Causes of the Hundred Years' War.
Wars between England and France had been many, since William the
Conqueror first linked their fortunes together by adding his English
kingdom to his Norman duchy. They were bound to recur as long as the
kings who ruled on this side of the Channel were possessed of
continental dominions, which lay as near, or nearer, to their hearts
than their insular realm. While the kingdom of France was weak, monarchs
like Henry II. and Richard I. might dream of extending their transmarine
possessions to the detriment of their suzerain at Paris. When France had
grown strong, under Philip Augustus, the house of Plantagenet still
retained a broad territory in Gascony and Guienne, and the house of
Capet could not but covet the possession of the largest surviving feudal
appanage which marred the solidarity of their kingdom. There had been a
long interval of peace in the 13th century, because Henry III. of
England was weak, and Louis IX. of France an idealist, much more set on
forwarding the welfare of Christendom than the expansion of France. But
the inevitable struggle had recommenced with the accession of the
unscrupulous Philip IV. Its cause was simple; France was incomplete as
long as the English king ruled at Bordeaux and Bayonne, and far up the
valleys of the Garonne and the Adour. From 1293 onward Philip and his
sons had been striving to make an end of the power of the Plantagenets
in Aquitaine, sometimes by the simple argument of war, more frequently
by the insidious process of encroaching on ducal rights, summoning
litigants to Paris, and encouraging local magnates and cities alike to
play off their allegiance to their suzerain against that to their
immediate lord. Both in the time of Edward II. and in that of his son
active violence had several times been called in to aid legal chicanery.
Fortunately for the duke of Guienne the majority of his subjects had no
desire to become Frenchmen; the Gascons felt no national sympathy with
their neighbours of the north, and the towns in especial were linked to
England by close ties of commerce, and had no wish whatever to break off
their allegiance to the house of Plantagenet. The English rule, if often
weak, had never proved tyrannical, and they had a great dread of French
taxes and French officialism. But there were always individuals, more
numerous among the noblesse than among the citizens, whose private
interests impelled them to seek the aid of France.
The root of the Hundred Years' War, now just about to commence, must be
sought in the affairs of Guienne, and not in any of the other causes
which complicated and obscured the outbreak of hostilities. These,
however, were sufficiently important in themselves. The most obvious was
the aid which Philip VI. had given to the exiled David Bruce, when he
was driven out of Scotland by Edward and his ally Baliol. The English
king replied by welcoming and harbouring Robert of Artois, a cousin whom
Philip VI. had expelled from France. He also made alliances with several
of the dukes and counts of the Netherlands, and with the emperor Louis
the Bavarian, obviously with the intention of raising trouble for France
on her northern and eastern frontiers.
Beginning of the war.
It was Philip, however, who actually began the war, by declaring Guienne
and the other continental dominions of Edward III. forfeited to the
French crown, and sending out a fleet which ravaged the south coast of
England in 1337. In return Edward raised a claim to the throne of
France, not that he had any serious intention of pressing it--for
throughout his reign he always showed himself ready to barter it away in
return for sufficient territorial gains--but because such a claim was in
several ways a useful asset to him both in war and in diplomacy. It was
first turned to account when the Flemings, who had scruples about
opposing their liege lord the king of France, found it convenient to
discover that, since Edward was the real king and not Philip, their
allegiance was due in the same direction whither their commercial
interests drew them. Led by the great demagogue dictator, Jacob van
Artevelde, they became the mainstay of the English party in the
Netherlands.
Edward III. and the French crown.
Edward's claim--such as it was--rested on the assertion that his mother,
Isabella, was nearer of kin to her brother Charles IV., the last king of
the main line of the house of Capet, than was Charles's cousin Philip of
Valois. The French lawyers ruled that heiresses could not succeed to the
crown themselves, but Edward pleaded that they could nevertheless
transmit their right to their sons. He found it convenient to forget
that the elder brother of Charles IV., King Louis X., had left a
daughter, whose son, the king of Navarre, had on this theory a title
preferable to his own. This prince, he said, had not been born at the
time of his grandfather's death, and so lost any rights that might have
passed to him had he been alive at that time. A far more fatal bar to
Edward's claim than the existence of Charles of Navarre was the fact
that the peers of France, when summoned to decide the succession
question nine years before, had decided that Philip of Valois had the
sole valid claim to the crown, and that Edward had then done homage to
him for Guienne. If he pleaded that in 1328 he had been the mere tool of
his mother and Mortimer, he could be reminded of the unfortunate fact
that in 1331, after he had crushed Mortimer, and taken the power into
his own hands, he had deliberately renewed his oath to King Philip.
Edward's claim to the French crown embittered the strife in a most
unnecessary fashion. It was an appeal to every discontented French
vassal to become a traitor under a plausible show of loyalty, and from
first to last many such persons utilized it. It also gave Edward an
excuse for treating every loyal Frenchman as guilty of treason, and, to
his shame, he did not always refrain from employing such a discreditable
device. Yet, as has been already said, he showed his consciousness of
the fallacy of his claim by offering to barter it again and again during
the course of the war for land or money. But he finally passed on the
wretched fiction as a heritage of his descendants, to cause untold woes
in the 15th century. It is seldom in the world's history that a hollow
legal device such as this has had such long enduring and deplorable
results.
Battle of Sluys.
In the commencement of his continental war Edward took little profit
either from his assumption of the French royal title, or from the
lengthy list of princes of the Low Countries whom he enrolled beneath
his banner. His two land-campaigns of 1339 and 1340 led to no victories
or conquests, but cost enormous sums of money. The Netherland allies
brought large contingents and took high pay from the king, but they
showed neither energy nor enthusiasm in his cause. When Philip of Valois
refused battle in the open, and confined his operations to defending
fortified towns, or stockading himself in entranched camps, the allies
drifted off, leaving the king with his English troops in force too small
to accomplish anything. The sole achievement of the early years of the
war which was of any profit to Edward or his realm was the great naval
triumph of Sluys (June 24, 1340), which gave the English the command of
the sea for the next twenty years. The French king had built or hired an
enormous fleet, and with it threatened to invade England. Seeing that he
could do nothing on land while his communications with the Low Countries
were endangered by the existence of this armada, Edward levied every
ship that was to be found, and brought the enemy to action in the
Flemish harbour of Sluys. After a day of desperate hand to hand
fighting--for the vessels grappled and the whole matter was settled by
boarding--the French fleet was annihilated. Henceforth England was safe
from coast raids, could conduct her commerce with Flanders without
danger, and could strike without difficulty at any point of the French
littoral. But it was not for some years that Edward utilized the
advantage that Sluys had given him. As long as he persevered in the
attempt to conduct the invasion of the northern frontier of France he
achieved nothing.
Financial crisis. Trial of Archbishop Stratford.
Such schemes were finally abandoned simply because the king discovered
that his allies were worthless and that his money was all spent. On his
return from Flanders in 1340 he became involved in an angry controversy
with his ministers, whom he accused, quite unjustly, of wasting his
revenue and wrecking his campaign thereby. He imprisoned some of them,
and wished to try his late chancellor, Archbishop Stratford, for
embezzlement, in the court of the exchequer. But the primate contended
very vigorously for the right to be tried before his peers, and since
the king could get no subsidies from his parliament till he acknowledged
the justice of this claim, he was forced to concede it. Stratford was
acquitted--the king's thriftlessness and not the chancellor's
maladministration had emptied the treasury. Edward drifted on along the
path to financial ruin till he actually went bankrupt in 1345, when he
repudiated his debts, and ruined several great Italian banking houses,
who had been unwise enough to continue lending him money to the last.
The Flemings were also hard hit by this collapse of the king's credit,
and very naturally lost their enthusiasm for the English alliance. Van
Artevelde, its chief advocate, was murdered by his own townsmen in this
same year.
War in Brittany.
The second act of the Hundred Years' War, after King Edward had
abandoned in despair his idea of invading France from the side of the
Netherlands, was fought out in another quarter--the duchy of Brittany.
Here a war of succession had broken out in which (oddly enough) Edward
took up the cause of the pretender who had male descent, while Philip
supported the one who represented a female line--each thus backing the
theory of heritage by which his rival claimed the throne of France. By
espousing the cause of John of Montfort Edward obtained a good foothold
on the flank of France, for many of the Breton fortresses were put into
his hands. But he failed to win any decisive advantage thereby over King
Philip. It was not till 1346, when he adopted the new policy of trusting
nothing to allies, and striking at the heart of France with a purely
English army, that Edward found the fortune of war turning in his
favour.
Edward invades France.
Battle of Crecy.
Capture of Calais.
In this year he landed in Normandy, where the English banner had not
been seen since the days of King John, and executed a destructive raid
through the duchy, and up the Seine, till he almost reached the gates of
Paris. This brought out the king of France against him, with a mighty
host, before which Edward retreated northward, apparently intending to
retire to Flanders. But after crossing the Somme he halted at Crecy,
near Abbeville, and offered battle to the pursuing enemy. He fought
relying on the tactics which had been tried against the Scots at Dupplin
and Halidon Hill, drawing up his army with masses of dismounted
men-at-arms flanked on either side by archery. This array proved as
effective against the disorderly charges of the French noblesse as it
had been against the heavy columns of the Scottish pikemen. Fourteen
times the squadrons of King Philip came back to the charge; but mowed
down by the arrow-shower, they seldom could get to handstrokes with the
English knights, and at last rode off the field in disorder. This
astonishing victory over fourfold numbers was no mere chivalrous feat of
arms, it had the solid result of giving the victors a foothold in
northern France. For Edward took his army to beleaguer Calais, and after
blockading it for nearly a year forced it to surrender. King Philip,
after his experience at Crecy, refused to fight again in order to raise
the siege. From henceforth the English possessed a secure landing-place
in northern France, at the most convenient point possible, immediately
opposite Dover. They held it for over two hundred years, to their own
inestimable advantage in every recurring war.
Battle of Neville's Cross.
The years 1345-1347 saw the zenith of King Edward's prosperity; in them
fell not only his own triumphs at Crecy and Calais, but a victory at
Auberoche in Perigord won by his cousin Henry of Lancaster, which
restored many long-lost regions of Guienne to the English suzerainty
(Oct. 21, 1345), and another and more famous battle in the far north. At
Neville's Cross, near Durham, the lords of the Border defeated and
captured David Bruce, king of Scotland (Oct. 17, 1346). The loss of
their king and the destruction of a fine army took the heart out of the
resistance of the Scots, who for many years to come could give their
French allies little assistance.
Truce with France. The Black Death.
In 1347 Edward made a short truce with King Philip: even after his late
victories he felt his strength much strained, his treasury being empty,
and his army exhausted by the year-long siege of Calais. But he would
have returned to the struggle without delay had it not been for the
dreadful calamity of the "Black Death," which fell upon France and
England, as upon all Europe, in the years 1348-1349. The disease, on
which the 14th century bestowed this name, was the bubonic plague, still
familiar in the East. After devastating western Asia, it reached the
Mediterranean ports of Europe in 1347, and spread across the continent
in a few months. It was said that in France, Italy and England a third
of the population perished, and though this estimate may be somewhat
exaggerated, local records of unimpeachable accuracy show that it cannot
be very far from the truth. The bishop's registers of the diocese of
Norwich show that many parishes had three and some four successive
vicars admitted in eighteen months. In the manor rolls it is not
uncommon to find whole families swept away, so that no heir can be
detected to their holdings. Among the monastic orders, whose crowded
common life seems to have been particularly favourable to the spread of
the plague, there were cases where a whole community, from the abbot
down to the novices, perished. The upper classes are said to have
suffered less than the poor; but the king's daughter Joan and two
archbishops of Canterbury were among the victims. The long continuance
of the visitation, which as a rule took six or nine months to work out
its virulence in any particular spot, seems to have cowed and
demoralized society. Though it first spread from the ports of Bristol
and Weymouth in the summer of 1348, it had not finished its destruction
in northern England till 1350, and only spread into Scotland in the
summer of that year.
Economic and social effects of the Black Death.
When the worst of the plague was over, and panic had died down, it was
found that the social conditions of England had been considerably
affected by the visitation. The condition of the realm had been stable
and prosperous during the earlier years of Edward III., the drain on its
resources caused by heavy war-taxation having been more than compensated
by the increased wealth that arose from growing commerce and developing
industries. The victory of Sluys, which gave England the command of the
seas, had been a great landmark in the economic no less than in the
naval history of this island. But the basis of society was shaken by the
Black Death; the kingdom was still essentially an agricultural
community, worked on the manorial system; and the sudden disappearance
of a third of the labouring hands by which that system had been
maintained threw everything into disorder. The landowners found
thousands of the crofts on which their villeins had been wont to dwell
vacant, and could not fill them with new tenants. Even if they exacted
the full rigour of service from the survivors, they could not get their
broad demesne lands properly tilled. The landless labourers, who might
have been hired to supply the deficiency, were so reduced in numbers
that they could command, if free competition prevailed, double and
triple rates of payment, compared with their earnings in the days before
the plague. Hence there arose, almost at once, a bitter strife between
the lords of manors and the labouring class, both landholding and
landless. The lords wished to exact all possible services from the
former, and to pay only the old two or three pence a day to the latter.
The villeins, as hard hit as their masters, resented the tightening of
old duties, which in some cases had already been commuted for small
money rents during the prosperous years preceding the plague. The
landless men formed combinations, disputed with the landlords, and asked
and often got twice as much as the old rates, despite of the murmurings
of the employer.
The Statute of Labourers.
After a short experience of these difficulties the king and council,
whose sympathies were naturally with the landholders, issued an
ordinance forbidding workmen of any kind to demand more than they had
been wont to receive before 1348. This was followed up by the famous
Statute of Labourers of 1351, which fixed rates for all wages
practically identical with those of the times before the Black Death.
Those workmen who refused to accept them were to be imprisoned, while
employers who went behind the backs of their fellows and secretly paid
higher sums were to be punished by heavy fines. Later additions to the
statute were devised to terrorize the labourer, by adding stripes and
branding to his punishment, if he still remained recalcitrant or
absconded. And landowners were empowered to seize all vagrant
able-bodied men, and to compel them to work at the statutory wages. As
some compensation for the low pay of the workmen, parliament tried to
bring down the price of commodities to their former level, for (like
labour) all manufactured articles had gone up immensely in value.
Thirty years of friction followed, while the parliament and the ruling
classes tried in a spasmodic way to enforce the statute, and the
peasantry strove to evade it. It proved impossible to carry out the
scheme; the labourers were too many and too cunning to be crushed. If
driven over hard they absconded to the towns, where hands were needed as
much as in the countryside, or migrated to districts where the statute
was laxly administered. Gradually the landowners discovered that the
only practical way out of their difficulties was to give up the old
custom of working the manorial demesne by the forced labour of their
villeins, and to cut it up into farms which were rented out to free
tenants, and cultivated by them. In the course of two generations the
"farmers" who paid rent for these holdings became more and more
numerous, and demesne land tilled by villein-service grew more and more
rare. But enough old-fashioned landlords remained to keep up the
struggle with the peasants to the end of the 14th century and beyond,
and the number of times that the Statute of Labourers was re-enacted and
recast was enormous. Nevertheless the struggle turned gradually to the
advantage of the labourer, and ended in the creation of the sturdy and
prosperous farming yeomanry who were the strength of the realm for
several centuries to come.
Renewal of the war with France.
Battle of Poitiers.
One immediate consequence of the "Black Death" was the renewal of the
truce between England and France by repeated agreements which lasted
from 1347 to 1355. During this interval Philip of France died, in 1350,
and was succeeded by his son John. The war did not entirely cease, but
became local and spasmodic. In Brittany the factions which supported the
two claimants to the ducal title were so embittered that they never laid
down their arms. In 1351 the French noblesse of Picardy, apparently
without their master's knowledge or consent, made an attempt to surprise
Calais, which was beaten off with some difficulty by King Edward in
person. There was also constant bickering on the borders of Guienne. But
the main forces on both sides were not brought into action till the
series of truces ran out in 1355. From that time onward the English took
the offensive with great vigour. Edward, prince of Wales, ravaged
Languedoc as far as the Mediterranean, while his younger brother John of
Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, executed a less ambitious raid in Picardy and
Artois. In the south this campaign marked real progress, not mere
objectless plunder, for it was followed by the reconquest of great
districts in Perigord and the Agenais, which had been lost to England
since the 13th century. A similar double invasion of France led to even
greater results in the following year, 1356. While Lancaster landed in
Normandy, and with the aid of local rebels occupied the greater part of
the peninsula of the Cotentin, the prince of Wales accomplished greater
things on the borders of Aquitaine. After executing a great circular
sweep through Perigord, Limousin and Berry, he was returning to Bordeaux
laden with plunder, when he was intercepted by the king of France near
Poitiers. The battle that followed was the most astonishing of all the
English victories during the Hundred Years' War. The odds against the
prince were far heavier than those of Crecy, but by taking up a strong
position and using the national tactics which combined the use of
archery and dismounted men-at-arms, the younger Edward not merely beat
off his assailants in a long defensive fight, but finally charged out
upon them, scattered them, and took King John prisoner (Sept. 19, 1356).
The English ravage France.
Peace of Bretigny.
This fortunate capture put an enormous advantage in the hands of the
English; for John, a facile and selfish prince, was ready to buy his
freedom by almost any concessions. He signed two successive treaties
which gave such advantageous terms to Edward III. that the dauphin
Charles, who was acting as regent, and the French states-general refused
to confirm them. This drove the English king to put still further
pressure on the enemy; in 1359 he led out from Calais the largest
English army that had been seen during the war, devastated all northern
France as far as Reims and the borders of Burgundy, and then--continuing
the campaign through the heart of the winter--presented himself before
the gates of Paris and ravaged the Ile de France. This brought the
regent Charles and his counsellors to the verge of despair; they
yielded, and on the 8th of May 1360, signed an agreement at Bretigny
near Chartres, by which nearly all King Edward's demands were granted.
These preliminaries were ratified by the definitive peace of Calais
(Oct. 24, 1360), which brought the first stage of the Hundred Years' War
to an end.
By this treaty King Edward formally gave up his claim to the French
throne, which he had always intended to use merely as an asset for
barter, and was to receive in return not only a sum of 3,000,000 gold
crowns for King John's personal ransom, but an immense cession of
territory which--in southern France at least--almost restored the old
boundaries of the time of Henry II. The duchy of Aquitaine was
reconstructed, so as to include not only the lands that Edward had
inherited, and his recent conquests, but all Poitou, Limousin,
Angoumois, Quercy, Rouergue and Saintonge--a full half of France south
of the Loire. This vast duchy the English king bestowed not long after
on his son Edward, the victor of Poitiers, who reigned there as a
vassal-sovereign, owing homage to England but administering his
possessions in his own right. In northern France, Calais and the county
of Guines, and also the isolated county of Ponthieu, the inheritance of
the wife of Edward I., were ceded to the English crown. All these
regions, it must be noted, were to be held for the future free of any
homage or acknowledgment of allegiance to an overlord, "in perpetuity,
and in the manner in which the kings of France had held them." There was
to be an end to the power of the courts of Paris to harass the duke of
Aquitaine, by using the rights of the suzerain to interfere with the
vassal's subjects. It was hoped that for the future the insidious legal
warfare which had been used with such effect by the French kings would
be effectually prevented.
Submission of David of Scotland.
To complete the picture of the triumph of Edward III. at this, the
culminating point of his reign, it must be mentioned that some time
before the peace of Calais he had made terms with Scotland. David Bruce
was to cede Roxburgh and Berwick, but to keep the rest of his dominions
on condition of paying a ransom of 100,000 marks. This sum could never
be raised, and Edward always had it in his power to bring pressure to
bear on the king of Scots by demanding the instalments, which were
always in arrear. David gave no further trouble; indeed he became so
friendly to England that he offered to proclaim Lionel of Clarence,
Edward's second son, as his heir, and would have done so but for the
vigorous opposition of his parliament.
Economic progress in England.
The English people had expected that a sort of Golden Age would follow
the conclusion of the peace with Scotland and France. Freed from the
war-taxes which had vexed them for the last twenty years, they would be
able to repair the ravages of the Black Death, and to develop the
commercial advantages which had been won at Sluys, and secured by the
dominion of the seas which they had held ever since. In some respects
this expectation was not deceived; the years that followed 1360 seem to
have been prosperous at home, despite the continued friction arising
from the Statute of Labourers. The towns would seem to have fared better
than the countryside, partly indeed at its expense, for the discontented
peasantry migrated in large numbers to the centres of population where
newly-developed manufactures were calling for more hands. The weaving
industry, introduced into the eastern counties by the king's invitation
to Flemish settlers, was making England something more than a mere
producer of raw material for export. The seaports soon recovered from
their losses in the Black Death, and English shipping was beginning to
appear in the distant seas of Portugal and the Baltic. Nothing
illustrates the growth of English wealth better than the fact that the
kingdom had, till the time of Edward III., contrived to conduct all its
commerce with a currency of small silver, but that within thirty years
of his introduction of a gold coinage in 1343, the English "noble" was
being struck in enormous quantities. It invaded all the markets of
western Europe, and became the prototype of the gold issues of the
Netherlands, Scotland, and even parts of Germany. It is in the latter
years of Edward III. that we find the first forerunners of that class of
English merchant princes who were to be such a marked feature in the
succeeding reigns. The Poles of Hull, whose descendants rose in three
generations to ducal rank, were the earliest specimens of their class.
The poet Chaucer may serve as a humbler example of the rise of the
burgher class--the son of a vintner, he became the father of a knight,
and the ancestor, through female descents, of many baronial families.
The second half of the 14th century is the first period in English
history in which we can detect a distinct rise in the importance of the
commercial as opposed to the landed interest. The latter, hard hit by
the manorial difficulties that followed the plague of 1348-1349, found
their rents stationary or even diminishing, while the price of the
commodities from which the former made their wealth had permanently
risen. As to intellectual vigour, the age that produced two minds of
such marked originality in different spheres as Wycliffe and Chaucer
must not be despised, even if it failed to carry out all the promise of
the 13th century.
English rule in France.
For a few years after the peace of 1360 the political influence of
Edward III. in western Europe seemed to be supreme. France, prostrated
by the results of the English raids, by peasant revolts, and municipal
and baronial turbulence, did not begin to recover strength till the
thriftless king John had died (1364) and had been succeeded by his
capable if unchivalrous son Charles V. Yet the state of the English
dominions on the continent was not satisfactory; in building up the vast
duchy of Aquitaine Edward had made a radical mistake. Instead of
contenting himself with creating a homogeneous Gascon state, which might
have grown together into a solid unit, he had annexed broad regions
which had been for a century and a half united to France, and had been
entirely assimilated to her. From the first Poitou, Quercy, Rouergue and
the Limousin chafed beneath the English yoke; the noblesse in especial
found the comparatively orderly and constitutional governance to which
they were subjected most intolerable. They waited for the first
opportunity to revolt, and meanwhile murmured against every act of their
duke, the prince of Wales, though he did his best to behave as a
gracious sovereign.
The Black Prince in Spain.
The younger Edward ended by losing his health and his wealth in an
unnecessary war beyond the Pyrenees. He was persuaded by the exiled
Peter the Cruel, king of Castile, to restore him to the throne which he
had forfeited by his misgovernment. In 1367 he gathered a great army,
entered Castile, defeated the usurper Henry of Trastamara at the battle
of Najera, and restored his ally. But Peter, when once re-established as
king, forgot his obligations and left the prince burdened with the whole
expense of the campaign. Edward left Spain with a discontented and
unpaid army, and had himself contracted the seeds of a disease which was
to leave him an invalid for the rest of his life. To pay his debts he
was obliged to resort to heavy taxation in Aquitaine, which gave his
discontented subjects in Poitou and the other outlying districts an
excuse for the rebellion that they had been for some time meditating. In
1368 his greatest vassals, the counts of Armagnac, Perigord and
Comminges, displayed their disloyalty by appealing to the king of France
as their suzerain against the legality of Edward's imposts. The French
overlordship had been formally abolished by the treaty of 1360, so this
appeal amounted to open rebellion. And when Charles V. accepted it, and
cited Edward to appear before his parlement to answer the complaints of
the counts, he was challenging England to renewed war. He found a
preposterous excuse for repudiating the treaty by which he was bound, by
declaring that some details had been omitted in its formal ratification.
Renewal of the war with France.
The Hundred Years' War, therefore, broke out again in 1369, after an
interval of nine years. Edward III. assumed once more the title of king
of France, while Charles V., in the usual style, declared that the whole
duchy of Aquitaine had been forfeited for treason and rebellion on the
part of its present holder. The second period of war, which was to last
till the death of the English king, and for some years after, was
destined to prove wholly disastrous to England. All the conditions had
changed since 1360. Edward, though only in his fifty-seventh year, was
entering into a premature and decrepit old age, in which he became the
prey of unworthy favourites, male and female. The men of the 14th
century, who commanded armies and executed _coups d'etat_ at eighteen,
were often worn out by sixty. The guidance of the war should have fallen
into the hands of his eldest son, the victor of Poitiers and Najera, but
the younger Edward had never recovered from the fatigues of his Spanish
campaign; his disease having developed into a form of dropsy, he had
become a confirmed invalid and could no longer take the field. The
charge of the military operations of the English armies had passed to
John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the king's younger son, a prince far
inferior in capacity to his father and brother. Though not destitute of
good impulses Lancaster was hasty, improvident and obstinate; he was
unfortunate in his choice of friends, for he allied himself to all his
father's unscrupulous dependents. He was destitute of military skill,
and wrecked army after army by attempting hard tasks at inappropriate
times and by mistaken methods. Despite of all checks and disasters he
remained active, self-confident and ambitious, and, since he had
acquired a complete control over his father, he had ample opportunity to
mismanage the political and military affairs of England.
Character of the war.
Lancaster's strategy, in the early years of the renewed war, consisted
mainly of attempts to wear down the force of France by devastating
raids; he hoped to provoke the enemy to battle by striking at the heart
of his realm, but never achieved his purpose. Warned by the disasters of
Crecy and Poitiers, Charles V. and his great captain Bertrand du
Guesclin would never commit themselves to an engagement in the open
field. They let the English invaders pass by, garrisoning the towns but
abandoning the countryside. Since Lancaster, in his great circular
raids, had never the leisure to sit down to a siege--generally a matter
of long months in the 14th century--he repeatedly crossed France leaving
a train of ruined villages behind him, but having accomplished nothing
else save the exhaustion of his own army. For the French always followed
him at a cautious distance, cutting off his stragglers, and restricting
the area of his ravages by keeping flying columns all around his path.
But while the duke was executing useless marches across France, the
outlying lands of Aquitaine were falling away, one after the other, to
the enemy. The limit of the territory which still remained loyal was
ever shrinking, and what was once lost was hardly ever regained. Almost
the only reconquest made was that of the city of Limoges, which was
stormed in September 1370 by the troops of the Black Prince, who rose
from his sick-bed to strike his last blow at the rebels. His success did
almost as much harm as good to his cause, for the deliberate sack of the
city was carried out with such ruthless severity that it roused wild
wrath rather than terror in the neighbouring regions. Next spring the
prince returned to England, feeling himself physically unable to
administer or defend his duchy any longer.
English reverses.
The greater part of Poitou, Quercy and Rouergue had been lost, and the
English cause was everywhere losing ground, when a new danger was
developed. Since Sluys the enemy had never disputed the command of the
seas; but in 1372 a Spanish fleet joined the French, and destroyed off
La Rochelle a squadron which was bringing reinforcements for Guienne.
The disaster was the direct result of the campaign of Najera--for Henry
of Trastamara, who had long since dethroned and slain his brother Peter
the Cruel, remained a consistent foe of England. From this date onward
Franco-Spanish fleets were perpetually to be met not only in the Bay of
Biscay but in the Channel; they made the voyage to Bordeaux unsafe, and
often executed descents on the shores of Kent, Sussex, Devon and
Cornwall. It was to no effect that, in the year after the battle of La
Rochelle, Lancaster carried out the last, the most expensive, and the
most fruitless of his great raids across France. He marched from Calais
to Bordeaux, inflicted great misery on Picardy, Champagne and Berry, and
left half his army dead by the way.
This did not prevent Bertrand du Guesclin from expelling from his
dominions John of Brittany, the one ally whom King Edward possessed in
France, or from pursuing a consistent career of petty conquest in the
heart of Aquitaine. By 1374 little was left of the great possessions
which the English had held beyond the Channel save Calais, and the coast
slip from Bordeaux to Bayonne, which formed the only loyal part of the
duchy of Guienne. Next year King Edward sued for peace--he failed to
obtain it, finding the French terms too hard for acceptance--but a
truce at least was signed at Bruges (Jan. 1375) which endured till a few
weeks before his death.
Domestic strife.
Agitation against the Church.
Wycliffe.
These two last years of Edward's reign were filled with an episode of
domestic strife, which had considerable constitutional importance. The
nation ascribed the series of disasters which had filled the space from
1369 to 1375 entirely to the maladministration of Lancaster and the
king's favourites, failing to see that it was largely due to the mere
fact that England was not strong enough to hold down Aquitaine, when
France was administered by a capable king and served by a great general.
Hence there arose, both in and out of parliament, a violent agitation
for the removal of Lancaster from power, and the punishment of the
favourites, who were believed, with complete justification, to be
misusing the royal name for their own private profit. Among the leaders
of this agitation were the clerical ministers whom John of Gaunt had
expelled from office in 1371, and chiefly William of Wykeham, bishop of
Winchester, the late chancellor; they were helped by Edmund Mortimer,
earl of March, a personal enemy of Lancaster, and could count on the
assistance of the prince of Wales when he was well enough to take a part
in politics. The greater part of the House of Commons was on their side,
and on the whole they may be regarded as the party of constitutional
protest against maladministration. But there was another movement on
foot at the same time, which cut across this political agitation in the
most bewildering fashion. Protests against the corruption of the Church
and the interference of the papacy in national affairs had always been
rife in England. At this moment they were more prevalent than ever,
largely in consequence of the way in which the popes at Avignon had made
themselves the allies and tools of the kings of France. The Statutes of
Praemunire and Provisors had been passed a few years before (1351-1365)
to check papal pretensions. There was a strong anti-clerical party,
whose practical aim was to fill the coffers of the state by large
measures of disendowment and confiscations of Church property. The
intellectual head of this party at the time was John Wycliffe, a famous
Oxford teacher, and for some time master of Balliol College. In his
lectures and sermons he was always laying stress on the unsatisfactory
state of the national church and the infamous corruption of the papacy.
The doctrine which first made him famous, and commended him to all
members of the anti-clerical faction, was that unworthy holders of
spiritual endowments ought to be dispossessed of them, because
"dominion" should depend on "grace." Churchmen, small and great, as he
held, had been corrupted, because they had fallen away from the early
Christian idea of apostolic poverty. Instead of discharging their proper
functions, bishops and abbots had become statesmen or wealthy barons,
and took no interest in anything save politics. The monasteries, with
their vast possessions, had become corporations of landlords, instead of
associations for prayer and good works. The papacy, with its secular
ambitions, and its insatiable greed for money, was the worst abuse of
all. A bad pope, and most popes were bad, was the true Antichrist, since
he was always overruling the divine law of the scriptures by his human
ordinances. Every man, as Wycliffe taught--using the feudal analogies of
contemporary society--is God's tenant-in-chief, directly responsible for
his acts to his overlord; the pope is always thrusting himself in
between, like a mesne-tenant, and destroying the touch between God and
man by his interference. Sometimes his commands are merely presumptuous;
sometimes--as when, for example, he preaches crusades against Christians
for purely secular reasons--they are the most horrible form of
blasphemy. Wycliffe at a later period of his life developed views on
doctrinal matters, not connected with his original thesis about the
relations between Church and State, and foreshadowed most of the leading
tenets of the reformers of the 16th century. But in 1376-1377 he was
known merely as the outspoken critic of the "Caesarean clergy" and the
papacy. He had a following of enthusiastic disciples at Oxford, and
scattered adherents both among the burghers and the knighthood, the
nucleus of the party that afterwards became famous as the Lollards. But
they had not yet differentiated themselves from the body of those who
were merely anti-clerical, without being committed to any theories of
religious reform.
John of Gaunt and Wycliffe.
Since Wycliffe was, above all things, the enemy of the political clergy
of high estate, and since those clergy were precisely the leaders of the
attack upon John of Gaunt, it came to pass that hatred of a common foe
drew the duke and the doctor together for a space. There was a strange
alliance between the advocate of clerical reform, and the practical
exponent of secular misgovernment. The only point on which they were
agreed was that it would be highly desirable to strip the Church of most
of her endowments, in order to fill the exchequer of the state.
Lancaster hoped to use Wycliffe as his mouthpiece against his enemies;
Wycliffe hoped to see Lancaster disendowing bishops and monasteries and
defying the pope. Hence the attempt of the political bishops to get
Wycliffe condemned as a heretic became inextricably mixed with the
attempt of the constitutional party, to which the bishops belonged, to
evict the duke from his position of first councillor to the king and
director of the policy of the realm.