THE BATTLE OF SLUYS 1340 - PART ONE
THE BATTLE OF SLUYS 1340
Any mention of the Hundred Year War leads to an instant recollection of the great English victories of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, still written about and still visited on battlefield tours. But it was another battle, now almost forgotten, that made those victories possible. Sluys, in 1340, during the opening stages of the war, was a battle that the French should have and could have won. Had they done so the war would never have happened and we would now be speaking French, eating horses and paying rather less for our wine. Sluys was a tipping point, the only battle of the war that could so easily have gone the other way and would have changed history decisively if it had.
Phillip IV of France ‘the Fair’ died in 1314, and as the French monarchy inherited by male primogeniture each of his three sons ruled after him in turn, but none produced a legitimate heir. When Phillip’s third son, Charles IV, died of dysentery in 1328 the Capetian line of French kings, who had ruled France for 341 years, came to an end. Phillip also had a daughter, however, Isabella, who had married Edward II of England. Although Edward was almost certainly homosexual[*], who preferred men to women as bed companions, he did fulfil his dynastic duty by fathering two sons and two daughters, but he had become increasingly unpopular and autocratic. Isabella, resentful of her husband’s preferment of his male friend to her, fled abroad with her young eldest son, the heir to the throne. While there she took as her lover Sir Roger Mortimer, also a refugee from the king’s disfavour. Then in 1327 she and Mortimer returned to England with a tiny army and with the support of the bulk of the population, and more important the nobility, they deposed Edward II in favour of his son, Edward III. When the last Capetian king of France died in 1328, his nearest male relative, therefore, was the sixteen year old Edward III, a grandson of Phillip the Fair and nephew of the last three French kings. French custom dictated that a woman could not ascend to the throne (although there were Capetian queens-regnant in other domains, notably Bohemia) but Isabella maintained that the claim could pass through her to her son, and she advanced Edward’s claim to the throne of France.
The French had speedily appointed a regent, Phillip of Valois, who was but a nephew of Phillip the Fair, but he was a grown man and a rich and powerful magnate, whom the French preferred to an unknown foreigner. Charles IV’s queen was pregnant when he died, but the child was stillborn and so Phillip of Valois was proclaimed king. It was this English claim to the French throne as of right, only given up in 1802, that was the catalyst for the series of battles and campaigns known as the Hundred Years War, and which would lead directly to the Battle of Sluys. Initially there was little that the English could do about the claim, and in any case young Edward was still in thrall to his mother and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. Increasingly the rule of Isabella as regent with Mortimer as the real power in the kingdom, came to be accused of the very abuses for which they had overthrown Edward II, and in 1330 a palace coup, probably orchestrated by the king, arrested Mortimer, who was accused of treason and hanged, and sent Isabella into comfortable retirement. Now the eighteen year old Edward III could rule in his own right, and was determined to pursue the claim to the French throne. Although this claim was the ostensible reason for the Hundred Years War, a series of campaigns that started in 1337 and went on until 1453, there were other more practical reasons.
William of Normandy conquered England from 1066 onwards and the new Norman nobility now held lands and titles in Europe as well as in England, and many of those former were held as feudatories of the king of France. Inevitably this led to conflicts of interests when England and France were in dispute. Henry II had come to the English throne in 1154 and was master not only of England but of Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine too, the latter acquired when in 1152 he had married Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine. This vast English empire in France was not to last, however, for the argument was always whether English kings and English magnates owned their lands and titles outright, or as subjects of the king of France. By the death of King John in 1216 all had been lost except Aquitaine, and that was under constant pressure. Not only did England claim the French throne, but she also wanted to regain those lost lands. English kings were constantly reminded of the Scottish alliance with France, which dated back to the time of Edward I ‘The Hammer of the Scots’ and meant that England’s back door, the border with Scotland, was always vulnerable. France was concerned by English mercantile ambitions and particularly by her increasing influence in Flanders, regarded by the French as a client state.
In May 1337 Phillip of France declared Aquitaine forfeit to the French crown, due, he claimed, to Edward of England’s refusal to acknowledge that he held it as Phillip’s vassal. Edward’s response was to mobilise an army and embark for France. The Hundred Years War had begun.
The war was to enhance and develop the English way of waging war, a process that was already well in train by the early fourteenth century. After the conquest of 1066 the Normans grafted their military system onto that of the Anglo Saxons. A form of feudalism, it meant that the king owned all the land, which he granted to his followers, who in turn owed him military service when required. The landholder was required to present himself properly mounted and equipped with a number of retainers depending upon the size of his holdings, ready to go on campaign for forty days, after which he could return home. In support was the militia, the successor to the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, which was the infantry of the common people half trained and ill armed. They too could be called out for forty days, but not during the planting season, and they had to be home for the harvest. This system was all very well for dynastic squabbles and border raids, but quite unsuitable for long sieges, or for expeditions abroad, which increasingly English kings wanted to mount. In the 1330s England was in the middle of a revolution in her way of waging war.
The term revolution is over-used and frequently misused. It is very rarely the product of a light-bulb moment, nor of one individual, nor of one nation or even one continent. Sometimes the revolution is in ideas, sometimes in technology, sometimes in a combination of factors. A true revolution is more often the product of ideas, experiments and inventions which may occur over a number of years in a number of areas. The revolution happens when all those ideas and devices are brought together to produce something that is so new that it makes everything that has gone before obsolete. In military affairs the chariot, gunpowder, barbed wire, submarines, dreadnaughts, military aviation and nuclear weapons were game changers, and while there may have been other developments that revolutionised the waging of war, they have been a lot fewer than popular imagination might suppose. In England the revolution occurred over a period of about a hundred years, beginning with Edward I and reaching its apogee with the army of the Black Prince in the 1340s. The English revolution rested on three legs. The first leg was professionalism.
During Edward I’s Welsh and Scottish wars both the king and some of his magnates began to recruit ‘knights for pay’ – that is men who contracted to serve for a laid down length of time for a specific rate of pay. This seems obvious today when the British army is made up entirely of men who voluntarily enlist for a specific period for a laid down salary, but it was not obvious in the thirteenth century. Since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century no one had professional armies: they may have had a handful of royal guards, like Harold of England’s House Carls, but otherwise war was waged by feudal array or by men conscripted when needed – the peasant put down his hoe and picked up a spear when called out. Professional armies were – and are – expensive. If the pay is not attractive men will not join, and if conditions of service are not good they will not stay. The advantages of employing paid volunteers were of course enormous. Rather than turning up for forty days and going home again, professionals went where the king wanted them to go and could be trained to use standardised weapons and fight as a team. As the system of professionalism developed and more and more of England’s soldiers became career warriors, a standard uniform appeared, so men knew exactly who was on their side and who was not. Initially this might simply be an arm band or a cockade worn in the helmet but as time went on it became a laid down pattern of armour or a jerkin of a specified cut and colour and a helmet issued to regulation design. A code of military law was devised, as it became obvious that the civil code was not designed to deal with military offences such as desertion or disobedience to orders.
The second leg of the English military revolution stemmed directly from the first: professional armies are expensive, therefore they are small, therefore technology is used as a force multiplier. Put simply, if you are probably always going to be outnumbered on the battlefield you need to find some means of compensating for that, and in the case of the English it was the longbow. The longbow was England’s weapon of mass destruction: consistently ignored by England’s enemies, they were consistently massacred by it. Men had used bows and arrows for millennia and the Normans had archers at Hastings, but these men used short bows, a useful adjunct but not a battle winning weapon. The longbow was a very different proposition. As tall as the man who wielded it with a pull of anything up to 100 pounds and in some cases even more, it could propel a yard long arrow to a range of 300 yards, and go through an inch of oak at 100 yards. With a variety of arrowheads, some designed to go through flesh with barbs to prevent them being extracted, some with a needle-like point which would go through chain mail and even penetrate plate armour at short range, the longbow was a devastating weapon in skilled hands, and English archers were skilled, capable of shooting ten arrows a minute for minute after minute. There was a whole industry for making bows (made by the bowyers) and arrows (produced by the fletchers). Each arrow required three feathers which came from the pinion feathers of a goose. A goose has six pinion feathers, three on each wing, which if removed grow again in the annual moult. Each goose therefore could provide for two arrows a year, and as various ordinances from the time of Henry III onwards made it compulsory for all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty to be in possession of a bow and a number of arrows, it is likely that the number of geese in the kingdom exceeded the number of men! It is probable that the longbow emerged as the result of experiment by hunters, rather than soldiers, and its range, accuracy and rate of fire would not be exceeded until the development of breech loading rifles in the 1880s. However, whereas it took much practice over years to produce an archer, a man could be trained to use a musket in a matter of hours, which is why the bow and arrow ceases to be included in the equipment tables of English armies during the reign of Elizabeth I.
As time wore on the proportion of archers in English armies grew until by the time of Henry V they made up around two thirds of the army, although at the time of Sluys they were just over half the English strength. The Welsh made considerable use of archery in their guerrilla wars against the English, and Edward III had Welsh archers in his army at Sluys, but archers were recruited from all over the kingdom, and it was said that the best came from Cheshire. While even before Sluys it was obvious to many French commanders just how dangerous English archers were, they could never persuade the French establishment as a whole to emulate them. French society was stratified to an extent that England’s was not, and they retained a feudal system for campaigning. The business of war was one for noblemen, with the lower orders there merely as an adjunct to the activities of their betters. Common men could not possibly influence the course of a battle, and in any case to arm the peasantry might only tempt them to turn on their betters. That the English usually won the battles was attributed to their unsportsmanlike behaviour of employing ill-bred archers.
The third leg of the military revolution was in the method of fighting. For centuries the mounted man had been king of the battlefield. Armoured cavalrymen had swept over Europe, not only the military superiors of the foot soldiers but their social superiors too – Equites, Chevalier, Caballero, Ritter, all titles that emphasised the position of the man on the horse. The infantry were mere humpers and dumpers, not much more than a moving fatigue party for the heavy cavalry of armoured knights, they could be scattered by a cavalry charge, hunted down and slaughtered. Then came Bannockburn, where in 1314 Edward II’s army of heavy cavalry had been roundly defeated by disciplined infantry who did not run, but stood their ground and presented a hedge of pikes, against which no horse would charge home. It was not only Bannockburn that changed English military opinion – there had been examples in Flanders of infantry defeating cavalry, but it was Bannockburn that acted as the spur for a change of tactics. Infantry, if it was properly disciplined, equipped and trained could see off any number of cavalrymen, however well-bred the latter might be. Put simply, no horse will gallop at something he cannot jump over or go through – go lickety-split at a hedge in the hunting field that your horse cannot jump and he will not go over it (although you might). From now on English armies would fight on foot, although they would move on horseback.
[*] Not then an offence in civil law but a heresy and generally disapproved of, particularly in a king.