It was, as we have seen, on the evening of Tuesday, September the
13th, that the Black Prince with his 7000 men and his heavy train of
booty had marched into La Haye des Cartes, a small town upon the right
bank of the Creuse, somewhat above the place where that river falls
into the Vienne.
His confidence that his well-mounted and light-armed troops could
outmarch his pursuers was not yet shaken; he was even prepared to
imagine that he had already shaken them off; but anyone who could have
taken a general survey of all that countryside would have discovered
how ill-founded was his belief. The great forces of the French king,
coming down slantways from the north and east, had had nearly four
miles to march to his three. Yet they were gaining on him. Edward had
given the French king a day's advance by his hesitation before Tours,
and the tardiness with which he had received news of John's crossing
the Loire was another point in favour of the French.
It was the Black Prince's business to get down on to the great road
which has been the trunk road of Western France for two thousand years,
and which leads from Paris through Châtellerault and Poitiers to
Angoulême, and so to Bordeaux. If (as he hoped) he could advance so
quickly as to get rid of the pursuit, so much the better. If he were
still pressed he must continue his rapid marching, but, at any rate,
that was the road he must take.
To the simple plan, however, of reaching Châtellerault and then
merely following the great road on through Poitiers, he must make a
local exception, for Poitiers itself contained a large population, with
plenty of trained men, munitions, and arms; and it was further, from
its position as well as from its walls, altogether too strong a place
for him to think of taking it.
The town had been from immemorial time a fortress: first tribal (and
the rallying point of the Gaulish Picts under the name of Limon);
later, Roman and Frankish. The traveller notes to-day its singular
strength, standing on the flat top and sides of its precipitous
peninsula, isolated from its plateau on every side save where a narrow
neck joins it to the higher land; it is impregnable to mere assault,
half surrounded by the Clain to the east, and on the west protected by
a deep and formidable ravine.
It was absolutely necessary for the Prince not only to avoid
Poitiers, but not to pass so close to it as to give the alarm. What he
proposed to do, therefore, was to strike the great Bordeaux road at a
point well south of the city, called Les Roches, and to do this he must
engage himself within the broadening triangle which lies between the
Clain and the Vienne: these rivers join their waters just above
Châtellerault itself.
The main road from Châtellerault to Poitiers runs on the further
side of the Clain from this triangle, and the Black Prince, by engaging
himself in the wedge between the rivers, would thus have a stream
between his column and the natural marching route of any force which
might approach him from the fortified city which he feared.
Further, he was well provided for part of this march through the
triangle between the rivers by the existence of a straight way formed
by the old Roman road which runs through it, and may still be followed.
He could not pursue this road all the way to Poitiers (which town it
ultimately reaches by a bridge over the Clain), but somewhere half-way
between Châtellerault and Poitiers he would diverge from it towards the
east, and so avoid the latter stronghold and make a straight line for
Les Roches. This it would be the easier for him to do because the soil
in that countryside is light and firm and traversed by very numerous
cross-lanes which serve its equally numerous farms. Only one
considerable obstacle interrupts a passage southward through the
triangle between the rivers. It is the forest of Moulière. But the
Black Prince's march along the Roman road would skirt this wood to the
west, and by the time his approach to Poitiers compelled him to diverge
from the Roman road eastward, the boundary of the forest also sloped
eastward away from it.
His first day's march upon this last lap, as it were, of his escape
was a long one. By the road he took it was no less than fifteen miles,
and at the end of it he gathered his column into Châtellerault, a
couple of miles from the place where the Clain and the Vienne meet, and
where the triangle between the two streams through which he proposed to
retreat begins. At the same hour that the Black Prince was bringing his
men into Châtellerault, John was leading the head of his column
into La Haye. He was just one day's march behind the Plantagenet.
There followed an unsoldierly and uncharacteristic blunder on the
part of the Black Prince which determined all the strange
cross-purposes of that week.
The Black Prince having made Châtellerault, believed that he had
shaken off the pursuit.
In explanation of this error, it must be remembered that the
population so far north as this was universally hostile to the southern
cause and to the claim of the Plantagenets. Whether news of the
ravaging and burning to the eastward had affected these peasants or no,
we are certain that they would give the Anglo-Gascon force nothing but
misleading information. The scouting, a perpetual weakness in mediæval
warfare, was imperfect; and even had it been better organised, to scout
rearwards is not the same thing as scouting on an advance or on the
flanks. At any rate, he took it for granted that there was no further
need for haste, that he had outmarched the French king, and that the
remainder of the retreat might be taken at his own pleasure. It must
further be noted that there was a frailty in the Black Prince's leading
which was more than once discovered in his various campaigns, and which
he only retrieved by his admirable tactical sense whenever he was
compelled to a decision. This frailty consisted, as might be guessed of
so headstrong a rider, in trying to get too much out of his troops in a
forced march, and paying for it upon the morrow of such efforts by
expensive delays which more than counterbalanced its value. He relied
too much upon the very large proportion of mounted men which formed the
bulk of his small force. He forgot the limitations of his few
foot-soldiers and the strain that a too-rapid advance put upon his
heavy and cumbersome train of waggons, laden with a heavier and heavier
booty as his raid proceeded.
He stayed in Châtellerault recruiting the strength of his mounts and
men for two whole days. He passed the Thursday and the Friday there
without moving, and it was not until the Saturday morning that he set
out from the town, crossed the Clain, and engaged himself within the
triangle between the two rivers.
The land through which he marched upon that Saturday morning had
been the scene of a much more famous and more decisive feat of arms;
for it was there, just north of the forest of Moulière, that Charles
Martel six hundred years before had overthrown the Mahommedans and
saved Europe for ever.
So he went forward under the morning, making south in a retreat
which he believed to be unthreatened.
Meanwhile, John, at the head of the French army, was pursuing a
better-thought-out strategical plan, whose complexity has only puzzled
historians because they have not weighed all the factors of the
military situation.
We do not know what numbers the King of France disposed of during
this, the first part of the pursuit, but we must presume that he could
not yet risk an engagement. The town of Poitiers was everything to him.
There he would find provisions and munition, some considerable body of
trained men, and the possibility of levying many thousands more. It was
a secure rallying point upon which to block the Black Prince's march to
the south, or from which to sally out and intercept his march. But when
John found himself in La Haye upon Wednesday the 14th, a day's march
behind Edward's command, he could not take the direct line for Poitiers
because that very command intercepted him. He knew that it had taken
the road for Châtellerault. He determined, therefore, by an
exceptionally rapid progress, to march round his enemy by the
east, to get down to Chauvigny, and from that point to turn westward
and reach Poitiers. It was a risk, but it was the only course open to
him. Had the Black Prince pursued his march instead of waiting at
Châtellerault, John's plan would have failed, prompt as its execution
was; but the Black Prince's delay gave him his opportunity.
From La Haye to Chauvigny by the crossroads that lead directly
southward is a matter of thirty miles. John covered this in two days.
Leaving La Haye upon the morning of Thursday the 15th, he brought his
force into Chauvigny upon the 16th, Friday. He left, no doubt, a
certain proportion delayed upon the road, but he himself, with the bulk
of the army, completed the distance.
While, therefore, the Black Prince was delaying all that Thursday
and Friday in Châtellerault, John was passing right in front and beyond
him some eight miles to the eastward; and on the Saturday, the 17th,
while the Black Prince was leading his column through the triangle
between the rivers, John was marching due west from Chauvigny to
Poitiers by the great road through St Julien, yet another fifteen miles
and more, in the third day of his great effort. The head of the column,
with the king himself, we must presume to have ridden through the gate
of Poitiers before or about noon, but the last contingents were spread
out along the road behind him when, in that same morning or early
afternoon of Saturday, the outriders of the Anglo-Gascon force appeared
upon the fields to the north.
It was an encounter as sudden as it was dramatic. The countryside at
this point consists in wide, open fields, the plough-lands of a plateau
which rises about one hundred feet above the level of the rivers. To
the east of this open country a line of wood marks the outlying
fragments of the forest of Moulière; to the west, five miles away, and
out of sight of these farms, stands upon its slope above the Clain the
town of Poitiers. The lane by which the Black Prince was advancing was
that which passes through the hamlet of Le Breuil.[1] It is possible
that he intended to camp there; he had covered sixteen miles. But if
that was his intention, the accident which followed changed it
altogether. A mile beyond the village there is a roll of rising land,
itself a mile short of the great road which joins Poitiers and
Chauvigny. It was from this slight eminence that scouts riding out in
front of Edward's army saw, massed upon that road and advancing
westward across their view, a considerable body of vehicles escorted by
armed men. It was the rearguard and the train of King John.
A man following to-day that great road between Poitiers and
Chauvigny eastward, notes a spinney and a farm lying respectively to
the right and to the left of his way, some four kilometres from the
gate of Poitiers, and not quite three from the famous megalith of the
“Lifted Stone,” which is a matter of immemorial reverence for the
townsfolk. That farm is known as La Chaboterie, and it marks the spot
upon the high road where John's rearguard first caught sight of
Edward's scouts upon the sky-line to the north.
The mounted men of this force turned northward off the high road,
and pursued the scouts to the main body near Le Breuil; then a sharp
skirmish ensued, and the French were driven off. This mêlée was the
first news the Black Prince had that the French army, so far from
having abandoned the pursuit, had marched right round him, and that his
column was actually in the gravest peril. It warned him that though he
had already covered those sixteen miles, he must press on further
before he could dare to camp for the night. His column was already
weary, but there was no alternative.
The army reached the high road, and crossed it long after the French
rearguard had disappeared to the west. Exhausted as it was, it pushed
on another mile or two southward by the lanes that lead across the
fields to the neighbourhood of Mignaloux, and there it camped. The men
had covered that day close on twenty miles! But before settling for the
evening, the Black Prince sent out the Captal de Buch north-westward
over the rolling plateau in reconnaissance. When this commander and his
body reached the heights which overlook the Clain, and faced the houses
of Poitiers upon the hill beyond, they saw in the valley beneath them,
and on the slopes of the river bank, the encampment of the French army;
and reported, upon their return, “that all the plain was covered with
men-at-arms.”
Upon the next morning, that of Sunday the 18th of September, broken
as the force was with fatigue, it was marshalled again for the
march—but no more than a mile or two was asked of it.
Edward had scouted forward upon the morning, and discovered, just in
front of the little town of Nouaillé and to the northward of the wood
that covers that little town, a position which, if it were necessary to
stand, would give him the opportunity for a defensive action.
That he intended any such action we may doubt in the light of what
followed. It was certainly not to his advantage to do so. The French by
occupying Poitiers had left his way to the south free, but the extreme
weariness of his force and the possibility that the French might strike
suddenly were both present in his mind. He wisely prepared for either
alternative of action or retreat, and carefully prepared the position
he had chosen. For its exact nature, I must refer my reader to the next
section, but the general conditions of the place are proper to the
interest of our present matter.
The main business, it must be remembered, upon which the Prince's
mind was concentrated was still his escape to the south. He must expect
the French advance upon him to come down by the shortest road to any
position he had prepared, even if he did not intend, or only half
intended, to stand there: and that position was therefore fixed
astraddle of the road which leads from Poitiers to Nouaillé.
Now, just behind—that is, to the south of—this position runs in a
tortuous course through a fairly sharp[2] little valley a stream called
the Miosson. It formed a sufficient obstacle to check pursuit for some
appreciable time. There was only one bridge across it, at Nouaillé
itself, which he could destroy when his army had passed; and the line
of it was strengthened by woods upon either side of the stream.
The Black Prince, therefore, must be judged (if we collate all the
evidence) to have looked forward to a general plan offering him two
alternatives.
Either the French would advance at once and press him. In which case
he would be compelled to take his chance of an action against what were
by this time far superior numbers; and in that case he had a good
prepared position, which will shortly be described, upon which to meet
them.
Or they would give him time to file away southward, in which case
the neighbouring Miosson, with its ravine and its woods, would
immediately, at the very beginning of the march, put an obstacle
between him and his pursuer; especially as he had two crossings, a
ford, and a bridge some way above it, and he could cut the bridge the
moment he had crossed it.
Finally, if (as was possible) a combination of these two
alternatives should present itself, he had but to depend upon his
prepared position for its rearguard to hold during just the time that
would permit the main force to make the passage of the Miosson, not two
miles away.
With this plan clearly developed he advanced upon the Sunday morning
no more than a mile or two to the position in question, fortified it
after the fashion which I shall later describe, and camped immediately
behind it to see what that Sunday might bring. He could not make off at
once, because his horses and his marching men were worn out with the
fatigue of the previous day's great march.