6
The Black Prince spent the winter of 1355 and spring of 1356 consolidating his position in Aquitaine and preparing for another chevauchée. Although no major operations were launched, there were constant but limited raids into French territory designed to recapture English possessions, and by the spring of 1356 thirty castles and towns had been recovered and garrisons installed. Orders were sent to England for the despatch of reinforcements and Sir Richard de Stafford was instructed to enlist 300 mounted archers. Two hundred were to be from Cheshire and the rest from wherever they could be found. They were to be arrayed, tested and equipped, and conveyed to Plymouth to take ship for Bordeaux without delay and in any case by Palm Sunday (15 March 1356). A resupply of weapons was also needed, so the prince sent one of his logisticians, Robert Pipot of Brookford, back to England to purchase 1,000 bows, 2,000 sheaves of arrows and 400 gross (57,600) of bowstrings. Clearly, the wastage rate of bowstrings was considerable. Pipot had problems in getting arrows, as all available stocks had already been bought up by the king and fletchers had to be hired to work night and day to make the quantities needed.
There was at least no problem in persuading soldiers to enlist, provided that they were available, for the depredations of the plague were of course still a major factor. Pay was reasonable and the rules for the division of plunder and ransom clearly spelled out. Wages were calculated by the day and there was usually a generous advance of pay on enlistment. In addition to their own pay, captains and leaders of companies were paid a bonus of 100 marks (about £66.66) per quarter for every thirty men they produced, and a leader who could produce 100 men (and there were some) could amass a lot of money in a reasonably short period of time – to say nothing of his cut of the loot and any ransoms paid for men captured by his company.
From the English point of view, it was increasingly important to meet the main French royal army and defeat it. Despite the successes of the 1355 campaign and the enormous plunder that had been realized from it, the English were still no nearer to forcing the French to recognize the legitimacy of English France. A decisive battle was needed, one which would end the war. Once again, the English plan was to coordinate attacks into central France from three directions: Henry of Lancaster from Normandy, King Edward from Calais and the Black Prince from Aquitaine. The prince would strike north for Paris, and, while we have no written evidence, he was almost certainly aiming to link up with Lancaster somewhere around the River Loire. The expense of such a plan – keeping three armies in the field, maintaining the various scattered garrisons and providing for the defence of Calais and Aquitaine – was enormous: around £100,000 in the financial year 1355/6 alone, about half of this for the Black Prince’s forces. But England could afford it, partially from taxation but mainly from customs duties and profits accrued from the campaigns so far and the ransoms obtained.
Jean of France had huge problems. His policy of avoiding pitched battles until the English ran out of money and went home had failed completely; he had demonstrably failed to protect those whom he regarded as his subjects; his government was riven with dissent and still suffering from the dislocation caused by the plague; his son and heir was plotting against him with the king of Navarre; and he was very short of money with which to continue the war – so much so that he declared a moratorium on the payment of government debt, which ruined great man and humble tradesman alike. This last point was perhaps Prince Edward’s major achievement of the previous year, for in a great swathe of territory from Bordeaux to the Mediterranean Sea the economy had been utterly ruined; it was calculated that by the destruction of Carcassonne and Limoux alone the French had been deprived of the funds to support 1,000 men-at-arms.26 English propaganda made much of Jean’s inability to prevent the English from going wherever they wanted and of his profligate frittering away of funds and oppressive taxation, stressing how much better life would be under the legitimate king of France – Edward III of England. The only solution open to Jean short of surrendering to all the English demands – which, given the attitudes of disgruntled French magnates, would have cost him his throne and possibly his life – was to abandon previous strategy and bring the English to battle, preferably on terms favourable to the French. Orders went out for men to be conscripted and mustered at various points along the River Loire.
On 4 August 1356, the Black Prince struck north towards Paris. As he could not afford to let a French army take advantage of his absence to invade Aquitaine, the seneschal, John de Chiverston, was left behind with a large force of about 2,000 men, leaving Prince Edward with a total of around 5,000 – 3,000 archers and 2,000 men-at-arms with a few hobelars. The whole army was mounted: they would move fast, never stopping long enough for the French to catch them at a disadvantage and only offering battle when it suited them to do so. As in previous chevauchées, no attention was paid to strongly fortified or defended castles or towns, but those that were only lightly held, or where the walls had fallen into disrepair, were swiftly taken and their stocks of food and wine taken to replenish the army. The baggage train was minimal and largely for carrying plunder and spare arrows and weapons – the plan was that the army would live off the land. The prince’s troops were covering around ten miles a day until the end of August, when they reached the town of Vierzon on the River Cher, which was found abandoned. The usual looting and burning in a wide area round about took place, and a detachment of troops under Sir James Audley and Sir John Chandos was sent off to do the same at Aubigny, twenty-five miles to the north-east.
Audley and Chandos were, like Manny, Holland and Dagworth, men of relatively modest origins who rose in wealth and status from their prowess in war. Audley, who was aged thirty-eight or thereabouts in 1356, was the illegitimate son of an Oxfordshire knight and a knight’s daughter and is first mentioned by the chroniclers as being in the retinue of Edward, Prince of Wales, during Edward III’s expedition of 1346/7. He was present at Crécy and at the siege of Calais, and, while we do not know when he was knighted, he was one of the founder members of the Order of the Garter. John Chandos was a younger son of a Derbyshire knight, and, while his date of birth is unknown, he was probably much the same age as Audley, for they appear to have been great friends and comrades in arms. Chandos was knighted in 1339, largely as a result of favourable comment on his courage and ability in a single combat outside Cambrai. He fought at the sea-battle of Sluys and, like Audley, was in the Prince of Wales’s retinue at Crécy. He was on board the prince’s ship at Winchelsea in 1350 and, again like Audley, was a founder member of the Garter.
Audley and Chandos completed their work of destruction at Aubigny and on their way back ran into and routed a band of French freebooters commanded by one Phillip de Chambry, known to his friends as Gris Mouton – ‘Grey Sheep’ – presumably from his appearance. It was from prisoners captured in this skirmish that the Black Prince discovered that the French were not as far away as he had thought. By now, Jean of France had assembled an army and had moved the various contingents to Chartres, but he still had no definite idea where the English were. With the obvious clues of a fifty-mile-wide trail of devastation pointing towards Paris and hordes of refugees fleeing the invaders, Jean knew from which direction the Black Prince was advancing but had no real idea of exactly how far he had got. What was clear to the French was that once the English crossed the Loire – assuming they could cross it – then the advantage would swing towards the French. For the river was in spate and the French hoped to trap the English army against it, leaving them no escape route.
It was probably when he was in the vicinity of Vierzon that the Black Prince realized he must abandon any intention of joining up with the duke of Lancaster. The duke had presumably calculated that, if he continued in the direction of Tours, he was going to meet the French army before he could join with Prince Edward. As he had no intention of fighting a hopeless battle, he wisely withdrew, sending a message to the French king that he had no intention of fighting as the French hoped but would ‘go where he liked and do as he wished’.27 The Black Prince’s expedition was not dependent on combining with Lancaster, but, now that this was no longer possible, he had to reappraise the situation. He was not afraid of a pitched battle with the French – indeed, he hoped for it – but to push further towards Paris without the addition of Lancaster’s troops would be unwise. It was essential that, if a battle were to take place, it was on ground of the prince’s choosing, where the English tactics could be best employed, rather than an opportunistic encounter dictated by the French. To move back the way he had come was not an option, as the territory had been laid waste and there would be no supplies or fodder for the horses to be found. He therefore decided to move west as far as Tours, from where he had the option of retiring south out of the devastated area and back to Bordeaux if no opportunity for a decisive battle presented itself.
Edward Plantagenet, Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, is in many ways an enigmatic figure. We are not even sure of the origin of the soubriquet. The Victorians thought it was because he wore black armour, and they painted his funerary monument in Canterbury Cathedral accordingly (it was later restored to its original steel and gilt); alternatively, it has been suggested that it was a French appellation, indicating how much they hated him. From contemporary descriptions and paintings and from the effigy on his tomb, he appears to have been tall, well built and handsome, with the long face of the Plantagenets, and like most sprigs of the nobility of the time he was fond of tournaments and jousting. From the age of thirteen he accompanied his father on campaign, and there can be no doubt that he was personally brave, as he showed at Crécy, and cognizant of the chivalric conduct of others, even of his enemies, as he demonstrated when he honoured the dead King John of Bohemia by taking his ostrich feather badge as his own personal insignia.51 In matters of religion, he appears to have gone beyond the conventional display of faith and to have had a genuine and deep belief. We know from lists of allowances and gifts of armour and plate given to friends and to those who had served him well that he was generous and, at least in his earlier years, accrued little personal profit from ransoms, often distributing much of the monies to companions and attendants. As a military commander, once away from his father and in sole command, he was a sound tactician and a natural leader, while always prepared to listen to subordinates who had more experience than he. On the debit side, he had the reputation of being a stern landlord, and tenants and inhabitants of the lands that were his main sources of income – Wales, Cornwall, Cheshire and Aquitaine – often found themselves heavily taxed. This was mainly in order to pay for military campaigns, however, rather than to fund personal extravagance, as was alleged.
To some, the prince appeared aloof and unapproachable, but this may simply have been the result of a preference for the company of those whom he knew and trusted. Politically, he could be naive: he was hopeless at intrigue and often settled for less than he might have got with more skilful negotiation. To modern eyes, his conduct on campaign – the burning, the levelling of towns, the destruction of crops – is nothing short of criminal, but it was the normal mode of behaviour in an enemy country at the time. It was intended not as wanton ruin per se but to entice the main enemy army to give battle, and to show the populace that he who claimed to be their ruler was unable to give them the protection that should have stemmed from allegiance. Overall, the verdict of history – British history at least – is that Edward was a great soldier, a great Englishman and a worthy occupant of the British pantheon.
It has to be said that on this occasion the young Edward showed a great deal of confidence in himself and his men, and very little sense of urgency, reinforcing the evidence that he wanted to provoke a battle. He calculated that his mounted army could easily outmarch the generally ponderous French military machine, so he moved along the River Cher to Romorantin, on the Loire, and laid siege to it. Not only could the Black Prince not afford to leave a hostile garrison in his rear, but there was also the hope that the French might try to relieve the town and thus give the prince his battle. If Jean did not take the bait, however, Edward was confident that he could take the town and be on his way long before the French could interfere. Romorantin took five days to subdue and was eventually forced to surrender when the walls were collapsed by mining and the central keep was set on fire, but there was no attempt by the French to raise the siege. More time was lost trying to find a crossing of the Loire in the Tours area, although the wait here may also have been dictated by a renewed hope that the duke of Lancaster might yet be able to rendezvous with the prince.
The French had destroyed all the bridges over the Loire from Tours north-east to Blois, so, having failed to find either the duke of Lancaster or a crossing point, the prince decided on 11 September to move south in the direction of the English base at Bordeaux, still at a leisurely pace. Whether this was due to overconfidence or because he wanted to entice the French into following him is still debated; all the evidence seems to point to the latter, but it may well have been a combination of the two. In fact, the French army was much closer than either the Black Prince or Jean of France knew, and soon they were marching parallel to each other as the English reached Châtellerault and the French La Haye, twelve miles to the north-east. Both commanders wanted a battle: the Black Prince because he needed to strike a decisive blow, being, as the chronicler le Baker avers, ‘Anxious for battle for the sake of the peace which usually follows’;28 and Jean because he could no longer placate his own people by procrastination. Moving rather faster than anyone expected, on 15 September, the French reached the east bank of the River Vienne at Chauvigny, from where they intended to move west towards Poitiers and cut the English off from Bordeaux. Reports from the Black Prince’s mounted reconnaissance patrols that the French were now to their south discomfited Edward not one whit. The French had now committed themselves to battle and Edward would oblige them. The English baggage train and its accumulated booty was moved off to the west so as not to hinder the movement of the army.
The first blows were struck on 17 September, when strong English mounted patrols under the Gascon knights d’Aubricourt and de Ghistelles intercepted the French rearguard, with the advantage going to the English. The lead scouts of the main bodies clashed briefly too, when the English tried to intercept the French as they crossed the Vienne, arriving too late to do so. The French army now took up position on the plateau south-east of Poitiers, with Jean himself in the town and the English army to the south. Before first light on the following day, Sunday, the English army was on the march south, in order to find a position suitable for battle, halting somewhere in the area of Nouaillé-Maupertuis, about four miles south-east of Poitiers.
The rest of the day was spent in negotiation on the instigation of the cardinal of Périgord, who scurried hither and thither trying to persuade each combatant to come to an arrangement that would avoid a battle. Eventually, Prince Edward agreed to talk and discussions began. On the French side were two archbishops, the count of Tancarville, who had been captured at Caen and ransomed for £6,000, and three other lords, while the English were represented by the earls of Warwick and Suffolk, senior commanders, and the trio of Audley, Chandos and Sir Bartholomew Burghersh. Burghersh was another who had made his name from war, although starting from rather more comfortable circumstances than most. He was the great-nephew of Lord Badlesmere, whose wife had refused Queen Isabella entry to Leeds Castle in 1322, the family losing their estates as a result, regaining them after Isabella and Mortimer’s invasion, losing them briefly on Edward III’s coup, and then finally re-establishing themselves in good standing. Burghersh’s father, the first Lord Burghersh, had made a great deal of money (relatively honestly), but his son owed his position to being a first-class soldier who was present at most of Edward III’s and the Black Prince’s battles and was another founder member of the Order of the Garter.
It is difficult to see what either side thought could come out of these parleys. Indeed, it is unclear whether they seriously wanted them to succeed. Points at issue included the prisoners in English hands, and the obvious sticking points were the French demand that the English should provide hostages and the English insistence that any agreement arrived at must be ratified by Edward III. Neither condition was in the least acceptable, and, when the French suggested that the question might be settled by a combat between 100 knights on each side, the earl of Warwick refused, saying that the issue must depend upon a battle between two armies and nothing else. Even if the French could be trusted to keep their word, the English had no intention of abrogating their tactical mix of archers and dismounted men-at-arms, which they knew gave them an advantage, in favour of an equal contest which they might lose. Jean was still leaning towards compromise but was eventually dissuaded by the rhetoric of two men, William Douglas and the bishop of Challons. Douglas commanded a force of 200 Scottish soldiers in the French army. There is some confusion over exactly who this Douglas was – the Scots have lamentably few surnames and use but a handful of Christian names. He was not the William Douglas, Lord of Liddesdale, who was still languishing in the Tower, but he had certainly fought the English, and he now assured Jean that, whatever the Black Prince might appear to agree to, he would continue to lay waste French lands and it would be much better to deal with him now than to have to fight him later in less advantageous circumstances. The bishop meanwhile made an impassioned plea, citing the shame and disgrace that the English operations had brought upon the present French king and his father, and insisting that the English were short of supplies, cut off from their base and hugely outnumbered. The only thing the English – any English – understood was force. Now was the time to deal with them once and for all. Jean was convinced and negotiations were broken off, the departure of the cardinal of Périgord’s entourage to fight for the French only serving to emphasize the existing English suspicion of papal peacemakers. One advantage to the French was that they had bought time for a reinforcement of another 1,000 men-at-arms to arrive – and perhaps buying time was the sole French intention in the first place.
While the negotiations were going on throughout the Sunday, the English were preparing their position. In conformity with what was now standard tactical practice, the three divisions would dismount and take position with two forward and one in rear, with archers on both flanks. We are told that the vanguard was commanded by the earls of Warwick and Oxford, the second division by the prince himself, and the rearguard by the earls of Salisbury and Suffolk. Confusingly, the prince took up position in rear, as was normal procedure for the overall commander, with the vanguard on the left and rearguard on the right covering the front. The command arrangements for the vanguard and rearguard are, on the face of it, unclear. Divided command is never a good idea and was a major factor in the series of defeats suffered by the French for most of the war. The chroniclers were not, of course, military men, and it may be that they simply tell us the senior magnates in each division, not meaning to imply that they exercised command jointly. While joint command might work in a static battle of attrition, it would be a recipe for chaos once any form of manoeuvre was required, and we may assume that divisions were commanded by the senior magnate in each – in this case, Warwick and Salisbury.
Not all historians agree the exact positions of the opposing armies, but the most likely location for the eventual English defensive position is on a low ridge running along an ancient track across a bend of the River Moisson, on the Plaine de Plumet west of the village of Les Bordes. The frontage is about 800 yards and the flanks are protected by steep drops to the river, while the rear is protected by the river itself. French accounts say the French army marched along a ‘maupertuis’ or ‘bad road’ from Poitiers to get there, and there is what is now a farm track running south-south-east from Gibauderie through Le Maupas and Brout de Chèvre to La Cadrousse, which is of considerable antiquity and may well be the road referred to. The two forward English battles would have been on the track, the right-flank archers south of La Cadrousse and those on the left somewhere around Le Plan. The reserve would have been placed some hundred yards to the rear, with a small mounted reserve of 200 knights under the Gascon lord, the Captal de Buch.
This was an excellent position for the English way of fighting. The flanks were secured by thick woods on one side and a steep escarpment on the other, and the frontal approach was crossed by sunken lanes and thick hedges. If the Anglo-Gascon army had around 2,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 archers, and the three divisions were of roughly equal size, then the frontage to be covered would dictate that the forward divisions fell in in no more than three ranks. Each division of archers would, as usual, have formed up in a square, lozenge or wedge shape. The Black Prince was not concerned about fighting a battle, even against a far larger force of probably around 3,000 crossbowmen and 16,000 men-at-arms, but he was concerned that the French might play for a stand-off until the meagre rations carried by the English ran out and the prince was forced to march off to find resupplies. Of course, the prince could decide to attack the French, but to do so against such superior numbers and where the English missile weapon could not be used to best advantage would be to invite disaster. It was imperative that the French be encouraged to attack, but they were unlikely to do so if they thought the English were well ensconced in their favourite defensive posture – the French had at least learned that from Crécy. The French would, however, be likely to attack if they thought they could catch the English on the line of march, or retreating, and it appears that the prince ordered his own division and that of Salisbury on the right flank to manoeuvre in order to give the impression that they were departing.
For all his many faults, Jean was inclined by now to listen to sound advice. Many of his senior commanders had faced the English, if not at Crécy, then in Normandy or Brittany, and Sir William Douglas had fought them in Scotland, and perhaps in France too. These men insisted that to send heavy cavalry against a dismounted English line was suicide: the only way to deal with English foot-soldiers whose flanks were secure was for the French to dismount too. They were also well aware of the slaughter that could be dealt out by English archers. The remedy was to attack them with cavalry, but only with men and horses that were covered in plate armour that arrows would not pierce. Mindful of this wise counsel, Jean had ordered 500 knights to equip their horses with armour that covered the animals’ bodies, heads and necks completely. It would slow them down, but it would allow them to reach the hated archers and kill them. Apart from this mounted task force, split into two units, each commanded by one of the French marshals, the French army was divided into three battles or divisions. The vanguard was commanded, at least in name, by the dauphin, Jean’s son;52 the second division by Jean’s brother, the duke of Orléans; and the third by Jean himself, with the bearer of the oriflamme – signifying no quarter or mercy – by his side. But, despite the French having three or four times as many men as the English, the Black Prince had chosen his ground well, and his numerical inferiority was partially nullified by the approach being restricted by marshes, streams and small ravines which limited the number of men that could advance at any one time.
The French plan, if they could not starve the Black Prince out, was to send the armoured cavalry against the archers and, having taken them out of the frame, to attack with the lead division on foot, supported by the next two divisions if they were needed – which they surely would not. The hedges and trees made it difficult to see exactly what the English were up to, but the commander of the right half of the anti-archer task force, Marshal Arnaud d’Audrehem, encouraged by William Douglas, and probably stationed around the east side of the Grand Chêne forest, was convinced that he could see movement of pennants and banners in the left-hand English division of the earl of Warwick – perhaps he could, for this may have been the Black Prince’s planned encouragement – and without reference to anyone ordered his men to charge. Up the slope they came and at first the volleys of arrows had little effect, glancing off the plate armour of man and horse. This would have had very serious repercussions had not Warwick’s second-in-command, the earl of Oxford, dismounted and run to the archers, ordering them to move further to the flank and to shoot at the horses’ unarmoured legs. Now the tables were suddenly turned, as arrows sliced into horses’ legs and bellies. Those animals not brought down but with arrows hanging off stifles and rumps became uncontrollable: they reared, whipped round and dumped even the most competent horsemen, before galloping back the way they had come and over unhorsed knights. D’Audrehem was captured and Douglas badly wounded, only evading capture (and probable execution) by being carted off the field by his personal retainers.
It was a terrible slaughter of the pride of France’s equines, only equalled by that which befell Marshal Jean de Clermont and the other mounted task force. He had not been fooled by the appearance of waving guidons, but, when his brother marshal went charging off against the English left, he had little choice but to follow suit against the right. Clermont was even more restricted than Audrehem, for he came up against a thick hedge with only one carter’s gap in it, wide enough for perhaps four horses abreast. Having run the gauntlet of the arrows, he then came up against infantry at the gap. He too could make no progress, and the survivors fled, picking their way through downed horses and men. The first phase of the battle had gone in favour of the English, but their officers now had to ensure that their men stayed in position and resisted the temptation to chase and take prisoners.
Now it was the turn of the French dismounted men-at-arms. The first division, led by the eighteen-year-old dauphin, who made up in personal courage what he lacked in common sense, advanced along the maupertuis preceded by a screen of crossbowmen. With a strength of around 5,000 men and covering an initial frontage of 1,000 yards or so, they would presumably have been in four or even five ranks. They had to climb the slope and negotiate the hedges before they could get to grips with the English infantry, and soon the inevitable arrow storm began to strike home, disposing of the crossbowmen and forcing the men-at-arms to crowd together towards the centre and causing death and destruction to such an extent that one chronicler says that the division was destroyed by arrow fire.29 While this was an exaggeration, the effort of trudging uphill for 800 yards or so in plate armour (and the French knights were always more heavily armoured than their English equivalents) and then coming under attack from something like 30,000 arrows each minute for the last 300 yards or so meant that, when the dauphin’s men managed to force their way through the hedge and meet their opponents, they were ill prepared for the physically punishing business of hand-to-hand fighting. They had shortened their lances, normally ten to fourteen feet in length and intended to be used on horseback, to a far more manageable five feet, which allowed them to compete on more even terms with the English wielders of pole arms, but it mattered little. Once two lines of men-at-arms closed, it was a question of who could thump the hardest: a sword would probably not go through plate armour or chain mail – although a halberd point might penetrate the former and certainly would the latter – and the aim was to knock one’s opponent off his feet, whereupon he could be despatched by a dagger though crevices in the armour or the visor slits, or be persuaded to yield on the promise of ransom. Try as they might, the men of the dauphin’s division could not break the English line, and, as casualties were mounting, either the dauphin or, more probably, one of his professional advisers ordered a withdrawal.
Even in modern armies, a withdrawal in contact with the enemy is one of the most difficult manoeuvres to carry out successfully. With inexperienced or undisciplined troops it can too often turn into a rout, and this is what happened here. The dauphin himself was hastened off the field by his personal retainers – a French heir was far too valuable a prize to risk capture – while those of his defeated troops who could still move fell back upon the next division in a disorderly panic. The commander of the second division, Jean’s brother, the duke of Orléans, saw the dauphin being removed from the stage and decided that he should depart as well, which he did, taking his two nephews, the dukes of Artois and Normandy, with him. The men of Orléans’s division, seeing themselves deserted by their commander, not unnaturally saw no point in staying and in moments they too were transformed into a disorderly rabble. Some called for their horses to be brought forward to effect their escape, others ran into the woods, and others fell back upon Jean’s third division, the only part of the army to stand its ground.
Jean did not run, nor did his division, which was augmented by those of the first two divisions who had not fled the field and the crossbowmen who had survived the first French attack. Altogether this final French formation probably now numbered around 7,000 men, mostly men-at-arms – considerably more, in other words, than the Black Prince could muster. Furthermore, the men of Jean’s division were mostly fresh, whereas the Anglo-Gascons had been in their battle positions for over twenty-four hours; they were exhausted, short of food and water, and had taken casualties. Jean ordered his reserve to dismount and join the line, and the advance began with the French moving towards the by now depleted English lines with a screen of crossbowmen in front. The archers were by this time running very short of arrows: the Knighton chronicle tells us that they ran out into no-man’s-land to pull arrows from corpses and the wounded to be used again, and that the real pessimists among them armed themselves with stones to throw at the advancing enemy.
The Black Prince was well aware that, while so far the fortunes of battle had been with him, the tide could easily turn and he could still suffer a massive defeat. He ordered the Gascon Captal de Buch to take his mounted reserve and a party of mounted archers (perhaps fifty or sixty) to work his way round to the flank and attack the French from the rear. Meanwhile, the French crossbowmen and the English archers began a long-range duel, which was won by the archers, despite their shortage of ammunition. The crossbowmen disposed of, the archers turned to the advancing infantry, but, while the high-angle arrow storm wreaked its usual savage carnage in the French rear, those in the front two ranks were relatively unscathed as they advanced behind their shields, which were interlocked and angled upwards. The Captal and his party now began to move back prior to working their way round to the French rear, and this seemed to some of Edward’s troops as if it were the beginning of a retreat. Some murmuring began and the prince, fearful that panic might set in and infect the whole of his division, immediately ordered ‘Banners – Advance’.
While this stilled any notion of a withdrawal, it was a very risky move. Standing on the defensive with hedges and other obstacles to their front and with archers on the flanks, the English were in a reasonably secure posture, whereas to advance gave up the advantage of ground and gave the French the ability to use their superiority in numbers. The prince’s division moved forward, at first level with and on the left of Warwick’s division, and then ahead of it until the two lines of infantry met with a mighty roar of ‘Saint-Denis!’ and ‘Beate Martin!’ from the French53 and ‘God and St George!’ from the English.54 This was the crunch for the Black Prince: the French line lapped around his, the English missile weapon could not be used, and it now came down to bloody brute strength, with the archers picking up discarded lances and swords from the first French assaults and joining in where they could. The French pushed the English back: Poitiers was going to be a French victory after all. And then, just as suddenly, the tide turned again. The earl of Salisbury turned his troops to their right and led them north, advancing them into line and falling upon the French left flank. At the same time, the Captal de Buch’s archers, having worked round to the west, appeared on the maupertuisand began to shoot arrows into the backs of the French men-at-arms, only pausing to let the Captal and his mounted followers hammer into the French rear.
Disciplined infantry in line can withstand cavalry if their flanks are secure, but not if that attack is preceded by an arrow storm, not if it comes from a totally unexpected direction, and not if they are already being assaulted from two other directions at the same time. Faced with the Black Prince in front, Warwick’s very nasty infantry to their left, and archers and cavalry to their rear, Jean’s division began to fall apart. Formations broke, banners began to fall, and men were running out of the line to escape or find their horses, to be promptly cut down by lightly armed archers hovering on the flanks. In minutes, the battle was over and the slaughter of those not worth holding for ransom began. Those who could fled towards what they thought would be the safety of the city of Poitiers, but they found the gates closed against them and many were killed by the pursuing Captal and his mounted knights. Jean II was captured with his youngest son Philip, as were four royal princes (including the count of Tancarville, who was by now making a habit of being captured by the English), eight counts, around 2,000 lesser nobility, the archbishop of Sens and twenty senior clergy. These latter were yet more evidence, thought the English, of papal bias, for as the contemporary satirical verse had it:
Now is the Pope a Frenchman born
And Christ an Englishman
And the world shall see what the Pope can do
More than his saviour can.30
Those French slain included two dukes, one marshal, one constable of France, several pages from the French equivalent of Burke’s Peerage, the bearer of the oriflamme and the bishop of Challons, the most vociferous exponent of fighting a battle on that day.31Altogether the French probably lost around 2,500 dead, and, although a total of perhaps 5,000 casualties may not seem very much, it was who they were that was significant, for at a stroke the government and the administration of the French nation had been rendered impotent – dead or prisoners of war. Not only was it a massive tactical victory for the English, but it was a huge strategic victory too, one that might well bring the war to an end. English losses were slight, perhaps surprisingly, and were probably no more than a few hundred dead and wounded, although among the latter was Sir James Audley, who was carried in on a shield, stripped of his armour and laid on a bed in Edward’s tent. While in attendance on the prince when Edward’s division was in rear, Audley had asked permission to join the battle and dashed off into the thick of the fighting. It was thoroughly irresponsible, but the sort of behaviour that appealed to the Black Prince (and indeed to well-bred society generally), and as a result Audley was granted an annual pension of £300 (around sixteen years’ salary for a man-at-arms).
The capture of Jean was, of course, a tremendous coup, and there was much argument about who had captured him, for, while he would have to become the Black Prince’s prisoner, his actual captor would be well rewarded. It seems that Jean, realizing that the game was up, had looked around the field to see where the Black Prince was, as it was to him that a king should surrender. Edward was not in the vicinity and it may have been a renegade French knight in the English service to whom Jean yielded. In any event, it was not until the arrival of the earl of Warwick that the unseemly argument going on around Jean was stilled, and Warwick took charge of the royal prisoner and delivered him to the prince.
The chronicles are generally silent about the fate of the wounded at Poitiers, as indeed they are for most medieval battles. We do not know how many eventually died days or weeks later from loss of blood, infection or botched surgery, but it must have been a significant number. Military surgeons of the time were not unskilled, but they suffered from a lack of an effective counter to what they termed ‘spasm’ (probably tetanus) as a postoperative complication, a lack of sterile conditions in which to operate, and a tendency to amputate a damaged limb (with the risk of shock leading to a sudden lowering of blood pressure and death) rather than attempting to repair or splint it. There were numerous medical manuals available, describing various ways of treating wounds, the most commonly used probably being Roger of Salerno’s Practica chirurgiae, which first appeared in 1180. Well regarded in England, it was still in use as an authority in the early fifteenth century.
There were many theories about the best way to deal with a wound caused by an arrow or a crossbow bolt – increasingly common as the Hundred Years War went on. If the offending metal had lodged in flesh, there were those who advocated pushing it on through until it exited; others recommended applying poultices to the wound to make it easier to pull out the foreign body; while others still advised doing nothing until the wound became so full of pus that the flesh was soft enough to allow the arrowhead to be extracted. Far more difficult was the removal of an arrowhead that had lodged in bone, as it had in the jaw of the young prince Henry (the future Henry V) at the Battle of Shrewsbury. In all cases, once the bolt or arrowhead had been removed, the wound was to be sealed by molten lard or boiling oil, and cauterized with a red-hot branding iron. Surgeons of the time were aware of the danger of nerve damage and local paralysis as the result of a cutting wound, and frequent massage of the affected area was encouraged. In an age before anaesthetics, having a wound treated would have been a long and often agonizing process.
As it was, the Anglo-Gascon army camped that night in the Forest of Nouailles to the east of the field of battle. The baggage train was called forward and tents erected for the prince and his immediate retinue, where he entertained Jean, his son and the senior French prisoners to supper – the food sequestered from the French stores, as the English had none. Gentlemen may fight each other, but they do not have to hate each other, and the Black Prince assured Jean that his father, Edward III, would treat him as befitted his high-born status (although continuing to refer to him as ‘the usurper’). It was not until the next day that the English could count the French dead, many of whom had already been robbed and stripped by the locals. The bodies of around 150 of the highest born were taken away by the clergy of Poitiers and buried in the Dominican church or the Franciscan cemetery, while the rest were left where they lay, to be eventually loaded on carts and dumped in grave pits near the church.
It was now time for Edward and his army to head back to the safety of Aquitaine, and, while the prince had inflicted a massive defeat on the French, he could not assume that he was safe from them. Poitiers contained a large garrison and was far too well fortified to fall quickly; the dauphin was still on the loose and might act as a rallying point; and the division of the duke of Orléans, though it had fled the field, had done so without casualties and was probably still somewhere in the vicinity. Given stout leadership, the French might yet block the route to Bordeaux and pluck a victory of sorts from the ashes of defeat. Speed was of the essence, but movement would be slowed in any case by the baggage train, where the booty had been hugely increased by the rich arms and robes acquired from the battle. Add to this the huge flock of prisoners, most of them on foot, and the chances of getting to Bordeaux without interference were sharply reduced. The solution was to use captured horses to carry baggage and to release all but the most important of the prisoners, having first made them promise to report to Bordeaux and pay their agreed ransoms ‘by Christmas’.
The Black Prince’s army marched straight to Bordeaux, a distance of 125 miles as the crow flies but not as the soldier marches. They averaged around fourteen miles a day and arrived at Bordeaux on 2 October 1356. Messengers were sent to England to give the good news to the king and the people; it was immediately ordered that it should be announced from all pulpits in the kingdom and read out at market crosses. Coupled to this was more good news from Brittany, where the duke of Lancaster was supporting John de Montfort in gobbling up towns loyal to Charles of Blois, who, released from prison on parole pending payment of an enormous ransom of around £60,000 and thus unable to take up arms, could only watch as more and more of Brittany fell to the English. Eventually, Charles fled to Paris to join the dauphin in the Louvre.
In Bordeaux, Prince Edward and his men settled down to see the winter out until the spring weather would allow safe passage for the army to return to England. Some of the French noblemen who had promised to turn up with their ransom money defaulted, but even so the money raised, along with the plunder acquired in the chevauchée, paid for the cost of the campaign many times over. The ransom for the archbishop of Sens was paid – £8,000 – and King Edward bought a batch of nobles for £66,000, an outlay he would recoup with a handsome profit to boot. In London there was jubilation, in Paris dismay that turned swiftly to anger. The French armies had been defeated, their king captured, and his brother and sons had run away. Knights who had escaped the slaughter dared not show their faces in Paris, and many could not even return home for fear of being blamed for the disgrace and physically attacked.
Negotiations now began from Bordeaux, before Jean and his court were taken to England, but, while Jean was prepared to concede almost anything for his freedom, the Estates General, consisting of nobility, clergy and bourgeoisie, nominally headed by the dauphin and trying to govern a kingdom that was rapidly falling apart, did not regard the return of their king as their first priority. Rather, they wanted to find a way to end the war, either by raising an army big enough to expel the English, or by coming to terms with them. King Edward, too, was in no hurry to release Jean, viewing him as a useful pawn in arriving at a permanent settlement, and his secret instructions to the Prince of Wales in Bordeaux were to enter into negotiations but to stall and to agree to nothing except perhaps a temporary and short truce, which was in any case to exclude Normandy and Brittany.
In Paris, the dauphin suspended the Estates General and attempted to raise money by a further devaluation of the coinage. When this aroused massive civil disobedience and when no help could be obtained from the Francophile Holy Roman Emperor at a conference in Metz, the dauphin’s clique had no option but to recall the Estates and to concede to their demands for a root-and-branch reform of the administration. This was to include the dismissal and imprisonment of many of the dauphin’s and his father’s advisers, the withdrawal of the new, devalued coinage, an insistence that the dauphin could only rule with the advice of a council nominated by the Estates, and a levy of new taxes to support a continuance of the war. No mention was made of raising money to release Jean. The dauphin agreed to all the demands – being without a sou in his empty treasury, he had no alternative. When the news percolated down to Bordeaux, Jean decided to take matters into his own hands and issued letters to be taken to Paris and read out at street corners repudiating the new administration and cancelling the levy. This resulted in even more chaos and a counter-repudiation from the dauphin, and, when Jean entered into negotiations with the Prince of Wales, nothing could be decided except for a two-year truce to run until Easter 1359.
In the spring, ships arrived from England to bring the army home, and on 24 May 1357 the Black Prince and his army made a triumphant entry into London to the cheers of the populace. Jean rode on a smart grey charger, while the Black Prince rode a modest pony – no doubt to make the point that, for all the French bombast and show, it could avail nothing against English skill at arms. Jean was lodged in the Palace of Savoy, built by Henry of Lancaster with the proceeds of French ransoms and near what is now the Savoy Hotel in the Strand, and began a luxurious detention while negotiations continued for his ransom. Edward III took a liking to his captive and took him hunting at Windsor, and occasionally paraded him along with that other captive king, David II of Scotland, who was now in his eleventh year in the Tower.
In June 1357, the French deputation arrived at Westminster to attend what would be a long-drawn-out conference to decide upon terms to bring the war to an end. It was headed by Cardinals Périgord, who was regarded with great suspicion by the English, and Cappoci, an Italian who was considered to be relatively unbiased. With them was a plethora of lawyers, civil servants, advisers, royal councillors and general hangers-on, all with their own servants, who had to be accommodated and fed. Parallel to these talks were discussions with the Scots, who had finally realized the hopelessness of continuing hostility to England when their backers, the French, were in such dire straits. At a meeting in Edinburgh, they agreed to pay a ransom of £67,000 – a huge sum for an impoverished country with a small population and no raw materials – to be paid over ten years, during which time the Scots agreed not to take up arms against England and to provide hostages against their good behaviour. King David was brought up to Berwick to attend the signing in October and was then released, although he now had little authority over the quarrelling factions in his country. Meanwhile, after much discussion and argument over the agenda, a draft treaty between England and France was at last agreed in December 1357. It allowed for almost a third of French territory, including Calais and the pale around it, to be ceded to Edward III in full sovereignty and a ransom of £650,000 with £100,000 down, after which Jean would be released on parole subject to hostages being delivered. In return, Edward would give up his claim to the throne of France.
The English parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster in February 1358 to agree the terms of the treaty. The members were in no hurry to come to a conclusion. England was now safe from invasion but there were vested interests keen to continue the war: the professional soldiers, civil servants who would administer conquered areas, owners of troop-ships hired by the government, manufacturers of arms and armour, bowyers and fletchers, and, presumably, the breeders of flocks of geese. Parliament decided that a solution to other long-standing matters could be tacked onto the treaty, particularly matters of papal authority. The pope was known to want peace between England and France, so concessions could be squeezed from him in order to get it. Specific matters were the taxation of English clergy by the pope, which meant English money going to Avignon in France, and appointments by the pope to English ecclesiastic posts, which most Englishmen felt should be a matter for them and not for some foreigner across the seas.55(Similar grievances would eventually lead to a final break with the Roman church less than two centuries later.) An embassy to Avignon would mean sending at least one senior bishop, lawyers, civil servants, clerks and escorts and would take a very long time, while armies would continue to be paid and arms manufacturers to thrive. King Edward drew the line at this, and, while he agreed that emissaries could be sent to Avignon, they could be reduced to a couple of knights and a clerk or two and thus conclude their business promptly. At the same time, Jean, knowing that the terms of the treaty might not find universal favour in France, despatched a group of his advisers to explain the finer points to government and people.
The difficulty for Jean was that France was effectively in a state of civil war. The Estates, trying to govern without their king, attempted to collect the increased taxes, but with the death or capture of so many magnates, normally the enforcers of good order and discipline, lawlessness spread. Demobilized soldiers and deserters, mainly English and Gascon but some Frenchmen too, formed themselves into ‘free companies’, or routiers, and roamed the countryside working for whomsoever could pay them. If no paymaster could be found, they simply appropriated a suitable castle or fortified town and set themselves up as district robber barons, levying tolls on all who moved and taxes on those who did not. The king of Navarre, who had been imprisoned by Jean for plotting against him, escaped from prison and, arriving in Paris, ‘persuaded’ the dauphin to pardon him. In Paris, the third estate, that of the bourgeoisie, was increasing in influence just as the nobility – defeated and disgraced at Poitiers – lost their authority, and their leader, Étienne Marcel, a prosperous cloth merchant, considered at one point making Charles of Navarre (who was, after all, a Capet) king of France. Navarre, who was quite happy to claim the crown when the time was ripe but was far too clever to have it given to him by acclamation of the mob, left Paris at speed. He was followed in March 1358 by the dauphin, who felt (rightly) that government had broken down to such an extent that even his life was in danger – a fact that was finally corroborated when agents of Étienne Marcel broke into the dauphin’s chambers and murdered two high-ranking officials lodging with him. The Parisians were now in control of the capital and they were against any treaty with England.
In the French countryside, those magnates who were still in control of their estates and had to raise money either for their own ransoms or for those of their relatives, and for the eventual ransom of Jean II, began to put even more pressure on their tenants and peasants, who were already taxed almost to extinction. Finally, the worm turned. It began in the Beauvaisis – now the département of Oise – in 1358 when the peasants, exploited beyond endurance, rose up and attacked their masters with whatever weapons they could find. It appears to have been a spontaneous rising, and in savagery it presaged the French Revolution over four centuries later, but unlike the latter it did not have a corps of the middle class and educated to lead it, at least not at first. Horrific bloodshed and disruption were caused by the Jacquerie,56 mainly directed against the nobility, the clergy and any owners of property. Lynchings and burnings spread, and, as the movement expanded into Champagne and Picardy, the reports of the doings of the disaffected became more and more lurid. One tale circulating told of a lady being gang-raped and then forced to eat the roasted flesh of her husband (at least they roasted him first). In the past, there had been regular outbreaks of defiance of authority in rural France, sometimes with violence, but they had usually fizzled out in a few days with little harm done. Here, however, the peasants themselves appear to have been so shocked by the excesses of what they had done that they had no option but to keep going, even attracting the support of some townsmen and minor nobles – who no doubt thought that they could thereby preserve their own lives and property. Étienne Marcel tried to make common cause with them, which did him no good in the end. And when a deputation of the Jacquerie tried to enlist the support of Charles of Navarre, he turned his soldiers on them and slaughtered the lot.
While the Jacquerie were neither encouraged nor supported by Edward III – peasants massacring their betters were not to be approved of, even if the betters were French – their activities served his purpose in that the uprising concentrated the minds of the French government and encouraged them to find a means of ending the war so that they could concentrate on restoring order internally. France was now in a state of complete and utter confusion, with the routiers, the Jacquerie, the Navarrese, the dauphin and the citizens of Paris all in arms and all out for what they could get. What was increasingly clear was that the Jacquerie was a threat to any sort of established order, and, when Charles of Navarre and noblemen whose castles had not been stormed began to organize themselves, the armies of peasants could not stand against them. Although the destruction was immense – eighty castles and manors destroyed between Soissons and Paris alone32 – by mid-June the rebellion was over and retribution began, with the vengeful nobility meting out punishment every bit as unpleasant as that inflicted by the rebellious peasants and finding novel ways to execute their leaders. The result of the rising, which was seen as threatening everyone’s way of life (except, of course, that of the downtrodden peasantry), was an upsurge of loyalty to the crown in the shape of the dauphin, a trickling away of Charles of Navarre’s supporters, and second thoughts among the citizens of Paris. The latter were beginning to turn against their erstwhile leader, Étienne Marcel, who had made common cause with Charles against the dauphin and had allowed the detachments of the army of Navarre, mainly composed of English mercenaries, into the city. On 31 July, the mob rose, in the name of the dauphin, and murdered Étienne and his principal lieutenants. On 2 August, the dauphin entered Paris and Charles of Navarre withdrew his army from its encampment at Saint-Denis, looted the abbey and then marched off to Mantes to plot his next moves.
Despite the pleadings of Jean’s advisers, the terms of the treaty agreed at the Westminster conference were not agreed by the dauphin and his government, whose confidence had been restored by the departure of Navarre and the end of the Parisians’ attempt to gain their independence. King Edward received their refusals and decided that only another military campaign would bring the French to their senses. Accordingly, more claims were attached to those already in the treaty, including a restatement of the claim to the French crown, and an army, numbering (according to the Chandos Herald) 10,000 men but more likely 6,000, evenly split between men-at-arms and archers, landed at Calais on 28 October 1358. It then advanced through Artois and Champagne, burning, looting and levelling in the usual manner, as far as Rheims. One of the men-at-arms was the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, whose experiences led him to write later: ‘There is ful many a man that crieth “Werre! Werre!” that wot ful litel what werre amounteth.’57 The army stayed at Rheims from December 1358 until January 1359, in appalling winter conditions, and, having failed to force a surrender of that heavily fortified city, moved off to Paris. In accordance with the now standard English military practice, King Edward took up a defensive position and tried very hard to persuade the dauphin to come out of the city and attack him. He even sent Sir Walter Manny up to the walls to shout insults at the craven French, some of whom were beginning to learn of the inadvisability of attacking an English army in a position of their choosing and wisely resisted the offer. The only small crumb of comfort for the French at this time was a raid on Winchelsea in March 1360, when a few French ships hove to offshore and landed men who burned the town, stayed there for one night and left again. The English had grown complacent; no such raid had happened in twenty years and the infliction on them of the sort of terror they had been imposing on the French for many years caused short-lived panic and long-lived indignation.
King Edward now moved off to Chartres and began to lay waste the area round about. It was the realization that the English could continue to wander all over France dealing out death and destruction at their leisure for as long as they liked, provided they avoided fortified cities, that brought the dauphin and his advisers to their senses. Negotiations began at Brétigny, near Chartres, in May, and in a week agreement was reached. The terms were very much the same as those in the December 1357 document, except that the ransom for Jean was reduced to £600,000. The agreement was signed at Calais in October 1360, by the dauphin for his father and – King Edward having returned to England – by the Black Prince for his. King Edward was to have Aquitaine, Ponthieu and Calais in full sovereignty and would drop his claim to the French throne. Once two-thirds of the ransom had been paid, raised by swingeing taxes on salt, wine, cloth and most movable goods and by the betrothal of Jean’s eleven-year-old daughter to the son of the duke of Milan, Jean was allowed to return to France, leaving his three younger sons behind. When John, duke of Anjou, broke his parole, returned to France and refused to come back, Jean went back to England in his son’s stead and was so well looked after that he died, still only in his mid-forties, in the Savoy Palace in April 1364. Meanwhile, the territory had been exchanged and the Black Prince, now duke of Aquitaine, had been installed as the ruler of English France. It seemed a very satisfactory outcome.
Sir John Hawkwood. Painting by artist Paolo Uccello created in 1436, currently displayed at the Duomo in Florence, Italy. A highly competent military commander made redundant by Edward III after the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, he took mercenary service in Europe and died in service of Florence in 1394 aged about 75. The stirrup leathers are so long as to be no more than an aid for mounting.