flank of France, for many of the Breton fortresses were put
into his hands. But he failed to win any decisive advantage
thereby over King Philip. It was not till 1346, when he adopted
the new policy of trusting nothing to allies, and striking at the
heart of France with a purely English army, that Edward found
the fortune of war turning in his favour.
In this year he landed in Normandy, where the English banner
had not been seen since the days of King John, and executed a
destructive raid through the duchy, and up the Seine,
till he almost reached the gates of Paris. This brought
out the king of France against him, with a mighty
Edward invades France.
Battle of Creçy.
host, before which Edward retreated northward,
apparently intending to retire to Flanders. But after crossing
the Somme he halted at Creçy, near Abbeville, and offered
battle to the pursuing enemy. He fought relying on
the tactics which had been tried against the Scots at
Dupplin and Halidon Hill, drawing up his army with
masses of dismounted men-at-arms flanked on either side by
archery. This array proved as effective against the disorderly
charges of the French noblesse as it had been against the heavy
columns of the Scottish pikemen. Fourteen times the squadrons
of King Philip came back to the charge; but mowed down by the
arrow-shower, they seldom could get to handstrokes with the
English knights, and at last rode off the field in disorder. This
astonishing victory over fourfold numbers was no mere chivalrous
feat of arms, it had the solid result of giving the victors a
foothold in northern France. For Edward took his
Capture of Calais.
army to beleaguer Calais, and after blockading it for
nearly a year forced it to surrender. King Philip,
after his experience at Creçy, refused to fight again in order to
raise the siege. From henceforth the English possessed a secure
landing-place in northern France, at the most convenient point
possible, immediately opposite Dover. They held it for over
two hundred years, to their own inestimable advantage in every
recurring war.
The years 1345–1347 saw the zenith of King Edward’s prosperity; in them fell not only his own triumphs at Creçy and Calais, but a victory at Auberoche in Périgord won by his cousin Henry of Lancaster, which restored many long-lost regions of Guienne to the English Battle of Neville’s Cross. suzerainty (Oct. 21, 1345), and another and more famous battle in the far north. At Neville’s Cross, near Durham, the lords of the Border defeated and captured David Bruce, king of Scotland (Oct. 17, 1346). The loss of their king and the destruction of a fine army took the heart out of the resistance of the Scots, who for many years to come could give their French allies little assistance.
In 1347 Edward made a short truce with King Philip: even
after his late victories he felt his strength much strained, his
treasury being empty, and his army exhausted by the
year-long siege of Calais. But he would have returned
to the struggle without delay had it not been for
Truce with France.
The Black Death.
the dreadful calamity of the “Black Death,” which
fell upon France and England, as upon all Europe, in the
years 1348–1349. The disease, on which the 14th century
bestowed this name, was the bubonic plague, still familiar in the
East. After devastating western Asia, it reached the Mediterranean
ports of Europe in 1347, and spread across the continent
in a few months. It was said that in France, Italy and
England a third of the population perished, and though this
estimate may be somewhat exaggerated, local records of unimpeachable
accuracy show that it cannot be very far from the
truth. The bishop’s registers of the diocese of Norwich show
that many parishes had three and some four successive vicars
admitted in eighteen months. In the manor rolls it is not uncommon
to find whole families swept away, so that no heir can
be detected to their holdings. Among the monastic orders, whose
crowded common life seems to have been particularly favourable
to the spread of the plague, there were cases where a whole community,
from the abbot down to the novices, perished. The
upper classes are said to have suffered less than the poor; but
the king’s daughter Joan and two archbishops of Canterbury
were among the victims. The long continuance of the visitation,
which as a rule took six or nine months to work out its virulence
in any particular spot, seems to have cowed and demoralized
society. Though it first spread from the ports of Bristol and
Weymouth in the summer of 1348, it had not finished its destruction
in northern England till 1350, and only spread into
Scotland in the summer of that year.
When the worst of the plague was over, and panic had died down, it was found that the social conditions of England had been considerably affected by the visitation. The condition of the realm had been stable and prosperous during the earlier years of Edward III., the drain on its resources Economic and social effects of the Black Death. caused by heavy war-taxation having been more than compensated by the increased wealth that arose from growing commerce and developing industries. The victory of Sluys, which gave England the command of the seas, had been a great landmark in the economic no less than in the naval history of this island. But the basis of society was shaken by the Black Death; the kingdom was still essentially an agricultural community, worked on the manorial system; and the sudden disappearance of a third of the labouring hands by which that system had been maintained threw everything into disorder. The landowners found thousands of the crofts on which their villeins had been wont to dwell vacant, and could not fill them with new tenants. Even if they exacted the full rigour of service from the survivors, they could not get their broad demesne lands properly tilled. The landless labourers, who might have been hired to supply the deficiency, were so reduced in numbers that they could command, if free competition prevailed, double and triple rates of payment, compared with their earnings in the days before the plague. Hence there arose, almost at once, a bitter strife between the lords of manors and the labouring class, both landholding and landless. The lords wished to exact all possible services from the former, and to pay only the old two or three pence a day to the latter. The villeins, as hard hit as their masters, resented the tightening of old duties, which in some cases had already been commuted for small money rents during the prosperous years preceding the plague. The landless men formed combinations, disputed with the landlords, and asked and often got twice as much as the old rates, despite of the murmurings of the employer.
After a short experience of these difficulties the king and council, whose sympathies were naturally with the landholders, issued an ordinance forbidding workmen of any kind to demand more than they had been wont to receive before 1348. This was followed up by the famous The Statute of Labourers. Statute of Labourers of 1351, which fixed rates for all wages practically identical with those of the times before the Black Death. Those workmen who refused to accept them were to be imprisoned, while employers who went behind the backs of their fellows and secretly paid higher sums were to be punished by heavy fines. Later additions to the statute were devised to terrorize the labourer, by adding stripes and branding to his punishment, if he still remained recalcitrant or absconded. And landowners were empowered to seize all vagrant able-bodied men, and to compel them to work at the statutory wages. As some compensation for the low pay of the workmen, parliament tried to bring down the price of commodities to their former level, for (like labour) all manufactured articles had gone up immensely in value.
Thirty years of friction followed, while the parliament and the ruling classes tried in a spasmodic way to enforce the statute, and the peasantry strove to evade it. It proved impossible to carry out the scheme; the labourers were too many and too cunning to be crushed. If driven over hard they absconded to the towns, where hands were needed as much as in the countryside, or migrated to districts where the statute was laxly administered. Gradually the landowners discovered that the only practical way out of their difficulties was to give up the old custom of working the manorial demesne by the forced labour of their villeins, and to cut it up into farms which were rented out to free tenants, and cultivated by them. In the course of two
