The old manorial and village ties were being dissipated. The pestilence slowly began to dissolve, therefore, the old certainties of status and position; the traditional network of communal relations was being supplanted by the exigencies of private interest. There is evidence that the remaining people, on the land, now worked harder; manor accounts show that output per man increased, and that women often took over jobs previously reserved for men. Their wages increased proportionally higher than those of men.
In this context we can place the various ordinances and measures taken by the Lords and Commons to discipline the thriving peasantry. Legislation was passed to forbid the wearing of costly clothes, and to impose restrictions on the daily diet. Women were to dress according to the social position of their fathers or husbands, and the wives of servants were not allowed to wear veils above 1 shilling in value. The wives of yeoman were not permitted to purchase silk veils, and agricultural labourers were not allowed to wear cloth priced at more than 12 pence a yard (0.91 metre). A worker’s gown and coat must ‘cover his privy members and buttocks’, and the toes of his shoes or boots ‘must not pass the length of two inches’ (5 centimetres). This was in remonstrance against the fashion for tight-fitting and figure-hugging clothing, as well as the taste for elongated shoes. At dinner or supper the lower classes were to enjoy only two courses. Laws were also passed that prohibited peasants from carrying weapons or indulging in disorderly games. Idleness, if proven, could be punished. Despite these maladroit exercises in social control, the feudal England of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was coming to an end. The English poet, John Gower, wrote at the close of the fourteenth century that:
The world is changed and overthrown
That it is well-nigh upside down
Compared with days of long ago.
There is no known response of Edward III to the pestilence time. He no doubt regarded it simply as a threat to the supply of soldiers for his army. All his thoughts were of war. An armistice was agreed after the fall of Calais that endured for six years before foundering on claims of bad faith. The king combined in warfare against the French with his eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, prince of Wales. The young man would also become known as the Black Prince, on account of his armour rather than his morals or disposition. Edward of Woodstock embarked upon what was effectively a reign of terror by which contingents of his army were despatched to ravage selected bands of French territory; ordered to pillage, burn or destroy whatever lay in their path, they were dedicated to wiping out the lives and the livelihoods of the people of France. They had not been summoned in a feudal call to arms; they were either forcibly conscripted or they were mercenaries paid by the day. Many of them were common thieves or murderers attracted to the prospects of spoil. In this pursuit they were eminently successful. The folk memory of English raids lived in the French national consciousness for many hundreds of years. Edward of Woodstock boasted that, in the space of seven weeks, he had laid waste 500 cities, towns and villages in the region of Bordeaux that had never known warfare in its history. It was a policy that had already been successfully deployed in Scotland.
The strategy of the French seems to have been to refrain from open confrontation but, in the autumn of 1356, the two armies came into contact; a French reconnaissance party stumbled upon the forces of the English. Battle could not be honourably delayed. The new king of France, John II, held a vast superiority in numbers with an army of 35,000 against the Black Prince’s 7,000; but his position, at Poitiers, was on rising ground covered with hedges and vineyards.
The location itself was not the principal difficulty. The English could always now claim the mastery of the field by the use of the longbow, and the Black Prince followed his father’s tactics at Crécy by using the archers as the main fighting force. The French cavalry were flung against the English line, only to be cut to pieces by a hail of arrows; the rest of the French knights then followed on foot, but they were also repulsed by the bows of yew. The average length of the bow was 6 feet (1.9 metres), and the arrows were 3 feet (0.91 metre) in length. The archer drew it to the ear, rather than to the chest, and with that momentum he could send it 250 yards (228 metres); he fired ten volleys each minute. This was a new age of warfare.
The French lines broke and dissolved; a retreat, and a general panic, ensued. In the confusion the French king and his son were captured by the English forces. It was a fresh calamity for the native army. King John was escorted to England by the Black Prince, and a truce of two years was agreed. When John was taken through the streets of London, it became a festive occasion for the citizens as the captive king was led in triumph to Westminster Hall where Edward III was waiting to greet him. It was a thoroughly medieval form of captivity. He was released on the surety of his son but, when his son escaped from England, he voluntarily returned to resume his life as a prisoner. He could not endure the dishonour of violating the terms of the agreement. Four months after his return to London, he died of an unknown disease. The king’s body was then sent back to France.
Edward resumed hostilities after the time of truce, but a campaign in the winter of 1359 did not supply the overwhelming victory for which he had prayed. He was, however, still in the ascendant. So in 1360 a treaty was reached in which Edward agreed to renounce his claim to the French throne in return for full sovereignty over Gascony, Calais, Guienne, Poitou and Ponthieu in northern France.
The Black Prince set up his own court at Bordeaux, the capital of the duchy of Guienne. All seemed to be set fair for English power across the Channel but in 1369 the new French king, Charles V, known as Charles the Wise, reasserted his feudal rights over all the territories of France. The Black Prince defied him, but all of his martial vaunts proved useless in the end. The English prince contracted dropsy and grew too weak to lead his forces into the field; there were in any case no set battles, the French king proceeding by raid, sortie and ambush. This reconquest of French land by stealth was eminently successful, and five years later Charles had taken back almost all of the duchies and provinces once claimed by the English. A truce was then formulated that continued until the time of Edward III’s death. All of Edward’s spoils, acquired at the expense of so much blood and suffering and cost, were one by one stripped from him. Only Calais and parts of Gascony were left. His quest for the French crown was ineffective and ineffectual. This continual see-saw, this claim and counter-claim, demonstrates the futility of the entire conflict. Its major consequences, as we have seen, were wholly domestic in the fashioning of an independent parliament and the formation of a national system of taxation.
Edward of Woodstock came back to England, where he lingered in ever declining health for six years. The morbidity of his symptoms served only to emphasize the sickness at the court itself, where the absence of any military success infected the atmosphere with rancour and suspicion. The ageing king no longer seemed to be wholly in command of affairs and was widely rumoured to be in thrall to his mistress, Alice Perrers; much of the government of the realm, therefore, devolved upon one of his younger sons, the duke of Lancaster known as John of Gaunt. Unlike his older brother, however, John was not widely popular. It was believed that a group of councillors around the king were exploiting the resources of the exchequer for their own ends. When a parliament was called in the spring of 1376, for the purpose of raising fresh taxation, the Commons refused to continue their deliberations until certain ‘evil counsellors’ had been removed from the king’s side.