Free The Hundred Years War by Desmond Seward

knew that to attack would be to invite another Crécy and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a truce. On 2 August he ordered his men to strike camp and set fire to their tents. The retreating French army could hear the lamentations of the doomed people of Calais as they rode away—its garrison threw the royal standard down into the ditch.
    By now even the richest of those inside Calais were dying from lack of food and the day after Philip’s withdrawal Jean de Vienne appeared on the battlements to shout that his garrison was ready to negotiate. He was told how the English King was so furious at the town’s resistance that its people would have to submit to being killed or ransomed as he chose. Eventually Edward was persuaded to limit his punishment to the six chief burgesses, who had to appear before him clad only in their shirts and with halters round their necks. ‘The King looked felly on them, for greatly he hated the people of Calais.’ Then he commanded their heads to be struck off. They were only saved by the intercession of the pregnant Queen Philippa who knelt before her husband in tears and pleaded, ‘Ah, gentle sir, since I passed the sea in great peril, I have desired nothing of you; therefore now I humbly require you in honour of the Son of the Virgin Mary and for the love of me that ye will take mercy of these six burgesses.’ Nonetheless Edward turned all the inhabitants out of the town in the clothes they had on and nothing else, later re-peopling it with English colonists who were assigned shops, inns and tenements. He gave many of the fine houses of the rich bourgeois to his friends.
    For two centuries Calais was to be the English gate into France—both entrepôt and bridgehead. A commentator has written, ‘The vital importance of Calais to the English is perhaps best realized if one were to imagine France in possession of Dover throughout the war, and the advantage this would have given her.’ The English soon felt passionately about Calais ; as Philip Contamine, the modern French historian, says, ‘For two centuries it remained a little piece of England on the continent,’ and it was even part of the diocese of Canterbury.
    Yet the town’s acquisition should not be seen in isolation, as the Crécy-Calais campaign was only one of the three interdependent operations of Edward III’s grand strategy. In the south-west the Earl of Derby was able to hold on to most of his gains ; he had been besieged at Aiguillon, but the Duke of Normandy raised the siege as soon as he heard of his father’s defeat and took his army north of the Loire. One of the reasons which may have made Philip abandon Calais was news of another English victory, in Brittany at La Roche Derrien where an English garrison was besieged. On 27 June 1347 Sir Thomas Dagworth wiped out the forces of Charles of Blois, who was captured and sent to join the King of Scots in the Tower of London. Only in Flanders did the English position grow weaker, the new Count (the strongly pro-French Louis de Male) managing to win over the towns.
    The Papacy deplored the misery caused by Edward’s campaigns. In 1347 Clement VI remonstrated with the King, writing to him of ‘the sadness of the poor, the children, the orphans, the widows, the wretched people who are plundered and enduring hunger, the destruction of churches and monasteries, the sacrilege in the theft of vessels and ornaments of Divine worship, the imprisonment and robbery of nuns’.
    At the Pope’s intervention England and France agreed to a truce, in September 1347. King Philip was in a desperate position. Not only had his armies been routed but he was without money. Yet he had to rebuild his strength without delay in case of another invasion. This proud and haughty man abased himself before the Estates when they met in Paris in November. Their spokesman told him, ‘You, by bad counsel, have lost everything and gained nothing,’ adding that the King had been ‘sent back scurvily’