What Was a Medieval Ravaging?
A medieval ravaging was a deliberate, systematic military operation to destroy the economic base of an enemy’s territory. The word — in Old French ravage, in medieval Latin devastatio — was the term that contemporary chroniclers used for the destruction of crops, the burning of villages, and the slaughter or enslavement of the rural population. The English chevauchée of the Edwardian phase was the most famous ravaging of the Hundred Years’ War. The French, in the Caroline phase, used the same tactics on a smaller scale and in reverse, denying the English army the food and forage that a chevauchée depended on. The standard treatment is Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (2014); the contributions to Rogers’ The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (2010) give the technical detail.
The practice
A ravaging in the Hundred Years’ War was, in form, a specific kind of military operation. The army moved through the enemy’s territory in a column, with scouts in advance and a rearguard. The foot soldiers and camp followers were deployed to either side of the line of march, and the country within reach of the line was systematically destroyed. Vineyards and orchards were cut down, grain in the fields was burned, mills and granaries were pulled down, livestock was driven off or slaughtered, and the rural population was killed, ransomed, or driven into the towns. The effect, in the long run, was the economic impoverishment of the region: the destruction of the harvest meant famine in the winter, the slaughter of the livestock meant no seed corn for the spring, the burning of the villages meant the labour force had no homes to return to.
The medieval chroniclers, on both sides, recorded these operations with a mixture of horror and admiration. Froissart, in his Chroniques, describes the English chevauchée of 1346 in the Norman countryside with the precision of a man who had been there. The Brut chronicles describe the English ravaging of the Scottish border in the 1330s with similar vividness. The French chronicles of the Caroline phase describe the English chevauchées of the 1370s with the same vocabulary. The ravaging was not a casual cruelty. It was a recognised form of military operation, regulated by the customs of war, and treated by the chroniclers as a distinct strategic category.
The Edwardian ravagings
The English used the ravaging systematically in the Edwardian phase. The 1346 campaign — Edward III’s chevauchée through lower Normandy and the campaign that ended at Crécy on 26 August 1346 — is the most famous. The English army landed on 12 July 1346 with perhaps 12,000 men, sacked Caen on 26 July, and systematically ravaged the Norman countryside as it marched north toward Ponthieu. The Black Prince’s campaign of 1355–1356, the most ambitious English ravaging of the war, brought the English army as far north as the Loire. The Black Prince’s chevauchée was followed by the French response at Poitiers on 19 September 1356.
The English ravagings of the 1370s, conducted by John of Gaunt and the indent captains who operated out of Aquitaine and Brittany, were smaller and less successful. The strategy of the Caroline phase was, in the standard reading of Rogers, a French strategy of avoidance: the French refused the pitched battle that the English wanted, and the English ravaging was, in the end, the most expensive way of not winning the war.
The French ravagings
The French used the same tactical vocabulary in the Caroline phase, but on a smaller scale. Charles V, advised by du Guesclin, did not raise large field armies for ravaging. He used the routier companies — the unemployed mercenary bands of the 1360s — to harry the English garrisons and to deny the English army the food and forage that a chevauchée depended on. The French chroniqueurs of the period, in particular the Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis and Cuvelier’s Vie de Bertrand du Guesclin, describe the French counter-strategy with the same care that the English chronicles use for the chevauchée. The vocabulary is identical. The scale is not.
The Scottish border and the English ravagings
The most destructive English ravagings of the war were not, in fact, in France. Edward I’s ravaging of Scotland in 1298, Edward II’s at Bannockburn in 1314, and the long sequence of English operations against the Scots in the 1330s, 1380s, and 1400s were the most thoroughgoing examples of the strategy. The English army under Henry IV devastated the Scottish border in 1400–1405; the Earl of Salisbury’s ravaging of 1403 was one of the most destructive operations of the Hundred Years’ War. The Scottish chronicles describe the result in the same vocabulary: villages burned, livestock slaughtered, harvests destroyed, the population driven into the towns. The pattern is the same. The political context is different.
The ravaging as a strategic system
The ravaging, in the standard reading of Rogers, was the strategic system that explains both the success of the English in 1346 and the failure of the English in 1370. The system was highly effective in conditions in which the army was disciplined, the enemy refused battle, and the political object was the provocation of a battle on ground favourable to the attacker. The system was much less effective in conditions in which the enemy adopted a strategy of avoidance, the army was operating in hostile country without secure lines of communication, and the political object was the occupation of territory. The English ravaging of the Edwardian phase won battles. The English ravaging of the Caroline phase did not. The reason is not the strategy but the context in which it was used.
The legal and moral framework
The ravaging was not, in the legal sense, an unregulated form of violence. The medieval customs of war, codified in the late thirteenth century and applied throughout the Hundred Years’ War, set limits on what a ravaging army could do. The army was required to spare churches, monasteries, and the persons of clerics; the army was required to accept the surrender of a town that offered to capitulate; the army was required to take rather than kill prisoners of rank, who could be ransomed. The system was imperfect, and the chronicles record many violations, but the framework was real. A ravaging army that violated the customs of war forfeited its right to a ransom and exposed its commanders to the penalties of the chivalric code. The system, in the long run, was one of the foundations of the European law of war.
The decline of the ravaging
The ravaging declined in importance in the Lancastrian phase, as the development of professional armies, the increasing use of gunpowder artillery, and the changing strategic objectives of the war made large-scale cavalry operations less effective. The English campaign of 1415, Henry V’s march from Harfleur to Agincourt, has some of the features of a ravaging, but the operation was conducted on a much smaller scale than the Edwardian chevauchées, and the principal object was the provocation of a battle, not the devastation of the French countryside. The long French reconquest of the 1440s and 1450s was a campaign of sieges, not of ravagings. The ravaging, as a strategic system, was finished.
Significance
The medieval ravaging is one of the canonical examples of a strategic system that worked brilliantly in one set of conditions and failed in another. The system was the English army’s principal instrument in the 1340s and 1350s; the French counter-strategy of avoidance, developed by Charles V and du Guesclin in the 1370s, was the most important single response. The system, in the standard reading, was the reason the Edwardian phase ended where it did. The ravaging had not, in 1453, disappeared from European warfare. The political and tactical framework in which it had been the dominant instrument had.