The need for a new biography of Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine may not be self-evident. What more can or needs to be said about this figure whose reputation and character is so well known but has been so shaped and shrouded by chivalric myth; who has been seen as a brutal but no less shadowy representation of the worst and at the same time most praiseworthy characteristics of the late medieval period? In part, it may be enough to say that it is over 20 years since the last biography of the Black Prince was published, concluding a flurry of interest in Edward of Woodstock that was on a scale which had not been seen since the end of the previous century when his qualities were valued more highly.1 Much of the commentary in the intervening years has been negative. The impression, although not one often given by his biographers, has tended to be of a violent, grasping, profligate and arrogant man. That the prince could be all these things is not in doubt, but there was much more to the man that won his spurs in the vanguard at Crécy aged 16, who married for love and not for politics at 31 years (an extraordinary age for the heir-apparent), and who formed a vibrant court, the envy of Europe, at Bordeaux. For a man who was so much a product of his own time, he has been judged to a great degree by the standards of a later age. The success of a late medieval prince was determined in no small way by military talent, his ability to secure adequate finances from his estates, the successful distribution of those revenues in the form of patronage and as a demonstration of power, and pride in his lineage and achievements. That such priorities might be seen to descend into violence, avarice, profligacy and arrogance, is to some extent merely a matter of vocabulary. The intention of this book is not to provide a postrevisionist picture of the Black Prince, but to place him in context, to place him in the milieu in which he was, until the last years, almost effortlessly comfortable.
Recent years have seen the publication of a considerable body of scholarship concerning the late medieval period in general, notably the Hundred Years War, and the fourteenth century in particular. The rekindling of interest in medieval military history in conjunction with extensive work on the chivalric ethic has refocused interest on Edward the Black Prince. A central concern of this book will be the campaigns and expeditions which he undertook in 1346, 1355–6, 1359–60 and 1367, and the contemporaneous developments in matters such as strategy, tactics and recruitment – in essence the ‘professionalisation’ of the English (or Anglo-Welsh/Anglo-Gascon) armies. The Black Prince did not fight in a strategic or tactical vacuum, his methods of recruitment, funding and equipping his soldiers were shaped by an environment outside the experiences of his father, his commanders and the structures of local and national government. Indeed, it was those structures and the experiences of many of those that comprised the force which was victorious at Crécy that provided the platform for future success and established the English and their heir-apparent among the finest soldiers in Europe.
Of additional and particular interest is the period of the principality of Aquitaine (1362–71), which has been greatly under-represented in English works on the war. This and the reopening of hostilities in 1369 is too important an event to cast aside as simply the consequence of the overbearing pride of the spoiled heir-apparent.
This book has developed partly as a consequence of my doctoral thesis on ‘The Household and Military Retinue of Edward the Black Prince’, and if what follows seems not always to be as much a biography of Edward himself but of those that surrounded him, then it can be attributed to that research and also to a deliberate attempt to highlight the collective and individual importance of that exceptional company.