Though the accounts of the Battle of Poitiers, both contemporary
with and subsequent to it, show, like most mediæval chronicling,
considerable discrepancies, it is possible by comparing the various
accounts and carefully studying the ground to present a collected
picture of that victory.
The reader, then, must first seize the position, character, and
numbers of Edward's force as it lay upon the early morning of Monday
the 19th of September.
Three considerable bodies of men arranged in dense formation, faced
west by a little north upon the level which intervenes between the
modern farm of Cardinerie and the wood of Nouaillé. These three bodies
of men stood armed, one rank behind the other, and all three parallel.
The first was commanded by Salisbury. It was drawn up along the hedge
that bounded the vineyards, and it stretched upon either side of the
lane which led and leads from Poitiers to Nouaillé. With Salisbury was
Suffolk; and this first line, thus facing the hedge, the depression,
and the fields beyond, from whence a French attack might develop, was
certainly the largest of the three lines. The reader must conceive of
the road astraddle of which this command of Salisbury's and Suffolk's
stood as lying flush with the fields around, until the edge of the
depression was reached, and there forming for some yards a sunken road
between the vines that stood on either side of it. The reader should
also remember that further to the left, and covered by the last
extension of this line of men, was the second diverging lane, crossing
through vineyards precisely as did the other, and sunk as the other was
sunk for some yards at the crest of the little depression. It is this
lane which now passes by the tile-works and leads later to the ford
over the river in the valley beyond. The line thus holding the hedge,
and commanded by Suffolk and Salisbury, contained the greater number of
the archers, and also a large proportion of men-at-arms, dismounted,
and ready to repel any French attack, should such an attack develop in
the course of the morning to interfere with the retirement which Edward
had planned; but as yet, in the neighbourhood of six o'clock, there was
no sign of the enemy in the empty fields upon the west beyond the
depression. The King of France's camp was more than two miles away, and
it looked as though Edward would be able to get his whole force beyond
the river without molestation.
So much for what we will call the first line, for the position of
which, as for that of its fellows, I must beg the reader to refer to
the coloured map forming the frontispiece of this book.
Immediately behind the first line so drawn up came a second line,
under the command of Warwick and Oxford, but it was a much smaller
body, because it had a very different task to perform. Its business was
to act as an escort for certain of the waggon-loads which Edward, both
on account of their value and of the difficulty of getting them up and
down the banks of the steep ravine of the river behind them, had
determined to send forward at the head of his retirement. This escort,
then, we may call the second line. Before the retiring movement began
it stood parallel to and immediately in the rear of the first line.
The third line was a somewhat larger command, principally of Gascon
men-at-arms under the direct leadership of the Black Prince himself.
To this picture of the three lines standing one behind the other and
facing away from the sunrise of that Monday morning, we must add a
great body of waggons, parked together, upon the right of the first
line and defending it from any turning movement that might be attempted
upon that flank, should a French advance develop after all. We must
suppose some few of the more valuable waggon-loads, carrying the best
booty of the raid, to have been put last in this park, so that their
drivers should have the opportunity of filing off first when the middle
or second line, which was to be their escort, began the retirement.
Further, we must remark teams harnessed and drivers mounted in front of
those special waggons, while the mass of the wheeled vehicles still lay
closely packed together for the purposes of defence against a possible
attack, their teams standing to the rear, ready to harness up only when
the retirement was in full swing, and to come last in the retreating
column, saving perhaps for a small rearguard that might be left to
watch the extremity of the line after everyone else had got safely off
the field. We must see the Black Prince's command, such of it as was
mounted, all on horseback already, and the men-at-arms of the second
line or escort under Warwick similarly in the saddle; but the first
line, which formed the bulk of the whole force, we must picture to
ourselves all on foot, the mounted men as well as the small proportion
of foot-sergeants: for if there should be occasion to repel some attack
developing during the retirement, it was in the essence of the
Plantagenet tactics to dismount the men-at-arms during the defensive,
and to hold a position entirely on foot.
I have said that no sign of the enemy appeared upon the empty fields
to the west beyond the depression while these dispositions were being
made; and, when all was ready, perhaps between seven and eight o'clock,
the order for the first movement of the retirement was given. Warwick
and the escort he commanded turned from line to column and began to
file off by the left, down towards the ford. The special waggons, whose
safety was thus being first anxiously provided for, followed, and the
whole of the second line thus got clear of the space between the first
and the third. It marched south towards the river, with its little body
of wheeled vehicles following up its mounted men.
When the second line had thus got clear of the original formation,
Edward, preceded by his banner and accompanied by a certain number of
men from the third line (how many we cannot tell, but presumably no
great force), rode off over the fields to the left of Warwick's string
of cavalry and waggons, to superintend the difficult passage of the
Miosson. He left behind him, standing to arms at the hedge, the whole
of the strong first line under Salisbury and Suffolk, and the bulk of
his own third line marshalled in parallel behind this first line.
At this moment, then, somewhere between seven and eight o'clock, the
situation is thus: the Prince and the band with him are riding off
towards the edge where the land falls somewhat steeply towards the
Miosson. He and his men have their backs turned to the bulk of the
army, which, in two bodies, the larger one lining the hedge and a
smaller one behind it, are holding the chosen defensive position in
case there should be any sign of a French pursuit. We must presume that
if no such pursuit appeared to be developing it was Edward's intention,
when he had got the special waggons and their escort safely across the
ford, to withdraw the bulk of his force thus left behind by the road
through Nouaillé and across its bridge. The smaller body would go
first; then, section by section, the first line would fall into column
and retire by the Nouaillé road, leaving at last no more than a small
rearguard at the hedge, which, when all the waggons of the park had
been harnessed up and were filing down the Nouaillé road, would itself
fall into column and bring up the extreme end of the retreat.
By this plan the valuable waggon-loads with their escort, which had
crossed at the ford under Warwick, would be joined in, say, an hour or
an hour and a half by the bulk of the army, which would have rejoined
by the Nouaillé road, and the junction would be effected at the spot
where, at the bottom of the frontispiece-map, the dotted line passing
the ford reaches the main road. Well before noon the whole command,
with its heavy and cumbersome train of wheeled vehicles, would be on
the heights there called Le Bouilleau and would be approaching in
safety, with the obstacle of the Miosson behind them, the great
south-western road to Bordeaux, along which the rest of the retreat
would take place.
This plan would have every advantage, always supposing that there
was no French pursuit, or that that pursuit should develop too late to
interfere with the Black Prince's scheme. The more valuable of the
booty would have been got clean away by a side track which was also a
short cut, and which would put it, when the whole retirement was
effected, ahead of the column, that is upon the safe side of the force,
furthest from an enemy's attack. It would have got away early without
suggesting to the enemy the line of its escape or the opportunity of
using the ford. The retirement of the mass of the army by the Nouaillé
road would lead the pursuit, if any, along that road and towards the
bridge, the cutting of which after the Anglo-Gascon force had passed
would leave that force with the obstacle of the river between it and
its enemy.
As it happened, a French pursuit did develop, and, luckily for the
Black Prince, it developed within a very few minutes of his setting off
to superintend Warwick's passage of the ford. Had it come an hour
later, when the mass of the force was in column of route and making for
Nouaillé, he might have had to record not a triumph but a disaster.
The French camp was, as I have said, rather more than two miles away
from the defensive position of Maupertuis. It lay on all that open land
which now forms the fields of La Miletrie farm and lies to the
south-west of that steading, between the great Lussac road and that
country road to Nouaillé along which the march of the French army had
proceeded, and across which, further along, the Black Prince's command
lay astraddle.
King John had no accurate knowledge of his enemy's dispositions. In
spite of the coming and going of the day before, he still knew no more
than the fact that somewhere two or three miles ahead down the road,
and between him and Nouaillé, the Black Prince's force was gathered. He
appears to have made no effort to grasp things in greater detail upon
that Monday morning, and when he marshalled his host and set out, it
was with the intention (which he pursued) of merely going forward until
he found the enemy, and then attacking. The host was arranged in four
bodies; three main “battles” or lines, comparable to the English three
lines—it was the universal formation of a mediæval army—were brought
up in column for the advance, to deploy when the field should be
reached. The first was commanded by the heir to the throne, the
Dauphin, Charles, Duke of Normandy; the second by the Duke of Orleans,
the king's brother; the third was commanded by the king himself, and
was the largest of the three.
The attempt to estimate the numbers which John could bring against
his enemy as he set out on that Monday morning is beset with
difficulties, but must nevertheless be made.
Froissart, with his quite unreliable and (let us be thankful)
romantic pen, speaks of over 40,000. That is nonsense. But it is not
without some value, because, like so many of Froissart's statements, it
mirrors the tradition of the conflict which future years developed. If
we had no other figures than Froissart's we should not accept them, but
we should accept, and rightly, an impression of great superiority in
numbers on the part of the attack.
On the other hand, we have the evidence of a man who wrote from the
field itself, and who wrote from the English side—Burghersh. If
anything, he would exaggerate, of course; but he was a soldier (and
Froissart was at the other psychological pole!). He actually wrote from
the spot, and he thought that everything mounted in front of him came
to about 8000, to which he added 3000 men upon foot. Now, Burghersh may
have been, and probably was, concerned to mention no more than what he
regarded as fighting units worth mentioning: infantry more or less
trained and properly accoutred men-at-arms. For these latter, and their
number of 8000, we have plenty of independent testimony, and especially
Baker's. Baker gives the same number. As regards the trained infantry,
we know that John had 2000 men armed with the arbalest (a mechanical
cross-bow worked with a ratchet), and we know that he also had, besides
these cross-bowmen, a number of trained mercenaries armed with
javelins.
We may set inferior and exterior limits to the numbers somewhat as
follows: the French host included 8000 fully-armed mounted men; that
is, not quite double the Gascon and English units of the same rank and
equipment. It had somewhat less than the English contingent of
missile-armed soldiers, and these armed with a weapon inferior to their
opponents. Count these two factors at 10,000 against the Anglo-Gascon
7000 or 8000. There you have an inferior limit which was certainly
exceeded, for John's command included a number of other rougher mounted
levies and other less trained or untrained infantry. Above that minimum
we may add anything we like up to 10,000 for the untrained, and we get
a superior limit for the total of 20,000 men all told. Averaging the
probabilities from the various accounts, we are fairly safe in setting
this addition at 5000, and perhaps a little over. So that the whole
force which John could have brought into the field, and which, had it
been properly led and organised, he might have used to full effect in
that field, was about double the numbers which the Black Prince could
oppose to him. The Anglo-Gascons, standing on the defensive, had from
7000 to 8000 men, and the force marching against them on the offensive
was presumably in the neighbourhood of 15,000 to 16,000; while an
analysis of the armament gives you, in the capital factors of it, an
inferior number of French missile weapons to the missile weapons of the
English prince, but double the number of fully-armed knights.
As a fact, the organisation of the two sides offered a more striking
contrast than the contrast in their numbers. The Plantagenet force
worked together and was one well-handled command. The Valois force was
in separate commands, so little cohesive that one of them, as we shall
see, abandoned the struggle without orders. For the other causes of the
defeat I must ask the reader to wait until we come to the actual
engagement.
To the three “battles” thus marshalled and advancing along the road,
John added a special vanguard, the constitution of which must be
carefully noted. It was sent forward under the two marshals, Audrehen
and Clermont. They commanded: first, 300 fully-armoured and
mounted men-at-arms, who rode at the head; next, and following
immediately behind these, certain German auxiliaries, also mounted, in
what precise numbers we do not know, but few; thirdly, 2000
spearmen on foot, and with them the whole 2000 cross-bowmen using the
only missile weapons at John's disposal.
It will be seen that something like a third of John's whole force,
and nearly half the trained part, was thus detached to form the
vanguard in front of the three marching columns. Its function and
mishap we shall gather when we come to the contact between them and
Edward's force. Meanwhile, we must conceive of the French army as
breaking camp some time between six and seven o'clock of the Monday,
forming in three columns upon the Nouaillé road, with the king
commanding the largest rear column, his brother, the Duke of Orleans,
the column immediately in front, and the King's son and heir, the Duke
of Normandy, in front of Orleans; while ahead of all these three
columns marched the 4000 or 5000 men of the vanguard under the
marshals, with their 300 picked knights leading the whole.
It must have been at about eight o'clock that the men thus riding
with the marshals in front of the French advance came up the slight
slope near La Moudurerie, topped the hill, and saw, six or seven
hundred yards in front of them, beyond the little depression, the
vineyards and the hedge behind the vineyards, and behind that hedge
again the massed first line of the Black Prince's force. Off in the
rear to the right they could see the Black Prince's banner, making away
down towards the river, and soon dropping out of sight behind the
shoulder of the hill. The special waggons of booty, with Warwick and
their escort, must already have disappeared when the French thus had
their first glimpse of the enemy.
The sight of the Black Prince's banner disappearing down into the
valley on the right rear, rightly decided the French vanguard that
their enemy had determined upon a retreat, and had actually begun it.
The force in front of them, behind the hedge, large as it was, they
rightly conceived to be the rearguard left to protect that retreat.
They determined to attack at once; and the nature of the attack, which
had carefully been planned beforehand under the advice of Douglas, the
Scotchman who was fighting on King John's side, and who had experience
of the new Plantagenet tactics, must next be grasped.
The experience and the memory of Crécy ten years before had left
with the Valois a clear though very general idea that the novel and
overwhelming superiority of the English long-bow could not be met by
the old-fashioned dense feudal cavalry charge. Any attempt to attack
the front of a line sufficiently defended by long-bowmen in this
fashion meant disaster, many horses would be shot long before their
riders could come within lance thrust, the dense packed line of feudal
knights, thousands in number, would be thrown into confusion by the
maddened and fallen animals, the weight of the remainder as they
pressed forward would only add to that confusion, and the first
“battle,” delivering the regular traditional first-charge with which
every old feudal battle had opened, would in a few minutes degenerate
into a wild obstacle of welter and carnage stretched in front of the
defensive line, and preventing anything behind them from coming up.
It was to avoid misfortune of this kind that the vanguard of which I
have spoken was formed. Its orders were these:—The picked three
hundred knights of that vanguard were to ride straight at the English
archers, and almost certainly to sacrifice themselves in so doing. But
as their numbers were few, their fall would not obstruct what was to
follow. It was their business in this immolation of their bodies to
make it possible for the mass of infantry, especially those armed with
missile weapons, to come close in behind and tackle the English line.
That infantry, aided by the mounted German mercenaries and meeting
missile with missile by getting hand to hand with the English bowmen at
last, would prevent those English bowmen from effective action against
the next phase of the offensive. This next phase was to be the advance
of the first “battle,” that of the Dauphin, the Duke of Normandy. His
men-at-arms were to go forward dismounted, and to close with the whole
English line while its most dangerous portion, the bowmen, were still
hampered by the close pressure of the vanguard.
The plan thus ordered by the French king at the advice of his Scotch
lieutenant was not so incompetent as the results have led some
historians to judge. It suffered from four misconceptions; but of these
one was not the fault of the French commander, while the other three
could only have been avoided by a thorough knowledge of the new
Plantagenet tactics, which had not yet been grasped in the entirety of
their consequences even by those who had invented them.
The four misconceptions were:—
(1) The idea that the attack would only have to meet the force
immediately in front of it, behind the hedge. This was a capital error,
for, as we shall see, Warwick with his men escorting the waggons came
back in time to take a decisive part in the first phase of the action.
But it was not an error which anyone on the French side could have
foreseen; Warwick's men having disappeared down the slope of the hill
towards the ford before the French vanguard caught its first sight of
the enemy.
(2) The underrating of the obstacle afforded by the vineyard in
front of the English line, and the consequent “bunching” of the attack
on to the lane which traversed that vineyard. Probably the archers
themselves did not know what an extraordinarily lucky accidental
defence the vineyard provided for their special weapon. It was exactly
suited to giving them the maximum effect of arrow-fire compatible with
the maximum hindrance to an advancing enemy.
(3) The French king and his advisers had not yet grasped—nor did
anyone in Europe for some time to come—the remarkable superiority of
the long-bow over the cross-bow. Just so modern Europe, and
particularly modern Prussia, with all its minute observation and
record, failed for ten good years to understand that rate of delivery
and not range is what turns the scale with modern artillery. The
cross-bow shot an uglier missile, inflicted a nastier wound, was more
feared by the man in danger of that wound than the long-bow was. In
range the two weapons might be regarded as nearly equal, save for this
deciding difference, that the trained long-bowman could always count
upon his maximum range, whereas the cross-bow varied, as a machine
always will, with conditions independent of the human will behind it.
You could not extend its pull to suit a damp string, for instance, and
if your ratchet caught, or your trigger jammed, the complicated thing
held you up; but delivery from the long-bow was, from the hands of the
strong and trained man, the simplest and most calculable of shots,
variable to every condition of the moment. Its elasticity of aim was
far superior, and, most important of all, its rate of fire was
something like three to one of the arbalest.
(4) Douglas and the French king rightly decided that horses were so
vulnerable to the long-bow as to prevent a mounted charge from having a
chance of success, if it were undertaken in a great mass. They decided,
upon that account, to dismount their men-at-arms, and to attack on
foot. But what they did not allow for was the effect of the new armour
upon foot tactics of that kind. It was one thing for a line holding the
defensive, and not compelled to any forward movement, to dismount its
armoured knights and bid them await an attack. It was quite another
thing for such armoured knights to have to make a forward movement of
half a mile or more on foot, and to engage with the sword or the
shortened lance at the end of it. Armour was at that moment in
transition. To the old suit of chain mail, itself quite ponderous
enough to burden a man on foot, there had been added in that generation
plate in various forms. Everyone had plate armour at least upon the
elbows, knees, and shoulders, many had it upon all the front of the
legs and all the front of the arms, some had adopted it as a complete
covering; and to go on foot thus loaded over open fields for the matter
of eight hundred yards was to be exhausted before contact came. But of
this men could not judge so early in the development of the new
tactics. They saw that if they were to attack the bowmen successfully
they must do so on foot, and they had not appreciated how ill-suited
the armoured man of the time was for an unmounted offensive, however
well he might serve in a defensive “wall.”
These four misconceptions between them determined all that was to
follow.
* * * * *
It was a little before nine when the vanguard of the Valois advanced
across the depression and began to approach the slight slope up towards
the vineyards and the hedge beyond. In that vineyard, upon either side
of the hollow road, stood, in the same “harrow” formation as at Crécy,
the English long-bowmen.
The picked three hundred knights under the two French marshals
spurred and charged. Small as their number was, it was crowded for the
road into which the stakes of the vineyard inevitably shepherded them
as they galloped forward, and, struggling to press on in that sunken
way, either side of their little column was exposed to the first
violent discharge of arrows from the vines. They were nearly all shot
down, but that little force, whose task it had been, after all, to
sacrifice their lives in making a way for their fellows, had permitted
the rest of the vanguard to come to close quarters. The entanglement of
the vineyard, the unexpected and overwhelming superiority of the
long-bow over the cross-bow, the superior numbers of the English
archers over their enemies' arbalests, made the attack a slow one, but
it was pressed home. The trained infantry of the vanguard, the German
mounted mercenaries, swarmed up the little slope. The front of them was
already at the hedge, and was engaged in a furious hand to hand with
the line defending it, the mass of the remainder were advancing up the
rise, when a new turn was given to the affair by the unexpected arrival
of Warwick.
The waggons which that commander had been escorting had been got
safely across the Miosson; the Black Prince had overlooked their safe
crossing, when there came news from the plateau above that the French
had appeared, and that the main force which the Black Prince had left
behind him was engaged. Edward rode back at once, and joined his own
particular line, which we saw just before the battle to be drawn up
immediately behind the first line which guarded the hedge and the
vineyard. Warwick, with excellent promptitude, did not make for
Salisbury and Suffolk to reinforce their struggling thousands with his
men, but took the shorter and more useful course of moving by his own
left to the southern extremity of his comrade's fiercely pressed line
(see frontispiece near the word “Hedge”; the curved red arrow lines
indicate the return of Warwick).
He came out over the edge of the hill, just before the mass of the
French vanguard had got home, and when only the front of it had reached
the hedge and was beginning the hand-to-hand struggle. He put such
archers as he had had with his escort somewhat in front of the line of
the hedge, and with their fire unexpectedly and immediately enfiladed
all that mass of the French infantry, which expected no danger from
such a quarter, and was pressing forward through the vineyards to the
summit of the little rise. This sharp and unlooked for flank fire
turned the scale. The whole French vanguard was thrown into confusion,
and broke down the side of the depression and up its opposing slope. As
it so broke it interfered with and in part confused the first of the
great French “battles,” that under the Dauphin, whose ordered task it
was to follow up the vanguard and reinforce its pressure upon the
English line. Though the vanguard had been broken, the Dauphin's big,
unwieldy body of dismounted armoured men managed to go forward through
the shaken and flying infantry, and in their turn to attack the hedge
and the vineyard before it. Against them, the flank fire from Warwick
could do less than it had done against the unarmoured cross-bowmen and
sergeants of the vanguard which it had just routed. The Dauphin's
cumbered and mailed knights did manage to reach the main English
position of the hedge, but they were not numerous enough for the effort
then demanded of them. The half mile of advance under such a weight of
iron had terribly exhausted them, and meanwhile Edward had come back,
the full weight of his command—every man of it except a reserve of
four hundred—was massed to meet the Dauphin's attack. Warwick's men
hurried up from the left to help in the sword play, and by the time the
mêlée was engaged that line of hedge saw the unusual struggle of a
defensive superior in numbers against an inferior offensive which
should, by all military rule, have refused to attempt the assault.
Nevertheless, that assault was pressed with astonishing vigour, and
it was that passage in the action, before and after the hour of ten
o'clock, which was the hottest of all. Regarded as an isolated episode
in the fight, the Dauphin's unequal struggle was one of the finest
feats of arms in all the Hundred Years' War. Nothing but a miracle
could have made it succeed, nor did it succeed; after a slaughter in
which the English defending line had itself suffered heavily and the
Dauphin's attack had been virtually cut to pieces, there followed a
third phase in the battle which quite cancelled not only the advantage
(for that was slight) but also the glory gained by the Dauphin's great
effort.
Next behind the Dauphin's line, the second “battle,” that of the
Duke of Orleans, should have proceeded to press on in reinforcement and
to have launched yet another wave of men against the hedge which had
been with such difficulty held. Had it done so, the battle would have
been decided against Edward. The Dauphin's force, though it was now
broken and the remnants of it were scattering back across the
depression, had hit the Anglo-Gascon corps very hard indeed. Edward had
lost heavily, his missile weapon was hampered and for the moment
useless, many of his men were occupied in an attempt to save the
wounded, or in seeking fresh arms from the train to replace those which
had been broken or lost in the struggle. What seems to have struck most
those who were present at the action upon the English side was the
exhaustion from which their men were suffering just after the Dauphin's
unsuccessful attempt to pierce the line. If Orleans had come up then,
he could have determined the day. But Orleans failed to come into
action at all, and the whole of his “battle,” the second, was thrown
away.
What exactly happened it is exceedingly difficult to infer from the
short and confused accounts that have reached us. It is certain that
the whole of Orleans' command left the field without actually coming
into contact with the enemy. The incident left a profound impression
upon the legend and traditions of the French masses, and was a basis of
that angry contempt which so violently swelled the coming revolt of the
populace against the declining claims of the feudal nobility. It may
almost be said that the French monarchy would not have conquered that
nobility with the aid of the French peasantry and townsmen had not the
knights of the second “battle” fled from the field of Poitiers.
What seems to have happened was this. The remnant of the Dauphin's
force, falling back in confusion down the slight slope, mixed into and
disarrayed the advancing “battle” of Orleans. These, again, were
apparently not all of them, nor most of them, dismounted as they should
have been, and, in any case, their horses were near at hand. The ebb
tide of the Dauphin's retirement may have destroyed the loose
organisation and discipline of that feudal force, must have stampeded
some horses, probably left dismounted knights in peril of losing their
chargers, and filled them with the first instinct of the feudal
soldier, which was to mount. We may well believe that to all this
scrimmage of men backing from a broken attack, men mounting in defiance
of the unfamiliar and unpopular orders which had put them on foot, here
riderless horses breaking through the ranks, there knots of men
stampeded, the whole body was borne back, first in confusion,
afterwards in flight. So slight are the inequalities of the ground,
that anyone watching from the midst of that crest could have made
nothing of the battle to the eastward, save that it was a surging mass
of the French king's men defeated, and followed (it might erroneously
have been thought) by the Black Prince and his victorious men.
At any rate, the whole of the second “battle,” mixed with the debris
of the first, broke from the field and rode off, scattered to the
north. It is upon Orleans himself that the chief blame must fall.
Whatever error, confusion, stampede, or even panic had destroyed the
ordering of his line, it was his business to rally his men and bring
them back. Whether from personal cowardice, from inaptitude for
command, or from political calculation, Orleans failed in his duty, and
his failure determined the action.
The pause which necessarily followed the withdrawal of the central
French force, or second “battle,” under Orleans gave Edward's army the
breathing space they needed. It further meant, counting the destruction
of the vanguard and the cutting to pieces of the Dauphin's “battle,”
the permanent inferiority through the rest of the day of anything that
the French king could bring against the Plantagenets. The battle was
lost from that moment, between ten and eleven o'clock, when Orleans'
confused column, pouring, jostled off the field, left the great gap
open between King John and the lead of his third battle and the English
force.
Had strict military rule commanded the feudal spirit (which it never
did), John would have accepted defeat. To have ridden off with what was
still intact of his force, to wit, his own command, the third “battle,”
would have been personally shameful to him as a knight, but politically
far less disastrous than the consequences of the chivalrous resolve he
now made. He had left, to make one supreme effort, perhaps five,
perhaps six thousand men. Archers wherewith to meet the enemy's archers
he had none. What number of fully-armoured men-at-arms he had with him
we cannot tell, but, at any rate, enough in his judgment to make the
attempt upon which he had decided. The rest of the large force that was
with him was of less considerable military value; but, on the other
hand, he could calculate not unjustly upon the fact that all his men
were fresh, and that he was leading them against a body that had
struggled for two hours against two fierce assaults, and one that has
but just emerged—unbroken, it is true—from a particularly severe
hand-to-hand fight.
John, then, determined to advance and, if possible, with this last
reserve to carry the position. It was dismounted, as he had ordered and
wished all his men-at-arms to be, and the King of France led this last
body of knights eastward across the little dip of land. As that large,
fresh body of mailed men approached the edge of the depression on its
further side, there were those in the Black Prince's force who began to
doubt the issue. A picturesque story remains to us of Edward's
overhearing a despairing phrase, and casting at its author the retort
that he had lied damnably if he so blasphemed as to say the Black
Prince could be conquered alive.
I have mentioned some pages back that reserve of four hundred
fully-equipped men-at-arms which Edward had detached from his own body
and had set about four hundred yards off, surrounding his standard. The
exact spot where this reserve took up its position is marked to-day by
the railway station. It overlooks (if anything can be said to
“overlook” in that flat stretch) the field. It is some twelve or
fifteen feet higher than the hedge at which, a couple of furlongs away,
the long defence had held its own throughout that morning. The Black
Prince recalled them to the main body. Having done so, he formed into
one closely ordered force all the now mixed men of the three lines who
were still able to go forward. John was coming on with his armoured
knights on foot, their horses almost a mile away (he was bringing those
men, embarrassed and weighted by their metal under the growing heat of
the day, nearly double the distance which his son's men had found too
much for them). Edward bade his men-at-arms mount, and his archers
mounted too. It will be remembered that six men out of seven were
mounted originally for the raid through Aquitaine. The fighting on foot
had spared the horses. They were all available. And the teams and
sumpter animals were available as well in so far as he had need of
them. John's men, just coming up on foot to the opposite edge of the
little dip, saw the low foot line of the Anglo-Gascons turning at a
word of command into a high mounted line. But before that mounted line
moved forward, Edward had a last command to give. He called for the
Captal of Buch, a Gascon captain not to be despised.
This man had done many things in the six weeks' course of the raid.
He was a cavalry leader, great not only with his own talent, but with
the political cause which he served, for of those lords under the
Pyrenees he was the most resolute for the Plantagenets and against the
Valois. The order Edward gave him was this: to take a little force all
mounted, to make a long circuit, skirting round to the north and hiding
its progress behind the spinneys and scrub-wood until he should get to
the rear of the last French reserve that was coming forward, and when
he had completed the circuit, to display his banner and come down upon
them unexpectedly from behind. It was an exceedingly small detachment
which was picked out for this service, not two hundred men all told.
Rather more than half of them archers, the rest of them fully-equipped
men-at-arms. Small as was this tiny contingent which the Black Prince
could barely spare, it proved in the event sufficient.
That order given, the Black Prince summoned his standard-bearer—an
Englishman whose name should be remembered, Woodland—set him, with the
great banner which the French had seen three hours before disappearing
into the river valley when Edward had been off watching the passage of
the ford, at the head of the massed mounted force, and ordered the
charge. The six thousand horse galloped against the dismounted armoured
men of John down the little slope. The shock between these riders and
those foot-men came in the hollow of the depression. The foot-men stood
the charge. In the first few minutes gaps were torn into and through
the French body by a discharge of the last arrows, and then came the
furious encounter with dagger and sword which ended the Battle of
Poitiers. It was the mounted men that had the better of the whole. The
struggle was very fierce and very bewildered, a mass of hand-to-hand
fighting in individual groups that swayed, as yet undetermined,
backwards and forwards in the hollow. But those who struck from
horseback had still the better of the blows, until, when this violence
had continued, not yet determined, for perhaps half an hour, the less
ordered and less armoured men who were the confused rearmost of John's
corps heard a shout behind them, and looking back saw, bearing down
upon them, the banner of St George, which was borne before the Captal,
and his archers and his men-at-arms charging with the lance. Small as
was the force of that charge, it came unexpectedly from the rear, and
produced that impression of outflanking and surrounding which most
demoralises fighting men. The rear ranks who pressed just behind the
place where the heaviest of the struggle was proceeding, and where
John's knights on foot were attempting to hold their own against the
mounted Gascons and English, broke away. The Captal's charge drove
home, and the remnant of the French force, with the king himself in the
midst of it, found themselves fighting against a ring which pressed
them from all sides.
King John had with him his little son Philip, a boy of fourteen,
later most properly to be called “The Bold.” And this lad fought side
by side with his father, calling to the king: “Father, guard to the
right! Father, guard to the left!” as the lance-thrusts and the
sword-strokes pressed them. The lessening and lessening group of French
lords that could still hold their own in the contracting circle was
doomed, and the battle was accomplished.
Scattering across those fields to the west and northward bodies of
the Plantagenet's men galloped, riding down the fugitives, killing, or
capturing for ransom, the wounded. And Edward, his work now done, rode
back to the old position, rested, sent messengers out to recall the
pursuers (some of whom had pressed stragglers for four miles), and
watched his men gathering and returning.
He saw advancing towards him a clamorous crowd, all in a hubbub
around some centre of great interest for them, and slowly making
eastward to where the banner of the Black Prince was now fixed. He sent
to ask what this might be, and was told that it was the King of France
who had been taken prisoner at last, and for whom various captors were
disputing. John, pressed by so many rivals, had given up his sword to
one of Edward's knights. That knight was a man from the Artois, who had
said to the Valois, his lawful king, “Sir, I am serving against you,
for I have lost my land, and, owing no allegiance, therefore, I became
the man of the King of England.”
Edward received his great captive, and that was the end of the
Battle of Poitiers.
It was noon when the fight was decided. It was mid-afternoon when
the last of the pursuers had been called back into the English camp.