Sluys and Tournai

Before his birth it had been predicted that Edward would wear 'three crowns'. The prophecy probably meant the iron, silver and gold crowns of die Holy Roman Emperor, the title currently borne by Ludvig of Bavaria. Ludvig declined to give up his tide, but Edward was not to be outdone. He already had a good claim to wear the sovereign crown of England, and a claim on the overlordship of Scotland. To these he had added the vicarial crown. But even these three were not enough. Now, in the market square of Ghent, in Flanders, he went one better, exceeding the prophecy with a claim on a fourth crown: that of France.

In reality only his English title imparted genuine sovereignty. Scotland was almost lost. The Holy Roman Empire had proved an expensive and weak ally, and its counts, margraves and dukes had shown themselves to be undutiful subjects. And Edward had not conquered so much as an inch of French soil. Those who witnessed his proclamation as king of France on 26 January, sitting on a makeshift throne in a marketplace, might have wondered if this was another gesture, as devoid of power as the last. But Edward's French claim was a deeply serious move, for by it he was able to accept overlordship of the Flemish people, and thereby 'conquer' a part of Philip's realm (in a manner of speaking) without having to pay or fight. In shifting his friendships away from the half-hearted German leaders towards Flanders, while keeping Brabant in die alliance, he had forged a much more powerful confederacy, for Flanders and Brabant had a definite interest in English affairs through their dependence on the English wool trade. An alliance with them had the potential to last.

Claiming the throne of France was a complicated business. Not least of the problems was that of which kingdom came first. Was Edward king of 'France and England', or 'England and France'? To the modern reader this might appear a minor point, but to contemporaries it was of grave importance, for it could be construed that it implied precedence and subjection. In October 1337, when Edward had first contemplated adopting the French title, he had played safe, issuing two sets of letters, one styled 'king of France and England' and the other with the order reversed. After 1337 it had been easy to refer to Philip as 'he who calls himself king of France',

or 'our cousin, Philip de Valois'. But actually claiming the tide was much harder. Philip himself may have contributed to the problem, mocking Edward at first for quartering the arms of England - the three leopards—with the fleur de lys of France. Probably before 1340, Philip pointed out in ridicule that Edward had put the arms of the little country of England in the upper dexter quarter - the most important position - thus relegating the arms of France (the largest and richest kingdom in Christendom) to a lesser position. Edward's decision to reverse this, putting the fleur de lys prominently in the upper dexter quarter, was a direct challenge to Philip, visually demonstrating in vivid blue and gold that he, Edward, was the heir of France.

Philip's response to Edward's claim was surprise and anger. His fury reached a peak on 8 February 1340, when Edward's new seal arrived. That day Edward issued a declaration to the French people, in French, declaring that, as the Flemings had recognised him as king of France, he invited them to do so too. Now Philip could see for himself, engraved on the seal, the French arms quartered with the English. When Philip read the motto - 'Edward, by the grace of God, king of France and England' he was aghast at his audacity. Then he learnt that Edward had issued the same declaration and issued copies of his seal to all the towns in and around Flanders as well as several places in France. Realising he had been challenged and embarrassed, he ordered a search of all church doors and public places for copies of the letter, and decreed that anyone found carrying a copy was to be regarded as a traitor and hanged.

The pope too was surprised and angered by Edward's claim, stating that the 'sight of his letters, with his new tide and seal engraved with the arms of France and England, caused surprise'. He insisted that heirs of females could not inherit in France, despite the arguments laid before him by Edward's lawyers. He added that, even if they could, there were others closer to the throne than Edward. Then he went on to castigate Edward for accepting 'evil counsel'. In this way he put forward a vehement protest on behalf of his homeland, with direct accusations that those who had advised Edward were untrustworthy and that the allies of France would do Edward no end of harm.

The pope's surprise at Edward's claim was probably genuine. When Edward had first claimed the tide in October 1337, it was probably only the prompt intervention of the cardinals which had prevented him from sustaining the claim. The pope felt that his cardinals had done enough then to dissuade Edward from adopting the tide, limiting him to merely disputing Philip's right. This may have been effected through secret threats as well as more open persuasion, and, at that point, this may have included threats to unveil his father, in Italy. Now, thanks to Niccolinus Fieschi, Edward could contain this threat. Perhaps in connection with this matter, it was Niccolinus whom Edward chose to go to explain his actions to the pope. Edward's position was that Philip de Valois had made no attempts to avert war, and although Edward would have been content with a modest attempt at peace, he could see no other option but force. But shortly after Niccolinus's arrival in Avignon, the French, with the help of the pope's marshal, broke into the house in which he was staying and kidnapped him in his nightclothes. Although Benedict was very much in favour of the French at this time, he took the seizure exceptionally seriously, and placed the whole of France under an interdict until Niccolinus Fieschi was set at liberty. To suspend the religious services (including burials, marriages and baptisms), confessions and privileges of an entire kingdom on account of a single offence committed in his own household against a Genoese knight acting for the English king was extreme, to say the least. Philip complained directly about the punishment. Whatever the real purpose of Niccolinus's mission, there was more to his seizure than a violation of diplomatic immunity. He had become as important to the pope as he was to Edward. Pope Benedict hanged all those he suspected of being involved. With regard to his marshal, who committed suicide in gaol before he could be hanged, the benign pontiff had the man's body exposed on a gibbet 'for the birds to eat'.

The English were the most surprised of all by Edward's new title. Although Edward decided on a solution with regard to the order of his kingdoms - 'king of France and England' for international affairs, and 'king of England and France' for matters relating to the British Isles - not even he could justify having more than one coat of arms. For the English to know that their king had adopted the arms of France and set them above those of England was confusing and damaging to English pride. It was threatening too, because his decision to adopt this coat of arms and title was made without any reference or explanation to parliament. Combined with his demands for money and his other high-handed orders since leaving England, it was beginning to seem that he gave little thought to the people of his homeland, and respected their independence even less.

Edward's point of view was very different. Eighteen months on the Continent had broadened his horizons. Here he was, the Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire, the self-proclaimed king of France, and a champion of Christendom: it is easy to see why he did not relish the prospect of returning to a small island to beg for every tenth scraggy sheep off the South Downs. But although Edward's conceit, anger and frustration sometimes blinded him, and made him act rashly, like his self-defeating father, he had not completely lost touch with reality. His claim on France and the vicariate were only made possible by revenues derived from English land and English sheep. If he wanted to reclaim all of Gascony, including the Agenais, and defend England against any counter-attack, then those sheep were important.

Edward had planned to return to England early in December 1339, and had written to the duke of Brabant arranging to leave hostages during his absence, hoping to wriggle out of the terms of his earlier financial agreement. This did not happen, possibly because the Flanders negotiations took longer than expected, possibly because the duke of Brabant refused him permission to leave, or possibly due to Edward deciding that his proclamation to the French throne had to be made while he was still in Flanders, on French sovereign territory. Whichever it was, events were now moving quickly, and even Edward was having difficulty maintaining control. Stuck in Ghent, he probably convinced himself that he could rely on past decisions of parliament to support his adoption of the French tide, and that a belated explanation would be acceptable. But his first inclination -to return to England and do his explaining up front - was the better one. In January the commons again refused to grant him a new subsidy. They would confer further and give him a formal answer in February. Such continued resistance from mere commoners had never before been voiced in an English parliament, and it alarmed him. He needed to return to England straightaway.

Edward landed in England on 21 February 1340, having left his heavily pregnant queen in Ghent. Two days earlier the commons had returned their final verdict. They had consulted with those they represented and they would grant no further taxation without concessions. Adapting quickly to the sensibilities of the English, and aware that these men of the shires and towns regarded themselves as representing those who had chosen them - a new development in itself - Edward issued a summons for them to attend another parliament at which he could address their grievances. In order to pre-empt criticism over setting the arms of France above those of England, he explained in the writ of summons that it had not been his intention to prejudice the kingdom of England by assuming the tide of France. Indeed, by 29 March, when parliament gathered in his presence for the first time in three years, Edward was in an attentive, concession-ready mode. He was prepared to say what the people wanted to hear, and to grant whatever they demanded.

Parliament had been worried by Edward's repeated high-handedness, and it assembled with a view to listing all of its many demands. Edward had only one requirement: money. If the commons wanted reform, they would have to agree first to finance Edward's war, for that was the bedrock of his policy: to keep the enemies of England on the defensive and in their own lands. To this the commons did agree. In fact they did more than just agree, they encouraged him and supported him in this policy by granting him every ninth sheep, fleece and sheaf for two years.8 Those who lived in forests and wastes, and foreign merchants, were to be taxed at a fifteenth of their goods, but it was stressed that it was not the wish of the king, nor of the magnates, nor of the commons, that this tax of a fifteenth should be extended to 'poor cottagers or those who lived by their labour' (this was the first time tax relief had been granted for the poor). Parliament also granted a duty of forty shillings on every sack of wool, every three hundred sheepskins and every last of leather exported. This generosity permitted parliament to ask for much in return. Liberties were confirmed, debts to the Crown were pardoned, and delays in the administration of justice were ordered to be dealt with. The use of standard English weights and measures was implemented throughout the kingdom. The method of appointing of sheriffs — widely hated officers of state — was reformed. The Walton Ordinances, which Edward had ordered when leaving England in 1338, were wholly repealed. The outdated custom of Englishry was dispensed with forever. Purveyance was dealt with, as well as rights of presentation to church benefices. A permanent baronial committee, appointed by parliament, was established to oversee all royal taxation and expenditure Lastly, the question of the subjection of England to the kingdom of France was firmly and unambiguously settled. Edward undertook that 'the realm of England never was or ought to be in the obedience of the kings of France' and 'that our realm of England and the people of the same shall never be made obedient to us, nor our heirs and successors, as kings of France'.

This process of creating legislation - responding to social demands in return for extraordinary taxation - was effectively selling laws. As a result, it has frequently been attacked as a haphazard legislative programme. It certainly suggests that Edward had no domestic legislative agenda of his own. But we have to ask whether a responsive approach to lawgiving was a negative thing. After all, most modern laws are passed in reaction to changing social circumstances. In April 1340 Edward was in no position to know what was required in England; he had been overseas for almost two years. All he knew was that he had to restore his standing in parliament. So the relatively free hand he gave to representatives to set the legislative agenda was not simply due to his need for taxation. It follows that he cannot be credited with the reforms of 1340 except in one important respect: he allowed these statutes to be enrolled. For this his contemporaries were prepared to give him some credit. They knew it was something his father would not have done.

*

On 16 April 1340 Edward was jousting at Windsor Castle. Unexpectedly, a messenger arrived from Flanders. Five days earlier, two of Edward's closest companions - the earls of Salisbury and Suffolk — had left the main army and set off to spy out the defences of Lille. They had had with them thirty men-at-arms, and some mounted archers. They were spotted, however, and as they moved around the town, they were gradually surrounded. When the garrison closed in, they were trapped, with their backs to the moat. They had drawn their weapons and fought furiously, even until dark. But when sixty or more men lay dead on the ground, the last seven were overpowered. One - a renegade French knight - was dragged over to a nearby tree and hanged there and then. Both earls and the remaining four men-at-arms were taken captive.

Salisbury and Suffolk - his friends, Montagu and Ufford - to Edward this must have come as a shock. But there was worse news to follow. The earl of Salisbury had been his principal commander in the Low Countries, and his capture flung the whole region into disarray. The French destroyed the towns of Haspres and Escaudoeuvres and many villages in Hainault. In May they attacked Valenciennes itself, the capital of Hainault, burning and destroying everything in the vicinity.'4 Sir Walter Manny's brother, Giles, was captured and killed. An allied attack on Tournai failed. Incursions into England from Scotland meant that now, unable to spare troops to defend the border, Edward had to sue for a lasting peace in Scotland, against his wishes. In addition to all this, Philip's fleet was so strong that Edward had to prohibit the export of wool for fear of it being stolen by the French.

To Edward there was only one solution. He had to return to France as quickly as possible and lead an attack on the French army. If he did not, Flanders would be lost to him, and his wife too, still a hostage in Ghent, recovering from giving birth to John, later known as John of 'Gaunt' (Ghent). Edward needed ships, particularly the large Mediterranean galleys which Philip had been able to requisition from the Genoese. He wrote to the pope exhorting him to make sure Niccolinus Fieschi was released from prison so he could arrange for the commissioning of vessels. He also wrote to the Venetians, asking them specifically for forty galleys.

It seems that Edward was just beginning to panic. In his letter to the Venetians he was at pains to point out why they should supply him with galleys and not Philip. He explained the cause of the war - that Philip had occupied his lands in France - and added that:

On this account, King Edward calls upon the said Philip to fight a pitched battle. But for the avoidance of reproach hereafter on account of so much Christian bloodshed, he at the commencement of the war offered, by letter, to settle the dispute either by single combat or with a band of six or eight, or any number he pleased on either side; or that, if he be the true king of France as asserted by him, he should stand the test of braving ravenous lions who would not harm a true king, or perform the miracle of touching for the evil; if unable, to be considered unworthy of the kingdom of France.

It all sounds very self-confident, bragging even. Edward was portraying himself as a leader prepared to risk his life for his political beliefs. But on reflection it is all a little too bombastic; these after all were very distant and very dignified correspondents on the Adriatic. This need to justify himself, personally, in a request for ships to a distant state, was inappropriate. This is especially so when one remembers that Philip was much older than Edward. Edward's need to show that he was a brave and divinely chosen king, brave enough to challenge Philip to single combat, protected by God from the hunger of beasts, hints at a self-conscious need to convince others of his greatness. Such a protest of bravery suggests self-doubt.

The reason for Edward's worry is not hard to find. His whole strategy was collapsing, economically and militarily. On 27 May Edward arranged for his son again to act as regent during his absence overseas. The council of regency was to be headed by the archbishop of Canterbury and the earl of Huntingdon. But they had only been appointed for a few days when the archbishop heard from a messenger of the count of Guelderland that the French were gathering their ships in a great fleet in the Channel to trap Edward when he returned to Flanders. Genoese, Picard, Spanish and French vessels were all drawing together to present an impenetrable wall. Philip had decided that Edward was the cause of, and the solution to, his problems. To capture him now became his highest priority. The archbishop conscientiously told Edward straightaway, but in so doing he made the mistake of telling him what he should and should not do. There were too many ships, he explained, for Edward to consider attacking them. He must remain in England. At this Edward's already-frayed nerves gave way. He exploded in rage at the archbishop, accusing him of being against the war and dictating to him. Faced with this onslaught, the archbishop immediately resigned his office of Chancellor. Edward coldly accepted his resignation, and called two of his most trusted naval advisers to him, Robert Morley, admiral of the northern fleet, and John Crabb. They confirmed what the archbishop had said, saying it was too dangerous to cross the Channel. Edward was furious. 'You and the archbishop are in league, preaching me a sermon to stop me crossing! Let me tell you this: I will cross, and you who are frightened where there is no fear, you may stay at home.’ The two naval advisers then said that if the king were to cross, then he and those who crossed with him would be facing almost certain death. But they would follow, even if it cost them their lives.

The chronicler who recorded the above lines was probably trying to accentuate Edward's bravery. However, he did not need to alter the facts to portray Edward as a brave man. Edward was all the braver because he did what he did despite his fear. The inappropriate stresses in the letter to Venice, his lack of money, elements of political misjudgement, his shortage of troops, his giving up of the Scottish war, his admission that the seas were too dangerous to risk the export of wool, the capture of two of his best friends by the French and the risk of losing his wife and son at Ghent, all suggest that now he was under extreme pressure. Given this it is truly impressive that Edward not only gathered a fleet but instilled in his men the belief that they were sailing to Flanders to engage and defeat the enemy. That he was able to inspire them, despite knowing the scale of the task facing them, is astonishing. There were two hundred ships and galleys in the enemy fleet at the mouth of the River Zwin, with nineteen thousand fighting men aboard. Two of the French ships - the Christopher and the Edward - had once been the pride of his own navy. He himself had only about 120-147 ships and they were mostly much smaller than the large galleys and warships of the French fleet, and fewer than twelve thousand fighting men when he gathered them all at Harwich.

On 20 June, one week late, Edward stepped aboard his largest remaining ship, the Thomas and received his new great seal from the archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop apologised to Edward. Edward accepted the apology and reinstated him as Chancellor, but the prelate, having thought over his position, would not accept. He was too old, he said. He could have added that he was too old to argue politics with a twenty-eight-year-old king who annually made a pilgrimage to see the point of the sword which had killed Thomas Becket, an earlier archbishop of Canterbury. For a second time Edward accepted his resignation. He appointed the archbishop's brother, Robert Stratford, instead. Then, resolved to fight the French, he gave the order for his fleet to sail towards Flanders.

The ships of the fleet all came together over the next two days, keeping close. Small wooden vessels bobbed up and down around Edward's cog: tiny by comparison with some of the vessels they would be facing. Nineteen of the French ships - including a few giant galleys hired from the Genoese - were said to have been larger than anything hitherto seen in the Channel.

Late on the next day, Friday 23 June, as the English approached the Zwin estuary, they all saw for themselves. There was no more arrogant bragging or self-delusion. Every man in the fleet could see what stood between them and their purpose. Masts like a forest rose up before them in the evening light. The ships' prows were all armoured with wooden castles, one after the other, all in a row, totally blocking the mouth of the River Zwin.

Edward gave the order for the fleet to drop anchor, and wait the night. The next few hours cannot have been easy for him or his men, trying to sleep with the movement of the ship, each half-listening for a surprise night attack. No sound but the waves lapping at the side of the boat and the low voices of those talking about strategies for the morning. No refuge from the thoughts of the danger that lay ahead. For the women Edward had brought to attend to his wife and newborn son, it must have been a troubling experience. They knew the horrific consequences if they were captured. Aware of their fears and vulnerability, the king ordered them to be kept well back from the battle.

In the morning Edward saw that the enemy ships had not moved overnight. As the sun came up, he and his men waited for them to leave the estuary, to sail towards him. He probably hoped that they would do what the mounted knights at Dupplin Moor had done: charge into the sights of his archers on the flanks. But the French did not move. Their greatest and largest ships were placed at the front, defensively. If Edward wanted to land in Flanders, he would have to take the fight to them.

Still he waited. It was 24 June, the feast of St John the Baptist. Facing the French, the English archers would have looked into the sun. So Edward continued to wait, close to the coast. He knew that if he sailed north, the French could sail between him and the midday sun. Only in the early afternoon, when he knew that the sun would be behind his ships for the rest of the day, and the wind and the tide were with him, did he give the signal to advance. The first of the three lines of English ships sailed forward, the Thomas in their centre, with Edward on board and with the new royal banner of England and France, resplendent in red, blue and gold above him.

Slowly he came within arrowshot of the huge French ships. The French and Genoese crossbowmen waited. The English loosed their arrows. The greater range and the faster speed of the English longbows swept the decks of the French vessels. The crossbowmen were powerless to put up a line of fire. Even with the rising and falling of the boats, the English arrows tore through the lines of men on the French vessels. Realising that the impetus lay with them, the English sailed their ships into the French line and hurled their grappling hooks over the sides, drawing them together. The French responded, sending galleys forward to pick off some of the leading English ships. Four great galleys armed with springalds (giant catapults) sailed towards one English ship, the Oliver, and fired large amounts of stone shot into its sails and across the decks of the vessel. Soon many aboard the Oliver were killed or wounded. But Edward gave orders to respond to the challenge, and several English ships reached the beleaguered boat, driving off the galleys.

Over die next few hours it became clear that to judge the armies by the numbers of ships and men had been misleading. The first line of the French fleet blocked the second line from attacking, and they blocked the third line. All the English ships massed in an attack on the leading French vessels. The men who now rushed from the English on to the French and Spanish ships were hardened fighters. Foremost among them were the earl of Huntingdon, Sir Walter Manny and John Crabb: men used to warfare at sea as well as on land. The men they commanded had marched with Edward against the Scots. They had marched with Edward against Philip at La Flamengrie. They had thought, talked and dreamed of war for the last ten years. Now, at last, they saw that a momentous victory was within reach. It was as if Edward was a sacred leader who could only lead them to victory, like Alexander. He stood on the deck of the Thomas, shouting orders, undaunted, even when a French spear struck him through his thigh. Very soon the Christopher had a grappling iron hurled on to its deck, and as the English archers on an adjacent vessel let loose volleys of arrows to pin down the Genoese crossbowmen and to curb the sailors throwing down stones from the mastheads, the English men-at-arms scrambled on board.21 A great shout went up from the English when they saw the French flag torn down from the Christopher. It was all the inspiration they needed.

Late that afternoon, when the foremost English vessels broke through the first French line, the second line was open to attack. Seeing the disaster unfolding, the third line fled that evening. The men of Flanders, who had been watching from the shore, themselves rushed to their boats and put out into the estuary. Attacked from both sides, and with very little chance of sailing around the island of Cadsand and away from the carnage, the majority of the French had no option but to fight to the death. Many threw themselves into the water and struggled to shore, where the Flemings caught and mutilated them. For many more there was no retreat, for their leather or metal armour would have drowned its wearer. And this being warfare at sea, which held special fears for men-at-arms, there were no chivalric courtesies. Probably seventeen thousand Frenchmen were killed or drowned, including both commanders of the French fleet. One of the French admirals was captured alive, but his skills rendered him too dangerous to ransom. Edward ordered the man to be hanged from the mast of his own ship.

It was the most extraordinary victory, and one for which Edward could take the full credit. Not only had he fought in the front line against heavy odds, the decision to sail had been his, the martial experience and ethos of his men had been down to him, and the strategic use of archers had been his. But even more than these, his leadership was responsible for this victory. He had inspired his men to take on a much larger and better-equipped fleet, knowing that the penalty for failure was death. He may have been half-mad with anger, frustration and worry when he had resolved to set sail; nonetheless he had convinced himself and his men that he could win. In his first great battle against the French - the battle of Sluys, as it came to be known — Edward captured 166 ships. Only twenty-four escaped. He had destroyed French naval supremacy in the Channel.

*

In London they could not believe the news. Only the previous October they had been driving piles and stakes into the Thames, fortifying the city, and arranging for church bells to be rung in warning, fully expecting to see two hundred French ships come sailing up the river to burn the city. Now that enemy fleet no longer existed. They could not believe it until a letter from Edward spelled it out for them. In Ghent too there was great rejoicing. Obviously the men he had led to victory themselves did the most celebrating, 'making much noise and much joy from the instruments they had brought'. Edward himself was deeply affected, and gave thanks to God over and over again. It was a propitious day; he had received victory by divine clemency: it was a great miracle. Thanks were given to God 'who had shown mercy to Edward in his great danger'.2'' The significance of it being the feast of St John the Baptist was not lost on Edward either (although it was probably a coincidence that his newborn son had been christened John shortly before). Thanks to that saint were offered in abundance. Edward could not walk or ride because of his thigh injury, and had to stay on board die Thomas for two weeks, but, if he had been able to, he would have no doubt gone on a pilgrimage straightaway. He did not neglect to send a letter to all the archbishops and bishops in England informing them of his victory and desiring their prayers. And he wrote to his son with news of the victory, stressing that the Christopher and the previously captured vessels had been retaken together with several other ships as large as die Christopher. This was news not just of a victory but of an improved platform for English trade, for it hugely increased die seaborne defences and security of the English wool fleet. As soon as he was well enough, he proceeded to the shrine of the Holy Blood at Bruges and the church of the Virgin Mary at Aardenburg to give thanks for his safe delivery.28 Only then did he progress to Ghent to see Philippa and his new son.

Edward had spent the time laid up with his injury discussing with van Artevelde how best to prosecute the next stage of the war. The sieges of Tournai and Saint-Omer, which had been planned earlier in the year, remained the top objectives. These were both French-controlled towns on the Flemish border, both of strategic significance to Flanders and of great symbolic value to Edward. Tournai in particular was fanatically loyal to Philip. There was no time to lose. Despite his recent victory, the archbishop of Canterbury had written to say that the council was having difficulty in gathering the wool to fund the expedition. The Peruzzi and Bardi banks were also failing to meet part of a loan agreed for the expenses of the royal household. Edward knew he had to keep the momentum going to avoid a repetition of the 1339 fiasco. He split his army into two parts. One, the smaller, was to attack Saint-Omer under the command of Robert d'Artois. He himself would command the other in an assault on Tournai when he was fit enough.

The expedition began badly. Robert d'Artois was an old man unused to Edward's new strategic thinking and unable to organise and inspire the English archers and men-at-arms. He was not trusted by the Flemish infantry either. He sought to take on the French with traditional methods, and was heavily defeated. Many valuable troops were lost to the alliance, and only remnants of the army made their way back to Edward. The siege did not just fail, it did not begin.

Edward reached Tournai on 23 July, one month after Sluys. As he and his allies were taking up positions around the city, it became clear that it was well-prepared to sustain a siege. Its massive walls had been built for just such a purpose. The River Scheldt ran through the centre of die city, making it impossible to deprive it of water. No attempt to take it by force had ever succeeded. More recently, Philip had stationed a strong French garrison there to galvanise the resistance of the twenty thousand inhabitants. The suburbs had been burnt in advance of the allies' arrival. It looked as though it would be a long siege.

Edward, still high after his victory at Sluys, decided the best way to keep the momentum going would be to challenge Philip to a duel. This was what he claimed to have done already in his letter to the Venetians. Now he actually issued such a challenge. On 26 July he sent a letter to Philip, 'count of Valois'. In it he demanded the throne of France, and complained that Philip had violently withheld from him his rightful inheritance. He went on to say that, since the quarrel was between the two men themselves, 'let the controversy between us be fairly decided by ourselves, body to body, that the great nobility and valour of each other may be seen before all men'. Failing that, he offered a pitched battle between each king and a hundred men. And failing that, a pitched battle between their two armies before the walls of Tournai. The sooner Edward could have a positive and decisive victory on land, the less the cost to him, and the sooner he could advance negotiations into his real object: the return of all the lands he had lost since his coronation.

Philip's reply was to pretend that he knew no one who answered to the name of Philip de Valois. It was a dull response, and it frustrated Edward, who clearly took pride in his being prepared to issue a personal challenge as a king. Everything now pointed to Tournai as where the great land battle would take place. It fell to Edward and his allies to subdue the city as quickly as possible. Against a city whose burghers themselves manned its defences and who volunteered to go out on raiding parties to attack the English, that was not going to be an easy task. It was 26 August - a whole month later - before any determined assault was made on the city walls. Two thousand Flemish sought to break through the northern defences. Despite its weakening state, they failed. They failed again a week later.

As the siege went on, Edward grew more and more disillusioned and angry. His money supplies had again dried up. The German allies who were doing nothing on the east of the city were reprimanded for their slackness. They resorted to the reasonable defence that Edward had not yet paid them. The Hainaulters on the southern fringe of the city were engaging often and having successes in ravaging the countryside. But they too were disillusioned by the inactivity of their allies. The Brabanters fell out with van Artevelde, feeling that he was winning the favouritism of the English king. Matters worsened after a Brabant lord told van Artevelde to 'go back to Ghent and brew beer', prompting van Artevelde to draw his sword and kill him. And still the defences of the city had not been breached. The French army under Philip, with the sixteen-year-old King David of Scotland in tow, was drawing close. Edward knew he would have the greatest difficulty resisting them, but there was no alternative. All the allied armies were drawn together, regardless of their squabbles, to face the French advance on 7 September. The citizens of Tournai took arms and prepared to launch themselves on the rear of the allied troops when the battle was underway. Edward stationed a rearguard to protect his armies, and readied his archers.

In one of the most prescient acts of his pontificate, Pope Benedict had sent secret messengers to both Philip and Edward two weeks earlier. To Philip he had sent the low-ranking William Amici, provost of Lavaur. For once we have a secret messenger's instructions written down, for a copy was kept in Pope Benedict's own register. The reason for sending a low-status messenger was to be explained to Philip; it was so he might move more freely than the cardinals sent in the past. He was to set before Philip the pope's fears for his safety and the safety of his eldest son, John, duke of Normandy. He was to stress how successful the English had been at sea, and how the tide in Gascony was beginning to turn in favour of the English. He was to accentuate the size of the Flemish army with Edward, and to underline the dangers of a revolt in the French nobility against Philip, about which the pope had obviously heard mutterings. Finally, there was a renewed danger of a Moorish invasion. Considering all these things the pope heartily desired there to be peace between the two sides, and suggested that Aquitaine should remain in Philip's overlordship with Edward offering fealty and homage for it, as he had before the war. To Edward he sent his chaplain, William Bateman, a trusted agent of Edward's, explaining that just because he had won one crushing victory did not mean he would always be victorious, Tor one who was conquered seventeen times won the eighteenth battle and another who won two victories was totally defeated in the third engagement'. He also made William write down a series of good reasons why Edward should want peace, namely the problems he was facing through being away from his own kingdom, and the danger of the huge army Philip was bringing against him.

Although the seeds of Pope Benedict's advice had always fallen on stony ground before now, and these low-ranking clerics were not directly successful, both kings listened to these emissaries. Their words prepared the ground for a more personal appeal, on the night of 22 September. At the pope's request, Jeanne de Valois, dowager countess of Hainault and an abbess since her husband's death, came to Edward in his tent. As Edward's mother-in-law and sister of King Philip, and mother to the count of Hainault (whom Philip was threatening to decapitate), she was well-placed to gain access to the leaders and able to beg for peace. She had already wept on her knees before Philip. Now she begged Edward to think of Hainault and the destruction and damage that was being done to her son's dominions. She implored Edward for the love of God to desist from fighting.

Normally Edward would have paid scant attention to such pleas. But he faced a very serious dilemma. A messenger from Tournai to Philip had been caught escaping from the city and had informed the English that the people were close to surrendering. That was certainly the feeling in the French camp; many French nobles were gathering with Philip in fear that their relatives in the city were starving to death. Edward desperately wanted to take Tournai. He saw it as a test of his military capability. But at the same time his army was falling apart. If the city lasted out another two weeks, he would lose altogether, and his army would begin to desert. Money from England had entirely dried up, and he was having to borrow at very high rates of interest just to keep going. Thus Jeanne de Valois' pleas and protestations - made by a holy woman, and a special emissary from the pope - gave Edward an honourable way to begin negotiations with Philip. He could pretend that he was agreeing to parley out of benevolence. He agreed that he would send an embassy to treat with Philip at the chapel of Esplechin, about three miles away.

As Edward admitted frankly in a later letter to the pope, his problem was money. Tournai might have been about to fall, or it might not, but Edward could not afford to go on. In this respect he did exactly the right thing, agreeing to terms, for Tournai was not strategically that important to him, and he stood to gain more from a generous peace than a hard-won victory. Three days after Jeanne de Valois' visit, a truce was agreed, to last until the following midsummer. This would apply to France, the Low Countries, Scotland, Gascony: everywhere that the two kings were at war. All armies and troops, including the Scots, would be required to cease their operations, including sieges, with immediate effect. Those who had made conquests could keep what they had won for the time being. There would be freedom to travel and trade. Prisoners were to be restored. The proclamation was to be read in all the countries affected within twenty-six days. One cannot say that normality was restored - war had become more 'normal' than peace between England and France - but a period of stability and relative safety had been settled.

It has been said that the treaty of Esplechin offered something for everyone except Edward. Philip had succeeded in relieving the siege of Tournai and sending Edward and his army back to England, and in pacifying the men of the Low Countries. Van Artevelde had protected his leadership of Flanders, had an interdict on his country lifted, and retained the English wool trade. The duke of Brabant and the count of Hainault preserved their frontiers, including several gains in the case of Hainault. They had no obligations to do any more fighting but were still owed a small fortune by Edward. But did Edward really lose by the treaty? If Tournai had fallen, the English would have occupied the city and there would have followed a siege or battle between Philip and Edward. The campaign would have been prolonged, and Edward would have found himself in even more dire financial circumstances, regardless of whether he had been militarily successful or not. If Edward had a clear vision of his situation in September 1340 - and from his letter to the pope it seems that he did - he would have seen that his greatest enemy was not the city of Tournai, nor Philip, but his lack of money. If we consider that it was money which defeated him, as he himself said and as historians unanimously agree, then it may be seen that Edward came out of the siege of Tournai very well, and indeed both the siege and the treaty were something to celebrate. He personally remained undefeated in battle. He had stopped the drain on his finances, stopped the attacks on Gascony and his castles in Scotland without having to spend any more money, retained the services of his allies in the Low Countries, and was free to turn his attention to finance. And for this he had had to make no concessions with regard to his claim on the throne of France, no surrender of lands seized by his allies, and most importandy no lasting peace. It is thus understandable that some contemporary knights regarded it as a victory. A great tournament was held at Ghent in October to celebrate his return from the siege. Some even ranked it alongside the more glorious episodes of Edward's career. Thus, although the siege was not successful, the truce which resulted from it was a success. Through it Edward achieved a stability which he needed more than the city of Tournai itself.

EIGHT

Chivalry and Shame

Despite the Treaty of Esplechin, Edward was not free to go home. The treaty did not erase or even put off his debts, and he remained a virtual prisoner in Ghent. It was an impossible situation: he could not efficiently deal with his financial problems from Flanders, yet he was forced to remain there until he had sorted out his finances. Two months of frustration followed. At the end of October he confronted his creditors, and offered twelve thousand sacks of wool in lieu of his debts; an offer which was not accepted. As his creditors had discovered, too much wool glutted the market and its value dropped. His mood was thus very low when, on 18 November 1340, he wrote to the pope.

Edward's letter is fascinating. In it he states that he had withdrawn from the siege at the pope's request 'even though he had had every chance of success'.' This claim to the moral high ground was accompanied by a reiteration of his claim to the throne of France, now reinforced with a detailed legal opinion, and a series of firm demands for permanent peace.2 The pope dearly wanted to see peace before he died, but, as he said in his reply to Edward, nothing said or presented to him was inclined to make him confident of a permanent settlement.

The letter was important for personal reasons too. Extraordinarily, Edward claimed that the reason why he had received no money at Tournai was that the archbishop of Canterbury was hoping that he would be killed: It seems that the failure to supply Edward with money had amplified his argument with the archbishop in his mind, so that Edward believed that Archbishop Stratford was trying to stop the war by stopping Edward personally. In his frustration, he had twisted this around to believe the archbishop was trying to kill him.

There was something else, even more extraordinary. The three envoys were instructed to tell die pope that the archbishop had (in Edward's words) 'spoken separately to me of my wife, and to my wife of me, in order that, if he were listened to, he might provoke us to such anger as to divide us forever'. Historians have not previously given this intriguing claim much attention. However, we have to wonder what the archbishop might have said to Edward about his cherished wife (and to her about him) that it risked the end of their relationship.

Two possibilities are suggested by the evidence (there may, of course, be others). The first is that it was an accusation of conjugal infidelity. It is very unlikely to have been simply an accusation of adultery on the king's part, for medieval marriages required only the wife to remain faithful, not the husband. Certainly the archbishop may have had other ideas about the sexual mores of kings, and told Philippa of something which Edward had done. But if the archbishop had said the same things about Philippa to Edward - accusing her of adultery - this would have been far more serious. It is almost unbelievable, given that Edward and Philippa had a famously strong marriage. However, it has not previously been noted that Edmund of Langley, their seventh child, might have been conceived while Edward was at Tournai and Philippa at Ghent. To be precise: the boy was born on 5 June 1341, which, assuming a thirty-eight-week gestation, implies conception on or around 12 September 1340. As noted above, the siege of Tournai lasted from 23 July until the Treaty of Esplechin, dated 25 September. Edward was back at Ghent on 28 September. If Philippa remained at Ghent throughout, either Edmund was born at least sixteen days before term or he was conceived as the result of an adulterous liaison between Philippa and another man.

These circumstances are very similar to a recent discussion surrounding the conception of Edward IV, which provides a good framework for considering this matter in more depth.7 The first point is obvious: thirty-five weeks is not particularly premature by modern standards, and occurs in about a tenth of modern confinements. The second - that allegations of bastardy were commonly invented to discredit royal political opponents -does not apply in this case, as whatever the archbishop said to Edward about his wife, it was before he knew that Philippa was pregnant. The archbishop might have invented the story to bring dissent between him and his wife, as Edward supposed, but if so we should wonder why. How could the archbishop have benefited from such claims? No public source mentions the story, not even an enemy one.

The third point of reference for circumstantial evidence of illegitimacy is family relationships. How did Edward behave thereafter towards Philippa? Edward was at the Tower at the time of Edmund's birth. Although it is unclear exacdy when in 1341 Philippa returned to England, she probably went straight to Langley to prepare for her seventh confinement. Edward visited Langley frequently in the first half of the year, presumably because she was there, and this would suggest no disruption in their relationship. During one of these visits Philippa asked Edward for permission to export wool to pay her debts overseas. Edward agreed on 11 April, but specifically charged her the full rate of duty on each sack she exported. This might be seen as a sign of ill-will, but, if so, it is an isolated instance. He attended her churching at Langley in early July 1341, and held a series of jousts to celebrate the occasion and the boy's baptism. He took part in the jousting himself in a new breastplate, and gave a large present of twenty marks to the minstrels who played during the feast. If there was any discord, he would appear to have been sufficiendy reconciled with Philippa by then to sleep with her, as nine months later their third daughter, Blanche, was born. This suggests that, if there was a rift between husband and wife, it was not a long-lasting one.

The other family relationship which must be considered is that of father and son. Did Edward treat Edmund like his other sons? The answer to this is no. Although he created his eldest three surviving sons earls at very young ages (Edward and John were created earls at the age of two years, and Lionel was married to the heiress of an earldom at the age of three), Edmund was not raised to the peerage as a child, and not created an earl until the age of twenty-one. Similarly, although Lionel was given his own household at a young age, and John of Gaunt was placed in his older brother's household, Edmund remained at his mother's side until 1354. When he was finally elevated to an earldom it was the same day as his three older brothers were raised to dukedoms. Edmund, John and Lionel were all born within three years of each other, and were all placed in Queen Philippa's care in November 1342, but only Edmund was not given a tide. In 1347, when Edmund's godfather the earl of Surrey died without an heir, the king allowed him only a minor portion of his godfather's inheritance. Unlike John, Edmund was not mentioned in his elder brother's will, nor in his father's. Lasdy, Edmund had fewer leadership qualities than perhaps any other member of the entire Plantagenet dynasty.

The second possible explanation for the archbishop's seeds of discord is similar to the above, but rather than being concerned with the legitimacy of one of the ancestors of the Yorkist claim to the throne, it concerns the legitimacy of the ancestor of the Lancastrian claim, John of Gaunt. It was said that Philippa confessed on her deathbed to William of Wykeham, the bishop of Winchester, that in Ghent in 1340 she had swapped the baby with that of a Flemish woman, who had had a son about the same time. This has always been taken as a mendacious piece of propaganda against John, and, although there are two different sources for this story, one of them - Thomas Walsingham - was definitely pro-Wykeham and anti-John of Gaunt in outlook. It has not previously been linked to the row between Edward and Philippa shortly after the child's birth. However, there are a number of reasons why we should be sceptical of this theory.'5 Most importantly, Edward himself never doubted the legitimacy of John of Gaunt, and promoted him in infanthood, adolescence and adulthood far beyond Edmund, who was only a year younger. John was also the first-named executor of Edward's will. If Edward ever heard of this rumour, he genuinely did not believe it.

In all this debate we must proceed with caution. It would be very rash to assume that there is a serious case to be made for illegitimacy, not least because both John and Edmund were recognised by Edward III as second and fourth in line to the throne in 1376. We do not have any corroborative evidence that what Stratford had said to Edward about Philippa related to her behaviour or the legitimacy of their children. And Edward spent a lot of time at Langley with Philippa, too much to imagine that they had had a serious disagreement. The important fact is that the royal marriage was strong enough to withstand the most damaging personal accusations made by the senior prelate in England. Without doubt this is testimony to the bond which Edward and Philippa had formed over the first thirteen years of their marriage.

With deeply unsettling rumours about his wife coming to his attention, and his money pressures weighing on his shoulders, and paranoic fears that the archbishop of Canterbury wanted him to be killed, Edward was keener than ever to escape the Low Countries. Being Edward, he now did so. Early in the morning of 28 November Edward slipped away from the palace at Ghent, pretending he was going riding in the suburbs of the city with a few companions, namely the earl of Northampton, Sir Walter Manny, Sir John and Sir Guy Beauchamp, John Darcy (his steward), William Kilsby (his secretary), and a clerk, Philip Weston. As soon as they could, they galloped to Sluys, and then via Zeeland, they sailed on to England. It was not the way in which Edward had planned to leave Flanders, like a fugitive. Nor was it the best time to try to cross the sea. A winter gale blew up, and caught them in the open, and for three days they laboured against storms. When nearing the mouth of the Thames Edward was very nearly drowned.'7 Thrashing around in the pitch dark, soaking, on a heaving wooden vessel in danger of sinking did nothing to allay his anger. Finally, the ship's navigator brought them into the safety of the river, and slowly in the darkness the ship sailed towards the port of London.

It was nearly midnight, 30 November. The ship came to rest at the wharf adjacent to the Tower. Edward disembarked. Movements across the river at night were against the ordinances of the city, so the guards at the Tower should have been alarmed to see a boat approaching. But there was no reaction. Furious at this lack of defence Edward demanded entry and stormed into the castle, demanding to know what was going on. Where was the Lieutenant of the Tower, Nicholas de la Beche? Out of town, came the nervous reply. That was not what Edward wanted to hear. He could barely control his rage. It was immediate confirmation of everything that his control-fixated mind had come to fear. There and then he wanted to see his ministers, especially the Treasurer and the Chancellor. He wanted to see his justices. He wanted to see the London merchants who could have made loans for his campaigns. And above all else, he wanted to see the archbishop of Canterbury.

Much discussion has taken place about the events which followed, which is usually known as the 'Crisis of 1341'. Most of the conclusions have been constitutional in nature. Taking a broader look at the situation in which Edward found himself in December 1340 - narrowly escaping death by drowning, fleeing on horseback with a handful of knights and two clerks from the demagogue of Flanders, his marriage in jeopardy, and above all else, the frustration of being starved of money so that he had to give up the siege of Tournai almost at the point of victory - one can understand his actions much more easily. He could see for himself the powerlessness his father had experienced, and felt it might overwhelm him too. He was reminded of his own experiences as a youthful king, under Mortimer's sway. However, in trying to counter this fear of powerlessness he exerted power more forcefully, thus emulating his father's tyranny. Those he now accused - especially the archbishop of Canterbury - were old enough and wise enough to remember how to deal with royal tyrants, especially when they were driven by hot-headed fury, as Edward was now.

Robert Stratford, the archbishop's brother, was the first to be accused. He was dismissed from his office as Chancellor and charged with failing to supply Edward with his money, and given until 6 January to prepare his case. The bishop of Lichfield was likewise dismissed as Treasurer. But Edward soon turned his attention to the archbishop himself, whom he saw as his principal enemy in this matter. In February he issued a document containing the charges he wanted to bring against the archbishop. In it he accused him of withholding money, encouraging opposition to the taxes granted by parliament, impoverishing the Crown and abusing his authority to his own advantage. No overt reference was made to Edward's secret fears that the archbishop was trying to arrange for him to be killed.

The archbishop's response to the news of Edward's sudden arrival back in England had been to flee to Canterbury. But having heard the things said about him, he soon angrily counter-attacked. In a particularly vicious letter of 1 January, the archbishop suggested that the king was acting tyrannically. The archbishop made the specific comparison between Edward's behaviour and that of his father, claiming he was

seizing clerks, peers and other people, and making unseemly process against the law of the land and against Magna Carta, which you are bound to keep and maintain by the oath made at your coronation ... And since certain [of those] who are near to you do falsely charge us with treason and falsehood, therefore they are excommunicated .. .

He completed his allusions to Edward's tyranny with the thinly veiled threat: 'and what happened to your father, sire, you know well'. Three days later he followed this up with another letter to the king in which he outlined his vision of the constitution. He demanded that he stand trial not before the king but before his peers. Edward's reaction to the implicit threat of excommunication was to summon the archbishop immediately to his presence. The archbishop refused. On 28 January he wrote again to Edward, this time openly threatening him with excommunication. Two days later he forbade the payment of clerical taxation. Edward responded with a famous (or infamous) document known by the name which the archbishop gave to it: Ubellus Famosus ('notorious libel'). In this letter, Edward heaped scorn and invective upon his ecclesiastical enemy, and accused the archbishop of criminal negligence, of urging clerics not to pay taxes, of failing to support Edward financially as agreed, of impoverishing the Crown and of abusing his position to advance his own career and those of members of his family, implying his recently discredited brother Robert (bishop of Chichester) and his nephew, Ralph (bishop of London). At the end of the document, the archbishop was charged with treason. Edward sent copies of the Libellus Famosus all around the country, and had it read widely. He also sent a copy to the pope, amplifying his earlier, secret comments, and claiming that, as the archbishop was preaching sedition, it was dangerous to allow him to remain in the country. He was planning to exile the archbishop.

The two men were locked in an almighty tussle. Both were strong characters, influential and intelligent. Edward was the better propagandist, but the archbishop had religion and intellectual discipline on his side. He also had one huge advantage: Edward's taxation had been so punitive - probably the heaviest there ever was in medieval Europe — that he was bound to attract a large degree of popular support, especially when Edward's agents had been trying to collect the taxation granted by parliament twice over. Thus, at the end of March, when Edward finally caved in and summoned a parliament, the archbishop was in the ascendant. Edward, however, was still angry, and when parliament assembled in the Painted Chamber at Westminster on St George's Day 1341 (23 April), the archbishop was barred entry. Instead he was directed to go to the Exchequer to answer two minor charges against him. The next day he turned up at the Painted Chamber again, and was directed again to face minor charges in the Exchequer. This time he refused, and forcefully took his place along with the other bishops. Edward, seeing there was a showdown developing in which the archbishop was playing the role of Thomas Becket, refused even to. enter the Painted Chamber, thereby disempowering the parliament.

On the third day there was no pretence. The archbishop was told flatly by a sergeant-at-arms that he had orders to bar him entry. This time, he refused to leave until receiving the king's order to do so. John Darcy, his son John, and John Beauchamp proceeded to insult the archbishop where he stood. All this, of course, merely played into the archbishop's hands, especially when he raised his cross above them and cursed them both in the name of God. The earl of Northampton attempted to intervene, but failed to reach an agreement with the archbishop. It was down to an old hand, the aged earl of Surrey, to open the way to a peaceful solution. Regarding Kilsby, the younger Darcy and others of the king's friends, he pointed out that this could hardly be called a parliament when those with no right to be there were in attendance and those who should be leading proceedings were barred. These were brave words, and it soon became clear that they represented the thoughts of many less brave men there. Embarrassed, Kilsby and Darcy left. The earl of Arundel (Surrey's nephew) then proposed that the archbishop's case be heard. After several days of negotiations, an appeal on the archbishop's behalf was presented to the king by a number of prelates and magnates, the Cinque Ports, the mayor of London, and the commons. Edward, having seen his accusations refuted, and his personal invective fail to meet with popular support, was forced to receive the archbishop back into his favour.

The whole episode had been gravely embarrassing for Edward. Parliament had decided that he was in the wrong. But as with his previous clash with parliament in 1340, in one respect he emerges with credit. He could admit that he was wrong, temporarily, at least. What is more, he once more exercised that facility of forgiveness which he had used to his credit so often in the past, with regard to men like Kent's and Mortimer's adherents in 1330, and other prisoners like Crabb who proved so valuable. The archbishop was restored to favour and later served again as head of the council of regency, and was even specifically called upon for his advice. De la Beche was appointed to the household of the heir, Prince Edward, and afterwards became seneschal of Aquitaine. In being able to compromise, and admit fault, Edward was immediately able to command loyalty, and reassert his power as king. And when he had reasserted power, he was able to apply it more freely. There is no better example of his doing this than with respect to the statute which the 1341 parliament forced him to accept. This had some important clauses, such as guaranteeing that peers could only be tried by their peers, and that ministers could only be dismissed in parliament. But on 1 October 1341 Edward simply issued letters stating that he had repealed it. There was no recourse to parliament. It was contrary to the law of the land, he claimed, and had been forced on him against his will. To make sure parliament did not react immediately he broke one of his own statutory promises and failed to summon a parliament the next year. From the parliamentary point of view this was of course reprehensible. But from Edward's point of view it was a necessary step in reasserting his royal prerogative. He learned many things from the events of early 1341, but perhaps the most important was that his ministers had to be ruthlessly efficient and utterly loyal to him. He could not rely on parliament to appoint and dismiss such men.

Even though the peace treaty was still in force, Edward was wary of a possible French attack. Before 21 June 1341 news reached him that Philip was secretly planning an invasion. A few days later he received a second blow, in the form of a letter from Ludvig of Bavaria stripping him of his imperial title. In itself this was no great loss - the German alliance had proved militarily worthless and financially crippling - but it was encouraging to his enemies, and coupled with Philip's military preparations it gave cause for concern. When a peace conference was proposed to take place at Antoing, four miles from Tournai, Edward had no hesitation. He sent an embassy consisting of the earl of Huntingdon, the Gascon Bernard le Bret, Sir Bartholomew Burghersh (brother of the late bishop of Lincoln, who had died the previous December), John Offord (archdeacon of Ely) and Niccolinus Fieschi. Edward's representatives were informed that his allies - especially the duke of Brabant — had had enough of war with France, and wanted him to prolong die truce until 24 June 1342. With the Scots once more on the warpath, Edward sensibly agreed.

The truce of Esplechin must have been confusing and frustrating to the Scots. Although they were pleased to draw on French support when it was offered, it was obvious to all that their interests and those of France only partially coincided. The nature of Scottish warfare was different too. It was characterised by very small armies looting, burning and destroying, and then melting back into their communities. It was more of a way of life than a military stand-off. As a result, the treaty did not hold in Scotland.

In April 1341 Sir William Douglas dreamed up a strategy for capturing Edinburgh Castle. Seeing as most Scotsmen did not shave their beards but Englishmen did, he gathered two hundred 'savage highlanders', made twelve of them shave, and then dressed these twelve in rough clothes, like English coal and corn traders. The remainder of his men hid in and around the city. Taking a boat laden with goods, he and his twelve 'traders' disembarked and hauled their wares towards die castle, making sure they arrived very early in the morning. They found only the porter awake, and made a preliminary offer to sell their merchandise cheaply. The porter replied that it was too early to wake the governor or his steward, but gave them entry to the outer ward of the castle. As the great gates swung open, they unloaded their coal sacks in the gateway so that the gates could not be closed and the portcullis could not be dropped. They killed the porter and Douglas blew his horn, the signal for the hidden men to attack. In the ensuing fight they killed all but half a dozen of the English garrison. Edinburgh Castle had fallen.

The following month, delighted at this news, David II left Chateau Gaillard in France and sailed back to Scotland with his queen and household. He landed on 2 June near Montrose, and very quickly accepted the loyalty of the Scots still fighting for him. With the son of the Bruce in their midst, the Scots felt bold enough again to ride into Northumberland. They pressed all the way to Newcastle, and there set about a siege of the town. David II, however, was an inexperienced commander, and was not confident enough to discipline his captains. As the Scots lay before Newcastle, two hundred Englishmen in the town made an early morning sortie to attack the earl of Moray, who was still asleep in his pavilion. Having captured him and killed many of his men, they returned to the town. When the Scots army realised that one of their leaders had been caught napping, literally, they desperately tried a full-scale attack, which left many of them dead at the foot of the town walls.

On hearing news of the incursion, Edward had appointed the earl of Derby to command the Scottish army. That was on 10 October. Seven days later, the earl was still in London. In fact the earl probably did not take charge at all, for at the end of October Edward travelled so rapidly to Newcastle that Derby would have had difficulty keeping up. News of the attack at Newcastle had been brought to Edward by Sir John Neville, who covered the distance (more than 280 miles) in five days, which was very good going for October. Edward seems to have covered the distance almost as fast, assuming personal control of the forces at Newcastle on 2 November.

The speed of Edward's advance was almost his only achievement on this campaign. The Scots withdrew at the approach of the English, and Edward had a miserable time in Ettrick Forest, trying to bring them to battle. He returned in a despondent mood, and only found a chance to redeem some fragment of glory when he learnt that David planned to hold his Christmas festivities at Melrose Abbey. This gave Edward a strong incentive for remaining in Scotland until then, to make sure that he was the one to stay at Melrose. The earl of Derby was directed to hold Christmas at Roxburgh, to safeguard the border and the security of the castle itself.

The notable feature of this campaign were the jousts of war. These were rare events in which knights rode against each other with their lances uncapped and sharpened, as if in battle. Normally jousts were jousts of peace, with lances capped with coronals, although men were often injured or killed from falls or internal injuries in these events too. Sir William Douglas came to Roxburgh, and with eleven of his knights, challenged the earl and his companions to a joust of war. His motive may have been to joust for the prize of the Scottish castles which remained in English hands, for such jousts were recorded as receiving royal licence, and took place at Roxburgh and Berwick. Maybe even the right to hold Christmas at Melrose was decided by a joust of war. If so, Edward's knights won, for there he remained for the latter part of December. Sir William Douglas was so severely hurt in his joust with the earl of Derby that he had to be carried back to Scotland. At Berwick, where twelve knights jousted on either side, two Scots knights were killed and one English knight, Sir John Twyford. The campaign resulted in nothing more than a truce until May. Edward left Melrose on or about 30 December, and came south slowly, through Cornhill, Bamburgh and Alnwick to Newminster, where he remained for two weeks. He then set out on his long journey back to the south-east, to attend the great tournament at Dunstable.

This brings us to one of the most famous, or infamous, stories about Edward III: his supposed infatuation for, and rape of, the countess of Salisbury, his best friend's wife. It appears in its fullest version in the chronicle of the Hainaulter, Jean le Bel, who had come to England in 1327. In brief, the story goes as follows. On the Melrose campaign, while Edward was still at Newcastle, a castle belonging to the earl of Salisbury was besieged by the Scots. In the castle was the earl's wife. The governor of the castle was supposedly the earl's nephew, the son of his sister, also called Sir William Montagu (according to le Bel). This Sir William escaped the siege and came to Edward at Newcastle, and begged him to bring assistance to his lady. Edward charged off to the rescue. The besieging Scots army fled, and Edward camped near the castle. He then decided he would take a dozen knights and visit the countess, one of the most beautiful women in England, whom he had not seen since her marriage. On hearing of his approach, the countess threw open the gates of the castle. She knelt in front of him, thanking him for his help, and led him into the castle. The king was utterly smitten by her, and, after brooding over her all evening, confessed his strong feelings. Her response was to beg him neither to tempt nor mock her, for what he was suggesting would bring dishonour to him, to her and to her husband the earl, who was at that time still in prison in France. Nevertheless, Edward continued to gaze at her longingly, his knights quite surprised to see him so besotted. Nothing untoward happened, however, and the next day he departed, and continued on his campaign, returning to England by a different route. However, in mid-August 1342, after her husband's return from captivity, Edward invited them both to a great tournament at London, to which the countess - to whom le Bel now gives the name Alice - came dressed as plainly as possible, suspecting the king's fascination with her was the reason for the invitation. Once again Edward did not pursue her. But, later in the year, when her husband had been despatched to fight in Brittany, Edward returned to her castle under the pretence of inspecting it for security. On this third occasion, in le Bel's words:

The good lady made him as much honour and good cheer as she could, as she knew she ought to for her lord's sake, although she would have preferred him to have gone elsewhere, so much she feared for her honour. And so it was that the king stayed all day and night, but never could get from the lady the answer agreeable to him, no matter how humbly he begged her. Come the night, when he had gone to bed in proper state, and he knew that the fine lady was in her bedchamber and that all her ladies were asleep and his gentlemen also, except his personal valets, he got up and told these valets that nothing must interfere with what he was going to do, on pain of death. So it was that he entered the lady's chamber, then shut the doors of the wardrobe so that her maids could not help her, then he took her and gagged her mouth so firmly that she could not cry out more than two or three times, and then he raped her so savagely that never was a woman so badly treated; and he left her lying there all battered about, bleeding from the nose and the mouth and elsewhere, which was for her great damage and great pity. Then he left the next day without saying a word, and returned to London, very disgusted with what he had done.

According to the story, the countess was never happy again. In a distraught state, she told her husband what had happened on his return from the Continent. The man was overcome with grief and so angry that he decided to leave England. Having settled half his estate on her and his heir, he went to fight the Moors, and died in the siege of Algeciras.

When Froissart came to this part of le Bel's manuscript he was profoundly shocked. Although le Bel had in several places prefaced his description of events with the words that he had only heard of one evil deed which Edward had ever done (and this was it), Froissart omitted the description of the rape altogether. He left only the fact that Edward had been enamoured of the countess. When he completed the second version of his text, he introduced a charming vignette in its place. In this, Edward played chess with the countess, deliberately not playing well so she would win. When she did win, and he pressed her to accept a valuable ring as her prize, she refused, to which Edward answered that she could be sure he would have taken something of hers if he had won. Instead of the rape scene he wrote

You have heard me speak of Edward's love for the countess of Salisbury. The chronicle of Jean le Bel speaks of this love less properly than I must, for, please God, it would never enter my head to incriminate the king of England and the countess of Salisbury with such a vile accusation. If respectable men ask why I mention that love, they should know that Jean le Bel relates in his chronicle that the English king raped the countess of Salisbury. Now I declare that I know England well, where I have lived for long periods mainly at the royal court and also with the great lords of the country. And I have never heard tell of this rape although I have asked people about it who must have known if it had ever happened. Moreover I cannot believe [it] and it is incredible that so great and valiant a man as the king of England would have allowed himself to dishonour one of the most notable of ladies of his realm and one of his knights who had served him so loyally all his life.

Clearly the whole episode caused Froissart great worry. When he came to rewrite his chronicle a third and final time, he omitted this careful passage too, so there was no reference at all to the rape.

Later historians have been equally concerned by the story. The great seventeenth-century antiquary William Dugdale would only have known of the 'romance' which Froissart relates (le Bel's version being lost at the time). Dugdale knew that the countess of Salisbury was not called Alice but Catherine. He also was aware that the earl had no nephew called William Montagu; the only other William Montagu in the family was his young son. So he looked around the family tree and focused on the earl's brother, Sir Edward Montagu. He decided - on what authority is not clear - that the governor of the castle at the time was this Sir Edward, and the 'countess of Salisbury' with whom the king fell head over heels in love was the intended bride of William's son: Joan, 'the Fair Maid of Kent'. Since his source was the third version of Froissart's work, and that had dropped any reference to the rape, the story now became merely that Edward had been touched by the beauty of Joan, his cousin (who was actually about thirteen at the time), and had been in a great study over his feelings for her, but next morning had left, as was decent, gone off to fight the Scots, and returned by a different route.

Modern writers have been no less intrigued by this story. The discovery and publication of le Bel's original chronicle focused attention on the more sordid details, and the discovery of a similar account, including the details of the rape, in a number of continental chronicles further encouraged people to suspect that Edward really was a rapist. However, all the continental stories have a common historiographical root: in other words, they are not all original accounts but copies of one archetypal story. So where did that come from? And does it have a basis in fact?

The first thing to note is that whoever composed the story of the rape knew the movements of the king and Salisbury in 1342 correctly. The English chronicles do not mention many details about the Scottish incursion into Northumberland, but le Bel and Froissart give plenty. David II and his army would very probably have passed by a castle belonging to the earl of Salisbury - Wark Castle - as there was a crossing over the River Tweed nearby. Edward's army also probably stayed near to Wark, for on his return from Melrose in 1341 his wardrobe spent the night of 31 December at the adjacent manor of Cornhill. There was a whole series of tournaments that year over which the king presided, Dunstable in February, Northampton in April, and Eltham in May. Although there is no overt record of a tournament at London in mid-August, there was a great feast, which very probably included jousting, at the Tower on 15 August, when Prince Lionel was married. As already noted elsewhere, the earl of Salisbury himself was indeed abroad in captivity at the time of the supposed infatuation but had been released early in June 1342. Finally, it should be noted that the earl did indeed fight the Moors in the Spanish peninsula, and died not long before the siege of Algeciras (although in England, not Spain). In this respect there is some accuracy in the story as related by le Bel.

The problem is that, although some of the details are verifiable, most are blatantly incorrect. As Dugdale noted, the countess was called Catherine, not Alice, and it is very unlikely that Edward had not seen her since her marriage for she had been married to his best friend for at least thirteen years. There was no nephew of the earl called 'William Montagu'. There is no evidence of any settlement of the family estates in 1342-44. The version of the story underlying the continental chronicle states that the earl had no heir, which is incorrect. It is very difficult to accept that the countess was at a border fortress during a period of hostility while her husband was overseas. It is even harder to accept that she habitually stayed there. There is no support for the story at all in any English or Scottish chronicle.

Caught between a string of significant errors and some correct facts, one twentieth-century biographer (Michael Packe) tried very hard to make the story fit. He decided that Dugdale was right - that it was Edward Montagu who was the governor of Wark, who escaped to warn Edward that the castle was about to fall - and added that this was how 'William Montagu' was supposed to be the nephew of the 'countess'. Edward Montagu's wife was indeed called Alice. Moreover she was also a cousin of Edward's, being the daughter of the earl of Norfolk, and so may well have been invited to the marriage tournament at London in August 1342. She was about eighteen years of age, and before her marriage to Montagu had been betrothed to his nephew, William Montagu, son of the earl of Salisbury. Packe did not attempt to tackle the question of why Edward Montagu might have left his royal wife and thirteen-year-old nephew in a border fortress during a period of hostility. He considered two details conclusive. First, le Bel mentions at one point that the young William Montagu had to pass a message to his aunt the 'countess'. And second, Alice was supposedly killed by her husband and several other men about ten years later. Packe decided that, because Edward did not pursue his cousin's killers with dire vengeance, he was somehow compromised by Edward Montagu.

In all this fact-shuffling and theory-dealing, some fundamental points have been ignored. There are three stories here, rolled into one. They may be connected but they are still separate events: the meeting at Wark, the tournament at London and the rape. One at least - the rape - circulated separately to the others. Therefore we must ask how information about these three events at opposite ends of the country - two of which took place in private — could have reached the person who eventually wrote them down. We might ask why a chronicler of no particularly high status should have known what Edward did or did not do in the countess's bedchamber. Not only that; in order to know what passed between the king and the 'countess' at Wark, the original teller of the tale would have had to be one of the dozen knights picked by Edward to visit the castle with him, or one of the lady's household servants, or a member of the castle garrison. It is exceptionally unlikely that any of these people did not know the woman's name and correct tide. It is equally unlikely that they did not know that the governor of the castle was not the earl's nephew, and that William Montagu was the earl's twelve-year-old son. There are too many errors in describing the family to put them all down to 'Chinese whispers' when other facts about the campaign are correctly related. The only way in which the story of the infatuation can be considered credible is if the names and relationships had all been distorted through having been standardised by an unreliable intermediary in the process of making this story fit with the two other events, namely the accounts of the rape and the tournament at London.

Taking this approach of assessing the three elements of the story separately, we may come to some more reliable conclusions. Edward did not rape the countess of Salisbury. The record evidence shows that he had very little time after the earl's departure for France to see the countess. In fact it seems likely that the earl and king sailed together: they were certainly both together on Edward's return journey the following spring. After they returned, the earl's relationship with the king did not break down.47 Indeed, in August 1343 Salisbury went abroad on Edward's behalf, as a royal plenipotentiary to see King Alfonso of Castile. It is difficult to believe he would have undertaken this if his feelings had been that of an injured husband, nor that Edward would have trusted him with the appointment in such circumstances. Finally, we may be confident that the story is false by closely examining the information underpinning it. The only possible witnesses who could have related the original rape story would have been Edward's valets (due to his instructions to them in his chamber before the rape) and they would have needed further information about the rape itself, presumably from the countess's maidservants. The story could not have spread from the valets to become a common rumour without circulating in the royal household. So it is significant that in later years Froissart, despite having far better access to the key members of the royal household than le Bel, was unable to find anyone who could corroborate the story. Hence we may be confident that the rape story was a piece of propaganda invented by one of Edward's enemies on the Continent.

But who was the 'countess' at Wark — if she was a real person - and who was 'Alice'? Is there any truth in the other parts of the story? As noted above, it is probable that Edward's army camped near Wark, and it is possible that this was due to a request to relieve the castle. It is also possible that Edward was briefly infatuated with a high-status lady staying at the castle, who may have been called Alice. He may or may not have invited her and her husband to the tournament at London in mid-August 1342. If so, it is highly unlikely that she was the wife of the earl of Salisbury. Le Bel wrote his chronicle in and after 1352.48 By this time there was probably another love story about Edward III circulating: a tale about the foundation of the Order of the Garter (1349). This did relate to a countess of Salisbury, but she was Joan, the 'Fair Maid of Kent' - the same girl whom Dugdale suggested - and she was only thirteen in 1341. As for the elder countess of Salisbury, it is very unlikely she was at a Scottish border castle while her husband was in custody in France. If the woman at Wark really existed, it is much more likely that she was the wife of the castellan of the castle, and this might have been Sir Edward Montagu. But the evidence amounts to just three very tenuous facts: Wark was a castle held by her husband's brother, Edward had not seen her since her wedding (as le Bel claims), as she was married in 1338 and Edward had been abroad, and she did have a young nephew William Montagu, who is quite likely to have served in, or visited, his uncle's household.

So how come a story about an infatuation (whether true or false) became mixed up with one about a rape and another about a tournament, and became twisted into a scandal involving the wife of Edward's best friend? The answer to this is simply that the continental rumour mongers of the 1340s and 1350s wanted to present Edward III in an immoral light. The stories together formed a 'catalogue' of Edward's sins - rape, disloyalty to his friend, adultery - which became widely circulated on the Continent. This in itself is not surprising. What is interesting is that le Bel believed the end result, and even Froissart was forced to consider it. Both these men had met Edward. Le Bel had been a footsoldier in his army, and Froissart knew him personally. So it is particularly interesting that le Bel believed this story, and tried partly to excuse it on the grounds that it was 'motivated by love'. This tallies with Froissart's view. He could not believe that Edward had raped the countess but he could believe that Edward was attracted to a noblewoman, and even sufliciently overcome with lust that he attempted a seduction. Edward's liking for women is well-attested. His sexual desire for his wife was evidently compulsive. Furthermore, if we examine the gifts that Edward gave out to members of Philippa's household, we may notice several women benefiting from his largesse. In 1335 he made a grant to Mabel Fitzwarenne, and in 1337 he similarly made grants to Margaret Jorce and Elena Mauley. All these women were 'damsels of Queen Philippa'. Such grants are not suspicious in themselves, but they alert us to the fact that Edward was aware of his wife's female companions, and since none of the grants were ostensibly at Philippa's request we might suspect that Edward himself initiated them. 'Entertaining ladies' (to use Sir Thomas Gray's phrase), in both its sinful and innocent forms, might well have given rise to a single public reputation. Edward acknowledged no illegitimate children in his youth - and so we should not presume he was promiscuous at this time - but he definitely enjoyed and encouraged the multiple flirtations of his sexually-charged court, and he was unashamed about it.

This is probably the most important thing about these stories. It shows Edward's perceived weakness. No one could accuse him of cowardice. No one could accuse him of failing to listen to his people's demands. No contemporary could accuse him of idleness, personal greed, or even fool-hardiness. Edward's Achilles' heel was his love of female company, for it was possible to build a moral case against him by representing it as promiscuity. The author of the Vow of the Heron knew this well, and painted a picture of Edward ruling over a lascivious court. The poem underlying the Vow story was probably composed in the Low Countries, in the 1340s. It would thus have been written by a countryman and contemporary of Jean le Bel, at about the same time as the rape story which le Bel heard. Le Bel was particularly biased in favour of Edward, but his informant about the rape scene clearly was not. The count of Hainault himself was somewhat ambivalent, despite being Edward's brother-in-law. It seems there were anti-Edward polemicists in Hainault, and one of these took a story he had heard about Edward's brief infatuation with a woman at Wark and turned it into a tale of rape, centred on the family of the famous earl of Salisbury. A Hainaulter audience in 1352 would not have known any better.

*

The discussions about the alleged rape of the countess have tended to obscure two important events which took place at this time. The first was the news that William Epworth, an officer of the Irish Exchequer, had been thrown into prison. Ireland had long been in a semi-autonomous state, and the Irish Exchequer had grown steadily poorer over the years, so when Edward tried to increase his revenues from the country by revoking all grants made since the death of Edward I, he was bound to cause a dispute. William Epworth was one of the men ordered on 24 July 1341 to reclaim all royal lands which had been granted out to other lords. Three days later Edward showed his lack of understanding of the Irish situation by issuing a writ which stated that he would 'be better served in Ireland by English ministers having incomes and property in England than by Irishmen, or Englishmen who have married and acquired possessions in Ireland and hold nothing in our kingdom of England'. This was an overt attack on the independent culture of the Irish and Anglo-Irish nobility. They responded with determination. They met in a parliament at Dublin in October, and then another at Kilkenny in November, and put forward a series of carefully written and constructed petitions, laying the blame for the policy at the door of Edward's ministers. These petitions gave Edward cause for reflection, and he realised that he was not in a position to lay down the law in Ireland, not without going there. Over the following few months he backtracked, restoring the territories he had tried to take into royal control, giving into almost all the petitions. As with his dispute with Stratford, however much he believed he was in the right, there was a limit to how far he wanted to push an argument.52

The second important event of early 1342 was one of the largest tournaments which Edward ever held. It took place at Dunstable, directly after his return from Scotland, on 11-12 February 1342. According to one account, 'all the armed youth of England' were present and no foreigners were invited: die total of knights exceeded two hundred and fifty. In a fuller version of the same chronicle it was noted that the earls of Derby, Warwick, Northampton, Pembroke, Oxford and Suffolk all took part, and the other earls were only excused by reason of old age or illness. The king himself fought as a 'simple knight'. A number of barons from the west of England were present. Even Queen Philippa was there, despite being heavily pregnant again (she gave birth the following month to their eighth child, Blanche). Far in the north, the chroniclers in their monasteries noted it. Stabling alone cost more than £113. A tournament on this scale in February was unusual, for it was almost impossible to set up and complete everything in the short space of daylight. Indeed, it took so long to organise that it was almost dark before the tournament began.

The reason usually given for the tournament at this time is that it was to celebrate the betrothal of the king's three-year-old son, Lionel of Antwerp, to the eight-year-old heiress of the earldom of Ulster, Elizabeth de Burgh. This is supported by the royal wardrobe accounts. But one feature about this tournament stands out. This is the first tournament at which Edward is known to have used a personal motto. Practically everything made for this tournament was embroidered with the words 'it is as it is', in English. Both the king and his son had state beds: Lionel's had love-knots and leaves on it, powdered with silk roses and his coat of arms. The king's bed was covered in green cloth embroidered with silk dragons which encircled the arms of England and France. Its top sheet had 'four circlets in which there are four angels, a final circlet in the middle covered with the helmet and crest of the king, while the field of this sheet is worked with other circlets and scrolls of silk bearing the legend "it is as it is"

Perhaps it was the very mysteriousness of the motto which caused the chronicler who described the tournament, Adam Murimuth, to misunderstand its purpose. Although he was no stranger to heraldic events, he thought it was to celebrate the truce with Scotland. That is hardly likely; truces with Scotland were a common event and never had they been celebrated on this scale by Edward, nor would it have been fitting to have the celebration so far from the border. But more than this, the organisation necessarily rules out the tournament being held at such short notice. Just making the costumes would have taken a considerable amount of time. The accounts reveal that Edward's tailor was paid for making 'various robes, tunics, surcoats and many other garments' for the king and his magnates. Many of these were embroidered with 'it is as it is'. Also, another suit of armour was made for the king bearing the arms of the legendary Sir Lionel, echoing the Dunstable tournament of 1334.

What did it mean, this motto, 'it is as it is'? To date the only historian seriously to have given this any thought assumed that the legend was 'fatalistic' and that its origins were 'probably literary'. A fatalistic message is entirely possible, meaning 'things are as they are and cannot be changed' in a negative, resigned sense. Given his recent Scottish expedition and his possible brief flirtation with a woman at Wark, we might say that the resignation suggested by the phrase reflects his feelings about Scotland, or her, or even the recent chaos in Ireland. But it is very unlikely that all the nobility of England would be gathered for such a purpose. A preferable interpretation is that it relates to the claim on the throne of France: 'it is as it is' being a cold assertion of the immutability of Edward's descent from Philip the Fair. Attractive and sensible as this interpretation would be, it is difficult to see why Edward waited four years after first claiming the tide, and two years after properly claiming it, before making this show, and why he made this demonstration in England, not France, and with no foreigners present, and in the depths of winter.

Another interpretation is possible. That 'it is as it is' was not fatalistic at all, but exactly the opposite: a celebration. If one puts the stress on the first 'is', the phrase reads as an achievement - 'it is as it is' - meaning 'things have come to be as they should be'. This is supported by Edward's order for twelve red hangings to be made, each one embroidered with 'it is as it is' These were huge: each one was more than twenty feet long and more than ten feet wide. The cost of these twelve banners was almost £30 (the annual income of nine skilled labourers).6' Although the statement was certainly mysterious, Edward wanted everyone to see it, and, for those who understood it, we may assume that it was important.

It is likely that 'it is as it is' finally announced the death of the old king, Edward II, to those who knew he had survived Berkeley. We cannot be certain about this, but there are a number of details which support the suggestion. First and foremost, Edward III finally passed on to his son and heir, Edward of Woodstock, the tide of 'Prince of Wales' - the only tide which his father had never given up - in the next parliament (in May 1343), strongly suggesting the old man had died by then. This was the first parliament for two years, and so it would appear that Edward III had heard about his father's death in the period May 1341-May 1343. Further support for this is that he made a pilgrimage to his father's tomb at Gloucester - his first such pilgrimage - in March 1343, after a near-death experience, indicating that by then his father had very probably been placed in his tomb. An irregularity in a Nottinghamshire chantry ordinance probably arising as a result of Edward IPs survival in 1335 was finally sorted out in January 1343, tempting us to push the terminus ante quern for Edward's death to 1342 at the latest. Given that Edward II was almost certainly still alive in 1339, and probably died in 1341-42, it seems not unreasonable to connect the 'it is as it is' message in February 1342 with the arrival of the news of the death not long before. It may well be that the appearance of Niccolinus Fieschi in London in November 1341 marks the critical moment.

It seems that at last Edward had the chance to lay his father to rest. It might be said that he had been fortunate to have had the services of the Fieschi and Pope John XXII to guard his father and to keep him secretly. But to reflect that he had lived with the problem of his father's secret survival for the last fourteen years, and had worked his foreign policy, his war and his relations with the pope around this extraordinary situation, and had even managed to meet his father again in Koblenz, is to reflect that Edward had coped successfully with the worst crisis the Plantagenet monarchy had ever faced. He had even managed to initiate and sustain an expansionist foreign policy in spite of it. It also rings a significant change in his life, for Edward from now on could be even more aggressive. From now on, as far as we know, no one had any secrets which could be used to compromise him, or restrain him. From now on, he did not need to tread so carefully. He could be himself like never before.

NINE

The Advent of the Golden Age

Medieval ship captains preferred to sail within sight of land. Having no means of calculating longitude, it was very easy for them to lose direction, and especially so in high winds. When Edward set sail from Sandwich on 5 October 1342 there were gales to contend with, and rough seas, so his captains carefully hugged the coast all the way to Portsmouth. Even then they had to wait for the wind to change direction, so they could proceed across the Channel. Only on 23 October did the coast of England finally disappear from Edward's view, and that of Brittany appear on the horizon.

The choice of Brittany was a profoundly sensible one. like Flanders, it was a semi-autonomous part of France. If Edward could control it, he would have both a bridgehead in Philip's kingdom and a means of protecting his shipping lanes to Gascony. For years he had toyed with this idea, and had taken care to remain on good terms with John, duke of Brittany. Almost alone among French peers after 1337, John was allowed to keep his English estates and tide (the earldom of Richmond). Thus it may be seen that, even when Edward had been trapped in his alliance with the German princes, he had had an alternative strategy in the back of his mind. The Opportunity to capitalise on that far-sightedness finally arose in May 1341. As the king was being castigated, denounced and threatened with excommunication by the archbishop of Canterbury, the news arrived that the duke of Brittany had died, without leaving an obvious heir.

As Edward had expected, the duke's death precipitated a bitter inheritance dispute between his half-brother, John de Montfort, and his niece, Jeanne. Normally there was little doubt that a male sibling of the half-blood took precedence over a daughter of a full-blood brother, but the late duke had disliked his synonymous half-brother. So to make sure that John de Montfort did not inherit, the duke arranged the marriage of his niece Jeanne to Charles de Blois, nephew of King Philip. Whatever the law said, John de Montfort would have to fight for his inheritance, and not only with Jeanne and her husband but with the king of France too.

John de Montfort was not unaware of the situation, and he was not unprepared. The moment his brother was laid to rest he took a force and seized Nantes - the administrative centre of Brittany - as well as his half-brother's treasure and most of the other castles of the region. Charles de Blois was left standing, wondering. King Philip proved similarly hesitant. Edward, in contrast, had been waiting years for this opportunity. Having settled the Crisis of 1341 by superficially capitulating to the archbishop's supporters, he sent a knight to John de Montfort to discuss a possible treaty for mutual aid when the truce with France expired.

At this point de Montfort himself hesitated. The problem was not his opposition to Edward but his justifiable anxiety in case his association with the English king should compromise his future standing in France. Philip assured him that he would have a fair hearing with regard to his inheritance in the French parliament. It is possible that John actually believed him, to the extent that he supposed Jeanne's inheritance would be judged unlawful, as the relationship by which she claimed to be the heiress was the same as that by which Edward III claimed to be king of France. But such subtleties were lost on Philip. The French parliament similarly saw the question not in terms of inheritance law but power. On 7 September 1341 they ruled that Philip's nephew, Charles de Blois, should be duke, inheriting through his wife. Before this judgement was given, however, Philip unwisely reprimanded John de Montfort for consorting with the English king, and ordered him to remain in Paris to await the judgement. John de Montfort fled.

Very few people in France in 1341 would have realised what a catastrophic decision their parliament had made. It threw John de Montfort and his legal claim straight into Edward's hands. Perhaps the French parliament thought that Edward, who had just agreed to extend the truce sealed at Esplechin for another year, would be disempowered by the treaty from helping de Montfort. Perhaps they thought de Montfort could be arrested, or paid off, or killed, leaving Charles de Blois free to strengthen the royal hand in Brittany. But if so they reckoned without the determination of John de Montfort's supporters, and in particular his wife, another of those redoubtable fourteenth-century women who did not flinch from the task of leading her troops into battle.

Edward probably understood the situation better than anyone else, and certainly better than the consensus of the French parliament. But having agreed to extend the truce until 24 June 1342, there was little direct action he could take before then. He waited to assess the strength of the support for the de Montfortist faction. All across the region castles and towns fell to the French. At l'Humeau, de Montfort came face to face with de Blois in a surprise encounter, and their armies battled each other for two days before de Montfort retreated to Nantes. After a week the Nantesians forced de Montfort to surrender himself. He went to Paris under the protection of a safe conduct. When he refused to give up his inheritance Philip immediately imprisoned him, disregarding what this said about the value of his own guarantees of safety, and believing too soon that this marked his victory. But Lady de Montfort held out. In fact she did more than just hold out. Having secured Rennes, she led an army to Redon, which she took by force, marching on to establish herself in the walled town of Hennebont, on the southern coast. With a stern realism she proclaimed her two-year-old son as the head of the de Montfortist faction in case her husband was put to death in Paris. And she wrote to Edward imploring him to come to her aid.1

Edward was eager to get involved in the battle for Brittany. He did not actually need a lady in distress to heighten his ambitions in that part of France. Nevertheless her example inspired him and many others, and it required him to take action before too late. He ordered a small advance party to set off in April 1342 under the command of Sir Walter Manny. He gave the earl of Northampton and Robert d'Artois command of an expeditionary force to set off later. In the meantime he built up his military reserves at the Tower. Seven thousand longbows were ordered, and three million arrows. As soon as the terms of the truce would allow, he would invade.

Time was running short for all parties. Rennes fell in early May, and Charles de Blois advanced on Hennebont itself, sending his brother to besiege the other de Montfortist stronghold at Vannes. In England, Edward was experiencing delays in sending Northampton and d'Artois. But Manny was underway, and savaging the lands of the Bretons who had failed to support de Montfort. Truce or no truce, he could not afford to wait too long before attempting to help die countess. Manny was a practical and hardbitten man, very experienced and abounding in courage. Although Lady de Montfort worsted Charles de Blois' advance forces in a skirmish at the walls of Hennebont, Manny knew that unless she received assistance quickly, there would be no de Montfortist cause to support, and no bridgehead for Edward in northern France. Thus, despite the truce, Manny set sail for Hennebont.

Within the town the countess was doing her best to inspire her men. She wore armour, and rode around the streets of the town on a destrier, calling on the inhabitants to fight and defend what was theirs and hers. According to Froissart, she ascended a tall tower to observe the attack on the walls, and seeing that the enemy camp was almost unguarded while the assault was on, she took three hundred men-at-arms with her and made a sortie from the town, burning Charles de Blois' supplies and slashing the ropes and walls of his tents and pavilions.3 There would be no surrender at Hennebont. Charles ordered his commanders to begin a siege, and to starve the inhabitants into submission. Promises were made and rewards offered to all those who would desert the de Montfortist cause. One of the countess's advisers - the bishop of Leon - was won over, and returned to hold a council in which he tried to persuade the countess and her vassals to agree to terms. The discussions went on for two days. The bishop spoke eloquently, and persuaded some of the Breton lords that their cause was lost. With his words ringing around the tower room in which the discussions were taking place, and with the continual thumping of the siege engines ringing in her head, the countess got up from where she was sitting and walked to the window. Looking down, she could hardly believe the sight that greeted her. She gasped: 'I see the help we have been promised for so long has arrived!' Sailing up the estuary were Sir Walter Manny's ships, their sails bearing the cross of St George.

The bishop of Leon might have spoken eloquently but the cross of St George was even more persuasive. Manny's force was small, and its commander had crossed the divide between courage and recklessness so often as not to notice it existed (he later made a sortie just to destroy a single French siege engine at Hennebont because it was disturbing his meal) but it was a significant token of future support. By July the truce had come to an end. The English were on their way.

Edward landed in Britanny on 26 October. Already the English had won several significant victories. Lady de Montfort still held Hennebont, her forces now augmented with English troops, and that was a victory in itself. More significantly the port of Brest - where Edward landed - had fallen to the earl of Northampton. The earl had even had the satisfaction of burning a dozen Genoese galleys in the service of the French. Most important of all at Morlaix on 30 September, Northampton had moved to confront a French army under the command of Geoffrey de Charny and had won a decisive victory. Having marched through the night and dug in, and having ordered all his men to fight on foot, he had seized more than one hundred and fifty knights and killed fifty others, besides thousands of men-at-arms and infantry. Back in England the result was wonder, admiration and excitement. Murimuth dutifully recorded incorrectly that 'a few English, namely a force of five hundred men' defeated three thousand French knights in battle. It was more like three thousand Englishmen and Bretons against five thousand Frenchmen, but that was not the way it was reported.

Edward decided that Vannes would be his principal objective. The French had taken it not long before, and thus controlled its harbour, which was of strategic interest to the English. But it was not an easy target. Edward decided on a two-pronged assault by land and sea. He despatched Robert d'Artois with the ships which remained in Brittany while he himself led the overland advance. D'Artois was a brave leader but an unlucky man, and the very last vestige of his little luck was now used up. He was attacked on the way by Spanish and Genoese ships. Leading an attack on Vannes itself with the remains of his navy, he was overpowered and mortally injured. With his death a few weeks later Edward lost a trusted and likeable friend, a man who had never betrayed him but who had never lived up to the confidence he had placed in his military abilities.

Despite the personal loss, it was to Edward's benefit that the positions of command in the field now fell to English lords. There were at least half-a-dozen very able commanders with Edward, including the earls of Derby, Warwick, Huntingdon, Northampton and Salisbury and Sir Walter Manny. Allowing these men to exercise their strengths and to fulfil their ambitions marked a new stage in the development of Edward's success as a king. Thirty years earlier, Robert Bruce in Scotland had run rings around the English by encouraging a cadre of commanders who would seek personal glory and yet be part of a collective struggle. Through encouraging the likes of Black Douglas and Sir Thomas Randolph, Bruce had wrested Scotland from the English. When Edward had begun his French war he had failed to pursue a similar course of action. Instead he had relied on the chivalric ambitions of other heads of state: the indecisive count of Hainault, the wary duke of Brabant, the merchant van Artevelde, and the mercenary Emperor Ludvig. His trust in them was misplaced: they were never going to share his strategic objectives or be part of die confraternity of warriors which would defeat Philip. They would never feel personally bound to Edward's peculiarly English quarrel, and still less to his personal command. But as soon as those responsibilities and expectations passed to his vassals, everything changed. In Brittany Edward began to reassert himself as the King Arthur of a chivalric court of victorious warriors who vied with each other for glory. As Edward destroyed the region around Vannes, the earls of Northampton and Warwick destroyed that around Nantes. The earl of Salisbury devastated the area around Dinan. Throughout Brittany, the army and the supporters of Charles de Blois were on the retreat. The endgame in Brittany was approaching.

Edward had a weakness, however. Being so far from home, he had difficulty raising supplies, and living off the land for any length of time in winter was not easy. He had lost many of his ships. His armies were dispersed across Brittany, and there were not enough of them to face a full French onslaught. In December the main French army approached. It joined up with Charles de Blois' companions who had survived Morlaix, and presented Edward with a force several times the size of his own. It stopped eighteen miles short of the English army. Despite this show of force, as at Esplechin, Edward managed to negotiate a compromise which did not reflect the precariousness of his situation. His treaty negotiators were like his commanders, enthused and personally committed to the struggle which he had started. In this respect it has to be said that Edward's judgement of men to do the job was impeccable. On 19 January 1343 the Treaty of Malestroit was agreed. Edward had to lift the siege of Vannes, but otherwise almost every term was in his favour. The allegiances, gains and losses in Brittany were to be respected, and no further war was to take place in Gascony, Scotland or elsewhere. John de Montfort was to be released. Flanders would remain outside the orbit of French control. The truce was to last for more than three years. Edward had effectively added one more frontier to his war on Philip de Valois. He had conquered a corner of France, and managed to call himself king of it without incurring serious loss.

*

When Edward had opted to lead the land army to attack Vannes he may well have been expressing a personal preference. Although he had commanded at the significant naval victory at Sluys, he was not lucky out on the open sea. Or perhaps we should say that he was lucky, for he seems to have survived more near-death experiences at sea than in battle. In 1326 he had been blown off course by a storm when returning to England with Mortimer and his mother. In 1340 he had almost died in a storm at the mouth of the Thames. He had suffered in the gales on his crossing to Brittany. And now, in February 1343, on his return trip he got caught in a catastrophic tempest which seriously threatened his life once more. Several ships in his fleet were lost: swept over and smashed to pieces by the waves. There was, of course, no respite from drowning for anyone on board those unfortunate boats. The whole fleet was dispersed, the sailors doing all they could simply to bring their vessels to port. Murimuth noted how the surviving ships put into ports wherever they could across southern England. The ship carrying Lady de Montfort ended up drifting into a port in Devon. Wreck stories clearly had a wide popular appeal, as most chroniclers note Edward's escape, even the far northern ones. A Franciscan chronicler on the Scottish border noted that Edward incurred many dangers in returning from Brittany, especially from flashes of lightning and unprecedented storms, whereby nearly all his ships were scattered from him and several were sunk in the sea. It is said that not one of his sailors or soldiers was so cheerful amid these storms and dangers as himself, who ever remained fearless and unperturbed through them all; whence he was delivered by God's grace and the Blessed Virgin's intercession, whom he always invoked and chose as his particular patron in all dangers.

On i March, he was blown to shore at Melcome Regis, in Dorset. He set off immediately for London, and reached the capital three days later. But this was one storm which had deeply affected him. He seems to have sworn at the height of the gales to go on a whole series of pilgrimages if he was saved. He even seems to have prayed to his recently deceased father to save him. He performed the promised pilgrimages straightaway. In London he gave thanks at the high altar of St Paul's Cathedral. He then took a handful of men and went to his father's tomb at Gloucester, and gave thanks at the high altar there, and at Walsingham Abbey. He went on foot to Canterbury, and gave thanks at the altars dedicated to St Thomas Becket and the Virgin Mary. At each place he promised a costly gift, and a golden incense boat in the shape of a ship was later delivered to each shrine. If Edward stood alone and unafraid on the deck of his storm-beleaguered ship, it was only because he was praying in the fury of the storm, and believed the Virgin Mary, St Thomas Becket and his late father were all looking out for him.

*

On 28 April 1343 Edward opened the first parliament held since the Crisis of 1341. There was much to discuss. One interesting preliminary was to ordain that in future no representatives should come to parliament in armour or with long knives or other weaponry as they had sometimes done in the past. The first main item on the agenda was the Treaty of Malestroit. In the now-accepted fashion, the two houses of parliament deliberated separately, and delivered their verdicts on 1 May. Both houses approved of the treaty, and of the continued search for peace. But if no adequate peace could be obtained, they approved of Edward continuing his quarrel with the French king, and would support him in this. It was a conciliatory statement, made in the light of the military successes in Brittany but also in the wake of Edward's refusal to summon a parliament for two years. Even more conciliatory was parliament's acceptance of Edward's revocation of the statute forced on him on that occasion.

Parliament and Grown had reached an understanding: although the prelates and representatives of the shires and towns might press for reform, the king would not accept extremist measures, or changes which might undermine his ability to run the government efficiently. As a result, the 1343 parliament was a success for Edward. He not only achieved support for his foreign policy, he renewed his royal authority over parliament, so much so that for the next thirty years representatives never questioned Edward's authority over ministerial appointments, nor his right to give royal estates to his chief vassals.

Along with parliamentary acknowledgement of the possibility of renewed hostilities came the agreement to fix wool customs, and a grant of duty to the king on wool for the next three years. Gradually Edward was bringing his finances back under control. He dealt with some of his Continental allies by responding to their demands for payment with letters stating that if he had failed to pay them by a certain date, then their obligations to him would lapse. The debt then was strategically neglected. Not all debts could be treated in this way, of course. Those owing to the Bardi and Peruzzi were a particularly difficult problem. If Edward simply backed out of these, there would inevitably be international repercussions. Indeed, shortly after this, both the Bardi and the Peruzzi banking houses collapsed.

The responsibility for the failure of the Bardi and the Peruzzi has traditionally been ascribed solely to Edward's refusal to honour his debts. This is a serious accusation; it amounts to personal responsibility for the biggest banking crash before modern times. But the view that Edward simply backed out of his financial commitments is mainly based on the opinion of a well-respected Florentine writer, Giovanni Villani, whose brother Filippo was a member of the Peruzzi. Villani said that Edward owed the Bardi 900,000 gold florins (£135,000),* and the Peruzzi 600,000 (£90,000), and that his refusal to pay caused an economic collapse across Florence and much further afield. Such an opinion is neither independent nor justified. Edward never refused to pay his debts. Moreover, recent research has shown that the Peruzzi (whose records survive) did not have the capital to lend Edward this much money, not even a fraction of it. For Edward to have owed them 600,000 florins, they would have needed to have raised further capital in England. They may have done this, but if so they must have received further income or actual repayments, for which Villani does not account. From the English records we may estimate what these repayments were. The total amount borrowed over the period 1337-41 has been calculated at 687,000 florins

* After 1340 the conversion rate used for the florin is 3s, rather than 3s 4d.

(£103,000) from the Bardi, and 474,000 florins (£71,000) from the Peruzzi. Some of this was repaid in cash, and some was repaid through royal grants, especially grants of wool, which allowed the Italians to recoup much of their original investment and to build up their capital. In other words, the total of more than one million florins represents only the borrowings, not the repayments, and thus not the balance owing It is now thought that the actual amount which Edward defaulted on was nearer the amount he later acknowledged, a mere £13,000. Edward's failure to repay this amount would have dented the companies' profitability, but it would not by itself have proved disastrous. Historians tend to regard the internal disputes in Florence as the cause of the crash, not Edward's failure to repay his debts. It is a telling fact that the third largest Florentine banking house, the Acciaiuoli, also suffered heavily in the 1340s, and many other smaller Florentine banking firms collapsed, despite the fact that they had not lent any money to Edward.

The other important financial measure discussed in the parliament of 1343 was the currency. For the last five hundred years practically the only coins minted in England had been silver pennies. Henry III had tried to introduce a 'gold penny', worth 2od, in 1257, but it had failed. Edward I had issued a new silver coinage in 1279, which resulted in the minting of silver groats (4d), halfpences and farthings, as well as pennies. But most international trade, and much domestic business, was conducted in florins (around 3s) and marks (13s 4d), so silver pennies were of limited use, as they were needed in their hundreds. Edward knew that a successful gold currency would be exported, and English gold coins would be handled and looked at in Avignon, Genoa and Paris as well as more Anglophile cities such as Ghent and Bruges and English dominions such as Gascony. The principle to which he was aspiring was very similar to the modern idea of trademark advertising. Edward would circulate artistically scuplted pieces of gold all around Europe showing him as a truly international monarch. As a result of these discussions, the first important English gold coins appeared in 1344. The largest of these was closely modelled on the French gold currency, showing Edward enthroned, with a leopard on the other side (Edward's own emblem and the heraldic beast on the English coat of arms). These first gold coins proved unsuccessful, being undervalued in relation to the value of the gold, so later in the same year (1344) he ordered the minting of the mighty 'noble', a gold coin worth half-a-mark (6s 8d). This showed the king standing on the deck of a ship. The ship logo drew attention to his victory at Sluys, but even more importandy it showed Edward as a king crossing seas, giving him that international status which he craved. This was a medieval power statement of the first order. It took a few reissues to get the balance of gold and nominal value right, but Edward would not allow his moneyers to fail. The figure of Edward standing on his ship, bearing a shield with the arms of France and England quartered, became one of the most widely known and enduring images of fourteenth-century kingship, being copied in the gold coinage of every subsequent medieval English king.

It was also in 1343 that parliament first pressed Edward to limit the power of the pope. It seemed to parliament that foreigners were increasingly being appointed to the most lucrative benefices in the English church. Edward seized on this. It gave him a weapon with which to attack Pope Clement VI, the newly elected successor to the peace-loving Benedict XII. Clement was, like his predecessor, a Frenchman; in fact he had previously served as Chancellor under King Philip. But his predecessor had been a man with whom Edward could do business, being genuinely concerned to find a peaceful solution to the Anglo-French problem. Clement saw that Benedict's policy had failed. As a Frenchman living at Avignon he naturally decided that the only way forward was to bring such pressure to bear on Edward that the English king would have to back down. During this parliament Edward wrote to Clement stressing how papal appointees often failed to perform their duties. With so many hospitals, monasteries, chantries and other foundations having been endowed by the English for the English, what benefit could arise from their revenues going abroad? Edward argued that God's work was at peril, souls were in danger, and churches were falling into disrepair." By the Ordinance of Provisors, Edward prohibited the receipt in England of papal letters against his interests, and the appointment of any clergy to ecclesiastical positions by such letters. Not only was it enacted with force, with several papal provisions being confiscated, it also resulted in the arrest and banishment of the proctors of the papal peace envoys. Edward realised that he could bring pressure to bear on the pope by representing the nationalist perspective. This was a question of enduring importance to the English. It would not be laid to rest until Henry VIII settled the matter two hundred years later, by removing the Church of England from papal authority altogether.

*

The latter part of 1343 and early 1344 was a time of relative calm and stability for Edward. He was now thirty-one years of age, and stronger than ever. He was approaching solvency once more, and could afford to remedy some of the embarrassing measures he had taken in 1338, such as redeeming his and Philippa's golden crowns from pawn. The pattern of his life reflected the way he had lived ten years earlier: a proud young king going from tournament to tournament and from hunt to hunt, always in the company of knights and women. Among his accounts we find reference to mulberry-coloured Turkish cloth and taffeta for Queen Philippa, Queen Isabella and four countesses to go on a hunting expedition with the king. The same account allows us a glimpse of Edward and the earl of Northampton dressed in white, with eleven earls and knights dressed in green Turkish cloth, and fifteen royal squires waiting on them, all dressed in green. Another reference reveals Edward participating in a tournament at Smithfield on 24 June 1343, jousting for three days against thirteen knights dressed up as the pope and twelve cardinals. No diplomatic niceties here: this was loud and clear political commentary, in which Edward was very clearly setting himself up as England's champion against the pope.

After a summer of tournaments, hunting and sending increasingly uncompromising letters to Avignon, Edward prepared for the next great public event. This was the second of his great winter tournaments at Windsor. On 18 January 1344 he gathered all the armed youth of England, including the earls of Derby, Salisbury, Warwick, Arundel, Pembroke and Suffolk, and many other knights and barons. As usual, he also invited large numbers of women: nine countesses were present, the wives of London merchants and barons, as well as Queen Philippa and their younger children. His mother, Queen Isabella, was also there. With all the other nondescript men, women and servants it amounted to 'an indescribable host of people'. Prince Edward, now thirteen, was given a prominent role, although he probably did not take part in the jousting Everyone ate and drank liberally and, 'dances were not lacking among die lords and ladies, embraces and kisses alternately intermingling'. Foreign knights came to join in the jousting, and the action -involving Edward, his son and eighteen other knights, who took on all comers - went on for three days. Gifts of money, precious objects and clothes were given, and minstrels played throughout. A great banquet was given on the Monday in which all the women ate in the hall with no men present except two French knights who waited on them. Finally, on the Wednesday evening, at the end of the tournament, Edward spoke to the crowd, and gave instructions that no one was to go home but everyone was to stay the night and hear an announcement he would make the following day.

On Thursday morning Edward was up early. He dressed in his finest new clothes and wore over everything a mantle of exquisite velvet and his crown. The queens likewise were specially dressed, and accompanied him into the castle chapel to hear mass. After the ceremony, led by two earls from the chapel, he stood outside and addressed the crowd. He took a bible, and, turning to the gospels, he swore a vow that he would begin a Round Table in the true spirit of King Arthur, and maintain in it three hundred knights. He added that he would build a great round building within the castle at Windsor where all these men and their ladies could eat together. The building would be two hundred feet in diameter, and surpass any previously seen in Europe. Every year, at Whitsun, he would hold a great tournament at the castle, like this they had just experienced. The earls present joined him in his oath, and afterwards there was more dancing to the minstrels and drums, with a great feast of exotic dishes, before all went home after their five days of merrymaking.

One man had already gone home. In the jousting, William Montagu, earl of Salisbury and for many years Edward's best friend, had been badly injured. On 30 January, eight days after the Round Table tournament ended, he died. The man who had delivered Edward his kingdom, and had dutifully followed him in his expeditions to Scotland, the Low Countries, France and Brittany, was no more. He was taken the short distance to Bisham Priory, which he had founded in the place of Edward's first childhood home, and was buried in the church there.

Edward was back at Westminster when he heard of Salisbury's death. There are no signs of any great outpouring of grief, nor of expensive arrangements for the burial, but nor would we necessarily find these in royal accounts. The official records simply note the bureaucratic process of winding up the earl's affairs. It is perhaps surprising that the chroniclers hardly mention Salisbury's death, and none mention any signs of grief from Edward. If the king attended his funeral then it was in a private capacity, with little fuss. Maybe from this we should wonder whether there was some truth in Froissart's confused story of Edward's lust for the countess. However, there is one sign that the death of his one-time friend caused Edward to stop and think. More than any other man, Salisbury was Edward's partner in chivalric role-playing. He had participated in most of the many tournaments Edward had attended in the seventeen years since he had become king. It was thus no surprise that he was there, jousting alongside Edward, when the Round Table was announced. The loss of Salisbury might therefore be the reason why he only half-heartedly set about the building project. Work began in February as planned, but was soon scaled back due to the expense, and stopped altogether in November. There would be no Round Table. The half-built huge stone circular walls stood empty. It seems the harsh reality of death had stripped the romance away from the tournament at Windsor. Indeed, tournaments altogether lost their appeal for him. Several years were to pass before he lifted a lance in sport again.

By the time Edward walked into the Painted Chamber at Westminster to meet parliament again on 7 June 1344, the war of words with the pope had escalated to condemnations as fierce as those Edward had exchanged with the archbishop of Canterbury during the Crisis of 1341. Pope Clement threatened Edward with excommunication, and told him he was in 'rebellion'. This was not likely to result in a comfortable atmosphere for the delegation negotiating peace with France. Things could only get harder for them when Clement openly denounced the English claim to the French throne. In January 1344 Edward responded by directly condemning the papal custom of providing benefices to his companions, and followed this up with an accusation that Philip had broken the truce, as some of Edward's allies had been executed in Paris. Edward's envoys claimed this was a renewal of hostilities, and that English emissaries to the pope were no longer safe in France. The pope expressed his disquiet but did little more. As far as he was concerned Philip was in the right, if only because the politics of restraint demanded that Edward had to be in the wrong.

In parliament Edward put forward the breaking of the truce in the most uncompromising terms. Philip, he declared, had 'falsely and maliciously' put his allies to death with the assent of the French parliament, he had raised armies and attacked Gascony and Brittany, seizing castles, towns, manors and fortlets, and occupying English royal lands.33 The answer was unanimous. Everyone - lords, prelates and commons alike - all asked Edward to bring this war to a close, 'either by battle, or a suitable peace, if he could get one'. Moreover they asked unanimously that he should confront Philip, and not be delayed by papal intervention, or the peacemaking efforts of anyone else. Parliament wanted an end to this war, and the people of England, who by now had borne a heavier tax burden than any other people in history, wanted closure on their own terms.34 To this end they added an interesting clause to the grant of a new subsidy: the money was conditional on Edward personally crossing over to France with an army to force Philip to submit.

All seemed set now for Edward's next invasion of France. Parliament and king were in accord, over this and many other issues, from opposing papal interference to domestic legal reform. But still Edward did not rush to war. Instead he used parliament's resolutions to bring more pressure to bear on the pope. He made one last attempt to negotiate, repeating his claim to France in a meticulously worded document presented to the pope by an experienced team of negotiators: the bishop of Norwich, John and Andrew Offord, Thomas Fastolf and Niccolinus Fieschi. Clement himself presided over the discussion, perhaps unnerved a little by how strong the arguments were in favour of Edward's claim. Biased he most certainly was, but neither his bias nor his acuity could break the stone wall of Edward's negotiators. They had powers only to discuss the claim to the French throne, which Edward would not under any circumstances give up. When offered money or a new title, Edward's representatives expressed indignation. In this they did well, for they did exactly what Edward wanted them to do. In December 1344 the conference broke down, with the pope, the cardinals and the French delegation failing to persuade Edward's redoubtable negotiators to admit to any weakness in his position.

*

Edward spent the latter part of 1344 attending to the discussion with the pope, receiving and delaying papal nuncios, and planning his next move in great detail. So concerned was he with this that he seems not to have attended Philippa's churching after the birth of his fourth daughter, Mary, who had been born at Waltham, near Winchester, in October. Instead he remained at Westminster or at the Tower, before moving off to Norwich for Christmas. He had now extricated himself from his financial embarrassment, having redeemed the last of his pawned jewels in October. He was more popular at home than he had been for years. Now he simply needed to put all his assets - armies, inspirational commanders, revenues, diplomatic alliances and technical strategic superiority - simultaneously to good effect.

In January Sir Hugh Neville returned from Avignon to report on the failure of the negotiations under the pope's auspices. Edward met him at Westminster, accompanied by the earls of Derby and Northampton, the archbishop of Canterbury and the archbishop's nephews, the bishops of Chichester and London (the Stratford family having been restored to favour). Edward's thinking until now had been to follow up his intransigent stance by sending Derby to the pope on a secret mission, but he changed his mind. As his advisers told him, diplomacy would achieve nothing unless he could bring real pressure to bear on Philip, and that required action. The longer the truce prevailed, the more Philip could chip away at his authority by pressurising the Gascon nobles and committing minor infringements of the truce in Brittany and Flanders.

Edward's thinking in the spring of 1345 was to divide the command of his army between himself and his two most experienced and successful commanders, the earls of Derby and Northampton. Throughout the first half of the year Derby remained with him, discussing plans and strategies. The earls of Northampton, Huntingdon and Arundel assisted, the latter two being admirals of his fleets. The plan they came up with was to gather a huge fleet of more than four hundred ships at Portsmouth, Sandwich and Southampton to bring a devastating three-pronged attack against the French in Brittany (led by Northampton), Gascony (led by Derby) and Flanders (led by Edward). This would force Philip to break up his army, and, with sufficient archers, the English had a chance to prevail.

The pope, hearing of Edward's preparations, sent a letter in March requiring him to seek peace. He tried to increase the moral pressure on the king by stating that Edward had broken his promise to send further negotiators, and by asking him to join a crusade. These letters came on top of others in which the pope expressed his displeasure at hearing that rumours were circulating in England that he had empowered two cardinals to 'publish processes and fulminate sentences' against the English. Edward had, at the time, refused to give these cardinals safe conducts to come to England, but had eventually received them, in order to say to them personally that he would not countenance any removal or restriction of his rights. The pope was in a weakening position. He only had diplomatic tools and religious threats, and these were ineffective weapons with which to control a man like Edward. No English contemporary doubted Edward's spirituality or his patriotism, whereas practically all the cardinals at the papal court were French, and therefore neither liked nor trusted in England. Even more significantly, the pope underestimated the collective determination of the English camp. He presumed he was dealing with an intemperate and opportunistic leader whose people wanted peace above all else, and would eventually desert their high-taxing king. It was not that Clement was unwise but that he was prejudiced, and thus he believed what he wanted to believe. This did not equip him to understand the situation in England. He also suffered from the unavoidable papal disadvantage of being of advanced years: he could not possibly understand the latest developments in warfare. The very idea that Edward could meet the much larger army of France in battle, and win, was not only outside his experience, it was beyond his imagination.

By the summer of 1345 the three fleets were ready. The earl of Northampton left for Brittany in early June, and, in late July, Derby sailed for Gascony. There he was supported by the recently appointed seneschal, Ralph Stafford, who had mustered the Gascons and laid siege to Blaye after Edward had formally renounced the truce on 14 June. Edward himself was preparing to sail from Sandwich, but at the end of June urgent news arrived from Flanders. There had been an armed rising, and van Artevelde was on the defensive. The count of Flanders stood poised to return. Not knowing what the situation would be in Flanders if he waited any longer, Edward ordered his fleet to set sail on 3 July. He arrived at Sluys two days later, and held a conference with van Artevelde on board his great ship, the Catherine.

The events of the next three weeks were momentous for Flanders. To some men of Ghent, van Artevelde was pursuing the alliance with the English for his own personal gain. When van Artevelde returned from Sluys, he was seized and beaten to death by a mob. Edward shrewdly used the murder of his ally as an excuse more directly to intervene. To the count of Flanders he offered the chance of rehabilitation if the count would swear homage to him as the king of France. The count refused, and so Edward was free to neglect his interests and directly to negotiate with the merchant leaders of the three major towns, Bruges, Ypres and Ghent. The burghers of these places found themselves negotiating with a king who controlled the supply of wool to their weavers, and conveniently had an army of two thousand men-at-arms anchored off the coast. Edward made his case, the Flemings all agreed to continue to accept his kingship, and Edward agreed to rid the country of the count of Flanders' supporters. At the end of the month, Edward gave orders for his fleet to sail to a secret destination. Unfortunately his luck with storms once more proved decisive, and his ships found themselves sailing northwards for two days. The secret destination - wherever it was - remained secret. No sailors reached it. Edward realised he needed to regroup and returned to England.

*

Van Artevelde's murder was just one of a series of deaths which cast a shadow over the summer of 1345. Only a few days earlier, while Edward was at Sluys, his trusted confidant John Shorditch was murdered. Shorditch had undertaken much secret business on Edward's behalf, and Edward was furious when told of his death. He had the killers tracked down and summarily executed. In September, at Worms, Edward's brother-in-law and erstwhile ally, the count of Hainault, was killed, leaving no obvious heir. He had betrayed Edward by swearing allegiance to Philip, and his death left Hainault without any leadership except that of his uncle, John of Hainault (the same John who had accompanied Edward to England in 1326). Despite their long association, John now swore allegiance to France, angered that Edward had not paid the money he had previously promised to the count. Edward showed what he thought of this by immediately trying to claim Hainault in right of his wife, even though she was not the eldest of the count's sisters. John retaliated by ensuring that the county passed to Albert, son of his niece Margaret and her husband Ludvig of Bavaria, who was now allied to Philip.

Natural deaths of men close to Edward also occurred at this time. Foremost of these was that of his old ally, Henry, earl of Lancaster, who died on 22 September. One of the now ageing guard who had taken part in the seizure of Mortimer, he was trusted to his dying day. When Edward had gone to Flanders in July, Henry had been appointed one of the advisers of seven-year-old Prince Lionel, keeper of England. Edward and Philippa attended the earl's funeral in person, specially buying black cloth for mourning clothes for themselves and their household.

Less emotional but diplomatically much more important were the deaths of various bishops. When Thomas Charlton, the bishop of Hereford, had died in 1344 the pope had acted quickly to appoint his successor, to enforce his rights. As relations with the pope worsened over the following twelve months it became clear that the next bishop to die would trigger a struggle between the king and the pope. As it happened, the next to go was the bishop of Durham, Richard Bury, who died in April 1345. Perhaps because of the special relationship between this bishop and the king, Edward won this round of episcopal nominations, achieving the election of his clerk Thomas Hatfield to the vacant see. (The pope's words on Hatfield were that he would have appointed a jackass if Edward had nominated one.) But Edward lost the next round of this game of dead bishop's shoes, in June, when the pope's man, Thomas Lisle, was appointed bishop of Ely. Edward decided to make an example of the next church body which dared to oppose him. When Adam of Orleton died the next month, and the monks of Winchester elected John Devenish in his place, against the king's will, Edward took the bold step of fining the monks two thousand pounds. Levying a fine against men who had supposedly given up their worldly wealth only hardened the pope's attitude, which was already hard enough. Clement responded by delaying any appointment to Winchester and maintaining his refusal to permit an arranged marriage between Edward's eldest son and the daughter of the duke of Brabant. Such obduracy was guaranteed not to soften the hearts of the English. Anti-papal propaganda began to circulate: it was rumoured that Clement had declared that the English were 'good asses' who would bear whatever load was thrust upon them. By the autumn of 1345 the English were as eager to fight the pope as they were King Philip. Opposition to the French pope increasingly fused with opposition to the French king. The diatribes written against the French at this point were extreme. 'France, womanish, pharisaic, embodiment of might, lynx-like, viperish, foxy, wolfish, a Medea, cunning, a siren, cruel, bitter, haughty: you are full of bile' was how one contemporary poem began. The English view of the truce was not much better: 'King, beware of truces, lest you perish by them' warned the same writer. Ironically, the only thing holding the English back from launching a full-scale invasion of France at this stage was Edward, and that was only because he already had two armies in the field.

On the death of his father, the earl of Derby had inherited the tide Earl of Lancaster. In keeping with his elevation, he had success from the moment he had landed. The siege of Blaye had been an unambitious affair, and he persuaded Stafford to negotiate a local truce. That done, both forces joined together under Lancaster's command and boldly marched to Montcuq, a Gascon castle besieged by the French. After a surprise night march, Lancaster shocked the besiegers into flight, and pursued them north to Bergerac, an important French town on the Dordogne. Barely pausing for breath, Lancaster and his knights (including the ever-present Sir Walter Manny) set about attacking the town. After a number of assaults it surrendered, on 24 August. Thereafter success followed success. Castles fell, valuable prisoners were captured, towns capitulated. Huge amounts of treasure were obtained by Lancaster and Manny. All of this fell to them personally, encouraging them to carry on the fight. And carry on they did, in style. Declining to attack the well-defended city of Perigueux, Lancaster left garrisons at all the surrounding fortified places he could capture. When the French responded by sending a substantial army to recapture one of these, Auberoche, he turned back on himself. Forcing his men on another surprise night march he came upon the French army at dawn on Tuesday 21 October. The result was utter confusion among the French, torn apart by the devastating effect of the English arrows. Despite their superior numbers they could not properly engage the English until the battle was well underway. Just when the French seemed to be stabilising their position and getting the upper hand, Lancaster brought up his mounted knights and men-at-arms, and the garrison of the castle made a sortie to attack the French from the rear. The pendulum of confidence swung in England's favour at the crucial moment of the battle. The rest was devastation. Among the valuable prisoners taken by Lancaster were a count, seven viscounts, three barons, twelve bannerets, many knights, and last, but certainly not least, one of the pope's nephews.

In Brittany the earl of Northampton had success of a much less dramatic kind. He recaptured the Channel Islands but then found himself picking up the pieces of Edward's broken strategy. It was no mistake or defeat which laid his campaign low: it was simply that John de Montfort suddenly fell ill at his castle of Hennebont, and died there on 26 September. It was a devastating blow. As a military leader de Montfort was replaceable but as the heir in whose name the English were fighting, he was not. Worse, back in England, his lion-hearted wife had gone mad, and was unfit to return to Brittany. Not even the six-year-old heir, John's son, was on hand to provide nominal leadership; he too was in England, at Edward's court. The earl of Northampton was forced to maintain his army in the field simply to keep the de Montfortist claim - and Edward's strategy - alive.

The news of de Montfort's death caused Edward to reflect deeply on his situation in October 1345. News of the battle of Auberoche and the subsequent victories of the earl of Lancaster had yet to reach England. The prime strategic factor guiding Edward was the instruction he had received in parliament the previous year: to bring this war to a swift conclusion with no concessions to French interests. It was clear to him now that this meant an English-led attack, entailing huge numbers of English troops, and thus extended supply lines into France, and the assembly of the biggest English military fleet ever assembled. And that was just to get a large enough army across the Channel: the military strategy on the ground was another consideration, the defence of the northern border was another, and the implications of victory yet another. Some necessary preparations could be undertaken straight away. Men could be raised, ships could be acquired and the Scottish border could be secured. But many unknowns remained. Much depended on the progress of the two armies in the field. If Northampton could wrest control of one of the major Breton ports, then Brittany might prove an ideal landing place. If Lancaster continued to enjoy success in Gascony, there might be an argument for taking the army there. In the circumstances Edward did exactly the right thing: he set the date for the navy and army to muster in the spring - 1 March 1346 - and left the details to be decided nearer the date. This left his commanders plenty of time to achieve their respective immediate strategic objectives and allowed him time to gather the huge number of vessels needed for the crossing and to arrange for the defence of the north.

Thus it was that, as Lancaster was wreaking havoc on the French armies in Gascony, and the French king was desperately trying to arrange for the defence of the Agenais and surrounding lands, Edward marched north to the Scottish border. On 8 November Lancaster turned the tide in the Agenais by walking into La Reole, one of the strongest towns in the region, at the invitation of the citizens. Five days later - but long before he heard the news - Edward set off on a high-speed march to the Scottish border. If the October discussions had not specifically recommended that Edward go north, the need became evident on 25 October, when the Scots invaded by Carlisle, and wasted many places in Cumberland. Although Edward himself fell very ill, his purpose in going had been to issue orders, not to lead a campaign. From his sick bed he sent word to the local commanders informing them that a massive invasion of France would take place the following spring, and that they could expect a concerted drive from the Scots at that time. Their task was to resist it.

By Christmas, Edward was back at Westminster and his health improving. He knew there was another papal nuncio on hand, waiting to introduce two further cardinals to lay Clement's proposals for peace before him. But he had instructions from the 1344 parliament not to delay his conclusion of the war for papal negotiators, and he refused at first to see the nuncio, or even to grant the cardinals safe conduct. Besides, he himself had no wish to see any of them. His grand scheme was now well underway, and he was not for a moment going to entertain sacrificing such an ambitious military expedition for the sake of Clement's pro-French diplomacy. In Brittany, Northampton had won a bitter battle for La Roche-Derrien, and in Gascony the successes which Lancaster was winning were extraordinary. First it had been Bergerac, then Auberoche, then La Reole. Subsequently then almost every citadel and fortress in the Agenais had fallen to the English. Although Edward did not yet know it, Angouleme too had temporarily fallen to John of Norwich. As victory after victory was reported in England, his popularity rose higher and higher. It was, after all, his kingship - his encouragement of a band of worthy knights which had brought these victories about. In contrast, the pope's popularity had already sunk irretrievably low in the parliament of 1344. Edward had just covered the length of the country and had been left in no doubt that the whole kingdom was behind him. Let Clement put the country under an interdict, and let him excommunicate him! Edward was rediscovering the sort of kingship which England had not seen for fifty years: confident, popular, patriotic and defiant. When he decided eventually to admit the papal nuncio into his presence, it was so he could lecture him on how his cause was just and right, and how it had been Philip who had broken the truce by executing his Breton subjects.

So began 1346, one of the truly momentous years in European history. In the north of England, Edward was preparing for a militia resistance against a Scots incursion. The Scots, aware of the scale of the attack planned on France, were waiting for Edward to leave England. The French were hastily trying to reclaim as much of Gascony as they could, using the army under the command of Duke John of Normandy. They brought thousands of men - Froissart claims no fewer than one hundred thousand - to besiege Aiguillon, where Sir Ralph Stafford and Sir Walter Manny were holed up with about six hundred archers and three hundred men-at-arms. The Genoese were sending galleys - slowly — in support of the French. As for Edward himself, as was made clear at a great council meeting in February, he was set on the path of war. There could be no turning back now. Although a delay set in due to his old enemy the weather, which scattered the ships as they tried to gather in March, nothing was going to deter him from invading France. More than just the French throne was at stake: this was as much about him honouring his promises to the English as his defiance of France and the pope. When the weather turned bad he simply put the muster date back to i May. The date had to be set back again, but Edward was not to be deterred. By the end of May approximately fifteen thousand men were gathered in and around Portsmouth, ready to embark on seven hundred and fifty ships. Edward himself was at Porchester Castle from 1 June, waiting. And all of Europe was waiting too. In their towns, parishes and cities across France, Gascony, Flanders, Brittany, Castille and Genoa, they were waiting; in the monasteries and castles, manor houses and street tenements. For no one knew where he would land. Edward had kept his destination a complete secret. Would it be Gascony? Brittany? Flanders? Or somewhere else, somewhere entirely new?

We do not know when Edward made his decision. Neither he nor his closest advisers told anyone. The destination was chosen before he set sail, as the captains of the ships all had sealed instructions where to land in the event of being separated by a storm, but the actual place remained a closely guarded secret. Edward ordered no ships to leave England for a week after the fleet departed, with the exception of a diversionary expedition, due to sail to Flanders under Hugh Hastings. The destination was still a secret on 28 June, when Edward boarded his flagship. Hundreds of vessels followed the great English warships flying their magnificent streamers as they headed westwards, hugging the English coast. The ships had all been equipped with sufficient rations to reach Gascony, and Froissart indicates that that was widely believed to have been the planned destination. A letter written after the landing by Sir Bartholomew Burghersh also states that the king originally intended to go to Gascony. But it was not a Gascony-bound breeze which Edward was waiting for. On 11 July, two weeks after setting out, the strategy was made known. That morning, in the clear sun, the trumpets from Edward's flagship blared out, and the great ships of the English navy unfurled their sails, turned their prows and started sailing south. They were heading towards the Normandy beaches.

TEN

Edward the Conqueror

On i July 1346, while Edward was still at sea, Simon Pouillet, a wealthy merchant of Compiegne, was dining with some of his relatives. At the dinner table he happened to remark that, in his opinion, it might be better if Edward were to become king of France, for 'it would be better for France to be ruled well by Edward than badly by Philip'. This remark was noted by some who were present, and mentioned to others, and so on, until it was carried around the town. Eventually it came to die attention of King Philip. His reaction says much about his state of mind. Pouillet was arrested, dragged to the Paris meat market and hanged on a meat hook like a beef carcass. Then he was butchered alive: first his arms being severed, then his legs, then his head. His limbless and headless torso was hung by a chain from the common gallows at Montfaucon, just outside Paris.

About one month before this, an event took place which reveals the morale of the English assailants in France, and perhaps explains Philip's paranoia. His nephew, Charles de Blois, was sweeping across Brittany in an attempt to destroy all Breton support for the English cause. So large was his army that he was successful in persuading many Bretons to switch sides. The English forces were then under the command of Sir Thomas Dagworth (Northampton having returned to England in January). Dagworth's force was too small to face de Blois, and so remained in the fortresses at Brest, Lesneven and La Roche-Derrien. But Dagworth was surprised while making a tour of his outposts. Very early in the morning on g June he and eighty men-at-arms and one hundred archers realised they were trapped by the entire French Breton army, numbering several thousand men. Offered no quarter, they dug themselves in, and prepared to fight to the death. They were hugely outnumbered, facing at least twenty if not forty times as many men. They had little chance of even creating an impression on the opposing force. One French knight declared he would himself tie up Dagworth like a parcel and bring him to de Blois. But as the fight raged, something almost unbelievable happened. The English position held. All day they fought, ten, twelve, fourteen hours, right into the evening. They countered attack after attack, and kept going until nightfall. Charles de Blois himself led the last charge and did all he could to break the English line. But Sir Thomas Dagworth and his men, wounded as they were, exhausted as they were, held firm. At the end of the day, having seen de Blois' army fall back, Dagworth realised something close to a military miracle had been accomplished. The French were retreating. Despite fighting for about sixteen hours, and sustaining terrible injuries, he and his troops had come through. It was cause for a letter to the king, and a claim that that day he had led the bravest men that England had to offer.

These two stories are glimpses of a huge contrast in mood in 1346. For twenty years Philip had kept up an awkward war of words and diplomatic squabbling with Edward, at least partly to sustain an image of royal superiority over the upstart grandson of Philip the Fair. And in all that time he had achieved nothing substantial; he had not even lessened the threat to his people. He had not engaged Edward in a full-scale battle, far less defeated him, and he had had to sacrifice territorial rights in order to avoid conflict, which had only resulted in accusations of cowardice. A succession of French popes had proved powerless to help him, and one, Benedict XII, had clearly thought him a fool. Now people openly derided him. But like many unconfident kings before and after, his reaction to dissent was anger and tyranny, and that only exacerbated his difficulties. Edward on the other hand had never stooped to butchering his detractors. His determination to keep the war on French soil meant that he was much more likely to keep the goodwill of his people than Philip. And his policy of continual war coupled with his reluctance to compromise meant that, when he did settle for a truce or a ceasefire, it was always on his own terms. He had every reason to be optimistic.

Optimism was not something to rely on, however, as Edward well knew, and there was still plenty of room for him to miscalculate and lose. Northampton's failure to win a major northern port suitable for an invasion was an indicator of how large Edward's problem was. There could be no failed siege this time, as at Tournai in 1340. Nor could there be a withdrawal, as at La Flamengrie in 1339. This time the armies of France and England had to clash. Philip could not afford to be called a coward again, and Edward had parliamentary expectations to satisfy, that he would bring the war to a successful close. This raised an issue that must have been in the back of Edward's mind: he had never actually defeated Philip on land. Indeed, no one had defeated the French army on French soil for more than a hundred and fifty years.3 They were reputed to be the best knights in Europe, and certainly constituted by far the largest assembly of trained men who would fight for a single cause. When the two armies did meet, it was probable that Edward would be facing an army two or three times the size of his own. And he could not be sure that the French would not pull some new tactics out to combat his archers. When Dagworth and his men had dug themselves in on top of a hill, it was noted that de Blois had advanced on foot, avoiding the entrapment techniques which Edward's forces had to date relied upon. This was Edward's quandary: he had to bring the French to battle, and defeat them comprehensively on their own soil, knowing he would be outnumbered, and knowing that his tactics were no longer unfamiliar to the enemy. Unless he could choose the place of the battle, and had time properly to arrange his forces, he would be in grave danger of losing everything for which he had fought and negotiated over the past sixteen years.

It is important to remember these dangers, for the character of Edward III has been portrayed as somewhat frivolous compared with such resolute figures from English history as William the Conqueror and Edward I. That would be absolutely the wrong picture to have of him now, on the point of invading France. Edward's ability to enjoy himself has been seen traditionally as reflecting a moral weakness, and his fondness for women has often been cited as a lack of commitment to the business of being a king. But his enjoyment of hunting and male as well as female company should not lull us into forgetting that beneath the lighthearted exterior was a deeply committed and serious core of ambition. He had already shown it dramatically at Halidon Hill and Sluys. It is clearly visible in the very elaborate preparations for this campaign. Although Philippa was about to give birth to another child, Edward did not allow family matters to distract him from his prime purpose.4 He was now aged thirty-three, Alexander the Great's age at death. Had William the Conqueror or Edward I met their descendant in Normandy in July 1346 they would have recognised a man every bit as resolute as they had been at the height of their powers, and one who was fully aware of the expectations of his peers, his parliament and his people. At times like this Edward was a warrior monk to whom the military guidebook of Vegetius was like a bible and whose reverential prayer all his waking hours was for victory over his adversary.

Propaganda was employed to the full. The very place of landing -Normandy - was partly chosen for its symbolism. The three main reasons for choosing the beaches were probably the proximity to England, the lack of a French army there and the difficulty of preventing a landing. But there was a fourth reason too: England had once been conquered by the duke of Normandy. Now England was returning the compliment. Edward's contemporaries would have understood this as recovering the lands of his ancestors, a powerful symbol of duty in the medieval mind, and in many ways similar to the crusaders' dream of recovering Christ's patrimony in the Holy Land. It was said that Edward tripped on landing, and bloodied his nose, but got up and claimed that it was a welcome embrace from the land of France. William the Conqueror was said to have fallen similarly in 1066, clutching the sands of England as he got up, saying he held England in his hands. Edward certainly came prepared to draw connections between his campaign and that of the Conqueror. In his speech to the invading troops he reminded them of his dynastic right to the duchy of Normandy, which, he told them, inaccurately 'had been taken unjusdy in the time of King Richard'.6 Would not his men fight to right this injustice done by the French to that crusader king? And, like William the Conqueror, he announced that he would send the ships away. There would be no retreat. When he exhorted his men to be valiant, and to conquer the land of France or die, the army responded with shouts and overwhelming enthusiasm that 'they would follow him, their dear lord, even to death'.

Edward's actual landing place - Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue - was on the western side of Normandy, on the Cotentin peninsula. No serious resistance to the landing was encountered; what little there was was quickly swept away by the vanguard, commanded by the earl of Warwick. Many Norman vassals were distrustful of Philip, and whether or not they wanted the old overlordship of England restored, they may have seen a political opportunity to change the king for one less inclined judicially to murder Norman lords such as Olivier de Clisson, who had been hanged during the truce, three years earlier. Godfrey de Harcourt - an important Norman landowner, who had been exiled from France - was with Edward, and may have pointed out that the Norman townsmen were not used to war on this scale, unlike the Flemings and Gascons. They would not be able to form a serious militia to resist Edward. As the English advanced towards Paris, they would be wresting control from Philip all the way.

Soon after landing Edward made his way on to a small hill near the beach. There he knighted his sixteen-year-old son, Prince Edward (the Black Prince), and several other promising young men including the eighteen-year-old William Montagu, second earl of Salisbury, son and heir of his late great friend, and the seventeen-year-old Roger Mortimer, grandson and heir of his late great enemy, the earl of March. He then resorted to Morsalines while his captains oversaw the disembarkation and organisation of all the troops, victuals and equipment, an operation which took a full five days. Edward sent troops to take the ports of Barfleur and Cherbourg which lay nearby. Both towns were looted and burnt. Edward did speak to his men - or as many as could hear him - telling them that he had not come to despoil Normandy but to accept its allegiance; but his exhortation failed to restrain the substantial minority who considered it their prerogative to loot the goods, rape the women, and gorge themselves on the fruits and soft cheeses of Normandy. Even as the troops disembarked the wildest English and Welsh bands - there were about three thousand Welsh spearmen with Edward - roamed between the villages and 'cheerfully' set fire to the countryside 'until the sky itself glowed red'.

On 17 July the English army began the march eastwards, towards Paris. They travelled in three divisions. The first, the vanguard, was under the nominal command of the prince of Wales, assisted by the earls of Warwick and Northampton. The main body of men was under the king's own direct control. The rear was commanded by the recently consecrated bishop of Durham, Thomas Hatfield. With such an enormous force approaching, the first town in their way - Valognes - had no option but to submit, the inhabitants begging only that Edward spare their lives. Edward made a show of granting to all the Normans who accepted his kingship that he would indeed spare their lives and property. But in reality his word alone was not sufficient to control the urges of his men, who looted the town and burnt it as they left. The same happened at the next town they came to, Carentan, which was also subjected to looting and burning despite the king's attempts to save the property of men whom he considered his subjects. After Carentan he knew that, wherever the English army went there would be destruction unless the most strenuous and time-consuming efforts were made to keep the troops in order. In most cases, this was counter-productive. For the French towns in his path, his approaching army was simply a tide of misery.

The inhabitants of the next town on die way to Paris, Saint-Lo, realised in advance what was likely to happen to them, and decided to resist. With a French army in the vicinity, commanded by Robert Bertrand, they prepared to defend their homes. They broke down the bridge and barricaded the streets. But their decision was a naive one. When the size of the English army became clear, Bertrand realised his position was suicidal, and withdrew to Caen, leaving the inhabitants of Saint-Lo to defend their homes as best they could. Had the English been a mere raiding party of a couple of hundred men, perhaps the townsmen could have held them back. But fifteen thousand fresh soldiers was impossible. Edward's carpenters repaired the bridge and the army smashed through the gates and barricades and swarmed over the town, seizing whatever they wanted and killing anyone who got in their way. When the news was spread that the three skulls hanging above the gates belonged to three Norman knights who had been executed against the terms of the truce for supporting Edward in 1343, the inhabitants were doomed. Overt statements that rapes took place are relatively rare in chronicles - killing could be considered chivalrous, rape never - but at Saint-Lo, in le Bel's words, 'several pretty women of the town and their daughters were raped, which was a great pity'. The wealthiest men - cloth merchants - were seized, bound and dragged off, to be shipped back to England and ransomed. As the first town that had actively resisted him, Edward did not say a word to try and prevent the destruction. Instead he gave the order for the whole town to be burnt. He might have lost the power to save those prepared to accept him, but he could still demonstrate what horrors would be inflicted on those towns which resisted.

Edward made his men rise early, before dawn. Each morning they were ordered to move out to a certain destination. On the 23rd they were ordered to Torigny, but a change of plan switched them to Cormolain. The next day's march took them to Fontenay le Pesnel, then Cheux. On 26 June, Edward arose, heard mass before sunrise, and ordered the army to advance on Caen.

Edward knew that Caen would be the site of the first important battle of his campaign. Inside the secure walls of the old town and its castle were the forces of the count of Eu, the lord of Tancarville, the bishop of Bayeux and a substantial population, probably in excess of twelve thousand people. There were also about three hundred mercenary Genoese crossbowmen. Outside, waiting for Edward, was a large contingent under the command of Robert Bertrand, including many townsmen of Caen who had insisted on meeting the English in the open, bravely trying to minimise the damage to their town.

The English approached at about three o'clock in the afternoon. Edward drew up his men in battle formation. Seeing the thousands of pennons approaching, the men of Caen realised that they had totally misjudged the scale of the invasion, and fled back within the old town. Fearful though they may have been, their retreat was also a sensible tactical move, strengthening further the town's defences. The French numbered between two and four thousand soldiers and perhaps four thousand adult male citizens; this made it a daunting task to storm the town, as the walls were strong, and seven thousand men (not to mention a few thousand women) could easily defend them for a long period. The king's confessor mentioned in a letter that when he first saw Caen, he thought it was impregnable.

Edward could not afford to think in terms of impregnability for he did not have time for a long siege. He noted that the two great abbeys built by the Conqueror - the Abbaye aux Hommes (where the Conqueror himself lay buried) and the Abbaye aux Dames — lay outside the walls, so that a complete destruction of the town need not destroy his ancestors' burial place or his religious foundations. When the bishop of Bayeux refused even to answer his letter offering to spare the lives of the inhabitants if the town surrendered, and failed also to permit the return of Edward's messenger, the destruction of the town became his determined path.

As it happened, the vanguard had run ahead of his decision-making. As the last of Bertrand's soldiers desperately made for the safety of the old town, the foremost of the troops under the prince and the earl of Warwick had followed them and attacked. A battle ensued in which the archers in the vanguard were confronted by large numbers of men-at-arms. In order to save his valuable archers, Edward sent a message to the earl of Warwick to order them to retreat, but, in the vicious chaos which followed in the streets of the old town, the earl also became drawn into the fighting. Realising there was nothing to do but engage fully, Edward ordered an attack. Everything centred on the bridge between the new and old towns. A contingent of Welsh spearmen, seeing the low tide allowed them to cross the river on foot, jumped in and bravely waded towards the defenders on the far bank, attacking the bridge from the rear. More English piled into the fray until the defenders lost heart and fell back, leaving their compatriots on the bridge to be killed. Some knights took refuge in the upper storeys of the gatehouse. They saw what happened to those caught in the streets. Even the wealthy were killed by the English troops who were (in Froissart's view) 'men of little conscience'. No one was being ransomed. The knights in the gatehouse only survived when one of their number happened to recognise the arms of Sir Thomas Holland amidst the melee, and pleaded with him to take them prisoner, so that their lives would be saved.

When the dust settled, more than five thousand Frenchmen lay dead in the streets and in the fields around the town, hacked down as they tried to flee. One hundred and seven knights were taken prisoner along with about one hundred and twenty esquires. Three hundred Genoese archers lay dead, their crossbows all useless after they ran out of bolts. As the town had resisted, a large number of women were systematically raped. Some of the English knights tried to prevent some of the rapes and killings. But Edward did nothing to prevent any of it. He was set on destroying everything, ruthlessly eliminating every obstacle between him and Philip. When he was told that he had lost several hundred soldiers, some killed in the ransacking of the town by citizens throwing stones down from their upper windows, he gave the order to kill everyone within and to burn the town. Only the insistence of Sir Godfrey de Harcourt persuaded him that he had destroyed enough already, that he needed to remain focused on his real ambition, which was to meet Philip in battle, reassuring him with the words 'without more killing we will still be lords and masters of this town'.

Edward accepted Harcourt's advice. It became a pattern for him to insist on the most stringent, horrific punishments for those who had dared oppose him, and only to relent when one of his own men begged him to show mercy. This campaign was not about mercy. It was about him being seen to be 'terrible to his enemies', demonstrating that Philip and the French, and the pope and die College of Cardinals, had to regard him not as the son of Edward II but as the greatest warrior in Christendom, and king of a commensurately great kingdom, capable of re-enacting the most glorious exploits of Arthur or anyone else from history they cared to mention. The self-doubt which he had experienced as a teenager still seems to have been pushing him on, to prove himself, to live up to the prophesies of greatness.

After the battle of Caen Edward spent five days in the town, preparing for the battles that lay ahead. He sent out troops to devastate the countryside around. When he received the capitulation of the citizens of Bayeux, terrified that theirs would be the next city destroyed, Edward told the city's representatives that he would accept their submission only when he could guarantee their safety, with the obvious implications that Philip had failed to do exactly that. He ordered twelve hundred reinforcement archers to be levied in England and despatched to him in Normandy together with their equipment. And he held a council of all his nobles. King Philip had taken possession of the sacred war banner - the Oriflamme - from the Abbot of Saint-Denis on 22 July and was marching to Rouen.

Edward's decision - presumably supported by his nobles - was to go straight for Philip. On 31 July he ordered the army to break camp and head towards Rouen. On either side of the main army rode the marshals, devastating everything, so that a broad trail of incineration and destruction fourteen miles wide was left behind Edward wherever he went. That night he encamped at Troarn, the next at Rumesnil. The following day he marched into the city of Lisieux. On 5 August he was at Le Neubourg, twenty-five miles from Rouen. On that day two cardinals sent by the pope to discuss a new peace initiative were allowed into Edward's presence. Their suggestion was that Edward should accept Philip's offer to restore the counties of Ponthieu and the duchy of Aquitaine to be held on the same terms as Edward II had held them, as feudal tenements of the French king. Edward must have been hard-pressed to retain a diplomatic front. These men were still treating him as if he was a supplicant, the king of a little country, a weak country, unable to question the military and ecclesiastical might of France. Did they not realise he had invaded France and was actively trying to engage the French king in combat? Did they think this was merely to regain his father's territorial possessions? Did they not realise that he did not care whether the pope placed England under an interdict? Where were their letters of authority? They had none, they admitted. He dismissed them from his sight, and gave orders to advance to Rouen.

Edward knew that the French army was growing larger every day. At the beginning of August Philip had crossed the Seine and had briefly headed towards Edward, but then had come news of the landing of the second English army in Flanders, under Hugh Hastings, and intelligence that the Flemings had provided a large force to invade France from the north-east. Philip hastened back to Rouen, uncertain of what to do. As the cardinals wasted Edward's time, Philip ordered the destruction of the bridge over the Seine at Rouen, thereby cutting himself off from Edward. He also sent troops ahead to guard the next bridge upstream, at Pont de 1'Arche, and the next at Vernon, and so on, giving him enough time to gather an even bigger army, hoping to sweep around through Paris and crush the English. This posed the question: would Edward attack the capital? His baggage wagons were only able to move slowly, about half the speed of the men, but a large contingent could certainly have reached it sooner than Philip, and could have perhaps burnt the suburbs. But it was a very risky move. To get drawn into street fighting in the largest city in northern Europe, against a massive and hostile population, was to risk being overpowered by numbers. The capital had been defended with barricades, compounding the difficulties. Nor would burning the capital of France have helped him reach the northern bank of the Seine. If Philip moved his army to guard the city, Edward would face an impossible series of obstacles between himself and safety. For good reasons, then, Philip gambled that Edward would not actually attack the capital, though he might threaten it. If Philip could bring another army against Edward from the south, and bring his main force through Paris to attack Edward from the east, he would force Edward back towards Normandy, if not destroy him. In view of this, Philip ordered the huge army under the command of his son, the duke of Normandy, to give up the siege of Aiguillon and begin the long march north.

This decision may have raised a smile in the English camp. It would certainly have raised a fantastic cheer in Aiguillon itself. The town had been besieged for over four months by Duke John, and he had sworn not to rest until he had overrun it. For the three hundred English men-at-arms and six hundred archers within, life had become very difficult. Only the remarkable antics of Sir Walter Manny and his indomitable comrades had prevented the town falling to the huge French army at the gates. Indeed, at times it seems that Manny regarded the enemy's presence as simply a form of entertainment to break the monotony of the siege, making daily sorties to destroy the French bridge being built over the river, and later to forage for supplies. On one of these sorties Manny and his men had found themselves cut off by a French foraging party six times the size of his own. In the ensuing fight, Manny's horse was killed underneath him, and his men were all cut down, but when a rescuing party from Aiguillon reached the skirmish and fought their way through to him, they found him carrying on the fight completely surrounded by Frenchmen, and 'fighting most valiantly'.

Edward destroyed all the manors of the king of France, even those within two miles of Paris, but he did not advance on the city itself. It is likely that he realised the risks were far too great, and the chances of bringing Philip to battle in favourable circumstances were far too small. He was still as determined as ever to fight, but to do so on his own terms required him to cross the Seine. He also knew that, before long, the duke of Normandy's army would trap him if he remained south of the river. So began a desperate chase along the river towards Paris to find a bridge. At Pont de l'Arche the local forces desperately fought off the English vanguard until the main French army arrived. The next bridges were at Vernon, Mantes and Meulan. At these places too the English found either the bridge in ruins, or defended by several thousand Frenchmen. Which left them no option but to press on to Poissy.

By 13 August, the situation must have been beginning to rattle those around Edward, even if he himself remained calm. Yes, they were within twenty miles of Paris. Yes, they were feasting off the king of France's own cattle and drinking his wine. But they were not safe. They had failed to engage the French army. Philip controlled the bridges, and by now his army was much larger than the force at Edward's disposal. Edward was stranded south of the Seine, with no way to go except back to Normandy, and that was unthinkable. There was an army of perhaps twenty-five thousand men between him and safety, and it was still growing in size. If Edward had lost only a thousand men in the campaign so far - and he had probably lost more - then he had about half this number. And a second French army was approaching from the south-east. His freedom was at stake, if not his life. Certainly his leadership was in question unless he made something happen soon. It was of paramount importance that he cross this river.

This was where Edward saw the return on the years and the money he had spent on encouraging chivalric pursuits. By promoting the cult of the knight, Edward had fostered men who saw opportunities for greatness and glory in fighting against odds of six to one. It was said in England that if a French army outnumbered an English one by three-to-one, it would be as fifteen lambs to five wolves. Sir Walter Manny and Sir Thomas Dagworth were not alone among Edward's men in showing outstanding courage and supreme fighting skills. Vignettes of an almost comic nature have come down to us, slipped as they were between the pages of the chronicles of enthralled contemporaries. When Sir Thomas Holland found the bridge at Rouen had been destroyed, dividing him from the French king, he was distraught. Having fought and killed the only two French knights he could find, he stood on the edge of the ruined bridge and repeatedly bellowed 'St George for King Edward!' at the concerned Frenchmen on the other side. Comic as such events may appear to us, Holland's shouting, Manny's extraordinary courage at Hennebont and Aiguillon, and even the wanton destruction of towns and villages by 'men of little conscience' are all indicative of a powerful collective will - one is tempted to say psychosis - to attack the enemy. Edward had encouraged a spirit to fight which was so strong that it was difficult to control. The upside of this was that he commanded a force which was undaunted by any task he set. That promise to follow him 'even to death', which the army had made on landing, was serious.

On 13 August the main army came to Poissy. The bridge itself was broken but, as the English looked at the remains, it seemed that the piles were still in place. Odd beams from the bridge floated here and there on the river's edge. Carpenters were called up. Could the bridge be repaired? It was possible, but if the French attacked in sufficient numbers, those first across would be massacred. Edward ordered the carpenters to begin work at once, and asked Northampton to stand by to defend them. Within a short while a single beam, one foot wide, was laid across the swift-moving river. As the last beam was secured, a French force of one thousand horsemen and two thousand infantry appeared on the far bank. Had Edward's men had any doubt in his leadership, things might have been very different. But Northampton and two dozen knights did not hesitate for a moment. They rushed straight over the narrow crossing, one after the other, swords drawn, and engaged the French in bitter hand-to-hand combat, and held them back, as reinforcements crossed behind them. By the end of the day, between five and twelve hundred Frenchmen lay dead around the north side of die crossing The English too had lost many men. But Edward had his bridge.

The next day Philip learnt that Edward held the bridge at Poissy. His policy of entrapment had failed. He now had no option but to take positive action. He issued a public challenge, declaring that he would meet

Edward's army in the area south of Paris, or north of Poissy (north of the Seine), between 17 and 22 August. Edward told Philip's messenger that he would be delighted to fight Philip, but he would choose the time and place of the meeting himself. When asked where Philip could expect to find him, Edward told him to look for the smoke of burning towns, and promptly gave orders to burn eveiy place between Poissy and Paris, including Montjoye, the French king's favourite residence and the place which gave him his battle-cry ('St Denis et Montjoye').

Philip may have supposed that Edward did mean to fight him south of the capital, in the plains. Perhaps he believed that Edward was so eager to fight that he would rush into poorly defended ground, where his comparatively small army could be surrounded. But Edward was a better military leader than Philip, and a more competent strategist than Philip's advisers were prepared to admit to their king. The day after the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (15 August) - during which both sides observed an informal truce - the French army marched south, towards Paris. In so doing they opened the door for Edward to cross the Seine at Poissy and march north, escaping their entrapment on die south side of the river.

This move has led many subsequent writers to believe that Edward never really meant to do battle with the French at all, that he was running away. But it is one thing to escape a trap, seeking a more suitable battle-field, and quite another to run away. Edward was doing what the Scots had done to him in 1327, what he had done on the way to La Flamengrie in 1339, and what any skilful strategist would have done in the circumstances. He was searching for a more advantageous place to fight. He even put his plan into a formal letter to Philip on the 15th, stating that his sole intention was 'to put an end to the war by battle', stating 'at whatever hour you approach you will find us ready to meet you in the field' and that 'we do not consider it advisable to be cut off by you, or to let you choose the time and place of battle'.

Having crossed the Seine on the 16th, Edward had the Somme on his north, and he now learnt that Philip had destroyed all the undefended bridges over that river also. If he stopped on the south bank, the massive French army would advance on him there, and surround him. It seemed as though all France was one big spider's web full of rivers on which he could be caught, and the French army a big spider able to crawl towards his army wherever it was trapped. If he came to the Somme, and was cornered, Philip's army could hold back and devour him at its leisure, slowly, without a pitched battle, thereby avoiding the risk of attacking the mass of Edward's archers. The answer therefore was simply not to get trapped. And that meant crossing Another big river.

Philip could destroy bridges, but he could not destroy fords. There was only one crossing which would guarantee Edward safety from the French army. This was the ford called Blanchetaque, the 'white spot': a path across the Somme estuary marked with a white stone which was traversable on foot at low ride. At high tide merchants' ships could sail up the river to Abbeville, so there was only a narrow opportunity to cross. This was known to Philip, of course, so he had already despatched Godemar du Fay to oversee its defence, with an elite corps of five hundred men-at-arms and three thousand archers and footsoldiers. This was more than enough to guarantee that it could not be crossed, so Edward sent Warwick to try to force the bridge at Pont-Remy. There Warwick encountered Sir John of Hainault and King John of Bohemia, who drove him back with heavy losses. Attempts to take the bridges at Longpre and Fontaine-sur-Somme proved equally fruitless. Edward's food supply was now beginning to run down, and Philip was just upstream with his army. Edward was once more vulnerable.

But Edward still had the chivalric fervour of his men on his side. When he needed men who were prepared to risk almost certain death in return for a chance of immortal glory, he had an abundance of volunteers. So, trusting in the valour of his men-at-arms, and the range of his archers, Edward selected the earl of Northampton and Sir Reginald Cobham to lead the perilous attack on Godemar du Fay at the ford.

What happened next was a testimony to how far the English had progressed since that day, nineteen years earlier, when Mortimer had held Edward back from attacking the Scots across the river at Stanhope Park. With incredible courage, Northampton and Cobham proved that it was possible to advance across a river facing large numbers of entrenched, well-armed forces, and drive them from their positions. With one hundred men-at-arms and one hundred archers, they waded into the water, twelve abreast. With the longbows' rapid fire pinning down the front ranks of the enemy, the first group of men-at-arms charged across the river and mounted the bank, despite the returning fire of the Genoese crossbows and the onslaught of the men-at-arms who defied the English longbows. In this way, despite heavy losses, they provided a place for the next hundred men-at-arms to run to, to take the place of the dead, dying and still-fighting first wave. And the archers moved slowly nearer and nearer to the far side, replenished from behind by the next hundred, and then the next hundred. This carried on until they had sufficient numbers to launch a full-scale onslaught on the men of Godemar du Fay. Before long the French men-at-arms realised that their advantage had been shot away by the English archers, and they fled, leaving their infantrymen to be rounded up and killed by the pursuing English knights who now rode freely across the ford. According to a contemporary newsletter, two thousand Frenchmen were killed in the forcing of the passage across the Somme. Soon the English army was across. Not long after that, the tide came in. Philip was cut off from the English. The French were left staring across the river at their elusive quarry. It was not quite comparable to Moses and the parting of the Red Sea, but for the English on the morning of 24 August 1346, it was another of those military miracles for which they were becoming famous. Edward was the first to offer thanks to God.

Edward had escaped entrapment. He was still no nearer to victory but at least he could choose when and where he would fight the French king. At first he considered it to his advantage to engage Philip on the river bank at Blanchetaque, and to this end offered Philip an unimpeded crossing. But Philip refused, and returned to Abbeville, where the bridge still stood, held for him by another large force.

Edward was now on home soil, in a manner of speaking. He was in the county of Ponthieu, which was his mother's inheritance, given to him by his father more than twenty years earlier. Froissart specifically attributes the arrival of the army in Ponthieu as the reason Edward stopped near Crecy: to go further would have been to relinquish land he rightly claimed as his own. This is probably correct; keeping the war on French soil was his highest priority. But it needs to be noted that Edward was on familiar ground. He had been here before, on his journey to see Philip in 1329. He had almost certainly been along the road from Abbeville to Saint-Riquier before, and perhaps more than once, for he was in the vicinity in 1325-26 and 1331. How well he could remember the land is another matter. In 1329 he had been a seventeen-year-old on his way to swear fealty to his cousin. Now things were very different. He was twice as old, and had about ten thousand tired men dependent on him; they were hungry, and their shoes were beginning to disintegrate after marching several hundred miles. And they were all about to be attacked by the largest and best-equipped army in Europe.

On Friday 25 August, Edward sent scouts towards Abbeville to find out whether Philip was going to attack that day. They returned to say they could see little sign of action. Sir Hugh Despenser had meanwhile attacked Le Crotoy and returned with plenty of victuals. Edward remained uneasy, concerned that Philip would attack that following night. He gave orders for the army to camp in the open, and to prepare a defensive formation. With still no sign of the French advance, he held a dinner for his nobles and captains. The men remained in their armour. Froissart states that when the lords had retired from the king's pavilion, the king spent several hours in a makeshift orator)', praying for victory, or at least honour. Without honour, he would be nothing, not even self-respecting. At around midnight he went to bed.

Next morning - Saturday 26 August - he was up before dawn. He summoned the prince to him, and together father and son heard mass and received Holy Communion. Then, as the rest of the camp was stirring, they rode out to survey the surrounding area with Edward's principal commanders, including Northampton, Warwick, Cobham and de Harcourt. One can imagine Edward looking over the ground with care, lines from Vegetius echoing in his head. Perhaps he repeated some of them for the benefit of his son, or tested the prince on what he could remember. 'The nature of the ground is often of more consequence than courage.' Or 'if your forces are few in comparison to the enemy, you must cover one of your flanks either with an eminence, a city, the sea, a river or some similar protection'. Edward did not have the sea, and he did not want a river, far less a city. But there was the forest of Crecy. With that to cover one flank he chose to place his standard at the top of a hill. He positioned his men in three battalions in front of it, across the hill. The first would be under the command of the Prince of Wales, and would include Warwick, de Harcourt, Cobham, Sir Thomas Holland, Sir Bartholomew Burghersh, Sir Thomas Clifford, Sir John Chandos and many other outstanding knights, with eight hundred men-at-arms and the surviving thousand Welshmen. The second would be under Northampton, with the earl of Arundel in support and a further eight hundred men-at-arms. To himself he reserved the remaining seven hundred men-at-arms, who would hold the rear, and about two thousand archers. It went without saying that the other four thousand or so archers would be on the flanks. Trapping the enemy was the essence of their power.

The baggage wagons were carefully positioned. Some were used to make a corral around the horses, who were placed at the rear of the army, near a windmill at the top of the hill. But some of those carts which had rumbled over the rough roads of France all the way from Saint-Vaast-La-Hougue were placed with the archers. King Philip was about to discover why his army had been able to cover thirty miles in a day and the English could only manage half that. They had been protecting these carts. Strapped beneath them were about one hundred small cannon. Now we can see how meticulous Edward's planning and preparation had been. The powder for these artillery pieces had been made at the Tower of London in March, long before landing in France. It had been hauled across the ford at Blanchetaque still dry. Until now gunpowder had only been used in sieges, with the sole exception of Mortimer's use of 'crakkis of war' on the Stanhope campaign. Those had been dangerous exploding buckets by comparison with Edward's refined guns. As well as small cannon with calibres of roughly four inches (the shot were still stone) he brought his newly developed 'ribalds' - series of bound gun barrels designed to shoot metal bolts, like crossbow bolts. And Edward not only had developed them, he had thought of how to use them too. That was why they were with the archers: to catch the advancing French in the deadly crossfire.

Edward had another surprise, also long in preparation. Beside his usual royal arms he unfurled another banner: a painted dragon clothed in his own arms. It was his answer to the Oriflamme. As the troops marched to their positions, they all saw this new symbol of English power and confidence: 'Drago' they called it, recalling the prophetic symbol of his grandfather, Edward I.

The English captains passed on the orders for pits, one foot deep, to be dug in front of their lines to break the charge of the French men-at-arms. As they worked, four French knights appeared in the distance, surveying the English array. Edward gave orders that they were not to be bothered or interrupted. Let them report to Philip how few they were in number! Let them see Drago! Let them tell the French army to come to them. For Edward was still dependent on being attacked. If his troops were drawn out and down to fight Philip and the French lords on their terms, the battle would be lost. Discipline was everything. He jumped on to a small palfrey and went among the ranks of men, carrying a white wand with which he made his gestures and directives clear to all those who could see him. And they listened. His words were words of honour, he spoke of the glory which they would win, and of the rights they would uphold. Never again would the French king be able to hold the English people in contempt, no, nor the pope. Froissart states that all who heard him, even those who were feeling afraid, were cheered by his presence, so positive and optimistic he seemed. He filled them with self-belief. And he did this as he rode at walking pace through all the ranks. Until ten o'clock he rode among them, exhorting them to do their utmost. He commended them to the protection of God and the Virgin Mary. Then he gave orders for the army to sit down, and rest some more, and have food distributed so that they might be strong when the French came on the scene.

Edward and his leaders met together for one last time in his pavilion. Those who were hungry ate, and they all drank a little. Then the pots and pans were packed up, and sent away to the carts at the rear, and each lord resumed his place with his men, said his prayers, and waited.

Edward might have been unfortunate with the weather at sea, but he surely would have gladly weathered all those storms again for the luck that came upon him now. It began to rain. The English sat or stood and waited in their positions as the summer grass beneath their feet was soaked. And as the grass grew damp so did the crossbow strings of the Genoese who were being force-marched to the front of the French army somewhere beyond their sight. Exhausted, and insulted by their French employers, these Genoese had been chosen to lead the assault on the English, using archers against archers. But these crossbowmen needed time to shoot and reload, and they usually fired from behind their great shields. These shields were still in the wagon trains, somewhere behind them. No time for those, they were told; they would have to fight without them.

It was mid-afternoon when the first ranks of Genoese archers came into view. Behind them, in a long disorderly mass, came the army of France: about thirty thousand men, roughly three times the size of the English force, with more following, yet to arrive. The English ranks were ordered to their feet. The archers restrung their bows. And they waited. The Genoese advanced, and shouting insultingly at the English. Local people had lined the road all the way to the battlefield, and chanting Kill! Kill! Kill! as the French army passed. Now the time to kill had come. Line after line advanced, shouting abuse, their bolts primed for the first volley. They yelled for a third time at the English, hoping to scare them. But the English did not move. Then with the boom of the first cannon, the Genoese loosed their volley of bolts. And with dismay they watched them die up on the air, and fall short. Hurriedly they began to reload in the open, as the next line advanced, taking up the shouting. Still there came nothing from the English but the occasional sighting shot from the cannon. Only when the bulk of the Genoese were in range and about to shoot did the English trumpets ring out for the attack to begin.

If Genoese pride had died in the air with the falling short of those first crossbow bolts, then English pride struck home hard and true with the first English volley. The Genoese were ripped to shreds: 'these arrows pierced their arms, heads and through their armour', said Froissart. Each archer in the English camp could fire between six and ten arrows per minute. If each man fired at the slower rate, to ensure accuracy, and if there were only five thousand archers in the English army, the Genoese -who numbered no more than six thousand - were suddenly struck by thirty thousand arrows per minute, each of which was potentially deadly. We do not know how long they could have kept this up, but if Edward had brought supplies on the same scale as he had ordered them in 1341 (a single order of three million arrows for seven thousand bows) then we may reckon that this rate of fire was sustainable for at least an hour. Chroniclers describe the effect in terms of arrows falling like snow.

Within a few minutes there were very few Genoese who were not dead or dying. Those that survived the attack retreated, shouting, some throwing down their crossbows. But the appalled French commanders refused to allow them to flee. The count of Alencon (King Philip's brother) set spurs to his horse and charged some of them down, slashing at them as an example. Philip himself gave the order to kill anyone who retreated from the battlefield as he saw the Genoese run: 'Kill these scoundrels, kill them all!' were his actual words, reported on good authority. But as his own men realised, killing Genoese crossbowmen would not help them against the English.

Despite this appalling start, the reputation of France as leading all Christendom in arms was much more than mere posturing. Pride ran very deep in the French psyche; military honour was integral to the identity of the French nobility. Even as the French knights saw their mercenaries run, they rallied and readied themselves. These men knew the purpose of their privileges, and recognised the time had come for them to do their utmost duty. They cannot have failed to understand at that moment that they were facing a test as severe as any previously encountered by a French army. Trumpets blared. Wave after wave of knights set their spurs to their horses and charged up the hill in a furious attempt to drive the English from their position, only to suffer humiliating and catastrophic losses on the hillside as their polished armour and surcoats were torn open by the humble arrows of the English archers. Each time they fell back, but, as befitting the flower of European chivalry, they regrouped and charged again. Fifteen charges were thrown against the English. At one point they broke the line, and fought through to reach the first battalion of English men-at-arms. Seeing the standard of the prince of Wales, they made a concerted effort to seize him. The prince, although only sixteen, was strong and brimful of confidence, and as soon as the French knights came to him he rushed at them, slashing at their horses, bringing down their riders, stamping on their helmets and cutting through their lances. As a result, he ran the risk of being surrounded, and briefly it seemed the French had managed to seize him. But they failed to disarm him, and he fought on, while his bodyguard ferociously fought back to save him. At one point he was struck to his knees, and his standard-bearer, Sir Richard Fitzsimon, resorted to the desperate measure of actually laying down the prince's standard in order to draw his sword to defend his master. Another of his men rushed back to Edward to ask for help for the prince. Edward sent it, but by the time it arrived the prince was far from needing it. With Fitzsimon's help he had regained his feet, and started fighting more furiously than ever, so that by the time the twenty knights from Edward's own bodyguard had reached him, they found him laughing and leaning on his sword beside a long pile of corpses, catching his breath before the next onslaught.

With the chaos of the hand-to-hand combat, and the volleys of arrows still being coordinated by the captains, the trumpets, the whinnying of horses, the cannon booming away, the arrows and the cannon bolts and cannonballs, and the yells, the shrieks and screams, the scene must have been truly terrifying. But one thing was clear to all, no matter where they stood: the English position was holding. Against all the odds, ten thousand were holding back thirty. When he was told of the developments on the battlefield, the fifty-year-old blind King John of Bohemia asked to be led forward. He had demanded to be given command of the French vanguard, for he too had believed they would easily pick off the English. They had even selected in advance who was to have which prisoners. Now he realised that his presumption had contributed to the rout. If he had not demanded the command of the vanguard - if the man in charge of the French advance had at least been sighted - they might have stood a chance. He asked his knights to do him one last service. Would they tie the bridle of his horse to theirs, and lead him to the front line so that he might, for one last time, lift his sword and charge into battle. He was asking them to lead him to his death, and for them to die with him. Solemnly they did what he asked. When the next trumpets blared, and the next great charge against the English rode at full tilt, the closest household knights of the king of Bohemia rode with them, all in one line, stretched out on either side of their king, shouting his war cry for one last time, lances couched and swords aloft. For them there could be no retreat. It was a matter of fighting with the knights and men-at-arms of the first battalion of the English until they were all dead. After the battle their dead horses were found, all still tethered together, with their corpses scattered near the body of their king.

With the last of the French charges failing on the front line, Edward gave the order for the English horses to be led forward. The pages ran to get their masters' steeds and led them out of the enclosure. When the fifteenth charge had fallen back into the mass of men on the slopes of the hill, the trumpets sounded the English attack and the mounted chivalry of England poured around the limits of the front line. When the French infantry saw the standards of Northampton, Warwick, Dagworth, Burghersh and Cobham bearing down towards them, they came to a horrified halt on the slope, and quickly turned and fled. King Philip - a tyrant but certainly not a coward - saw his men desert him in their thousands. And as he watched, on came the English knights. Philip's bodyguard rallied around him, so too some infantry and some of his closest friends and supporters, but the battle they now fought was not for victory, it was for their king's survival. Bitterly they exchanged blows until evening gave way to night. His standard-bearer was killed as he stood beside him. The king's own horse was killed beneath him. An arrow flew into the fray from one of the English archers and struck Philip in the face. The English raised a great shout, and then another as the Oriflamme went down. The sacred war banner of France lay in the mud of the battlefield. John of Hainault realised that nothing now could save the day, and forcing the long on to a spare horse, and keeping hold of the reins, he and a few knights dragged the king from the battlefield. As Edward had previously given strict orders not to pursue the enemy into the night, Philip escaped. Of all the knights and great men who had come with him to Crecy, he had only five barons with him when he departed.

As Philip fled in the darkness towards Amiens, the English regrouped in their positions on the hillside. There was a windmill at the top of the hill; now Edward ordered it to be filled with brushwood and set alight to act as a beacon and a focal point for the English. Still he kept order, wearing his full armour, not even having removed his helmet. Only when he came to the lines of the first battle which had withstood the French attacks, and saw his son Prince Edward with his own eyes, did he remove it. He embraced him and kissed him. 'Fair son, God save you! You are my good son, and you have acquitted yourself nobly. You are worthy to keep a realm.' And the prince bowed to his father, honouring him. He had picked up the crest of the fallen king of Bohemia, an ostrich feather, and repeated his motto as he knelt before his father: 'Ich dien (I serve). Edward then began to speak about the battle to all those present. No one was to boast; everyone was to thank God for their good fortune. And they must be on their guard lest there be a counter-attack by a relief force in the night.

There was no other attack that night. The English rested safely with the burning windmill above them and the mounds of corpses and wounded in the darkness below, lying in the cold. There the unfortunate lay in pain, expiring on the killing field, or unable to move, able only to wait for the dawn and the swift cutting of their throats as die English infantry began to pick over the battlefield looking for loot. On the day after the battle there was another fight, between a second contingent of Frenchmen who arrived too late for the battle and who came out of the morning mist to find themselves face to face with the earl of Northampton. Soon they too lay dying When on the Sunday Edward expressed a desire to know how many had died on either side, he ordered Sir Reginald Cobham, Sir Ralph Stafford and the heralds to establish an accurate figure by collecting all the French surcoats worn by the men-at-arms. Edward ordered that his men now ransacking the battlefield itself could keep all they found as long as they surrendered the surcoats to him. Over the day they covered the whole area of the battle and all the outlying fields and forest, and the site of the battle between Northampton and the reinforcements who had arrived too late for the battle proper. Eleven great princes lay dead, including the king of Bohemia, the count of Flanders, the duke of Lorraine and Philip's brother and nephew, the counts of Alencon and Blois. One archbishop and one bishop lay among the dead, and eight great secular lords. Eighty bannerets - principal knights - were dead, and 1,542 knights and esquires lay just in the area before the English front line, where the prince had been fighting. A great number - thousands - of uncounted infantrymen's bodies were scattered over the battlefield. A further four thousand French men-at-arms and Genoese crossbowmen had been killed by the earl of Northampton in the attack on the following day. In comparison, English losses amounted to about three hundred men.

The importance of the battle of Crecy cannot be exaggerated. It demands that we look beyond the limits of Edward's own life to understand his achievement in the broader terms of European history. Leaving aside the political circumstances of the fourteenth century, it was the first major battle between two well-resourced martial kingdoms in which victory was obtained by projectile weaponry rather than hand-to-hand fighting. In that sense it marks the advent of modern warfare. Since his victory at Halidon Hill in 1333 Edward had pioneered the systematic deployment of archers to win a battle. In the mid-i330s he was experimenting with mounted archers. By 1339 he had a projectile-based means of fighting which was exportable, and in 1346 he demonstrated against the best-equipped and proudest military kingdom in Europe that archery could and would defeat the greatest array of chivalry, provided the battlefield was chosen with care. From now on, groups of well-disciplined commoners with longbows could destroy much larger groups of the richest, most-heavily armoured, bravest and well-trained noblemen in Christendom, even when they were backed up with crossbowmen and huge numbers of infantrymen. The banner of aristocratic military splendour which characterises the middle ages had been shredded, not in a single afternoon by a few thousand archers but by thirteen years of careful experimentation and thought as to how projectile-based warfare could be perfected.

The implications of this for European society were profound. It is easy to point to the effects of the approaching plague as a reason for the socioeconomic changes by which the medieval peasant was freed from his feudal bonds in the period 1350-1450. Fewer peasants to work the land meant more could sell their labour, and move away from their original manor and its obligations. It is less frequently noted that this socioeconomic shift was accompanied by a huge change in outlooks and attitudes after the battle of Crecy. Previously medieval society had understood that it was composed of three 'estates' of people: those who fought (the nobility and knightly class), those who prayed (monks and the secular clergy), and those who worked (the peasantry). In reality, 'those who worked' also provided the infantry levies to support their lords; but infantry were raised through a feudal hierarchy, were not well-trained, and they did not generally win battles by themselves. At Crecy all that changed. From now on, 'those who worked' were 'those who fought'. A thousand well-trained and well-equipped peasants with longbows were more than a match for a thousand of the best-equipped knights in Christendom. The consequent effect on the pride and military confidence of the English peasantry should not be underestimated.

The effect on the political situation was every bit as profound. Edward had not just won a victory over the French, he had turned many of society's values upside down. He had overturned the common understanding that France was the greatest military power in Christendom, and he had done it in such a way that all could see that this was not a lucky or accidental victory. It was a carefully planned and well-executed systematic destruction of an enemy which could be repeated again and again. This upset the commonly held understanding of God's natural order - the assembled fighting nobility were demonstrably weaker than the peasantry - and paved the way for that combination of political authority and large armies which would eventually see feudalism give way to absolutism. It also threatened papal influence: what help had a French pope been for the French king? If the pope's prayers on behalf of France had so little effect on divine providence, and had not even saved the sacred Oriflamme from being trampled into the mud, how could a papal interdict on England be a sign of divine will? How could it be anything other than a sign of French bitterness?

For Edward, Crecy was a mark of personal glory. He had done what had been prophesied at his birth. He had won a military victory on the Continent and, in so doing, had done something absolutely remarkable. No English army had ever previously won a battle on this scale against the French on French soil. After the long campaigns and the heavy taxation, the news in England that Edward had triumphed was sensational, and the credit went directly to the king. Victory meant that the years of taxation, the strategy, the planning and the very policy of taking the war to France were all seen as a complete success.

For us, looking back on Edward as a man and as a king, it is not just the victory but the Crecy campaign as a whole which is remarkable. If we peel away the concretions of anti-Edwardian polemic written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - especially that Edward had been scared into flight by the approach of Philip's army and had been forced to do battle at Crecy against his will, and was lucky - we may see that the entire campaign leading up to the battle had been planned meticulously, managed effectively and led superbly. Today few scholars would deny that in 1346 Edward demonstrated all the qualities for which he was to remain famous for the next four centuries. His courage has to stand high in any list of these. If he had lost his nerve at Crecy or at any time earlier in the campaign - if he had been trapped at Poissy or Blanchetaque, for example - he would have lost not one but every chance of greatness. Great kings do not lose important battles. His reputation at home would have been severely dented, and his ability to raise money to further his firm anti-French policy would have been undermined. Then there is the matter of his leadership. Edward's personal courage would have meant nothing if he had not had men willing to fight for him in extremely difficult situations at Poissy and Blanchetaque. His generalship thus commands respect. But in masterminding the whole policy of an aggressive response to Philip's infringements of his sovereignty, in bringing the English parliament around to support his war, in organising the taxation to pay for it, and in devising the strategy which would ensure victory, Edward proved himself much more than a mere general. The battle of Crecy might have been won by English archers, but the archers by themselves would never have found themselves in France, still less in a position to have won the battle, if it had not been for the king's inspired leadership. All Edward's positive attributes - courage, leadership, strategic thinking, tactical brilliance, discipline, innovation and political astuteness - came together in the Crecy campaign. Together they gave his kingship a touch of greatness.

The battle of Crecy undermined Philip's authority but in itself it was a symbolic and strategic demonstration of superiority; it was not a conquest. On the second day after the battle, as the body of King John of Bohemia and the other great men were solemnly buried by the English, and as Philip was issuing orders for all the Genoese archers who had retreated from the battlefield to be hanged, Edward prepared to press home his advantage. Had he seriously wanted to make himself the sole king of France at this time, he should have advanced on Paris. But such an advance would have carried with it many problems, not least the task of trying to persuade more than a hundred thousand Parisians to accept that the Louvre might be occupied by an Englishman. It would have been just as hard in the long term to persuade the English that their royal family might remove itself to Paris and patronise French merchants and craftsmen as much as English ones, and administer French justice, hear French pleas, and attend French parliaments. The idea of a single monarchy might have been militarily viable at this point but it was not a realistic political proposition. Had Edward tried it, no doubt he would have had the same problem as he had in Scotland: a legal monarchy fighting a rival 'nationalist' one, without the means to support an inevitable succession of French campaigns, each of which would probably be organised to coincide with the Scots' harrying of Northern England. It is therefore not surprising that Edward refused to countenance a march on Paris. On 29 August Edward ordered the army to take the road north, towards Calais.

Edward's policy in Scotland had not been to occupy the whole country but to be able to march through the country at will. This was what he now decided to do in France. But to enable himself to bring an English army across the Channel whenever he wished required a permanent bridgehead on the northern coast. For this purpose, Brittany was too distant, too often subject to bad weather, and too hostile to the English. Normandy had been originally intended as a place to build such a bridgehead but victory at Crecy allowed Edward many more options. Calais was the strongest defensive town on the coast - it was practically impregnable — and the nearest port to England, the safest from the weather and the most easily supplied. Edward knew he would never have a better opportunity to set about the long siege which would be necessary to force it to submit.

The siege of Calais is today remembered largely for the story of Queen Philippa begging for the lives of the six burghers who surrendered the town, but this small detail masks a victory as politically important and as strategically significant as that of Crecy itself. It also masks the not-inconsiderable fact that the task of attacking the town was every bit as difficult as engaging a superior French army on French soil and winning. The town was surrounded by water and marshes. It was built on a concentric plan with two strong curtain walls between mighty towers, and ditches also protecting it. It could not be attacked by siege engines or mining, due to the marshes and water. That left Edward only two options: he could try to attack the outer defences using boats and scaling ladders and overwhelming numbers, or he could starve the inhabitants into submission, in conjunction with a slow attempt to break down the walls with stone and iron missiles, and wear down their will. He opted for the latter.

The reasons for this decision continue to be debated by historians. One view is simply that the place was too strongly defended: the walls, for example, being too high. But we have to wonder; given sufficient numbers and a little time, surely every fortified place is vulnerable. And Edward did have sufficient numbers at his disposal. A recently suggested alternative is that Edward was trying to provoke another full-scale battle with Philip. The truth is probably a combination of the two positions, Edward's preferred strategy changing as circumstances around him changed. Yes, he would have relished the chance to fight Philip again on his own terms, and so may have placed himself ostentatiously at Calais to lure him to attack. He certainly stayed there expecting him to do so. But even before Edward arrived at Calais he had sent an order to England to send across all the remaining cannon at the Tower, so he clearly anticipated an assault on the town. However, no full-scale onslaught on the walls took place. Instead Edward built elaborate siege defences around the town, with shops and a marketplace and incorporating stone houses for his leaders and a fine palace for himself. 'Villeneuve-le-hardi', he called it mockingly, 'Brave New Town'. Perhaps he thought that a concerted effort to take Calais would result in the complete destruction of the walls, which he wanted to avoid if he could help it. But with more sombre warning for the besieged, he declared he was prepared to stay there twelve years, if it should take so long to gain the town. And he populated Villeneuve-le-hardi with a very substantial force, up to thirty-two thousand men. If this figure - drawn from army pay records, not the exaggerations of chroniclers - is correct, it would amount to the largest English army raised for an overseas expedition before the eighteenth century.

Calais was commanded by Jean de Vienne, as resolute and committed a man as Philip could have wished to be in command. When the town was first besieged he took a quick and ruthless decision to expel all the poor women and children of the town, so that food could be conserved for the defenders as long as possible. Seventeen hundred women and children thus found themselves trapped between the walls of their home town and the English army, with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. Often in such circumstances such people became used as prey to twist the minds of the defenders, sometimes being killed in front of the walls but more often being left there to starve to death in the sight of their fellow townsmen. On this occasion, Edward was merciful, and not only allowed the women and children to go but gave them a meal as they passed through.

Philip's hope was probably that news of a large Scots attack in England combined with the advance of a French army would drive Edward off from Calais. To this end he summoned his own army to reassemble on 1 October at Compiegne, and sent to King David asking him for an immediate invasion in the north of England.44 David, who had been waiting for such a call, led an army forward at the beginning of October. Edward's northern frontier was not undefended, however. The levies of the north were ready, commanded by William Zouche (the archbishop of York), Sir Thomas Rokeby and Sir Henry Percy. On 14 October, as a Scottish foraging party led by Douglas looted a village near Durham, the archbishop led his men forward. As they did so, a thick fog came down. The Scots, suddenly realising that they were surrounded by an army which they could not see, panicked. They fled back to their main army. When told that they were being attacked, King David responded that they had nothing to be afraid of, for he had twelve thousand men and there were not that many soldiers left in all of Northern England. But Archbishop Zouche was one of those clergymen who not only knew how to pray, he knew how to fight too. Now he put the two together, preaching to his army that they were defending not only their homelands but the lands of Durham Cathedral and the shrine of St Cuthbert. Three days later, at Neville's Cross, the king of Scotland met an army as large as his own, motivated by fear and pious courage. English archers devastated two of the Scottish battalions, and forced them to break ranks. The third, commanded by David, was left exposed. Although he fought ferociously, even when shot through the nose by an English archer, he had no hope of escape, still less of victory. He was pursued, overpowered and captured. Sir William Douglas and four Scottish earls were captured along with him, the earl of Moray being left dead on the battlefield.

The news of the Scottish defeat stupefied the French. It hit them just two weeks after an English onslaught in the south. Sir Walter Manny, eager to join in the action at Calais, had obtained a safe conduct letter for himself and twenty men to go to Edward, but on his journey north he was overpowered and thrown into prison at Saint-Jean-d'Angely. Not a man to suffer wrongful imprisonment cheerfully, he broke out of his cell and stormed off. His eighteen fellow-prisoners were unable to escape, but Lancaster rode to their rescue a little later, as he pressed the boundary of Gascony further to the northward. And having come this far, Lancaster decided he would go on to attack Lusignan, where he had some notable successes. The sack of the rich city of Poitiers in particular, coming on top of the news of Neville's Cross, paralysed the French. Few men responded to Philip's summons. No one wanted to march into the hail of arrows which had massacred so many at Crecy. By the end of October Philip had given up hope of bringing an army against Edward, and turned bitterly to accuse his ministers and even members of his own family of ineptitude and disloyalty. His only hope as far as Calais was concerned was that Jean de Vienne would hold out for so long that Edward would be forced to give up the siege.

The last thing Edward was going to do was give up. It is in his camp at Calais that we may see him at his most confident and most resolute. The defences he had prepared around Villeneuve-le-hardi were exceptionally strong. He had a huge army with him. Although all his attempts to cross the walls were met with determined resistance, and some French ships did break through to supply the men within, he remained focused on the capture of this important town week-in, week-out. The lack of a relieving army merely persuaded him that he would be spending winter in Villeneuve-le-hardi, so he sent for Queen Philippa to join him for Christmas in his temporary palace. The contrast with the situation of Jean de Vienne could not have been greater. Realising he could not expect a relieving army before the spring, the city's stern commander ousted a further five hundred people into the ditch between the walls and the English army.

So the stand-off continued well into 1347. As each day went by, Edward knew he drew nearer to victory and de Vienne became more desperate. By March it was clear that Edward would not retreat from Calais unless forced to do so. Philip summoned another army in March 1347, and went to the abbey of Saint-Denis to take a newly embroidered Oriflamme. Edward waited, twisting his garrotte around Calais even tighter. Lancaster, who had returned to England from Gascony in January, crossed the Channel to join in the siege. After a French attempt to drive barges towards the town in April was fought off by the earl of Northampton, Edward ordered a timber castle to be built on the sandbank on the seaward side of Calais. He garrisoned it with archers and men-at-arms, preventing any supply ships approaching the town by day or night. He seized every approach road to Calais, and defended them all. He knew that Philip had no option but to attack him. His regnal responsibility demanded it. And this time he was in a far stronger position than he had been at Crecy. In addition to his army of Englishmen he had a force of several thousand Flemings. He was inviting Philip to march to his doom.

The pressure on Philip to meet Edward in battle was growing greater all the time. By the end of June it was extreme. Gascony had been reduced to English control or smouldering ruins, and the flame of English resistance in Brittany was burning more brightly than ever. On 19-20 June the five thousand-strong Breton army of Charles de Blois was defeated in a night attack at La Roche-Derrien by seven hundred men under Sir Thomas Dagworth and a few hundred men of the town, Charles himself being captured in the attack. Philip had lost another nephew to the English. It seemed that whatever Philip did in any corner of his realm, he was powerless to stop the relentless tide of English military success. In the space of two years the English had overrun and looted more than fifty towns and countless villages and monasteries. And there seemed nothing that Philip could do to oust them. He could not even remove Edward from Calais.

The siege had now gone on for nine months. The food had finally run out, and with Edward's comprehensive blockade in force, there was no hope of relief. Jean de Vienne in desperation wrote a letter to Philip and gave it to a Genoese captain to try and smuggle out of the town. He left, in his ship, quietly at dawn on 26 June. The English caught sight of the man, and pursued him in their own vessels. In an attempt to conceal the contents of the letter, in the last moments of freedom the messenger thrust an axe through it and hurled it as far as he could into the sea. Unfortunately for him, all the English had to do was wait for low tide. A few hours later they took the letter to Edward. Now Edward could read for himself of the plight within the walls:

Right dear and dread lord... The town is in sore need of corn, wine and meat. For know that there is nothing herein which has not been eaten, both dogs and cats and horses, so that we cannot find any more food within the town unless we eat human flesh. Formerly you wrote that I should hold the town so long as there should be food. And now we are at that point that we have nothing on which to live. So we have resolved amongst us that, if we do not receive help soon, we shall all march out of the town into the open field to fight for life or death. For it is better to die with honour in the field than to eat each other. Wherefore, right dear and dread lord, do what shall seem fitting to you, for if nothing is done soon, you will not hear from me again, and the town will be lost, as well as us. Our Lord grant you a good and long life and give you the will, if we die for you, to acknowledge our sacrifice to our heirs.

Edward, fully realising the power of this letter, copied it, then fixed his own seal to it and sent it to Philip. It was as good as a challenge.

The French army arrived at Sangatte, six miles from Villeneuve-le-hardi, on 27 July. In the town the defenders were overjoyed, and lit bonfires and raised flags in honour of the arrival of the French king. But Edward also watched them as they drew up on the ridge above the marshes, knowing it would be certain catastrophe for them to attack him in his current position. He had his archers, his strong defences and more men-at-arms. He also knew that Philip had no time to spare; the one last attempt to buy time for Calais - sending a fleet of eight barges with food and drink to the besieged - had been captured by the watchful English. Delaying tactics now would prove of no avail. Calais was as good as his.

That evening the two cardinals with responsibility for the peace negotiations between England and France asked for safe conduct to come to the English camp and put proposals before the king. Edward appointed the greatest scourges of French troops to receive them: Lancaster, Northampton, Sir Walter Manny, Sir Reginald Cobham and Sir Bartholomew Burghersh.48 The following day a French embassy came through the marshes with the cardinals to meet the English negotiators. They recognised that Calais was lost, and that the best which Philip could do was to beg for the lives of those who had held out for so long But Edward did not need to bother with agreements of this sort, and his negotiators let the cardinals know they had not been empowered to discuss the town, which was already theirs. When the French embassy then tentatively suggested a peace treaty, to include the restoration of all of the duchy of Aquitaine, to be held on the same terms as Edward I had held it, they were told this was a small thing hardly in proportion to the efforts which Edward had made to recoup his rights. For four days the debates continued, everytime the French trying to bring Calais back into the discussions. On 31 July, with nothing else to offer or discuss, they departed.

On the departure of the cardinals, Philip resigned himself to war and the bloody destruction of his kingship. What precisely happened is still obscure, but one thing does seem certain: when the peace negotiations failed on Tuesday 31 July, Philip's negotiators returned from Philip immediately with a challenge to Edward to do battle in an open space between then and Friday evening. This was to be selected by four knights on either side, and safe conducts were to be offered to those who would do the choosing. One chronicle - that of Jean le Bel - states that Edward refused, saying that he (Philip) could see that he was in his realm and despoiling it; if he wished him to leave then he should attack him. However, this is probably incorrect, amounting to no more than le Bel's interpretation a few years later. In his own letter to the archbishop of Canterbury, Edward states that his negotiators received this challenge on the evening of Tuesday 31st. They said they would show the challenge to Edward, and promised a response on the following day. Edward then took advice and 'trusting in God and our right, we answered that we accepted their offer and took up the battle willingly'. This reply was presumably delivered on the Wednesday, together with the safe conducts which Edward ordered to be written. But, as Edward himself states, 'they of the other side, when now they had heard this answer, began to shift in their offers and to speak of the town all anew, as if putting off the battle'. It would appear that Philip's advisers had demanded why they were fighting, if not to save the town? If Edward had agreed to fight in the open, should the town not be the prize? Edward's refusal to talk about the town probably made up Philip's mind for him. He stood to lose not only Calais but a second battle. He could do nothing about the former, but he could at least save his forces a second ignominious defeat. Philip gave orders for his men to burn their own camp and any supplies they could not carry, and to disperse.

A little after dawn on Thursday 2 August 1347, before the walls of Calais, Edward watched as the army of France gave way before him. Anyone of a normal disposition would have been overjoyed, but not Edward. He did not feel victorious. He had promised to make an end to the war, and now he knew his adversary would live to fight another day. He had promised in his letters back home that there would be a second great battle, and a victory, God willing. His mood was therefore blacker than it had been for ages when his attention was dragged back to the plight of the beleaguered town. Sir Walter Manny had been summoned by a messenger to treat with the governor of Calais. After eleven months of bitter siege conditions, and desperate hopes, the crushed garrison realised they had held out in vain. Their king had deserted them.

In the traditional form of chivalric behaviour, the garrison now sought terms. After eleven months of siege, and cheated of his second battle, Edward was in no mind to offer terms at all. When Manny passed this news to Jean de Vienne the governor was at a loss, and pleaded with him to return to Edward to beg for their lives. 'We are just a few knights and squires who have loyally served our master, as you would have done, and have suffered much as a result... I therefore once more entreat you, out of compassion, to return to the king of England and beg of him to have pity on us. Manny relayed this plea to the king who again refused it, insisting that the Frenchmen should submit unconditionally to his will. At this even the hardbitten Sir Walter Manny seems to have been moved, for he answered the king back. 'My lord, you may be to blame in this, for you set a very bad example. If you order us to go to any of your castles we will not obey you so cheerfully if you put these people to death; for they will treat us likewise if we find ourselves in a similar situation.' These words struck home. Manny was alluding to the many small garrisons Edward had left in Normandy, which had been overpowered and massacred after he decided to besiege Calais. After due thought he announced his decision:

Gentlemen, I am not so obstinate as to hold my opinion alone against you all. Sir Walter, you will inform the governor of Calais that the only grace he must expect from me is that six of the principal citizens of Calais march out of the town with bare heads and bare feet, with ropes around their necks, and the keys of the town and castle in their hands. These six persons shall be at my absolute disposal, and the remainder of the inhabitants pardoned.

Having heard this offer from Manny, Jean de Vienne ordered the town bell to be rung so the citizens would assemble in the marketplace. In the most famous passage in his chronicle, Froissart repeats how one by one six of the wealthiest men of Calais volunteered to die so that their fellow townsmen would be pardoned. The first to volunteer was Eustace de Saint-Pierre. He was followed by Jean d'Aire, the brothers Jacques and Pierre Wissant, Andrieu d'Andres and finally Jean de Vienne himself.

On 4 August 1347, eleven months to the day since the siege had begun, these six men did as Edward had asked. Carrying the keys of Calais they walked barefoot with ropes around their necks. De Vienne was so weak he could hardly walk, and had to be given a horse. When Manny led them before the king, they prostrated themselves before him, begging for their lives. Edward simply ordered them to be beheaded. Everyone present was shocked, after the courage shown by these men in coming forward. Edward's mind was not inclined to sympathy but to business; his campaign was not yet finished. Even Sir Walter Manny's requests for Edward to show mercy were ignored. According to Froissart, only when Philippa implored him to show mercy did he relent. Aware of the accusations of cruelty which would be brought against him if these men were killed, Edward did what he had always previously done: he relented when begged to do so by someone dear to him.

Forgiveness at the point of death. It was a powerful image, especially for a warrior-king. But it was typical of Edward, right through to his core. He had behaved in exactly the same way when the tournament stand had collapsed at Cheapside in 1331, almost killing Philippa. He had similarly given in to Philippa's plea for him to show mercy when a young girl was brought before him on a heinous charge in 1337. At Caen he had at first ordered a massacre and then relented when begged to do so. In fact, although Edward ordered quite a number of large-scale massacres in France, none was ever carried out. It was as if in each case he was trying to play the dread king 'terrible to his enemies' as well as the compassionate monarch. At Calais, as elsewhere, it was a method which confused and frightened his enemies. But from Edward's point of view, it said everything about him which he wanted to project: magnanimity in victory, mercy, ruthlessness and power.

*

Edward had plans for Calais. Some of the citizens died in the next few days - from eating too much food and drink, when Edward sent abundant food supplies into the town - but most of the remaining townsmen were sent into France. In their place he established a strong English garrison. He destroyed Villeneuve-le-hardi so it could not be reused by Philip in a reprisal attack, and gave rich houses in Calais to each of his leading warriors. His vision for the town was as a landing place for future English armies, and men like Lancaster and Sir Walter Manny would doubdess be on such expeditions. To ensure the financial prosperity of the town he established there a mint and the English tin, lead and cloth staples (the official trading posts). Eventually he would add the valuable wool staple but not until 1363; for the time being that remained at Ghent, to the benefit of his Flemish allies.

Edward never dropped his guard. On 20 August, after the dispersal of the English army, he learned that Philip had summoned the French army to gather again for a surprise attack. Without hesitation he ordered his own forces to return to Calais. He repeated this instruction at the beginning of September, fully determined to meet Philip in battle as agreed before. Edward sounded out his leading magnates and then announced he was going to proceed into France once more 'to do battle with our adversary... in order to recover our rights and to take whatever grace and fortune which God shall give us'. But with both sides exhausted, financially as well as militarily, a truce was the preferred option on both sides. In addition, the English army was suffering badly from dysentery. The truce was agreed in mid-September. As before it was to include Scotland as well as France and Flanders. Everywhere Edward's gains were to be respected, and loyalties were not to be broken. The peace, which was planned to last until 8 July 1348, was wholly in favour of the English.

Edward remained for a few more weeks in Calais, and then set sail for England. And as soon as he was out at sea, he got caught in another storm. In England, Edward's voyages had almost become a means of predicting the weather. It was commonly joked that if he was going to France, the weather would be fine, but if he was returning, they could expect storms. After invoking the protection of the Virgin yet again, he landed at Sandwich on 12 October and arrived in London two days later. After two months of seeing to the rewards of those who had fought at Neville's Cross and providing for the administration of Calais, Edward went to Guildford to celebrate Christmas.

Christmas 1347 was a great occasion. He had just completed the longest and most dramatic overseas expedition of any English king since the time of Richard I. Now he could enjoy himself once more. Roll out the tournament banners! For Edward went straight back to enjoying his hunts and his feasts, his celebrations, tournaments and games. Once more we may read in the wardrobe accounts of the extravagant purchases of this proud, happy monarch. For the Christmas games at Guildford Edward ordered:

forty-two masks bearing the likenesses of women, bearded men, and angels' heads in silver. Twenty-eight crests, fourteen with legs reversed with shoes on, and fourteen with hills and rabbits. Fourteen painted cloaks, fourteen dragons' heads, fourteen white buckram tunics, fourteen pheasant heads with fourteen pairs of wings for these heads, fourteen tunics painted with the eyes of a pheasant, fourteen swans' heads with fourteen pairs of wings for the swans, fourteen painted linen tunics, and fourteen tunics painted with stars.

He himself and all his fellow knights wore long green robes embroidered with peacock feathers. We could almost say that it was business as usual at the English court. Edward's daughter, Joan, was betrothed to be married to the son of the king of Castile. And Philippa was pregnant again.

But in reality, life was never going to be quite the same. On n October 1347 Ludvig of Bavaria died while out hunting bears, and the electors chose Edward to be his successor as Holy Roman Emperor. Those prophesies from his youth, of European victories and of receiving the three crowns of the Empire, which once had seemed so daunting, had all come true. But it was not the offer itself that marks the difference, although it was a very rare honour for an Englishman to be offered the triple crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The real difference between Edward before and after Crecy lies in his response. He turned the offer down. He no longer sought to add to his prestige through allusions to prophesies, or the acquisition of great tides. He no longer needed to associate himself with old kings and legends. His own reputation, won through his own efforts, and in new ways, was greatness enough in itself.

At the age of thirty-five he had achieved everything his kingdom had expected of him. The English collectively had a new pride, a new identity, and it was one unparalleled in Europe. Edward's war had begun to galvanise England into a nation, with common interests and, increasingly, a common culture. In the words of the great chronicler Thomas Walsingham 'it seemed that a new sun had arisen for the English because of the abundance of peace, the plenitude of goods and the glory of the victor'.