1000 Years of Annoying the French Page 8

  Edward was spoiling for a fight – not just because he was that kind of guy but also because his Dutch and German mercenaries were complaining about not having enough food and threatening to go home. So he agreed to meet Philippe however he wanted, in a massive clash of two armies or a more chivalrous face-off between individual knights. In the end, though, Philippe simply didn’t turn up.

  Cowardly, perhaps, but effective. Like an English pensioner hit by the rising euro, Edward quite simply could not afford to stay in France, and had to withdraw. He was so short of money that he even had to leave his wife Philippa in Ghent as security for loans. His invasion – the attack that was supposed to sweep him to Paris and win the French throne – had lasted a month and got him no further than the outskirts of Calais.

  However, in terms of the war to come, the mission had not been a total loss, because Edward and his troops had created a brand-new concept, and in a brilliant piece of double-speak they had given it a French name to hide the fact that it was an English invention.

  The French word chevauchée had previously meant a harmless horse-ride, a refreshing trot in the country, but Edward III now gave it a much less innocent meaning. As his men marched through France, he ordered them to destroy everything in their path. He even boasted about it in a letter to his son, the Black Prince, noting matter-of-factly that he advanced with ‘our people burning and destroying to the breadth of twelve or fourteen leagues of country’, and that the area around the city of Cambrai was ‘laid waste, of corn and cattle and other goods’. He didn’t mention that this involved torching whole towns and forcing the population to flee or be put to death.

  A similar technique had been used in England by William the Conqueror, mainly as a punitive action to put down rebellion. But this was how Edward planned to wage his whole war, in an attempt to make France so sick of the carnage that they would capitulate. It was almost exactly the same argument that would be used to justify bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. If nuclear warheads had existed in the fourteenth century, the only thing that would have kept Edward from using them would have been the loss of profitable hostages and the danger that the French throne would be too radioactive for him to sit on.

  French tactics are a joke

  Edward III was obviously a cruel man, but one thing you could not fault was his determination. Because no sooner had he returned to England than he persuaded Parliament to vote him a tax on wool, corn and lamb, and – to prove that he wasn’t anti-rural – a straight one-ninth share of every townsman’s property. He used the money to get his wife out of hock and prepare a new anti-French campaign. And this time he would meet with spectacular success.

  Aware that Philippe was preparing an invasion fleet, Edward decided to hit the enemy at sea. In June 1340, he led around 200 ships, most of them converted merchant vessels, out of Suffolk and across the Channel.

  On paper, this was pure folly. Edward’s ships were converted cargo vessels, whereas the French had rented highly manoeuvrable Genoese war galleys that were equipped with rams and catapults and captained by an old Genoese sea-dog usually known as Barbanera, or Blackbeard. These, along with shiploads of French men-at-arms,* were now anchored in a large natural harbour at Sluys, in modern-day Holland, tied up side by side in a defensive battle line to prevent boarders.

  Edward’s plan was simple: he would sail straight at them and board, using his armoured troops. Men in medieval armour clambering over the gunwales of a ship? A less optimistic leader might have thought that this was not very practical. However, Edward did not know that he had one massive factor in his favour, a French weakness that lives on to this day.

  Philippe VI’s fleet may have had a great Genoese sea-captain on hand to lead it, but Barbanera was outranked by the two Frenchmen in charge, Hugues Quiéret and Nicolas Béhuchet, neither of whom were seamen. One of them, Béhuchet, was a former tax collector. And when Barbanera advised them to leave harbour and take to the open sea, where his nimble galleys would be able to dance around the sluggish English fleet and sink it, the two Frenchmen refused.

  This is a very French trait. Today, if a big manufacturing company is in trouble, it will parachute in a graduate of one of France’s grandes écoles, someone who has studied business theory and maths for ten years but never actually been inside a factory. The important thing to the French is not experience, it is leadership – or, more exactly, French-style leadership, which mainly involves ignoring advice from anyone with lots of experience but no French grande école on their CV.

  So Quiéret and Béhuchet kept their fleet at anchor while Edward sailed slowly but surely into harbour and discovered to his surprise that the supposedly defensive French line left the end ships vulnerable to boarding from the side. What was more, the other ships, being tied up alongside, could not sail to their aid.

  While the two French admirals consulted the manual on what to do in such cases, the English troops were able to clamber along the row of vessels, from one ship to the next, first wreaking havoc with a bombardment of arrows (British longbowmen were seeing their first major action abroad) and then storming the surviving French soldiers, taking the rich ones prisoner and throwing the rest overboard, where their armour did not help them swim to safety. Any lightly clad Frenchmen who made it to shore were promptly hacked to death by the Flemish locals.

  Barbanera, the Genoese veteran, quickly realized that this was going to be a disaster of titanic proportions (even though the Titanic would not sink for another 572 years), and rowed his galleys swiftly away so that his men could live to fight for paymasters who might actually listen to his advice.

  Overwhelmed, the French leaders, Quiéret and Béhuchet, tried to apply what they had learned of the theory of medieval war by surrendering and being held for ransom, but it was not to be their lucky day. Quiéret had his head lopped off, and Béhuchet was taken to Edward III’s flagship and strung up, so that the sight of his swinging corpse would demoralize the remaining French troops. Edward might have needed ransoms, but he was fighting total war – so total that even the ship containing his wife and her attendants had taken part in the battle, resulting in the death of a lady-in-waiting. It was the last time the Queen was going to accept one of Edward’s invitations to ‘take a spin on my yacht’.

  The result of the encounter was that the French invasion fleet was almost totally destroyed, and France lost tens of thousands of its troops. King Philippe VI’s courtiers were so nervous about giving him the bad news that it was left to the court jester to tell him in joke form.

  ‘Our knights are far braver than the English,’ the jester said.

  ‘Why is that?’ Philippe asked.

  ‘Because the English don’t dare to jump into the sea in full armour.’

  Like many French jokes, it had to be explained, and didn’t get much of a laugh.

  Crécy, a battle caused by the loss of some bacon

  It was yet another French traitor who spurred Edward on to fight the next phase in the war – a little spot of collaboration that would result in an even more disastrous defeat for Philippe VI.

  Geoffroy d’Harcourt was a Norman knight who had sworn an oath to fight for Philippe VI. However, when Geoffroy decided to marry a rich Norman heiress with the very rural name of Jeanne Bacon, he found that he had a serious rival – a powerful friend of King Philippe’s called Guillaume Bertrand. Predictably, Philippe declared that Jeanne should marry Guillaume (no one asked Jeanne what she wanted), so Geoffroy started a small-scale private war against the Bertrand family. It probably got no further than burning a few farms and murdering some cows and peasants, but the Bertrands complained to the King, who confiscated Geoffroy’s land and had four of his best friends beheaded.

  Understandably peeved, Geoffroy went to England and offered his services to Edward III. More than this, he brought valuable intelligence. According to the chronicler Froissart, Geoffroy told Edward that:

  the country of Normandy is one of the richest countries in the world
… and if you land there, no one will resist you … There you will find great towns that are not walled, so that your men will make so much booty that they will still be rich twenty years later.

  Edward didn’t even pause to ask what the local women looked like – he got together as many ships and men as he could and, on 5 July 1346, they all sailed for Normandy, landing a week later at La Hague, near Cherbourg, which (no doubt in commemoration of the event) France has more recently chosen as the site of a nuclear reprocessing plant.

  Edward’s army chevauchéed its bloody way across country, with Geoffroy d’Harcourt himself leading a raiding party of 500 men to do some personal plundering. At Caen, the inhabitants tried to defend themselves by climbing on to their rooftops and throwing down anything they could lay their hands on at the invaders. This so infuriated Edward that he ordered his men to burn the whole town and kill all the inhabitants. After three days of destruction and 3,000 deaths, the army had gathered so much booty that they had to send it downriver to the coast on barges. Soon, ships laden with jewellery, gold and silver plate, furs, richly embroidered clothing and, of course, hostages were sailing back to England.

  The French allege that Edward now planned to head for Paris and unseat Philippe VI. If this is true, then his mission failed. But it seems more likely that the English King just wanted to goad the battle-shy Frenchman into fighting. So, after burning the Parisian suburbs of Saint-Cloud and Saint-Germain-en-Laye (both of which, ironically, are now strongholds of the British ex-pat community), Edward turned northeast again and made for Ponthieu, a territory that Philippe had recently confiscated from him. And after crossing the river Somme, the Brits stopped near a small town called Crécy.

  Today, the site of the battle of Crécy probably looks much like it did in 1346, apart from a modern house built in one corner of the field, a bit of deforestation, and a small concrete toilet block by the car park. The windmill that stood at the crest of the muddy slope has been replaced by a wooden observation tower, from the top of which you can see … well, more sloping mud. Not that one should scoff at the mud – those are some of the most famous clods in English history.

  At the foot of the observation tower there is a rather battered plaque that gives the visitor a short, quintessentially French, description of the battle. It is, basically, a list of excuses for losing – ‘the [French] troops were blinded by the sun, which was shining again’,* it says, and compares the French cavalry, who had had a long ride to the battlefield, with ‘the [English] bowmen who were refreshed and well prepared’. The mass slaughter of France’s noblest knights is mentioned almost in passing – ‘the French cavalry encountered difficulties and was then defeated’. Yes, being hit by probably the most concentrated shower of arrows ever seen in Europe was just a ‘difficulty’.

  Down in Crécy itself, there is a wonderful little museum in the former village school, with an exhibition in two converted classrooms just opposite a line of five outside toilets – four loos with small doors for the children, one with a more discreet full-length door for the teachers.

  The guide unlocked each room for my visit – it was a sunny afternoon in the February mid-term break, but no French people seemed to be interested in a history outing – and told me that until 2004 there was no mention of the battle in the museum. It was an archaeological display featuring shards of pottery and lumps of rust that had been excavated from the castle mound. This was the only history that interested the people of the village, apart from the fact that Crécy had been the site of the first launch pads for Nazi V1 doodlebugs. Perhaps the British bombing that knocked out the V1s had blasted the medieval battle from their minds.

  Things changed, however, when the charity that runs the museum was taken over by an Englishman, who thought that a small commemoration of Edward III’s victory might be appropriate. And it is the Brits who have provided most of the exhibits – Crécy is a mecca for pretty well every archery club in England and when they come, often in period costume, they bring artefacts with them. Some they donate to the museum, others they leave rather undiplomatically on the battlefield – a metal-tipped arrow, an exact replica of those used in 1346, was recently found embedded near the observation tower, with ‘For Saint George and England’ carved into its shaft. It was removed ‘for safety reasons’.

  And the most impressive exhibit in the museum is the case containing similar replicas of the arrows. One thing is for sure – it can’t have been much fun being a French knight on the receiving end of one of these monsters. The shafts are a yard in length, as thick as a thumb, and tipped with metal spikes as long as an index finger. Some have straight, four-sided arrowheads – the ‘bodkins’ that were used to pierce armour – and others have wicked barbs that would slice into a horse’s flesh and send the charger careering away, mad with pain.

  At Crécy, there were around 7,000 English longbowmen, who could fire ten arrows a minute with deadly accuracy. In the first sixty seconds of battle, some 70,000 arrows would have fallen on Philippe VI’s front line of troops. It’s hardly surprising that things got off to a bad start for him.

  French roads can be hell in August

  Before going into the gory details of the battle, it might be a good idea to take in a little more background information.

  Edward III, whose troops had just finished their highly profitable chevauchée across the north of France, chose where the battle would take place, and quite understandably picked the best location for himself. His camp was at the top of a long slope, protected on one side by a river and on the other by a thick band of forest.

  Edward had a force of between 11,000 and 16,000 men, consisting of the aforementioned archers (both English and Welsh), around 2,000 armoured footsoldiers, 1,500 or so knifemen (that is, dagger-wielding murderers) and a few hundred knights on horseback. His army was much smaller than Philippe’s, but well trained, well positioned and, perhaps most important of all, blooded.

  The French had a massive force, with some 15,000 Genoese crossbowmen, 20,000 men-at-arms, several thousand knights on horseback, and untold numbers of peasants wielding rocks, scythes and anything they could find that would enable them to take revenge for the havoc wreaked on their farmland. Philippe also brought along musicians – mainly trumpeters and drummers – to scare the enemy. Even then, French music was known to terrify the English.

  It is true that Edward had time to prepare. He organized his troops in an attacking V formation, with men-at-arms in the centre and two wings of archers. The archers went out and dug small holes in the field, designed to put the horses off their stride, or even make them fall over. They also littered the ground with caltraps, large four-sided metal spikes designed to pierce hooves or footsoldiers’ boots. Divisions of the English army were commanded by veterans, including the Norman deserter, Geoffroy d’Harcourt, who was given the task of protecting Edward’s son, the sixteen-year-old Black Prince, about to see his first major action.

  After they had made their preparations, Edward III had wine and meat distributed to the troops (fresh supplies had been ‘liberated’ nearby), and then let them rest. The morning of Saturday, 26 August 1346 was, admittedly, quite a relaxing one for the Brits.

  The French, on the other hand, were characteristically late for the battle, and when Philippe VI got to Crécy, most of his army still hadn’t arrived. One of his advisers told him that there was no point fighting that day, because the troops would be tired and, besides, it had been raining and some of the knights had water trickling down inside their armour and it was just too, too uncomfortable. Philippe, who, as we have seen, was never averse to avoiding a battle if he could do so, gave the order to make camp.

  What Philippe didn’t realize, because summer holidays hadn’t yet been invented, was that the last weekend in August is absolute hell on French roads. Hordes of knights, footsoldiers and peasants were surging along all lanes leading to Crécy, and began to cause such a logjam that the front line of Philippe’s army, the Genoese crossbowmen, had
no choice but to advance to avoid the crush.

  These poor Italians (who obviously hadn’t been warned by their compatriot, the sailor Barbanera, about bad French organization) were the first victims of Edward’s arrow storm, and have been feeling the brunt of French resentment ever since.

  They marched across rain-soaked terrain, straight uphill towards the longbowmen, having to stand still for up to a minute every time they wanted to reload their cumbersome crossbows. What’s more, during their long trek to the battlefield, the Genoese had left their shields on the baggage carts in the rear, and hadn’t been able to go back and fetch them. The English and Welsh longbowmen saw the first wave of attackers lumbering forwards and simply slaughtered them, their arrows tearing through leather jerkins, piercing helmets and slicing holes in faces.

  The Genoese were mercenaries, and, just like Barbanera at the Battle of Sluys, seem to have had a collective bout of ‘sod this job’. They turned and fled – or tried to. There was nowhere to flee, because they were being followed by massed ranks of French cavalry.

  Some French sources forgive the Genoese – one chronicle goes as far as to say that they were handicapped because their crossbow strings had gone limp in the rain – but most are unforgiving. They report the fury of Philippe VI’s brother, Charles de Valois, who, seeing this unchivalrous retreat, ordered his cavalry to ‘stomp the rabble’. Some even accuse the Genoese of turning on the French, drawing knives and trying to cut horses’ sinews and knights’ throats. One thing is for certain, though: Edward’s archers were now firing at will on a helpless mob of panicking crossbowmen, stumbling horses and indignantly snorting French nobles. Philippe’s royal brother Charles himself rode at the crossbowmen, got tangled up in the mound of bodies and was probably killed within minutes of entering the battle.