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PART PAGE

INTRODUCTION 9

" No. 2 " 32

" No. 3 " 49

" No. 4 " 61

POITIERS

INTRODUCTION

The Battle of Poitiers was fought ten years and four weeks after that of Cr?cy.

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.

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 right up to the neighbourhood of the Loire; and 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 , 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 Cr?cy 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 ability in the planning of an action or the grasp of a field, not cruel as yet , 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.

PART I

THE CAMPAIGN

But these parallel and typical actions, lying ten years apart, have, of course, one main point of resemblance more important than all the rest: each includes the complete overthrow of a large body of feudal cavalry by the trained forces of the Plantagenets; Cr?cy wholly, Poitiers partly, by the excellence of a missile weapon--the long-bow. Each shows also a striking disproportion of numbers: the little force on the defensive completely defeating the much larger body of the attack.

Those of my readers, therefore, who have made themselves acquainted with the details of Cr?cy must expect a repetition of much the same sort of incidents in the details of Poitiers. The two battles are twin, and stand out conspicuously in their sharpness of result from the mass of contemporary mediaeval warfare.

In this opening section I will describe the great ride of Edward the Black Prince from the Dordogne to the Loire, and show by what a march the raid proceeded to its unexpected crisis in the final battle.

I have said that the Black Prince's object was to draw the pressure from the English troops in the north.

As a fact, the effort was wasted for any such purpose. Lancaster, who commanded in the north, was already in retreat before the Black Prince had started, but that commander in the south could not, under the conditions of the time, learn the fact until he had set off. Further, the Black Prince hoped, by this diversion of a raid up from the south through the centre of France, to make it easier for King Edward, his father, to cross over and prosecute the war in Normandy. As a fact, the King of England never started upon that expedition, but his son thought he was about to do so, and said as much in a letter to the Mayor of London.

The point of departure which the Black Prince chose for this dash to the north was Bergerac upon the Dordogne, and the date upon which he broke camp was Thursday, the 4th August 1356.

Of the 7000 who marched with him, perhaps the greater part, and certainly half, were Gascon gentlemen from the south who were in sympathy with the English occupation of Aquitaine, or, having no sentiment one way or the other, joined in the expedition for the sake of wealth and of adventure. Of these were much the most of the men-at-arms. But the archers were for the most part English.

Raid though it was, the Black Prince's advance was not hurried. He proposed no more than to summon southward the French king by his efforts, and it was a matter of some indifference to him how far northward he might have proceeded before he would be compelled by the neighbourhood of the enemy's forces to return. His high proportion of mounted men and the lightness of his few foot-soldiers were for local mobility rather than for perpetual speed; nor did the Black Prince intend to make a race of it until the pursuit should begin. Whenever that might be, he felt secure in his power to outmarch any body the King of France might bring against him. He must further have thought that his chance of a rapid and successful retreat, and his power to outmarch any possible pursuers, would increase in proportion to the size of the force that might be sent after him.

The raid into the north began and was continued in a fashion not exactly leisurely, but methodically slow. It made at first through P?rigueux to Brant?me. Thence up through the country of the watershed to Bellac. It turned off north-westward as far as Lussac, and thence broke back, but a little north of east, to Argenton.

It will be evident from the trace of such a route that it had no definite strategic purpose. It was a mere raid: a harrying of the land with the object of relieving the pressure upon the north. It vaguely held, perhaps, a further object of impressing the towns of Aquitaine with the presence of a Plantagenet force. But this last feature we must not exaggerate. The Black Prince did not treat the towns he visited as territory ultimately to be governed by himself or his father. He treated them as objects for plunder.

The pace and method with which all this early part of the business was conducted in the first three weeks of August may be judged by the fact that, measured along the roads the Black Prince followed, he covered between Bergerac and Argenton just on a hundred and eighty miles, and he did it in just under eighteen marching days. In other words, he kept to a fairly regular ten miles a day, and slowly rolled up an increasing loot without fatiguing his horses or his men.

From Argenton, which he thus reached quite unweakened on the 21st of August, he made Ch?teauroux in two days, reaching it on the 23rd. Thence he turned still more to the eastward, and passed by Issoudun towards Bourges. This last excursion or "elbow" in the road was less strategically motiveless than most of the march; for the Prince had had news that some French force under the son of the French king was lying at Bourges, and to draw off such a force southward was part of the very vague plan which he was following. Unlike that string of open towns which the mounted band had sacked upon their way, Bourges was impregnable to them, for it was walled and properly defended. They turned back from it, therefore, down the River Yevre towards the Cher Valley again, and upon the 28th of August reached Vierzon, having marched in the five days from Ch?teauroux the regulation ten miles a day; for they covered fifty miles or a little more.

This point, Vierzon, is an important one to note in the march. The town lies just to the south of a curious district very little known to English travellers, or, for that matter, to the French themselves. It is a district called the "Sologne," that is, the "Solitarium" or "Desert." For a space of something like forty miles by sixty a great isolated area of wild, almost uncultivatable, land intervenes between the valley of the Cher and that of the Loire. Only one road of importance traverses it, that coming from Paris and Orleans, and making across the waste for Vierzon to the south. No town of any size is discoverable in this desolate region of stagnant pools, scrub, low forest, and hunters.

It was such a situation on the outer edge of the Sologne which made Vierzon the outpost of Aquitaine, and having reached Vierzon, the Prince, in so far as he was concerned with emphasising the Plantagenet claim over Aquitaine, had reached his northern term. But his raid had, as we know, another object: that of drawing the French forces southward. And, with the characteristic indecision of feudal strategic aims, it occurred to the Black Prince at this stage to immix with that object an alternative, and to see whether he could not get across the Loire to join Lancaster's force, which was campaigning in the West of France on the other side of that river.

At Vierzon Edward's men came across the first resistance. A handful of John's forces, irregulars hired by the French king under a leader most charmingly named "Grey Mutton," skirmished to their disadvantage against the Anglo-Gascon force.

The Black Prince made back westward after "Grey Mutton," thinking, perhaps, to cross the Loire at Blois, and two days out from Vierzon he made the only assault upon fortifications which he permitted his men in the whole campaign. This was an attack upon the Castle of Romorantin, in which "Grey Mutton" had taken refuge.

It was not the moment for delay. Edward knew that the French army must now be somewhere in the neighbourhood; he had already touched lance with one small French force; but he had his teeth into the business and would not let go his hold. The outworks were taken early in the affair. The keep held out for four days more, surrendering at last to fire upon the 3rd of September.

The season was now full late if the Black Prince intended a return to the south. But, as we have seen, he no longer entirely intended such a retreat. He had already begun to consider the alternative of crossing the Loire and joining his brother's force beyond it. He had information, however, that the bridges directly in front of him were cut. It is not easy to reconcile this with the passage immediately afterwards of the French army. But the most vivid, and perhaps the most accurate, account we have of this march not only tells us that the bridges were cut, but particularly alludes to the high water in the Loire at that moment. It is a significant piece of information, because no river in Europe north of the Pyrenees differs so much in its volume from day to day as does the Loire, which is sometimes a trickle of water in the midst of sandbanks, and at other times a great flood a quarter of a mile across, and twenty feet deep, like the Thames at London.

At any rate, from Romorantin, Prince Edward made for Tours, a distance of fifty miles as the crow flies, and a march of precisely five days. It will be observed that his plotted rate of marching at ten miles a day was most accurately maintained.

Now from his camp in front of Tours, Edward behaved in a fashion singular even for the unbusinesslike warfare of that somewhat theatrical generation. He sat down, apparently undecided which way to turn, and remained in that posture during the remainder of September the 8th, all the next day, September 9th, and all the next day again, the 10th. There could be no question of attacking Tours. It was a strong, large, and well-defended town, and quite beyond the power of the Black Prince's force, which was by this time encumbered with a very heavy train of waggons carrying his booty. But while he was waiting there , his enemy, with such forces as he had been able to collect, was marching down upon him.

The King of France had begun to get men together at Chartres upon the same day that his rival had reached Vierzon, the 28th of August. Five days later, just when Romorantin Castle was surrendering, he had broken up and was marching to the Loire. And upon the same 8th of September which saw the Black Prince pitch his tents under the walls of Tours, the first bodies of the French command were beginning to cross the Loire at the two upper points of Meung and Blois, while some of them were preparing to cross at Tours itself.

Yet so defective was Edward's information that it was not until Sunday, September 11th, that news reached him of King John's movements. He heard upon that day that the French king himself had crossed at Blois, thirty miles up river behind him. Edward at once broke camp and started on his retreat to the south. After him as he went followed the French host, which had combined its forces after its separate passages of the river.

John marched down the Loire straight on Tours. He reached Amboise, twenty miles off, in two days, coming under that town and castle upon Monday the 12th of September, twenty-four hours after the Black Prince had broken up his camp in front of Tours. As it was now useless to go on to Tours, John turned and marched due south, reaching Loches, another twenty miles away, not in two days but in one. It was a fine forced march; and if the Black Prince had appreciated the mobility of the foe, he would not have committed the blunder which will be described in the next section. He himself was marching well, but, encumbered as he was by his heavy baggage train, he covered on the 12th and 13th just less than thirty miles, and reached the town of La Haye des Cartes upon Tuesday the 13th, just as John, with his mixed force of Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, was marching into Loches, twenty miles away.

On the next day, Wednesday the 14th, John made yet another of those astonishing marches which merited a better fate than the disaster that was to conclude them, covered the twenty miles between Loches and La Haye, and entered the latter town just as the Black Prince was bringing his men into Ch?tellerault, only fifteen miles in front of him. Both the commanders, pursuing and pursued, had been getting remarkable work out of their men; for even the Black Prince, though the slower of the two, had covered forty-five miles in three days. But John in that determined advance after him had covered forty miles in two days.

With John's entry into La Haye des Cartes and Edward's leaving that town twenty-four hours ahead of him, we enter the curious bit of cross-marching and conflicting purposes which may properly be called "The Preliminaries" of the Battle of Poitiers, and it is under this title that I shall deal with them in the next section.

PART II

THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION

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 Ch?tellerault and Poitiers to Angoul?me, and so to Bordeaux. If 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 Ch?tellerault 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 ; 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 Ch?tellerault itself.

The main road from Ch?tellerault 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 , but somewhere half-way between Ch?tellerault 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 Mouli?re. 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.

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