Sumption - 1991;2009;

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, Lincoln and Eltham, teams of horsemen dressed in bulky padded armour and huge decorated pot-helmets rode into the lists to fight each other with blunt lances according to the stylised convention of lawyers, heralds and romancers. At Lichfield, where one of the most splendid of these pageants was held at the beginning of May, the King, disguised in the armour of one of his household knights, entered the lists with his companions dressed in uniform blue and white, their horses covered in blue velvet, gold plate and silk. Twenty-eight ladies of the court assisted them in the procession, wearing extravagant fancy dress of the same colours. Nearly 300 more watched among the supporters from the boundaries, peering at the spectacle through the eye-slits of fantastic decorated masks. Thus did they squander their wealth and deck out their bodies with the trappings of frippery, buffoonery and lust , an unfriendly observer wrote; not one of the men whom they were serving seemed to realise that their victories were a gift from the God of all bounty, the true benefactor of the chivalry of England.

Perhaps they did not. When, at Windsor some six weeks later, Edward IIIs court celebrated the churching of the Queen after the birth of her sixth son, the tournament teams included all the most famous of the Kings prisoners of war: the Count of Eu, Constable of France, carried off the prize; the lord of Tancarville, Chamberlain of Normandy who, like the Constable, had been captured at Caen as he tried to halt the advance of the English army through Normandy in July 1346; there was a handful of the survivors of the terrible slaughter of the French army at Crcy, a month later; David II, King of Scotland, taken at Nevilles Cross as the largest Scottish army to invade England for many years dispersed and fled around him; and Charles of Blois, claimant of

Beyond his realm Edwards reputation had never been higher. After years in which his campaigns had failed, his continental alliances had fallen apart, his debts had mounted and his pretensions had come to seem increasingly absurd, men watched in astonishment as the King overwhelmed the foremost military power of Europe. Petrarch was to proclaim the transformation of the English from the most timid of all the uncouth races into the supreme warriors of Europe. The protagonists in a German civil war offered Edward the Crown of Germany, which he had the good sense to refuse. The King of Castile, whose realm had moved in the orbit of France for more than a century, betrothed his heir to Edwards daughter Joan. Alfonsos ambassadors were pointed out among the courtiers attending Edwards great tournament at Lincoln in April 1348. Princes and noblemen of France, Germany and the Low Countries laid their disputes before him as, once, their forebears had laid them before Edward I at the height of his fame.

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 years, the English King fought no major campaign on the continent. He clung on to what he held. His commanders fought off raids and launched others of their own. He watched as the war became a formless mle fought between small forces of half-disciplined soldiers and punctuated by ill-observed truces. The reason was lack of money, the perennial problem which had limited all his enterprises. Walter Chiriton, the London financier whose syndicate had paid most of the cost of the siege of Calais, crashed in April 1349, a victim of the Kings duplicity and of his own dishonesty and greed. Edwards ministers turned to more orthodox methods of public finance as much from necessity as conviction. The debt generated by the campaigns of the mid-1340s was gradually paid off, a process which was still continuing well into the next decade. Chiritons affairs were wound up over a period of two years by his creditors and guarantors. The revenues of the customs had been mortgaged to Chiriton years before. Edward did not