Economic Costs

Superficially at least, Edward’s combination of warfare and diplomacy rode high. Beneath the surface, however, lurked deep gulfs of economic and strategic miscalculation. The cost of maintaining garrisons at Calais, in Gascony and on the borders with Scotland were themselves crippling, let alone the costs of mounting expeditions from these redoubts. Edward had perhaps already spent even more on his naval forces than on his land army. On the one hand, this suggests a new bid for sovereignty of the seas, the first occasion since the reign of King John when the English had effectively sought mastery of the Channel: an important contribution towards the pride and reputation of the later royal navy. Edward had new gold coins minted, including the ‘noble’, worth 6s 8d (half a ‘mark’), intended for high value payments in trade and diplomacy: precisely the sort of coin that was needed in an era of massive taxation and no less massive ransom payments. They were stamped with a portrait of the King standing crowned and armed on board a great vessel of war, emblazoned with the heraldic symbols of England and France, the reverse bearing an inscription comparing Edward III with Christ himself passing through the midst of his enemies (‘Jesus passing through the midst of them, went his way’, Luke 4:30). Yet such empty boasting was small recompense for the costs of Edward’s naval operations. Far from the English gaining supremacy over the seas, the Channel itself became a vector of warfare, with French, Genoese and Spanish ships raiding along the southern English coast. Portsmouth was burned in 1338 and 1342, Plymouth was attacked in 1340, Winchelsea in 1356. For the first time in recorded history, English merchant shipping had to travel in convoy. The trade which such shipping carried and the English political classes who profited from it were taxed and taxed again. Meanwhile, the strategy behind Edward’s continental campaigns remained simplistic to the point of idiocy.

The more defeats inflicted upon the French, the more noblemen captured, the more territory ravaged, the greater the proof of God’s favour and the higher the potential profit to the English King. Yet no manner of victory, not even such victories as Crécy or Poitiers, could alter the fact that the English lands in France remained open to counterattack and to essentially French cultural and economic influences, that the ransoms demanded from noble prisoners were often impossible to enforce, and that, even after the Treaty of Brétigny, the French subjects of Aquitaine and the south continued to look to French royal justice and to the French Parlement in much the same way that Capetian influence had been intruded into Plantagenet Gascony in the years after 1259. The basic problems of English rule in France remained unresolved.

Whether Edward or his advisers had any real idea of the broader strategy of their war, as opposed to the potential glory of its individual episodes, remains unclear. Perhaps they pursued a conscious policy of inviting the French to pitched battle which the English believed they could win. Perhaps like one of the war’s chief chroniclers, the French poet Jean Froissart, they were inclined to confound romance with history and to mingle fiction with fact. In the long winter evenings, Froissart had alternated writing his Chronicle with reciting long passages from his epic romance Meliador, in which damsels in distress, wild bears and shipwrecks on an Isle of Man implausibly peopled by the ancient Hebrews rubbed shoulders with more ‘realistic’ events. The Treaty of Brétigny was stored by the English in a special box, the ‘Calais Chest’ (still in the Public Record Office), an exquisite symbol of chivalry and diplomacy, emblazoned with the arms of the Kings and their ministers who had negotiated peace. Its terms, meanwhile, were a dead letter almost from the moment that it was consigned to its magnificent casket.

King Jean of France died in English captivity with the bulk of his ransom still unpaid. The costs of maintaining peace as of waging war mounted beyond all control. The Black Prince’s expedition into northern Spain in 1367, intended merely (and in the final resort unsuccessfully) to ensure a continued alliance with the King of Castile, inflicted a great victory at Nájera but nonetheless cost nearly 3 million gold florins for no tangible economic or strategic return. Strategy was sacrificed to chivalry and common sense to the pursuit of glory, in a way more reminiscent of the posturings of a Napoleon than of the caution and parsimony normally associated with English warfare. The Spanish Armada of 1588 was, in this reading, merely Spain’s belated response to an even more pointless and vindictive English aggression. Long before the Peninsular War of the early nineteenth century, the armies of the Black Prince had trudged through the future battlefields of Vitoria and Burgos in pursuit of their own small measure of fame.