Poitiers Part 1

Poitiers.

by Hilaire Belloc.

INTRODUCTION

The Battle of Poitiers was fought ten years and four weeks after that of Crecy.

The singular similarity between the two actions will be pointed out upon a later page. For the moment it must suffice to point out that Poitiers and Crecy form unique historical parallels, distinguishing like double summits the English successes of Edward III.'s army upon the Continent and of the first part of the Hundred Years' War.

For the political situation which had produced that conflict, and for the objects which Edward III. had in provoking it, I must refer my reader to the first section of my little book upon Crecy in this series; as also for the armament and organisation of the forces that served the English crown.

There remain to be added, however, for the understanding of Poitiers and its campaign, two features which differentiate the fighting of 1356 from that of ten years before. These two features are: first, the character of the commander; and secondly, the nature of the regions from which he started and through which he proceeded, coupled with the political character of the English rule in the South of France. I will take these points in inverse order.

When Calais had fallen and had become an English possession in the summer of 1347 no peace followed. A truce was patched up for some months, followed by further truces. Through the mediation of the Pope a final and definite treaty was sketched, which should terminate the war upon the cession of Aquitaine to Edward III. in full sovereignty. The French Valois king would perhaps have agreed to a settlement which would have preserved his feudal headship, though it would have put the Plantagenets in virtual possession of half France (as France was then defined). But Edward III.

would not accept the terms. He had claimed the crown of France. He had won his great victory at Crecy still claiming that crown. He would not be content with adding to his _feudal tenures_ under the French crown. He would add to his _sovereignty_ at least, to his absolute _sovereignty_, or continue the war. In 1354 (the Black Death intervening) the war was renewed. Edward would have been content, not with the whole of Aquitaine, but with complete sovereignty over the triangle between the Garonne and the Pyrenees in the south, coupled with complete sovereignty over the north-eastern seaboard of France from the Somme to Calais, and inland as far as Arras, and its territory, the Artois. But the French monarchy, though ready to admit _feudal_ encroachments, would not dismember the nominal unity of the kingdom: just as a stickler in our north will grant a 999-year _lease_, but will not _sell_.

The result of this breach in the negotiations was that Edward, and his son the Black Prince, entered upon the renewal of the war with a vague claim to Aquitaine as a whole, with an active claim upon Guienne--that is, the territory just north of the Garonne--and a real hold upon Gascony; and still preserving at the back of the whole scheme of operations that half-earnest, half-theatrical plan for an Anglo-French monarchy under the house of Plantagenet which had been formulated twenty-five years before.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

It must be clearly grasped by the general reader how natural was both the real and the fantastic side of that pursuit. It involved no question of nationality as we should now understand it. It was based upon still living traditions of feudal connections which were personal and not racial; the chivalry of France and England was a French-speaking society based upon common ideals and fed with common memories. Gascony was in favour of the Plantagenets. Further, Guienne--the district north of Gascony beyond the Garonne--was Edward's feudal own. He was not king of it, but he was feudal lord of it, and had done homage for it in 1331 to the Valois. It was not a new or distant tie. For the rest of the quarrel my first section in the essay on Crecy already alluded to must suffice, but for the link with Gascony a more particular emphasis is needed. The trade of Bordeaux, its great town, was princ.i.p.ally with British ports. Its export of wine was a trade with Britain. It lay far from the centre of the French monarchy. It had counted in its _Basque_ population an element indifferent for hundreds of years to the national unity of Gaul. The moneyed interests of its great commercial centres, of the western ones, at least (which were by far the richest), were closely bound up with England, with English trade. Add to this his actual feudal tenure of Guienne, and we can see how the feeling that all the south-west corner of France was his grew to be a very real feeling in Edward's mind, and was shared by his son.

When, therefore, upon the 20th September 1355, Edward, the Black Prince, landed at Bordeaux, it was to find a province the n.o.bles of which were honestly attached to his cause and the greater townsmen as well; while in the ma.s.s of the people there was no disaffection to the idea of this one out of the vague, many, French-speaking feudal lords whom they knew to be their masters, being the actual governor of the land. There was no conquest, nor any need for it, so far as Gascony was concerned; and in any expedition the Prince might make he was as certain of a regular following from the towns and estates that lay between the mountains and the Garonne as the King of France was certain of his own feudal levies in the north.

But expeditions and fighting there would be because the Black Prince came with a commission not only to govern Gascony, but to establish himself in the more doubtful Guienne, and even to be--if he could conquer it--the lieutenant of his father, Edward, in all Aquitaine. He was to recover the districts immediately north of the Garonne, and even (in theory, at least) right up to the neighbourhood of the Loire; and (in theory, again) he was to regard those who might resist his administration of all these "lost" countries of the Central and Southern West of France as "rebels."

It was thought certain at first, of course, that the whole claim could never be pushed home; but the Black Prince might well hope so to harry the districts which were claimed--and the neighbouring county of Toulouse to the east, which was admittedly feudatory to the King of Paris--as to compel that sovereign to recognise at last his father's absolute sovereignty over Gascony certainly, and perhaps over Guienne, or even somewhat more than Guienne.

The remainder of that year, 1355, therefore--the autumn and the winter--were spent in striking at the sole portion of Gascony that was disaffected (that of Armagnac), and pushing eastward to ravage Toulouse and Carca.s.sonne; for though these towns were admittedly outside Edward's land, the wasting of their territory was a depletion of the King of France's revenue.

The Black Prince did more. In the early part of the next year, 1356, he set up his flag upon Perigueux, some days' march to the north of his father's real boundary; and, as the year proceeded, he planned an advance far to the northward of that, which advance was to be taken in co-operation with a descent of the Plantagenet forces upon the other extremity of the French kingdom.

As to the character of the Black Prince, which so largely determined what is to follow, and especially his character in command, nothing is more conspicuous in the history of the Middle Ages. He was, partly from the influence of models, partly from personal force, the mirror of what the fighting, French-speaking n.o.bility of that century took for its ideal conception of a captain. Far the first thing for him was the trade and the profession of arms, and the appet.i.te for combat which this career satisfied certainly in its baser, but still more certainly in its n.o.bler, effects in the mind of a virile youth. He had gone through the great experience of Crecy as a boy of sixteen. He was now, upon the eve of the Campaign of Poitiers, a man in his twenty-sixth year, thoroughly avid not only of honour but of capture, thoroughly contemptuous of gain, generous with a mad magnificence, always in debt, and always utterly careless of it. His courage was of the sort that takes a sharp delight in danger, and particularly in danger accompanied by strong action; he was an intense and a variable lover of women, an unwearied rider, of some (but no conspicuous) ability in the planning of an action or the grasp of a field, not cruel as yet (but already violent to an excess which later years, alas! refined into cruelty), splendidly adventurous, and strung every way for command. He could and did inspire a force, especially a small force, in the fashion which it was his chief desire to achieve. He was a great soldier; but his sins doomed him to an unhappy failure and to the wasting of his life at last.

PART I

THE CAMPAIGN

As the first of the great raids, that of Crecy, had been designed to draw off the pressure from Edward III.'s troops in the South of France, and to bring the French levies northward away from them, so the second great raid ten years later, which may be called by courtesy the "Campaign" of Poitiers, was designed to call pressure off the English troops in the north and to bring the French levies down southward away from them. As Edward's march through Normandy had been a daring ride for booty, so was the Black Prince's ride northward from Aquitaine; and as Edward from the neighbourhood of Paris turned and retreated at top speed from before the French host, so did the Black Prince turn from the neighbourhood of the Loire and retreat at speed from before the pursuit of the bodies which the King of France had gathered. And as the one great raid ended in the signal victory of Crecy, so did the other end in the signal victory of Poitiers.

But these parallel and typical actions, lying ten years apart, have, of course, one main point of resemblance more important than all the rest: each includes the complete overthrow of a large body of feudal cavalry by the trained forces of the Plantagenets; Crecy wholly, Poitiers partly, by the excellence of a missile weapon--the long-bow. Each shows also a striking disproportion of numbers: the little force on the defensive completely defeating the much larger body of the attack.

Those of my readers, therefore, who have made themselves acquainted with the details of Crecy must expect a repet.i.tion of much the same sort of incidents in the details of Poitiers. The two battles are twin, and stand out conspicuously in their sharpness of result from the ma.s.s of contemporary mediaeval warfare.

In this opening section I will describe the great ride of Edward the Black Prince from the Dordogne to the Loire, and show by what a march the raid proceeded to its unexpected crisis in the final battle.

I have said that the Black Prince's object (apart from booty, which was a main business in all these rapid darts of the time) was to draw the pressure from the English troops in the north.

As a fact, the effort was wasted for any such purpose. Lancaster, who commanded in the north, was already in retreat before the Black Prince had started, but that commander in the south could not, under the conditions of the time, learn the fact until he had set off. Further, the Black Prince hoped, by this diversion of a raid up from the south through the centre of France, to make it easier for King Edward, his father, to cross over and prosecute the war in Normandy. As a fact, the King of England never started upon that expedition, but his son thought he was about to do so, and said as much in a letter to the Mayor of London.

The point of departure which the Black Prince chose for this dash to the north was Bergerac upon the Dordogne, and the date upon which he broke camp was Thursday, the 4th August 1356.

His force was an extremely small and a very mobile one; 3500 men-at-arms--that is, fully armoured gentlemen--were the nucleus of it; 2500 archers accompanied them, and it is remarkable that these archers he _mounted_. Besides these 6000 riding men, he took with him 1000 lightly armed foot-soldiers, and thus, with a little band of no more than 7000 combatants all told, he began the adventure. He had no intention of risking action. It was his desire to take booty, to harry, to compel the French king to come south in his pursuit, and when that enemy should be close upon him, at whatever stage this might be in his own northern progress, to turn and ride back south as rapidly as he had ridden north.

Thus he would draw the French feudal levies after him, and render what he had been told was the forthcoming English expedition to Normandy an easy matter, free from opposition. As things turned out, he was able to ride north as far as the Loire before his enemy was upon him, and it gives one an idea of the scale on which this great raid was planned, that from the point on the Dordogne whence he started, to the point on the Loire where he turned southward, was in a straight line no less than a hundred and fifty miles. As a fact, his raid northward came to much more, for he went round to the east in a great bend before he came to the neighbourhood of the French forces, and his total advance covered more than two hundred miles of road.

Of the 7000 who marched with him, perhaps the greater part, and certainly half, were Gascon gentlemen from the south who were in sympathy with the English occupation of Aquitaine, or, having no sentiment one way or the other, joined in the expedition for the sake of wealth and of adventure.

Of these were much the most of the men-at-arms. But the archers were for the most part English.

Raid though it was, the Black Prince's advance was not hurried. He proposed no more than to summon southward the French king by his efforts, and it was a matter of some indifference to him how far northward he might have proceeded before he would be compelled by the neighbourhood of the enemy's forces to return. His high proportion of mounted men and the lightness of his few foot-soldiers were for local mobility rather than for perpetual speed; nor did the Black Prince intend to make a race of it until the pursuit should begin. Whenever that might be, he felt secure (though in the event his judgment proved to be wrong) in his power to outmarch any body the King of France might bring against him. He must further have thought that his chance of a rapid and successful retreat, and his power to outmarch any possible pursuers, would increase in proportion to the size of the force that might be sent after him.

The raid into the north began and was continued in a fashion not exactly leisurely, but methodically slow. It made at first through Perigueux to Brantome. Thence up through the country of the watershed to Bellac. It turned off north-westward as far as Lussac, and thence broke back, but a little north of east, to Argenton.

It will be evident from the trace of such a route that it had no definite strategic purpose. It was a mere raid: a harrying of the land with the object of relieving the pressure upon the north. It vaguely held, perhaps, a further object of impressing the towns of Aquitaine with the presence of a Plantagenet force. But this last feature we must not exaggerate. The Black Prince did not treat the towns he visited as territory ultimately to be governed by himself or his father. He treated them as objects for plunder.

The pace and method with which all this early part of the business was conducted in the first three weeks of August may be judged by the fact that, measured along the roads the Black Prince followed, he covered between Bergerac and Argenton just on a hundred and eighty miles, and he did it in just under eighteen marching days. In other words, he kept to a fairly regular ten miles a day, and slowly rolled up an increasing loot without fatiguing his horses or his men.

From Argenton, which he thus reached quite unweakened on the 21st of August, he made Chateauroux (rather more than eighteen miles off, but not nineteen by the great road) in two days, reaching it on the 23rd. Thence he turned still more to the eastward, and pa.s.sed by Issoudun towards Bourges. This last excursion or "elbow" in the road was less strategically motiveless than most of the march; for the Prince had had news that some French force under the son of the French king was lying at Bourges, and to draw off such a force southward was part of the very vague plan which he was following. Unlike that string of open towns which the mounted band had sacked upon their way, Bourges was impregnable to them, for it was walled and properly defended. They turned back from it, therefore, down the River Yevre towards the Cher Valley again, and upon the 28th of August reached Vierzon, having marched in the five days from Chateauroux the regulation ten miles a day; for they covered fifty miles or a little more.

This point, Vierzon, is an important one to note in the march. The town lies just to the south of a curious district very little known to English travellers, or, for that matter, to the French themselves. It is a district called the "Sologne," that is, the "Solitarium" or "Desert." For a s.p.a.ce of something like forty miles by sixty a great isolated area of wild, almost uncultivatable, land intervenes between the valley of the Cher and that of the Loire. Only one road of importance traverses it, that coming from Paris and Orleans, and making across the waste for Vierzon to the south. No town of any size is discoverable in this desolate region of stagnant pools, scrub, low forest, and hunters.

It was such a situation on the outer edge of the Sologne which made Vierzon the outpost of Aquitaine, and having reached Vierzon, the Prince, in so far as he was concerned with emphasising the Plantagenet claim over Aquitaine, had reached his northern term. But his raid had, as we know, another object: that of drawing the French forces southward. And, with the characteristic indecision of feudal strategic aims, it occurred to the Black Prince at this stage to immix with that object an alternative, and to see whether he could not get across the Loire to join Lancaster's force, which was campaigning in the West of France on the other side of that river.

At Vierzon Edward's men came across the first resistance. A handful of John's forces, irregulars hired by the French king under a leader most charmingly named "Grey Mutton," skirmished to their disadvantage against the Anglo-Gascon force.

The Black Prince made back westward after "Grey Mutton," thinking, perhaps, to cross the Loire at Blois, and two days out from Vierzon (rather over twenty miles) he made the only a.s.sault upon fortifications which he permitted his men in the whole campaign. This was an attack upon the Castle of Romorantin, in which "Grey Mutton" had taken refuge.

It was not the moment for delay. Edward knew that the French army must now be somewhere in the neighbourhood; he had already touched lance with one small French force; but he had his teeth into the business and would not let go his hold. The outworks were taken early in the affair. The keep held out for four days more, surrendering at last to fire upon the 3rd of September.

The season was now full late if the Black Prince intended a return to the south. But, as we have seen, he no longer entirely intended such a retreat. He had already begun to consider the alternative of crossing the Loire and joining his brother's force beyond it. He had information, however, that the bridges directly in front of him were cut. It is not easy to reconcile this with the pa.s.sage immediately afterwards of the French army. But the most vivid, and perhaps the most accurate, account we have of this march not only tells us that the bridges were cut, but particularly alludes to the high water in the Loire at that moment. It is a significant piece of information, because no river in Europe north of the Pyrenees differs so much in its volume from day to day as does the Loire, which is sometimes a trickle of water in the midst of sandbanks, and at other times a great flood a quarter of a mile across, and twenty feet deep, like the Thames at London.

At any rate, from Romorantin, Prince Edward made for Tours, a distance of fifty miles as the crow flies, and a march of precisely five days. It will be observed that his plotted rate of marching at ten miles a day was most accurately maintained.

Now from his camp in front of Tours, Edward behaved in a fashion singular even for the unbusinesslike warfare of that somewhat theatrical generation. He sat down, apparently undecided which way to turn, and remained in that posture during the remainder of September the 8th, all the next day, September 9th, and all the next day again, the 10th. There could be no question of attacking Tours. It was a strong, large, and well-defended town, and quite beyond the power of the Black Prince's force, which was by this time enc.u.mbered with a very heavy train of waggons carrying his booty. But while he was waiting there (and he could see, says one account, the fires of his brother's army by night beyond the Loire), his enemy, with such forces as he had been able to collect, was marching down upon him.

The King of France had begun to get men together at Chartres upon the same day that his rival had reached Vierzon, the 28th of August. Five days later, just when Romorantin Castle was surrendering, he had broken up and was marching to the Loire. And upon the same 8th of September which saw the Black Prince pitch his tents under the walls of Tours, the first bodies of the French command were beginning to cross the Loire at the two upper points of Meung and Blois, while some of them were preparing to cross at Tours itself.

Yet so defective was Edward's information that it was not until Sunday, September 11th, that news reached him of King John's movements. He heard upon that day that the French king himself had crossed at Blois, thirty miles up river behind him. Edward at once broke camp and started on his retreat to the south. After him as he went followed the French host, which had combined its forces after its separate pa.s.sages of the river.

It is important, if we are to understand what follows, to appreciate both the quality and the numbers of those whom the King of France had been able to gather. He had with him, by the still necessary and fatal military weakness of French society, only those loose feudal levies whose lack of cohesion had accounted ten years before for the disaster of Crecy. But John commanded no such host as Philip had nominally led in the Picardy Campaign against Edward III. At the most, and counting all his command, it was little if at all superior in numbers to that of the Black Prince. He hoped, indeed, to increase it somewhat with further levies as his progress southward advanced, and we shall see that his ultimate entry into the town of Poitiers did considerably reinforce him. But at no time before the battle which decided this campaign was John in any important numerical superiority over his enemy, and even in that battle the superiority had nothing of the dramatic disproportion which has rendered the field of Crecy famous.

John marched down the Loire straight on Tours. He reached Amboise, twenty miles off, in two days, coming under that town and castle upon Monday the 12th of September, twenty-four hours after the Black Prince had broken up his camp in front of Tours. As it was now useless to go on to Tours, John turned and marched due south, reaching Loches, another twenty miles away, not in two days but in one. It was a fine forced march; and if the Black Prince had appreciated the mobility of the foe, he would not have committed the blunder which will be described in the next section. He himself was marching well, but, enc.u.mbered as he was by his heavy baggage train, he covered on the 12th and 13th just less than thirty miles, and reached the town of La Haye des Cartes upon Tuesday the 13th, just as John, with his mixed force of Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, was marching into Loches, twenty miles away.

On the next day, Wednesday the 14th, John made yet another of those astonishing marches which merited a better fate than the disaster that was to conclude them, covered the twenty miles between Loches and La Haye, and entered the latter town just as the Black Prince was bringing his men into Chatellerault, only fifteen miles in front of him. Both the commanders, pursuing and pursued, had been getting remarkable work out of their men; for even the Black Prince, though the slower of the two, had covered forty-five miles in three days. But John in that determined advance after him had covered forty miles in two days.