A Great and Glorious Adventure (25 page)
Read A Great and Glorious Adventure Online
Authors: Gordon Corrigan
In the French countryside, those magnates who were still in control of their estates and had to raise money either for their own ransoms or for those of their relatives, and for the eventual
ransom of Jean II, began to put even more pressure on their tenants and peasants, who were already taxed almost to extinction. Finally, the worm turned. It began in the Beauvaisis – now the
département
of Oise – in 1358 when the peasants, exploited beyond endurance, rose up and attacked their masters with whatever weapons they could find. It appears to have been
a spontaneous rising, and in savagery it presaged the French Revolution over four centuries later, but unlike the latter it did not have a corps of the middle class and educated to lead it, at
least not at first. Horrific bloodshed and disruption were caused by the
Jacquerie
,
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mainly directed against the nobility, the clergy and any
owners of property. Lynchings and burnings spread, and, as the movement expanded into Champagne and Picardy, the reports of the doings of the disaffected became more and more lurid. One tale
circulating
told of a lady being gang-raped and then forced to eat the roasted flesh of her husband (at least they roasted him first). In the past, there had been regular
outbreaks of defiance of authority in rural France, sometimes with violence, but they had usually fizzled out in a few days with little harm done. Here, however, the peasants themselves appear to
have been so shocked by the excesses of what they had done that they had no option but to keep going, even attracting the support of some townsmen and minor nobles – who no doubt thought that
they could thereby preserve their own lives and property. Étienne Marcel tried to make common cause with them, which did him no good in the end. And when a deputation of the
Jacquerie
tried to enlist the support of Charles of Navarre, he turned his soldiers on them and slaughtered the lot.
While the
Jacquerie
were neither encouraged nor supported by Edward III – peasants massacring their betters were not to be approved of, even if the betters were French –
their activities served his purpose in that the uprising concentrated the minds of the French government and encouraged them to find a means of ending the war so that they could concentrate on
restoring order internally. France was now in a state of complete and utter confusion, with the
routiers
, the
Jacquerie
, the Navarrese, the dauphin and the citizens of Paris all
in arms and all out for what they could get. What was increasingly clear was that the
Jacquerie
was a threat to any sort of established order, and, when Charles of Navarre and noblemen
whose castles had not been stormed began to organize themselves, the armies of peasants could not stand against them. Although the destruction was immense – eighty castles and manors
destroyed between Soissons and Paris alone
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– by mid-June the rebellion was over and retribution began, with the vengeful nobility meting
out punishment every bit as unpleasant as that inflicted by the rebellious peasants and finding novel ways to execute their leaders. The result of the rising, which was seen as threatening
everyone’s way of life (except, of course, that of the downtrodden peasantry), was an upsurge of loyalty to the crown in the shape of the dauphin, a trickling away of Charles of
Navarre’s supporters, and second thoughts among the citizens of Paris. The latter were beginning to turn against their erstwhile leader, Étienne Marcel, who had made common cause with
Charles against the dauphin and had allowed the detachments of the army of Navarre, mainly composed of English mercenaries, into the city. On 31 July, the
mob rose, in the
name of the dauphin, and murdered Étienne and his principal lieutenants. On 2 August, the dauphin entered Paris and Charles of Navarre withdrew his army from its encampment at Saint-Denis,
looted the abbey and then marched off to Mantes to plot his next moves.
Despite the pleadings of Jean’s advisers, the terms of the treaty agreed at the Westminster conference were not agreed by the dauphin and his government, whose confidence had been restored
by the departure of Navarre and the end of the Parisians’ attempt to gain their independence. King Edward received their refusals and decided that only another military campaign would bring
the French to their senses. Accordingly, more claims were attached to those already in the treaty, including a restatement of the claim to the French crown, and an army, numbering (according to the
Chandos Herald) 10,000 men but more likely 6,000, evenly split between men-at-arms and archers, landed at Calais on 28 October 1358. It then advanced through Artois and Champagne, burning, looting
and levelling in the usual manner, as far as Rheims. One of the men-at-arms was the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, whose experiences led him to write later: ‘There is ful many a man that crieth
“Werre! Werre!” that wot ful litel what werre amounteth.’
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The army stayed at Rheims from December 1358 until January 1359, in
appalling winter conditions, and, having failed to force a surrender of that heavily fortified city, moved off to Paris. In accordance with the now standard English military practice, King Edward
took up a defensive position and tried very hard to persuade the dauphin to come out of the city and attack him. He even sent Sir Walter Manny up to the walls to shout insults at the craven French,
some of whom were beginning to learn of the inadvisability of attacking an English army in a position of their choosing and wisely resisted the offer. The only small crumb of comfort for the French
at this time was a raid on Winchelsea in March 1360, when a few French ships hove to offshore and landed men who burned the town, stayed there for one night and left again. The English had grown
complacent; no such raid had happened in twenty years and the infliction on them of the sort of terror they had been imposing on the French for many years caused short-lived panic and long-lived
indignation.
King Edward now moved off to Chartres and began to lay waste the area round about. It was the realization that the English could continue to wander all over France
dealing out death and destruction at their leisure for as long as they liked, provided they avoided fortified cities, that brought the dauphin and his advisers to their senses. Negotiations began
at Brétigny, near Chartres, in May, and in a week agreement was reached. The terms were very much the same as those in the December 1357 document, except that the ransom for Jean was reduced
to £600,000. The agreement was signed at Calais in October 1360, by the dauphin for his father and – King Edward having returned to England – by the Black Prince for his. King
Edward was to have Aquitaine, Ponthieu and Calais in full sovereignty and would drop his claim to the French throne. Once two-thirds of the ransom had been paid, raised by swingeing taxes on salt,
wine, cloth and most movable goods and by the betrothal of Jean’s eleven-year-old daughter to the son of the duke of Milan, Jean was allowed to return to France, leaving his three younger
sons behind. When John, duke of Anjou, broke his parole, returned to France and refused to come back, Jean went back to England in his son’s stead and was so well looked after that he died,
still only in his mid-forties, in the Savoy Palace in April 1364. Meanwhile, the territory had been exchanged and the Black Prince, now duke of Aquitaine, had been installed as the ruler of English
France. It seemed a very satisfactory outcome.
THE FRENCH REVIVAL
The Treaty of Brétigny marked the culmination of Edward III’s twenty-four years of campaigning in France and the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years War.
The king had stated his claim to the French crown aged twenty-four and he was now forty-seven. Poitiers was a great victory and told the world, if the world needed telling, that the English had
moved from being backward amateurs in the waging of war to being the foremost practitioners of it. The combination of professional soldiers fighting on foot with archers on the flanks was
unbeatable, and the mobility of English armies meant that the French could neither trap them, nor fight them other than on ground which favoured the English, nor starve them out – although
sometimes the latter was a close-run thing. Certainly, the Black Prince had been unable to take Rheims or Paris in 1356, but he had accepted that fact rather than become bogged down in a lengthy
siege which would have forced him to remain in one place long enough for the French to concentrate against him. Given their inability to defeat the English militarily, the French had little option
but to sue for what terms they could get: the economy was in ruins, the government had broken down, the fields could not be tilled, the population yearned for peace at any price, and Jean would
promise virtually anything to gain his freedom. From the English point of view, the gains were enormous: it was true that the claim to the French throne had been abandoned, but a third of the
kingdom definitely assured was better than the whole of the kingdom as a possibility. No one, French or English, could have predicted that in a mere fifteen years almost all the English gains would
be lost.
The Treaty of Brétigny did not stop war by surrogacy from continuing. In Brittany, the struggle between the Blois and Montfort factions was finally settled with the death of Charles of
Blois at the Battle of Auray in September 1364, when the English army was commanded by Sir John Chandos with Sir Hugh Calveley as his second-in-command. One of the prisoners taken at Auray was to
make a habit of being captured by the English and subsequently ransomed, in this case the sum agreed being paid by the French king. He was Bertrand du Guesclin, a Breton born of impoverished
gentlefolk who was the exception to the rule of French social immobility. He had come to the attention of the dauphin during the earlier fighting in the Breton wars, and eventually – although
with no great ability as a general – he would become a great French hero in a land badly needing heroes, be made constable of France and prove a constant thorn in the side of the English. On
the English side, Calveley was yet another who had risen to prominence on the strength
of his ability as a soldier. A native of Cheshire, he first fought under Sir Thomas
Dagworth in Brittany, and in the guerrilla war that followed he was twice captured and ransomed, once at the Battle of the Thirty in 1351 and again as the captain of the garrison of
Bécherel. He was a captain of archers at Poitiers and subsequently commanded a mixed force of men-at-arms and archers which became in effect a free company after the Treaty of
Brétigny. Calveley and his company served in Spain as mercenaries in the army of the king of Castile, who was an ally of Edward III’s, before returning to Brittany. At some stage,
Calveley was knighted and success at Auray brought him the grateful thanks of John de Montfort, now duke of Brittany, and a large annual pension.
In 1361, the Black Prince, now thirty, married his childhood friend Joan, countess of Kent and widow of Sir Thomas Holland, described by the Chandos Herald as a ‘lady of great worth’
despite the fact that until recently she had been stony broke. This was in many ways an extraordinary match. No heir to the throne had taken an English bride since the Norman Conquest. Dynastic
marriages with members of foreign royal families were major diplomatic instruments in the hands of English kings, and not only did Joan have a racy past, as we have seen, but she was also the same
age as the prince and already had four living children, two sons and two daughters (a fifth, a daughter, had died in infancy). It seems, nonetheless, to have been a genuine love match, and,
surprisingly perhaps, to have been approved of by King Edward, for he instigated a petition to the pope for a dispensation to allow the marriage (the couple were cousins).