A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [52]
The claim to the French crown gave an excuse of legality to any vassal of France whom Edward could recruit as an ally. If he, not Philip, were the rightful King of France, a vassal could transfer his homage on the ground that it had simply been misplaced. Allegiance in the 14th century was still given to a person, not a nation, and the great territorial lords of duchies and counties felt themselves free to make alliances as if almost autonomous. The Harcourts of Normandy and the Duke and other lords of Brittany, for various reasons, did just that. Edward’s claim through his mother gave him the one thing that made his venture feasible—support within France and a friendly beachhead. He never had to fight his way in. In either Normandy or Brittany this situation was to last forty years, and at Calais, captured after the Battle of Crécy, it was to outlast the Middle Ages.
In Brittany the war centered upon the relentless feud between two rival claimants to the dukedom and two parties of the population, one supported by France and the other by England. As a result, France was perpetually endangered by the access given to the enemy. The Breton seacoast was open to English ships, English garrisons were on Breton soil, Breton nobles were openly allied to Edward. Brittany was France’s Scotland, choleric, Celtic, stony, bred to opposition and resistance, and ready to use the English in its struggles against its overlord as the Scots used the French in theirs. Along its rockbound coast, in Michelet’s words, “two enemies, earth and sea, man and nature, meet in eternal conflict.” Storms throw up monstrous waves, fifty, sixty, eighty feet, whose foam flies as high as the church steeple. “Nature is atrocious here; so is man; they seem to understand each other.”
The contestants for the dukedom were two relentless extremists, a man and a woman. In 1341 the last Duke had died, leaving a half-brother, Jean Comte de Montfort, and a niece, Jeanne de Penthièvre, as rival heirs. Montfort was the candidate and ally of England while Jeanne’s claim was assumed by her husband, Charles de Blois, a nephew of Philip VI, who became the French candidate for the dukedom.
Given to the study of books as a child, Charles was an ascetic of exaggerated piety who sought spirituality by mortifying the flesh. Like Thomas à Becket, he wore unwashed clothes crawling with lice; he put pebbles in his shoes, slept on straw on the floor next to his wife’s bed, and after his death was found to have worn a coarse shirt of horsehair under his armor, and cords wound so tightly around his body that the knots dug into his flesh. By these practices a seeker of holiness expressed contempt for the world, self-abasement, and humility, although he often found himself guilty of a perverse pride in his excesses. Charles confessed every night so that he might not go to sleep in a state of sin. He fathered a bastard son called Jehan de Blois, but sins of the flesh did not have to be eschewed, only repented. He treated the humble with deference, it was said, met the complaints of the poor with goodness and justice, and refrained from too heavy taxes. Such was his reputation for saintliness that when he undertook to walk barefoot in the snow to a Breton shrine, the people covered his path with straw and blankets, but he took another way at a cost of bleeding and frozen feet, so that for weeks afterward he was unable to walk.
His piety detracted not at all from his ferocious pursuit of the dukedom. He stated his claim below the walls of Nantes by having his siege engines hurl into the city the heads of thirty captured partisans of Montfort. His successful siege of Quimper was followed by a ruthless massacre of 2,000 civilian inhabitants of all ages and both sexes. According to then current laws of war, the besieged could make terms if they