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1345–1351] flank of France, for many of the Breton fortresses were put into his hands. But he failed to win any decisive advantage thereby over King Philip. It was not till 1346, when he adopted the new policy of trusting nothing to allies, and striking at the heart of France with a purely English army, that Edward found the fortune of war turning in his favour.

In this year he landed in Normandy, where the English banner had not been seen since the days of King John, and executed a destructive raid through the duchy, and up the Seine, till he almost reached the gates of Paris. This brought out the king of France against him, with a mighty

host, before which Edward retreated northward, apparently intending to retire to Flanders. But after crossing the Somme he halted at Creçy, near Abbeville, and offered battle to the pursuing enemy. He fought relying on the tactics which had been tried against the Scots at Dupplin and Halidon Hill, drawing up his army with masses of dismounted men-at-arms flanked on either side by archery. This array proved as effective against the disorderly charges of the French noblesse as it had been against the heavy columns of the Scottish pikemen. Fourteen times the squadrons of King Philip came back to the charge; but mowed down by the arrow-shower, they seldom could get to handstrokes with the English knights, and at last rode off the field in disorder. This astonishing victory over fourfold numbers was no mere chivalrous feat of arms, it had the solid result of giving the victors a foothold in northern France. For Edward took his

army to beleaguer Calais, and after blockading it for nearly a year forced it to surrender. King Philip, after his experience at Creçy, refused to fight again in order to raise the siege. From henceforth the English possessed a secure landing-place in northern France, at the most convenient point possible, immediately opposite Dover. They held it for over two hundred years, to their own inestimable advantage in every recurring war.

The years 1345–1347 saw the zenith of King Edward’s prosperity; in them fell not only his own triumphs at Creçy and Calais, but a victory at Auberoche in Périgord won by his cousin Henry of Lancaster, which restored many long-lost regions of Guienne to the English

suzerainty (Oct. 21, 1345), and another and more famous battle in the far north. At Neville’s Cross, near Durham, the lords of the Border defeated and captured David Bruce, king of Scotland (Oct. 17, 1346). The loss of their king and the destruction of a fine army took the heart out of the resistance of the Scots, who for many years to come could give their French allies little assistance.

In 1347 Edward made a short truce with King Philip: even after his late victories he felt his strength much strained, his treasury being empty, and his army exhausted by the year-long siege of Calais. But he would have returned to the struggle without delay had it not been for

the dreadful calamity of the “Black Death,” which fell upon France and England, as upon all Europe, in the years 1348–1349. The disease, on which the 14th century bestowed this name, was the bubonic plague, still familiar in the East. After devastating western Asia, it reached the Mediterranean ports of Europe in 1347, and spread across the continent in a few months. It was said that in France, Italy and England a third of the population perished, and though this estimate may be somewhat exaggerated, local records of unimpeachable accuracy show that it cannot be very far from the truth. The bishop’s registers of the diocese of Norwich show that many parishes had three and some four successive vicars admitted in eighteen months. In the manor rolls it is not uncommon to find whole families swept away, so that no heir can be detected to their holdings. Among the monastic orders, whose crowded common life seems to have been particularly favourable to the spread of the plague, there were cases where a whole community, from the abbot down to the novices, perished. The upper classes are said to have suffered less than the poor; but the king’s daughter Joan and two archbishops of Canterbury were among the victims. The long continuance of the visitation, which as a rule took six or nine months to work out its virulence in any particular spot, seems to have cowed and demoralized society. Though it first spread from the ports of Bristol and Weymouth in the summer of 1348, it had not finished its destruction in northern England till 1350, and only spread into Scotland in the summer of that year.

When the worst of the plague was over, and panic had died down, it was found that the social conditions of England had been considerably affected by the visitation. The condition of the realm had been stable and prosperous during the earlier years of Edward III., the drain on its resources

caused by heavy war-taxation having been more than compensated by the increased wealth that arose from growing commerce and developing industries. The victory of Sluys, which gave England the command of the seas, had been a great landmark in the economic no less than in the naval history of this island. But the basis of society was shaken by the Black Death; the kingdom was still essentially an agricultural community, worked on the manorial system; and the sudden disappearance of a third of the labouring hands by which that system had been maintained threw everything into disorder. The landowners found thousands of the crofts on which their villeins had been wont to dwell vacant, and could not fill them with new tenants. Even if they exacted the full rigour of service from the survivors, they could not get their broad demesne lands properly tilled. The landless labourers, who might have been hired to supply the deficiency, were so reduced in numbers that they could command, if free competition prevailed, double and triple rates of payment, compared with their earnings in the days before the plague. Hence there arose, almost at once, a bitter strife between the lords of manors and the labouring class, both landholding and landless. The lords wished to exact all possible services from the former, and to pay only the old two or three pence a day to the latter. The villeins, as hard hit as their masters, resented the tightening of old duties, which in some cases had already been commuted for small money rents during the prosperous years preceding the plague. The landless men formed combinations, disputed with the landlords, and asked and often got twice as much as the old rates, despite of the murmurings of the employer.

After a short experience of these difficulties the king and council, whose sympathies were naturally with the landholders, issued an ordinance forbidding workmen of any kind to demand more than they had been wont to receive before 1348. This was followed up by the famous

Statute of Labourers of 1351, which fixed rates for all wages practically identical with those of the times before the Black Death. Those workmen who refused to accept them were to be imprisoned, while employers who went behind the backs of their fellows and secretly paid higher sums were to be punished by heavy fines. Later additions to the statute were devised to terrorize the labourer, by adding stripes and branding to his punishment, if he still remained recalcitrant or absconded. And landowners were empowered to seize all vagrant able-bodied men, and to compel them to work at the statutory wages. As some compensation for the low pay of the workmen, parliament tried to bring down the price of commodities to their former level, for (like labour) all manufactured articles had gone up immensely in value.

Thirty years of friction followed, while the parliament and the ruling classes tried in a spasmodic way to enforce the statute, and the peasantry strove to evade it. It proved impossible to carry out the scheme; the labourers were too many and too cunning to be crushed. If driven over hard they absconded to the towns, where hands were needed as much as in the countryside, or migrated to districts where the statute was laxly administered. Gradually the landowners discovered that the only practical way out of their difficulties was to give up the old custom of working the manorial demesne by the forced labour of their villeins, and to cut it up into farms which were rented out to free tenants, and cultivated by them. In the course of two