Another tacit assumption of the chivalric love-code comes out clearly in the Knight’s Tale, and even goes some way to explain the Franklin’s; though this latter evidently recounts an old Breton lay in which the perspective is as frankly fantastic as the landscape of a miniature. The honest commentator Benvenuto da Imola is at great pains to assure us that Dante’s amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona was not an exhaustive statement of actual fact; and that even the kindest ladies sometimes remained obdurate to the prayers of the most meritorious suitors. What is to happen, then? The hero may, of course, sometimes die; but not always; that would be too monotonous. The solution here, as in so many other cases, lies in a poetic paraphrase of too prosaic facts. The Duc de Berri, who was a great connoisseur and a man of the most refined tastes, bought at an immense sacrifice of money the most delicate little countess in the market: she, of course, had no choice at all in the matter. At an equal sacrifice of blood, first Arcite and then Palamon won the equally passive Emelye, who, when Theseus had set her up as a prize to the better fighter, could only pray that she might either avoid them both, or at least fall to him who loved her best in his inmost heart. At a cost of equal suffering, though in a different way, Aurelius won the unwilling Dorigen—for his subsequent generosity is beside the present purpose. The reader’s sympathy, in medieval romance, is nearly always enlisted for the pursuing man. If only he can show sufficient valour, or suffer long enough, he must have the prize, and the lady is sure to shake down comfortably enough sooner or later.[221] The idea is not, of course, peculiar to medieval poetry, but the frequency with which it there occurs supplies another answer to the main question of this chapter. Why, if medieval marriages were really so business-like, is medieval love-poetry so transcendental? It is not, in fact, by any means so transcendental as it seems on the surface; neither Palamon nor Arcite, at the bottom of all his extravagant protestations of humble worship, feels the least scruple in making Emelye the prize of a series of swashing blows at best, and possibly of a single lucky prod. The chance of Shakespeare’s caskets does at least give Portia to the man whom her heart had already chosen; but the similar chances and counter-chances of the Knight’s Tale simply play shuttlecock with a helpless and unwilling girl. Under the spell of Chaucer’s art, we know quite well that Palamon and Emelye lived very happily ever afterwards; but the Knight’s Tale gives us no reason to doubt the overwhelming evidence that, while heroes in poetry conquered their wives with their right arm, plain men in prose openly bargained for them.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE GREAT WAR

“Ce voyons bien, qu’au temps présent
La guerre si commune éprend,
Qu’a peine y a nul labourer
Lequel a son métier se prend:
Le prêtre laist le sacrement,[laisse
Et le vilain le charruer,
Tous vont aux armes travailler.
Si Dieu ne pense à l’amender,
L’on peut douter prochainement
Que tout le mond doit reverser.”
Gower, “Mirour,” 24097

Of all the causes that tended in Chaucer’s time to modify the old ideals of knighthood, none perhaps was more potent than the Hundred Years’ War. Unjust as it was on both sides—for the cause of Philippe de Valois cannot be separated from certain inexcusable manœuvres of his predecessors on the French throne—it was the first thoroughly national war on so large a scale since the institution of chivalry. No longer merely feudal levies, but a whole people on either side is gradually involved in this struggle; and its military lessons anticipate, to a certain extent, those of the French Revolutionary Wars. Even in Froissart’s narrative, the greatest heroes of Crécy are the English archers; and the Welsh knifemen by their side play a part undreamed of in earlier feudal warfare. “When the Genoese were assembled together and began to approach, they made a great cry to abash the Englishmen, but they stood still and stirred not for all that; then the Genoese again the second time made another fell cry, and stept forward a little, and the Englishmen removed not one foot; thirdly, again they cried, and went forth till they came within shot; then they shot fiercely with their cross-bows. Then the English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so wholly together and so thick, that it seemed snow.... And ever still the Englishmen shot whereas they saw thickest press; the sharp arrows ran into the men of arms and into their horses, and many fell, horse and men.... And also among the Englishmen there were certain rascals that went afoot with great knives, and they went in among the men of arms, and slew and murdered many as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights and squires, whereof the king of England was after displeased, for he had rather they had been taken prisoners.”

Those “certain rascals” did not only kill certain knights, they killed also the old idea of Knighthood. From that time forward the art of war, which had so long been practised under the frequent restraint of certain aristocratic conventions, took a great leap in the direction of modern business methods. The people were concerned now; and they had grown, as they are apt to grow, inconveniently in earnest. There is a peculiarly living interest for modern England in the story of that army which at Crécy won the first of a series of victories astounding to all Christendom. Only a few months after Chaucer’s unlucky campaign in France, Petrarch had travelled across to Paris, and recorded his impressions in a letter. “The English ... have overthrown the ancient glories of France by victories so numerous and unexpected that this people, which formerly was inferior to the miserable Scots, has now (not to speak of that lamentable and undeserved fall of a great king which I cannot recall without a sigh) so wasted with fire and sword the whole kingdom of France that I, when I last crossed the country on business, could scarce believe it to be the same land which I had seen before.”[222] The events which so startled Petrarch were indeed immediately attributable to the business qualities and the ambitions of two English kings; but their ultimate cause lay far deeper. During all the first stages of the war, in which the English superiority was most marked, the conflict was practically between the French feudal forces and the English national levies. While French kings ignored the duty of every man to serve in defence of his own home, or remembered it only as an excuse for extorting money instead of personal service, Edward III. brought the vast latent forces of his whole kingdom, and (what was perhaps even more important) its full business energies, to bear against a chivalry which at its best had been unpractical in its exclusiveness, and was now already decaying. “Edward I. and III. ... (and this makes their reigns a decisive epoch in the history of the Middle Ages, as well as in that of England) were the real creators of modern infantry. We must not, however, ascribe the honour of this creation only to the military genius of the two English Kings; they were driven to it by necessity, the mother of invention. The device which they used is essentially the same which has been employed in every age by countries of small extent and therefore of scanty population, viz. compulsory military service. Although the name of conscription is obviously modern, the thing itself is of ancient use among the very people who know least of it nowadays; and it may be proved conclusively that Edward III., especially, practised it on a great scale. The documentary evidence for this fact is so plentiful that to draw up the briefest summary of it would be to write a whole chapter—neither the least interesting nor the least novel, be it said—of English history; and that is no part of my plan here.” So wrote Siméon Luce, the greatest French specialist on the period, thirty years ago; but the point which he here makes so clearly has hardly yet been fully grasped by English writers.[223] It may therefore be worth while to bring forward here some specimens of the mass of evidence to which Luce alludes. Compulsory service is, of course, prehistoric and universal; few nations could have survived in the past unless all their citizens had been ready to fight for them in case of need; and the decadence of imperial Rome began with the time when her populace demanded to be fed at the public expense, and defended by hired troops. In principle, therefore, even 14th-century France recognized the liability of every citizen to serve, while England had not only the principle but the practice. Her old Fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia system, was reorganized by Henry II. and again by Edward I. By the latter’s “Statute of Winchester” every able-bodied man was bound not only to possess arms on a scale proportionate to his wealth, but also to learn their use. A fresh impulse was given to this military training by Edward I., who learned from his Welsh enemies that the longbow, already a well-known weapon among his own subjects, was far superior in battle to the crossbow. Edward, therefore, gradually set about training a large force of English archers. Falkirk (1298) was the first important battle in which the archery was used in scientific combination with cavalry; Bannockburn (1314) was the last in which the English repeated the old blunder of relying on mounted knights and men-at-arms, and allowing the infantry to act as a more or less disordered mass. While Philippe de Valois was raising money by the suicidal expedients of taxing bowstrings and ordaining general levies from which every one was expected to redeem himself by a money fine, Edward III. was giving the strictest orders that archery should take precedence of all other sports in England, and that the country should furnish him all the men he needed for his wars.[224] Of all the documents to which Luce refers (and which are even more numerous than he could have guessed thirty years ago) let us here glance at two or three which bring the whole system visibly before us. In this matter, as in several others, the clearest evidence is to be found among Mr. Hudson’s invaluable gleanings from the Norwich archives.[225] He has printed and analyzed a number of documents which show the working of the militia system in the city between 1355 and 1370—that is, at a time when it is generally asserted that we were conducting the French wars on the voluntary system. In these documents we find that the Statute of Winchester was being worked quite as strictly as we are entitled to expect of any medieval statute, and a great deal more strictly than the average. The city did in fact provide, and periodically review, an armed force equal in numbers to rather more than one-tenth of its total population—a somewhat larger proportion, that is, than would be furnished by the modern system of conscription on the Continent. Many of these men, of course, turned out with no more than the minimum club and knife; the next step was to add a sword or an axe to these primitive weapons, and so on through the archers to the numerous “half-armed men,” who had in addition to their offensive weapons a plated doublet with visor and iron gauntlets, and finally the “fully-armed,” who had in addition a shirt of mail under the doublet, a neck-piece and arm-plates, and whose total equipment must have cost some £30 or £40 of modern money. Mr. Hudson also notes that “it is plain that the Norwich archers were many of them men of good standing.”

Moreover, this small amount of compulsion was found in medieval England, as in modern Switzerland, to stimulate rather than to repress the volunteer energies of the nation. Not only did shooting become the favourite national sport, but many of whom we might least have expected such self-sacrifice came forward gladly to fight side by side with their fellow-citizens for hearth and home. In 1346, when the Scots invaded England under the misapprehension that none remained to defend the country but “ploughmen and shepherds and feeble or broken-down chaplains,” they found among the powerful militia force which met them many parsons who were neither feeble nor infirm. Crowds of priests were among those who trooped out from Beverley and York, and other northern towns, to a victory of which Englishmen have more real reason to be proud than of any other in our early history. Marching with sword and quiver on their thigh and the good six-foot bow under their arm, they took off shoes and stockings at the town gates and started barefoot, with chants and litanies, upon that righteous campaign. In 1360, again, when there was a scare of invasion and all men from sixteen to sixty were called out, then “bishops, abbots, and priors, rectors, vicars, and chaplains were as ready as the abbots [sic] had been, some to be men-at-arms and some to be archers ... and the beneficed clergy who could not serve in person hired substitutes.” In 1383 priests and monks were fighting even among the so-called crusaders whom Bishop Despenser led against the French in Flanders.[226]

To have so large a proportion of the nation thus trained for home defence was in itself a most important military asset, for it freed the hands of the army which was on foreign service, and enabled it to act without misgivings as to what might be happening at home. This was in fact the militia which, while Edward III. was with his great army at Crécy and Calais, inflicted on the Scottish invaders at Neville’s Cross one of the most crushing defeats in their history, and added one more crowned head to the collection of noble prisoners in London.[227] But, more than this, it formed a recruiting-field which alone enabled English armies, far from their base, to hold their own against the forces of a country which at that time had an enormous numerical superiority in population. It had always been doubtful how far the militia was bound to serve abroad. Edward III. himself had twice been forced to grant immunity by statute (first and twenty-fifth years), but with the all-important saving clause “except under great urgency.” Such great urgency was in fact constantly pleaded, and the cities did not care to contest the point. Several calls were made on Norwich for 120 men at a time, a proportion which, in figures of modern town population, would be roughly equivalent to 1200 from Northampton, 8000 from Birmingham, and 10,000 from Glasgow. In the year before Crécy the less populous town of Lynn was assessed at 100 men “of the strongest and most vigorous of the said town, each armed with breastplate, helmet, and gauntlets ... for the defence and rescue of Our duchy of Aquitaine.” The drain on London at the same time was enormous, as I have already had occasion to note in Chapter X. The briefest summary of the evidence contained in Dr. Sharpe’s Letter-Books will suffice here. On the outbreak of war in 1337, in addition to a considerable tribute of ships, the city was called upon for a contingent of 500 men—which would be equivalent to the enormous tribute of 50,000 soldiers from modern London. Presently “the king ... took occasion to find fault with the city’s dilatoriness in carrying out his orders, and complained of the want of physique in the men that were being supplied. At the request of John de Pulteneye, who was then occupying the Mayoral chair for the fourth time, he consented to accept 200 able-bodied archers at once, and to postpone the selection of the remainder of the force. At the same time he issued letters patent declaring that the aid furnished by the city should not become a precedent. The names of the 200 archers that went to Gascony are set out in the Letter-Book....” But Royal promises are unstable. Another contingent of 100 was sent soon after. In 1338 London was ordered to fit out four ships with 300 men to join the home defence fleet at Winchelsea; the citizens protested so strongly that this was reduced by a half. In 1340 the King seized all ships of forty tons’ burden and raised 300 more soldiers from London, who took part in the glorious victory of Sluys. In 1342 another levy; in 1344, 400 archers again; in 1346 “the sheriffs of London were called upon to make proclamation for all persons between the ages of sixteen and sixty to take up arms and to be at Portsmouth by March 26th”—a command which, however interpreted with the usual elasticity, must yet have produced several hundred recruits for the army which fought at Crécy. Next year two ships were demanded with 180 armed men, and two more again later in the year. In 1350 two London ships with 170 armed men were raised for the battle of Les Espagnols sur Mer. In 1355, again, 520 soldiers were demanded from the city.