1000 Years of Annoying the French Read online

  However, in October 1216, when John died of dysentery while fleeing from the French invaders, the barons made a pro-English choice, switching their allegiance away from Louis and on to John’s son, whom they crowned Henry III. This might well have been because Henry was only nine years old at the time, and therefore easy to dominate – you could make him cut taxes just by taking away his toy horse. But it was also a decision that isolated England from France, and forced the most powerful Englishmen, who had previously thought of themselves primarily as Norman expats, to get their head around the notion that, after 150 years on English soil, their families might actually be staying there.

  This growing Englishness became all the more tangible when Henry III came of age in 1227 and began to reign without a regent. He invited a horde of foreign advisers to his court, including members of his French mother’s side of his family, and made things worse after his marriage to a twelve-year-old countess called Eleanor of Provence; the child bride arrived with an entourage of interfering Franco-Italian cousins, whose prominence at the English court made Eleanor so unpopular that Londoners once tried to sink her barge as she was cruising down the Thames.

  The Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste,* disapproved of the situation so much that he criticized King Henry publicly, complaining that these French courtiers were ‘foreigners and the worst enemies of England. They do not even understand the English language.’

  The French, never ones to stay out of an argument, added fuel to this increasingly heated nationalistic debate. In 1244, King Louis IX of France (the son of the Prince Louis who had been invited to rule England) declared that ‘it is impossible for a man who lives in my country but has lands in England to serve two masters. He must either bow to my authority or to that of the English King.’

  The split from France was almost complete.

  England takes its punishment where it hurts

  Fortunately for France, England was not yet ready to attack it, because Kings Edward I and II, whose reigns lasted from 1272 to 1327, expended most of their energies persecuting the Scots and the Welsh. And they received some painful wounds in reply, including the massacre of the English army at Bannockburn in 1314. However, this mauling at the hands of the Scots and the Welsh had two positive consequences that would come back to haunt the French.

  First of all, the English found out to their cost that the Welsh were experts with the murderous longbow. This was a very different animal to the bow that had (possibly) killed Harold at the Battle of Hastings. The Welsh bows were five or six feet long – usually taller than the men firing them – and could shoot heavy, iron-tipped arrows 250 yards with deadly accuracy. It was like the difference between musket balls and sniper bullets. It took a lifetime of practice and forearm strength to pull back the string of a six-foot longbow, and, thanks to this defeat against the Welsh, English village greens were soon echoing to the swish-plunk of arrows hitting targets. It was a sound that would soon have French knights trembling in their armour.

  Secondly, at Bannockburn, Edward II’s army of 20,000 knights was decimated by Robert the Bruce’s small force of Scottish footsoldiers because the English tried to charge in full armour across boggy ground. They learned from their mistake, and were to lure the French into exactly the same trap on two historic occasions in the next century.

  Edward II was not a popular king. As well as his skill at losing battles, he was openly gay, which – despite William Rufus’s pioneering work 120 years earlier, and Richard the Lionheart’s alleged follow-up – was not yet fashionable amongst the English upper classes.

  In the end, Edward’s own wife, a French princess whose temper had earned her the nickname ‘Isabelle the she-wolf of France’, arranged to have him deposed and murdered in 1327, in gruesome circumstances. It was reported at the time that Edward, imprisoned in Berkeley Castle near Gloucester, was pinned to a bed while a horn or metal tube was shoved into his rectum. If this were not bad enough, a red-hot piece of metal was then inserted into the tube, burning Edward’s innards and killing him.

  While this was being done to him (if it was – other reports say he was suffocated), England was at a depressing low. The nation was impoverished because of a series of bad harvests and its rulers’ fruitless attempts to oppress their Celtic neighbours. It had also lost yet another of its holdings in France, Gascony, which had been grabbed by the French without a struggle. All in all, Edward II’s horrific death could be seen as a symbol of England getting its recent past shoved up its rear end.

  The country therefore felt a deep desire to get back on its feet and regain its self-esteem. England was primed and ready for the Hundred Years War, the longest single conflict in British history. And its opponents of choice were the French.

  * Queens were illegal in England until Mary Tudor in 1553.

  * They didn’t care that it was also unspellable, because almost none of them could write.

  * This is Mathilde, daughter of Henry I, and her son Henry, grandson of Henry I. Yes, lots of Mathildes and Henrys, but we saw what happened when they tried something different and went for a Stephen.

  * France had not yet developed its excellent health service.

  * This was an Anglo-Norman name meaning ‘Bighead’, and nothing to do with large testicles.

  3

  The Hundred Years War: A Huge Mistake

  Featuring the Black Prince, Henry V and lots of dead French people …

  Most people who write about the Hundred Years War are at pains to point out that it is an obvious miscalculation: a conflict that lasts from 1337 to 1453 is clearly not a Hundred Years War. And the most disappointing thing is that it was given its name by the Victorians, who were generally excellent at maths because of all the measuring they had to do for the maps of their expanding empire.

  In fact, though, the mistake goes far deeper than that, because the name is an almost deliberate piece of whitewashing. For a start, it wasn’t a single war; it was a whole series of conflicts that flared up and died down as the kings of England got up the energy and the cash to fight. And although the dates we remember today-commemorate famous battles – Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415 – it is wrong to imagine that the Hundred Years War was fought out by armies of knights and archers battling for king and country on the field of glory.

  This is because, apart from a few outbreaks of chivalrous combat, the ‘war’ was quite simply 120 years of terror inflicted on French civilians by gangs of out-of-control English bandits, claiming to defend their king’s rights but actually hard at work enriching themselves and massacring as many people as they could in the process.

  For more than a century, no town in the northern half of France was safe from siege, and peasants could not work in their fields without posting lookouts on hilltops and belfries or in trees. If a dust cloud was sighted, the farmers would instantly down tools and run, because they knew that any man caught alive by the English would be either held to ransom if he was rich enough, or killed out of hand if not, usually after being hideously tortured to reveal where his meagre savings were buried. For women captives, all the above was equally valid, except that they would also be gang-raped. It wasn’t so much a Hundred Years War as a Century of Genocide, sanctioned by the King (and therefore, in feudal minds, by God).

  The French-language Wikipedia entry for La guerre de Cent Ans summarizes the war by saying: ‘Date 1337–1453. Outcome: French victory.’ But that is a bit like saying ‘Black Death 1349–51. Outcome: Human victory.’ It ignores rather a large amount of suffering – and in the case of the Hundred Years War, most of it was French.

  Annoying the French for fun and profit

  The question is: why would the English inflict such a campaign of death and destruction on their neighbours? And the answer, as usual in such cases, is: because they could. Or, more exactly, because they couldn’t do it anywhere else. To the east, the Flemish were allies. The Scots and the Welsh to the north and west had proved to be impossibly tough nuts to crack,
and the pickings weren’t especially rich. France, on the other hand, was like a widow on a Caribbean cruise: rich, available and convenient.

  In the early 1300s, in comparison to England, France was a very wealthy nation. Its farmland was about the most productive in Europe, and the country was criss-crossed by trade routes from the Mediterranean and the Orient. Consequently, its population was growing in both size and sophistication – while the English were still chewing on turnips, the French were getting snobbish about how much pepper should go in the soupe à l’oignon.

  What’s more, King Philippe VI was the undisputed ruler of almost the whole of France. Seen from the English side of the Channel, his was a privileged position but a dangerous one. To give the soon-to-be-declared war another metaphor, it was a bit like a gang of English lager louts spotting a French playboy lying on the beach. There he is, his Rolex glinting in the sun, his eyes protected by super-hip Ray-Bans, his ears plugged into a limited-edition iPod. Even his swimming shorts are straight out of Vogue Homme. The temptation to go and pour beer (or worse) on his face is irresistible. This, plus the chance to steal all his valuable designer gear and dent his too-perfect teeth. And then go back and give him cigarette burns until he reveals his credit-card PIN number. In short, the war was going to be cruel, racist and criminal. But, most of all, it was going to be fun.

  England’s new king, Edward III, was not exactly a lager lout, but he was a fifteen-year-old emerging from a disturbed childhood. As we saw in Chapter 2, his father was probably burnt to death by a red-hot suppository, and Edward knew that it was with the connivance of his mother, Queen Isabelle. The young Prince must also have guessed that he had only been saved from a similar fate because his existence enabled Isabelle to rule England with a regent – her lover, an earl called Roger Mortimer. But when Isabelle got pregnant by Mortimer, Edward probably felt the hot metal closing in on his backside, so one night in October 1330 he broke down his mother’s bedroom door with an axe, dragged Mortimer off to be hanged, drawn and quartered, and locked Isabelle away in Norfolk, where she is said to have had a miscarriage. Whether she was ‘aided’ in this by one of Edward’s supporters is not clear, but suffice it to say that the King subsequently had one less potential rival for the throne.

  England was now ruled by a teenage survivor who was looking for action. One of the first things he did was head north and burn large tracts of lowland Scotland, letting off some steam about Bannockburn. He also led an army of archers in a victorious battle against a few Scottish spearmen at Halidon Hill, near Berwick, in 1333, and returned to London to be hailed as ‘the new King Arthur’. He had tasted not only victory but revenge.

  It was at this point that King Philippe VI of France made the huge mistake of irritating the newly blooded young ruler.

  In May 1334, Philippe invited the ten-year-old king of Scotland, David II, to take refuge from the English in France, and warned Edward III to stop bullying wee Davie. This was a provocative warning, because in giving it Philippe was repeating the old French taunt that the King of England was a feudal vassal of the King of France. Richard the Lionheart’s claim that an English king had no superior except Dieu still hadn’t convinced the French at all. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, the Bishop of Rouen gave a sermon gleefully announcing that a 6,000-strong French army was getting ready to go and defend Scotland against English incursions.

  So King Edward did what any red-blooded Englishman would have done: he claimed the throne of France.

  All queens are illegal, but some are less illegal than others

  Edward’s mother Isabelle had already tried to claim France for herself in 1328. She was the sister of the recently deceased French King Charles IV, who had died leaving a baby girl as his only heir. Isabelle therefore argued that she was the natural candidate for succession. However, the assembly gathered to debate the succession refused Isabelle’s claim because, as a contemporary chronicler, Jean Froissart, recorded, ‘the realm of France was so noble that it must not fall into a woman’s hands.’

  In the event, the vacant throne was grabbed by Philippe VI, a 35-year-old champion jouster with a large army – the sort who quite often used to win arguments about who was going to be a medieval ruler. And Edward III seems to have forgotten about his mother’s claim to the French crown until 1334, when Philippe made the mistake of declaring that he was a Scotland supporter.

  Trouble was further stirred up by the presence at Edward’s court of a scheming French nobleman, a fifty-year-old bon vivant called Robert d’Artois. Robert was King Philippe VI’s brother-in-law, and had fled to England after – it was rumoured – poisoning his aunt to try and steal her inheritance. If true, this was small beer for the times, but Robert was sentenced to death and exiled. When Philippe VI announced that anyone who harboured Robert would be considered his mortal enemy, Edward took him in, made him an earl and gave him three castles. A clear statement if ever there was one.

  A classic brother-in-law, and French to boot, Robert could not resist whinging about Philippe and egging Edward on to claim his ‘rightful inheritance’. According to a poem of the time, ‘Les Voeux du héron’ – ‘The Vows of the Heron’ – Robert brought matters to a head at a banquet in 1338, during which he accused Edward III of being a coward for not invading France, and cajoled the influential dinner guests into promising that they would help Edward win the French throne. Robert did this by taking an oath over a cooked heron (a timid bird that symbolized cowardice),* and getting the other participants to invent variations on the vow – a fashionable dinner-party game in the early fourteenth century.

  Before you could say who wants to pull the heron wishbone, Edward had announced his intention to go and grab the French Crown, and even designed himself a new coat of arms – a combination of England’s rampant lions and the French fleur-de-lis. The new Anglo-French banner, which would have come with matching shield, helmet, doublet and squire’s uniform, was the rudest, most provocative insult that Edward could have conceived, a bit like sleeping with a modern Frenchman’s wife and putting the video on YouTube. With one bit of fashion design, Edward had just made it likely that the coming war was going to be very brutal indeed.

  How to get funding for your conflict

  Edward III was no longer a disturbed adolescent. In his mid-twenties, he was by all accounts a well-bred and learned man, who could even write. His first language was Anglo-Norman, as it was for all his class, but he was able to speak English like a native (which, of course, he was), and could understand Latin, German and Flemish. He also had, as one contemporary put it, ‘the face of a god’, and used it to maximum effect, enticing countless women with a shake of his long blond locks, a royal smile, and no doubt the odd Flemish joke.

  He didn’t limit his charms to sexual encounters either, and as soon as his mind was set on war, he embarked on a spectacularly successful career as a royal conman, wheedling a war chest out of a whole series of rich bankers and merchants in Italy, Holland and England, almost all of whom later went bankrupt when he failed to pay them back.

  Edward also pawned not only his own English crown, but the one he had had made, rather optimistically, for when he would be crowned King of France.

  Philippe VI, on the other hand, had severe problems getting funding for his war. Even in those days, the French liked nothing better than ignoring laws, and many of them refused to pay taxes. Philippe had to resort to slapping a duty on salt and debasing his currency, calling in silver coins and reissuing them in cheap metal. In the end, he was forced to top up his war chest by borrowing a million gold florins from the Pope.*

  Philippe used his funding to raise an army of some 60,000 heavy cavalry, many of them aristocrats in search of a reputation as knights. Edward did more or less the opposite, and wrote to England’s constables and bailiffs instructing them to send him the most suitable candidates for warfare aged between sixteen and sixty. As well as selecting the best longbowmen, most of these local officials also took the opportunity to pa
ck off their thieves and murderers.

  So while France’s noblest knights strapped on their armour and tested each other on the rules of chivalry, thousands of English criminals were swapping hints on the best way to stab toffs.

  Giving massacre a bad name

  If any excuse is needed for the horrors that were about to be inflicted on France, it should be stressed that the French started it.

  In 1337 they began to raid the English coast, and over the following year, Rye, Hastings, Portsmouth, Southampton, the Isle of Wight and Plymouth were all attacked and looted. English merchant vessels were captured, and French ships even sailed into the Thames Estuary. Rumours of a massive French invasion began to circulate, and it was said that captured Kentish fishermen were being tortured and paraded through the streets of Calais.

  The English quickly realized that this raiding business was a good idea, and Norman and Breton ports began to get a taste of their own medicine. Sometimes, the English raiders were even able to steal back plunder that had recently been taken from their own towns. Soon, no ship in the Channel was safe. The Cornish port of Fowey had a band of pirates who roamed the coasts of England and France, and even attacked English ships. Though, as Cornishmen, they no doubt regarded the English as foreign, too.

  Then came the invasion proper. In September 1339, Edward III attacked France with a force of around 15,000 men, many of whom were Dutch and German mercenaries paid for by his borrowed money. Philippe VI was waiting for them at a place called La Flamengrie in northeastern France with an army of 35,000. Even though Philippe had numerical superiority, he offered to make a sporting occasion of the battle by proposing a sort of tournament between France’s paladins – its noblest knights – and the best men in the English army. This may well have been a jibe at Edward, who had been one of the paladins until Philippe confiscated his French lands.