Victories at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers, in 1356, led to the highly favourable Treaty of Brétigny, in which England made territorial gains, and Edward renounced his claim to the French throne.

[17][18][19][c] The King had alienated several English nobles and Scottish allies by abandoning his father's war with Scotland soon after his accession, and continued to lose battles against the Scots intermittently.

The King married Philippa of Hainault at York Minster on 24 January 1328, and the birth of their first child, Edward of Woodstock, on 15 June 1330 only increased tension with Mortimer.

[36] The historian Mark Ormrod argued that at this point Edward had had "little instruction in the art of kingship",[38] and although he had received several books on the subject on his betrothal to Philippa, "it is extremely doubtful that he read or comprehended these works".

The English king responded by laying siege to the important border town of Berwick and defeated a large relieving army at the Battle of Halidon Hill,[41] even while under threat from foreign raids.

[55] James Bothwell argues that, while he managed to reconcile the sides bloodlessly and with minimum acrimony, it was insufficient to leave him secure on his own: he lanced the opposition but had not turned them into a loyalist cadre.

[57] Of these, Bohun, Clinton, Montagu and Ufford had played leading roles in Edward's coup against Mortimer; they were likewise the greatest beneficiaries in terms of grants and estates.

The regency council at home was frustrated by the mounting national debt, while the King and his commanders on the Continent were angered by the failure of the government in England to provide sufficient funds.

[83] Historian Nicholas Rodger called Edward III's claim to be the "Sovereign of the Seas" into question, arguing there was hardly any royal navy before the reign of Henry V (1413–1422).

[137] According to Fryde, "one of Edward's most onerous and wasteful liabilities" came in February 1339, when he effectively pawned the Great Crown of England to the Archbishop of Trier, for which the King promised repayment of £16,650.

[138] Edward met his creditors in Ghent in 1340, but, unable to immediately satisfy their demands, notes Bertie Wilkinson, "pretending that he wanted to take a walk, he secretly rode away".

[142] At the same time, Edward expanded the ranks of the peerage upwards, by introducing the new title of duke for close relatives of the king;[143] creating the first three dukedoms of England (Cornwall, Lancaster, and Clarence).

It has been argued that the total warfare tactics employed by the English at Crécy in 1346 were contrary to Arthurian ideals and made Arthur a problematic paradigm for Edward, especially at the time of the institution of the Garter.

[152] Polydore Vergil tells of how the young Joan of Kent – allegedly the King's favourite at the time – accidentally dropped her garter at a ball at Calais.

Edward responded to the ensuing ridicule of the crowd by tying the garter around his own knee with the words honi soit qui mal y pense (shame on him who thinks ill of it).

[154] Just as the war with Scotland had done, the fear of a French invasion helped strengthen a sense of national unity and nationalise the aristocracy that had been largely Anglo-Norman since the Norman conquest.

[166] In France, meanwhile, the decade following the Treaty of Brétigny was one of relative tranquillity, but on 8 April 1364, John II died in captivity in England, after unsuccessfully trying to raise his own ransom at home.

[167] He was followed by the vigorous Charles V, who enlisted the help of the capable Bertrand du Guesclin, Constable of France[168] In 1369, the French war started anew, and Edward's son John of Gaunt was given the responsibility of a military campaign.

[172] The contemporary chronicler Thomas Walsingham saw her as a low-born woman who, through her own ambition, made a fortune from the besotted King;[173] and this was the popular view presented to the Good Parliament of 1376, in which she was also accused of taking 2000 to 3000 pounds in gold and silver per annum from the royal treasury.

[196] By the mid-1360s his family had furthered his continental policy, both diplomatically and militarily, sufficiently that he allowed his son Edward and his daughter Isabella to do that rarest of things in the Middle Ages: marry for love.

However, the historian Kathryn Warner has suggested that, as William of Woodstock was also born and died the same year, and combined with the paucity of material evidence, it is likely that this Thomas is a composite.

She argues that "the entire existence of 'Thomas of Windsor' in some modern books and websites appears to be based on the spurious story by two chroniclers that Philippa was heavily pregnant when she interceded for the Calais burghers in early August 1347".

Unlike his father's passion for manual work, including carpentry, thatching and rowing, Edward III "shared to the full the conventional tastes and pleasure of the aristocracy",[226] with his principal interest being architecture.

Even the final destruction of the Plantagenets at Bosworth in 1485 failed to impinge on Edward III's posthumous image; he was also the most recent king Henry VII could lay claim of descent from.

[246]This view has been challenged through most of the 20th century, and Ormrod has observed that "no modern reader could seriously accept all these compliments at face value",[247] although also that in their efforts to counter the prevailing hagiography, early 20th-century historians were more critical: Edward III is now often seen as a rather second-rate ruler, stubborn and selfish in his foreign ambitions, weak and yielding in his domestic policies.

A medieval king could not be expected to work towards some future ideal of a parliamentary monarchy as if it were good in itself; rather, his role was a pragmatic one – to maintain order and solve problems as they arose.

[232] Ormrod argues that in overturning the Stubbsian paradigm, historians may have gone too far in the opposite direction, not taking into account the problems he had to solve and the number of different factions he had to accommodate to get things done.

This, they argue, is the most important point regarding modern scholarship on Edward III: not necessarily to overturn previous consensus, but to look at all aspects of a multi-faceted King and examine how he achieved this success.

[192] Edward's grandson, the young Richard II, faced political and economic problems, many resulting from the Black Death, including the Peasants' Revolt that broke out across the south of England in 1381.

[252][253] Over the coming decades, Richard and groups of nobles vied for power and control of policy towards France until Henry of Bolingbroke seized the throne with the support of Parliament in 1399.