THE BURDEN OF THE WAR
"[Edward], the first of English nation
That ever had right unto the crown of France
By succession of blood and generation
Of his mother withouten variance,
The which me thinketh should be of most substance;
For Christ was king by his mother of Judee,
Which surer side is ay, as thinketh me."
HARDYNG, "Chronicle," 335
It must, however, be admitted that so terrible a weapon in so rough an age
was only too dangerous. When Edward III. found that his cousin of France
not only meant to deal treacherously with him in Aquitaine, but had also
allied himself with our deadly enemies of Scotland, he found a very
colourable excuse for retaliation by raising a claim to the throne of
France. But for the Salic law, which forbade inheritance through a female,
Edward would undoubtedly be, if not the rightful heir, at least nearer
than Philippe de Valois, who now sat on that throne. The Biblical colour
which he gave to his claim by pleading the precedent of "Judee" was of
course the after-thought of some ingenious theologian; the real strength
of Edward's claim lay in his army. To appreciate the strength of Edward's
temptations here, we must imagine modern Germany adding to her other
armaments a navy capable of commanding the seas, a Kaiser fettered by even
less constitutional checks than at present, and sharing with his people
even greater incitements to cupidity. Beyond the prospect, always dazzling
enough to a statesman, of an enormous indemnity and a substantial
increase of territory, medieval warfare offered even to the meanest
English soldier only too probable hopes of riot and booty. Froissart,
though he seldom feels very deeply for the mere people, describes our
first march through the defenceless districts of Normandy in words which
make us understand why this unhappy, unprepared country could only mark
time for the next hundred years, while we, in spite of all our faults and
follies, went on slowly from strength to strength. England, with her own
four or five millions and a little help from Aquitaine, rode roughshod
again and again over the disorganized ten millions north of the Loire;
while the French--even during those thirty years of union which elapsed
between the recovery of Guienne and the murder of the Duke of
Orleans--frequently enough burned our southern seaports, but never
penetrated more than a few miles inland in the face of our shire-levies.
The contrast is in every way characteristic of Chaucer's England, and
Froissart's description is of the deepest significance, not only to the
student of political and social history, but even to the literary
historian. It has been noted that Chaucer's deepest note of pathos is for
the sorrows of the helpless--the irremediable sufferings of those whose
frailty has tempted murder or oppression, and to whom the poet himself can
offer nothing but a tear on earth and some hope of redress in heaven. Let
us remember, then, that Chaucer fought in two French campaigns, identical
in kind and not even differing much in degree from the invasion of 1346
which Froissart describes. "They came to a good port and to a good town
called Barfleur, the which incontinent was won, for they within gave up
for fear of death. Howbeit, for all that the town was robbed, and much
gold and silver there found, and rich jewels; there was found so much
riches, that the boys and villains of the host set nothing by good furred
gowns; they made all the men of the town to issue out and to go into the
ships, because they would not suffer them to be behind them for fear of
rebelling again. After the town of Barfleur was thus taken and robbed
without brenning, then they spread abroad in the country and did what they
list, for there was none to resist them. At last they came to a great and
a rich town called Cherbourg; the town they won and robbed it, and brent
part thereof, but into the castle they could not come, it was so strong
and well furnished with men of war. Then they passed forth and came to
Montebourg, and took it and robbed and brent it clean. In this manner they
brent many other towns in that country and won so much riches, that it was
marvel to reckon it. Then they came to a great town well closed called
Carentan, where there was also a strong castle and many soldiers within to
keep it. Then the lords came out of their ships and fiercely made assault;
the burgesses of the town were in great fear of their lives, wives and
children; they suffered the Englishmen to enter into the town against the
will of all the soldiers that were there; they put all their goods to the
Englishmen's pleasures, they thought that most advantage. When the
soldiers within saw that, they went into the castle; the Englishmen went
into the town, and two days together they made sore assaults, so that when
they within saw no succour, they yielded up, their lives and goods saved,
and so departed. The Englishmen had their pleasure of that good town and
castle, and when they saw they might not maintain to keep it, they set
fire therein and brent it, and made the burgesses of the town to enter
into their ships, as they had done with them of Barfleur, Cherbourg and
Montebourg, and of other towns that they had won on the sea-side.... The
lord Godfrey as marshal rode forth with five hundred men of arms, and rode
off from the king's battle a six or seven leagues, in brenning and exiling
the country, the which was plentiful of everything--the granges full of
corn, the houses full of all riches, rich burgesses, carts and chariots,
horse, swine, muttons and other beasts; they took what them list and
brought into the king's host; but the soldiers made no count to the king
nor to none of his officers of the gold and silver that they did get; they
kept that to themselves.... Thus by the Englishmen was brent, exiled,
robbed, wasted and pilled the good, plentiful country of Normandy.... It
was no marvel though they of the country were afraid, for before that time
they had never seen men of war, nor they wist not what war or battle
meant. They fled away as far as they might hear speaking of the
Englishmen, and left their houses well stuffed, and granges full of corn,
they wist not how to save and keep it." Hitherto Froissart has only
deigned to record the fire and pillage; but the melancholy catalogue now
goes on to Coutances, Saint-Lo, and Caen, where at last the citizens
fought boldly in defence of their unwalled town, "greater than any city in
England except London." In spite of their numbers, and of an obstinate
courage which extorted the admiration of their adversaries, the half-armed
and untrained citizens were at last hopelessly beaten, and the town given
over to the infuriated soldiery; though here Sir Thomas Holland, an old
Crusader, who might have sat for Chaucer's Knight, "rode into the streets
and saved many lives of ladies, damosels, and cloisterers from defoiling,
for the soldiers were without mercy."[230]
At a later stage, when the horrors of civil war were added to those of the
English invasion, the Norman chronicler, Thomas Basin, describes the
fertile country between Loire, Seine, and Somme as a mere wilderness, half
overgrown with brambles and thickets. "Moreover, whatsoever husbandry
there was in the aforesaid lands, was only in the neighbourhood and
suburbs of cities, towns, or castles, for so far as a watchman's eye from
some tower or point of vantage could reach to see robbers coming upon
them; then would the watchman sound the alarm ... on a bell or hunting
horn, or other bugle. Which alarms and incursions were so common and
frequent in very many places, that when the oxen and plough-horses were
loosed from the plough, hearing the watchman's signal, they took flight
and galloped away forthwith of their own accord, by the force of habit, to
their places of refuge; nay, the very sheep and swine had learnt by long
use to do the same." The French Bishop Jean-Jouvenel des Ursins, in 1433,
speaks of the sufferings of his diocese in language too painful and too
direct to be reproduced here.[231]
To realize the full force of these descriptions, it is necessary to
compare them with those of the good monk Walsingham, who drily records how
Edward "attacked, took, sacked, and burnt Caen, and many other cities
after it." It is only when Edward comes back from Calais with his
victorious army that Walsingham waxes eloquent. "Then folk thought that a
new sun was rising over England, for the abundance of peace, the plenty of
possessions, and the glory of victory. For there was no woman of any name,
but had somewhat of the spoils of Caen, Calais, and other cities beyond
the seas. Furs, feather-beds, or household utensils, tablecloths and
necklaces, cups of gold or silver, linen and sheets, were to be seen
scattered about England in different houses. Then began the English ladies
to wax wanton in the vesture of the French women; and as the latter
grieved to have lost their goods, so the former rejoiced to have obtained
them."[232] In an age of brute force, when popes hesitated no more than
kings to shed rivers of blood for a few square miles of territory, when
every sailor was a potential pirate and every baron a potential
highwayman[233]--in such an age as this, no nation could have resisted the
lust of conquest when it had once realized the wealth and supine
helplessness of a neighbour. "The English," wrote Froissart, when old age
had brought him to ponder less on feats of arms and more on eternity, "The
English will never love or honour their king but if he be victorious, and
a lover of arms and war against his neighbours, and especially against
such as are greater and richer than themselves.... Their land is more
fulfilled of riches and all manner of goods when they are at war, than in
times of peace; and therein are they born and ingrained, nor could a man
make them understand the contrary.... They take delight and solace in
battles and in slaughter: covetous and envious are they above measure of
other men's wealth."[234] But when exhausted France could no longer yield
more than a mere livelihood to the armies which overran her, then at last
things found their proper level, and the nation wearied of bloodshed.
"Universal conscription proved then as now the great inculcator of peace.
To the burgher called from the loom and the dyeing pit and the market
stall to take down his bow or dagger, war was a hard and ungrateful
service, where reward and plunder were dealt out with a niggardly hand;
and men conceived a deep hatred of strife and disorder of which they had
measured all the misery."[235]
But, terribly as it might press upon our enemies in those days, when the
private soldier had almost an unrestricted right of pillage, the Statute
of Winchester was none the less necessary to the full development of our
political freedom. Indeed, it is scarcely a paradox to say that those
civic and Parliamentary liberties which made such rapid strides during the
sixty years of Chaucer's lifetime owed as much to this burden of personal
service as to anything else. To begin with, it was a police system also;
and, for by far the greater part of the country, the only police system.
When the hue and cry was raised after a robber or a murderer, all were
then bound to tumble out of doors and join in the chase with such arms as
they had, just as they were bound to turn out and take their share in the
national war. When all the disorders of the 14th century have been counted
up in England, they are as dust in the balance compared with those of
foreign countries. The Peasants' Rising of 1381 astonishes modern
historians in nothing so much as in its sudden rise, its sudden end when
the King had promised redress, and its comparative orderliness in
disorder. But, on second thoughts, does not this seem natural enough among
a people accustomed to rough military discipline, and liable any day to be
arrayed, as they had laboured, side by side?[236] Lastly, we have the
repeated testimony of our most determined enemies to the superiority of
English over French discipline. Bishop des Ursins, in a letter written to
the French Parliament in 1433, describes the worst horrors of the war as
having been committed by French upon French; and he expressly adds, "at
present, things are somewhat amended by the coming of the English." This
modified compliment he repeats again in a letter to Charles VII., adding,
"[the English] did indeed at least keep their assurances once given, and
also their safe conducts"; while the French (as he complains) often made
light of their own engagements.[237] Indeed, the whole array of documents
collected by the astounding diligence of the late subprefect of the
Vatican Library is calculated--we may not say, to make us read with
equanimity the tale of horrors perpetrated by our countrymen in
France--but at least to shift much of the blame from the individuals to
the times in which they lived. The English were not cruel merely because
they were strong; the weaker French were on the whole more cruel; nowhere
has the bitter proverb _Gallus Gallo lupus_ been more terribly justified.
The main difference was that, in an age when a man must needs be hammer or
anvil, our national character and organization, no doubt assisted also by
fortune, enabled us to play the former part. Father Denifle shows very
clearly how even great and good Frenchmen like Des Ursins, living in Joan
of Arc's time, were ashamed of her because she seemed to have failed. The
impulses of actual chivalry--apart from its nominal code--were at best
even more capricious in France than in England. Knightly mercy and
forbearance seldom even professed to include the mere rank and file of a
conquered army. When a place was taken by storm, it was common to ransom
the officers and kill the rest without mercy. Here and there a knight
earns special praise from Froissart by pleading for the lives of the
unhappy privates who had fought as bravely as himself; but I remember no
case of one who actually insisted on sharing the fate of his men. The
Black Prince tarnished his fair fame by the massacre of Limoges; yet in
this he did but follow the example of the saintly Charles de Blois, who
thanked God for victory in the cathedral of Quimper while his men were
making a hell of the captured city. His orisons finished, Charles stayed
the slaughter; and the Black Prince, after watching the butchery of
Limoges from his litter, and turning his face away from women and
children who knelt to implore his mercy, was at last appeased by the manly
spectacle of three French warriors fighting boldly for their lives against
three Englishmen.[238] Their courage saved them, and what we might now
call their conqueror's sporting instincts; just as Queen Philippa's timely
pleading saved the citizens of Calais. All honour to the noble impulse in
both cases; but greater honour still to the manly independence and
discipline which saved our English commonalty from the need of appealing
to a conqueror's mercy; which defended them alike from robbers at home and
Frenchmen over the seas, and left us free to work out our own liberties
without foreign interference. No doubt the Wars of the Roses were partly a
legacy of our unjust aggression in France; but English civil wars have
been among the least disorderly the world has known; in all of them the
citizen-levies have fought stoutly on the side of liberty; and for
centuries after Chaucer's death the national militia was recognized as a
strong counterpoise to the unconstitutional tendencies of the standing
army.
Of all this Froissart recognized little indeed; though we, in the light of
a hundred other documents, can see how all went on under Froissart's eyes.
He saw clearly that this was the most warlike nation in Europe; he saw
also that it was the most democratic; but he seems neither to have traced
any connection here on the one hand, nor on the other to have been
troubled by any sense of contrast; it was not in his genius to look for
causes, but rather to repeat with child-like vivacity what he saw and
heard. Yet for us, to whom nothing in Chaucer's England can be more
interesting than to watch, under the great trees of the forest, the
springing of that undergrowth which was in time to become the present
British people, it is delightful to turn from pictures of mere successful
bloodshed to Froissart's bitter-sweet judgments on the national character.
"Englishmen suffer indeed for a season, but in the end they repay so
cruelly that it may stand as a great warning; for no man may mock them;
the lord who governs them rises and lays him down to rest in sore peril of
his life.... And specially there is no people under the sun so perilous in
the matter of its common folk as they are in England. For in England the
nature and condition of the nobles is very far different from that of the
common folk and villeins; for the gentlefolk are of loyal and noble
condition, and the common people is of a fell, perilous, proud and
disloyal condition: and wheresoever the people would show their fierceness
and their power, the nobles would not last long after. But now for a long
time they have been at good accord together, for the nobles ask nothing of
the people but what is of full reason; moreover none would suffer them to
take aught from him without payment--nay, not an egg or a hen. The
tradesmen and labourers of England live by the travail of their hands, and
the nobles live on their own rents and revenues, and if the kings vex them
they are repaid; not that the king can tax his people at pleasure, no! nor
the people would not or could not suffer it. There are certain ordinances
and covenants settled upon the staple of wool, wherefrom the king is
assisted beyond his own rents and revenues; and when they go to war, that
covenant is doubled. England is best kept of all lands in the world;
otherwise they could by no means live together; and it behoveth well that
a king who is their lord should order his ways after them and bow to their
will in many matters; and if he do the contrary, so that evil come
thereof, bitterly then shall he rue it, as did this king Edward II." "And
men said then in London and throughout England 'we must reform and take a
new ordinance [with our king]; for that which we have had hath brought us
sore weariness and travail, and this kingdom of ours is not worth a straw
without a good head; whereas we have had one as bad as a man can find....
We have no use for a sluggish and heavy king who seeketh too much his own
ease and pleasure; we would rather slay half a hundred of such, one after
the other, than fail to get a king to our use and liking.'" "The King of
England must needs obey his people, and do all their will."[239]
We with our present liberties must not of course take these words of
Froissart's too literally; but they must have conveyed a very definite
and, on the whole, a very true impression to his French contemporaries;
for no language but that of hyperbole could adequately have described the
contrast between their polity and that of England. Moreover, it must be
remembered that Froissart wrote this with the Peasant's Revolt not far
behind him, and the deposition of Richard II. fresh in his mind. The truth
is that the feudal system was already slowly but surely breaking down in
England: our lower classes, with recognized constitutional rights on the
one hand, and on the other hand a rough military organization and
discipline of their own, were, in many ways, far more free in 1389 than
the French peasants of 1789. Chaucer and Froissart always felt at the
bottom of their hearts this coming of the People; it lends a breadth to
their thoughts and colour to their brush even when they paint the gorgeous
pageantry of overripe feudalism; labouring the more earnestly, perhaps, to
record these fleeting hues because of the night which must needs come
before the new day. And how vivid their pictures are! The prologue to the
"Book of the Duchess," the castle garden and the tournament in the
Knight's Tale, Troilus with his knights pacing the aisles of the temple to
gaze on the ladies at their prayers, or riding home under Criseyde's
balcony after the victorious fight: Froissart's stories of the Chaplet of
Pearls, the Court of Gaston de Foix, the Dance of the Wild Men, Queen
Isabella's entry into London--what an enchanted palace of tapestries and
stained glass we have here, and what a school of stately manners! But
time, which takes away so much, brings us still more in compensation; and
without treason to Chaucer or his age we may frankly admit that his
perfect knight is only younger brother to Colonel Newcome, and that
Froissart himself can show us no figure so deeply chivalrous as the
Lawrences or the Havelocks of our later Indian Wars.