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
Crécy; 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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Footnotes:
[1] Le Breuil Mingot, not Le Breuil l'Abbesse, which lies south upon
the Chauvigny road.
[2] The tops of the steep banks are nearly a hundred feet above the
water.
[3] There are to-day three bridges, but in the fourteenth century
only one existed, the central one.
[4] “Facing north-east,” Fortescue, History of the British Army, vol. i. p. 39. I mention this considerable error for the purposes of
correction: Mr Fortescue's history being rightly regarded as the
standard text-book of English military history.
[5] “Some fifteen miles,” Fortescue, ibid. “Seven miles,”
Oman, History of Art of War, etc. Always use a map when you
write about battles.
[6] “South-west,” Fortescue, ibid., p. 38.
[7] It may be presumed upon the analogy of surrounding
vineyards—though it is not certain—that the cultivation of the vine
would cease on the lower slope (since that inclined away from the sun),
and was thickest upon the summit of the ridge.