Chapter IV: The Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) (1)

Causes of the Hundred Years' War.

Wars between England and France had been many, since William the Conqueror first linked their fortunes together by adding his English kingdom to his Norman duchy. They were bound to recur as long as the kings who ruled on this side of the Channel were possessed of continental dominions, which lay as near, or nearer, to their hearts than their insular realm. While the kingdom of France was weak, monarchs like Henry II. and Richard I. might dream of extending their transmarine possessions to the detriment of their suzerain at Paris. When France had grown strong, under Philip Augustus, the house of Plantagenet still retained a broad territory in Gascony and Guienne, and the house of Capet could not but covet the possession of the largest surviving feudal appanage which marred the solidarity of their kingdom. There had been a long interval of peace in the 13th century, because Henry III. of England was weak, and Louis IX. of France an idealist, much more set on forwarding the welfare of Christendom than the expansion of France. But the inevitable struggle had recommenced with the accession of the unscrupulous Philip IV. Its cause was simple; France was incomplete as long as the English king ruled at Bordeaux and Bayonne, and far up the valleys of the Garonne and the Adour. From 1293 onward Philip and his sons had been striving to make an end of the power of the Plantagenets in Aquitaine, sometimes by the simple argument of war, more frequently by the insidious process of encroaching on ducal rights, summoning litigants to Paris, and encouraging local magnates and cities alike to play off their allegiance to their suzerain against that to their immediate lord. Both in the time of Edward II. and in that of his son active violence had several times been called in to aid legal chicanery. Fortunately for the duke of Guienne the majority of his subjects had no desire to become Frenchmen; the Gascons felt no national sympathy with their neighbours of the north, and the towns in especial were linked to England by close ties of commerce, and had no wish whatever to break off their allegiance to the house of Plantagenet. The English rule, if often weak, had never proved tyrannical, and they had a great dread of French taxes and French officialism. But there were always individuals, more numerous among the noblesse than among the citizens, whose private interests impelled them to seek the aid of France.

The root of the Hundred Years' War, now just about to commence, must be sought in the affairs of Guienne, and not in any of the other causes which complicated and obscured the outbreak of hostilities. These, however, were sufficiently important in themselves. The most obvious was the aid which Philip VI. had given to the exiled David Bruce, when he was driven out of Scotland by Edward and his ally Baliol. The English king replied by welcoming and harbouring Robert of Artois, a cousin whom Philip VI. had expelled from France. He also made alliances with several of the dukes and counts of the Netherlands, and with the emperor Louis the Bavarian, obviously with the intention of raising trouble for France on her northern and eastern frontiers.

Beginning of the war.

It was Philip, however, who actually began the war, by declaring Guienne and the other continental dominions of Edward III. forfeited to the French crown, and sending out a fleet which ravaged the south coast of England in 1337. In return Edward raised a claim to the throne of France, not that he had any serious intention of pressing it--for throughout his reign he always showed himself ready to barter it away in return for sufficient territorial gains--but because such a claim was in several ways a useful asset to him both in war and in diplomacy. It was first turned to account when the Flemings, who had scruples about opposing their liege lord the king of France, found it convenient to discover that, since Edward was the real king and not Philip, their allegiance was due in the same direction whither their commercial interests drew them. Led by the great demagogue dictator, Jacob van Artevelde, they became the mainstay of the English party in the Netherlands.

Edward III. and the French crown.

Edward's claim--such as it was--rested on the assertion that his mother, Isabella, was nearer of kin to her brother Charles IV., the last king of the main line of the house of Capet, than was Charles's cousin Philip of Valois. The French lawyers ruled that heiresses could not succeed to the crown themselves, but Edward pleaded that they could nevertheless transmit their right to their sons. He found it convenient to forget that the elder brother of Charles IV., King Louis X., had left a daughter, whose son, the king of Navarre, had on this theory a title preferable to his own. This prince, he said, had not been born at the time of his grandfather's death, and so lost any rights that might have passed to him had he been alive at that time. A far more fatal bar to Edward's claim than the existence of Charles of Navarre was the fact that the peers of France, when summoned to decide the succession question nine years before, had decided that Philip of Valois had the sole valid claim to the crown, and that Edward had then done homage to him for Guienne. If he pleaded that in 1328 he had been the mere tool of his mother and Mortimer, he could be reminded of the unfortunate fact that in 1331, after he had crushed Mortimer, and taken the power into his own hands, he had deliberately renewed his oath to King Philip.

Edward's claim to the French crown embittered the strife in a most unnecessary fashion. It was an appeal to every discontented French vassal to become a traitor under a plausible show of loyalty, and from first to last many such persons utilized it. It also gave Edward an excuse for treating every loyal Frenchman as guilty of treason, and, to his shame, he did not always refrain from employing such a discreditable device. Yet, as has been already said, he showed his consciousness of the fallacy of his claim by offering to barter it again and again during the course of the war for land or money. But he finally passed on the wretched fiction as a heritage of his descendants, to cause untold woes in the 15th century. It is seldom in the world's history that a hollow legal device such as this has had such long enduring and deplorable results.

Battle of Sluys.

In the commencement of his continental war Edward took little profit either from his assumption of the French royal title, or from the lengthy list of princes of the Low Countries whom he enrolled beneath his banner. His two land-campaigns of 1339 and 1340 led to no victories or conquests, but cost enormous sums of money. The Netherland allies brought large contingents and took high pay from the king, but they showed neither energy nor enthusiasm in his cause. When Philip of Valois refused battle in the open, and confined his operations to defending fortified towns, or stockading himself in entranched camps, the allies drifted off, leaving the king with his English troops in force too small to accomplish anything. The sole achievement of the early years of the war which was of any profit to Edward or his realm was the great naval triumph of Sluys (June 24, 1340), which gave the English the command of the sea for the next twenty years. The French king had built or hired an enormous fleet, and with it threatened to invade England. Seeing that he could do nothing on land while his communications with the Low Countries were endangered by the existence of this armada, Edward levied every ship that was to be found, and brought the enemy to action in the Flemish harbour of Sluys. After a day of desperate hand to hand fighting--for the vessels grappled and the whole matter was settled by boarding--the French fleet was annihilated. Henceforth England was safe from coast raids, could conduct her commerce with Flanders without danger, and could strike without difficulty at any point of the French littoral. But it was not for some years that Edward utilized the advantage that Sluys had given him. As long as he persevered in the attempt to conduct the invasion of the northern frontier of France he achieved nothing.

Financial crisis. Trial of Archbishop Stratford.

Such schemes were finally abandoned simply because the king discovered that his allies were worthless and that his money was all spent. On his return from Flanders in 1340 he became involved in an angry controversy with his ministers, whom he accused, quite unjustly, of wasting his revenue and wrecking his campaign thereby. He imprisoned some of them, and wished to try his late chancellor, Archbishop Stratford, for embezzlement, in the court of the exchequer. But the primate contended very vigorously for the right to be tried before his peers, and since the king could get no subsidies from his parliament till he acknowledged the justice of this claim, he was forced to concede it. Stratford was acquitted--the king's thriftlessness and not the chancellor's maladministration had emptied the treasury. Edward drifted on along the path to financial ruin till he actually went bankrupt in 1345, when he repudiated his debts, and ruined several great Italian banking houses, who had been unwise enough to continue lending him money to the last. The Flemings were also hard hit by this collapse of the king's credit, and very naturally lost their enthusiasm for the English alliance. Van Artevelde, its chief advocate, was murdered by his own townsmen in this same year.

War in Brittany.

The second act of the Hundred Years' War, after King Edward had abandoned in despair his idea of invading France from the side of the Netherlands, was fought out in another quarter--the duchy of Brittany. Here a war of succession had broken out in which (oddly enough) Edward took up the cause of the pretender who had male descent, while Philip supported the one who represented a female line--each thus backing the theory of heritage by which his rival claimed the throne of France. By espousing the cause of John of Montfort Edward obtained a good foothold on the flank of France, for many of the Breton fortresses were put into his hands. But he failed to win any decisive advantage thereby over King Philip. It was not till 1346, when he adopted the new policy of trusting nothing to allies, and striking at the heart of France with a purely English army, that Edward found the fortune of war turning in his favour.

Edward invades France.

Battle of Crecy.

Capture of Calais.

In this year he landed in Normandy, where the English banner had not been seen since the days of King John, and executed a destructive raid through the duchy, and up the Seine, till he almost reached the gates of Paris. This brought out the king of France against him, with a mighty host, before which Edward retreated northward, apparently intending to retire to Flanders. But after crossing the Somme he halted at Crecy, near Abbeville, and offered battle to the pursuing enemy. He fought relying on the tactics which had been tried against the Scots at Dupplin and Halidon Hill, drawing up his army with masses of dismounted men-at-arms flanked on either side by archery. This array proved as effective against the disorderly charges of the French noblesse as it had been against the heavy columns of the Scottish pikemen. Fourteen times the squadrons of King Philip came back to the charge; but mowed down by the arrow-shower, they seldom could get to handstrokes with the English knights, and at last rode off the field in disorder. This astonishing victory over fourfold numbers was no mere chivalrous feat of arms, it had the solid result of giving the victors a foothold in northern France. For Edward took his army to beleaguer Calais, and after blockading it for nearly a year forced it to surrender. King Philip, after his experience at Crecy, refused to fight again in order to raise the siege. From henceforth the English possessed a secure landing-place in northern France, at the most convenient point possible, immediately opposite Dover. They held it for over two hundred years, to their own inestimable advantage in every recurring war.

Battle of Neville's Cross.

The years 1345-1347 saw the zenith of King Edward's prosperity; in them fell not only his own triumphs at Crecy and Calais, but a victory at Auberoche in Perigord won by his cousin Henry of Lancaster, which restored many long-lost regions of Guienne to the English suzerainty (Oct. 21, 1345), and another and more famous battle in the far north. At Neville's Cross, near Durham, the lords of the Border defeated and captured David Bruce, king of Scotland (Oct. 17, 1346). The loss of their king and the destruction of a fine army took the heart out of the resistance of the Scots, who for many years to come could give their French allies little assistance.

Truce with France. The Black Death.

In 1347 Edward made a short truce with King Philip: even after his late victories he felt his strength much strained, his treasury being empty, and his army exhausted by the year-long siege of Calais. But he would have returned to the struggle without delay had it not been for the dreadful calamity of the "Black Death," which fell upon France and England, as upon all Europe, in the years 1348-1349. The disease, on which the 14th century bestowed this name, was the bubonic plague, still familiar in the East. After devastating western Asia, it reached the Mediterranean ports of Europe in 1347, and spread across the continent in a few months. It was said that in France, Italy and England a third of the population perished, and though this estimate may be somewhat exaggerated, local records of unimpeachable accuracy show that it cannot be very far from the truth. The bishop's registers of the diocese of Norwich show that many parishes had three and some four successive vicars admitted in eighteen months. In the manor rolls it is not uncommon to find whole families swept away, so that no heir can be detected to their holdings. Among the monastic orders, whose crowded common life seems to have been particularly favourable to the spread of the plague, there were cases where a whole community, from the abbot down to the novices, perished. The upper classes are said to have suffered less than the poor; but the king's daughter Joan and two archbishops of Canterbury were among the victims. The long continuance of the visitation, which as a rule took six or nine months to work out its virulence in any particular spot, seems to have cowed and demoralized society. Though it first spread from the ports of Bristol and Weymouth in the summer of 1348, it had not finished its destruction in northern England till 1350, and only spread into Scotland in the summer of that year.

Economic and social effects of the Black Death.

When the worst of the plague was over, and panic had died down, it was found that the social conditions of England had been considerably affected by the visitation. The condition of the realm had been stable and prosperous during the earlier years of Edward III., the drain on its resources caused by heavy war-taxation having been more than compensated by the increased wealth that arose from growing commerce and developing industries. The victory of Sluys, which gave England the command of the seas, had been a great landmark in the economic no less than in the naval history of this island. But the basis of society was shaken by the Black Death; the kingdom was still essentially an agricultural community, worked on the manorial system; and the sudden disappearance of a third of the labouring hands by which that system had been maintained threw everything into disorder. The landowners found thousands of the crofts on which their villeins had been wont to dwell vacant, and could not fill them with new tenants. Even if they exacted the full rigour of service from the survivors, they could not get their broad demesne lands properly tilled. The landless labourers, who might have been hired to supply the deficiency, were so reduced in numbers that they could command, if free competition prevailed, double and triple rates of payment, compared with their earnings in the days before the plague. Hence there arose, almost at once, a bitter strife between the lords of manors and the labouring class, both landholding and landless. The lords wished to exact all possible services from the former, and to pay only the old two or three pence a day to the latter. The villeins, as hard hit as their masters, resented the tightening of old duties, which in some cases had already been commuted for small money rents during the prosperous years preceding the plague. The landless men formed combinations, disputed with the landlords, and asked and often got twice as much as the old rates, despite of the murmurings of the employer.

The Statute of Labourers.

After a short experience of these difficulties the king and council, whose sympathies were naturally with the landholders, issued an ordinance forbidding workmen of any kind to demand more than they had been wont to receive before 1348. This was followed up by the famous Statute of Labourers of 1351, which fixed rates for all wages practically identical with those of the times before the Black Death. Those workmen who refused to accept them were to be imprisoned, while employers who went behind the backs of their fellows and secretly paid higher sums were to be punished by heavy fines. Later additions to the statute were devised to terrorize the labourer, by adding stripes and branding to his punishment, if he still remained recalcitrant or absconded. And landowners were empowered to seize all vagrant able-bodied men, and to compel them to work at the statutory wages. As some compensation for the low pay of the workmen, parliament tried to bring down the price of commodities to their former level, for (like labour) all manufactured articles had gone up immensely in value.

Thirty years of friction followed, while the parliament and the ruling classes tried in a spasmodic way to enforce the statute, and the peasantry strove to evade it. It proved impossible to carry out the scheme; the labourers were too many and too cunning to be crushed. If driven over hard they absconded to the towns, where hands were needed as much as in the countryside, or migrated to districts where the statute was laxly administered. Gradually the landowners discovered that the only practical way out of their difficulties was to give up the old custom of working the manorial demesne by the forced labour of their villeins, and to cut it up into farms which were rented out to free tenants, and cultivated by them. In the course of two generations the "farmers" who paid rent for these holdings became more and more numerous, and demesne land tilled by villein-service grew more and more rare. But enough old-fashioned landlords remained to keep up the struggle with the peasants to the end of the 14th century and beyond, and the number of times that the Statute of Labourers was re-enacted and recast was enormous. Nevertheless the struggle turned gradually to the advantage of the labourer, and ended in the creation of the sturdy and prosperous farming yeomanry who were the strength of the realm for several centuries to come.

Renewal of the war with France.

Battle of Poitiers.

One immediate consequence of the "Black Death" was the renewal of the truce between England and France by repeated agreements which lasted from 1347 to 1355. During this interval Philip of France died, in 1350, and was succeeded by his son John. The war did not entirely cease, but became local and spasmodic. In Brittany the factions which supported the two claimants to the ducal title were so embittered that they never laid down their arms. In 1351 the French noblesse of Picardy, apparently without their master's knowledge or consent, made an attempt to surprise Calais, which was beaten off with some difficulty by King Edward in person. There was also constant bickering on the borders of Guienne. But the main forces on both sides were not brought into action till the series of truces ran out in 1355. From that time onward the English took the offensive with great vigour. Edward, prince of Wales, ravaged Languedoc as far as the Mediterranean, while his younger brother John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, executed a less ambitious raid in Picardy and Artois. In the south this campaign marked real progress, not mere objectless plunder, for it was followed by the reconquest of great districts in Perigord and the Agenais, which had been lost to England since the 13th century. A similar double invasion of France led to even greater results in the following year, 1356. While Lancaster landed in Normandy, and with the aid of local rebels occupied the greater part of the peninsula of the Cotentin, the prince of Wales accomplished greater things on the borders of Aquitaine. After executing a great circular sweep through Perigord, Limousin and Berry, he was returning to Bordeaux laden with plunder, when he was intercepted by the king of France near Poitiers. The battle that followed was the most astonishing of all the English victories during the Hundred Years' War. The odds against the prince were far heavier than those of Crecy, but by taking up a strong position and using the national tactics which combined the use of archery and dismounted men-at-arms, the younger Edward not merely beat off his assailants in a long defensive fight, but finally charged out upon them, scattered them, and took King John prisoner (Sept. 19, 1356).

The English ravage France.

Peace of Bretigny.

This fortunate capture put an enormous advantage in the hands of the English; for John, a facile and selfish prince, was ready to buy his freedom by almost any concessions. He signed two successive treaties which gave such advantageous terms to Edward III. that the dauphin Charles, who was acting as regent, and the French states-general refused to confirm them. This drove the English king to put still further pressure on the enemy; in 1359 he led out from Calais the largest English army that had been seen during the war, devastated all northern France as far as Reims and the borders of Burgundy, and then--continuing the campaign through the heart of the winter--presented himself before the gates of Paris and ravaged the Ile de France. This brought the regent Charles and his counsellors to the verge of despair; they yielded, and on the 8th of May 1360, signed an agreement at Bretigny near Chartres, by which nearly all King Edward's demands were granted. These preliminaries were ratified by the definitive peace of Calais (Oct. 24, 1360), which brought the first stage of the Hundred Years' War to an end.

By this treaty King Edward formally gave up his claim to the French throne, which he had always intended to use merely as an asset for barter, and was to receive in return not only a sum of 3,000,000 gold crowns for King John's personal ransom, but an immense cession of territory which--in southern France at least--almost restored the old boundaries of the time of Henry II. The duchy of Aquitaine was reconstructed, so as to include not only the lands that Edward had inherited, and his recent conquests, but all Poitou, Limousin, Angoumois, Quercy, Rouergue and Saintonge--a full half of France south of the Loire. This vast duchy the English king bestowed not long after on his son Edward, the victor of Poitiers, who reigned there as a vassal-sovereign, owing homage to England but administering his possessions in his own right. In northern France, Calais and the county of Guines, and also the isolated county of Ponthieu, the inheritance of the wife of Edward I., were ceded to the English crown. All these regions, it must be noted, were to be held for the future free of any homage or acknowledgment of allegiance to an overlord, "in perpetuity, and in the manner in which the kings of France had held them." There was to be an end to the power of the courts of Paris to harass the duke of Aquitaine, by using the rights of the suzerain to interfere with the vassal's subjects. It was hoped that for the future the insidious legal warfare which had been used with such effect by the French kings would be effectually prevented.

Submission of David of Scotland.

To complete the picture of the triumph of Edward III. at this, the culminating point of his reign, it must be mentioned that some time before the peace of Calais he had made terms with Scotland. David Bruce was to cede Roxburgh and Berwick, but to keep the rest of his dominions on condition of paying a ransom of 100,000 marks. This sum could never be raised, and Edward always had it in his power to bring pressure to bear on the king of Scots by demanding the instalments, which were always in arrear. David gave no further trouble; indeed he became so friendly to England that he offered to proclaim Lionel of Clarence, Edward's second son, as his heir, and would have done so but for the vigorous opposition of his parliament.

Economic progress in England.

The English people had expected that a sort of Golden Age would follow the conclusion of the peace with Scotland and France. Freed from the war-taxes which had vexed them for the last twenty years, they would be able to repair the ravages of the Black Death, and to develop the commercial advantages which had been won at Sluys, and secured by the dominion of the seas which they had held ever since. In some respects this expectation was not deceived; the years that followed 1360 seem to have been prosperous at home, despite the continued friction arising from the Statute of Labourers. The towns would seem to have fared better than the countryside, partly indeed at its expense, for the discontented peasantry migrated in large numbers to the centres of population where newly-developed manufactures were calling for more hands. The weaving industry, introduced into the eastern counties by the king's invitation to Flemish settlers, was making England something more than a mere producer of raw material for export. The seaports soon recovered from their losses in the Black Death, and English shipping was beginning to appear in the distant seas of Portugal and the Baltic. Nothing illustrates the growth of English wealth better than the fact that the kingdom had, till the time of Edward III., contrived to conduct all its commerce with a currency of small silver, but that within thirty years of his introduction of a gold coinage in 1343, the English "noble" was being struck in enormous quantities. It invaded all the markets of western Europe, and became the prototype of the gold issues of the Netherlands, Scotland, and even parts of Germany. It is in the latter years of Edward III. that we find the first forerunners of that class of English merchant princes who were to be such a marked feature in the succeeding reigns. The Poles of Hull, whose descendants rose in three generations to ducal rank, were the earliest specimens of their class. The poet Chaucer may serve as a humbler example of the rise of the burgher class--the son of a vintner, he became the father of a knight, and the ancestor, through female descents, of many baronial families. The second half of the 14th century is the first period in English history in which we can detect a distinct rise in the importance of the commercial as opposed to the landed interest. The latter, hard hit by the manorial difficulties that followed the plague of 1348-1349, found their rents stationary or even diminishing, while the price of the commodities from which the former made their wealth had permanently risen. As to intellectual vigour, the age that produced two minds of such marked originality in different spheres as Wycliffe and Chaucer must not be despised, even if it failed to carry out all the promise of the 13th century.

English rule in France.

For a few years after the peace of 1360 the political influence of Edward III. in western Europe seemed to be supreme. France, prostrated by the results of the English raids, by peasant revolts, and municipal and baronial turbulence, did not begin to recover strength till the thriftless king John had died (1364) and had been succeeded by his capable if unchivalrous son Charles V. Yet the state of the English dominions on the continent was not satisfactory; in building up the vast duchy of Aquitaine Edward had made a radical mistake. Instead of contenting himself with creating a homogeneous Gascon state, which might have grown together into a solid unit, he had annexed broad regions which had been for a century and a half united to France, and had been entirely assimilated to her. From the first Poitou, Quercy, Rouergue and the Limousin chafed beneath the English yoke; the noblesse in especial found the comparatively orderly and constitutional governance to which they were subjected most intolerable. They waited for the first opportunity to revolt, and meanwhile murmured against every act of their duke, the prince of Wales, though he did his best to behave as a gracious sovereign.

The Black Prince in Spain.

The younger Edward ended by losing his health and his wealth in an unnecessary war beyond the Pyrenees. He was persuaded by the exiled Peter the Cruel, king of Castile, to restore him to the throne which he had forfeited by his misgovernment. In 1367 he gathered a great army, entered Castile, defeated the usurper Henry of Trastamara at the battle of Najera, and restored his ally. But Peter, when once re-established as king, forgot his obligations and left the prince burdened with the whole expense of the campaign. Edward left Spain with a discontented and unpaid army, and had himself contracted the seeds of a disease which was to leave him an invalid for the rest of his life. To pay his debts he was obliged to resort to heavy taxation in Aquitaine, which gave his discontented subjects in Poitou and the other outlying districts an excuse for the rebellion that they had been for some time meditating. In 1368 his greatest vassals, the counts of Armagnac, Perigord and Comminges, displayed their disloyalty by appealing to the king of France as their suzerain against the legality of Edward's imposts. The French overlordship had been formally abolished by the treaty of 1360, so this appeal amounted to open rebellion. And when Charles V. accepted it, and cited Edward to appear before his parlement to answer the complaints of the counts, he was challenging England to renewed war. He found a preposterous excuse for repudiating the treaty by which he was bound, by declaring that some details had been omitted in its formal ratification.

Renewal of the war with France.

The Hundred Years' War, therefore, broke out again in 1369, after an interval of nine years. Edward III. assumed once more the title of king of France, while Charles V., in the usual style, declared that the whole duchy of Aquitaine had been forfeited for treason and rebellion on the part of its present holder. The second period of war, which was to last till the death of the English king, and for some years after, was destined to prove wholly disastrous to England. All the conditions had changed since 1360. Edward, though only in his fifty-seventh year, was entering into a premature and decrepit old age, in which he became the prey of unworthy favourites, male and female. The men of the 14th century, who commanded armies and executed _coups d'etat_ at eighteen, were often worn out by sixty. The guidance of the war should have fallen into the hands of his eldest son, the victor of Poitiers and Najera, but the younger Edward had never recovered from the fatigues of his Spanish campaign; his disease having developed into a form of dropsy, he had become a confirmed invalid and could no longer take the field. The charge of the military operations of the English armies had passed to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the king's younger son, a prince far inferior in capacity to his father and brother. Though not destitute of good impulses Lancaster was hasty, improvident and obstinate; he was unfortunate in his choice of friends, for he allied himself to all his father's unscrupulous dependents. He was destitute of military skill, and wrecked army after army by attempting hard tasks at inappropriate times and by mistaken methods. Despite of all checks and disasters he remained active, self-confident and ambitious, and, since he had acquired a complete control over his father, he had ample opportunity to mismanage the political and military affairs of England.

Character of the war.

Lancaster's strategy, in the early years of the renewed war, consisted mainly of attempts to wear down the force of France by devastating raids; he hoped to provoke the enemy to battle by striking at the heart of his realm, but never achieved his purpose. Warned by the disasters of Crecy and Poitiers, Charles V. and his great captain Bertrand du Guesclin would never commit themselves to an engagement in the open field. They let the English invaders pass by, garrisoning the towns but abandoning the countryside. Since Lancaster, in his great circular raids, had never the leisure to sit down to a siege--generally a matter of long months in the 14th century--he repeatedly crossed France leaving a train of ruined villages behind him, but having accomplished nothing else save the exhaustion of his own army. For the French always followed him at a cautious distance, cutting off his stragglers, and restricting the area of his ravages by keeping flying columns all around his path. But while the duke was executing useless marches across France, the outlying lands of Aquitaine were falling away, one after the other, to the enemy. The limit of the territory which still remained loyal was ever shrinking, and what was once lost was hardly ever regained. Almost the only reconquest made was that of the city of Limoges, which was stormed in September 1370 by the troops of the Black Prince, who rose from his sick-bed to strike his last blow at the rebels. His success did almost as much harm as good to his cause, for the deliberate sack of the city was carried out with such ruthless severity that it roused wild wrath rather than terror in the neighbouring regions. Next spring the prince returned to England, feeling himself physically unable to administer or defend his duchy any longer.

English reverses.

The greater part of Poitou, Quercy and Rouergue had been lost, and the English cause was everywhere losing ground, when a new danger was developed. Since Sluys the enemy had never disputed the command of the seas; but in 1372 a Spanish fleet joined the French, and destroyed off La Rochelle a squadron which was bringing reinforcements for Guienne. The disaster was the direct result of the campaign of Najera--for Henry of Trastamara, who had long since dethroned and slain his brother Peter the Cruel, remained a consistent foe of England. From this date onward Franco-Spanish fleets were perpetually to be met not only in the Bay of Biscay but in the Channel; they made the voyage to Bordeaux unsafe, and often executed descents on the shores of Kent, Sussex, Devon and Cornwall. It was to no effect that, in the year after the battle of La Rochelle, Lancaster carried out the last, the most expensive, and the most fruitless of his great raids across France. He marched from Calais to Bordeaux, inflicted great misery on Picardy, Champagne and Berry, and left half his army dead by the way.

This did not prevent Bertrand du Guesclin from expelling from his dominions John of Brittany, the one ally whom King Edward possessed in France, or from pursuing a consistent career of petty conquest in the heart of Aquitaine. By 1374 little was left of the great possessions which the English had held beyond the Channel save Calais, and the coast slip from Bordeaux to Bayonne, which formed the only loyal part of the duchy of Guienne. Next year King Edward sued for peace--he failed to obtain it, finding the French terms too hard for acceptance--but a truce at least was signed at Bruges (Jan. 1375) which endured till a few weeks before his death.

Domestic strife.

Agitation against the Church.

Wycliffe.

These two last years of Edward's reign were filled with an episode of domestic strife, which had considerable constitutional importance. The nation ascribed the series of disasters which had filled the space from 1369 to 1375 entirely to the maladministration of Lancaster and the king's favourites, failing to see that it was largely due to the mere fact that England was not strong enough to hold down Aquitaine, when France was administered by a capable king and served by a great general. Hence there arose, both in and out of parliament, a violent agitation for the removal of Lancaster from power, and the punishment of the favourites, who were believed, with complete justification, to be misusing the royal name for their own private profit. Among the leaders of this agitation were the clerical ministers whom John of Gaunt had expelled from office in 1371, and chiefly William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, the late chancellor; they were helped by Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, a personal enemy of Lancaster, and could count on the assistance of the prince of Wales when he was well enough to take a part in politics. The greater part of the House of Commons was on their side, and on the whole they may be regarded as the party of constitutional protest against maladministration. But there was another movement on foot at the same time, which cut across this political agitation in the most bewildering fashion. Protests against the corruption of the Church and the interference of the papacy in national affairs had always been rife in England. At this moment they were more prevalent than ever, largely in consequence of the way in which the popes at Avignon had made themselves the allies and tools of the kings of France. The Statutes of Praemunire and Provisors had been passed a few years before (1351-1365) to check papal pretensions. There was a strong anti-clerical party, whose practical aim was to fill the coffers of the state by large measures of disendowment and confiscations of Church property. The intellectual head of this party at the time was John Wycliffe, a famous Oxford teacher, and for some time master of Balliol College. In his lectures and sermons he was always laying stress on the unsatisfactory state of the national church and the infamous corruption of the papacy. The doctrine which first made him famous, and commended him to all members of the anti-clerical faction, was that unworthy holders of spiritual endowments ought to be dispossessed of them, because "dominion" should depend on "grace." Churchmen, small and great, as he held, had been corrupted, because they had fallen away from the early Christian idea of apostolic poverty. Instead of discharging their proper functions, bishops and abbots had become statesmen or wealthy barons, and took no interest in anything save politics. The monasteries, with their vast possessions, had become corporations of landlords, instead of associations for prayer and good works. The papacy, with its secular ambitions, and its insatiable greed for money, was the worst abuse of all. A bad pope, and most popes were bad, was the true Antichrist, since he was always overruling the divine law of the scriptures by his human ordinances. Every man, as Wycliffe taught--using the feudal analogies of contemporary society--is God's tenant-in-chief, directly responsible for his acts to his overlord; the pope is always thrusting himself in between, like a mesne-tenant, and destroying the touch between God and man by his interference. Sometimes his commands are merely presumptuous; sometimes--as when, for example, he preaches crusades against Christians for purely secular reasons--they are the most horrible form of blasphemy. Wycliffe at a later period of his life developed views on doctrinal matters, not connected with his original thesis about the relations between Church and State, and foreshadowed most of the leading tenets of the reformers of the 16th century. But in 1376-1377 he was known merely as the outspoken critic of the "Caesarean clergy" and the papacy. He had a following of enthusiastic disciples at Oxford, and scattered adherents both among the burghers and the knighthood, the nucleus of the party that afterwards became famous as the Lollards. But they had not yet differentiated themselves from the body of those who were merely anti-clerical, without being committed to any theories of religious reform.

John of Gaunt and Wycliffe.

Since Wycliffe was, above all things, the enemy of the political clergy of high estate, and since those clergy were precisely the leaders of the attack upon John of Gaunt, it came to pass that hatred of a common foe drew the duke and the doctor together for a space. There was a strange alliance between the advocate of clerical reform, and the practical exponent of secular misgovernment. The only point on which they were agreed was that it would be highly desirable to strip the Church of most of her endowments, in order to fill the exchequer of the state. Lancaster hoped to use Wycliffe as his mouthpiece against his enemies; Wycliffe hoped to see Lancaster disendowing bishops and monasteries and defying the pope. Hence the attempt of the political bishops to get Wycliffe condemned as a heretic became inextricably mixed with the attempt of the constitutional party, to which the bishops belonged, to evict the duke from his position of first councillor to the king and director of the policy of the realm.

The "Good Parliament."

Overthrow of the king's favourites.

Constitutional reforms.

The struggle began in the parliament of 1376, called by the anti-Lancastrian party the "Good Parliament." Headed by the earl of March, William Courtenay, bishop of London, and Sir Peter de la Mare, the daring speaker of the House of Commons, the duke's enemies began their campaign by accusing the king's ministers and favourites of corruption. Here they were on safe ground, for the misdeeds of Lord Latimer--the king's chamberlain, Lord Neville--his steward, Richard Lyons--his financial agent, and Alice Perrers--his greedy and shameless mistress, had been so flagrant that it was hard for Lancaster to defend them. In face of the evidence brought forward the old king and his son had to abandon their friends to the angry parliament. Latimer and Lyons were condemned to imprisonment and forfeiture of their goods, Alice Perrers was banished from court. Encouraged by this victory, the parliament passed on to constitutional reforms, forced on the king a council of twelve peers nominated by themselves, who were to exercise over him much the same control that the lords ordainers had held over his father, and compelled him to assent to a long list of petitions which, if properly carried out, would have removed most of the practical grievances of the nation. Having so done they dispersed, not guessing that Lancaster had yielded so easily because he was set on undoing their work the moment that they were gone.

John of Gaunt re-establishes the royal power.

Death of the Black Prince.

This, however, was the case; after the shortest of intervals the duke executed something like a _coup d'etat_. In his father's name he released Latimer and Lyons, dismissed the council of twelve, imprisoned Peter de la Mare, sequestrated the temporalities of Bishop Wykeham, and sent the earl of March out of the realm. Alice Perrers took possession again of the king, and all his corrupt courtiers came back to him. A royal edict declared the statutes of the "Good Parliament" null and void. Lancaster would never have dared to defy public opinion and challenge the constitutional party to a life-and-death struggle in this fashion, had it not been that his brother the prince of Wales had died while the "Good Parliament" was sitting; thus the opposition had been deprived of their strongest support. The prince's heir was a mere child, Richard of Bordeaux, aged only nine. It was feared by some that Duke John might carry his ambitions so far as to aim at the throne--he could do what he pleased with his doting father, and flaws might have been picked in the marriage of the Black Prince and his wife Joan of Kent, who were cousins, and therefore within the "prohibited degrees." As a matter of fact Lancaster was a more honest man than his enemies suspected; he hastened to acknowledge his little nephew's rights, acknowledged him as prince of Wales, and introduced him as his grandfather's heir before the parliament of January 1377.

Death of Edward III.

The character of this body was a proof of the great strength of the royal name and power even in days when parliamentary institutions had been long in existence, and were supposed to act as a check on the crown. To legalize his arbitrary acts Duke John dared to summon the estates together, after he had issued stringent orders to the sheriffs to exclude his enemies and return his friends when the members for the Commons were chosen. He obtained a house of the complexion that he desired, and having a strong following among the peers actually succeeded in undoing all the work of 1376. No sign of trouble or rebellion followed, the opposition being destitute of a fighting leader. March had left the realm; Bishop Wykeham showed an unworthy subservience by suing for pardon through the mediation of Alice Perrers. Only Bishop Courtenay refused to be terrorized; he chose this moment to open a campaign against the duke's ally, John Wycliffe, who was arraigned for heresy before the ecclesiastical courts. His trial, however, ended in a scandalous fiasco. Lancaster and his friend Lord Percy came to St Paul's, and so insulted and browbeat the bishop, that the proceedings degenerated into a riot, and reached no conclusion (Feb. 19). Courtenay dared not recommence them, and Lancaster ruled as he pleased till his father, five months later, died. Deserted by his worthless courtiers and plundered on his death-bed by his greedy mistress, the victor of Sluys and Crecy sank into an unhonoured grave. It was a relief to the nation that he was gone. Yet there was a general feeling that chaos might follow. If Lancaster should justify the malevolent rumours that were afloat by making a snatch at the crown, the last state of the realm might be worse than the first.

Richard II.

Duke John, however, was a better man than his enemies supposed. He was loyal to the crown according to his lights, and showed a chivalrous self-denial that had hardly been expected from him. He saluted his little nephew as king without a moment's hesitation, though he was aware that with the commencement of a new reign his own dictatorship had come to an end. The princess of Wales, in whose hands the young Richard II. was placed, had never been his friend, and was surrounded by adherents of her deceased husband, who belonged to the constitutional party. Disarmed, however, by the duke's frank submission they wisely resolved not to push him to extremes, and the first council which was appointed to act for the new monarch was a sort of "coalition ministry" in which Lancaster's followers as well as his foes were represented. For that very reason it was lacking in strength and unity of purpose, and proved lamentably incapable of dealing with the problems of the moment.

The French war.

Of these the most pressing was the renewal of the French war; the truce had expired a few weeks before the death of Edward III., and the new reign began with a series of military disasters. The French fleet landed in great force in Sussex, burnt Rye and Hastings and routed the shire levies. Simultaneously the seneschal of Aquitaine was defeated in battle, and Bergerac, the last great town in the inland which remained in English hands, was captured by the duke of Anjou.

First parliament of Richard. Reforms.

The first parliament of Richard II. met in October under the most gloomy auspices. It showed its temper by taking up the work of the "Good Parliament." Lancaster's adherents were turned out of the council; the persons condemned in 1376 were declared incapable of serving in it; Alice Perrers was sentenced to banishment and forfeiture, and the little king was made to repudiate the declaration whereby his uncle had quashed the statutes of 1376 by declaring that "no act of parliament can be repealed save with parliament's consent." John of Gaunt bowed before the storm, retired to his estates, and for some time took little part in affairs of state.

Unfortunately the new government proved wholly unable either to conduct the struggle with France successfully or to pluck up courage to make a humiliating peace--the only wise course before them. The nation was too proud to accept defeat, and persevered in the unhappy attempt to reverse the fortunes of war. An almost unbroken series of petty disasters marked the first three years of King Richard. The worst was the failure of the last great devastating raid which the English launched against France. Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III., took a powerful army to Calais, and marched through Picardy and Champagne, past Orleans, and finally to Rennes in Brittany, but accomplished nothing save the ruin of his own troops and the wasting of a vast sum of money. Meanwhile taxation was heavy, the whole nation was seething with discontent, and--what was worst--no way was visible out of the miserable situation; ministers and councillors were repeatedly displaced, but their successors always proved equally incompetent to find a remedy.

The Great Revolt of 1381.