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By Root 885 0

of Blois, the daughter of the late Duke’s younger brother who had predeceased him; and by John, Count of Montfort, the Duke’s half-brother. Jeanne was the niece of Philip VI, who—with a certain irony, in view of his inheritance through an exclusively male line—recognized her as Duchess of Brittany. John of Montfort thereupon sailed to England, where he acknowledged Edward to be the rightful King of France; in return he was accepted as Duke of Brittany and was also created Earl of Richmond (Robert of Artois having recently been killed). There were sound economic and strategic reasons why Edward should intervene in this struggle. On their way to Bordeaux, or to Portugal and Castile, the little English ships dared not cross the stormy Bay of Biscay but hugged the coast; it was essential that they should be able to put in at Breton ports and sail without fear of Breton privateers. A friendly Duke had to reign at Rennes if the Gascon sea-route was to be guaranteed, just as later British communications with India depended on a biddable Cairo and a biddable Aden.

A vicious little war ensued in Brittany, the lesser nobles and the peasants of the Celtic west rallying to John of Montfort, the great lords and French-speaking bourgeois of the east supporting Jeanne of Blois. In November 1341 Count John was besieged in Nantes by the French, who catapulted the heads of thirty of his knights over the walls which so terrified the defenders that they surrendered, John being taken prisoner to Paris. However, his gallant Countess kept his cause alive. She was saved by the arrival of Edward III in person in the autumn of 1342, bringing 12,000 men with him. He launched a savage chevauchée, and laid siege to the duchy’s three great cities—Rennes, Nantes and Vannes. King Philip’s son and heir, John, Duke of Normandy, marched to relieve them with a host which outnumbered the English army by at least two to one. Edward thereupon copied Philip’s precedent by digging in at a strong position. Autumn turned into a wet midwinter and soon both camps were waterlogged. In these dismal conditions Papal envoys were able to negotiate a truce in January 1343. The King returned to England, but he left troops behind him in well-chosen fortresses, under the redoubtable Sir Thomas Dagworth, to keep the Montfort cause alive. When John of Montfort died in 1345, his young son took refuge at the English court where he was brought up; eventually he regained his duchy. In consequence Edward could always count on finding support in Brittany.

In 1334 Pope Clement VI succeeded in arranging a peace conference between the English and the French. It took place in the autumn at Avignon. The English tried to discuss Edward’s claim to the throne of France, but the French refused even to consider the matter. Then the English asked for compensation in the shape of an enlarged Guyenne, free of any obligations to the French King and in full sovereignty. Indeed Edward may well have been ready to settle for this. But Philip was not prepared to give away a single foot of French soil—his final offer was a slight enlargement of Guyenne’s frontiers on condition that the duchy was held not by Edward but by one of Edward’s sons as a vassal of France. Philip VI believed that he was negotiating from a position of strength.

Edward now adopted a new strategy, attacking in France on three fronts with comparatively small armies. His interim objective may have been to strengthen his position in Guyenne while reinforcing the alliance with Flanders. In the spring of 1345 his Plantagenet cousin, Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Derby and future Duke of Lancaster, assisted by Sir Hugh Hastings, struck in upper Gascony. He caught the French off guard, capturing Bergerac and many other towns and castles; the latter included La Réole, which the English had lost in 1325 and which only fell after a determined siege of nine weeks. This stronghold, high above the river Gironde and forty miles from Bordeaux, enabled the English to regain the long-disputed Agenais. They also penetrated as far north as Angoulême,