Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (41 page)

Yet his plans for a rapid campaign were frustrated; the scheme for financing the war through wool proved disastrous; problems arose both with the merchants and the collectors of the customs. The king’s financiers were growing restless, and threatened to cut off supplies. With the king out of the country, too, rumours spread of invasions from France and from Scotland. The members of the council that Edward had set up to rule England in his absence were growing fractious; the king accused them of withholding money from him, while they in turn complained that they had many expensive duties to perform including the defence of the realm. It was said that the king was growing as reckless and as extravagant as his father. ‘I counsel that ye begin no war in trust of your riches,’ Dame Prudence declared in Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Melibee’, ‘for they . . . suffice not wars to maintain.’

In 1340, three years after the declaration of war with France, a taxpayers’ revolt was organized in the parliament house. It was said that ‘a king ought not to go forth from his kingdom in manner of war unless the commune of his realm agree to it’. The parliament had become the institution that, according to the injunctions of Magna Carta, gave the consent of the realm to fresh taxation. Successive kings, under force of circumstance, had accepted its role.
The knights and townsmen had already begun humbly to submit petitions from their various neighbourhoods, to which appropriate royal legislation came in response. It was a system of quid pro quo.

The parliament had already granted heavy taxation for the first three years of the conflict. In the summer of 1339 the king asked for a further grant of £300,000. The Commons, made up of the townsmen and the knights of the shires, prevaricated; they asked leave to return to their own districts, and consult the people. When they assembled again, in the early months of 1340, they offered a grant in return for certain concessions from the king. They had in effect distinguished themselves from the Lords. They were beginning to feel their power.

Their principal submission was that the finances of the nation should be ordered and controlled by a council of magnates answerable to parliament. It was to be directed by John Stratford, the archbishop of Canterbury. The king, in desperate need for the means to wage war, conceded this demand. As long as he was fighting, he was happy. His agreement also marks the moment when the Commons became a coherent political assembly that gradually began to formulate its own rules of procedure. War, and taxation, had brought them together. The parliament itself was now supposed to meet on a regular basis; it was also the assembly in which the council of the nation, and the custodians of taxation, were chosen. Thirty-five years later, it would be strong enough to impeach the king’s principal councillors. The idea of an independent parliament, then, was part of the consequence of the Hundred Years War.

On 22 June 1340, Edward returned to the Low Countries in the full expectation that hostilities would soon be resumed. Stratford would ensure that the money reached him. Yet the fresh exactions of the king provoked hostility and violence throughout the country; the collectors were supposed to take up 20,000 sacks of wool, from the nine most productive sheep-rearing counties, and sell them to the local merchants. But the people successfully resisted this extortion. As a result the king was not receiving the aid he had expected; he could not pay his debts, or his troops, and his active campaign came to an end.

In his fury he turned upon Archbishop Stratford. He sailed
back to England and, in the middle of the night of 30 November, he suddenly arrived at the Tower of London. He asked for the constable, but the absence of that official confirmed the king’s sense that his realm was not being properly administered. Edward accused the archbishop of wilfully withholding money; he believed, or professed to believe, that Stratford had wished to sabotage the French campaign of which the cleric disapproved. The senior members of the council were dismissed. Stratford fled back to Canterbury, where he was in theory safe from the king’s wrath.

Then Edward, in defiance of his previous pledge to parliament, took control of the country without consultation. He embarked upon a reassessment of the whole administration, and in particular of its financial resources; he appointed new collectors of the wool supplies; he levied fines on individuals, and communities, that had evaded the tax. On 29 December Stratford entered the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral, and delivered a sermon in English defending his actions. He declared that he was only enforcing the collective will of the parliament and that the king had been swayed by evil councillors. He alluded to the Magna Carta, with the clear implication that the king had broken its provisions. He knew that the nation was supporting him, and he demanded a trial by his peers. He was effectively defying the king to do his worst.

The king then called a parliament, to which he reluctantly admitted Stratford himself. The archbishop was formally reconciled to the king – he was received ‘into the king’s grace’ – and the work of parliamentary negotiation began. In return for an extra 10,000 sacks of wool, Edward agreed that his chief ministers would in future be approved by the magnates and the council. Accommodations and compromises were agreed on every side; the king was reconciled to the Lords on the condition that he would be their good lord, and he eventually reached a settlement with the Commons on the understanding that he would ‘rule them by leniency and gentleness’. He had a more astute understanding of political realities than his father had ever shown. He knew when to turn his cheek. It was only to be expected that, five months later, he reversed his concessions on the grounds that he had granted them unwillingly. Within two years he had regained most of his power. In his duel with parliament he had survived.

The war with France continued like a piece of vast background music. In the summer of 1340 the English fleet surprised and destroyed French ships on the Flanders coast at Sluys. It was the first notable victory of the conflict and after the battle the king issued a gold coin, called the noble, in which he was portrayed standing on board a warship. Here was the image of the master of the seas. His reign had become identified with the pursuit of war. No French minister had dared to inform Philip VI of the English victory, and it was decided that only his Fool could break the news with impunity. So the Fool declared to his master that the English were arrant cowards; when asked the reason he replied that they, unlike the French, had not leapt into the sea.

The defeat of the French fleet meant that the English were at liberty to invade by means of the Channel. Yet Edward’s squabbles with his allies, and with the Flemish in particular, meant that no immediate successes were achieved. The French forces ducked and wove, refusing to be drawn into battle. This was in fact to become the pattern of the French defence. In the autumn of 1340 a truce was agreed. But it could not last. There were inconclusive hostilities in Brittany, and in Gascony, over the succeeding few years and then in 1346 Edward made the decisive move of invading Normandy; he hoped to join his Flemish allies in an assault upon Paris or perhaps a march into Gascony. He kept the French king guessing.

On 11 July 1346, 8,000 men (half of them archers) sailed south from Portsmouth to northern France. They marched through Normandy on their way to Paris, plundering and wasting everything in their path. They advanced as far as the suburbs of the capital, where they turned north towards Calais in order to join forces with the Flemish allies. Philip VI marched rapidly across the great northern plain of the Somme in an effort to divert or destroy them; on the afternoon of 26 August, he attacked them as they assembled near the wood of Crécy-en-Ponthieu. An impetuous army of Genoese crossbowmen and French cavalry were beaten back by the English forces and, in the ensuing mêlée, the French army was effectively crushed.

Gunpowder cannon were for the first time used in battle,
causing more panic than death; but the palm of victory must be awarded to Edward’s archers who, wielding longbows, defeated the knights of feudal chivalry. It had been a day of partial eclipse, of thunder and of lightning; at its close the French knights lay on the field, many of them despatched by the use of long and slender daggers known as ‘misericords’ or mercy killers that ripped open the body from the armpit to the heart. One among the 30,000 dead was John, the blind king of Bohemia, whose motto of
Ich dien
or ‘I serve’ was adopted by subsequent princes of Wales.

The battle of Crécy was a signal victory, of which Edward took immediate opportunity; he marched north and, nine days later, he was waiting beneath the walls of Calais. This town would be an excellent base for further incursions into French territory; it was also a convenient port for raids against French pirates. The townsmen of Calais endured almost a year of famine. The commander of the French garrison wrote to Philip VI that ‘we can find no more food in the town unless we eat men’s flesh . . . this is the last letter that you will receive from me, for the town will be lost and all of us that are within it’. The letter was intercepted before it reached the French king and was delivered to Edward; he read it, applied his personal seal and sent it on to its destination.

In the eleventh month the women, children and old people of Calais came out from the gates as ‘useless mouths’ to be removed. The English would not allow them to pass through their lines, and they were hounded back to the town ditch where they expired from want. So the town was forced to submit. The story of the six burghers of Calais, coming out with nooses around their necks and submitting to the clemency of a gracious king, may well be authentic. It is a type of political theatre at which Edward excelled.

He had already vanquished another ancient enemy. In the year of Crécy, David Bruce, or David II of Scotland, had invaded England; he had inherited the ‘old alliance’ with France, and hoped that the absence of Edward would demoralize the English forces. But at Neville’s Cross, close to Durham, the Scottish forces were overwhelmed and David Bruce himself was escorted to the Tower of London where he remained for eleven years. The Black Rood of Scotland, a piece of Christ’s cross kept in a black case, was taken
in triumph to Durham Cathedral. So Edward III was victorious over all his foes. The knights and lords now clustered around him in amity. He had become their ideal of a monarch.

Whether it meant as much to the English people is open to doubt. The war against the French represented a quarrel between two monarchs, who were members of the same family and who both spoke French as their native language. What had the affairs of princes to do with the condition of England? The people had in any case far more serious matters with which to deal when, in 1348, all the forces of infection and death were unleashed in an epidemic without parallel.

It was named as ‘the pestilence time’. The disease itself was called ‘the plague’ or ‘the Black Death’. It may not have been bubonic plague, however; it has been variously described as anthrax or influenza or a form of haemorrhagic fever. It may have been a disease that no longer exists. Contrary to popular superstition it is unlikely to have been carried by rats.

It came out of Central Asia in the early 1330s and then spread throughout the known world by means of the trade routes. It had reached Italy by 1347 and, in the summer of the following year, touched Bristol and other ports. By the autumn of 1348 it had reached London before travelling north. It manifested itself in buboes, ulcerated swellings in the groin or armpit; a contemporary described a bubo as in ‘the form of an apple, or the head of an onion . . . it seethes like a burning cinder, and is of the colour of ash’. In some cases the body erupted in abscesses filled with pus. This was accompanied by aching limbs, vomiting and diarrhoea; the victims were generally dead within three days.

They were buried in mass graves, laid side by side in long trenches, the adults carrying their dead children on their shoulders. An old belief still persists that the parts of certain graveyards must never be disturbed for fear of ‘letting out the plague’. It is not completely without justification; the spores of anthrax can survive for hundreds of years. The cemeteries of London were soon filled, and 13 acres (5.2 hectares) of land were purchased on the borders of Smithfield to be converted into a vast graveyard. One third, or
even perhaps one half, of the population died. There had never been mortality on this scale, nor has there been since. At the best estimation a population of approximately 6 million was reduced to 3 million or 4 million. It remained at this level until the early sixteenth century.

It is likely that, before the plague, the country had been overpopulated; it may even be that malnutrition actively hastened the fatalities. So on some form of Malthusian calculation the distemper freed the energies of the surviving population and increased the availability of resources. It did not seem like this at the time. According to Henry Knighton, a chronicler of the period, ‘many buildings, great and small, fell into ruins in every city, borough, and village for lack of people; likewise many villages and hamlets became desolate, not a house being left in them, all having died who dwelt there; and it was probable that many such villages would never be inhabited’. Men could not be found to work the land, so women and children were obliged to drive the plough. In a school textbook of the next generation there is a set sentence, ‘The roof of an old house had almost fallen on me yesterday.’ Ruined buildings were a familiar hazard.

A Franciscan friar, John Clyn, left an account of the period. ‘Lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time’, he wrote,