It's hard to imagine today that there was ever a time
when England and France were more than two separate countries.
But 700 years ago, our ruling classes were bound
by a shared set of values, codes of behaviour and language.
Locked together by one culture in a marriage that had lasted 300 years.
But, in the mid-14th century, it hit the rocks.
What followed was the longest and bloodiest divorce in history
set against a backdrop of raging plague and violent revolution.
Oh, my goodness! You can feel the texture of the skin.
I'm going to tell the story of over a hundred years of war,
when little England dared to challenge
the mighty superpower that was France and refused to give up.
I want to uncover how those famous battles like Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt
were more than just military victories in what became a fight for national identity.
I'll show what was really at stake for charismatic leaders
like Henry V, Edward III and Joan of Arc.
And reveal how these people and events shaped and changed us,
helping make England what it is today.
In this episode,
a bold English king does the unthinkable
when he rips up the medieval rule book to take on France
with new weapons, new ideas and, above all, a burning will to win.
For me as a cultural historian,
these are some of the most interesting documents in English history.
They're records of parliamentary sessions
held between 1066 and 1360.
They document three centuries of English governance, law and policy.
But have a look at this.
They're in French.
(SPEAKS FRENCH) These are the remembrances...
(SPEAKS FRENCH)
..of parliaments summoned in the reign of the king.
French was the language of the English ruling class.
In fact, they had more in common with their counterparts across the channel
than with the rest of the population.
There's no more potent symbol than this
of the ties that, for 300 years,
bound France, the most powerful country in Europe,
with her poor neighbour England.
Since the Norman Conquest, they had been joined not just by language but by lands.
France was a country divided into semi-independent provinces.
By 1327, the English king still held Ponthieu, a small area of northern France.
And the valuable duchy of Gascony or Aquitaine.
The English king ruled over these territories not as a monarch but as a duke.
These lands came at a price.
To keep them, English kings had to pay homage to the French monarch.
This was a delicate arrangement but it worked.
That was until one man challenged the rules of this uneasy marriage.
And here he is.
Edward III.
Edward was crowned aged 14 here in Westminster Abbey, where his tomb now lies.
No one could have expected that he would pose such a challenge
to the relationship between England and France.
He was three-quarters French and had grown up steeped in the same chivalric traditions
as his relations across the Channel.
With flowing blond locks and charming manners,
Edward seemed to embody the knightly ideal.
But behind this image lay a brilliant mind, a ruthless streak
and a will of iron.
Edward had survived a traumatic childhood.
His father had died a broken man,
rumoured to have been murdered by his mother's ambitious lover,
a man who would pose such a threat to Edward that he would have him executed.
Edward may have been a young king but he was not one to antagonise.
Only a year into his reign, events conspired to do just that.
Edward had been bought up to believe that, through his mother,
the French King's sister, he had a claim to the crown of France.
But, in 1328, it was given to his cousin Philip.
Relations between the two men would never recover.
Paying homage as the Duke of Aquitaine to his cousin
didn't come easy to the proud Edward.
But Edward couldn't afford to lose his lands in France.
Gascony was more than just his birthright.
Together with the wool trade from Flanders,
it was propping up the English economy.
Over 80,000 tons of wine were exported from here each year.
The tax alone was worth more than that collected from all the shires of England.
In France, Edward should have known his place as the king's vassal.
Instead, he seemed increasingly keen to assert his authority
over that of his cousin.
Here in Gascony, evidence of this still survives today.
I'm here in the church of St Seurin
and up in the ceiling is a keystone of one the side chapels.
You can just make out a shield held aloft by an angel,
with the three leopards couchant of England depicted on it.
More than ornamentation,
this stamp of ownership was 14th-century propaganda
and would have been unmistakably English.
This would've been painted in heraldic colours of red and gold
and would've been instantly recognisable to worshippers here
as a symbol of strength and continuity
Edward was becoming a most problematic vassal.
Not known for his diplomatic brilliance,
King Philip was already struggling to manage his unwieldy country.
And, by 1337, he wanted Edward out.
In an unprecedented move, he sent his army to confiscate Ponthieu,
attacked Edward's castles and tried to seize Gascony.
Edward couldn't retaliate, his army was tied up in a border war with Scotland.
But the furious English king wasn't going to let this lie.
Three years later, having secured valuable allies here in Flanders,
in the market square of Ghent, he made a provocative gesture.
Its consequences would last for over a hundred years.
In front of the gathering of English barons and Flemish allies,
he unveiled his new royal coat of arms.
Where once there was just the three leopards of the English royal family,
there were now three leopards quartered with the fleur-de-lis,
symbol of the French monarchy.
Edward III had done the unthinkable,
he had proclaimed himself king of England and France.
This was now more than a territorial dispute.
And Edward and Philip both knew there was only one way this challenge could be settled.
Knightly combat.
And that was dictated by a shared code of military conduct.
A code that would be pushed to its limits.
These 600-year-old manuscripts tell us about this set of rules
developed for the French and English knights.
A way of life both on and off the battlefield. Chivalry.
The rules of chivalry were written by the knights themselves.
They were written in French, which was the international language of chivalry.
There was an element of snobbery in it, yes,
because it's an upper-class thing.
But, above all, it was concerned with right honourable behaviour that saw
the knightly class as ordained by god to protect king, kingdom and people.
But the causes that they fought in were those of kings.
Here in the Luttrell Psalter, we can see a knight being equipped.
Here he is in all his heraldic splendour.
His arms are being handed to him by his wife and daughter,
he is setting out for war.
But here in this illustration of the St Inglevert tournament
from Froissart's Chronicle,
we see a scene of a famous tournament held at St Inglevert near Calais.
This was a tournament between the English and the French knights in friendly conditions.
Here we see two knights in the foreground tilting at each other in the lists.
And you can see it's a great occasion, it's like Royal Ascot.
It's exotic, it's colourful, it is showing off.
Showing off on a grand scale. It's conspicuous consumption.
It's the brotherhood solidarity of the upper classes.
And the knights used the engagements to show off their prowess.
And to inspire future generations of knights.
For all their pomp and ceremony, tournaments were a training ground
where knights prepared for the greatest of chivalric combats, war.
After five years' preparation, Edward was ready to take on the mightiest army in Europe.
He organised a force to defend his own lands in Gascony.
But Edward would lead a different campaign.
He would invade King Philip's territories.
On the 5th of August 1346,
he set sail across the Channel
with 750 ships and an army of 15,000 men.
And this is where Edward's army landed.
He'd wanted to fool the French king that he was going to land
several hundred miles in that direction in Gascony.
But, instead, they landed here on the beaches of Normandy.
The first thing the king did was to knight his 16-year-old son,
Edward, the Prince of Wales, later known as the Black Prince.
He then sent all the ships home.
This was to be a campaign of no return.
With the Black Prince in the vanguard,
Edward's army stormed east.
Their target, the prosperous city of Caen.
The Hundred Years' War is remembered for its iconic set-piece battles.
What happened here at Caen was very different.
The city was defended outside the walls by 2,500 men.
But, when they saw Edward's army approaching,
the French fled back to the safety of the castle here in the city walls.
But they were too late, the Black Prince and the Earl of Warwick
were already upon them before they had reached the city gates.
What followed was perhaps more typical of medieval warfare
than any of the famous battles to come.
(MAN SPEAKS FRENCH)
I'm with Francois Neveux, an expert on the history of Normandy.
(SPEAKS FRENCH)
After three days, 5,000 men, women and children lay dead.
Then the looting began,
something which probably motivated Edward's men more than any sense
of loyalty to the king or idealistic set of values.
Chivalry in action was far removed from the gilded images of manuscripts.
It was a brutal business and its rules didn't apply to everyone.
(LAUGHS) Thank you.
Caen was Edward's first victory but to claim back his rights in France
he would have to take on Philip's army.
With still no sign of that mighty force, Edward continued south,
burning all in his path, towards Paris.
Never before had the superpower France been so violated.
I've come to the Abbey of St Denis in Paris,
where Philip prepared a chivalric response,
confident he could crush his impertinent cousin.
Philip really had to do something to stop Edward III once and for all.
He raised the call to arms and messengers were sent to all his allies and vassals abroad,
assembling one of the biggest armies France has ever seen.
Then he rode here to take possession of the Oriflamme,
the sacred war banner of France, from the abbot.
And here it is. This is the flag of St Denis
that medieval monarchs would come here to collect before they went to do battle.
This is a more recent version. During the Hundred Years' War,
the banner would have had a central motif
of a flaming gold sun against a blood-red backdrop.
And this banner really symbolised all that was great about France,
both spiritually and militarily.
It's said that Charlemagne's army bore the Oriflamme before it
as they went to battle against the infidels.
But the unfurling of this banner during the Hundred Years' War
meant something else, "guerre mortelle," a fight to the death.
This meant the opposing side would be shown no mercy,
given no quarter, and no prisoners were to be taken.
But Edward had a trick up his sleeve,
one that he'd spent years preparing.
And it would shake the very foundations of chivalry.
He wouldn't rely just on knights but on low-born archers
equipped with a devastating new weapon
rarely used outside the British Isles.
This is a statute from the latter years of Edward's reign.
And its very existence is a direct acknowledgement
of the importance of the longbow in the king's wars.
It states that each Sunday, every able-bodied man
should go to the archery butts and practise with bows and arrows,
pellets or bolts, the art of shooting.
And it also states, rather interestingly, that it is forbidden
to play or watch sports of null value, such as football.
Draw! Loose! Middle rank!
Mark!
Edward would use his archers in a unique formation.
Their role is still remembered today at events like this in Bosworth.
I'm here to meet Matthew Strickland, an expert on the longbow.
So, Matthew, we know that Edward III was developing the use of archers in his battle plans.
In 1341, he makes an order for 3 million arrows and 7,000 bows.
Archery is important to him. It's extremely important.
It's important to remember that Edward I and Edward II's armies
had a lot or archers but they were auxiliaries to the cavalry.
The English cavalry was the main striking force.
But during the wars with Scotland,
particularly the defeat of the English army at Bannockburn in 1314,
the English developed this new tactical formation.
The first time we see this is at Dupplin Moor in 1332,
where the English flank a unit of dismounted knights,
dismounted men-at-arms, flanked by wings of archers, longbowmen.
And this gives them a very, very powerful defensive formation.
And it's that tactical combination combining dismounted knights
flanked by wings of archers, that can enfilade an attacking French force,
that he realises will deliver a knockout blow if he can get the French to join battle.
That is his principal strategy.
This was a risky tactic.
For it to work, Edward's archers would have be on higher ground than the French.
By mid-August, Edward was just 20 miles from Paris.
But he had no intention of attacking the capital.
With his troops in sight of the French,
he turned his army and headed north.
But French garrisons stationed on the Somme blocked Edward's path.
In an incredible act of heroism, two of Edward's senior knights,
William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton, and Sir Reginald Cobham,
waded across the river under enemy crossbow fire,
covered by their own archers and a hundred men at arms
to engage the French on the other side and push them back.
The two knights had cleared the way. The English were through.
Finally, after two more days of marching, Edward halted his men.
They had reached the tiny village of Crecy in Ponthieu,
Edward's former Duchy.
He stationed his men on a hilltop overlooking the plain.
He knew that this was the best place to do battle because he knew the lie of the land.
On the 25th of August 1346,
the English army took up camp over there
in the forest of Crecy and simply waited.
Two days later, Philip's troops,
one of the largest French armies ever gathered, caught up.
They had followed him all the way here.
Just as Edward had wanted.
Historian Andrew Ayton has pieced together what happened next.
The battle probably began with the English first division,
the vanguard division of the Prince of Wales,
deployed in a crescent about here.
From the tower at one end to that apple tree in the distance down there.
Below them is a kind of bowl of terrain into which the French army advanced.
The battle began when the crossbow men were pushed forward by Philip
to neutralise the English defence at the beginning of the battle.
To soften them up, if you like.
The problem was that, before the crossbowmen got within range,
they had been mown down by concentrated massed archery shooting.
This was exactly what Edward had planned.
Froissart recorded that the English arrows were so thick they fell like snow.
The French had never experienced anything like it.
With this first set back, the massed ranks of French knights responded.
What we see then are a series of French heavy cavalry attacks on the English position.
As the cavalry advanced, of course horses would begin to come down.
They would create mounds of horse cadavers,
which would then be difficult for the next wave of cavalry to get round.
So they would stop, presenting easy targets for the archers.
After a while, the battlefield would have been littered with horseflesh.
And under the horses would have fallen their riders.
If they hadn't been hit by arrows,
they would have been crushed by their horses.
One of the most vivid remarks that a French chronicler makes is,
"On this day, men were killed by their horses."
So it's a killing ground down there
and it's created by the topography of the battlefield.
And Edward exploits it to perfection.
The high ground really is giving an advantage. It is.
It's a perfect place for an archer to use his bow.
Shooting down, you're not wasting energy by going up and then down.
And it negated, it neutralised, the French advantage of heavy cavalry.
It's also creating an impediment to this face to face combat
that's supposedly so important to this chivalric king.
Only a proportion of the French aristocracy would get within striking distance
of their English counterparts on foot around the prince in his division.
That's true. But, from Edward's point of view this didn't matter,
because the French had such a numerical advantage in terms of knights, noblemen, men-at-arms,
it was crucial, from the English point of view,
to take out as many of them as possible at a distance.
To even the odds, if you like.
So, when after the battle, a French chronicler, the Grande Chroniques,
says it was such a shame that so many noblemen were brought down by men of no value,
Edward's point of view would have been, "Well, that's just part of my tactical method."
There are individual acts of heroism, aren't there?
There are. The most dramatic is King John of Bohemia who, by this time, was blind.
When he hears that the battle is not going well,
he asks the Bohemian knights, who are accompanying him to the field,
to take him forward into the fray.
One of the chroniclers tells us he and they were all killed
tied together, chained together on the field.
Whether he actually got to give a blow with his sword, we don't know.
In one of England's greatest victories,
Edward had lost just 300 mounted men.
Philip, who'd been hit in the neck by an arrow, had fled.
Behind him in these fields lay the bodies of 10,000 French nobles.
Allegedly, a white ostrich feather like this was plucked from the crown
of the dead King John of Bohemia by the Prince of Wales and presented to his father,
who said, "Ich dien," I serve.
This act is commemorated to this day on the two-pence coin
where you see the three ostrich feathers.
And it's still the emblem of the Prince of Wales.
Returning from the battle of Crecy, here at Gloucester Cathedral,
one of Edward's commanders commissioned the East Window in celebration.
Rising 22 metres high, it glorifies the great hierarchy of chivalry.
Knights, kings and saints beneath the head of the church.
It's perhaps ironic that it wasn't knights who had won the battle
but low-born archers.
In fact, Edward had shown just how willing he was
to abandon the shared rules of chivalry to win.
But one battle wasn't enough.
To win back his lands, Edward would have to carry on fighting.
And he needed to keep his men supplied.
His next target was Calais.
To take the town, Edward would embark on the longest
and most expensive siege in medieval history.
This 15th-century copy of Jean Froissart's Chronicles
tells us about the fight for this strategically vital port.
The people of Calais held out for nearly a year,
forced to eat horses and rats to survive.
By the time the town fell in September 1347,
they were in no position to negotiate.
Edward could dictate his terms for the city's humiliating surrender.
Instead of ordering a massacre of the whole population,
he says that, "Six of the principal citizens of Calais
shall march out of the town with bare heads and feet,
with ropes around their necks
and with the keys to the town and the castle in their hands."
"They shall be at my absolute disposal."
In France, these six men have never been forgotten.
And here they are in the square in Calais,
captured so evocatively by Rodin in 1889.
The sculpture was commissioned to commemorate French heroism in the Franco-Prussian War.
It's interesting that the subject of the Burghers of Calais was chosen.
These men going willingly to what they thought was their imminent death
has become a symbol of self-sacrifice.
A symbol of French national pride.
Across the Channel, the exact same sculpture
stands opposite the Houses of Parliament in London.
Here it has a very different meaning.
When these men had left the gates of Calais ready to die for their town,
Edward, in a great show of mercy, spared their lives.
Here, this sculpture commemorates
the act of a monarch powerful enough to be benevolent.
Ten years into the war,
in England King Edward and his campaigns were hugely popular,
not least for the vast spoils flooding in from France.
For Edward, this war wasn't just to be fought on the battlefield.
His next move was a political one at home.
But every bit as destructive to the relationship with France as any military victory.
I've come to Lingfield Church in Surrey to see the tomb
of one of Edward's most loyal commanders, Sir Reginald Cobham.
Cobham was a prominent figure in Edward III's military circle.
A hero of Caen and Crecy, and one of the men who crossed the ford
at Blanchetaque to clear the way for Edward's army.
Reginald Cobham's tomb tells us how Edward's Knights saw them themselves
and how they wanted to be remembered.
But he doesn't just want to be remembered as an individual soldier.
It's his fraternity that's all important.
Just look at the coats of arms on the base of this tomb.
Each one represents a different knightly family.
But Reginald's tomb tells us something else about him.
Strapped around his left leg is a thin band of leather.
It shows he was a member of Edward's newly founded Order of the Garter.
This exclusive institution had all the trappings of conventional chivalry.
But there was a crucial difference.
Its members were not just the chivalric elite.
Sir Reginald wasn't a hero of the nobility but of the battlefield.
The elevation of a man of humble rank to a Garter Knight
was a sign that King Edward
was interested in rewarding service not birth.
Edward was changing the way the knighthood would fight this war.
In creating the Order of the Garter at Windsor Castle,
Edward surrounded himself with men loyal only to him.
Designed to mirror the legendary knights of Arthur's Round Table,
it had just 26 elite members.
The inaugural meeting of the knights took place in St George's Chapel on the 23rd of April 1349.
All around me are the coats of arms of the original knights and their successors,
right up to the present day.
Edward's order wouldn't just fight under
the traditional shared values of chivalry but for his cause.
They were bestowed with a mission statement to be displayed wherever they roamed.
The motto, "Honi soit qui mal y pense,"
"Shame on he who thinks evil of it,"
is thought to be a pointed reference
to the king's claims to the throne of France.
And there was another provocative detail.
The colours chosen for the leather garter were blue and gold,
the royal colours of the French.
But I think Edward's masterstroke was that his men would fight under
the red cross of the 4th-century warrior St George, Edward's personal saint.
The inauguration of the Garter Knights was a seminal moment in our history.
It wasn't just about Edward's dynastic claims.
This was about service to a national project.
And the King's saint and protector, St George, was also nationalised.
It was a triumph of propaganda and strategic thinking.
The symbol of the English nation had been born
and Edward had further eroded the bonds between France and England.
In contrast, France was wracked with crisis.
King Philip had never recovered from his defeat at Crecy.
When he died in 1350, it was as a broken man.
Philip's successor was his son John II.
He had earned his nickname John the Good
more for his prowess in tournaments than for his strategic thinking.
And here he is, John II.
This is the first real portrait of a French king.
Taking his inspiration from the 26 Knights of the Garter,
John founded his own order of chivalry.
His Knights of the Star were established
"For the glory of god, of our lady,
for the heightening of chivalry and the augmenting of honour."
The French response was to be more chivalric than ever.
In contrast to Edward's elite force of 26,
here 500 knights swore loyalty to the king
and never to flee the battlefield.
The man who put the whole thing together was Geoffroi de Charny,
the perfect French knight, a hero from the struggle for Calais
and the author of his own book on chivalry.
Here he is pictured fighting opposite Edward III
during an ill-starred attempt to retake Calais in 1347.
In the Book Of Chivalry, Charny regards skills at arms
as the pinnacle of knightly values
and war as the greatest of chivalric combats.
He says, "You will have to put up with great labour before you achieve honour from this employ."
"You will be afraid when you see men slaughtering one another,
fleeing, dying and being taken prisoner,
and your friends dead, whose corpses lie before you."
"You could flee with your horse and ride off without honour."
"But, if you stay, you will have honour ever after."
"Is this not a greater martyrdom?"
The French King was convinced that, with chivalry reasserted,
they could defeat the English.
But in 1348, both France and England were stopped in their tracks
by catastrophic events outside of anyone's control.
There's a remarkable testimony to what happened here at the Church of St Mary's in Ashwell.
Its walls are covered in graffiti, some of it medieval.
These aren't the words of kings and chroniclers but of ordinary people.
There's a particularly irreverent message here.
It says, "Archidiacobus asemnes."
Roughly translated, "The archdeacon is an ass."
But I'm here to see one message in particular.
It's scratched into the walls of the bell tower.
And here it is.
You can just make it out here.
Written in Latin, it says, "Pestilencia."
"There was a plague."
"Miseranda ferox violenta."
"Miserable, fierce and violent."
"A wretched populace survives to witness."
The Black Death had reached Europe.
And in just two years it would wipe out half the population.
The disease had arrived in England in 1348
and swept east through the country.
It's thought that the graffiti was scratched in the stone
by monks fleeing the plague in London.
We can only imagine the horrors they witnessed.
In just 18 months, some 40,000 Londoners were killed.
That no one could explain this pestilence made it all the more terrifying.
Most shocking to the medieval mind
was that it attacked all levels of society.
It had no respect for the social order and nobody was safe.
King Edward lost his 14-year-old daughter to the disease.
France and England were forced to agree a truce.
But it was a fragile one.
Edward's appetite for conquest hadn't diminished
and France was more vulnerable than ever.
On top of years of failed war,
the plague had plunged the country into moral panic
and an economic crisis that Edward was keen to exploit.
After five years of truce and failed peace negotiations,
Edward re-ignited the war.
The new campaign was to be led by his 25-year-old son, the Prince of Wales.
In Canterbury Cathedral lies his elaborate tomb,
built to his specific instructions.
It was only after his death that this young prince became known as the Black Prince.
Some believe the name comes from his tournament arms,
those three ostrich feathers on a black background.
Others that he'd earnt it for the ferocious reputation he would gain in France.
The boy who had served at Caen and Crecy was about to become a legend in his own right.
I'm with his with biographer David Green.
David, you've looked into the life, the mind of the Black Prince.
What do you think of his personality?
What was he like as a person?
I think he's a product of his time and environment.
Undoubtedly, his background is something that is bound up with military ability.
He goes to his first tournament that we know of when he was about six.
He gets his first suit of armour when he's eight.
He fights at his first tournament when he's about 13.
When he's 16, he's fighting in the vanguard at Crecy.
I think he was a very inspirational figure to his men,
very effective in rallying the troops.
I think he's a proud man undoubtedly.
Seen as being perhaps rather haughty, rather domineering.
At the core, though, is still this military ability.
In October 1355, the Black Prince sailed to Gascony
and mustered an army of over 6,000.
The plan was not to meet the French in battle but to terrorise them.
All this was a long way from the chivalric ideas of warfare.
The Black Prince launched his army on a chevauchee,
literally, a horse raid through the country.
It was a medieval blitzkrieg beyond Gascony
and into the French king's lands, destroying everything in its path.
This was systematic pillage and destruction
designed to cripple the French economy, demoralise the population
and undermine faith in the French king.
Neither life nor properties were spared.
Historian Peter Hoskins has followed the route and studied the Black Prince's tactics.
They're going to destroy anything which they can't take.
Small farms, mills, homesteads,
vineyards. Crops are going to be destroyed in the fields.
Anything that can be taken is going to be taken and put on the carts.
It's a swathe of disruption, 20 miles wide.
What makes it so important really here,
bearing in mind this is a very economically important area for France,
it's almost the bread basket because of the grain that is grown here, it's a very important area.
So it's crippling the French It is.
It's about economic warfare.
It's about damaging the ability of the French king to raise taxes
to prosecute the war in the months and year to come.
They're going out, they're attacking anything they find. It's indiscriminate?
I think it's almost more than indiscriminate, it's total. Right.
If you come across a mill, you'll destroy it.
You'll try and damage or break the millstones if you can.
If you come across a farm, you'll take whatever you can.
You've got to live off the land, so you take food supplies.
If you come to a village, you'll want to empty the stores of food.
Then you'll burn it. The key to these operations is movement, you keep on the move all the time.
Keep the enemy guessing. You want the next villages to know you're coming.
They need to think about what they're going to do.
Are they going to surrender? Are they going to flee to the hills?
The brutality of the chevauchee campaign seems to be about
this imposition of the king's power on distant lands.
How do you control distant lands? Through this brutal campaign of annihilating the landscape.
It is about the demonstration of power but there's another element to it as well,
which is to demonstrate that the French king is powerless. Yes.
One of the fundamental duties of the nobility and the lords of the period is to protect their people.
And if you can demonstrate that the king cannot protect you,
protect the people, then that's a powerful message.
Not far behind us is the little village of Simorre.
We know that the people from Simorre fled on the approach of the army.
We don't know whether it was burned down after the army left
but, typically, it would've been burnt down.
Leaving a trail of devastation that would scar France for decades to come,
the Black Prince's men continued east for 300 miles.
They travelled at such speed, no French army could catch them.
After four weeks, they reached the walled city of Carcassonne.
Down there, outside the walls and across the river,
is the old town or the Bourg.
For three days, the Black Prince's men camped there,
feasting on the finest produce and guzzling the very best wine.
While up here in the city, the French knights looked on,
offering their townspeople no support and offering no resistance.
When the townspeople offered 250,000 gold ecus to save their city,
the Black Prince responded that he came not for gold but for justice.
What the Black Prince is doing is stressing both his
and his father's rights to this city and to the crown of France.
And, as such, he's implying that the townspeople of Carcassonne
are deluded in continuing to swear allegiance to King John.
And with that, he burnt the town.
Still the French king John didn't act.
He had neither the resources nor the imagination to counter this kind of campaign.
Instead of sending an army to Carcassonne, he sent a letter.
It arrived two weeks later.
It says, "I have been deeply affected by these events
and want nothing more than to avenge the wrongs done to the people of this town."
This is the best King John can do to reassure his demoralised subjects.
The Black Prince's plan was working perfectly.
So far, he'd managed to avoid the French king's army
and grew ever more confident.
He wrote home proudly of the "Many goodly towns and strongholds burnt and destroyed."
In spring the next year, the Black Prince launched a raid north east,
miles into the heart of central France, and reached as far as Tours.
But King John had finally gathered an army.
On the 17th of September, outside Poitiers,
the English, laden down with plunder, were intercepted.
The prince's army of 10,000,
led by his commanders Sir Reginald Cobham and Sir John Chandos,
would have to face King John,
that paragon of chivalry Geoffroi de Charny and 20,000 men.
All of them determined not just to crush the son
but to avenge the sins of his father
in what would be the first major battle since Crecy.
According to an account written by Chandos's herald,
they all met on the eve of battle to try settle their differences.
As a last resort, de Charny says,
"I make the offer that we fight you 100 against 100."
"Cent par cent."
The Black Prince refused this chivalric gesture.
He was his father's son but this wasn't the carefully planned battle of Crecy.
The French attacked first.
This time, they were prepared for the English longbows.
The first wave were not on vulnerable horses but on foot
and ploughed their way through the English lines.
The Black Prince's only hope was a hidden unit,
which he sent to attack the French from behind.
Then he and his men made a remarkable attempt
to hack their way through to the French standard and King John.
In the clash that followed, the Knights of the Order of the Star were decimated.
Bound by the rules of their order,
they were unable to leave the battlefield
and so fell doing their chivalric duty.
One of Froissart's chronicles records that de Charny,
still holding the Oriflamme, was cut down by Reginald Cobham.
The Order of the Star had met the Order of the Garter.
The real prize, captured with one of his sons, was the French king.
In triumph, the Black Prince took the humiliated John to Gascony.
After seven months in Bordeaux, King John, his son
and hundreds of noble prisoners were shipped to England for ransom.
Edward III would make a fortune.
This time, Edward had not just humbled the French monarchy,
he had broken it.
So, Andrew, after Poitiers,
can we really see the bonds between English and French nobility
pulling apart once and for all?
The English had been using the French war as a means of making vast profit
at the expense of the French nobility.
The balance of payments on ransoms is massively in England's favour.
If we imagine the French elite as a vast social network,
their hubs had been torn out. It left society in France without leaders.
Given that 20 years of war had led to the rape of the French countryside,
systematically in some parts of France,
it is hardly surprising that, by the 1360s,
the English and French nobilities no longer saw eye to eye.
Defeated at Poitiers, with their king held prisoner,
the French had no choice but to agree a peace.
With the Treaty of Bretigny,
Edward was to be given full sovereignty,
not just of an enlarged Gascony, but of all his conquests in France.
On receipt of these lands, nearly a third of the country,
Edward was to formally renounce his claim to be king of France.
So really is this claim to the French crown a bit of a red herring?
He's using it to further his rights to his ancestral territories.
Well, the question about his claim to the throne of France is how real it really was.
Was it intended primarily as a sort of bargaining lever in the diplomatic stage?
Or was he using this to extract a large ransom from the French king?
And his ancestral lands expanded now, in full sovereignty,
was that what he was using his claim to the throne for?
Was he accepting that, at some point, he may need to set it aside
in order to achieve what he was really after all the time,
the property that his ancestors had had in France?
Whatever his motivation, Edward spent his triumphant years,
and vast spoils, turning Windsor,
the seat of his loyal Knights of the Garter, into a magnificence palace.
It escaped everyone's notice that Edward's formal renunciation
of his claim to the French crown was never made.
As for King John of France,
he was unable to pay his colossal three million gold crown ransom.
A gracious King Edward actually let him go home,
keeping instead his two sons as hostages.
Within a year, King John was back.
He preferred hawking in captivity to reconstructing his ruined country.
He would eventually die here in England, a truly defeated man.
Edward had got what he wanted, he'd won.
But he'd done more than that.
No longer a vassal, he had changed the rules of England's relationship with France.
And he'd set his country on a path from which there would be no way back.
Next on the Hundred Years' War,
France is out for revenge.
England descends into civil war as the peasants rise up in revolt.
Oh, my god!
But in all this chaos a new cultural identity emerges.
And for the English a new hero,
Henry V.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd