The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [3]
During the assembly which Philip had summoned to Paris on the death of Charles IV, two English envoys had demanded the crown for Queen Isabel. There was only one instance in France of a female claim being set aside and that was very recent—when John I had died in 1316, after ten days of life and kingship, his sister had been excluded from the succession by an assembly. They were unable to produce any convincing legal argument in support of their decision, but the girl’s guardian conveniently renounced her claims on her behalf. The English spokesman, Bishop Adam Orleton of Worcester, argued a plausible case ; that the precedent of 1316 was no true precedent as no woman had ever been legally excluded from wearing the crown of France, even if there was no instance of a female sovereign in French history; and that it was undeniable that every feudal fief in the land, not excepting the mightest duchy, could be inherited by a woman. (The Salic Law of the ancient Franks, which forbade inheritance by a woman or through the female line, was not disinterred from the mists of time until much later.) But the assembly ‘put clean out’ Queen Isabel of England. According to Froissart they ‘maintained that the realm of France was of so great noblesse that it ought not by succession to fall into a woman’s hand’. They had had the opportunity to see Isabel and her appalling lover—with whom Orleton was known to be hand-in-glove—when they had visited the French court in 1326, and had no wish to be ruled by them.
When the young King of England won control of his kingdom, it was only as a leader of dissatisfied barons. He was far too weak to challenge Philip VI. Indeed, at this date Edward III merely hoped to retain his Duchy of Aquitaine (or Guyenne) which since 1259 the Kings of England had held as feudatories of the Kings of France. This last fragment of Henry II’s Angevin empire consisted of a long, narrow strip of coastal territory, stretching from just south of La Rochelle to Bayonne and the Pyrenees—the western parts of Guenne proper, the Saintonge and Gascony—defended by a string of frontier bastides, carefully sited and strongly fortified town colonies.
However, Guyenne was in no sense a colony. Though the highest administrative posts were usually held by Englishmen—those of the Seneschal of Guyenne, the Constable and Mayor of Bordeaux, and the Seneschal of the Saintonge ; and those of a number of under-seneschals and of the captains of most fortresses—in all these amounted to perhaps 200. The majority of officials were locally recruited. No Englishman was ever Archbishop of Bordeaux, and though there were plenty of English merchants there were few English landowners. All the important seigneurs were Guyennois, some of whom also had estates in England.
The duchy was an important source of income for Edward. There were royal toll-bridges along the entire Garonne which extracted a rich yield in taxes, for wine was to Guyenne what wool was to England; sometimes (as in 1306—1307) the revenue from Guyenne was larger than that from England. Bordeaux, the ducal capital with a population of 30,000, owed its prosperity to the English connection; wine flowed into England in such quantities as to make it cheap for all save the poorest—the fourteenth-century English drank several times more claret per head than they do today. Not only Bordeaux but Bayonne (which built the ships) and many other towns benefited from the wine trade, as did countless seigneurs who owned vineyards, for claret was then a blended wine which made use of such far-off vintages as those of Gaillac or Cahors. Indeed there was not a sufficient market at home for all their produce. On the other hand Guyenne depended on England for grain—in 1334 it took 50,000 quarters—and bought English wool, leather, resin and salt. The duchy’s language was not really French