PART VI_Poitiers

THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE

The immediate results of the victory of Poitiers consisted, first, in the

immensely increased prestige which it gave to the House of Plantagenet

throughout Europe.

Next, we must reckon the local, though ephemeral, effect upon the opinion

of Aquitaine, through which the Black Prince was now free to retreat at

his ease towards Bordeaux and the secure territories of Gascony.

But though these results were the most immediate, and though the victory

of one monarch over the other was the most salient aspect of the victory

for contemporaries, as it is for us, there was another element which we

must particularly consider because it illustrates the difference between

the political conditions of the fourteenth century and of our own time.

The real point of the success was the capture of the king's person. The

importance of the action lay, of course, to some extent, in the prestige

it gave to the Black Prince personally; though that point was lost a very

few years afterwards in the subsequent decline of the Plantagenet power in

the south. In so far as an action in those days could carry a _national_

effect--that is, could be regarded by distant civilian populations as

proof of strength or weakness in contrasting races and societies--Poitiers

had not even the claim of Crecy; for it was not principally an archers'

but a knights' battle, and the knights were mainly the gentry of the South

of France, while those who had been broken by the only cavalry movement of

the engagement were not even French knights, but levies of German,

Spanish, and other origin. But the capture of the King of France at that

particular moment of chivalry, that last fermentation of a feudal society

which was reaching its term, had a vast positive effect, as well as an

almost incalculable moral effect.

There is nothing in modern times to which such an accident can be

accurately paralleled. Perhaps the capture of the capital city would be

the nearest thing; but there is this grave difference between them, that

the capture of the modern capital must mean prolonged and decisive

success in war, whereas the capture of John was an accident of the field.

The victory would have been less by far if the whole of the king's command

had fled, with the king himself at the head of the rout.

A modern parallel more nearly exact would be the transference in the midst

of a conflict of some great financial power from one side to the other; or

again, in a naval war, the blowing up of so many capital ships by contact

mines as would put one of the two opposing fleets into a hopeless

inferiority to the other. To capture a king was to capture not so much a

necessary part of the mechanism of government as the most important and

the richest member of a feudal organisation. It meant the power to claim

an enormous feudal ransom for his person. It meant, more doubtfully, the

power to engage him, while he was yet a prisoner, to terms that would bind

his lieges: "more doubtfully," because the whole feudal system jealously

regarded the rights both of individual owners and of custom from the

peasant to the crown. Finally, to capture the king was to get hold of the

chief financial support of an enemy. A feudal king had vast revenues in

the shape of rents, not competitive, but fixed, which came to him as they

did to any other lord, but in much greater amount than to any other lord.

The king was the chief economic factor in that autonomous economic

federation which we call the feudal organisation of Gaul.

The fact that his capture was an accident in no way lessened the result;

it was regarded in the military mind of those days much as we regard the

crippling of a modern financial power by some chance of speculation. It

was only a bit of good fortune on the one side, and of bad fortune on the

other, but one to be duly taken advantage of by those whom it would

profit.

The immediate result of that capture was twofold: an admission on the part

of John of the Plantagenet claim, and a corresponding spontaneous movement

in France which led to the defeat of that claim; the signing (ultimately)

of a treaty tearing the French monarchy in two; and, finally, the

rejection and nullifying of that treaty by the mere instinct of the

nation. But these lengthy political consequences--followed by the further

success of the Black Prince's nephew at Agincourt, and again by his

successor's loss of all save Calais--do not concern this book.

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