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And the Black Prince's Grand Chevauchée of 1355 Sean “Sheer Terror” 317 “Sheer Terror” and The Black Prince’S GRAND CHEVAUCHÉE of 1355 Sean McGlynn “Frightening your enemy is the fundamental and presumably the oldest weapon of war.”1 The historians who provide this quote were writing about the mass bombing campaigns of World War II, the aerial raids of destruction that shared common features with the medieval chevauchée: destruction of the enemy’s economic base; attempts to undermine morale; and exposing the weakness of the enemy. If one accepts the veracity of their observation, as this writer certainly does, then it is but a short step to see this truth applying to the terrifying reality of medieval warfare and its chevauchées. The popular image of the Middle Ages, and especially of its wars, is one of Hobbesian brutality. Jan Huizinga’s influential work, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), captures this perception with his chapter entitled “The Violent Tenor of Medieval Life.” Thus when Slobodan Milosevic was on trial at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 2002, the chief prosecutor accused the former Serbian leader of “medieval savagery.”2 However, bru- tality in the wars of the Middle Ages was no more pronounced as a mani- festation of a particularly medieval mind-set than at other times and in other conflicts; rather it forms a coherent and calculated attempt to employ fear as a central weapon in the medieval armory.3 This article will examine the role of terror and atrocity as deployed in the chevauchée in the Hundred Years War, with an emphasis on Edward the Black Prince’s campaign in 1355 in Languedoc, placing actions first within the wider context of strategy in medieval warfare and then by exploring other motivations for atrocities committed against non-combat- ants.4 1 Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, and John Pritchard, Total War: The Causes and Courses of the Second World War, 2 vols., 2nd ed (London, 1989), 1: 512. 2 Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919; reprint, New York, 1949), 9-31. 3 Sean McGlynn, By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare (London, 2008). 4 A non-combatant can be hard to define and even harder to identify (especially in 318 Sean McGlynn The savagery of the Hundred Years War should be surprising in some ways. Was not this the age of high chivalry? Were not the worst manifesta- tions of war during this period reserved for the clash between religions and cultures on the periphery of Christendom? In fact, wherever they were fought—whether in the Holy Land or in the heart of France—medieval warfare displayed the same fundamental characteristics. Such wars involved political considerations, financial and logistical concerns, recruit- ment and retention of forces, and strategies that were based on ravaging of territory and the protection of strongholds. All conflict also made mea- sured use of terror to intimidate the enemy into submission.5 Recent stud- ies of the Hundred Years War leave little room for doubt on just how brutal this conflict could be and how dreadful its impact on non-combat- ants.6 As with other struggles before and after the medieval period, the Hundred Years War provides copious examples of terror in pursuit of a defined military objective. The chevauchée has come to symbolize the nature of warfare during the conflict, becoming almost synonymous with it. John Barnie has defined this maneuver as typical of the Hundred Years War, “the aim of which was to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy through the destruction of his resources.”7 The word chevauchée simply means a swift ravaging operation of the type performed throughout the entire Middle Ages. The Old French chron- icle by the Anonymous of Béthune, written in the early thirteenth century, used the term in the same context as it utilized during the Hundred Years siege situations). For purposes here, the term is used in its broad meaning of any body outside a combat force, what we would today call civilians. 5 The literature on medieval warfare is vast. For a detailed historiography of its con- stituent parts and commanders, see the articles by Kelly DeVries, John France, Sean McGlynn, Laurence Marvin and Michael Prestwich in Reader’s Guide to Military History, ed. Charles Messenger (London, 2001); also John France, “Recent Writing on Medieval Warfare: From the Fall of Rome to c.1300,” The Journal of Military History 65 (2001). A com- prehensive list of books on medieval warfare up to 2010 is to be found in the bibliography of Sean McGlynn, Blood Cries Afar: The Forgotten Invasion of England 1216 (Stroud, 2010). 6 See, for example, Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French Countryside (Woodbridge, 1998), 62-79; Clifford J Rogers, “By Fire and Sword: Bellum Hostile and “Civilians” in the Hundred Years’ War”, in Civilians in the Path of War, ed. Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (Lincoln, 2002), 33-78; L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Cut Off Their Heads, Or I’ll Cut Off Yours”: Castilian Strategy and Tactics in the War of the Two Pedros and the Supporting Evidence from Murcia,” in The Hunded Years War (Part II), ed. L.J. Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden 2008), 153-84; McGlynn, By Sword and Fire, 113-29, 179-84, 233-39. 7 J. Barnie, War in Medieval English Society: Social Values in the Hundred Years War, 1377-99 (New York, 1974), 10. See also the definition in Chris Cook, A Dictionary of Historical Terms (Basingstoke, 1998), 67, which highlights the Hundred Years War..
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