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POITIERS
[Illustration]
POITIERS
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
LONDON
HUGH REES, LTD.
5 REGENT STREET, PALL MALL, S.W.
1913
CONTENTS
PART PAGE
INTRODUCTION 9
I. THE CAMPAIGN 18
II. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION 33
III. THE TERRAIN 47
IV. THE ACTION 68
V. THE ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES 102
VI. THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE 115
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Coloured Plan of the Battle _frontispiece_
Plan No. 1 _page_ 12
" No. 2 " 32
" No. 3 " 49
" No. 4 " 61
POITIERS
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.
[Illustration]
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 principally 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 nobles of which were
honestly attached to his cause and the greater townsmen as well; while in
the mass 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 Carcassonne; 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 nobility 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 appetite for combat which this career
satisfied certainly in its baser, but still more certainly in its nobler,
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 repetition 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 mass 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 passed 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 space 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 assault 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 passage 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 encumbered 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 passages 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, encumbered 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.
With John's entry into La Haye des Cartes and Edward's leaving that town
twenty-four hours ahead of him, we enter the curious bit of cross-marching
and conflicting purposes which may properly be called "The Preliminaries"
of the Battle of Poitiers, and it is under this title that I shall deal
with them in the next section.
[Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF OPERATIONS PRECEDING THE BATTLE]