The historian Dan Jones looks at the “gripping” story of the Siege of Calais in 1347, which has had little attention from English historians. It’s part of the background to his new book, Wolves of Winter.
In front of the town hall in Calais today stands a magnificent sculpture by Auguste Rodin. It depicts six ragged, hungry men standing with nooses around their necks. They are facing their deaths, and each does so in his own way: with defiance, acceptance or anguish.
The sculpture is known as Les Bourgeois de Calais, and the historical scene it recreates is one of the most famous in the city’s history, as well as one of the best-known episodes from the Hundred Years’ War.
It is the late summer of 1347 and the Bourgeois – or burghers – are emerging to plead with the English king Edward III, for the lives of their fellow citizens. In exchange they are offering their own lives and the keys to the city.
A long siege has left them with no other option. All they can do is hope the war-weary English king will show them a scrap of mercy.
How did it come to this? What was Edward doing besieging Calais? And why were the burghers – the wealthy merchants who led the city – prepared to make such a grim sacrifice?
Strangely, beyond its melodramatic denouement, the siege of Calais has scarcely been written about at any length in English. But the story is gripping and deserves to be better known.
In July 1346, Edward III invaded Normandy with 15,000 troops. He claimed to be prosecuting his right to the crown of France, as well as England. This was the basis for what today we call the Hundred Years’ War, a conflict of 116 years, which pitted English and French kings against one another and drew in allies of both sides from all over Western Europe.
Having landed in Normandy, Edward’s English army went on the rampage for several weeks, in a campaign of terror given the heroic-chivalric name of a chevauchée. Eventually, the French king Philip VI raised an army and tried to chase them away.
On 26th August, the two forces met in battle beside the forest of Crécy. The English, despite having the smaller, more exhausted, hungrier army, crushed the French.
Often the story of the ‘Crécy campaign’ ends there. Yet what the English did next had even more historical significance.
On the morning after the battle Edward decided that a stirring victory was not a good enough return on the vast amounts of money and blood that had been expended so far. He needed something tangible. So he marched his army towards the coast and in early September laid siege to Calais.
Calais was a tempting but difficult target. It was handily located opposite the Cinque Ports of the English southeast coast, and near the Flemish towns with whom the English were economically and politically allied. That was the good news. The bad news was that Calais was defended with huge walls, a double set of moats, two castles, the sea and a large area of marshland into which siege engines would simply sink.
Edward’s solution was a double blockade. Across the islands in the marsh, the English built an entire wooden city of their own, equipped with everything a modern medieval city needed: municipal buildings, stables, a marketplace, and barracks for an army that at its largest would number 30,000.
The town was nicknamed Villeneuve la Hardi (Bold New Town) – at its peak it was more populous than any English town outside London.
Its sheer size, and a ditch and fortifications around the outside, meant it was almost impossible for Philip VI, still reeling from Crécy, to contemplate driving the English away.
Building Villeneuve, however, was the easy bit. Much harder was enforcing a sea blockade. The English had the edge over the French navy, which relied for combat ships on unreliable, expensive Genoan allies.
What Edward’s admirals struggled to stop was a daring, bootstrap, blockade-running operation, led by a pirate called Jean Marant, who ran a gang of freebooters out of a pub called The Tin Jar.
Marant and his crew kept Calais supplied throughout the winter of 1346–7. Eventually Edward had to order a ship scuttled in the mouth of Calais’ harbour, and mount a difficult military operation to seize control of a fortress that overlooked the harbour on a spit of land known as the Risbank.
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Even then, Marant’s pirates kept finding a way through. It was not until the late spring of 1347, when the English had been camped outside Calais for eight months, that Edward had enough ships to clamp down for good.
By this time, disease was running through the English camp. Desertion was rife. To replenish his troops, Edward had to send to England to recruit criminals into his army, who agreed to serve in exchange for a pardon for their crimes.
If conditions outside Calais were bad, however, things inside the city were worse. Once the blockade tightened, food and ammunition began to run out. Calais’ leaders, headed by the burghers and a veteran soldier called Jean de Vienne, expelled ‘useless mouths’ more than once. But by the summer of 1347 they were all starving.
Desperate for help from his king, Vienne penned a famous letter to Philip VI describing the plight of the city. They had eaten the horses, dogs and rats, he said. Soon there would be nothing at all left to feed on, ‘unless we eat the flesh of men.’
Philip was by this time nearby, with an army, wondering if he dared attack the English in Villeneuve. As was his way, he thought about it too long, changed his mind, and let it be known that in fact he preferred caution to valour.
When the news that he was retreating reached Calais, the burghers realised they had no choice. They opened the gates, and six of them came out to negotiate with Edward, in the scene portrayed by Rodin.
Edward, understandably fed up with having taken such trouble over Calais, was angry, and decided to hang the burghers. According to chronicle accounts, it was only the pleading of his pregnant queen, Philippa of Hainault, that inclined him to mercy.
Yet if he spared the burghers’ and citizens’ lives, Edward did not spare their livelihoods. Calais was taken into English hands and its businesses and houses confiscated and divided between the merchants who had funded Edward’s war.
Calais remained a mercantile and military outpost of England for more than 200 years afterwards, until it was lost at the end of Mary Tudor’s reign. It was said she died mourning a city that her ancestor Edward had taken so much trouble to seize.
Wolves of Winter by Dan Jones is published on 12 October, 2023.
Read our interview with Dan, in which he talks about moving from from being a bestselling historian to writing historical fiction with the first book in this series, Essex Dogs.
Images:
- The Burghers of Calais, statue by Rodin outside the Palace of Westminster: Christine Matthews for Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed)
- Edward III pays homage for Aquitaine to Philip VI by Jean Fouquet, Grandes Chroniques de France, 1455–60: Levan Ramishvili for Flickr (public domain)
- The Battle of Crécy by Jean Fouquet, Grandes Chroniques de France, 1455–60: Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Siege of Calais, medieval illustration: Wikimedia (public domain)
- The French attempt to retake Calais in 1350 by Jean Fouquet, Grandes Chroniques de France, 1455–60: Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Les Bourgeois de Calais by Auguste Rodin, Musée Rodin, Paris: Wally Gobetz for Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Deed)
