The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [11]
What makes the 1339 campaign of particular interest is the misery inflicted on French non-combatants. It was the custom of medieval warfare to wreak as much damage as possible on both towns and country in order to weaken the enemy government. The English had acquired nasty habits in their Scottish wars and during the campaign Edward wrote to the young Prince of Wales how his men had burnt and plundered ‘so that the country is quite laid waste of corn, of cattle and of any other goods’. Every little hamlet went up in flames, each house being looted and then put to the torch. Neither abbeys and churches nor hospitals were spared. Hundreds of civilians—men, women and children, priests, bourgeois and peasants—were killed while thousands fled starving to the fortified towns. The English King saw the effectiveness of ‘total war’ in such a rich and thickly populated land; henceforth the chevauchée, a raid which systematically devastated enemy territory, was used as much as possible in the hope of making the French sick of war. (Exactly the same principle inspired General Sherman’s March through Georgia four centuries later.) The English were obviously satisfied with what they had achieved on this occasion. One of Edward’s advisers, the great judge Sir Geoffrey Scrope, took a French cardinal ‘up a great and high tower, showing him the whole countryside towards Paris for a distance of fifteen miles burning in every place’. ‘Sir,’ asked Scrope, ‘does it not seem to you that the silken thread encompassing France is broken?’ At this, the cardinal fell down ‘as if dead, stretched out on the roof of the tower from fear and grief’.
Some more detached observers were equally horrified. Pope Benedict XII sent 6,000 gold florins to Paris for the relief of the refugees. The Archdeacon of Eu, who distributed the Papal bounty, left a report which speaks of 7,879 victims, mostly destitute, whom he relieved (though he does not give any estimate of the number of dead); nearly all were simple peasants or artisans. He tells of destruction by fire in 174 parishes, many of which had been entirely demolished together with their parish churches.
Edward now found himself even more alarmingly short of money than usual. After buying with his last remaining cash the alliance with Jacob van Artevelde, the King returned to England to try and find new funds, though he had to leave his children and pregnant wife at Ghent as surety for his debts. (His third son to survive, born at Ghent in his absence, was consequently named ‘John of Gaunt’.) The great historian of the Hundred Years War, Professor Edouard Perroy, writes how at this time, ‘anyone except Edward III would have been discouraged’.
Before leaving for England, Edward held an imposing assembly at Ghent on 6 February 1340. Here he publicly assumed the arms of France, quartering the golden lilies on their blue ground with his own gold lions on red, and styled himself King of France. (He is said to have done so on the advice of Jacob van Artevelde, who pointed out that by doing this he would become not merely the ally of the gallant Flemish pikemen but their King.) In addition Edward issued a cunningly worded proclamation addressed not only to the French lords but also to the common people of France ; he promised to ‘revive the good laws and customs which were in force in the time of St Louis our ancestor’, to reduce taxation and to stop debasing the coinage, and to be ‘guided by the counsel and advice of the peers, prelates, magnates and faithful vassals of the kingdom’. He was posing as a champion of local independence against