“So we rode afterwards through the land of Armagnac, harrying and wasting the country, whereby the lieges of our said most honoured lord, whom the count had oppressed, were much comforted.” ~ excerpt of a letter from Edward, the Black Prince, to the Bishop of Winchester, 1355
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.
Read Full Article »