Jonathan Sumption - The Hundred Years War

The rain fell in England throughout the summer of 1348 as, amid a landscape of mud and flattened grain, men celebrated a decade of war and three years of victory. In a succession of opulent tournaments in the spring at Reading, Bury St. Edmunds,

Perhaps they did not. When, at Windsor some six weeks later, Edward

Beyond his realm Edwards reputation had

Some of these men believed that Edward III had only to press his advantages in order to achieve complete victory. Yet, between the truce of Calais in September 1347 and the autumn of 1355, a period of eight

Behind this unaccustomed financial prudence lay Edward IIIs growing awareness of the limits of his realms resources and the difficulty

Honisoitquimalypense. The phrase, which was coined in about 1348, is more likely to have referred to Edwards war aims and their critics than to any ladys garter. Yet those aims were as enigmatic as his famous motto. All that can be said with confidence is that his ambitions were smaller than his claims. Edward had claimed the Crown of France since 1340, but whenever he was strong enough to bargain with his adversary on something like equal terms he was always ready to trade his claim for territory. How much territory depended on the military situation of the moment. The least that Edward was ever willing to accept was the whole of the duchy of Aquitaine as it had stood on the death of his grandfather in 1307. This meant not only the Bordelais, the Landes and the valley of the Adour and its tributaries, but also Saintonge, southern Prigord and the Agenais. If he could get it he wanted more: Quercy and the Rouergue; Poitou; the Limousin, which Edward I had briefly won and lost at the end of the thirteenth century; the provinces of Anjou and Maine in the western Loire; Brittany; even Normandy; in fact the whole tract of western France which the Angevin dynasty had ruled at the height of its power in the twelfth century. Moreover, the status of this territory was at least as important as its extent. Whatever Edward gained had to be held in free sovereignty, quit of the residual obligations to the French Crown which even the Angevins had acknowledged. This much is clear from the hints that Edwards ambassadors had let slip in the interminable and frustrating diplomatic conferences in the papal palace at Avignon in 1344 and from the loud assertions of Henry of Lancaster in the same place ten years later.

Even in the aftermath of Edwards greatest victories, in 1346 and 1356, it is unlikely that he expected to be King of France. The claim to the French throne was a bargaining counter, a device for achieving a satisfactory settlement when the time was right, and a means of causing embarrassment to the Valois Kings. Edward was enough of a realist to know this. But he also knew that he could not admit it. To acknowledge that his royal title was no more than the prelude to crude horse-trading would have destroyed its practical value. So the King said nothing, refusing to disclose what he wanted except at moments when it seemed attainable. The disasters of the 1330s had taught him patience, and experience brought him a better understanding of his enemies than they ever had of him. He rarely negotiated from a position of weakness, always preferring to temporise, to wait for another year, another campaign, another ally. He took refuge in truces, preserving his conquests, gaining time, gathering his limited resources for a better day.

In France, the failures of the past decade had been received with incomprehension, frustration and finally with unconcealed fury. When the Estates-General opened in Paris on 30 November 1347, the purpose of the meeting was to canvass opinion as to how the war should be prosecuted and to prepare the ground for further heavy taxation to pay for it. But when Philip VIs ministers had made their opening speeches and the assembled representatives withdrew to consider their opinions among themselves, there were loud mutterings and angry proposals for reforming the government. They hardly troubled to hide their feelings behind the courtly convention which attributed a kings every error to his advisers. They blamed the King himself.