Why Men Fought in the 100 Years War

In the middle decades of the fourteenth century, the English attitude to war underwent a profound change. In the century that followed the loss of most of the French territories of the Angevin kings, the English nobles and knights showed little enthusiasm for campaigning overseas: indeed, it was said at the time that the English knights did not give a bean for the whole of France. The refusal of the Earl of Norfolk to serve in Flanders in 1297 provoked the famous retort from Edward I - 'Aut ibis aut pendebis ' (You will go or you will hang), to which the Earl replied that he would neither go nor hang. The wars in France and Scotland in the reign of Edward I and Edward II gave rise to financial and constitutional strains and to conflict in parliament between the King and both nobility and commons. In terms of military success there was little to show for the expenditure of so much blood and treasure, and in Scotland the English were compelled by 1328 to abandon everything that Edward I and his son had fought for.

Thus at the accession of Edward III England enjoyed no very high reputation as a military power, and there was no sign of a will to war that might induce men to accept the financial and political problems that lengthy campaigning engendered. Indeed, the military campaigns of Edward III's early years were not notably successful or popular. His first campaign against the Scots, in the summer of 1327, almost ended in disaster and was followed by the humiliating Treaty of Edinburgh. The renewal of war in Scotland in 1332 produced some initial success, but by 1335 the pro-English forces had been dislodged and French mobilisation on behalf of the Scots presented a serious threat to English security. The raising of money, supplies and men for the Scottish wars provoked the same sort of discontent that had been voiced in Edward I's and Edward II's reigns. Even with the shift of emphasis in campaigning from Scotland to France after 1337, attitudes did not change immediately. Although there is some evidence that men were more ready to volunteer for service in France than in Scotland, the diplomacy and the military preparations of the opening phase of the Hundred Year's War imposed unprecedented financial strains on England, and underlay the political crisis of 1340-41. Indeed, it has been suggested that the weight of taxation between 1336 and 1341 was greater than at any other time in the middle ages, and serious unrest was perhaps only narrowly averted.

Yet six years later, the English victory over the French at Creacutecy generated an atmosphere of euphoria. The Commons thanked God for the great victory He had given their King, and they declared that all the money they had voted had been well spent. Henceforward, there could be little doubt about the popularity of the war with France. The victory of the Black Prince at Poitiers in 1356 and the capture of the French King himself raised enthusiasm to new heights, though it also created expectations about the fruits of victory which soon appeared unrealistic. Even the stalemate of the 1370s led to demands that the war should be properly, efficiently and economically conducted rather than abandoned. The frustration of English aims in France brought the government political unpopularity, but no widespread desire for peace. Indeed, Richard II's attempt to negotiate peace with France in the 1390s was regarded with suspicion, if not downright hostility, by important sections of opinion in England. Henry V found little difficulty in renewing and orchestrating popular enthusiasm for the war, and the victory at Agincourt in 1415 produced an atmosphere of euphoria and a loosening of the purse strings reminiscent of the aftermath of Crécy. Within a generation of Edward III's accession, England had become the foremost, and perhaps the most feared, military power in Europe; her reputation for military success outlived her final collapse in France between 1449 and 1453, and helps to explain the wariness with which the French kings of the latter part of the fifteenth century approached their dealings with the English.

For most of the period between 1337 and 1453, therefore, popular enthusiasm for the war with France can scarcely be doubted; but it requires explanation. To some extent, enthusiasm for the war was generated by royal propaganda, stressing the rightness of the King's cause, the danger to England and the English language from the aggressive ambitions of the French, and, in the Lancastrian phase of the war, the duty of the King and his subjects to maintain their lawfully acquired inheritance in France. Royal propaganda was accompanied by ceremonial which reinforced the military ethos of Edward III's court. In 1344, for instance,

The lord king... took a corporal oath that he himself... would begin a Round Table in the same manner and estate as the lord Arthur, formerly king of England, maintained it, namely to the number of 300 knights, a number always to be maintained, and he would support and cherish it according to his power... The Earls of Derby, Salisbury, Warwick, Arundel, Pembroke and Suffolk, and many other barons and knights, whom uprightness and fame put forward to be worthy of praise, made a like oath.

The following year the building of a 'round house' at Windsor was begun. The Order of the Garter, founded in 1349, united chivalric idealism to religious devotion, and was open even to 'simple knights' who by their 'proven worth' were fit to associate with the King and the great earls.

But propaganda and court ceremonial alone could not whip up and sustain support for war, persuade the Commons to finance military campaigns and induce men of all social ranks to take up arms. The excitement and glory of war, especially successful war, was for many a justification in itself. The upbringing and education of young men of the noble and knightly classes stressed the importance of military values and prowess in battle, while the literature that such men read presented a chivalric ideal which, however far from being realised in practice, made the profession of arms appear a noble calling. To young men in particular the glamour, idealism and patriotism of the king's wars had a strong appeal, and it is as well to remember the extent to which war in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a young man's business. The Black Prince was sixteen when he 'won his spurs' at Crecy; Edward III's companions in arms, chief amongst whom was Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Lancaster, were mostly in their twenties when the war began, and Henry V was twenty-eight when he won his victory at Agincourt. A recent study of the Gloucestershire gentry has suggested that for most men of the knightly class war was an occupation of youth, and those who survived assumed careers as administrators in the county in middle life when war no longer held the same appeal.

Throughout the war, however, part of the attraction and glamour of campaigning was the opportunity it offered for profit, and there can be little doubt that the profit motive was of even greater importance than propaganda and patriotism in persuading men to serve and in sustaining enthusiasm for war. In 1391, according to Froissart, the Duke of Gloucester argued that the prosperity of 'the poor knights and esquires of England' depended upon war, and in 1414 the Chancellor, Bishop Beaufort, used the prospect of profit as an inducement to persuade the Commons to grant a tax for the forthcoming campaign in Normandy. To a freebooter such as the Bascot de Mauleon, portrayed by Froissart, profit was the principal purpose of war. The Battle of Brignais, Froissart records the Bascot as saying, 'was a godsend to (his) companions, for they were very hard up. They all grew rich on the good prisoners and the towns and fortresses they took in the Archbishopric of Lyons and down the Rhone'. It has even been suggested that Henry V's order to kill the French prisoners at Agincourt was resisted or ignored because of the profits that the English expected to win from ransoming their captives.

Although the armies which Edward III and his successors put into the field were paid, wages were not the main financial attraction and source of wealth for those who enlisted. Rates of pay - 6d per day for a mounted archer, 3d for an infantryman in Edward III's reign - were not generous, and they did not increase to keep pace with the rise in agricultural labourers' wages in the years after the Black Death. Wages were commonly supplemented by a regardum , a 'reward' or bonus which most captains of retinues agreed to pay. Yet even when supplemented by the 'reward', wages in themselves could hardly be a reason for serving, especially when men might often have to wait weeks or months to receive what was due to them. The real source of profit was exploitation of the enemy, in the form of ransoms of prisoners, loot from captured towns, booty seized on the battlefield, and, especially in the fifteenth century, the systematic and long-term exploitation of land captured and settled by Englishmen in France.

Because the war took place, of course, on French territory, and because, until the last four years, the English won most of the major battles, there was little in the way of loss to offset the profits from warfare in France. Casualties in battle were probably not as low as has sometimes been supposed, and disease claimed as many, if not more, victims than enemy action; but in comparison with the other hazards that faced young men in the fourteenth and fifteenth century war was not an especially risky activity. Some English soldiers of all ranks were captured, imprisoned, and ransomed: the Earl of Pembroke, for example, was captured by the Castilians at the battle of La Rochelle in 1372 and ransomed for 120,000 francs. More pathetically, one Walter Ferrefort wrote, probably in 1375 or 1376, to his lord Sir John Strother from prison in St. Brieuc where he was being held 'with iron fetters on his feet and hands', beseeching him to arrange for his release, presumably by ransom. On balance, however, the traffic in ransoms was heavily in favour of the English. At Poitiers the English gained the biggest prize of all when they captured the French King, John II. His ransom was fixed at 3,000,000 gold crowns, the equivalent of £500,000 sterling, though rather less than half was eventually paid. In all, 1,974 captives were said to have been taken at Poitiers, including thirteen counts, five viscounts, and twenty-one bannerets. At Agincourt, where French casualities seem to have been substantially higher than at Poitiers, one chronicler estimated the number of prisoners at 700, excluding those killed by Henry V's order, and heading the list of captives were two dukes, Orleans and Bourbon, three counts, and the veteran Marshall of France the Sire de Boucicaut.

It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the traffic in ransoms acquired all the characteristics of a business, and gave rise to disputes, litigation, and sometimes violence. The Black Prince sold three French lords taken at Poitiers to his father for £20,000; Richard II granted the proceeds of the ransom of Jean de Bretagne, Count of Penthievre, to Robert de Vere, Duke of Ireland, with the intention that the money should contribute towards the cost of de Vere's expedition to Ireland; and a dispute about the ransom of the Count of Denia led to the famous episode in 1378 when Robert Hauley, one of the Count's captors, was murdered on the steps of the altar of Westminster Abbey.

It is much less easy to quantify the profits from loot and booty, though there can be little doubt about their importance. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham wrote that in 1348 there was no woman in England who did not have some booty from Caen, Calais, and other overseas towns. After Poitiers the English ransacked the French camp, and according to Froissart 'they found plate and gold and silver belts and precious jewels in chests crammed full of them, as well as excellent cloaks, so that they took no notice of armour, arms or equipment'. Lancaster's army returned from a raid into Poitou in 1346 'so laden with riches that they made no account of cloths unless they were of gold or silver, or trimmed with furs'. Walsingham probably exaggerated the extent to which booty from the war was distributed amongst the people of England. Even for the combatants, there could be no certainty of profit: the attraction was the possibility - the chance that the revolution of Fortune's wheel might bring riches - even though only a small number of those who enlisted enjoyed big winnings and a permanent improvement in their wealth and status.

With the profit motive so important a reason for enlistment, it is scarcely surprising that during Edward III's reign rules were established governing the sharing out of ransoms and booty. Each company had an official known as a butiner whose duty it was to control the division of the loot taken on campaign; and in the fifteenth century each garrison in Normandy had a controller attached to it who was responsible to the receiver-general of Normandy for ensuring that the share of ransoms and booty due to the king was handed over. By the 1360s a series of conventions governing the sharing out of profits had been evolved which, with a few exceptions, held good for the rest of the war. In the early stages of the war, some commanders, such as the Black Prince, expected one half of the gains of their subordinates; but by the 1360s the so-called rule of thirds had evolved, under which the soldier making the gain could expect to retain one third of its value, with a third going to the captain of his company and one third to the king. These rules for the division of plunder were sometimes written into the indentures under which men agreed to serve in a lord's retinue, an indication of the importance ordinary soldiers attached to the possibility of profit and of the need to ensure that the rules for the division of the spoils of war were clearly understood.

The principal sources of profit from the campaigns of the fourteenth century, therefore, were ransoms and booty; but in the fifteenth century the opportunity for profit from the war was greatly increased by the English occupation and settlement of Normandy and Maine. The conquest and systematic long-term exploitation of French territory had formed no part of Edward III's war aims. Englishmen had been encouraged to settle in Calais after the capture, and English garrisons in strongholds such as Cherbourg and Brest had created 'ransom districts' in the surrounding countryside, from which food, materials, and labour services were exacted to sustain the garrisons. But Edward III did not grant lands to Englishmen in those parts of France which recognised him as king: to grant lands in Normandy or Brittany to Englishmen would in all probability have jeopardised the diplomatic relationship with the Duke of Brittany and those Breton and Norman nobles who, for whatever reason, supported Edward III's claim to the French throne.

Henry V's approach to the question of land grants was quite different, however. In his propaganda at the start of his campaign in Normandy he stressed the ancient connection between England and Normandy: as one of the best contemporary narratives put it, Henry

prepared to cross to Normandy in order first to recover his duchy of Normandy, which belongs to him entirely by a right dating from the time of William the first, the Conqueror, even though now, as for a long time past, it is thus witheld, against God and all justice, by the violence of the French.

However, Henry's real motives in conquering Normandy were to secure the strategically placed Duchy as a base for further conquest in France, to create a vested interest in the English conquest by land grants to Englishmen, and to place in English hands the substantial resources of the Duchy, resources which might be used to pay for the war elsewhere in France and thus reduce the financial burden on the English taxpayer. Thus the grants of land in Normandy to English settlers had a military and a fiscal purpose, but they also proved a source of substantial profit to the English settlers, and much of this profit was repatriated. The late K.B. McFarlane showed how one captain and recipient of lands in Normandy, Sir John Fastolf, derived substantial wealth from the English occupation of Normandy and Maine, and set up an administrative system to handle the repatriation of his gains. The fifteenth-century writer William of Worcester, who resided in Fastolf's household from 1422 to 1435, said that at the Battle of Verneuil (August 17th, 1424) Fastolf 'won by the fortune of war about 20,000 marks'. From Henry V and Bedford he received the barony of Silly-Guillaume near Le Mans; lands in the Pays de Caux, ten castles, and other property in Normandy. Even in 1445, when English control over Normandy and Maine was weakening, he was still able to derive an income of £401 a year from his French lands.

It is impossible to say how typical Fastolf s career of service and profit in Normandy and Maine was. The sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland believed that many castles and houses in England had been built out of the profits of the French war. Sir William Bowes, for example, was in France with the Duke of Bedford for seventeen years and 'waxid riche', rich enough to build 'a fundamentis the manor place of Streatlam, Co. Durham'. Some lords on the other hand were absentees, drawing revenue from Normandy without contributing to its defence. Sir John Grey of Heton in Northumberland, for instance, was granted the conté of Tancarville in 1419 but was killed at Bauge two years later; his young son's guardians in England drew the profits from the conté but even when he came to manhood Henry played no part in the defence of Normandy. Conversely, other settlers, particularly men of lower social status, had no resources other than their Norman lands, and lost everything when Normandy fell in 1449-50: Oliver Kathersby esquire, lieutenant of the Captain of Domfront, was captured by the French when they retook the town in August 1450, eventually returned to England where 'he died of grief of heart at Westminster ... in very great poverty'.

The impact on English society of the wealth won from war has never been fully analysed, and indeed perhaps it cannot be. For it was essentially the lucky individual who gained; for each soldier who made money on the scale of Sir John Fastolf there were many who made nothing at all, and a few who lost everything by being captured themselves or, like Sir John Grey, did not live long enough to enjoy their profits. Some of the wealth won from war was invested in land: the Earl of Arundel's systematic purchase of manors in Surrey and Sussex in the 1370s probably represented the investment of the profits of war. Some money, as Leland realised, was spent on that most conspicious of all forms of consumption, building. Sir John de la Mare thought to have financed the building of Nunney Castle in Somerset out of wealth gained in France, and there is little doubt that Fastolf used his income from France in building his castle at Caistor-by-Yarmouth. Most conspicuously of all, Edward III spent some of the ransom of John II on building works at Windsor Castle, where the remodelled royal apartments represent one of the most enduring monuments to the wealth the English won from war in France. Some individuals greatly enhanced their social status by means of their gains in war and their rewards from a grateful king for their deeds of valour on the battlefield. The prospect of gain was a powerful incentive to serve in the king's wars, and did perhaps more than anything else to sustain popular support for the war; but when set beside the long-term effects of demographic decline and economic contraction it would be hard to show that the wealth won from war, however powerful a motivating force on individuals, had more than a marginal impact on English society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Anthony Tuck is Master of Collingwood College, University of Durham.