CHAPTER XVI.
THE EARLY CAMPAIGNS OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR.
In the late summer of 1339 Edward III. was at last able to take the offensive against France. During the negotiations England strained every effort to provide her absent sovereign with men and money, but neither the troops nor the supplies were adequate. The army which assembled in September in the neighbourhood of Brussels consisted largely of imperial vassals, hired by the English King, and clamorous for the regular payment of their wages. Already Edward told his ministers that, had not "a good friend in Flanders" advanced him a large sum, he would have been obliged to return with shame to England. As it was, enough was raised to set the unwieldy host in motion, and on September 20 he marched from Valenciennes, and thence advanced into the bishopric of Cambrai, whose lord, though an imperial vassal, had declared for France and the papacy.
The rolling uplands of the Cambrésis were devastated with fire and sword. One night an English baron took the Cardinal Bertrand, who with his comrade Peter still accompanied Edward's host, to the summit of a high tower, whence they could witness the flaming homesteads and villages of the fertile and populous district. In that woeful spectacle the churchman saw the futility of his last two years of constant labour, and fell in a swoon to the ground. But the confederates could do little more than devastate the open country. Cambrai itself was besieged to no purpose, and Edward pressed on to the invasion of France. On October g he spent his first night on French soil at the abbey of Mont Saint-Martin. He learnt how slender was the tie which bound his foreign allies to him, for his brother-in-law, William of Hainault, refused to serve, except on imperial soil, against his uncle Philip VI. Consoled for this defection by the arrival of the sluggish Duke of Brabant and of the Elector of Brandenburg, the eldest son of the emperor, Edward marched through the Vermandois, the Soissonais, and the Laonnais, burning and devastating, without meeting any serious resistance. Philip of Valois timidly held aloof in the neighbourhood of Péronne.
By the middle of October, when Edward was near St. Quentin on the Oise, the Duke of Brabant suggested the expediency of seeking out winter quarters. The slow-moving host was almost in mutiny, when the master crossbowman of the King of France brought a challenge from his lord. "Let the King of England," ran the message, "seek out a field favourable for a pitched battle, where there is neither wood, nor marsh, nor river." Edward cheerfully accepted a day for the combat, and chose his ground higher up the Oise valley, among the green meadowlands and hedgerows of the Thiérache. The appointed day passed by, and the French came not. At last, when Edward almost despaired of a meeting, he was told that the French were arrayed at Buironfosse, on the plateau between the Oise and the upper Sambre, and that Philip was ready to fight the next day, Saturday, October 23. Edward once more chose a suitable field of action in a plain between La Flamangrie and Buironfosse, a league and a half from the French. "On the Saturday," wrote Edward to his son in England, "we were in the field, a full quarter of an hour before dawn, and took up our position in a fitting place to fight. In the early morning some of the enemy's scouts were taken, and they told us that his advanced guard was in battle array and coming out towards us. The news having come to our host, our allies, though they had hitherto borne themselves somewhat sluggishly, were in truth of such loyal intent that never were folk of such goodwill to fight. In the meantime one of our scouts, a knight of Germany, was taken, and he showed all our array to the enemy. Thereupon the foe withdrew his van, gave orders to encamp, made trenches around him, and cut down large trees in order to prevent us from approaching him. We tarried all day on foot in order of battle, until towards evening it seemed to our allies that we had waited long enough. And at vespers we mounted our horses and went near to Avesnes, and made him to know that we would await him there all the Sunday. On the Monday morning we had news that the lord Philip had withdrawn. And so would our allies no longer afterwards abide."
Thus ended the inglorious campaign of the Thiérache. Edward returned to Brussels "like a fox to his hole," and each side denounced the other for failing to keep the appointed tryst. The chivalry of the fourteenth century saw something ignoble in the sluggishness of Philip; but no modern soldier would blame him for his inactivity. Without striking a blow, he obtained the object of his campaign, for the enemy abandoned French territory. Had Edward been fully confident of victory, he could easily have forced a battle by advancing on Buironfosse; but he preferred to run the risk of a fiasco rather than abandon the defensive tactics on which he relied. Thus, even from the chivalrous point of view, he was by no means blameless. From the material standpoint, his first French campaign was a failure. It left its only mark on the devastated countryside, the beggared peasantry, the desolated churches and monasteries, the farmsteads and villages burnt to ashes.
Edward seemed ruined both in reputation and purse. He had exhausted his resources in meeting the extravagant demands of his allies, and their help had profited him nothing at all. Yet his inexhaustible energy opened up a surer means of foreign assistance than had been supplied by the unruly vassals of Louis of Bavaria. At the moment when the imperial alliance was tried and found wanting, the way was opened up for close friendship between Edward and the Flemish cities. In earlier years the chivalrous devotion of Louis of Nevers to his overlord had secured the political dependence of Flanders upon the King of France. If the action of their count made the Flemings the tools of French policy, their commercial necessities bound them to England by chains forged by nature itself. Alone of the lands of northern and western Europe, Flanders was not a self-sufficing economic community.[1] Its great ports and weaving towns depended for their customers on foreign markets, and the raw material of their staple manufacture was mainly derived from England. When in 1337 Edward prohibited the export of wool to Flanders, his action at once brought about the same result that the cessation of the supplies of American cotton would cause in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire. A wool famine, like the Lancashire cotton famine of 1862-65, plunged Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges into grievous distress. The starving weavers wandered through the farms begging their bread, and, when charity at home proved inadequate, they exposed their rags and their misery in the chief cities of northern France. Even wealthy merchants felt the pinch of the crisis which ruined the small craftsmen.
[1] See for this Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, vols. i. and ii., and Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, iii., 304-324, and iv., 134-142.
A common desire to avoid calamity bound together the warring classes and rival districts of Flanders, as they had never been united before. Bruges and Ypres had borne the brunt of earlier struggles, and had not even yet recovered from the exhaustion of the wars of the early years of the century. Their exhaustion left the way open to Ghent, where the old patricians and the rich merchants, the weavers and the fullers, forgot their ancient rivalries and worked together to remedy the crisis. A wealthy landholder and merchant-prince of Ghent, James van Artevelde, made himself the spokesman of all classes of that great manufacturing city. He was no demagogue nor artisan, though his eloquence and force had wonderful power over the impressionable craftsmen of the trading guilds. He was no Netherlandish patriot, as some moderns have imagined, though he was anxious to unite Flanders with her neighbour states, on the broad basis of their identity of economic and political interests. A man of Ghent, above all things, his policy was to save the imperilled industries of his native town, and to make it the centre of a new movement for the vindication of commercial liberty against feudal domination. By the winter of 1337 this rich capitalist allied himself with the turbulent democracy of the weavers' guilds, and put himself at the head of affairs. Early in 1338 he began to negotiate with Edward III., and his loans to the distressed monarch had the result of removing the embargo on English wool. The famished craftsmen hailed the enemy of their class as a god who had come down from heaven for their salvation.
Louis of Nevers and Philip of Valois took the alarm. Seeing in the ascendency of Artevelde the certainty that Flanders would join the English alliance, they left no stone unturned to avoid so dire a calamity. Artevelde, conscious of the narrow basis of his own authority, was prudent enough to be moderate. Instead of pressing the English alliance to a conclusion, he accepted the suggestion of Philip VI., that Flanders should remain neutral. Louis of Nevers hated the notion; but in June, 1338, Edward and Philip agreed to recognise Flemish neutrality, and he was forced to acquiesce in it. Both monarchs promised to avoid Flemish territory, and offered free commercial relations between Flanders and their respective dominions.