In some ways, 1355 had been a disappointing year: the expected perpetual peace had not arrived, the three-pronged attack had not happened, and the Scots had once more invaded England. The latter threat was soon dealt with, however, and, while the Black Prince’s mounted raid led to no great battles, it once again demonstrated the inability of the French king to protect his subjects, put heart into the Gascons, reduced the taxes that could be raised from the raided areas, and liberated a great deal of valuable plate, cloth and wine, to say nothing of horses and prisoners for ransom. Edward’s troops had good reason to be satisfied and they looked forward to similar success the following year. In that hope they were not to be disappointed, for 1356 would see the second of the great English victories on land of the Hundred Years War.
The tomb of Edward the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral. A highly competent military commander, his early death at the age of forty-six set back by forty years England’s hopes of regaining her rights on the continent of Europe.
6
THE CAPTURE OF A KING
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 Frenc
h 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.
A Great and Glorious Adventure Page 16