A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  As religious as he was martial, he wrote in French (still the language of the English court) a devotional book called the Livre des sainetes médecines, in which he used allegory to reveal the wounds of his soul—that is to say, his sins—to Christ, the Divine Physician. Each part of the body had an allegorical wound and each remedy a matching religious symbolism. Because the Duke was examining himself, a 14th century grand seigneur emerges as a real person who admires the elegance of his long pointed toes in the stirrup, and at jousts stretches out his legs for the notice of the ladies; who also reproaches himself for recoiling from the stench of the poor and the sick, and for extorting money, lands, and other property by exercising undue influence on his courts.

  In the invasion of France in 1355, Lancaster was joined by King Edward. Making for Calais instead of Cherbourg, they landed on November 2, collected a force of 3,000 men-at-arms, 2,000 mounted archers, and about as many on foot, and set out ostensibly to seek battle with the King of France while raiding the Pas de Calais, Artois, and Picardy en route.

  The King of France had “solemnly and publicly” issued the arrièreban or general summons to all men between eighteen and sixty in May just before the truce ended. Perhaps owing to a poor response, it was repeated several times during the summer in Paris and all important places of the realm—“especially in Picardy,” according to one chronicler. Since a general summons brought in persons of doubtful military value, the monarchy preferred to demand the cost of a given number rather than the men themselves, and tried to fix physical standards for those who served and send the rest home. Sorting them out to assemble a fighting force took time; doubtless also, owing to recent discontents, not a few nobles dragged their feet. By November the host that Jean led north to meet the English was incomplete.

  Enguerrand de Coucy VII, aged fifteen, was a part of it. Nothing is reported of what he did, only that he was present among the “barons of Picardy” in the battalion of Moreau de Fiennes, a future Marshal of France. He was in distinguished company, with his guardian, Matthieu de Roye, Master of Crossbowmen, Geoffrey de Charny, known as the “perfect knight,” and Marshal Arnoul d’Audrehem. The battalion also included the bourgeois of Paris, Rouen, and Amiens.

  The campaign that was Enguerrand’s first experience of war was no stuff for heroic legend. The French host was at Amiens on November 5–7 and had advanced northward to St. Omer by November 11, bypassing en route the English on the left who were simultaneously marching south to Hesdin. The armies sniffed and circled around each other, each King issuing invitations to the other to fight—“body to body or force against force,” in the words of Jean’s challenge—which each managed to decline in ornamental verbiage. If Jean, as the English chroniclers claimed, feared to seek pitched battle, Edward was no more eager. Jean’s major military action was to burn or carry off provisions of the countryside so as to deprive the English of supply, at the cost of the local populace. Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.

  Jean’s scorched-earth policy forced the English to fall back upon the coast for lack of food, wine, and beer. For four days they had no other drink but water, which seemed like starvation in an age that depended on wine or beer as an essential part of diet. The French had also taken care with letters and money to stimulate a Scottish diversion. News of a threat from the Scottish border plus the prospect of a winter on water caused Edward and Lancaster to re-embark after a campaign lasting no more than ten days.

  Jean now faced the necessity of obtaining from an Assembly of the Three Estates a subsidy to pay his troops. Summoned by the King, the Estates of Langued’oil—that is, of northern France—met in Paris in December. Because, as a result of the tax-exemption of clergy and nobles, the Third Estate paid most of the taxes, it controlled the decision on how much aid to grant, and since it could use its leverage to exact reforms or privileges, the monarchy was never very happy on these occasions.

  The offer made by the Estates of 1355 revealed the wealth of French resources and the national loyalty beneath the discontents, and also a profound mistrust of the King’s government. The Estates agreed to support 30,000 men-at-arms for one year at an estimated cost of five million livres on condition that the funds were to be administered not by the King’s treasury but by a committee of the Estates themselves which would pay the troops directly. The money was to be raised by a tax on everyone of all Estates and by a salt tax as well, at rates which had to be increased in the following year when the required sum was not produced. The new rates amounted to a tax of 4 percent on the incomes of the rich, 5 percent on the middle class, and 10 percent on the lowest taxable class. One result was a revolt of the “little against the great” in the textile city of Arras in northern Picardy. Though quickly suppressed, it was a signal of coming trouble.

  Meanwhile, the restless scheming of Charles of Navarre produced the next explosion. He was trying to turn the eighteen-year-old Dauphin Charles against his father, and at the same time was encouraging the Norman lords to resist payment of aids to the King.

  In April 1356 the Dauphin, in his capacity as Duke of Normandy, was entertaining Charles of Navarre and the leading Norman nobles at a banquet in Rouen when suddenly the doors were broken open and the King in helmet with many followers, preceded by Marshal d’Audrehem with drawn sword, burst in. “Let no one move or he is a dead man!” cried the Marshal. The King seized Navarre, calling him “Traitor,” at which Navarre’s squire Colin Doublel drew his dagger in the terrible act of lèse majesté and threatened to plunge it into the King’s breast. Without flinching, Jean ordered his guards to “seize that boy and his Master too.” He himself laid hold of Jean d’Harcourt so roughly that he tore his doublet from collar to belt, accusing him, and others present who had been in the party that murdered Charles d’Espagne, of treason. In horror, the Dauphin begged his father not to dishonor him by violence upon his guests, but was told by the King, “You do not know what I know”; these were wicked traitors whose crimes had been discovered. Charles of Navarre pleaded for mercy, saying he was the victim of false reports, but the King had him arrested with the others while the remaining guests fled, “climbing over walls in their terror.”

  Next morning, Jean d’Harcourt, Colin Doublel, and two other Norman lords were taken toward the gibbet, in two carts, the ignominious vehicle used for the condemned, accompanied by the King in person, dressed in full armor as if expecting attack. His nerves evidently working on him, Jean suddenly halted the procession in a field and ordered the prisoners decapitated on the spot. He allowed them no priest, for as traitors they were to die without being confessed, except for Colin Doublel, who was condemned for raising a weapon against the King rather than for treason. A substitute executioner was hastily located who took six blows to sever Harcourt’s head. The four bodies, dragged the rest of the way to the gibbet, were hung up in chains and their heads stuck on lances, where they remained for two years. Charles of Navarre was imprisoned in the Châtelet in Paris and his estates in Normandy were again confiscated by the King.

  When Welsh Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V speaks of the King’s “cholers and his moods and his displeasures and his indignations and also being a little intoxicate in his brains,” he might have been describing Jean le Bon. The King’s principal victim, Jean d’Harcourt, had three brothers and nine children married into a network of families of northern France (a daughter subsequently married Raoul de Coucy, uncle of Enguerrand VII). The King succeeded in outraging the many connections of his victims without eliminating his real enemy, Charles of Navarre. Sympathy was aroused for the prisoner of the Châtelet, and popular songs were composed in his honor.

  The affair of Rouen accomplished just what the King had tried to thwart—the reopening of Normandy to England. Jean d’Harcourt’s brother Godefrey, the same who had led Edward III into Normandy ten years before, and Navarre’s brother Philip appealed for English help to
recover their estates, and when the English landed at Cherbourg in July 1356, both these lords took the oath of homage to Edward III as King of France. From Cherbourg the English under the Duke of Lancaster advanced toward contact with Brittany just at the time the Black Prince started out from Bordeaux on a new raid northward toward the heart of France. Events now moved toward the collision at Poitiers.

  With English, Gascons, and reinforcements from home, the Prince marched north with a force of about 8,000. His object was to link up with Lancaster and spread damage on the way, taking plunder rather than towns, fortresses, or territory. Marching, fighting, and amassing loot, the Prince reached the Loire on or about September 3 and, finding the bridges destroyed, turned westward toward Tours, where he learned that a large French army was advancing toward him. He also received word that Lancaster had broken out of Normandy and was hastening toward a junction. But the Loire lay between them, and the country was alive with French men-at-arms. His men were now fatigued from many sharp fights, sated and burdened with plunder. After four days’ hesitation which lost him a head start, the Prince turned southward again with clear intention to avoid pitched battle and bring his gains safely back to Bordeaux.

  In the north Jean had first moved against Lancaster’s force in Normandy and temporarily blocked it before turning to face the threat from the south. He had summoned a great mobilization for defense of the realm to rendezvous at Chartres in the first week of September. Stimulated by the enemy’s presence on the Loire in the center of France, the nobles responded to the summons, whatever their sentiments toward the King. They came from Auvergne, Berry, Burgundy, Lorraine, Hainault, Artois, Vermandois, Picardy, Brittany, Normandy. “No knight and no squire remained at home,” wrote the chroniclers; here was gathered “all the flower of France.”

  With the King were his four sons, aged fourteen to nineteen; the new Constable, Gautier de Brienne, who bore the title, Duke of Athens, from a defunct duchy founded in the crusades; the two Marshals; 26 counts and dukes, 334 bannerets, and nearly all the lesser lords. It was the largest French army of the century—a “great marvel,” wrote an English chronicler, the “equal never seen of Nobility in arms.” The actual number, given by chroniclers with individual abandon at anything up to 80,000, has been endlessly disputed and eventually brought to settle at around 16,000, about twice the size of the Black Prince’s army.

  It had no cohesion. The great seigneurs came at their own time, many late for the rendezvous, each with his own troop of 50, 100, or 150 under his own banner, and with his own household and baggage train and gold and silver vessels and plate for turning into ready cash when needed. The provisions of the ordinance of 1351 for discipline and order had borne few results. Owing to a quarrel over renewed taxation, bourgeois support was disaffected, causing the towns to withdraw their contingents. Froissart, on the other hand, reports that Jean dismissed the bourgeois forces when he crossed the Loire, “which was madness in him and in those who advised him.”

  With the might of France assembled, Jean was confident he could force the Prince back into Aquitaine, even back to England. Between September 8 and 13 the French army crossed the Loire at Orléans, Blois, and other points and pushed south in pursuit of the Anglo-Gascons. On September 12 the Black Prince was at Montbazon, five miles south of Tours, where he was met by the papal legates who had been endeavoring to make peace since early in the year. Besides writing to the Kings of England and France and to leading nobles of the two countries, urging them to negotiate, the Pope had dispatched the two cardinals in person to try to halt the hostilities.

  The chief of the two was the aristocratic Cardinal Talleyrand de Périgord, a prelate baldonzoso e superbo (proud and haughty), as Villani called him. He was a son of the Count of Périgord and of the beautiful Countess reputed to have been Pope Clement V’s mistress. At the age of six, perhaps too early to have a religious calling but not its income, he had been given the Pope’s permission to receive the clerical tonsure and therefore the right to hold ecclesiastical benefices. A bishop at twenty-three, a cardinal at thirty, he had held at one time or another nine English benefices in London, York, Lincoln, and Canterbury, making him a principal target of English resentment.

  From Cardinal Talleyrand, Prince Edward learned that the King of France counted on intercepting him and was preparing for pitched battle on September 14, and that the French army was daily enlarging as new units arrived. Though the Prince was not anxious to risk battle against fresh and superior numbers, he nevertheless rejected Talleyrand’s proposal to negotiate a truce, perhaps because he was overconfident of being able to elude the enemy. The French were pushing hard, intending to outflank the Prince at Poitiers, where they would get across the road to Bordeaux and cut off his retreat. For four days more the armies continued on the march without making contact, the English barely ten or twelve miles ahead, the French gradually closing the gap.

  On September 17 at a farm called La Chaboterie, three miles west of Poitiers, a French party led by Raoul de Coucy, Sire de Montmirail, uncle of Enguerrand VII and reputed one of the bravest knights of his time, sighted an English reconnaissance unit, and on its own initiative galloped to the attack. Whether Enguerrand was in the party is unrecorded, or even whether he was with the host. The domain of Coucy must certainly have sent its contingent, unless this was with the forces in Normandy opposing Lancaster. In the clash that now occurred, Raoul dashed so far forward that he reached the Prince’s banner-bearer, fighting valiantly. Under the ardor of the French assault, the Anglo-Gascons reeled back, yet inexplicably, though they were far outnumbered, they recovered and overpowered the French. Many were killed and Raoul was captured, though ransomed soon afterward. Like so much else that happened at Poitiers, the outcome at La Chaboterie is difficult to explain.

  Greedy for ransoms from the skirmish, the Anglo-Gascons pursued with such vigor that they were drawn three leagues from the field, with the result that the Prince, in order to rally and reassemble his forces, had to halt where he was and camp for the night though suffering greatly from lack of water.

  On the following morning, Sunday, September 18, as the Prince’s weary company resumed march just below Poitiers, his scouts from a crest of land saw a glitter of armor and the flutter of a thousand pennants as the French main body came into view. Knowing he was overtaken and battle now unavoidable, the Prince drew up his forces in the most favorable site he could find, on a wooded slope edged by vineyards and hedges and by a stream meandering through marshy land. Beyond the stream was a wide field traversed by a narrow road. The place was about two miles southeast of Poitiers.

  Confident of victory in his superior strength, King Jean was held back from attack by Cardinal Talleyrand, who arrived with a great company of clerics to beg him to keep Sunday’s “Truce of God” until next morning while allowing the Cardinal another chance to mediate. At a war council in the King’s pavilion of scarlet silk, Marshal d’Audrehem and others ardent for battle, and conscious of the threat of the Duke of Lancaster at their rear, urged no delay. Against their advice, the King fatally agreed to the Cardinal’s plea for delay. A proposal by Geoffrey de Charny for an arranged combat of 100 champions on each side was rejected by his companions lest it exclude too many from combat, glory, and ransoms. If either immediate battle or Charny’s proposal had been adopted, the ultimate outcome might have been different.

  When Cardinal Talleyrand hastened back to the English camp, he found the Prince was now amenable to, even anxious for, any arrangement that would get him out of danger with honor and spoils intact. Edward offered to restore free of ransom all prisoners he had taken during the two campaigns and all places he had occupied, and to agree to non-belligerency for seven years, during which he would pledge not to take up arms against the King of France. He even offered, according to the Chronique des Quatre Premiers Valois, to yield Calais and Guînes, though he certainly lacked the authority for such a surrender. His extraordinary concessions indicate his sense of a desperate s
ituation and the realization that he could be starved out if the French chose to surround and invest him. Or, knowing that so inglorious a choice by the French was unlikely, he may have been playing for time to complete preparation of his archers’ positions. This his men were already engaged in doing, and throughout the day of parleys they continued entrenching and setting up palisades.

  King Jean agreed to consider the proposal. Cardinal Talleyrand and his clerics hurried back and forth on their mules, and the Prince’s chief knights came under safe-conduct to parley in person. Hardly a battle of the endless war, except in Brittany, was not preceded by efforts to stop it that never succeeded. Arrogant in his confidence of victory, Jean accepted the offer on condition that the Prince of Wales would surrender himself and 100 of his knights as prisoners of the King of France. Such humiliation the Prince resolutely refused, having meanwhile improved his position among the woods and behind hedges. While Talleyrand still begged the King for the love of Christ to agree at least to a truce until Christmas, the day of parleys was over. The French council of war reconvened to determine a plan of attack.