would have been Évreux, but that town had a strongly fortified castle
with a garrison and the king did not want to get tied down in siege operations at this stage – he had to keep moving, and so he next took the unfortified but prosperous cloth-making town of
Louviers. From here both Froissart and Northburg list the towns on the English army’s route,
¹⁹
but in an order which makes little sense,
involving as it would have done a great deal of doubling back to no discernible purpose.

After Louviers, the intention seems to have been to cross the Seine at Pont-de-l’Arche and to advance on Rouen, then, as now, a major Norman city. Intelligence soon informed Edward that
Rouen was well garrisoned by a substantial body of men-at-arms under the count of Harcourt (whose brother, Sir Godfrey Harcourt, was serving in Edward’s army) and the count of Dreux, with a
sizeable outpost in Pont-de-l’Arche, and in any case the bridge over the river at Pont-de-l’Arche had been pulled down. The army now moved along the left (south) bank of the Seine,
heading for Vernon, looking for a crossing point and moving ever closer to Paris, while a scratch French force (which for a time at least included Philip VI) moved along the north bank destroying
the bridges. Vernon was well fortified and, although the English took the fortress of Longueville on the approaches to it, they could not take the town itself and without the town the bridge could
not be reached.

The only success to be plucked from the search for a bridge so far was a totally pointless but rather gallant little venture by the thirty-six-year-old Sir Robert de Ferrers, a Staffordshire
landowner whose command consisted of one banneret, three knights, twenty-five esquires, thirty-two mounted archers and three foot archers. Ferrers, or some of his men, found a boat on the south
side of the Seine. Ferrers packed as many men as he could into it, crossed the river and approached the castle of La Roche-Guyon on the north side of the river. The defence works of the castle were
(and are) formidable and Ferrers could not possibly have taken it with
the few men he had with him. The commander of the garrison, however, panicked, thought that
Ferrers’s little band was the vanguard of the whole English army, and instead of withdrawing into the keep, where he could have held out for months against any attacking force, surrendered
the castle and its inhabitants. The only English casualty was Sir Edward Atte Wode, who was killed by a stone thrown from the castle walls. Ferrers agreed not to take the captured nobles prisoner
in exchange for a promise that they would pay their ransoms later, recrossed the river and rejoined the army. His escapade was of no military significance whatsoever, but it demonstrated yet again
the inability of Philip VI to defend his subjects on his own territory, something that had already been made clear south of the Seine.

Philip had already made a half-hearted attempt to negotiate when a French bishop was sent to offer Edward the county of Ponthieu and the confiscated parts of Aquitaine, provided that he would
hold them as a vassal of the (Valois) king of France. This was, of course, quite unacceptable. From Vernon, the English army moved off to the next possible crossing, at Mantes, but having got there
they very sensibly ignored the sizeable body of French men-at-arms drawn up outside its walls and continued along the river, bypassing any town or castle that was defended, while razing to the
ground anything that was not. The next bridge was at Poissy, only twenty miles from Paris, and Edward got there on the evening of 12 August. That same day, Philip VI ordered the bridge to be broken
and left a few soldiers to watch the site, while the main French army marched round the bend of the Seine to the last bridge before the city, at Saint-Cloud. Although the bridge at Poissy had been
torn down, the piles were still in place, and Edward ordered the engineers to bridge the river using the piles. While timber was cut and hauled to the river, strong patrols were sent off to lay
waste the various palaces and hunting lodges that were scattered among the Parisian suburbs to the south of the river. Within two days there was a whole line of destruction running all the way from
Saint-Germain-en-Laye south-east to Boulogne on the outskirts of the city. Inside the capital there was panic, with citizens being formed into hastily organized parties to build barricades across
the streets and troops deployed to restore order.

Philip, meanwhile, was at Saint-Denis, the burial place of French kings to the north of the city, where he was assailed by differing advice on what to do
next. The tactic
of avoiding battle until the English ran out of money or men was not working; the opportunity to cross the Seine and defeat the English south of the river had been missed, another front had just
been opened from Flanders, Aquitaine was not subdued, and Philip could never afford to neglect what might be happening in Brittany. Orders were sent out to the cities and towns to send all
available troops to Paris, as Edward’s army crossed the Seine by the reconstructed bridge at Poissy and marched north. Its advance guard, commanded by Sir Godfrey Harcourt with 500
men-at-arms and 1,200 archers, all of them mounted, ran into a French army marching south. These were the troops provided by the city of Amiens marching to Paris as ordered, and, although they put
up a stout defence, they were no match for the now battle-hardened, or at least massacre-hardened, Englishmen. Many of the Amiens burgesses were killed or taken for eventual ransom, but of more
importance was the capture of their baggage train, which was well stocked with rations, wine and clothing.

The next stop for Edward’s army was Beauvais, where the usual looting and burning was entered into with gusto. The Abbey of Saint-Lucien was set on fire – whether deliberately or
accidentally is not known, although the former seems more likely – and, as Edward had issued orders that no church buildings were to be damaged, he was not pleased. He ordered the hanging of
those responsible, said to number twenty but in all probability a lot less than that – soldiers were expensive assets and could not easily be replaced. It is likely that the punishment was
dealt out to one or two known trouble-makers as a warning that, while plundering and burning was officially encouraged, discipline was still required and men were not to overstep the mark.

The army moved on, through Milly (probably Marseilles-en-Beauvais) and Grandvilliers to Poix, taking the lightly held castle at Dargies on the way. At Poix they found not one castle but two,
neither garrisoned, and when a deputation of the town’s inhabitants appeared and offered to pay a large sum of money, to be collected and delivered in the morning, if the town was spared
being put to the torch, Edward agreed. Alas, when the army moved off the next day leaving a small party behind to collect the ransom, the locals decided not to pay after all and a fight developed.
The English were getting the worst of it when a messenger on a fast horse caught up with Edward and recalled the
army. Now the town was looted and burned, and those who had
taken up arms were hanged.

Edward’s next halt was at Airaines, about three miles from the River Somme, which he would have to cross before he could make contact with the fleet. Here, not only did it seem that all
the bridges had again been destroyed, but it was reported that Philip had now assembled an army considerably bigger than Edward’s, had left Paris and by a series of forced marches of up to
twenty-five miles a day was close behind. By now, most of Edward’s foot-soldiers were mounted on captured horses, but even so the constant halts to plunder, and the need to forage far and
wide for food for the men and fodder for the horses, slowed the English down. It was now imperative to get across the Somme and either join with the fleet or head for Flanders, where an allied army
had just taken the town of Béthune. The major bridges were in Amiens and Abbeville, however, both of which were strongly held by French troops, and the main French army commanded by Philip
was moving into Amiens.

In just over six weeks, the English army had covered 400 miles – considerably more for the foragers and looters – and was now tired, short of provisions, and for the first time in
the campaign beginning to encounter partisans. Civilians, emboldened by the knowledge that the Valois army was closing up, began to ambush small foraging parties and kill any soldier foolish enough
to leave the line of march on his own. Like their successors almost six centuries later, during the German occupation, these members of the resistance made little difference to the course of the
war, but they were a nuisance and meant that sentries had to be doubled and the size of patrols increased.

Edward halted around Oisemont and scouting parties searched along the banks for a crossing, but from Pont-Rémy, just east of Abbeville, to Picquigny, just west of Amiens, the bridges were
down and the fords guarded. All along the north bank French troops swarmed and all attempts by English detachments to get across were repulsed. Then Edward was informed of a ford at Blanchetaque,
between Abbeville and the mouth of the Somme, which could apparently be crossed at low tide. It is unclear – the sources vary – whether this information came from a prisoner offered his
freedom and that of twenty of his chosen companions, or from an English soldier who had served in the area before. On 23 August, the
English army began to move to a
concentration area at Acheux, eight miles from the river, and that same day the French army began to move west from Amiens along the south bank of the river. Their hopes were high: the English
could not cross the river, and the French would trap them with far superior forces and destroy them.

Sometime during the night of 23/24 August, the English army marched, intending to get to Blanchetaque at low tide. Loading the baggage wagons and the sumpter horses in the dark took longer than
it should have, and the army was late. When the troops arrived at the river on the morning of 24 August 1346, the sun was up and the tide in: neither man nor horse could wade across, and they had
to wait until the tide turned once again. The deep and fast-flowing water was not the only problem, however, for Philip also knew about Blanchetaque and had sent one of his more competent
commanders, Godemar du Fay, with a mixed force of men-at-arms, Genoese crossbowmen and light infantry to hold the north side of the river and prevent a crossing. Froissart, with the
chronicler’s usual exaggeration, puts Godemar’s detachment at around 12,000, but it was probably nearer 500 men-at-arms and around 1,000 infantry including the Genoese.
²⁰
The French were drawn up in three ranks and it was clear that they were there to stay.