The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [47]
From Calais in 1377 the Deputy Sir Hugh Calveley raided Boulogne, burning ships and plundering. When the fortress of Marke in the Calais march fell to the French he retook it the same day. In 1378 the King of Navarre returned to the scene: he seems to have offered John of Gaunt the County of Evreux in return for the hand of his daughter Catherine. He also had an interesting scheme for poisoning Charles V (he was credited with having recently rid himself of an irritating cardinal by this method), a plot which was discovered when two of his agents were arrested. The Constable at once invaded Navarre’s last possessions in Normandy. But before fleeing to his Pyrenean kingdom, Charles the Bad managed to sell Cherbourg to the English, who rushed in a garrison.
In Normandy, Brittany and the Pas-de-Calais the ordinary people had continued to suffer from English garrisons. In 1371 1 that of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in the Contentin held 263 parishes in thrall, extracting over £13 from each. The English were greedier in Brittany; at Brest in 1384 they were to mulct every one of 160 parishes of nearly £40, and they had been equally rapacious at Vannes, Ploermel and Becherel. During the peace which followed Brétigny, and in the midst of all the reverses of the French reconquest, English troops, as well as blackmailing miserable peasants, also contrived to make a fat profit from ransoms. Sometimes enormous sums were realized. In 1365 Sir Matthew Gurney obtained nearly £5,000 for Jean de Laval, and in 1375 Lord Basset of Drayton got £2,000 for a prisoner. There were other ways in which a soldier might make money in addition to ransoms and loot. In 1375 the English garrison at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte were paid £9,000 to surrender their fortress and march off peacefully. (Cherbourg replaced Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte as the scourge of Normandy.)
So long as men gave good service to the English King’s armies, the most deplorable conduct was tolerated. Sir Robert Knollys, said by Jean le Bel to have been one of the first routiers, was the principal captain of the Grand Company in 1358 and made 100,000 gold crowns (nearly £17,000) during that one year alone, when he controlled forty castles in the Loire valley-where the peasants were credited with throwing themselves into the river out of terror at the mere mention of his name-sacked the suburbs of Orleans, and threatened the Pope himself at Avignon. Charred gables were called ‘Knollys’s mitres’. Yet Edward III was so pleased with the damage inflicted by Sir Robert on the French that he gave him an official pardon. Later he became one of the King’s principal generals, leading as has been seen the chevauchée of 1370 and acting as chief-of-staff in another in 1380. (In 1370 he was paid the princely sum of 8s per day, or £146 a year.) Sir Robert amassed ‘regal wealth’ and built a palatial house in London as well as buying rich estates. He died full of years and honour in 1407. Even Sir John Chandos’s respected friend, Sir Hugh Calveley, led 2,000 routiers to ravage Armagnac in the late 1360s ; like Knollys, who was his half-brother, Calveley had to seek pardon for felony. Later he was Deputy Lieutenant of Calais and then Governor of Brest.
In 1376 the Commons petitioned the King to give a pardon like that of Knollys’ to Sir Nicholas Hawkwood, who was the most famous of all the ‘rutters’. The son of an Essex tanner and said to have been a London tailor in his youth, Hawkwood was pressed into Edward’s army as an ordinary archer,