A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [61]
The defeat of French chivalry and of the supposedly most powerful sovereign in Europe started a train of reactions that were to grow more serious with time. Although it did not bring down the French monarchy nor bring it to terms, it did cause a crisis of confidence in the royal government, and a general resentment when the King once more had to resort to extraordinary taxation. From this date, too, began an erosion of belief in the nobles’ performance of their function.
Philip had neither the instinct for rule possessed by Philip the Fair and St. Louis, nor councillors capable of reforming the military and financial customs to meet the new dangers that had come upon them. The provincial estates whose consent was required for new taxes were reluctant, like most representative bodies, to recognize crisis until it was underfoot. Given an inadequate and obsolete system, the King had to devise substitutes like the sales tax—called maltôte because it was so hated—or the equally unpopular salt tax; or else he fell back on devaluing the coinage. In disruption of prices, rents, debts, and credit, the effect of this subterfuge for taxation was regularly disastrous. “And in the year 1343 Philip of Valois made 15 deniers worth three,” wrote one chronicler in sufficient comment.
Each time they were summoned to vote aids, the Estates voiced their loud discontent with fiscal abuses. Each time they made their grudging subsidies contingent on stated reforms, in the belief that better management by more honest men would enable the King once again to live of his own.
After Crécy and the loss of Calais, a new Estates General was summoned in 1347 to meet the King’s desperate need of money for defense. Armed forces and a fleet had to be reconstructed against the danger of renewed invasion. Sharpened by the shame of steady defeats, the Estates’ displeasure with the royal government was outspoken. “You should know,” they told the King, “how and by what counsel you have conducted your wars and how you, by bad counsel, have lost all and gained nothing.” If he had had good counsel, they said, no prince in the world “should have been able to do ill to you and your subjects.” They reminded him how he had gone to Crécy and Calais “in great company, at great cost and great expense [14th century speakers and writers had an affinity for double statements] and how you were treated shamefully and sent back scurvily and made to grant all manner of truces even while the enemy were in your kingdom.… And by such counsel have you been dishonored.” After this scolding, the Estates, acknowledging the need for defenses, promised subsidies, but on rather indefinite terms.
While besieging Calais, Edward still hoped to cement an alliance with Flanders by his daughter’s marriage to the young Count Louis de Male. The death at Crécy of the boy’s father, Count Louis de Nevers, removed the main obstacle. But fifteen-year-old Louis, “who had been ever nourished among the noble men of France,” would not agree and “ever he said he would not wed her whose father had slain his, though he might have half the whole realm of England.” When the Flemings saw that their lord was “too much French and evil counseled,” they put him in “courteous prison” until he should agree to accept their counsel, which greatly annoyed him, so that after several months in prison he gave the required promise. Released, he was allowed to go hawking by the river, but kept under such close surveillance lest he should steal away “that he could not piss without their