[1] See for this, Rotulus Normannice in Cal. Patent Rolls, 1345-48, especially PP. 473-526. For the vast force gathered later, see Wrottesley and Morris, U.S.
The French made a great effort, both by sea and land, to relieve Calais. On June 25 Northampton went out with his ships as far as the mouth of the Somme, where off Le Crotoy he won a naval victory which made the English command of the sea absolutely secure. A month later Philip, at the head of the land army, looked down upon the lines of Calais from the heights of Guînes. The two cardinals made their usual efforts for a truce, but the English would not allow their prey to be snatched from them at the eleventh hour. Then Philip challenged the enemy to a pitched battle, and four knights on each side were appointed to select the place of combat. The French, however, were of no mind to risk another Crecy, and on the morning of July 31 the smoke of their burning camp told the English that once more Philip had shrunk from a meeting. Then at last the garrison opened its gates on August 3, 1347. The defenders were treated chivalrously by the victor, who admired their courage and endurance. But the mass of the population were removed from their homes, and numerous grants of houses and property made to Englishmen. Edward resolved to make his conquest an English town, and, from that time onwards, it became the fortress through which an English army might at any time be poured into France, and the warehouse from which the spinners and weavers of Flanders were to draw their supplies of raw wool. For more than two hundred years, English Calais retained all its military and most of its commercial importance. Later conquests enabled a ring of forts to be erected round it which strengthened its natural advantages.
Crecy, Neville's Cross, Aiguillon, and Calais did not exhaust the glories of this strenuous time. The war of the Breton succession, which Northampton had waged since 1345, was continued in 1346 by Thomas Dagworth, a knight appointed as his lieutenant on his withdrawal to join the army of Crecy and Calais. The Montfort star was still in the ascendant, and even the hereditary dominions of Joan of Penthièvre were assailed. An English garrison was established at La Roche Derien, situated some four miles higher up the river Jaudy than the little open episcopal city of Tréguier, and communicating by the river with the sea and with England. So troublesome did Montfort's garrison at La Roche become to the vassals of Penthièvre, that in the summer of 1347 Charles of Blois collected an army, wherein nearly all the greatest feudal houses of Brittany were strongly represented, and sat down before La Roche. Dagworth, one of the ablest of English soldiers, was at Carhaix, in the heart of the central uplands, when he heard of the danger of the single English post within the lands of Penthièvre. He at once hurried northwards, and on the night of June 19 rested at the abbey of Bégard, about ten miles to the south of La Roche. From Bégard two roads led to La Roche, one on each bank of the Jaudy. Thinking that Dagworth would pursue the shorter road on the left bank, Charles of Blois stationed a portion of his army at some distance from La Roche on that side of the Jaudy, while the rest remained with himself on the right bank before the walls of the town. Dagworth, however, chose the longer route, and before daybreak, on the morning of June 20, fell suddenly upon Charles. A fierce fight in the dark was ended after dawn in favour of Montfort by a timely sally of the beleaguered garrison. In the confusion Charles forgot to recall the division uselessly stationed beyond the Jaudy, and this error completed his ruin. Charles fought like a hero, and, after receiving seventeen wounds, yielded up his sword to a Breton lord rather than to the English commander. When his wounds were healed, Charles was sent to London, where he joined David of Scotland, the Count of Eu, and the Lord of Tancarville. It looked as if Montfort's triumph was secured.
In the midst of his successes Edward made a truce, yielding to the earnest request of the cardinals, "through his reverence to the apostolic see". The truce of Calais was signed on September 28, and included Scotland and Brittany as well as France within its scope. On October 12 Edward returned to his kingdom. Financial exhaustion, the need of repose, the unwillingness of his subjects to continue the combat, and the failure of the Flemish and Netherlandish alliances sufficiently explain this halt in the midst of victory. Yet from the military standpoint Edward's action, harmful everywhere to his partisans, was particularly fatal in Brittany, where most of Penthièvre and nearly all upper Brittany were still obedient to Charles of Blois.[1] But Edward had embarked upon a course infinitely beyond his material resources. When a special effort could only give him the one town of Calais, how could he ever conquer all France?
[1] See on this A. de la Borderie, Hist. de Brétagne, iii., 507, et seq.
CHAPTER XVII.
FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO THE TREATY OF CALAIS.
At the conclusion of the truce of Calais in 1347, Edward III and England were at the height of their military reputation. Perhaps the nation was in even a stronger position than the monarch. Edward had dissipated his resources in winning his successes, but the danger which faced the ruler had but slightly impaired the fortunes of his subjects. The country was in a sufficiently prosperous condition to bear its burdens without much real suffering. The widespread dislike of extraordinary taxation, which so often assumed the form of the familiar cry that the king must live of his own, had taken the shape of unwillingness to accept responsibility for the king's policy and a growing indisposition to meet his demands. But since the rule of Edward began, England enjoyed a prosperity so unbroken that far heavier burdens would hardly have brought about a diminution of the well-being which stood in glaring contrast to the desolation long inflicted by Edward's wars on France. A war waged exclusively on foreign soil did little harm to England, and offered careers whereby many an English adventurer was gaining a place among the landed classes. The simple archers and men-at-arms, who received high wages and good hopes of plunder in the king's foreign service, found in it a congenial and lucrative, if demoralising profession. In England, though wages were low, provisions were cheap and employment constant. The growth of the wool trade, then further stimulated by refugees from the "three towns of Flanders," against which Louis de Male was waging relentless war, was bringing comfort to many, and riches to a few. The maritime greatness of England that found its first results in the battle of Sluys was the fruit of a commercial activity on the sea which enabled English shipmen to deprive the Italians, Netherlanders, and Germans of the overwhelming share they had hitherto enjoyed of our foreign trade. The dark shadows of medieval life were indeed never absent from the picture; but medieval England seldom enjoyed greater wellbeing and tranquillity than during the first eighteen years of the personal rule of Edward III. One sign of the increasing attention paid to suppressing disorder was an act of 1344, which empowered the local conservators of the peace, already an element in the administrative machinery, to hear and determine felonies. A later act made this a part of their regular functions, and gave them the title of justices of the peace, thus setting up a means of maintaining local order so effective that the old machinery of the local courts gradually gave way to it.
A rude ending to this period of prosperity was brought about by the devastations of the pestilence known to modern readers as the Black Death, which since 1347 had decimated the Levant. This was the bubonic plague, almost as familiar in the east of to-day as in the mid-fourteenth century. It was brought along the chief commercial highways which bound the western world to the markets of the east. First introduced into the west at the great ports of the Mediterranean, Venice, Genoa, Marseilles, it spread over France and Italy by the early months of 1348. Avignon was a chief centre of the infection, and, amidst the desolation around him, Clement VI. strove with rare energy to give peace to a distracted world. The regions of western and northern France, which had felt the full force of the war, were among the worst sufferers. Aquitaine, too, was cruelly desolated, and among the victims was Edward III.'s daughter, Joan, who perished at Bordeaux on her way to Castile, as the bride of the prince afterwards infamous as Peter the Cruel. Early in August, 1348, the scourge crossed the channel, making its first appearance in England at Weymouth. Thence it spread northwards and westwards. Bristol was the first great English town to feel its ravages. Though the Gloucestershire men prohibited all intercourse between the infected port and their own villages, the plague was in no wise stayed by their precautions. The disease extended, by way of Gloucester and Oxford, to London, reaching the capital early in November, and continuing its ravages until the following Whitsuntide. When it had almost died out in London, it began, in the spring of 1349, to rage severely in East Anglia,[1] while in Lancashire the worst time seems to have been from the autumn of 1349 to the beginning of 1350.[2] Scotland was so long exempt that the Scots, proud of their immunity, were wont to swear "by the foul death of England". In 1350 they gathered together an army in Ettrick forest with the object of invading the plague-stricken border shires. But the pestilence fell upon the host assembled for the foray, and all war was stopped while Scotland was devastated from end to end. Ireland began to suffer in August, 1349, the disease being at first confined to the Englishry of the towns, though, after a time, it made its way also to the pure Irish.[3]