At a lavish royal banquet taking place in late May of 1357, Edward III of England was
accompanied by two of the most prestigious dinner guests in Medieval history.
On one side of him sat the captured King of Scotland - David II - and on the other was
France’s Valois King Jean II.
These priceless hostages were being displayed purposefully as an indicator of just how far
the English kingdom of only around four million people had come.
It had defeated the flower of Medieval Europe twice and now was in a position to win the
war.
Though chaos reigned in the now kingless France and Edward III believed his complete victory
to be only a matter of time, the old land of Charlemagne would start to recover under
the capable rule of Charles V. Welcome to our video on the Caroline phase of the Hundred
Years’ War.
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When the Black Prince removed his royal Valois prisoner from France, he also removed the
anchor which kept the ship of state afloat.
As military historian John Corrigan stated in his book ‘A Great and Glorious Adventure’
- ‘France was effectively in a state of civil war’.
The three years following Poitiers were some of the worst in French history.
Rabid discontent with the government spread like a plague among the nobility and Paris’
Third Estate even asserted its authority under the leadership of Étienne Marcel - a cloth
merchant.
This wasn’t the end of it.
Demobilised soldiers, deserters and common bandits from England, Gascony, France and
even further afield went renegade and formed so-called routiers - or ‘free companies’.
These bands of armed men roamed and ravaged the lawless countryside almost at will, serving
any who would pay them and sometimes even setting themselves up as robber barons in
their own right.
They would remain a problem for decades to come.
Even in lands where feudal control was maintained, it didn’t do France any good.
Extortionate ransom payments paid to the English for the swathe of highborn prisoners taken
at Poitiers prompted a ruthless tax hike, and this finally enflamed the peasants into
a revolt.
A horrific bloodletting known as the Jacquerie began in the Oise Valley, with peasants lynching
and murdering any noble they could get their hands on.
The uprising lasted for weeks before Charles of Navarre brutally put it down.
Threatened by another large assault by Edward III, the beleaguered Dauphin signed the Treaty
of Bretigny in October 1360 - giving the Plantagenets all of Aquitaine, Ponthieu and Calais in return
for the English king’s renunciation of his own claim to the French throne, in addition
to a £600,000 ransom for Jean’s return.
When two-thirds of the ransom had been paid, Jean II was allowed to return to France.
However, one of his imprisoned sons escaped contrary to the agreement, which prompted
the French king to voluntarily return to Edward’s captivity in exchange for the younger Valois.
He finally died there in 1364 and was succeeded as king by Charles V, whose accession was
accompanied by a defeat in Brittany at Auray which ended the succession war there.
To deal with the rampaging routiers and secure Castile as an ally in one move, the new king
gathered a large force of them under a Breton called Bertrand du Guesclin and sent them
to install a friendly contender on the Castilian throne in 1365 - Henry of Trastamara.
The deposed king - Pedro the Cruel, went to the Black Prince - who was now Duke of Aquitaine,
for help.
Realising the strategic benefit of having a friendly monarch in Castile1, the prince
gathered an army and marched against Henry, defeating him at Najera in 1367 and putting
Pedro back on the throne.
Unfortunately for him, this reign only lasted two more years before Henry assassinated his
rival and took the crown once again - a Francophile was now firmly on Castile’s throne.
By the time Edward returned to Bordeaux in the late 1360s, he was growing ill from a
disease contracted in Spain, and his direct rule in Aquitaine was creating discontent
among long-time English subjects, not only the lands gained at Bretigny.
To pay for his military campaigns and the court of Bordeaux, Aquitaine’s overlord
had been imposing harsh taxes for years, but when he declared yet another fouage - or ‘hearth
tax’ in 1368, some of the highest feudal lords in the realm2 revolted, petitioning
Charles V for assistance - it was the chance he had been waiting for.
Technically Charles no longer had sovereignty over Aquitaine, but used a loophole in the
Treaty of Bretigny as an excuse to receive the discontented nobles and again formally
confiscate English possessions in France during late 1369.
Despite attempted peace overtures by Edward III, Charles V was eager for revenge and the
war was back on.
The French attacked immediately, seizing the thinly defended counties of Ponthieu and Rouergue
with new tactics - smaller, mobile contingents of soldiers replaced the large, massed armies
which had been defeated at Crecy and Poitiers.
Charles V also commanded that his generals refuse battle with the English, wary of suffering
the bitter defeats of the 1340s and 1350s again.
As Aquitaine’s unwieldy new borders were being attacked, Edward III’s son John of
Gaunt launched a limited chevauchée in Normandy before withdrawing back to Calais not long
after.
In the following year - 1370, a notorious captain called Sir Robert Knolles was contracted
to lead 4,000 troops to do the same thing.
They set out on a devastating raid from Calais and from there devastated northern France
before approaching Paris.
Again, Charles V restrained his knights from meeting the English in open battle, and Knolles’
band moved further into France.
Realising he needed a military leader with whom he saw eye to eye, France’s Valois
king made the pragmatic Breton routier captain Bertrand de Guesclin - a formidable guerilla
leader who had previously served in Castile - the new Constable of France.
This new commander quickly made a base at Caen and raised a force to meet Knolles’
4,000, before marching after the English.
Errors in coordination and internal division among the raiding army resulted in disaster
in early December 1370 when Guesclin surprised and crushed it at the battles of Pontvallain
and Vaas, destroying the chevauchée before it could inflict any real damage on the king’s
reputation.
In the south, French forces under Charles V’s brother the Duke of Anjou continued
the English disaster by capturing Agenais, Limousin and Buzac, with many local lords
defecting from their Plantagenet overlords and going over to the Valois.
The now-ailing Black Prince was livid about the treachery of his lords and reacted violently
when the bishop of Limoges - his own son’s godfather - betrayed the town to the French.
He marched there, stormed into the city and brutally sacked it against all chivalric conventions,
supposedly not even sparing women and children who begged at his feet.
Sickly and demoralised by the death of his eldest son the Black Prince went home to England
in 1371 a tired man, leaving John of Gaunt in charge of Aquitaine.
After Poitou was wrenched away from the Plantagenet crown in 1372 Edward III realised more help
was needed, and so he sent the Earl of Pembroke3 to Aquitaine with 160 soldiers in 20 ships,
3 of which were larger battle-worthy vessels with archery towers on them.
As Pembroke was approaching La Rochelle harbour at the head of a coastal inlet, however, he
was confronted by a smaller fleet of Castilian combat galleys which were waiting for him
to arrive.
Castile’s ships launched their attack first and came into close quarters with the outnumbering
but outmatched English, inflicting a few losses among the non-combat craft.
Nevertheless, Pembroke’s meagre number of archers managed to do their job incredibly
well, laying down a precise rain of arrows on the Iberian ships.
At the same time, his spear-wielding men-at-arms managed to bravely fight off boarding attempts
by the enemy until dusk, when the fleets separated.
Pembroke sailed slightly out to sea and set anchor while the Castilians waited just off
La Rochelle until dawn the next day.
The English were nervous - they couldn’t escape because the enemy galleys were faster
than their own ships, nor could they pass through the treacherous shallow waters of
La Rochelle at low tide.
However, some Poitevin knights and their retinues did row out to join the english during the
night.
Pembroke kept his ships anchored, not expecting an enemy attack until high tide.
However, the Castilian ships used their shallower draught and closed on the English while they
were still immobile, spraying their decks and rigging with oil before lighting the fuel
with flaming arrows.
This was the end of the battle in a complete victory for France’s Iberian ally - many
English were burned alive, most of their ships were destroyed and Pembroke himself was taken
prisoner.
English naval superiority established at Sluys in 1340 met its end at La Rochelle, and a
planned expedition by Edward III himself was cancelled.
The next year, John of Gaunt led around 10,000 men out from Calais on the so-called ‘Great
Chevauchée’, laying waste to a massive swathe of land on his march all the way to
Bordeaux.
Nevertheless, the French did not engage the English in pitched battle, instead harrassing
John’s vulnerably supply lines and picking off any stragglers or raiding columns which
strayed too far.
This effectively limited the damage, and even though the Chevauchée pulled Valois soldiers
away from Aquitaine, by the close of 1373 almost all of the province was under French
control.
English territory in France had been reduced to its pre-war levels once again.
Rather than covering each small-scale military action over the next decade, we’ll cover
the crucial dynastic politics which begins to affect the course of the war from this
point on.
In the June of both 1376 and 1377, England suffered a great loss.
The bedridden Black Prince - formerly the great model of medieval chivalry, succumbed
first, followed the year after by his legendary father Edward III, who perished after a reign
of half a century, widely viewed as a golden age for the Kingdom of England.
The successor was Richard II - second son of the Black Prince.
Since he was still a minor however, true authority would be wielded by a regency council until
the king came of age.
Only days after Richard II’s coronation, the boy king’s realm was beset by a series
of lightning shipborne raids on its channel ports.
From Rye in the east to Plymouth in the west the French pirates, led by a talented knight
and admiral called Jean de Vienne, used their dominance of the sea to viciously plunder
and loot.
France’s political situation also changed when, in mid-September 1380, Charles V ‘the
Wise’ - France’s Valois monarch who had held his kingdom together in its darkest hour
and doggedly led the reconquest of Aquitaine, died of an illness.
He left the crown to the eleven-year-old Charles VI, who was also in his minority.
This situation gave the king’s four uncles - the so-called ‘princes of blood’, an
opportunity to form a regency council as well - the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, Bourbon and Burgundy4.
The Duke of Burgundy - Philip the Bold - was the younger son who was captured with Jean
II at Poitiers in 1356, and his dynasty would bring Burgundy to power in the fifteenth century.
Unfortunately for France, the regency also gave the dukes an opportunity to exploit their
positions to gain more power, and they squandered the carefully maintained treasury of Charles
V.5
The political situation had changed again in both kingdoms by the late 1380s as both
kings asserted their independent rule.
In France, Charles VI embarked on a personal rule, dismissing the Valois magnates from
his council in November of 1388 and replacing them with a group of his father’s old advisors
known as the ‘marmousets’.
His rule started well and the people began to call their king ‘the Beloved’, but
on the other side of the English Channel Richard II’s reign descended into a tyranny throughout
the last decade of the fourteenth-century.
While the king managed to forge a 28-year truce with the French, his internal problems
began to get worse.
This all came to a climax when John of Gaunt’s son - Henry Bolingbroke, was cast out of England
for ten years as a political threat.
The former didn’t react to his son’s exile, but when Gaunt died in 1399 and Richard II
both extended his banishment for life and confiscated his vast Duchy of Lancaster, the
Rubicon had been crossed.
Henry Bolingbroke returned and landed at the Humber estuary in June, and almost immediately
most of Richard’s nobles deserted him, unnerved by the king’s actions.
Richard - who had travelled to Ireland to put down a rebellion there, was deposed and
died a few months later in prison, while the House of Lancaster became the royal house
of England when its usurping patriarch came to the throne as Henry IV.
As the fifteenth century approached, it seemed as though internal strife in England and wise
rule in France would set the tone for another generation.
However, a single figure would turn that state of affairs onto its head and reignite the
English war effort - Henry V. Our story of the Hundred Years’ War will continue soon,
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