A Great and Glorious Adventure

by Gordon Corrigan

  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 t
owards 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 maupertuis and 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.31 Altogether 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).