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Early in March 1347 the King and Queen of England with their daughter Isabelle came up from Calais to Flanders. The betrothal took place in great ceremony, the marriage contract was drawn, the wedding day fixed for the first week in April, and lavish gifts were prepared by the royal parents. Louis continued to go hawking daily by the river, making pretense that the marriage pleased him greatly, so that the Flemings relaxed their watch. But they misjudged their lord’s outward countenance, “for his inward courage was all French.”

In the same week that the marriage was to take place, he rode forth as usual with his falconer. Casting his hawk after a heron with the call “Hoie! Hoie!” he followed the flight until at some distance off he “dashed his spurs to his horse and galloped forth,” not stopping until he was over the border in France, where he joined King Philip and told him how with “great subtlety” he had escaped the English marriage. The King was overjoyed and speedily arranged Louis’ marriage with Margaret of Brabant, daughter of the Duke of Brabant, Flanders’ neighbor on the east, who was closely allied to France. The insult to the English crown was sharp, and doubtless sharper to the fifteen-year-old bride. Her feelings could not have been soothed by a song written in her name and, according to Jean de Venette, sung everywhere in France with the refrain, “J’ay failli à celui à qui je estoie donnée par amour” (I have lost him whose love I was given to be). Four years later she revenged herself on a different bridegroom by jilting him in her turn almost at the church door. Either because these aborted betrothals gave her a taste for independence, or because she had a character notoriously willful, Isabelle of England was still unmarried when she met Enguerrand de Coucy VII thirteen years later.

The capture of Calais a few months after the Flemish marital fiasco was the single great result of the campaign. Philip had assembled a relief force and started toward the city, but, hampered by lack of money and the losses after Crécy, turned away without fighting. Waiting for the relief that never came and cut off from food, the citizens of Calais held out until, reduced to eating rats and mice and even excrement, they were starved into surrender. Recently wounded, their captain, Jean de Vienne, bare-headed and holding his sword reversed in token of submission, rode through the gate to hand over the keys of the city to the English. Walking behind him barefoot in their shirts were the six richest burghers with halters around their necks to signify the victor’s right to hang them at will. In that somber scene, watched by the hollow-eyed, desolate survivors, a French cause was born: to retrieve Calais.

Exasperated by the prolonged resistance which had dragged him, against the medieval habit, through a winter’s siege, Edward was in a furious mood and would have hung the six burghers but for Queen Philippa’s moving plea for mercy. The drawn-out effort from August 1346 to August 1347 had soured his troops and exhausted his resources. Provisions, horses, arms, and reinforcements had to be brought from England, where the requisitioning of grain and cattle caused hardship, and the necessary mobilizing of ships wrecked commerce, reducing revenues from the wool-export tax. It has been estimated that some 32,000 combatants, plus the crews of ships and all the service troops needed for the siege, making a total of 60,000 to 80,000 men, were employed in the course of the Crécy-Calais campaign. The drain having reached its limits, Edward could not advance from his victory. The new foothold in France led nowhere but to acceptance of a truce running until April 1351.

If belligerents could make sober judgments during the course of a war, which they rarely can, the first ten years of the Anglo-French contest would have shown the English how inconclusive were their triumphs: to win a smashing naval victory, a smashing field victory, and a permanent foothold on the coast was still far