Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} War Cruel and Sharp English Strategy Under Edward III 1327-1360 by Clifford J. Rogers War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, Clifford J. Rogers. The current orthodox view of the campaigns of Edward III is that his victories were due to the tactical abilities of his armies, and had little to do with any overall strategy. The general assumption is that he and his son Edward, the Black Prince, weren't actually seeking battle during there repeated raids across France, but were instead forced into fighting when trapped by French armies. Professor Rogers's argument is that Edward III actually had a clear strategic plan for winning the war against France, based around seeking battle on the right terms, fighting in positions where the French were forced to attack. Edward learnt this strategy fighting the Scots, who used it against him very effectively in the Weardale Campaign of 1327, where they took up a good defensive position that the English were unwilling to attack. This sort of book, attempting to overthrow an historical orthodoxy, is rarely this good, or this well researched. Rogers knows the primary sources, and makes good use of them to support his case. Most of the original sources directly support his case, as did Edward's own statements. The key to Roger's argument is that he ties the detailed events of the many English raids across France to the idea that Edward was seeking battle. This makes sense of many English movements that don't really fit with the idea that they were trying to avoid battle. This detailed approach also makes it clear how often battles nearly happened - many of the raids that didn’t produce a major battle did see the two armies get close to each other, and the two commanders enter into negotiations to agree on the time and location for a battle. Personally I find Rogers's case to be very persuasive, in particular because of his detailed source based approach to the topic. This is a major contribution to our understand of this phase of the Hundred Years War, and will be of interest even to those who don't agree with his conclusions. Chapters 1 - Introduction 2 - The Weardale Campaign of 1327, Edward III's Military Apprenticeship 3 - The Dupplin Moor Campaign, 1332 4 - The Siege of Berwick and Battle of Halidon Hill, 1333 5 - From Scotland to France, 1334-1347 6 - Strategy and Edward III's Diplomacy in the Low Countries, 1337-1338 7 - The Cambrai-Thiérache Campaign, 1339 8 - Flanders and the Two Kings of France, 1340 9 - The Siege of Tournai, 1340 10- The Invasion of 1346: Strategic Options and Historigraphy 11 - The Crécy Chevauchée, 1346 12 - The Siege of Calais and the Year of Miracles in Retrospect 13 - The Twin Chevauchées of 1355 14 - Three Campaigns of Early 1356 15 - The Poitiers Campaign, 1356 16 - The Reims Campaign and Peace, 1359-1360. Author: Clifford J. Rogers Edition: Paperback Pages: 408 Publisher: Boydell Year: 2014 edition of 2000 original. War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy Under Edward III 1327-1360 by Clifford J. Rogers. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #27b267c0-ce24-11eb-9e79-752567c69395 VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Tue, 15 Jun 2021 21:53:44 GMT. War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy Under Edward III 1327-1360 by Clifford J. Rogers. I thank Professor Prestwich for his generous remarks on my book, which are all the more appreciated because of the stature of the reviewer. Readers of his review who have not also read my book, however, might infer that there is more disagreement between him and myself than is actually the case. Professor Prestwich is correct that my basic thesis is that Edward III never pursued a battle-avoiding strategy (with the possible exception of 1343 in Brittany, which I do not cover), but rather almost invariably sought battle, provided he could fight it on his own terms. It is also true that that a case for this thesis "is easier to make for some campaigns than others," but it should be understood that I have not tried to argue that Edward III during the Burnt Candlemas campaign was actively aiming for a battle with the enemy, in the way that he was in 1333, 1339, 1340, 1346, 1347, 1355, and 1359-60. As I say on p. 338, "his strategy in 1356 was to use the opportunity presented by the aggression against Berwick to take a great army into Scotland, so that he could 'apply pressure directly to the Scottish commons and magnates', who otherwise had little motive to support the peace arrangements agreed between the two kings [Edward III and David II]." (Emphasis added.) On the other hand, I'm sure Professor Prestwich would agree that King Edward was certainly not avoiding battle with the Scots that year, and indeed would have been overjoyed had his elusive foes chosen to make an open stand against him. Likewise, I am essentially in agreement with Professor Prestwich - in substance if perhaps not in nuance - concerning Lancaster's Normandy chevauchée of 1356: I write that the duke was "prepared to fight, even outnumbered, 'if necessary', but for him a major battle was rather an 'impediment' to his task than an overriding goal in itself." (p. 342, emphasis added). Since there is little or nothing of importance with which I disagree in Professor Prestwich's review, let me turn to the one minor point on which we are in dispute. The issue of the position of the Scottish army during the Weardale episode is an interesting one. As with very many other points of military detail from this period, there is a wide divergence of scholarly opinion the subject. Everyone agrees that when the English host first encountered the raiders' army near Stanhope, the two forces were separated by the river Wear. It is also agreed that after a few days in those positions, the Scots shifted to a new position within Stanhope Park, and the English followed them and again encamped on the far side of the river from their enemies. There the disagreements begin. C. McNamee and R. A. Nicholson locate the Scots on the south bank. Professor G. W. S. Barrow has the first Scottish position on the south bank, but recognises that their second position was on the north bank. Barbour's various editors (most recently A. A. M. Duncan) support or lean towards the view that the Scots were on the north side of the river the whole time. The main argument for the first-mentioned conclusion is the one that Professor Prestwich gives: it is clear from Jean le Bel and other sources that the English were marching generally southwards from Haltwhistle on the three days before meeting the Scots. Since they were marching south, and no mention is made of crossing the Wear before they found the Scots on its opposite bank, le Bel's narrative has been taken to imply that the Scots initially occupied the south side of the river. This implication is further strengthened by the statement of the Chronicon de Lanercost that in order to reach Scotland after sneaking out of the park, the Scots had to go around the English army. There are, however, three problems with this argument. First, John Barbour's Bruce is explicit that the initial Scottish position lay "on north halff Wer towart Scotland." Second, Thomas Gray's Scalacronica describes the same position as "nearby alongside" ('prestes iouste') Stanhope, not "across from" the hamlet, which is on the north side of the Wear. Third, it is agreed that the second Scottish position was within the confines of Stanhope Park. Stanhope Park was located along the northern bank of the Wear, with its entrances at Westgate and Eastgate (which take their names from that fact). If the initial Scottish position was on the south bank, then in their shift of position to the park they would have had to have crossed the river (as Barrow concludes they did), and the English would have to have done the same: yet there is no hint in the sources that either army did so. Thus, even if we leave aside the perhaps overly precise reading of the Scalacronica, we are left with a disagreement between two explicit sources (Barbour and Lanercost), and two conflicting hypotheses concerning a difference of omission: either the sources neglected to mention that the English crossed the Wear before encountering the Scots, or they neglected to mention the English and Scots crossing the Wear during the repositioning of 2-3 August. Although the Chronicon de Lanercost was written well before Barbour's Bruce , or even Jean le Bel's chronicle, that does not mean it should automatically be preferred. Barbour's account is far more detailed, clearly having been based on the (probably written) narrative of a participant. Insofar as it can be checked it is very accurate, containing no errors comparable to le Bel's conflation of the Eden and the Tyne, or his confusion between "William" and James Douglas. If we did not know that Stanhope Park was on the north bank of the Wear, it would be difficult to decide which source to accept, though I would lean towards Barbour. But that brings us back to the issue of the "silent" crossing of the Wear. Surely it is very unlikely that the Scots or the English would make a night crossing of the Wear while within striking distance of the enemy, and equally unlikely that the sources on both sides would fail to mention such a dramatic episode if it had taken place. It is much easier to believe that le Bel simply neglected to report that, on their journey from the Tyne, the English crossed the Wear before turning east towards Stanhope. Hence, I conclude that the Scots were on the "north halff Wer" next to Stanhope when they first encountered the English, as well as later when they occupied Stanhope Park. I deal with this point so elaborately in this reply because it so well illustrates the difficulty of the sources which have to be reconciled to create a good narrative of fourteenth-century campaigns-- but also the possibility of doing so. That is why my footnotes (which some historians may perhaps find excessive) are so extensive: apparently in this case they were, even so, not sufficient to head off dispute over the facts. War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy Under Edward III 1327-1360 by Clifford J. Rogers. It has been fashionable to downplay the importance of battles in medieval military history. 'Most campaigns did not end in battle largely because both commanders were reluctant to risk battle', was John Gillingham's verdict. He pointed out that Henry II never fought a battle, yet had a great military reputation. Richard I fought only one battle in the West, as did his rival Philip Augustus. Wars, in this interpretation, were fought with the intention of devastating territory, and capturing towns and castles, not of risking all in the field of battle. It would be possible to write a history of the many battles that did not happen, when armies faced each other but decided that prudence was the best course of action. If battles are unpopular, so also is strategy when the concept is applied to the middle ages. In the new Oxford Companion to Military History (ed. R. Holmes, Oxford, 2001), it is suggested that because medieval armies were not permanent in character, and were capable of engaging in sustained combat for no more than a few hours, 'the strategic pursuit or "exploitation" necessary to capitalize on tactical success did not exist.' It would therefore 'be wrong to imagine that anything like "strategic planning" existed before the nineteenth century.' Clifford Rogers in this study will have none of this. His is a very different approach. The aim of his book is simple. It is 'to re-establish Edward III's military reputation' and to demonstrate that his military strategy was intended to force his enemies to fight him in battle. As befits the subject, this is a combative book. He adopts is a chronological approach, starting with the unsuccessful Weardale campaign of 1327, and concluding with the expedition of 1359-60 to Reims and beyond. Although the historical method is essentially that of narrative, he does not follow Jonathan Sumption's example and provide a full blow-by-blow account of the wars. The Brittany war of the early 1340s, for example, is dismissed in a sentence as 'opportunistic sniping'; attention is primarily given to the Scottish wars of the early part of Edward III's reign, to the strategy of the early years of the Hundred Years War, 1337-40, to the Crécy-Calais campaign of 1346-7, and to the campaigns of 1355-6 and 1359-60. While questions about recruitment and supply are of course fully brought into the discussion, the book does not aim to analyse the logistics of fourteenth-century warfare. One of the many strengths of the book is the use made of a wide range of chronicle material, and notably of several unprinted works. An unprinted Anglo-Norman Brut, for example, provides a fascinating speech allegedly made at the battle of Dupplin Moor. Throughout, the book is very solidly based on the sources, as the ample footnoting makes very clear. Unfortunately, there is all too little discussion of strategy in the surviving documents. There is nothing from this period similar to the advice on how to conduct a crusade addressed to Edward I, or like that of Pierre Dubois to Philip IV of France. Edward III had no Sir John Fastolf to write a memorandum like that of 1435 on the war. Contemporary letters about the war are of some help, but to a considerable extent it is necessary to deduce the strategy from the events. Did Edward intend from the first to invade Normandy in 1346, rather than relieve the siege of Aiguillon in Gascony? Rogers argues that he did, but while the case is a good one, it cannot be proven beyond doubt. It remains possible that he went to Normandy simply because many delays, in part caused by contrary winds, delayed the expedition so long that the Gascon plan had to be abandoned. Of course royal propaganda made much of the king's desire for battle. There is a sense in which the challenges exchanged between Edward III and his rival Philip VI amounted to a game of chicken - which king would back down, and fail to engage? Rogers' view, and he is surely right, is that it was the French who were reluctant to fight. That was certainly the case in 1339 near Buironfosse. Philip VI of France had far more to lose than Edward, and it was a big risk to attack an army drawn up in a well-prepared position. Again, outside Calais in 1347, it made little sense for Philip to attack the English. The technique of besieging a town so as to compel opponents to risk battle in order to relieve it had worked at Berwick in 1333, but did not serve Edward III well subsequently. Rogers' case is easier to make for some campaigns than for others. Not all of Edward's campaigns were battle-seeking. The infamous 'Burnt Candlemas', with the savage destruction of Lothian early in 1356, was intended to punish the Scots, rather than to bring them to battle. In Normandy in the same year, Henry of Lancaster avoided battle with the French, when he was at a severe disadvantage of numbers. Crucial to the argument, however, is the Black Prince's campaign that culminated in his victory at Poitiers. The traditional view is that the Prince was outmanoeuvred by the French as he was retreating towards Gascony, and forced to turn and fight. Rogers has to admit that the sources for this campaign are 'mutually contradictory'. His view is that the Black Prince was prepared to fight if he had to, and that the conventional analysis is not justified. In the negotiations before the battle the Prince was apparently prepared to accept humiliating terms: a massive indemnity to be paid, return of all prisoners, and a promise not to campaign against the French king for seven years. Rogers emphasises, however, the qualification that the agreement was to be subject to the English king's agreement, and further points out that it was not through fear of battle that the English offered terms. What they did not want was to be starved out by the French. The case is well argued. The Chandos herald is the one source to suggest that the Prince would have avoided battle if he could; the majority of chronicles are clear that he was eager to fight. The diplomatic background to the campaign of 1359-60 is carefully analysed. French rejection of the second treaty of London gave Edward III no option other than to fight. The expedition itself had the siege and capture of the city of Reims as its immediate aim, but when the English army approached Paris in the spring of 1360, it is again clear that Edward III intended to draw the French into battle, forming up his army and sending heralds to invite them to fight. The ploy, however, failed on this occasion, for the French had too much to lose. For them, a battle-avoiding strategy was what made sense, particularly at this stage of the war. One possible difficulty with the thesis that the English strategy was battle-seeking is, of course, that their tactics did not articulate well with this. Their well-proven and effective method of fighting relied on the strength of dismounted troops formed up in a well-established defensive position. Any enemy, Scots or French, would have to be goaded into attack, or deluded into thinking that they had an advantage. Edward III and his commanders could not fight whenever they chose. This does not contradict the central argument of the book; it helps, however, to explain why there were not more battles, when battle was what the English sought. There are, of course, detailed points on which it is possible to disagree with Professor Rogers. To take one minor one, he asserts that on the Stanhope campaign the Scots position when the English attempted to engage them in battle was on the north bank of the river Wear. That seems unlikely. If Jean le Bel, who was an eyewitness, was correct in saying that the English marched towards the south from Blanchland to engage the Scots, and found a river between them and their enemy, the Scots were surely on the south bank. The evidence of John Barbour, who wrote his book on Robert Bruce very much later, is surely far less reliable than that of Le Bel. Professor Rogers has written an impressive and lively study, properly based on a close reading of the sources. The footnotes alone are full of riches. It remains to be seen how far his analysis will affect interpretations of other periods, but it should certainly help to make historians rethink some of the established assumptions about the nature of medieval warfare. Strategic planning was not a nineteenth-century invention. ‘War, Cruel and Sharp’: England’s Grand Strategy during the Hundred Years’ War. At the outset of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337, the ambitious King Edward III of England faced a dire strategic dilemma – he had just declared all-out war on a realm that possessed five times the landmass (which, in an era of agricultural economic dominance, meant five times the resources) and three times the population of his own. In the early 14th Century, the Kingdom of France rested easy as perhaps the premier power of Christendom – thanks to far greater political unity and organization than her theoretically superior neighbor, the Holy Roman Empire. Edward would need to find a way to close the strategic gap utilizing the limited resources of his own realm – a task he would accomplish brilliantly thanks to an early military setback he himself would experience as a young man. As Professor Clifford Rogers of the US Military Academy has effectively argued, the roots of the grand strategy that Edward would employ in France are to be found in his earlier Scottish expeditions of the 1320s and 30s. During the disastrous reign of his hapless father, Edward II, the Bruces of Scotland had humiliated the English in a string of military upsets, the most famous of which was Bannockburn in 1314. The secret to Scottish military success was their ability to mobilize and deploy fast-moving armies that could range across the north of England, inflicting untold damage on the agriculturally-based economy via in-depth raids, while always staying one step ahead of the heavier and more ponderous English armies. Campaigns against Scotland. Edward III’s first taste of this kind of campaigning was in 1327 in the Weardale against a raiding force led by the notorious Black Douglas. During this campaign, the superior mobility of the Scots and resulting military results brought the young king to tears. Scotland’s luck finally ran out in 1332, however, when a tiny English force of contracted men-at-arms and archers led by the grizzled northern veteran and leader of those disinherited after the Battle of Bannockburn (1314) Henry de Beaumont annihilated a Scottish force ten times its size deep in Scottish territory at Dupplin Moor – ultimately resulting in Edward Balliol being crowned at Scone. This time, the Scots’ own tactical concept was used against them. De Beaumont had grasped the essence of this concept – dense pike formations (schiltrons) that could be wielded offensively or defensively to great effect against enemy cavalry formations – and had worked out a solution: by deploying his dismounted men-at-arms in a defensive posture and then placing archers wielding the formidable English longbow on their flanks de Beaumont realized that he could not only nullify the Scots’ battlefield advantage, he could actually defeat them in detail. Edward learned well the lessons of Dupplin Moor as taught to him by de Beaumont when they met at York late in 1334, and applied them successfully for the first time against the Scottish foe at the Battle of Halidon Hill in 1335. In this decisive encounter, Sir Archibald Douglas was leading a large Scottish force in an attempt to relieve the port of Berwick-upon-Tweed, which had been besieged by the English and was on the verge of falling. In order to accomplish this task, Sir Douglas would first have to defeat the English force, which dominated all the approaches to the beleaguered port from its commanding position on the hill. Even though the terrain was disadvantageous, the Scottish commander he was forced to give battle. The result was disastrous for him. Drawn up in their now-traditional schiltron formation, the Scots began their advance. Almost as soon as they did, however, they were met with a hail of arrows. As at Dupplin Moor the result was inevitable, or at least as anything can be inevitable in battle: the Scottish army was not just defeated, it was utterly destroyed. The following day, Berwick surrendered. Soon thereafter, the victorious Edward, thinking he had finally broken the back of the Scottish resistance to Balliol’s rule and thus ended forever the northern wars, departed Scotland for England. As news of the great victory over the Scots spread, all of England exulted. As a popular English poem from the time went, “Thaire was crakked many a crowne Of wild Scottes.” And there’s no gainsaying the fact that Halidon Hill truly was a decisive battle. King Edward had faced a strategic challenge of immense proportions in Scotland and had more than met it. But the most important lesson Edward learned was not how to defeat a Scottish schiltron, though that tactical lesson would be employed to great effect in several pitched battles between English and French armies during the course of the war. Rather, the key lesson that Edward learned in Scotland was that the side that was best able to mobilize and deploy fast-moving armies capable of launching in-depth raids against an enemy’s economic base would enjoy a tremendous strategic advantage over its enemy – irrespective of the relative disparities of the two belligerents in terms of territory or manpower. Chevauchées. This strategic concept would serve Edward well in his wars against the Kingdom of France. Such was the French advantage, on paper at least, that the French king must have believed that his armies would have little trouble vanquishing the English forces on the Continent. In the field, however, the only place where it really mattered, the English would demonstrate both strategic and operational-level superiority that would allow them to prevail over the theoretically far more powerful French kingdom. Simply put, based on his experience in Scotland, Edward developed a grand strategy for his war against France that would have done its Scottish forebears proud: use highly disciplined, compact forces to penetrate deep into French territory in chevauchées (literally “great rides”, i.e. mounted raids-in-depth) for the purpose, not of occupying territory, but of wreaking extensive economic, social, and psychological havoc on the French, with the ultimate goal of fatally undermining France’s war effort. Secondarily, but importantly, Edward’s strategy also entailed avoiding anything like a decisive battle until the conditions were overwhelmingly in England’s favor (whereupon the tactical lessons learned in Scotland would prove devastatingly applicable). Military professionals today will recognize these characteristics as hallmarks of a school of strategic thought called Maneuver Warfare – and hopefully be amazed at their stellar application centuries before the term itself existed despite the baffling modern misperception that the medieval period was devoid of strategic and operational art. Initially, and perhaps not surprisingly given the lack of coordination between English, Flemish and Imperial allies, coupled with his own relative inexperience, Edward’s first continental adventures were less than impressive. The new English strategy soon began to pay dividends, however, as witnessed in William de Bohun’s campaigns in Brittany and those of the brilliant Henry de Grosmont in Gascony, both in the early 1340s. The concept having been proven, Edward III himself brought its full fury to bear on France in his 1346 Normandy Campaign, a campaign that culminated in a legendary victory – against a French army three times the size of his – at Crécy. France reeled from this onslaught and found it nearly impossible to successfully counter the far more mobile and lethal English armies that rampaged at will across their lands. French fortunes took an additional downturn with the advent on the scene of perhaps the most brilliant English commander of the war (and possibly of the medieval period as a whole), Edward III’s son and heir, Edward “the Black Prince.” Executing his father’s grand strategy with a ruthless tenacity, the Black Prince executed two consecutive chevauchées from his base in Bordeaux – one in 1355 that struck deep into the rich heartlands of the Southern French Languedoc and another in 1356 north into the Massif Central and Poitou. In both, the Black Prince divided his forces into self-sustaining detachments and then had each detachment range out over 10-30 mile-wide swaths, burning and pillaging everything of value in their path, all the while carefully remaining out of reach of larger French pursuit forces. His 1356 campaign would ultimately climax at the Battle of Poitiers, where another vastly larger French army – this one led by King Jean II himself – would be defeated in detail. King Jean was captured on the field and, in 1360, was compelled to agree to the Treaty of Bretigny – signing away nearly a third of French territory to England and incurring crippling war indemnities for his ransom. As Professor Rogers has argued, France would not suffer another military humiliation of that magnitude until May of 1940. Indeed, the French defeat was of such a magnitude that it nearly consigned the kingdom to the dustbin of history. Ultimately, however, it did not, for reasons we will explore in a future column. Further Reading: Rogers, Clifford, “Edward III and the Dialectics of Strategy” in The Wars of Edward III . ed. Clifford Rogers (Boydell Press, 1999) Dr. Andrew Latham is a professor of political science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author, most recently, of a monograph entitled Medieval Sovereignty, to be published in 2020 by ARC Humanities Press. You can visit Andrew’s website at www.aalatham.com or follow Andrew on Twitter @aalatham. Capt Rand Lee Brown II is a commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps currently assigned to Marine Forces Reserve. Holding a Master of Arts degree in Military History from Norwich University with a focus on medieval warfare, Capt Brown has written on military history for a variety of forums, including the Marine Corps Gazette and Medievalists.net. Top Image: A city being sacked in the fourteenth century. Jean Froissart, Chroniques, BnF Français 2644, fol. 135r.