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Ralph Neville spoiled David of Scotland’s alliance with France in the Hundred Years’ War
King David II of Scotland tried to help his ally France in the Hundred Years’ War, by knocking boldly on England’s back door. But after he stumbled across Ralph Neville’s defence force in a mist, things went from bad to worse.
When the Reformers sold off the treasures of Durham Cathedral, they sold a priceless piece of Scottish history into oblivion.
The Black Rood of Scotland was an heirloom of the Scottish royal family, captured by the English at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346 and added to the treasures of Durham Abbey. After the sixteenth-century Reformers ransacked the cathedral, the cross disappeared. A generation later, the Rites of Durham recalled some of the wonderful history of the vanished relic in a breathless tale, edited here by John Davies in 1671.
Henry VI’s campaign to confirm himself as King of France looked to be in trouble after the Duke of Brittany switched sides.
In 1425, England’s Henry VI and France’s Charles VII were still fighting the Hundred Years’ War for the French crown. That October, John V, Duke of Brittany followed his brother Arthur’s example and backed Charles. The Earl of Salisbury and other English generals replied with raids on Brittany from their base at Saint-James in Normandy, and by February, Arthur could see that brother John needed help.
As the Duke of Bedford and other English captains were besieging Orleans, they received a startling letter from a seventeen-year-old girl.
From October 1428 to the following May, an English army besieged the French city of Orléans, southwest of Paris. Invoking the Treaty of Troyes, signed in 1420 on the back of the late Henry V’s victory at Agincourt, the Duke of Bedford claimed the French crown for his young nephew Henry VI, and might have won it but for a defiant teenager named Joan of Arc, who in March sent Bedford this stinging rebuke.
Following the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, King Henry V instructed the Church of York to recognise the contribution of one of her eighth-century bishops.
Anyone who has watched William Shakespeare’s play Henry V knows that England’s unlikely victory at Agincourt on October 25th, 1415, came on the feast day of St Crispin and St Crispianus. What is less well known is that it was also a feast of St John of Beverley in Yorkshire, and that owing to a remarkable miracle the King himself instructed the Church of York to keep the day ever after with especial magnificence.
A few years before the Battle of Agincourt, the Duke of Orléans challenged King Henry IV to meet him in Bordeaux for a winner-takes-all joust.
In 1404, during an uneasy peace in the Hundred Years’ War, the Duke of Orléans invited King Henry IV of England to Bordeaux, then in English hands. There they were to do combat — with a few men, or single combat if Henry liked — and the winner would ransom the loser back to his people. Henry played for time, the two princes traded insults and Louis lost his temper.
A few weeks after a large French raiding party had been driven away from the Isle of Wight, another flotilla arrived from across the Channel demanding money with menaces.
Shortly before Christmas 1403, French pirates landed a thousand men on the Isle of Wight only to be scared off by irate islanders. In the New Year more ships came. Since Henry Bolingbroke (said their captains) had seen fit to depose his cousin King Richard II, and call himself Henry IV, some recompense was surely due for the humiliation of Richard’s young French wife, Isabella of Valois.