Free The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones by Ed West Page B

father, Edward the Third was a king of almost unparalleled strength and vigour. Great in every sense, he sent many men to their graves during his bloody 50-year reign that was wracked by plague and war. Afterwards his sons and their sons and grandsons would soak the kingdom in blood scrapping over his crown.
    But while he was still a mere child, his mother and Mortimer wrecked the finances of the Realm, Crown reserves decreasing from over £60,000 in 1326 to just £41 in 1330. That year the young prince decided to act; just 17, he led a small band of friends his age in capturing Mortimer at Nottingham Castle in a daring raid. The king had his mother’s lover hung, drawn and quartered in Tyburn, west of London, while the queen was banished to Norfolk, where she spent the rest of her life, although he continued to send her gifts of boar, love birds and wine. Wine and the king’s mother were the two great issues that would lead the country to war.
    England’s supply came from Gascony, the only part of France it still controlled after King John’s defeat, and the King of France wished to conquer it. Things were further complicated because Edward, through his mother, the sister of the last King of France, had a claim to the French throne. The French didn’t recognise female heirs, nor their children, and so the crown went to the king’s cousin, but Edward saw it as a pretext. 
    The English king was reluctant to press the claim until, according to one story, he was presented with a heron at a feast – a deliberate insult since it was considered the coward of the bird world – after which Edward’s response was to swear an oath to ‘cross the sea, my subjects with me… set the country ablaze and… await my mortal enemy, Philippe of Valois, who wears the fleur-de-lis… I renounce him, you can be sure of that, for I will make war on him by word and deed.’
    At first the English won many victories. At Sluys in 1340 they defeated a French navy twice as big; the battle left so many dead that it was said that if fish spoke, they could have learned French. Edward also defeated the Scottish king David II and kept him prisoner for 10 years, and took back ‘the Black Rood of Scotland’, supposedly a piece of Christ’s cross kept in a black case. (Although there was by one estimate enough of the ‘true cross’ circulating around Europe at the time to build a battleship.)
    The glorious way in which his campaign was viewed belies the fact that this kind of medieval warfare brought misery to the people whose homes stood in the soldiers’ path. The king could also show ruthlessness: after Edward took Calais he expelled all its inhabitants, and set up an English colony there, but he originally planned to massacre the population until his wife persuaded him to spare them.
    His greatest victory came at Crecy on August 26, 1346. Some 8,000 men, half of them archers, had sailed from Portsmouth to France, then marched through Normandy on their way to Paris. North of the capital they turned around to join Flemish allies, and Philippe VI trudged across the Somme to catch them. At Crecy-en-Ponthieu the English and Welsh destroyed the French cavalry and Genoese crossbowmen, the battle won with the Welsh longbow, which could fire off up to 10 arrows a minute, against the crossbow’s four.
    Following a hail of arrows at the enemy, Welsh knifemen armed with ‘misericordes’ daggers (‘mercy killers’), were sent in after dark to sneak under the horses and cut open their stomachs, then the Frenchmen above them. By the end of the day 1,500 French noblemen and 10,000 soldiers lay dead. Crecy saw the use of cannon and gunpowder, which the French had acquired from Italy. First used by the Chinese in the 8th century, this was to change medieval Europe and its feudal system based around the castle, impenetrable fortresses that could withstand rebellions or invading armies, but were powerless against the new technology.
    Gunpowder was not the