The Black Prince

by David Green

  In addition, formerly military titles were being conferred for civilian service. This is not to say that military service had lost its importance, it could not in the context of the Hundred Years War, although perhaps the triumph of the contract army changed its character. However, administrative and legal abilities were becoming highly valued. Thus, knighthood was losing its monopoly on chivalry as it passed to non-knightly ranks and as the knights themselves saw the opportunities of non-military careers. In this capacity, they could still act as the leaders of local society and the landowning elite could still serve the king or an overlord through an institutionalised relationship. The prince’s retinue demonstrates this clearly through the changing character of the administration in which clerks were replaced by soldier-administrators, men such as John Delves and John Henxteworth, before progressing to a ‘professional’ bureaucracy.

  While they remained the recruiting captains, knights were no longer the chief defenders of the realm or the key weapons in an army. The knight now often fought dismounted, alongside lowborn soldiers, indeed often criminals, fighting for booty and a pardon. Chivalry always had financial connotations; the development of the ransom system lay at the heart of the ethic on the battlefield and in the tournament. Now, however, knights fought for pay as part of a tactical system of which they were only a component. Some of the chivalric veneer was taken from them even as some of it passed to those they fought alongside. Knighthood itself, despite a brief resurrection following early English military successes, was becoming less popular. Therefore, while this was undoubtedly a period of chivalric revival, the numbers of militarily active knights diminished to such a degree that action had to be taken to reverse this trend. A variety of theories have been proposed to answer the question of why the need to distrain arose: increasing costs of equipment; the spiralling expense of the dubbing ceremony; and escalating and onerous local duties have all been mooted. While plate armour and horse costs increased in the period up to the Reims campaign, the value of warhorses taken abroad by the English after the resumption of the war in 1369 fell considerably. This was probably due to the nature of English raiding tactics, the chevauchée, which necessitated the use of light, swift horses, and the Crown’s unwillingness to reimburse the loss of horses on campaign. The developing stratification of the lower aristocracy, the diffusion of the chivalric aura and the concurrent extension of gentility to these new ranks enabled potential knights to decline the honour and retain a comparable social position.27

  Differing influences shaped the military aristocracy, as nobility and knighthood and chivalry, virtually synonymous for so long, became separate concepts and realities. To a degree, and only briefly, they came together in the halcyon days after Crécy and Poitiers. Edward III emphasised the military implications of chivalry, assimilating the ideals of knighthood with royal policy and dynastic ambition.28 So it was that ‘Chivalry remained a live cultural model even when, after Crécy … it was out of tune not only with the new military techniques but with the moral perception of the practical irrelevance and visible “frivolity” of the knight in shining armour.’29

  The conduct of the prince’s knightly retinue when on military service was governed by chivalry, particularly those aspects which found expression in the Laws of War – compounds of Christian and Classical theories bound with feudal tradition. These prescribed a minimum of humane and rational behaviour30 which fell short of the chivalric ideal but for some mitigated the worst battle conditions. They dealt with matters such as military discipline, the payment of wages, the division of spoils, military ranks and honours, duels, treaties, truces and alliances. They were chivalric rather than simply military in that pacts sworn under the law of arms were sworn on the knighthood of those concerned. In the context of a cosmopolitan knightly caste, the law of arms was international. There were, however, no international courts to implement the laws and cases were brought before the sovereign of the defendant. There were obvious difficulties in getting a fair hearing once one had overcome the immediate practical barriers of travel to the court, which was very possibly in enemy territory. The cases were heard by knights with experience of such matters who were often the official lieutenants of the lord in question, his constable or marshal. In England, cases were heard before the court of chivalry in which the Lord High Constable and the Earl Marshal presided. The constable, John Chandos, heard cases brought before the Black Prince, as prince of Aquitaine.

  The effect of the crusades, romance literature and social tradition led to both an idealisation of war and ambivalence towards violence allowing for an equivocal attitude to mercenaries and the condottieri. Although written after the conclusion of the Hundred Years War, the following passage is indicative of fourteenth-century attitudes: ‘War! What a joyful thing it is! One hears and sees so many fine things, and learns so much that is good.’31 There was a direct link between chivalric idealism and the social distress and devastation caused by its implementation. Despite courtly and literary influences and those from religious authorities, from the introduction of the Peace and Truce of God movements onwards, it is difficult to see those outside the chivalric order gaining any practical benefits from the code. For some, such as Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster, chivalry prescribed a strict moral code and contemporaries saw him as an archetype of religious chivalry. He crusaded in Lithuania and elsewhere and was the author of a devotional treatise that confessed his own sins and highlighted the tension between one’s duty as a Christian and a delight in the noble lifestyle. Nonetheless, on several occasions he massacred the inhabitants of a city who had resisted him, including women and children. His acts were justified by the Laws of War and did not detract from his chivalric status. Geoffrey de Charny, bearer of the French royal standard who died at Poitiers, and was, incidentally, the first known owner of the Turin Shroud, had similar views, which he extended to the whole order of knighthood. Like Grosmont, Charny’s Livre de Chevalerie, probably written for the Company of the Star, the French answer to the Garter, sometimes has an almost puritanical tone and contains some very similar images, particularly those concerning the denigration of the body. Charny emphasised the physical suffering endured by the knight on campaign and in battle. He viewed the life of a true knight as almost one of martyrdom. He drew parallels between the order of chivalry and a religious order but argued that no order of religion imposed greater rigours than chivalry. In much the same way as St Bernard had written of the Knights Templar so Charny wrote of the order of knighthood in general, stating that ‘Through the hard martyrdom of their profession knights acted in accordance with God’s will.’32 For the majority, chivalry provided less elevated strictures although they benefited from those attitudes. The Black Prince and Bertrand du Guesclin may be seen as leading examples of this ‘secular’ knighthood.33 Away from the battlefield, the prince behaved with the courtesy and generosity expected of a knight of his station; in battle he was governed by the laws of war and the practicalities of the chevauchée strategy.

  Before the 1346 expedition, Edward III issued strict orders to check excesses by his troops. No towns or manors were to be burnt, no churches or holy places sacked, and the old, women and children were to be spared, on pain of life or limb. This had relatively little effect, if indeed it had ever been more than propaganda. It was impossible to restrain troops whose main object was pillage.34 As Froissart said, ‘in spite of the King’s orders, many atrocious murders, thefts and acts of arson were committed, for in the kind of army that King Edward led there are always villains, rogues and men of easy conscience’.35 However, when the abbey of St Lucien near Beauvais was destroyed, the king promptly hanged twenty of the men responsible. The Black Prince’s raids of 1355–6 were particularly vicious and it appears the prince was unable to prevent a great deal of devastation, such as the burning of Carcassonne after he had given explicit orders for its preservation. It was not incongruous that the leaders of the 1355 raid should spend a Sunday at a monastery whilst their men,
a few miles away, were burning and looting.36

  It has been said, ‘It is impossible to be chivalrous without a horse.’37 The knight was by definition a soldier. He had gained social and political status as a result of being a highly effective mounted warrior powerful enough, in the words of Anna Comnena, to batter down the walls of Babylon.38 Yet, in 1346, the chivalry of France was defeated at the battle of Crécy by a combination of archers and dismounted knights and men-at-arms. It was confirmation of the end of the dominance of the mounted knight. His customary military role had altered and would further change. This shaped the ethos that sustained the knight and reinforced his social and political position. Nonetheless, knights remained an important constituent of armies although they were to adopt different tactics and modes of fighting.39

  The increasing use and role of the longbow also compromised the influence of the knight and, it has been suggested, brought an end to chivalry on the battlefield. The devastating power commonly attributed to the longbow may have been overstated and there is much disagreement over the physical nature of the weapons concerned, let alone their deployment and effect in a battle situation. There is no doubt, however, that throughout this period the complement of armies changed and the emphasis on heavy horsed troops shifted significantly in favour of archers, both mounted and on foot. Campaigns continued to concentrate on economic warfare bent on destroying the enemy’s revenue. The chevauchée was used to great effect by the English in the early years of the war. In addition to financial consequences, it struck a powerful psychological blow. The people suffered and the authority of the French nobility was questioned and threatened in the strongest possible manner. The battles of Crécy and Poitiers followed such chevauchées and it has been argued that they were deliberately provocative actions designed to bring the French to battle where highly effective defensive tactics could then be used to good effect.40 The essential factor in the use of this new tactic was discipline. This, in itself, ran counter to the knightly quest for individual glory. It is arguable that Crécy and Poitiers were victories of professional discipline over traditional chivalric recklessness.

  By the early fourteenth century, the old feudal basis of knighthood had virtually disappeared in England. The summons to the feudal levy was no more than a technical obligation, and money not land was exchanged for military service as the indenture system became increasingly common. As a consequence, the Hundred Years War was fought, for the most part, by paid professionals. This was true not only of the mercenary Free Companies but also the nobility who augmented their fortunes in land with the profits of a career in arms, and of the rank and file raised in England and Wales. Yet, despite the new practicalities of war, it was recorded and reported in an older fashion. The tournament had begun as a mimic war; war was now described in terms reminiscent of a tournament. This was so because guerre mortelle remained rare until the fifteenth century having been reserved usually for the infidel. Crécy was an exception to this.41 Ransoms prevented wholesale aristocratic slaughter but encouraged hostilities. War was often an economic necessity for poorer knights and the rewards for service could be considerable.

  The direct effect of chivalry in a military context is more difficult to pin down and may serve to show that despite the overt ‘courtliness’ of the Black Prince’s household, his military retinue was an altogether professional military unit. In an age of discipline and defensive tactics, chivalry, and particularly mounted chivalry, was more likely to bring about defeat than victory as had happened at Crécy, Poitiers and Nájera. It was not only a French ‘weakness’. During the Crécy campaign a scouting party of the first division, of which the prince was in nominal command, was detached to see if a way across the river Seine could be found for all the bridges were broken. Eventually they found a ford but it was heavily defended. The French troops on the other side taunted and bared their backsides at them. This so enraged the English that they made an ill-advised assault and were beaten back with heavy losses. Ten years later while on a scouting expedition shortly before the battle of Poitiers, the captal de Buch, Burghersh, the sire de Pommiers and Eustace d’Aubrechicourt attacked the French army. ‘These Englishmen could not forebear but set upon the tail of the French host and cast many down to the earth and took diverse prisoners so that the host began to stir and tidings thereof came to the French King …’42

  The members of the Black Prince’s retinue achieved the military success necessary for chivalric acclaim and were at the forefront of Edward III’s policy. It was further supported by the atmosphere and ethos at work within the household and court of the prince. It was there in the household, in the tournament, in the courtly world that the prince’s chivalric reputation is best exemplified, for his military success was founded on a tactical system that flew in the face of the chivalric ideal, being both dismounted and disciplined. The retinue benefited from the military success gained on the battlefield and the chivalrous and courtly milieu when not on campaign. It brought members of the retinue together through military associations of various kinds and gave them a collective identity. Many individuals who fought with the prince were marked out as worthy knights, prudhommes in their own right, but all benefited from the prince’s reflected glory, a glory which in its way sounded the death-knell of chivalry on the battlefield.

  Such a change in strategy, tactics and attitude to war begs the question of whether this constituted a ‘military revolution’. Unfortunately it is difficult to ascertain the conditions under which war was fought and battles undertaken, if they were undertaken with any regularity or confidence before the period for which a number of authors have suggested that there was such a revolution. The role of the warhorse, long held to have been the mainstay and supreme weapon in the ‘feudal’ army, has been questioned, the importance of infantry highlighted, and the significance of the longbow considered. However, although infantry, well drilled, preferably experienced and occupying a defensible site, would defeat heavy cavalry in most situations does not preclude the importance of the knight and his warhorse as a savagely effective weapon both physically, and perhaps more importantly, psychologically.

  Whether or not there was a military revolution in the early decades of the fourteenth century there was a change in English tactical thinking, probably spurred by a number of humiliations at the hands of the Scots. The use of dismounted knights necessitated alterations in equipment, particularly to provide increased mobility out of the saddle. Nonetheless, ‘The military scene was still dominated by the heavily armed knight armed with a lance and sword even if it often happened that he fought on foot.’43 The development of the use of infantry in co-ordination with archers was of vital importance in the English successes of 1346 and 1356. The ‘revolution’ was not marked by a great increase in troop numbers, especially when compared with those armies raised by Edward I. The paucity of particular records for 1346–7 does not allow for an accurate breakdown of the types of troops involved although the complement was probably in the region of 8,000 foot soldiers and over 3,000 mounted archers and hobelars. This was perhaps the largest field army raised during Edward III’s reign. It was augmented for the Calais siege.The army of the Reims campaign may only have numbered 6,600 in total.

  The use of dismounted troops was not an innovation, although to dismount knights, with its inherent social implications, was rare. The cavalry charge was an uncommon, if highly effective phenomenon. It could also prove very costly. The charge was not to be used as an opening gambit but as at Crécy and at Poitiers, Englishtroops were remounted towards the end of the battle after the archers and dismounted troops and infantry had done their work. The manoeuvre of the captal de Buch at Poitiers in which he led a cavalry force to attack the rear of the French army was decisive, as was Calveley’s similar action at Auray, and it was also undertaken at Nájera. This pattern was rare; after Bannockburn there was scarcely a battle in which the English chivalrous class fought on horseback.44

  The early victories and those at La Roch
e-Derrien, 1347, Taillebourg, 1351, Ardres, 1351, Mauron, 1352, and Poitiers in 1356 have not all been attributed to an Anglo-Gascon tactical approach. Jim Bradbury maintained that the French failures were the result of not developing a type of infantry to match the pikemen and infantrymen of other nations. Perroy attributed the English victory of 1346 to numerical inferiority that forced Edward ‘to resort to improvised ruses, of which, in his heart of hearts, he was somewhat ashamed’.45 Rogers states that the early victories that were so influential only occurred because of peculiarities of terrain and the mistakes of enemies.46 Rogers’ theory of an English battle-seeking strategy is open to question but it would seem likely that, particularly at Poitiers, the prince could have avoided battle if he so wished. Philip VI’s tactics in the 1330s and early 1340s proved highly effective. The rashness of Audrehem at Poitiers and the failure of Enrique to listen to French advice not to give battle before Nájera brought about defeat.

  The characteristics of the wider strategy and more narrowly-focused tactics were, by the beginning of the prince’s military career, based around an experienced and professional body of men, both in the wider military community and within his own retinue and household. The basic characteristics of the English battle formation remained constant from Dupplin Moor to Agincourt. The disposition of troops was crucial to the English and Anglo-Gascon victories, and the arrangement of troops at Crécy followed the pattern instigated by Northampton at Morlaix. The most significant element of the strategy and the close-quarter tactics that supported it was the necessity to entice the enemy to attack; these tactics were essentially defensive. For this reason, men-at-arms were dismounted and, when possible, the battlefield was prepared with defensive contrivances to protect the foot soldiers from enemy cavalry with trenches, stakes and other items.