The trouble with ceasefires...

 

Several of the more high profile conflicts in today’s world appear far more medieval than the ones we grew up with, which tended to be driven by supposedly more modern phenomena: ideologies, nationalisms, imperialisms and so on. 

This quote comes from a book about the 1380s when England and France were already locked into what would become known as the Hundred Years War, (which actually lasted a bit longer than that). 

At the time the country rather clearly needed peace in order to avoid the financial burden and all round distraction of permanent international strife, but there didn’t seem to be a way to achieve it without giving up what was seen as a fundamental principle, sovereignty: e.g. England did not want to hold its remaining territories on the continent in ‘fealty’ to the French King, it wanted Aquitaine and Calais for example, to remain part of England. 

And because they could not make peace in any way that would be satisfactory, this war became a long drawn out game of temporary ceasefires. In such an environment, negotiations tend to bog down with all sides acutely aware during this process that the best form of defence is almost always attack. 

The English also had to crane their necks to look behind them, so to speak. In 1385 the truce between them and the Scots was due to expire on July 15. As this date approached, a massive army was assembled at York, because the French were simultaneously preparing to join forces with the Scots at the moment the ceasefire was due to expire in order to attack from the north. 

Faced with this combined threat, 20,000 Englishmen marched behind their King and all his great lords into Scotland. For reasons not entirely military, this campaign collapsed fairly quickly and the English had retreated back to Newcastle as the French and the Scots poured over the border into Cumbria. 

This invasion in turn fizzled out because these perhaps unlikely allies discovered a few of their basic incompatibilities: the French knights were apparently appalled by the uncouth habits of the Scots coupled with the horrendous absence of wine, while the latter found siege warfare utterly boring, convinced that their home territory favoured faster-paced ‘guerrilla’ attacks. 

Anyway, medieval truces were respected, for what they were, which was not peace, but rather constantly re-scheduled interruptions to the on-going fighting. 

Compare the violent competition between states here in ancient Mesoamerica, which was also stop-start, but according to fixed calendrical milestones, so a bit more like the way European football leagues are currently organised.