By Susan Higginbotham

“I gather the news is good. My lord is coming home?”
Bess shook her head. “No—he is staying in Calais. But the news is good. We—I and the queen and her daughters and many others—are going there!”

As this snippet shows, Bess, the heroine of my novel Hugh and Bess , is bound in November 1346 for Calais, then under siege by troops led by King Edward III. Thanks to Edward III’s careful planning, she would find many of the comforts of home there.

Having won a stunning victory over the French at Crécy in August 1346, Edward III’s army moved to Calais in September. As the town’s strong fortifications and marshy environs made taking it by battle unfeasible, Edward decided to starve its citizens into submission. Knowing that he was in the siege for the long haul, the king ordered the construction of what amounted to the equivalent of a modern military base, complete with barracks, officers’ quarters, and shopping. As the chronicler Jean Froissart reports:

On the king’s arrival before Calais, he laid siege to it, and built, between it and the river and bridge, houses of wood : they were laid out in streets, and thatched with straw or broom ; and in this town of the king’s, there was everything necessary for an army, besides a market-place, where there were markets, every Wednesday and Saturday, for butcher’s meat, and all other sorts of merchandise : cloth, bread, and everything else, which came from England, and Flanders, might be had there, as well as all comforts, for money. [p. 169]

Edward called his wooden town, which also boasted a palace for himself and stone houses for his leaders, Villeneuve-le-hardi, or “Brave New Town.” Construction on the town, built about a mile from the coast, must have been rapid, for by November 1346, Queen Philippa and a host of other English ladies, eager to visit their menfolk, had arrived in Calais for a visit.

While life for the English outside of Calais was fairly comfortable as the siege dragged on, life for the French inside the walls of Calais was quite different. By June 1347, the commander of Calais, Jean de Vienne, wrote a letter to the French king, Philip, informing him that the citizens of Calais had been reduced to eating cats, dogs, and horses. If help did not arrive, he concluded, the men would march out of town to meet certain death rather than be reduced to eating each other. King Philip did indeed send an army to assist the citizens of Calais, but he gave up the enterprise after becoming convinced that an attack on the English besiegers would be futile.

Their last hope of rescue shattered, the starving citizens of Calais began to negotiate a surrender with Edward III, who finally agreed to spare the rest of the citizens if six of their leading men would submit themselves to him, to do with them as he pleased. On August 4, 1347, in one of the most famous scenes from medieval history, the six men of Calais, dressed only in their shirts, knelt before the victorious English king and pleaded for their lives. Edward ordered their immediate beheading. Only when Queen Philippa herself knelt before Edward to join in their pleas did he agree to spare the men, who were then clothed and fed before being sent on their way to start new lives elsewhere. Whether Edward really intended to execute the men or had planned to spare them all along, knowing that his notoriously soft-hearted queen would be unable to resist begging him for mercy, is unknown.

With Calais conquered and its citizens expelled, the English began settling into the houses left behind. They and their descendants would remain there until January 1558, when Mary I’s reign finally lost Calais to the French. Villeneuve-le-hardi , however, was doomed by its builder’s very success: after gaining Calais, Edward III ordered the wooden town’s destruction, Ian Mortimer writes, to prevent the possibility of its being used by a French army against the English.

Susan Higginbotham has written two historical novels set in fourteenth-century England: The Traitor’s Wife and Hugh and Bess. Her third novel, The Stolen Crown, set during the Wars of the Roses, will be published by Sourcebooks in March.

Sources:

Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, Spain and the Adjoining Countries, vol. I. Trans. Thomas Johnes. London: Henry J. Bohn, 1857.

Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.

Susan Rose. Calais: An English Town in France, 1347–1558. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008.

IMAGE: The Burghers of Calais, Auguste Rodin, 1889

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