The Battle of Poitiers was fought ten years and four weeks after
that of Crécy.
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 Crécy 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 Crécy 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 Crécy 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 Crécy 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 Crécy 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.