The Battle of Poitiers 1356 (6 page)

With the king taken the battle was finished, and the chase for the remaining prisoners began. Some remnants of the French were routed into the marshes below the original English position, and others fled towards Poitiers, eight kilometres north-west of the battlefield. Englishmen and Gascons pursued them to the walls, which forced the townspeople to close the gates for the defence of the city. A terrible massacre followed outside Poitiers, and many Frenchmen readily surrendered in order to save their own lives.

The number of those Frenchmen captured and killed was very considerable – around 2,500 men-at-arms. By comparison only 40 Anglo-Gascon men-at-arms were recorded as slain, in addition to an undisclosed (and presumably much more sizeable) number of infantrymen and archers. Many more were wounded. One William Lenche lost an eye in the battle and the prince rewarded him with the rights to the ferry in Saltash in Cornwall. Sir James Audley was also gravely wounded, and in recognition of this and his great deeds of arms in the battle he received the most generous reward of all those who served the prince in the expeditions of 1355–6, an annuity of £400.

With considerations of strategy completed and the battle won, the prince invited all the captured nobles to dine with him. The prince himself served the king’s table, and all the other tables as well with every mark of humility, and refused to sit at the king’s table saying he was not yet worthy of such an honour, and that it would not be fitting for him to sit at the same table as so great a prince, and one who had shown himself so valiant that day.
⁶
Such courteous behaviour set the seal on what became the Black Prince’s almost legendary reputation, but this was a courtesy and chivalry only appropriate after a battle; it was also courtesy due to those of noble and royal blood, and, of course, it was courtesy to a relative.

The victory at Poitiers and the capture of Jean immediately changed the diplomatic and political balance of Anglo-French relations, but to what extent and how far would be the subject of hard bargaining. Geoffrey Hamelyn, the prince’s attendant, was sent to London with Jean’s tunic and helmet as proof of his capture. The army returned to Bordeaux and negotiations began regarding a truce and the exact value of a king’s ransom.

Analysis of the Battle

The sources for the battle of Poitiers are difficult, often contradictory and lacking detail. They include chronicles and campaign letters which need to be used in conjunction with cartographic and landscape evidence although with the understanding that contemporary geographical features are not identical to those in 1356. In particular the extent of marshland around the Miosson and the size of the wood of Nouaillé must be conjectural. More significantly for the purposes of reconstructing the initial disposition of troops, the length and position of the hedge and ditches which protected the Anglo-Gascon position is especially problematic. There have been many attempts to describe the battle, and many of these have been consulted in the present study alongside a range of contemporary and near-contemporary sources. Any reconstruction must be conjectural because of the nature of those sources, and not all questions have been resolved satisfactorily. The key problem lies in the initial disposition of English and French forces after which the course of the battle is somewhat more straightforward. The battle plans provide an interpretation of the encounter but some evidence will be cited at length so that the reader may come to his or her own conclusions.
⁷

A number of campaign letters were written concerning the engagement but most of these, such as Burghersh’s dispatch recorded by Froissart, merely noted the names and number of casualties and prisoners taken and that the battle took place half a league from Poitiers. The prince himself wrote to the mayor, commons and aldermen of London on 22 October but provided no information concerning the disposition of troops, merely noting that ‘our very dear and beloved knight Nigel Loryng, our chamberlain, who is bringing this [letter], will tell you more in detail from his own knowledge.’
⁸
The situation prior to the battle is best described by the Anonimalle Chronicler.

‘That night [Saturday, 17 September 1356] the prince encamped with all his army in a wood on a little river near the site of the defeat ... On Monday morning ... the Earl of Warwick crossed a narrow causeway over the marsh ... but the press of the carriage of the English army was so great and the causeway so narrow that they could hardly pass and so they remained up through the first hour of daylight. And then they saw the vanguard of the French come towards the Prince ... And so the Earl of Warwick turned back with his men’
⁹

It appears that some of inherent contradiction in the sources can be resolved if the events they describe are considered to have been contracted or expanded over time. Such a possibility should be considered when reading Geoffrey Le Baker’s account below. This provides an explanation for the suggested positioning of the prince in a northerly location along the wood. Le Baker suggests Edward first camped around the south and then moved north, perhaps making a camp on the hill to the north of the wood. From there his forces were repositioned along the western edge of the wood protected by the hedge that may have run along much of the length of the road. The gaps described may have been made by the carters mentioned. According to Geoffrey Le Baker:

...he [the prince] surveyed the scene, and saw that to one side there was a nearby hill...Between our men and the hill was a broad deep valley and marsh watered by a stream. The prince’s battalion crossed the stream at a fairly narrow ford and occupied the hill beyond the marshes and ditches where they easily concealed their positions among the thickets, lying higher than the enemy. The field in which our vanguard and centre were stationed was separated from the level ground which the French occupied by a long hedge and ditch, whose other end reached down to the marsh. The earl of Warwick in command of the vanguard, held the slope down to the marsh. In the upper part of the hedge, well away from the slope, there was a certain open space or gap, made by the carters in autumn, a stone’s throw away from which our rearguard was positioned, under the command of the earl of Salisbury.
¹⁰

Some further details are provided by the less-than-reliable Jean Froissart, but his evidence cannot be ignored.

‘And how are they disposed?’ asked the King. ‘Sire’, replied Sir Eustace [de Ribemont], ‘they are in a very strong position...They have chosen a length of road strongly protected by hedges and bushes and they have lined the hedge on both sides with their archers, so that one cannot enter that road or ride along it without passing between them. Yet one must go that way before one can fight them...At the end of the hedge, among vines and thorn-bushes between which it would be impossible to march or ride, are their men-at-arms ... It is a very skilful piece of work.’
¹¹

This reasonably detailed description is confusing. Froissart suggests the Anglo-Gascons were arranged along a road which was strongly protected by hedges - an approach I have followed. His comment that these were lined with archers so that any assault had to pass between them requires some assumptions about the positioning of a gap and therefore the disposition of the archers. This gap was only wide enough for four men to ride abreast. Presumably, if one accepts this account, the archers were drawn up behind a hedge facing the French, and this hedge was bisected with a road and/or the carters’ track. There were also archers at either end of the hedge arranged in a formation that Froissart describes as being in the form of a ‘herce’, possibly a triangle or ‘harrow’ shape. This can be explained by the archers under Salisbury to the north and those commanded by Warwick to the south.

One of the reasons for the prince’s success in 1356 and indeed for many English victories during this phase of the Hundred Years War was the composition of the armies that encountered the French. This developed from the salutary lessons the English had received at the hands of the Scots from the early years of the fourteenth century. The war that the English fought in France was a mobile one that struck at the social and economic foundations of the Valois kingdom and yet allowed for the possibility of a set-piece encounter. The evolution (if not revolution) in military thinking that had taken place since Edward I’s reign had created an increasingly professional army, one recruited to perform specific tasks. Troops were recruited after 1347 almost entirely through the indenture system by which captains signed up to lead a particular number of soldiers armed to particular specifications to implement a range of strategic and tactical plans. The prince’s forces at Poitiers and during the
chevauchées
of 1355 and 1356 consisted of three types of troops: men-at-arms, horsed archers, and footmen. This allowed for an extremely flexible tactical response to a variety of situations.

The Anglo-Gascon army was probably composed of 3,000–4,000 men-at-arms, 2,500–3,000 archers, and 1,000 other light troops. The French army may have included 8,000 men-at-arms, 2,000 arbalesters, and numerous poorly trained and lightly armed troops totalling some 15,000-16,000 soldiers.

Hence, Jean could raise fewer men for Poitiers than his father, Philippe VI, had ten years before at Crécy, but contemporaries did not attribute defeat to a shortage of manpower. Rather, and particularly by the author of
La complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers
, blame was heaped upon the nobility.
¹²
The very
raison d’etre
of the nobility was to defend the
patria
– the homeland; they held their exalted social position because they had been appointed by God to that sacred task. They were, in traditional feudal parlance, the
bellatores
– those who fought – and if they failed in this role, they failed in their primary function and duty. It is significant that the revolt of the Jacquerie which occurred in the anarchy after Poitiers targeted the French aristocracy. It was not, like the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a reaction to economic and social impositions. Rather it was a violent response to the general failure of the nobility to fulfil its traditional role.

In addition to the failure of French chivalry (the warrior aristocracy), were other, more prosaic reasons for the defeat. One of these was the lack of missile weapons Jean had at his disposal, and that those crossbows he had were inferior to the English longbow. Crossbows could do considerable damage, but they were slow and clumsy weapons compared to the longbow. Furthermore, the English had been allowed time to prepare their defensive position. The army was well dug-in behind earthworks and used the natural protection of the hedge and wood – they had the terrain in their favour. ‘
Par son recrutement, et plus encore par sa préparation immédiate, la petite armée du prince de Galles était dans les meilleures conditions pour vaincre
.’
¹³

The English were drawn up in three major ‘battles’. Warwick and Oxford led the Anglo-Gascon vanguard with the captal de Buch, and Salisbury and Suffolk commanded the rearguard. The bulk of the prince’s retinue was in the centre led by Edward, with Burghersh, Audley, Chandos and Cobham. The archers, perhaps defended by earthworks, were stationed on the flanks and possibly at right angles to the enemy because of the nature of the herce formation (on the battle plans depicted as a ‘harrow’). As at Crécy, the longbowmen proved extremely effective against mounted troops, but less so against infantry advancing in close formation – that is until the French were at close range when the longbows with their heavy draw-weights could punch through French armour. However, the length of the battle meant that arrows were in short supply after the opening salvos.

The French army was in its entirety considerably larger than the Anglo-Gascon force, perhaps twice its size, but Jean did not take full advantage of his greater strength. The French divisions attacked in turn not
en masse
, and Orléans fled or was dismissed before engaging the enemy. Consequently, in many of the phases of the battle the prince may have not been at any sort of numerical disadvantage.

The victory at Poitiers combined the defensive tactics, witnessed by the prince at Crécy, with the chivalric traditions of an earlier age. After the failure of the French attacks against his infantry, Edward responded with a classic heavy cavalry charge. To add a more modern flavour to this tradition, the flanking force led by the captal de Buch may have included mounted archers and possibly Gascon crossbowmen. The battle was thus a fine illustration of the use of dismounted troops who, as at Crécy, in concert with archers in a defensible position, broke the French attacks, then remounted and defeated the enemy with a cavalry attack, which was now uncommon, if not anachronistic.

Although the outcome of the battle seems clear, it is uncertain whether the prince ever intended to fight a battle, certainly at least under the conditions in which Edward found himself. If a meeting with Lancaster had been achieved then the combined English force would have been formidable and the prince could have anticipated a victory. Certainly, English battle strategy had proved very effective in several encounters, Crécy not the least. Had additional forces and resources been available, and the arrival of the Black Death not precluded further military action, then the 1346–7 campaign and the victory at Crécy might well have yielded far greater spoils than Calais and the ransoms of a few and deaths of many of the French nobility. With this experience in mind it seems extremely likely that the prince actively sought a battle in the 1355–6 expeditions, but he wished to fight on his own terms and against an enemy whom he felt confident of defeating. The concessions the prince was willing to make prior to the battle and some of his remarks made afterwards suggest he lacked confidence early on the morning of Monday 19 September. However, once the victory had been achieved it influenced not only further military tactics but also broader political strategy. The English had now demonstrated in both Scotland and France that if they could bring an enemy to battle on their own terms then they could win: that confidence coloured wider aspirations in the Hundred Years War. The struggle that previously had centred on sovereignty in Gascony, became, albeit briefly, about sovereignty over the entire kingdom of France.