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-Lô, 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.