A History of England, Period I. Mediæval Monarchy

by J. Franck Bright

But although the Papal See thus comes constantly forward as mediator in the quarrels of princes, and though cardinals were repeatedly charged with missions of peace in all directions, since the French had caused the overthrow of Boniface VIII. it had no longer its old influence or its old character. Seated at Avignon, the Pope was completely in the hands of the French King; while the rising spirit of freedom, the abuse of crusades which had been frequently employed against Christian princes, and the infinite exactions invented by the papal lawyers, had roused the temper of the people against him. The English Parliament, therefore, was doing a less difficult thing than the Parliament of Lincoln in Edward I.’s reign, when it insisted that the mediation specified in the treaty should be regarded only as that of a private man, without special authority or sanctity, and coupled even that modified acceptance of the offer with a strong protest against provisors. Having thus protested against the Pope, not without covert allusion to the King’s own connection with him, the people made grants, which were terribly wanted to save the King from his impoverished condition. The great Italian house of the Bardi was ruined by the great advances it made to him; the German merchants of the Steelyard, the only corporation of German merchants in London, had got a grant of much of the taxes; the subsidies, as we have seen, had been paid in raw wool, seized at the rate of £6 the sack, and sold at £20; the main point of Bishop Stratford’s defence had been that the enormous interest on the royal loans swallowed up at once all the money that was collected. But for the timely and liberal grants of the people the government must apparently have stopped. Meanwhile, the Pope was preparing his decision; but it was impossible to expect an honest verdict from him, and though, by the treaty, Philip should have restored his prisoners, he still kept De Montfort and others in prison.

War breaks out again. 1346.

Derby hard pressed in Guienne.

Edward to relieve him lands in Normandy.

Marches towards Calais.

It was plain that the war would soon be renewed. The Parliament in the year 1344 made their grants on the express understanding that this was the case, and that Scotland was waiting to join in the quarrel. In 1345 the expected event took place. The close connection between England and Artevelt has been mentioned. It was of the last importance to the Flemings that England should help them against their Count, and supply their looms with wool. Artevelt now offered to make the Prince of Wales Count of Flanders; and in all probability the attack upon France would have been in the old direction, had not a quarrel between the weavers and the fullers in the Flemish towns produced the murder of their great leader. It was in Gascony that the war actually broke out. Thither the Earl of Derby,[59] the son of Henry of Lancaster, had been sent, and he had there won a great victory over the French at Auberoche. He was soon, however, hard pressed by Philip’s eldest son, the Duke of Normandy, and driven to stand a siege in the fortress of Aiguillon, on the Garonne. Meanwhile, a great fleet and army had been collected, apparently for the purpose of relieving them. But while sailing down the Channel Edward suddenly changed his course, it is believed on the advice of Geoffrey of Harcourt, a French refugee, and landed at La Hogue in Normandy. His object was to draw the Duke of Normandy northward, and thus to relieve Derby, while he himself marched through France into Flanders, and joined his Flemish allies, who had already crossed the French frontiers. But in executing this manœuvre, Edward found all the bridges over the Seine broken, and the French King in force upon the other side, evidently desirous of hemming him in between his own army and that of his son advancing from the south. It was in vain that Edward pushed even to the suburbs of Paris, Philip would not be provoked to break his plan of the campaign. It became absolutely necessary for Edward to cross the river. A rapid feint upon Paris left the broken bridge of Poissy open. Edward hurried back, mended the bridge, and the river was passed.

The tables were now turned. It was the French King who wanted, Edward who avoided, battle. He pushed on, destroying the country as he went, till a fresh obstacle met him at the Somme. With Philip and his vastly superior army immediately in his rear, his position became critical. A peasant was induced to show him the ford of Blanchetaque, near Abbeville, where the river could be crossed. Even that ford was strongly defended, and only won after a sharp skirmish in the midst of the water. The returning tide checked the pursuit of the French, and enabled Edward, who had at length determined to bring matters to a decisive issue, to choose his ground in the neighbourhood of Cressy.[60] There was fought the first of that great series of battles, in which the small armies of the English showed themselves superior to overwhelming numbers of French.

Change in the character of the army.

The cause of this superiority lay partly in the skill of the English archers, but still more in the practised discipline of regular volunteer soldiers, when opposed to an army still formed upon the feudal model. The wars with the Scotch had taught the English a lesson they had not been slow to learn. Edward I. had been a soldier of the old school; the strength of his armies had always consisted in the heavy armed cavalry, in which man and horse had been laden with defensive armour to the utmost limits of their capacity; the infantry had been entirely a secondary consideration. But Wallace had proved at Cambuskenneth, and (even though defeated) at Falkirk, the power of resistance which resides in firmly arranged bodies of infantry. Bruce at Bannockburn had shown still more plainly the weakness of heavy cavalry upon ground not exactly suited for their particular form of fighting. Edward III.’s chief claim to greatness as a soldier rests on the readiness and skill with which he adopted the idea supplied him by Bruce and Wallace. The difficulties of keeping together a feudal array during a lengthened foreign campaign, the comparative cheapness of an equipment of foot-soldiers, the increasing number of freemen not employed upon the soil, were all likewise inducements to change the character of the army. The cavalry employed in the French wars was insignificant in comparison to the infantry. The midland counties supplied the army with archers, Wales with ordinary infantry. This change in the army, itself in part the fruit of social growth, reacted on society. Regular hired troops required trained commanders; and there thus grew up a class of professional soldiers, whose existence dealt a heavy blow to the hitherto unquestioned superiority of the feudal leaders.