Foix and friends

After the truce of Vives-St Bavon in 1297, whereby England and France agreed to stop fighting for a bit, the Gascons were free to return to their private wars. Count Roger-Bernard had led French troops in Gascony, but now he started to build up alliances against his nephew and enemy, Bertrard of Armagnac.

Philip le Bel, once an enemy of the English, now joined forces with them to put an end to the Foix-Armagnac feud. Three of Edward I’s councillors were invited to the great French parliament at Toulouse in 1304, where the rival families were summoned to explain themselves. There was some serious bling on display:

‘Toulouse, glowing red-rose in the southern winter sunlight, provided a setting worthy of the magnificent assemblage; the king was robed in cloth of gold over purple and gold brocade, sprinkled with the fleur-de-lus, the princes of the blood wore purple cloth of gold, and the constable of France, who bore the king’s sword before him, outshone them all, in his robe of state, divided by strips of gold into blue and red squares with the fleur-de-lis in the center of each one’. -

Esther Rose Clifford, A Knight of Great Renown

All of this show and glitter produced, in Clifford’s words, ‘a very small mouse’: all Philip could do was force the rival parties to exchange the kiss of peace and swear to obey his new law against private warfare. Like hell.

The trigger for the next round of bloodshed was a genuine act of chivalric generosity. Constance of Béarn, a Gascon noblewoman, had defected to the French in the recent war and lost all her lands in England, which were confiscated and given to a Gascon loyalist, Amanieu d’Albret. In September 1304, at the explicit request of Amanieu, Constance was taken back into Edward I’s favour. This meant her lands were taken away from him and restored to her.

Just in case anyone thought Amanieu was going soft, he decided to start a war.