While this was going on in the towns, the Berkeley papers give us similar evidence of conscription in the counties, though the documents are not here continuous. In 1332 the Sheriff of Gloucester was bidden to raise 100 men for service in Ireland; next year 500 for Scotland. Three years later the country was obliged to send 2500 to Scotland, besides the Gloucester city and Bristol contingents. Then comes the French war. In 1337 and 1338 Lord Berkeley spends most of his time mustering and arraying soldiers for France. In the latter year, and again in 1339, Edward commissions him to array and arm all the able men in the country, as others were doing throughout the kingdom; 563 were thus arrayed in the shire, and Smyth very plausibly conjectures that the small number is due to Lord Berkeley’s secret favour for his own county. In 1345, when Edward made the great effort which culminated at Crécy, the county and the town of Bristol had to raise and arm 622 men “to be conducted whither Lord Berkeley should direct.” And so on until 1347, when there is a significant addition of plenary powers to punish all refractory and rebellious persons, a riot having apparently broken out on account of these levies.[228] From this time forward the scattered notices never refer to levies for service abroad; but they are still frequent for home defence, and Smyth proudly records in three folio volumes the numbers of trained and disciplined men in his own time (James I.), with their “names and several statures,” in the single hundred of Berkeley. The national militia always remained the most valuable recruiting ground, and kept up that love of archery for which the English were famous down to Elizabeth’s days and beyond; yet, for purely foreign wars, Edward’s frequent drains broke the national patience before the end of his reign. The evidence from London points most plainly in this direction. In 1369 at last we find the tell-tale notice: “It was frequently easier for the City to furnish the King with money than with men. Hence we find it recorded that at the end of August of this year the citizens had agreed to raise a sum of £2000 for the king in lieu of furnishing him with a military contingent.” Already by this time the tide had turned against us in France; not that the few English troops failed to keep up their superiority in the field, but Du Guesclin played a waiting game and wore us steadily out. Castle after castle was surprised; isolated detachments were crushed one by one; reinforcements were difficult to raise; and before Edward’s death three seaports alone were left of all his French conquests. He had at one time wielded an army almost like Napoleon’s—a mass of professional soldiers raised from a nation in arms. But, like Napoleon, he had used it recklessly. Such material could not be supplied ad infinitum, and our victories began again only after a period of comparative rest, when France was crippled by the madness of her King and divided by internecine feuds.
Edward’s conscription, it will be seen, was somewhat old-fashioned compared with that of modern France and Germany. Men were enrolled for a campaign partly by bargain, partly by force; and, once enrolled, the wars generally made them into professional soldiers for life. No doubt Shakespeare’s caricature in the second part of King Henry IV. may help us a little here, so long as we make due allowance for his comic purpose and the rustiness of the institution in his time. For already in Chaucer’s lifetime there was a great change in our system of over-sea service. As the sources of conscription began to dry up, the King fell back more and more upon the expedient of hiring troops: he would get some great captain to contract himself by indenture to bring so many armed men at a given time, and the contractor in his turn entered into a number of sub-contracts with minor leaders to contribute to his contingent. Under this system a very large proportion of aliens came into our armies; but even then we kept the same organization and principles as in those earlier hosts which were really contingents of English militia.
An army thus drawn from a people accustomed to some real measure of self-government inevitably broke through many feudal traditions; and from a very early stage in the war we find important commands given to knights and squires who had fought their way up from the ranks. The most renowned of all these English soldiers of fortune, Sir John Hawkwood, married the sister of Clarence’s Violante, with a dowry of a million florins; yet he is recorded to have begun as a common archer. He was probably a younger son of a good Essex house; but this again simply emphasizes the democratic and business-like organization of the English army compared with its rivals. Du Guesclin, though he was the eldest son of one of the smaller French nobles, found his promotion terribly retarded by his lack of birth and influence. He was probably the most distinguished leader in France before he even received the honour of knighthood. At the date of the battle of Cocherel he had fought with success for more than twenty years, and was by far the most distinguished captain present; yet he owed the command on that day only to the rare good fortune that the greatest noble present recognized his own comparative incapacity, and that the rest agreed in offering to fight under a man of less social distinction but incomparably greater experience than any of themselves. In the English army there would from the first have been no doubt about the real commander—Hawkwood, perhaps, who was believed to have begun life as a tailor’s apprentice, or Knolles, whom this war had taken from the weaver’s loom.
Even the magnificent Edward, with all his Round Table and his Order of the Garter, was forced to recognize clearly that war is above all things a business. In the earlier days he did indeed defy Philippe de Valois to single combat; but during the campaign of Crécy he made light of the laws of chivalry. He had penetrated close to Paris; his army was melting away; provisions were scarce; and the French had broken the bridges in his rear. At this point Philip sent him a regular chivalric challenge in form to meet him with his army on a field and a day to be fixed at his own choice, within certain reasonable limits. Edward returned a misleading answer, made a corresponding feint with his troops, rapidly rebuilt the bridge of Poissy, and had crossed to a place of safety before Philip realized that a clever piece of strategy had been executed under his very nose and behind the forms of chivalry. Then only did Edward throw off the mask, and declare his intention of choosing his own place and time for battle. His Royal great-grandson was even more business-like. When the French nobles asked Henry V. to give a great tourney in honour of his marriage, as had always been the custom, he refused in the bluntest and most soldierly fashion. He and his men, he replied, would be engaged for the next few weeks at the siege of Sens; if any gallant Frenchman wished to break a lance or two, he might come and break them there. While this mimic warfare was at its highest favour in France, the three Edwards had always kept jealous control over it in England, and constantly forbidden tournaments without Royal licence. This policy is, no doubt, partly explained by some deference to ecclesiastical prohibitions, and partly by the disorders to which jousts constantly gave rise; but we may pretty safely infer (with Luce) that our kings had little belief in the direct value of the knightly tournament as a school of warfare, and that here, as on so many other points, the practical genius of the race broke even through class prejudices.[229]
It is impossible better to sum up the results of English business methods in warfare than in the words which are forced reluctantly from M. Luce’s impartial pen. “In my opinion, five or six thousand English archers, thus drilled and equipped, and supported by an equal number of knifemen, would always have beaten even considerably larger forces of the bravest chivalry in the world—at least in a frontal attack and as a matter of sheer hard fighting. Such, moreover, seems to have been the opinion of Bertrand du Guesclin, the most renowned captain of the Middle Ages, who never fought a great pitched battle against a real English army if he could possibly help it. At Cocherel his adversaries were mostly Gascons, and at Pontvallain he crushed Knolles’s rear-guard by one of those startling marches of which he had the secret; but he was beaten at Auray and Navarette.” Gower might complain without too poetical exaggeration that the vortex of war swept away not only the serf from his plough but the very priest from his altar; yet even Chaucer’s Poor Parson may well have conceded that, if we must have an army at all, we might as well have it as efficient and as truly national as possible.
BODIAM CASTLE, KENT
BUILT DURING CHAUCER’S LIFETIME BY SIR EDWARD DALYNGRUDGE,
WHO HAD FOUGHT AT CRÉCY AND POITIERS