1356

by Bernard Cornwell

  of that will make his uncle happy.’ He laughed at Thomas’s expression. No one was attacking the Scotsman because any Englishman or Gascon assumed a horseman who was not fleeing northwards must be on their side even if, like Sculley, he did not wear a red cross of Saint George. Now Sculley curbed his stolen horse. ‘Would you rather just surrender to me?’ he asked, then suddenly rowelled his spurs so that the destrier charged straight at Thomas, who, taken by surprise, could only thrust his poleaxe at the Scotsman, who easily avoided the clumsy blow and swept the ancient blade hard at Thomas’s neck, trying to take his head as he had taken Robbie’s.

  Thomas jerked the axe back and upwards and somehow managed to parry the blow. The two weapons met with violent force and Thomas thought the old sword must break, but la Malice was still in one piece and Sculley backswung it with malevolent speed. Thomas ducked. La Malice’s blade hit his bascinet and scraped across the crown, and Thomas instinctively wrenched his horse to the left and saw the sword coming back, snake-fast, in a cut aimed at his face. He somehow leaned out of the way, aware of the broad tip of the sword flashing perilously close. He tried to lunge the poleaxe’s spiked tip at the Scotsman, but Sculley just parried the heavy blade and struck again, this time slamming la Malice hard down, and the blade clashed onto Thomas’s helmet so fiercely that he was half stunned, his ears ringing, but the bascinet’s steel resisted the blade even though he was slumping in the saddle, grunting, trying to gather his wits and make room to swing his poleaxe.

  ‘Christ’s bowels, but you’re feeble,’ Sculley taunted. He grinned, prodded Thomas with the sword and laughed when Thomas swayed in the saddle. ‘Time to say hello to the devil, Englishman,’ Sculley said, and drew la Malice back for the killing blow, and Thomas dropped the axe, kicked his left foot free of the stirrup and lunged at the Scotsman. He threw his arms around Sculley’s chest and held on, gripping him, tearing Sculley out of the saddle so that they both thumped onto the ground, and Thomas was on top. He used his archer’s strength to punch Sculley in the face, his iron-clad gauntlet shattering a cheekbone and nose. He hit him again, and Sculley tried to bite him and Thomas drove his gauntlet down again, but this time with out-thrust rigid fingers that drove into Sculley’s left eyeball. The Scotsman gave a gurgling scream as the eye collapsed, then Thomas headbutted him with his helmet, and rolled off. He seized Sculley’s right arm and wrenched the sword free. ‘Bastard,’ he said, and he held the sword in both hands, left hand on the hilt, right on the backblade, and he drove the fore-edge into Sculley’s throat and sawed it hard so that he cut through gullet and blood vessels and sinew and muscle and Sculley still gurgled and blood jetted onto Thomas’s face and he went on pushing as the blood pulsed warm and the pulses slowly slackened and still Thomas sawed and pushed until the old blade met bone.

  And Sculley was dead.

  ‘Jesus,’ Thomas said, ‘sweet Jesus.’ He was on his knees, shaking. He stared at the sword. A miracle? He saw that someone had made a new wooden hilt for the ancient blade, and that hilt was slick with blood.

  He stood. Robbie’s horse was beside him and, in a spasm of anger, he cut the hair that held Robbie’s head. It thumped on the ground. He would have to find the rest of his old friend and dig a grave, but before he could think how he might do that he saw Roland de Verrec standing helpless in front of a fat man in armour. The fat man had a green and white jupon and, as Thomas watched, he drew his sword and held it towards Roland. It was the Count of Labrouillade. There was shit dribbling down the back of his armoured legs. ‘I am your prisoner!’ he announced loudly.

  Thomas walked towards the two men. Sam and a half-dozen archers had seen Thomas and they now rode towards him, bringing Thomas’s horse with them.

  ‘He surrendered,’ Roland called to Thomas.

  Thomas said nothing. Kept walking.

  ‘I have yielded,’ the count said loudly, ‘and will pay a ransom.’

  ‘Kill the fat bastard!’ Sam called.

  ‘No!’ Roland de Verrec held up his hand. ‘You cannot kill him. That is dishonourable.’ He stumbled over the English word.

  ‘Dishonourable?’ Sam asked, incredulous.

  ‘Sir Thomas,’ Roland looked desperately unhappy, ‘a man who has surrendered is safe, is he not?’

  Thomas ignored Roland, seemed not even to see him. He still said nothing. He walked up to the count, who was holding his sword out in surrender.

  ‘Chivalry dictates that he must be kept alive,’ Roland said. ‘Is that not so, Sir Thomas?’

  Thomas had not even looked at Roland. He just gazed at the count and then, almost as fast as Sculley, he backswung la Malice so that the blade chopped into the count’s neck. The sword sliced beneath the helmet’s rim, cutting through the aventail to bite deep into the fat neck, and Thomas sawed it back, thrust it forward with an archer’s strength and was hit by even more blood as the Count of Labrouillade sank to his knees, and Thomas gouged the blade deeper and deeper until the life went from Labrouillade’s eyes and he fell hard onto the grass.

  ‘Sir Thomas!’ Roland said in outrage.

  Thomas turned wide-eyed on Roland. ‘Did you say something?’

  ‘He had surrendered!’ Roland protested.

  ‘I’m deaf,’ Thomas said. ‘I was hit on the head and I can’t hear a thing. What are you telling me?’

  ‘He had surrendered!’

  ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying,’ Thomas said. He turned away and winked at Sam.

  Fifty yards away men were fighting around the King of France. His standard had fallen, the standard bearer was dead, and his son was trying to help his father. ‘Look left, Father! To the right! Watch out!’ The king was fighting with an axe, though no one was trying to kill him, just to capture him. The decoys who had worn his colours were dead or had fled, but everyone knew this was the real king because his helmet was surmounted by a golden crown, and men wanted to take him alive because his ransom would be unimaginably huge. Men grabbed at the king, fought each other to get close to him, and the king shouted that he could make them all rich, but then two horsemen forced their great destriers into the crowd and bellowed at all the men to step back on pain of death.

  The Earl of Warwick and Sir Reginald Cobham confronted King Jean and Prince Philippe. Both men dismounted and both men bowed low. ‘Your Majesty,’ the earl said.

  ‘I am a prisoner,’ the King of France said.

  ‘Alas, Your Highness,’ Sir Reginald said, ‘it is the fate of battle.’

  The king was taken.

  One of the archers played pipes made from oat straw, the tune wistful and thin. A campfire burned, throwing twisting red light onto the branches of the oaks. A man sang; other men laughed.

  The King of France was being feasted by the Prince of Wales, while on the flat hilltop where the battle had ended the birds and beasts gorged themselves on the dead. The dead went all the way to the gates of Poitiers because the English and Gascons had pursued the enemy that far, and the citizens of Poitiers, fearing an English invasion, had refused to open their gates and so the fugitives had been trapped under the walls and there the last of them had died. The old Roman road that ran to the city was littered with the dead, but now the living sat around fires and ate food they had plundered from the enemy’s abandoned camp.

  Thomas had joined the pursuit, riding with Sam and a dozen other archers. Those archers would all become rich on their plunder, but Thomas had not ridden to find jewels or plate armour or an expensive horse.

  ‘You found him?’ Genevieve asked. She sat beside him, her head on his shoulder, and Hugh leaned against her.

  ‘I found them both.’

  ‘Tell me again,’ she said, like a child wanting to hear a familiar and comforting story.

  So Thomas told her how he had caught up with Cardinal Bessières and how the cardinal’s men-at-arms had tried to protect their master, and how Sam and the archers had beaten them down, and Thomas had confronted Father Marchant, who had loudly declared that he
was a priest and not a combatant, and Thomas had used la Malice to disembowel him so that his guts slid out from his robe and spilt onto the saddle and then down to the ground, and Thomas had laughed at him. ‘That’s payment for my wife’s eye, you bastard.’ He had been tempted to let the priest die in agony, but then killed him with another swing of la Malice.

  Cardinal Bessières had been begging for mercy.

  ‘You are a combatant,’ Thomas had said.

  ‘No! I am a cardinal! I will pay you!’

  ‘I see no red hat,’ Thomas said, ‘only a helmet,’ and the cardinal had tried to pull the bascinet off his head, then screamed as he saw la Malice coming, and the scream only stopped when Saint Peter’s blade had ripped open his throat. Only then had Thomas turned back towards the battlefield where the dead now lay beneath the stars.

  Roland was with his Bertille. ‘I should have shouted at you,’ he told Thomas, ‘I didn’t realise you had been deafened.’

  ‘It was a terrible mistake,’ Thomas lied gravely, ‘and I apologise.’

  ‘It was not dishonourable,’ Roland said, ‘because you were not to know he had surrendered. He was still holding a sword, and you were deafened.’

  ‘It was God’s will,’ Bertille said. She looked radiant.

  Roland nodded. ‘It was God’s will,’ he agreed, then, after a pause. ‘And la Malice?’

  ‘She’s gone,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where she cannot be found,’ Thomas said.

  He had taken la Malice to the largest gap in the hedge where men were piling weapons discarded on the battlefield. The good weapons were put into one pile, the cheap and worthless weapons onto another. There were broken swords, shattered crossbows, an axe with a bent blade, and a score of rusted falchions. ‘What happens to them?’ Thomas had asked a man wearing the Prince of Wales’s three-feathered badge.

  ‘Melted down, like as not. That looks like a piece of shit.’

  ‘It is,’ Thomas had said, and he had tossed the Sword of the Fisherman onto the pile of worthless junk. It looked no different to all the other cheap falchions. A shattered spear had landed on top of it, then a broken sword had clattered onto the heap. When he had looked back Thomas could not even tell which sword was the relic and which was not. It would be put into the fire, melted, and then reforged. Perhaps a ploughshare?

  ‘Now we go home,’ he said. ‘Castillon first, then back to England.’

  ‘Home,’ Genevieve said happily.

  The Sword of Saint Peter had come. It had gone. It was over. It was time to go home.

  Historical Note

  Edward, Prince of Wales, eldest son of King Edward III, is best known as the Black Prince, though that name was not coined until long after his death. No one is quite sure why he was to be called the Black Prince, but even in France he was remembered as le Prince Noir, and I have come across references as late as the nineteenth century to French mothers threatening their disobedient children with a ghostly visit from this long-dead enemy. Some say the name arose from the colour of his armour, but there is little evidence to support that explanation, nor does it seem to be a reference to his character, which, so far as we can tell from the little information that remains, was anything but dark. He was generous, probably headstrong, probably romantic (he made an impractical marriage to the beautiful Joan, Maid of Kent), loyal to his father, but otherwise little is known of his personality. He is most famous as a soldier, though much of his life was spent in inefficient administration of his father’s French possessions. He fought at Crécy, and shortly before his death won a victory at Najera in Spain, but Poitiers is his most significant military achievement, and, despite his fame, the battle has receded from common memory while his father’s great victory at Crécy, and Henry V’s triumph at Agincourt remain celebrated.

  Yet Poitiers deserves a place among England’s most significant military achievements. It was an extraordinary battle. The prince was outnumbered, his army was thirsty, hungry, and travel-worn, yet it fought, by medieval standards, a very long battle and ended it as outright victors and with the King of France as their prisoner. King Jean II was taken back to London where he joined another royal prisoner, King David II of Scotland, who had been captured after the battle of Neville’s Cross ten years before (described in Thomas of Hookton’s adventure Vagabond).

  The battle of Poitiers was the culmination of the prince’s second great chevauchée through France. The first, in 1355, had struck south-east from Gascony and laid waste a great swathe of country, stopping just short of Montpellier, but ravaging, among many other towns and cities, the bourg of Carcassonne. A chevauchée was a destructive raid, designed to inflict severe economic damage on the enemy who, to end the losses, would need to fight a battle. If the enemy refused battle, as the French did in 1355, the chevauchée resulted in a shameful loss of face for the French and huge profit for the English. If they accepted battle, as King Jean chose in 1356, they risked defeat. Or perhaps they would achieve revenge and victory.

  There are many riddles around the battle of Poitiers. One of the most puzzling is whether the prince really wanted to fight on that September morning. The previous day, a Sunday, had been spent in tortuous negotiations with the cardinals (Bessières is fictional, but Talleyrand was the principal negotiator). There is evidence that the prince was ready to accept the humiliating terms the church offered, but some historians believe he was merely playing for time. What does seem certain is that the battle began early on the Monday morning when the French perceived the English left wing retreating, and they feared that the prince planned to slip away across the Miosson and so escape them. That would have been an extraordinarily risky manoeuvre, to pass an army over a river while a dwindling rearguard defended against an enemy intent on stopping the retreat, but undoubtedly the Earl of Warwick’s battle was intending to cross the Miosson. My own suspicion is that the prince hoped to evade the French and continue his retreat to Gascony, but was prepared to change that plan if the French attacked.

  If the prince was in two minds, the same could be said of King Jean. He was no great warrior and he undoubtedly feared the power of the English archers. On the other hand he had the advantage of numbers and must have known his enemy was weakened by hunger. Some of his advisers suggested caution, others urged him to battle. He chose battle. It is possible that neither side was wholly committed to fighting that day, yet the hotheads on the French side prevailed and King Jean decided to attack. The prince, I am sure, would have preferred to retreat.

  Yet one of the aims of a chevauchée was to bring the enemy to battle, so why not fight at Poitiers? There were excellent reasons to avoid a fight; not only was the prince outnumbered, but his army was tired, hungry and thirsty. The river might have been nearby, but the difficulties of carrying enough water up the hill were such that many horses were given wine to slake their thirst. The outlook must have seemed bleak to the English, and their best hope was either to escape southwards and outmarch the French or else hope to recover their strength and discover a place where the terrain was more helpful to a defensive battle.

  Yet, in truth, the position the English and their Gascon allies occupied was strong, but now there are more puzzles. We know where the battle was fought, but the exact placement is frustratingly uncertain. The chroniclers mention the hedge, which was evidently a formidable obstacle, but the hedge has long vanished and no one can tell precisely where it was. There are two fords across the Miosson (the novel only mentions one), and it is not certain which was the scene of the opening fight. Most historians agree that it was le Gué de l’Homme, the ford closest to the village and abbey at Nouaillé. We do know that the Captal de Buch led the cavalry attack of about one hundred and sixty men, of whom one hundred were mounted archers, which provoked the French panic and disintegration, but we cannot be sure of where that attack took place. It probably curved round the north of the French, though some people suggest it went around the south (I have preferred the n
orthern route). We know roughly where the prince’s army was drawn up. West of the village, now known as Nouaillé-Maupertuis, there is a bridge where once there was a ford, le Gué de l’Homme, and a minor road runs north from that bridge, passing the battlefield memorial as it climbs to the long ridge, and that road, once it gains the height, marks the Prince’s position. But from which direction did the French attack? There is disagreement. Some historians would have the attack coming from the north, while others prefer an attack from the west. Usually a visit to a battlefield will suggest answers, but I confess I found the topography confusing. I have preferred an attack from the west, simply because that approach looked easier to me, but there is no certainty. The French approach to the battlefield was from the north and, considering the difficulties of manoeuvring large bodies of men, an attack from the north makes sense (because that would have involved less manoeuvring), but the French were trying to stop the English crossing the Miosson so they could well have marched parallel to the prince’s position before turning to attack, a solution I have preferred. Any reader wanting a full discussion of the difficulties in placing the battle in the landscape should read Peter Hoskins’s excellent book In the Steps of the Black Prince (The Boydell Press, 2011).

  If the exact placement of the battle is problematic, at least we do know the course of the fight. It began with the cavalry attacks on the two wings of the English army, attacks that were repulsed by archery. The attack on the ford was made through marshland and, at the opening of that fight, the archers’ arrows were making small impression on the heavily armoured French horses, but a quick move to the flank remedied that problem. Geoffrey le Baker, one of the battle’s chroniclers, recounts that the arrows either broke when they hit the armour of the horses and riders, or else ricocheted skywards. It’s a tantalising passage. Did he mean that the arrow-heads broke from the shafts? Or that the heads themselves broke? It was probably both, for certainly the arrow-heads were not made of good steel. Some were, most were probably not. But quick thinking saved the day. By moving to the flank the archers were able to aim at the unarmoured hindquarters of the horses. William, Lord of Douglas, who had taken two hundred Scottish men-at-arms to aid the French, was badly wounded in that fight (though some believe he survived to be wounded in the dauphin’s attack, while one chronicler contends that he fled rather than be captured when the fight was ending). Meanwhile the dauphin, the clever but ungainly Charles, led the first attack on the main English line, an attack that had to deal with the frustrating hedge. The fight was long and hard, but Anglo-Gascon discipline prevailed, the line was not broken, and after some two hours the dauphin’s men retreated. It should now have been the turn of the king’s brother, the Duke of Orléans, to lead his battle against the battered English line, but the duke chose to leave the battlefield. Why? We do not know. It seems King Jean ordered his heir to leave. The dauphin Charles had done his duty and the king presumably did not want to put him at further risk, and it seems he instructed the dauphin to withdraw and the duke chose to withdraw with him. So now two-thirds of the French army had gone, and the king was left to attack with his own battle. That was when the captal led the impudent charge, the French ranks were shattered and the real slaughter began. It took place, we are told, on le Champ d’Alexandre, but where exactly is that? Some claim it is a stretch of wetland beside the Miosson, but it seems improbable to me that the French would flee southwards and my exploration of the battlefield convinced me that le Champ d’Alexandre was the plateau of the flat-topped hill west of the English position. But wherever it was the Field of Alexander proved a death-trap to the French, and it was there that the king and his youngest son were captured. Men squabbled over who had taken Jean le Bon prisoner, but the Earl of Warwick and Sir Reginald Cobham took charge of the king and of his son and escorted them back to Prince Edward who treated the royal captives with elaborate courtesy.