A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [384]
Slowly, improbably, the tasks of ruling made a King of Charles VII, and better fortune brought better men into his service. The great bourgeois financier Jacques Coeur supplied a footing of money and credit, and siege artillery perfected by skilled gunners outside the ranks of chivalry broke the English hold on castles and towns with an efficacy unknown in the 14th century. Town after town opened its gates to the King’s forces, the more readily because Charles VII accomplished at last the fundamental military reform that had defeated his grandfather Charles V. In 1444–45 he succeeded in establishing a standing army, incorporating and at the same time eliminating the lawless companies, the greatest scourge of the time. Under the new law, twenty compagnies d’ordonnance of 100 lances each were established, with two archers, a squire, a page, and a valet de guerre for each lancer, making a total of 600 per company. Officered by the most reliable of the mercenary captains, who recruited their own men, the new companies were paid and provisioned by the crown by means of regular annual taxation, and were quartered at strategic points throughout France. By relentless effort, the remaining écorcheurs were disbanded. Among signs of change at mid-century, none was more important than this innovation of the standing army. What it signified was a principle of order where all before—plague, war, and schism–had been agents of disorder.
Recovery was aided by England’s fading will for conquest. Henry VI, as an adult, wanted peace. A feeble, uncertain King, he was the pawn of quarreling cabals among the barons and prelates. His competent uncle, the Duke of Bedford, was dead, leaving no one of outstanding status able to lead or terminate the war. By 1450 the French had recovered all of Normandy; towns surrendered as soon as the artillery train appeared. Even English Aquitaine had dwindled to little more than the environs of Bordeaux.
In 1453 at Castillon, the only remaining English foothold outside Bordeaux, the last battle was fought. Traditional roles were reversed, with foolhardy valor on the English side and bourgeois competence on the French. Castillon having surrendered to the French, Lord John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, set out from Bordeaux to recapture it. According to Basin, he was habitually given to “impetuous daring rather than deliberate assault,” and insisted, against the advice of an experienced lieutenant, on a frontal attack at the head of his mounted men-at-arms. The French, under the guidance of “a certain Jean Bureau, citizen of Paris, a man of small stature but of purpose and daring, particularly skilled and experienced in the use of [artillery],” had defended their camp by a ditch, a wall of earth reinforced by tree trunks, and “machines of war”—culverins, serpentines, arbalests, and various launchers of projectiles. Talbot and his knights threw themselves against these defenses and were repulsed by stones, lead, and missiles of every description. Talbot was killed and his army routed. Bordeaux itself fell soon after. Nothing was left of England’s continental empire except Calais and an empty claim to the French crown.
The longest war was over, though perhaps few were aware of it. After so many truces and renewals, who could have realized that the end had come? Without ceremony or cease-fire, treaty or settlement, the adventure and agony of five generations faded away. National identities were formed by its passage. The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity. The brotherhood of chivalry was severed, just as the internationalism of the universities, under the combined effect of war and schism, could not survive. Between England and France the