Late Middle Ages

Edward III’s early campaigns in France

Between 1340 and 1356, the English crown under Edward III won three of the most extraordinary military campaigns of the Middle Ages. The first opened the war and won control of the Channel. The second forced the French to fight in northern France and culminated in the disaster of Crécy. The third was a long march through southern France, ending with the capture of the French king at Poitiers. The three campaigns are usually treated as a single study: they share the same commanders, the same army, the same tactical system, and the same king. They also share a chronicler, in the second and the third, in the person of Jean le Bel, canon of Liège, whose Chronique was used by Jean Froissart for the Chroniques. They do not, however, share a battlefield; the geography and the enemy are different in each case, and the cumulative effect on the politics of France was different in each case as well.

The king and his war: Edward III and the politics of 1337

Edward III, in 1337, was a young king of twenty-five. He had been recognised as legitimate by the parliament of 1330, and he had taken the royal authority into his own hands in the October of that year, deposing his mother’s lover Roger Mortimer at Nottingham Castle. The first years of his personal rule were marked by cautious reform. Theobald de Verdun was sent to the papal court at Avignon; William de la Zouche was sent to Gascony; the wool staple, the system of markets for English wool, was reorganised. The actual breach with France came in May 1337, when the great council at Westminster voted the king a subsidy for the defence of Aquitaine, and the French council, meeting at Vincennes in the same month, declared the duchy forfeit.

The English case in 1337 was a simple one. The duchy of Aquitaine, held by the English king as duke, had been a fief of the French crown since 1259; the duchy was now summoned to appear before the French courts at the suit of the count of Armagnac. Edward refused, and was duly summoned. He refused again. The French king, Philip VI, declared the duchy forfeit on 24 May 1337, and the English council, at Westminster, voted a subsidy. The two kingdoms were now formally at war.

The English needed an alliance. Edward sought it in the Low Countries, with the duke of Brabant and the count of Hainaut; he found it in the count of Flanders, whose subjects, the weavers of Ghent and Ypres, were the customers of the English wool trade. The Flemish alliance was sealed by the marriage of Edward to Philippa of Hainaut, daughter of the count, on 24 January 1328, four years before the war. The alliance was to dominate the diplomacy of the 1330s and 1340s.

Sluys and the command of the sea

The first great English victory of the war was a naval one. The French had been assembling a fleet at the Sluys, a roadstead in the Zwin inlet on the Flemish coast, to support the Flemish cities in their revolt against the count. Edward, with an English fleet of perhaps 200 to 240 ships, met the French on the morning of 24 June 1340. The French fleet, of some 190 galleys, was at anchor in three lines; the English sailed in and grappled them. The battle, which lasted from mid-morning to late evening, was a slaughter. The French galleys, lashed together with chains, were boarded and burned; the crews, largely Genoese and Marseillais crossbowmen, were killed in great numbers. Modern estimates of the French dead run from 12,000 to 18,000. The chronicler Adam of Murimuth wrote that the English found “the sea covered with dead men and the wreckage of ships.”

The battle of Sluys has been described as the first great triumph of the war. It was not a tour de force of seamanship — the English had no real advantage in naval skill — but a matter of getting the better of a French fleet that had been caught at anchor. The English fleet was, however, from this point onward, in control of the Channel. The wool trade to Flanders was now safe; the French could not reinforce their garrisons in Gascony; the English could land armies anywhere on the French coast. The command of the sea, which the English had won at Sluys, was a precondition for the campaigns of 1346 and 1356.

The Crécy campaign of 1346

The 1346 campaign is the most fully documented. The English army, raised by indenture for the half-year, was assembled at Southampton in July 1346, and the king sailed for Normandy. The numbers are uncertain, but the Issue Rolls and the Indentures of the army suggest an effective force of perhaps 12,000 to 14,000 men, of whom 7,000 were longbowmen. The English landed at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue on 12 July 1346 and, by a long march, reached the Seine above Rouen; the French, taken by surprise, were unable to prevent the crossing; Edward crossed at Poissy on 16 August. The English then turned north, crossed the Somme at Blanchetaque on 24 August, and on 26 August 1346 met the French army of Philip VI on the ridge above Crécy.

The battle of Crécy is examined in detail in The Battle of Crécy (1346). For the wider campaign, the important point is that the English, having won, did not immediately follow up. Edward marched north, invested the port of Calais on 4 September 1346, and took it on 3 August 1347, after a siege of eleven months. The fall of Calais, which remained in English hands for more than two centuries, was a strategic prize of the first order: a bridgehead on the French mainland, a base for raids into the Île-de-France, and a market for English wool. The English victory of 1346, in short, was not the destruction of the French army on a single day; it was the establishment of an English war on the continent.

Poitiers, 1356, and the capture of King John

The third of the great English campaigns of the Edwardian war was the work of the Prince of Wales, Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, in 1355 and 1356. The prince had been appointed lieutenant of Aquitaine in 1362, but his career as a commander had begun in 1355, when he led a chevauchée through the south of France with an army drawn from the duchy: Gascon lords, the routier captains of the Free Companies, and English men-at-arms under the earls of Warwick, Salisbury, and Suffolk. The campaign of 1355 was a great success: the army moved from Bordeaux through the Armagnac and the Languedoc, sacked the towns of Montauban, Avignonet, Carcassonne, and Narbonne, and returned to Bordeaux in November. The Gascon chronicler Jean Froissart, who had accompanied the army as a young man, recorded the sack in detail.

The second campaign, in 1356, was longer. The prince, with an army of perhaps 6,000 to 8,000 men, left Bordeaux on 7 August, moved up the Lot to the Auvergne, and turned north, hoping to lure the French king into battle. The French, under King John II, gathered an army of perhaps 18,000 to 20,000 men and pursued the English. The two armies met, on 19 September 1356, on the plain of Maupertuis, south of Poitiers, where the prince had taken up a position behind a hedge and a line of mounted men. The English longbowmen, drawn up in the hedgerow, opened fire on the French. The French vanguard, made up of German and English mercenaries under the count of Salisbury, was overrun; the second French line, the chivalry of the realm, was cut down in the mud. The king himself, fighting in the third line, was wounded in the face and was taken prisoner. The chronicler Jean Froissart, who was not present at the battle, was told by veterans that the king surrendered to a French knight, Denis de Morbecque, who had served the English in the first campaign.

The capture of King John was a catastrophe for France. The English, having won the day, marched to Bordeaux, where the king was held in honourable captivity, and from there the terms of his ransom were negotiated. The treaty of Brétigny, signed on 8 May 1360, was the result. Edward III renounced his claim to the French throne in exchange for the full sovereignty of Aquitaine, the Ponthieu, and Calais, and a ransom of three million crowns for King John. The first phase of the war was, in formal terms, over.

From Brétigny to the Caroline War

The Treaty of Brétigny, however, was not implemented. The renunciation of the claim, in the words of Jonathan Sumption, was “a paper transaction that was never carried out.” The English, in possession of Aquitaine, were in no hurry to renounce; the French, in no hurry to accept. The peace held, more or less, until 1369, when Charles V, who had succeeded his father, reopened the war in alliance with the count of Foix, the count of Armagnac, and the dukes of Berry and Burgundy. The second phase of the war, the Caroline War, was a long French revenge: the rout of Najera in 1367 (in which the Black Prince defeated Henry of Trastámara, but at great cost to his own army), the recovery of Poitou and the Limousin between 1370 and 1375, the death of the Black Prince in 1376, and the death of Edward III himself in 1377. The Edwardian campaigns of 1340, 1346, and 1356 were, in the end, the high point of English military achievement. The Caroline War would turn the tide.

The history of the Edwardian campaigns has been the subject of two important modern studies: Jonathan Sumption’s volumes I and II of The Hundred Years’ War, and Clifford Rogers’s War Cruel and Sharp. Both scholars treat the longbow, the chevauchée, and the army of indentured retainers as the keys to the English success; both treat the French defeat as a combination of English efficiency and French misjudgement. The campaigns of 1340 to 1356 are the foundation of the English claim, and the foundation of the English reputation, in the Hundred Years’ War.

References and further reading

  • Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, vol. I: Trial by Battle (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) and vol. II: Trial by Fire (1999).
  • Clifford J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000).
  • Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994).
  • Michael Prestwich, Edward I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and his essays in Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
  • Anne Curry, The Hundred Years’ War, 1337–1453 (Oxford: Osprey, 2002).