of the commercial as opposed to the landed interest. The latter,
hard hit by the manorial difficulties that followed the plague of
1348–1349, found their rents stationary or even diminishing,
while the price of the commodities from which the former
made their wealth had permanently risen. As to intellectual
vigour, the age that produced two minds of such marked originality
in different spheres as Wycliffe and Chaucer must not be
despised, even if it failed to carry out all the promise of the
13th century.
For a few years after the peace of 1360 the political influence
of Edward III. in western Europe seemed to be supreme. France,
prostrated by the results of the English raids, by
peasant revolts, and municipal and baronial turbulence,
did not begin to recover strength till the thriftless king
English
rule in France.
John had died (1364) and had been succeeded by his
capable if unchivalrous son Charles V. Yet the state of the
English dominions on the continent was not satisfactory; in
building up the vast duchy of Aquitaine Edward had made a
radical mistake. Instead of contenting himself with creating
a homogeneous Gascon state, which might have grown together
into a solid unit, he had annexed broad regions which had been
for a century and a half united to France, and had been entirely
assimilated to her. From the first Poitou, Quercy, Rouergue
and the Limousin chafed beneath the English yoke; the noblesse
in especial found the comparatively orderly and constitutional
governance to which they were subjected most intolerable.
They waited for the first opportunity to revolt, and meanwhile
murmured against every act of their duke, the prince of Wales,
though he did his best to behave as a gracious sovereign.
The younger Edward ended by losing his health and his wealth in an unnecessary war beyond the Pyrenees. He was persuaded by the exiled Peter the Cruel, king of Castile, to restore him to the throne which he had forfeited by his misgovernment. In 1367 he gathered a great army, The Black Prince in Spain. entered Castile, defeated the usurper Henry of Trastamara at the battle of Najera, and restored his ally. But Peter, when once re-established as king, forgot his obligations and left the prince burdened with the whole expense of the campaign. Edward left Spain with a discontented and unpaid army, and had himself contracted the seeds of a disease which was to leave him an invalid for the rest of his life. To pay his debts he was obliged to resort to heavy taxation in Aquitaine, which gave his discontented subjects in Poitou and the other outlying districts an excuse for the rebellion that they had been for some time meditating. In 1368 his greatest vassals, the counts of Armagnac, Périgord and Comminges, displayed their disloyalty by appealing to the king of France as their suzerain against the legality of Edward’s imposts. The French overlordship had been formally abolished by the treaty of 1360, so this appeal amounted to open rebellion. And when Charles V. accepted it, and cited Edward to appear before his parlement to answer the complaints of the counts, he was challenging England to renewed war. He found a preposterous excuse for repudiating the treaty by which he was bound, by declaring that some details had been omitted in its formal ratification.
The Hundred Years’ War, therefore, broke out again in 1369, after an interval of nine years. Edward III. assumed once more the title of king of France, while Charles V., in the usual style, declared that the whole duchy of Aquitaine had been forfeited for treason and rebellion on Renewal of the war with France. the part of its present holder. The second period of war, which was to last till the death of the English king, and for some years after, was destined to prove wholly disastrous to England. All the conditions had changed since 1360. Edward, though only in his fifty-seventh year, was entering into a premature and decrepit old age, in which he became the prey of unworthy favourites, male and female. The men of the 14th century, who commanded armies and executed coups d’état at eighteen, were often worn out by sixty. The guidance of the war should have fallen into the hands of his eldest son, the victor of Poitiers and Najera, but the younger Edward had never recovered from the fatigues of his Spanish campaign; his disease having developed into a form of dropsy, he had become a confirmed invalid and could no longer take the field. The charge of the military operations of the English armies had passed to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the king’s younger son, a prince far inferior in capacity to his father and brother. Though not destitute of good impulses Lancaster was hasty, improvident and obstinate; he was unfortunate in his choice of friends, for he allied himself to all his father’s unscrupulous dependents. He was destitute of military skill, and wrecked army after army by attempting hard tasks at inappropriate times and by mistaken methods. Despite of all checks and disasters he remained active, self-confident and ambitious, and, since he had acquired a complete control over his father, he had ample opportunity to mismanage the political and military affairs of England.
Lancaster’s strategy, in the early years of the renewed war,
consisted mainly of attempts to wear down the force of France
by devastating raids; he hoped to provoke the enemy
to battle by striking at the heart of his realm, but
never achieved his purpose. Warned by the disasters
Character
of the war.
of Creçy and Poitiers, Charles V. and his great captain
Bertrand du Guesclin would never commit themselves to an
engagement in the open field. They let the English invaders
pass by, garrisoning the towns but abandoning the countryside.
Since Lancaster, in his great circular raids, had never the leisure
to sit down to a siege—generally a matter of long months in the
14th century—he repeatedly crossed France leaving a train of
ruined villages behind him, but having accomplished nothing
else save the exhaustion of his own army. For the French
always followed him at a cautious distance, cutting off his
stragglers, and restricting the area of his ravages by keeping
flying columns all around his path. But while the duke was
executing useless marches across France, the outlying lands of
Aquitaine were falling away, one after the other, to the enemy.
The limit of the territory which still remained loyal was ever
shrinking, and what was once lost was hardly ever regained.
Almost the only reconquest made was that of the city of Limoges,
which was stormed in September 1370 by the troops of the
Black Prince, who rose from his sick-bed to strike his last blow at
the rebels. His success did almost as much harm as good to his
cause, for the deliberate sack of the city was carried out with
such ruthless severity that it roused wild wrath rather than
terror in the neighbouring regions. Next spring the prince
returned to England, feeling himself physically unable to administer
or defend his duchy any longer.
The greater part of Poitou, Quercy and Rouergue had been lost, and the English cause was everywhere losing ground, when a new danger was developed. Since Sluys the enemy had never disputed the command of the seas; but in 1372 a Spanish fleet joined the French, and destroyed English reverses. off La Rochelle a squadron which was bringing reinforcements for Guienne. The disaster was the direct result of the campaign of Najera—for Henry of Trastamara, who had long since dethroned and slain his brother Peter the Cruel, remained a consistent foe of England. From this date onward Franco-Spanish fleets were perpetually to be met not only in the Bay of Biscay but in the Channel; they made the voyage to Bordeaux unsafe, and often executed descents on the shores of Kent, Sussex, Devon and Cornwall. It was to no effect that, in the year after the battle of La Rochelle, Lancaster carried out the last, the most expensive, and the most fruitless of his great raids across France. He marched from Calais to Bordeaux, inflicted great misery on Picardy, Champagne and Berry, and left half his army dead by the way.
This did not prevent Bertrand du Guesclin from expelling from his dominions John of Brittany, the one ally whom King Edward possessed in France, or from pursuing a consistent career of petty conquest in the heart of Aquitaine. By 1374 little was left of the great possessions which the English had held beyond the Channel save Calais, and the coast slip from Bordeaux to Bayonne, which formed the only loyal part of the duchy of Guienne. Next year King Edward sued for peace—he failed to obtain it, finding the French terms too hard for acceptance—but
