Edward III (1327–1377)

Edward III would rule England for fifty years, but he is most remembered as the great warrior who with his son the Black Prince led the English to victory after victory in the Hundred Years War. The Battle of Agincourt won by Edward III’s great-grandson Henry V was an apparent vindication of this protracted attempt to claim the French throne. It enabled Henry to marry the French king’s daughter Katharine, and his infant son Henry VI was briefly both King of England and King of France. Moreover, Edward III’s victories secured Aquitaine for England and thus almost a quarter of the territory of today’s France, as well as gaining the important French Channel port of Calais. The immense popularity the war brought him meant that the crown’s authority was never in doubt for much of his reign, and the barons’ energies were taken up by the French campaign. At the king’s extended Gothic castle at Windsor countless great feasts and tournaments took place which appealed to the spirit of the age, modelled on the hundred-year-old cult of King Arthur, the Dark Age chieftain who had been transformed by the courtly romances into a perfect gentle knight and the summit of the chivalric ideal.

The booty from the Hundred Years War paid for an ambitious and popular royal building programme which reinforced the sense of Englishness reviving across the country. Edward III’s age marks the beginning of the peculiarly English style of late-Gothic architecture named Perpendicular. In contrast to the flowing lines of the contemporary Gothic style prevailing on the continent, English building whether at Gloucester Cathedral, St George’s Chapel Windsor or Winchester Cathedral, is constructed on sterner, more geometric lines. From 1362 onwards English officially replaced Latin as the language of the English law courts. One of England’s greatest writers, Geoffrey Chaucer, was born around 1344. A member of a well-to-do family of wine merchants, Chaucer had a cosmopolitan upbringing and spoke at least four languages. His fascination with French poetry and with the writings of Dante and Boccaccio was intensified by a career as a diplomat in the royal service. So influential were his own works, such as The Book of the Duchess (which marks the death of John of Gaunt’s wife Blanche of Lancaster) and ultimately The Canterbury Tales, that by the end of the fourteenth century English had permanently replaced Latin and French as the language of England’s literature. William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also testify to the new creative spirit abroad.

Despite the era’s military glory and the king’s personal popularity, Edward III’s reign was also a time of considerable social misery. In 1348 the bubonic plague known as the Black Death arrived to wreak havoc on the population of England as it did in the rest of Europe. Carried by the black rat on Genoese ships, this curse of God (or so it seemed to contemporary observers) had originated in Asia, where the Republic of Genoa’s vast trading operation had its most extensive dealings. In England it killed an astonishing one-fifth of the population within the year, ultimately being responsible for the deaths of one-third of the population. In France and Italy half the population died. The pessimism that this brought to the succeeding European generation was similar to that experienced after the First World War. The death of labourers able to produce food ensured that the English population declined for almost a century. It would not be until the mid-fifteenth century that numbers began to increase again.

The shortage of labour undermined the system of serfdom or villeinage introduced by the Normans which forbade families to move from their local lords’ domain. So many landowners were desperate for men to work their fields that a ‘no questions asked’ policy towards runaway serfs was widely operated, and by the end of the fourteenth century the institution was in tatters. But attempts on the part of agricultural workers to better themselves by demanding a living wage were met by swingeing government legislation. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 kept wages down to the level prevailing before the inflation prompted by the Black Death. Many landowners took the decision to turn their fields over to sheep runs because grazing required little labour. Former serfs were grateful if they could find any work at all. This discontent was mirrored in risings or jacqueries all over western Europe, and is reflected in Piers Plowman.

For numerous landowners sheep-farming was a swift route to profit. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the high point of English wool export, and by Edward III’s reign woollen textile manufacture was replacing raw wool as England’s chief export or staple. East Anglia did not have the hills and rushing streams that would see the thirteenth-century invention of water-powered mills make areas like the Yorkshire and Lancashire Pennines, and the west country, centres of woollen manufacture for hundreds of years. But the region’s soft water (integral to the textile production process) and the fine wool from its native sheep resulted in a much admired material known as worsted after the Norfolk village of that name–a direct result of Edward encouraging Flemish weavers in 1331 to initiate the English into the secrets of fine cloth. The immense personal riches of individual clothiers who controlled the wool staple, the customs entrepôts of the export wool trade, enabled them to take over the Jewish community’s position as moneylenders to the king.

The first three years of Edward’s kingship were dominated by the regency of his mother Isabella and Roger Mortimer. But their hold on power was not to last. Mortimer’s greed, his open attempt to make himself the overlord of Wales where the Mortimer estates were based and the irregularity of the couple’s union soon made them extremely unpopular. Their failure to prevent the French king Charles IV seizing most of Gascony added to a feeling of disorder and betrayal. Though Bordeaux and Bayonne remained, the important and historic English wine trade–at a time when wine was the equivalent of clean water for drinking–was dramatically curtailed.

In 1330 Edward seized power. He had just fathered his first child, the warrior known as the Black Prince, and was far more confident and able to stand up for himself. While Isabella and Mortimer slept at Nottingham Castle, the young king–accompanied by a band of armed soldiers–stole in through an underground passage and dragged Mortimer from his bed, closing his ears to his mother’s cries for mercy. Mortimer was hung at Tyburn Tree, the gallows for common criminals which until the late eighteenth century stood at the junction of Edgware Road and Marble Arch. Queen Isabella was exiled to the manor of Castle Rising, where she lived on for another thirty years.

Almost immediately the young king was hurled into war. On the death of Robert the Bruce his son David had become King of Scotland, but by 1332 King David lost his throne to John Balliol’s son Edward. The following year Edward III recaptured Berwick-on-Tweed from the Scots at the Battle of Halidon Hill and made the border town permanently part of England. But on the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, once the bulk of Edward III’s soldiers were across the Channel, David returned and was recognized once more as king of the Scots.

In many ways the Hundred Years War was simply a continuation of earlier wars between France and England over the remains of the Angevin Empire on French soil, such as the conflict recently lost by Isabella and Mortimer. Pride and the wine trade made it impossible for Edward III to put up with the continuous attacks on the French kings on Gascony. Likewise the French kings could not abandon their longstanding policy of uniting all the territories on the French continent under the French crown. The diplomatic situation was made more volatile by the threat of the French king’s support for the Bruce cause. But a freshly complicating factor was the struggle for mastery over France’s north-east neighbour, Flanders–England’s biggest trading partner.

The immensely lucrative clothing trade of Flanders was run by powerful, independently minded merchants. They had little use for their impoverished count, whose feudal rights over them seemed irrelevant relics of an almost forgotten age. Their interests were with England, whose wool had made them rich. But the Count of Flanders, who remained nominally their overlord, was the vassal of the French king. For some time there had been disagreements between the Flemish burghers or clothing-town leaders and the count over their liberties and powers. When the count opted to settle them by force with the aid of French troops, the Flemish burghers’ leader James van Artevelde declared independence and in 1338 made a separate alliance with Edward III. The vigorous English king would give the Flemish clothing towns and their trade the protection they needed.

The Battle of Sluys, which is said to be the first naval battle in English history, is generally accepted as the beginning of the Hundred Years War. In 1340 a large French fleet of over 200 men-of-war (including warships from the Norman and Genoese navies) crowded the sea at the port of Sluys to block all English ships reaching Flanders for the war effort. Against the advice of his Great Council the king sailed up in person to attack it. He had gathered a smaller fleet in the Orwell Estuary made up in a more haphazard fashion, from every ship he could find at anchor in the southern ports of England. The chance of ridding the country of the French naval menace was too good to miss.

The battle secured the freedom of the Channel for the next thirty years. It was the first occasion when the French got a taste of the longbow, the weapon which (though developed by the Welsh) would make the English armies invincible in pitched battle for the best part of a century. No contemporary weapon had the same capacity for rapid fire, and in the hands of a master it defeated the more technologically advanced crossbow.

The longbow was so difficult to use that archers had to be brought up practising the art from boyhood to develop the muscles in the arm required for the enormously heavy weapon. At six feet long and three feet broad when drawn back to the ear, the longbow was taller that most Welsh and Englishmen. Lacking the craft traditions which could transform a piece of elm into a perfectly balanced bow, and which had made archery a national sport in England, the French army was never able to master the longbow. Once this became clear, in order to secure a continuous supply of longbowmen Edward III forbade all sports other than archery on the village green.

At Sluys the hail of English arrows drove so many Frenchmen to jump overboard or dive for cover that all 200 ships were captured. So embarrassing was this episode for France’s naval prestige that her commanders did not dare tell Philip VI. It was left to his jester to inform him. ‘The English are cowards,’ he told his royal master as he waited for news of the battle; ‘they did not have the courage to jump into the sea like the French and the Normans.’

With the Channel secured, Edward III could afford to make a truce with the French, though he returned to England to raise more money for a new land campaign against them. The war meanwhile had shifted into a game with higher stakes. Through his mother Isabella, Edward III had a strong claim to the French throne since Isabella’s brother King Charles IV had died without male heirs. The French crown therefore passed to the head of the more distant Valois branch of the family, who ascended the throne as Philip VI. But it was arguable that Edward, as the former king’s nephew, had a nearer claim.

In 1340 Edward III had revived his claim to be King of France. This was partly to please the Flemings, who did not like being seen to rebel against their feudal overlord. If Edward III was their overlord, their rebellion was given legitimacy. But pride also convinced Edward that the war could not be dropped as long as his claim existed. For the next century the English and French were in a state of constant warfare. Indeed, it would not be until the nineteenth century that the English crown abandoned its claim to the throne of France. Until that date in the King of England’s coat of arms the fleur-de-lis or lilies of France are to be seen side by side with the lions rampant of England.

In 1346 Philip VI’s forces launched such a fierce attack on Edward’s garrison in Gascony that the English seemed in danger of being expelled from the continent for ever. As a diversionary tactic Edward invaded northern France on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy. At first he was successful. Philip abandoned the Gascon campaign to counter the English army, which was sweeping through Normandy under the command of the English king. With him was his son, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, whose black armour earned him the nickname the Black Prince. Laying waste to the country, they moved up the Seine until they were in sight of the French king’s capital of Paris. But Philip VI now rallied. Edward was forced to turn north-east towards the coast and the friendly Flemish frontier, with the French armies in hot pursuit. Beating off the French cavalry which guarded the ford that emerged at Blanche Taque at low tide, Edward crossed the Somme. Then he decided he could flee no longer. He must stand and fight. He took his stand at the little village of Crécy in his hereditary county of Ponthieu.

The Battle of Crécy made Edward III’s reputation on the European continent. His men were outnumbered by over two to one, yet by clever positioning and the use of the longbow alongside the infantry the French army was destroyed. Crécy established the superiority of English tactics to the French cavalry charge. Thanks to this great victory, Edward was able to secure the strategically crucial port of Calais to the east. This became a pivotal English stronghold as both entrepôt and garrison. It was not until 1558 that the town which gave England command of the Channel was returned to its rightful owners.

Choosing where to give battle gave Edward III an extra edge at Crécy. He elected to do so on ground that sloped up to a windmill, from where he himself watched the battle. The Welsh and English archers were drawn up in a pattern like a chevron so that those behind could fire over and at the same time cover their colleagues below. The cavalry on whom the French were relying for victory would have to charge uphill–no easy task for warhorses with knights in armour on their backs. Try as they might, charge as they might, in the way that had made them famous, the French cavalry were mown down in mid-gallop by the English archers. Fifteen times they started out again, fifteen times they were forced back by the longbowmen under the command of the Black Prince.

The next morning among the many thousands slain were found to be the King of France’s brother, the Duke of Alençon, and the old blind King of Bohemia. The latter had insisted on joining the battle and had told his knights to lead him to the front line of the battle, ‘that I too may have a stroke at the English’. Edward III and the Black Prince found the sightless king’s body and the helmet surmounted with the Bohemian crest of three ostrich feathers which had rolled a little way away. The Black Prince was so moved by the blind king’s gallantry that he took the three ostrich feathers for his own crest, as well as the king’s motto ‘Ich Dien’ (German for ‘I serve’). Both crest and motto have been the Prince of Wales’s ever since. Crécy, as Edward III said, was the day that the Black Prince won his spurs.

Though war was cruel and ruthless its perpetrators considered it to be leavened by what is known as the spirit of chivalry. Deriving from the French word for ‘mounted knight’ and influenced by the Arab east, chivalry was a formal code that insisted on the protection of the weak and the victor’s honourable treatment of his defeated enemy. Some of our more humane instincts, such as the strict rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war laid down in the Geneva Convention, derive from this code.

To the barons and knights of the fourteenth century one of the most admired examples of the chivalric code in operation was exemplified by the conduct of all the chief participants in the siege of Calais. Five of the town’s leading burghers had offered their lives to Edward III if he would spare the rest of the citizens. Edward coldly sent a message that he would receive them only if they were naked but for their shirts and were holding the rope halters from which they would be hanged. His wife Queen Philippa was impressed by the nobility of the burghers, however, and begged him to spare them. Edward complied: the courtesy of deference to the weaker sex which was also part of the knightly code secured their lives.

On his return to England in 1348, Edward III celebrated Crécy by creating the Order of the Garter, made up of twenty-four knights and the king himself. Legend has it that its motto derives from the tie or garter used to hold up ladies’ stockings. One night at a ball held at Windsor, Edward is supposed to have wrapped round his arm a garter which had fallen from the leg of his dancing companion. When he saw the shocked faces of his guests the expansive king is said to have quipped, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘Shame to him who evil thinks’). Whatever its origins the Garter remains one of Britain’s highest honours, and continues to be in the personal gift of the sovereign. Every year in June a service to commemorate the order takes place at Windsor in the Chapel of St George, where it was founded.

During these years many an impoverished English knight took unofficial advantage of the English claim to the French throne by joining what were called the Free Companies. These were armed companies of Englishmen who roamed the continent ostensibly fighting for the English king but in fact making their fortune from plunder. Since the ideals of chivalry were at their height, to be a knight and relentlessly involved in warfare had the elements of a vocation; this was only encouraged by the king’s personal cult of the tournament.

The activities of these adventurers guaranteed that hostility between the two countries would flare up into war again. In September 1356 the Black Prince had led a small army of around 1,800 men from Bordeaux up the Garonne into central France, penetrating as far as the Loire Valley, and was returning to Gascony laden with his new war chest when the new King of France, Philip VI’s daring son John, cut him off with 8,000 troops at Poitiers. Though he was heavily outnumbered, the day was the Black Prince’s. The French fell into the same trap of setting their cavalry against the English longbow, and once more came to grief. In the heat of battle the impetuous and brave warrior King John was captured and was later taken to England in triumph to join the king of the Scots in captivity (David II had been taken at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346). It was a considerable humiliation for the French when their king, riding a cream charger, was led through the bunting-decorated streets of London. Because chivalry demanded that the French king be better horsed than the Black Prince, John’s conqueror trotted beside him on a small pony.

With the French king in his hands Edward III had the leverage in 1360 to negotiate the extremely advantageous Treaty of Brétigny. The whole of Aquitaine (including Poitou and the Limousin) was to be returned. Edward was also confirmed in possession of Ponthieu and Calais, as well as being granted a ransom in gold so enormous that it was never paid in full. In return he abandoned his claim to the French throne.

But this was the peak of English triumph. Hatred of the English, who for twenty years had ruined French agriculture with their wars, began to unite the whole of France behind the new king Charles V, and the ancient regional loyalties from which the English had benefited were further eroded when the desperate French were devastated by a new wave of the bubonic plague in 1362, and by the famine which followed in its wake. In 1369 Aquitaine revolted against the Black Prince.

Edward the Black Prince’s most recent adventure in Spain, to restore Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Castile, had been inconclusive and very expensive. When he attempted to pay for the expedition by new taxes on Aquitaine the magnates outside Gascony, who had become used to thinking of themselves as Frenchmen, seized their chance. They had not wished to be vassals of the fierce and warlike prince, as agreed by the Treaty of Brétigny. They called to Charles V for help. On the grounds that the treaty had not been completely implemented and that he was still the Aquitainians’ overlord, Charles summoned the Black Prince to answer the charges before the Parliament of Paris. When Prince Edward responded that he would debate with Parliament with a helmet on his head and 60,000 men the war began again.

This time, however, it was an even more pointless and destructive affair. The Black Prince had contracted a wasting disease on the Spanish campaign and was too ill to sit on a horse. Instead he was jolted in a litter from city to city, burning and plundering in the name of his father who had revived his claim to the French throne. In 1370 the sack of Limoges, capital of the Limousin which had revolted against him, blackened his reputation for ever. When he ordered every man, woman and child to be massacred by his soldiers in front of him, it gave the lie to the notion of war as a chivalrous pursuit.

For the rest of Edward III’s reign the French showed that they had learned their lesson. Under Charles V and his superb Breton commander Bertrand de Guesclin, they refused to meet the English in pitched battle and instead allowed them to wear out their strength in fruitless local campaigns–which just added to the bad feeling against the English. The Black Prince returned to England to die and was replaced by his younger brother, Edward III’s fourth surviving son John of Gaunt (for Ghent, where he was born), Duke of Lancaster.

But the trail of ruin John of Gaunt left as he marched in 1373 from Calais on the north-east coast down to Bordeaux in the south-west achieved nothing. It also killed half his soldiers, who succumbed to hunger and exposure. When the French seized control of the Channel with the help of the Castilian navy and prevented reinforcements reaching the English troops, the war petered out. By the time of Edward III’s death in 1377 the achievements of the great battles of the earlier part of his reign had been completely undone. For all the excitement of war, other than Calais the English possessions were less now than they had been under Isabella and Mortimer, consisting only of the few coastal towns of Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest and Cherbourg.

From the early 1370s on, Edward III declined into premature senility. The country was ruled meanwhile by the squabbling factions in the King’s Council–the supporters of John of Gaunt versus those of his elder brother, the dying Black Prince. Just as the main participants in the triumph of England were dead or decaying, the country itself was in crisis. Ever since the Black Death had killed a third of the population in the year 1348–9, chaos had prevailed at all levels of life. A series of droughts and poor harvests had reduced food supplies in England and Europe to dangerously low levels in any case, and even before the plague much of the European population had been suffering from malnutrition. So they were less able to resist the deadly disease, which began with black boils erupting from under the skin in the groin and armpits. In almost all cases it ended with death a few hours later.

But 1348–9 was not the end of the plague in England. In 1362 it returned, as it did in France and elsewhere, and again in 1369. The figures speak for themselves. Before the Black Death the English population is generally estimated to have been about five and half million. By the end of the fourteenth century there were two million fewer. The optimism which had accompanied the material prosperity of the years before 1348 was replaced by an anger and discontent that could not be assuaged by religion and would soon give rise to the Peasants’ Revolt. The flow of international trade which had been so profitable for everyone had already been faltering under the impact of the war. Now it fell to a trickle.

The natural order of centuries was overthrown when serfs and landowners were carried off so fast and in such numbers that there was no one left to remember the feudal arrangements, which had often been maintained by oral tradition. Attitudes to authority were changed too, as the English became less naturally deferential. When the response to the plague of wealthy bishops and barons was to shut themselves up in their castles or leave for the continent, they lost the instinctive respect of the locals. Even the parish priests no longer commanded much automatic obedience, though their behaviour during the Black Death had been exemplary. They had persistently nursed their highly contagious flocks after their families abandoned them, with the result that the death rate among priests was higher than among ordinary folk.

Such is the perversity of human nature that in an age before scientific medicine this was taken as a sign that priests were no holier than other men. Not only had they not been spared from what was commonly considered to be God’s vengeance on a wicked race but they were being singled out by him. By the late fourteenth century their self-sacrifice had produced a great shortage of priests to serve in parishes. Very few were left to preach against the dark pessimism and obsession with death seen in the paintings and poetry of the time.

Moreover, for some time in this country there had been a growing anti-clerical sentiment. Ever since 1309 when a French pope removed the Papal Court or Curia to Avignon in southern France, all the popes elected had been French, so that for the next sixty years until 1378 the papacy had come to be seen by the English government as an appendage of their enemy the French king. At Edward III’s behest the Statute of Provisors and the Statute of Praemunire asserted English independence from the pope over Church appointments and banned appeals to foreign courts. In 1366 Parliament itself demanded the revocation of King John’s agreement to be the pope’s vassal and put an end to the annual tax sent to Avignon instead of Rome.

In this feverish religious vacuum and unsettled atmosphere the stress on personal responsibility of a new group of preachers named the Lollards offered an attractive new direction for the disillusioned. The Lollards were followers of a radical Oxford theologian named John Wyclif, whose teachings anticipated many elements of the Reformation. Wyclif believed that the ultimate source of religious authority was not the priesthood but the Bible. With his regular denunciations of the clergy, he also provided a convenient weapon for John of Gaunt in the continued struggle for control of the King’s Council.

Thanks to his first marriage to the hugely wealthy northern heiress Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt was now the greatest magnate in the country. He was anyway a swaggering figure with a private life of such epic dimensions that it aroused the antagonism of the English bishops, who formed part of the Black Prince’s faction. Gaunt was therefore leader of the anti-clerical party. Using as intellectual justification Wyclif’s theory that priests should not be involved in politics, Gaunt got Alice Perrers, Edward III’s mistress, to dismiss most of the bishops who, following the long standing English custom, filled the government offices. William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and the rest of the clerical party were now at daggers drawn with John of Gaunt’s party.

In fact the real corruption at court, the bribes in return for favours, monopolies and offices, was the work of John of Gaunt and his accomplices–Alice Perrers, a London merchant named Richard Lyons, and Lord Latimer. Although he could control most of the government appointments, Gaunt could not control what was now known as the Commons, the elected members from the boroughs and shires, who from the 1330s were congregating apart from the Lords. And the Commons was hard to handle because it was there that the Black Prince’s supporters were especially strong. At last in 1376 the bishops and Commons together in what became known as the Good Parliament publicly attacked the court party of John of Gaunt. The Commons then elected what they called a Speaker (the first instance of this title being used), and the man they chose, Sir Peter de la Mare, launched the first case of impeachment in English history, against Gaunt’s leading accomplices. De la Mare himself acted as prosecuting counsel for the Commons, while the House of Lords took the part of judges–this remained the standard method of conducting a political trial until the eighteenth century. The Lords found Latimer and Lyons guilty of bribery and corruption, and Alice Perrers, who was also held to be guilty, was ordered to be removed from the king’s palace as an evil influence. Just before sentence was pronounced, the Commons’ greatest protector the Black Prince died. John of Gaunt was thus able to use his now completely unopposed influence in the country to call a new parliament, and abolished the acts passed by the Good Parliament.

Edward III finally expired on Midsummer’s Day 1377. For a long time his own glorious summer had been a fading memory. As he was breathing his last, ungrateful courtiers ran from the palace to attend to the new powerbrokers in the land. Even Alice Perrers, who had been such a feature of the great Edwardian tournaments where she had appeared as the Lady of the Sun, deserted him–though not neglecting to pull the rings off his fingers first. The man who had been the greatest prince of the Europe of his day and England’s most popular king for two centuries would have died alone had not a priest happened to be passing. He gave the old king the last rites before his soul departed.