A Great and Glorious Adventure by Gordon Corrigan

Author:Gordon Corrigan [Corrigan, Gordon]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782390268
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Sir John Hawkwood. Painting by artist Paolo Uccello created in 1436, currently displayed at the Duomo in Florence, Italy. A highly competent military commander made redundant by Edward III after the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, he took mercenary service in Europe and died in service of Florence in 1394 aged about 75. The stirrup leathers are so long as to be no more than an aid for mounting.

7

THE FRENCH REVIVAL

The Treaty of Brétigny marked the culmination of Edward III’s twenty-four years of campaigning in France and the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years War. The king had stated his claim to the French crown aged twenty-four and he was now forty-seven. Poitiers was a great victory and told the world, if the world needed telling, that the English had moved from being backward amateurs in the waging of war to being the foremost practitioners of it. The combination of professional soldiers fighting on foot with archers on the flanks was unbeatable, and the mobility of English armies meant that the French could neither trap them, nor fight them other than on ground which favoured the English, nor starve them out – although sometimes the latter was a close-run thing. Certainly, the Black Prince had been unable to take Rheims or Paris in 1356, but he had accepted that fact rather than become bogged down in a lengthy siege which would have forced him to remain in one place long enough for the French to concentrate against him. Given their inability to defeat the English militarily, the French had little option but to sue for what terms they could get: the economy was in ruins, the government had broken down, the fields could not be tilled, the population yearned for peace at any price, and Jean would promise virtually anything to gain his freedom. From the English point of view, the gains were enormous: it was true that the claim to the French throne had been abandoned, but a third of the kingdom definitely assured was better than the whole of the kingdom as a possibility. No one, French or English, could have predicted that in a mere fifteen years almost all the English gains would be lost.

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