A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Marshal Clermont advised blockade, the very action the Prince had feared. Rather than the folly of attacking the English in their protected position, he said the French should encamp around them and when they had no more food “they would depart from that place.” This was the obvious and sensible course to adopt, but the dictates of chivalry forbade it. Met with scorn and fierce dispute by Marshal d’Audrehem, Clermont’s proposal was rejected. Three knights who had reconnoitered the English lines came in to report that the only access to the enemy was a narrow passage permitting no more than four abreast to ride through. On the advice of Sir William Douglas, a Scot experienced against the English who was acting as the King’s chief of tactics, the critical decision was taken for the main body to attack on foot. But rather than forgo altogether the cavalry charge of heavy armor, it was decided that the initial breakthrough of the archers’ lines should be carried out by a task force of 300 of the elite of the army mounted on the strongest and swiftest war-horses. All three military chiefs, the Constable and both Marshals, were recklessly assigned to this body.

  At sunrise on Monday, September 19, in bustle and clamor of arms with trumpets sounding, the French host was drawn up behind the mounted spearhead in the usual three battalions. They were deployed one behind the other, presumably for successive shocks, but precluded by this position from aiding one another on the flank. The nineteen-year-old Dauphin, who had never fought in war before, was nominal commander of the first battalion; Philippe d’Orléans, brother of the King, aged twenty and equally a novice, commanded the second; the King himself, the third. He was accompanied by a personal guard of nineteen others dressed exactly like him in black armor and white surcoat marked with fleur-de-lys. This was a prudent if not exactly knightly precaution, since in a battle in which a sovereign engaged, the enemy would do its utmost to capture him.

  “On foot! On foot!” ordered Jean, and “he put himself on foot before all.” It has been said that he took the decision to dismount in order to reduce the opportunity among his disunited forces for individual action or flight. Modern critics—for the debate has continued-have called it “suicidal folly”; others have considered it the only sensible and feasible decision because cavalry could not deploy en masse owing to the marshes, hedges, and ditches.

  The knights dismounted, removed spurs, cut off the long pointed toes of their poulaines, and shortened their lances to five feet. The Oriflamme, fork-tongued scarlet banner of the Kings of France, was awarded to Geoffrey de Charny, “the perfect knight,” to carry. Legend derived the banner from Charlemagne, who was said to have carried it to the Holy Land in response to an angel’s prophecy that a knight armed with a golden lance from whose tip flames of “great marvel” burned would deliver the land from the Saracens. Embroidered with golden flames that gave it its name, the banner had been adopted by the monarchy from the Abbey of St. Denis along with the battle cry “Montjoie-St. Denis!” As the signal for advance or rally, the war cry signified allegiance to a particular lord. On that morning the King announced the royal cry as the cry for all. “You have cursed the English,” he cried to the assembled ranks of chivalry, “and longed to measure swords with them. Behold them in your presence! Remember the wrongs they have done you and revenge yourselves for the losses and sufferings they have inflicted on France. I promise you we shall do battle with them, and God be with us!”

  The Prince of Wales deployed two battalions in front for mutual support and one behind, with the archers in saw-tooth formation divided among the three. The four Earls—Warwick and Oxford, Suffolk and Salisbury—commanded the two front divisions, the Prince and Chandos the rear, with a body of 400 reserves at their side. The English had the advantage of terrain and a far greater advantage in being a coherent body, experienced together in two campaigns, professionally trained, and based on better management and organization. For overseas expeditions the English had to plan carefully and recruit selectively the ablest and strongest fighting material.

  Yet even now, perhaps because of divided opinion among his advisors, the Prince essayed a movement to get away toward the road to Bordeaux. “For on that day,” in the words of Chandos Herald, “he did not wish for combat, I tell you true, but wished without fail to avoid battle entirely.” The movement of baggage wagons behind the hill, revealed by the fluttering pennants of their advance guard, was seen by Marshal d’Audrehem, who shouted, “Ha! Pursue! Charge, ere the English are lost to us!” The more sober Clermont still advised a surrounding action, precipitating a furious quarrel between the two Marshals on the very brink of battle. Audrehem accused his fellow of being “afraid to look on them” and of causing delay that would lose the day, to which Clermont replied with suitable insult. “Ha, Maréchal, you are not so bold but that your horse’s nose will find itself in my horse’s ass!” In this disunity the charge of the mounted spearhead was launched.

  Warned of the assault, the Prince had halted the initial departure, reassembled, and in a fiery oration called upon his knights to fight for their King’s claim to the French crown, for the great honor of victory, for rich spoils and eternal fame. He told them to trust in God and obey commands.

  Attacking from the flank, Audrehem’s squadron was caught and crushed under the piercing arrows of the archers, while Clermont, joined by the Constable, charged in the frontal attack he so mistrusted and was beaten back under flights of arrows so thick they darkened the air. Shooting from sheltered positions protected by dismounted knights and foot soldiers, the archers, at the express order of the Earl of Oxford, aimed for the horses’ unarmored rumps. Stumbling and falling, the horses went down under their riders or reared back among those who followed, “making great slaughter upon their own masters.” It was the frenzy of Crécy over again. Fallen knights could not raise their horses or rise themselves. In the melee that followed, amid call of trumpets, shouted battle cries, and screams of wounded men and horses, both Clermont and the Constable were killed, Audrehem was captured, and the greater part of the picked knights killed or taken prisoner.

  Already the Dauphin’s battalion was advancing on foot into the havoc. With Charles in the front lines were his two brothers, seventeen-year-old Louis, Duc d’Anjou, and sixteen-year-old Jean, future Duc de Berry. Tangled in the confusion of riderless horses and raging combat, many of the battalion fought on savagely, hand to hand, stabbing with shortened lances and hacking with battle-ax and sword. But with no hardened leader in command, only a boy witnessing debacle, the unit began to fall back. A shout of triumph from enemy throats signaled seizure of the Dauphin’s standard. Whether on order of the King to save his sons, as later claimed, or at the decision of the four lords appointed as the princes’ guardians, the greater part of the battalion withdrew from the field, falling back upon and infecting with failure the Duc d’Orléans’ battalion. Instead of coming in with fresh force to give the hard-pressed English no pause, which at this stage might well have turned the tide, Orléans’ battalion, swept up in the retreat, fled without striking a blow, retrieved its waiting horses, and galloped for the city.

  “Advance,” cried the King upon this successive disaster, “for I will recover the day or die on the field!” With Oriflamme flying and his youngest son, fourteen-year-old Philip, future Duke of Burgundy, at his father’s side, this largest of the three battalions, awkward on foot in their iron cocoons, marched upon the bloody field. “Alack! We are undone!” cried an English knight, seeing them come. “You lie, miserable coward,” stormed the Prince, “if you so blaspheme as to say that I, alive, may be conquered!” Each side fell upon the other with the strength and ferocity of desperation. Although a battle’s outcome, it was said, could be told by the time the sixth arrow was loosed, now when the English archers had emptied their sheaves the issue wavered. In the pause before the new French assault, the archers had retrieved arrows from the wounds and dead bodies of the fallen; others now hurled stones and fought with knives. Had the third French assault been mounted, it is possible that at this stage, against a battered o
pponent, it might have prevailed.

  The battle entered its seventh hour, a tossing mass of separate groups hammering each other, oblivious of any formation, except for the Prince and Chandos still holding command with the reserves on the hilltop. Pointing to where the Oriflamme flew, Chandos advised the Prince to attack the King’s unit, for, he said, “Valor will not allow him to flee; he will fall into our power and victory will be ours.” In what proved the decisive maneuver, the Prince ordered his D’Artagnesque ally, the Captal de Buch, to lead a small mounted force in attack upon the French rear while, with the mounted reserves and the unwounded from his own battalion, he summoned the army’s last strength for a frontal offensive. “Sirs, behold me here! For God’s mercy, think on striking! Advance, Banner, in the name of God and St. George!”

  His trumpets sounded, and their echo, thrown back by the stone walls of Poitiers, rang through the woods “so that you would think the hills had called out to the valleys and that it had thundered in the clouds.” The English charge, in whole or in part on horseback, rushed down upon the King’s unit “like the wild boar of Cornwall.” The battle reached climactic fury “and none so hardy” wrote Chandos Herald, “whose heart was not dismayed.” “Beware, Father, to the right! Ware, to the left!” Philip cried as the blows descended. Knights grappled in personal combat, “each thinking of his own honor.” Attacked by the Prince’s charge in front and the Captal’s horsemen from the rear, the French fought in ferocious despair. Bleeding from multiple wounds, Geoffrey de Charny was cut down and killed still holding the Oriflamme. The King’s guard, surrounding him in a mighty wedge, tottered under the assault. “Some, eviscerated, tread on their own entrails, others vomit forth their teeth, some still standing have their arms cut off. The dying roll about in the blood of strangers, the fallen bodies groan, and the proud spirits, abandoning their inert bodies, moan horribly.” The slain piled up around the flailing battle-ax of the King, who with his helmet knocked off was bleeding from two wounds on his face. “Yield, yield,” cried voices, “or you are a dead man!” In the midst of hoarse shouts and fierce contention to seize him, a French exile, Denis de Morbecque, banished for manslaughter and now serving the English, pressed forward and said, “Sire, I am a knight of Artois. Yield yourself to me and I will lead you to the Prince of Wales.” King Jean handed him his glove and surrendered.

  With the loss of the King, the remaining French forces disintegrated, those who could flying for the gates of Poitiers to escape capture. English and Gascons of all ranks pursued wildly, greed overmastering exhaustion, and scrambled for prisoners under the very walls of the city. Some of the French turned in flight and captured their pursuers.

  The defeat swept France of its leadership. In addition to the King, the Constable and both Marshals, and the bearer of the Oriflamme, who were either dead or taken, the victors captured one fighting archbishop, 13 counts, 5 viscounts, 21 barons and bannerets, and some 2,000 knights, squires, and men-at-arms of the gentry. Too many to be taken back, most were released on a pledge to bring their ransoms to Bordeaux before Christmas.

  The number of killed, a different figure in every account, was at least several thousand, of whom 2,426 were of the nobility. The fact that they equaled or outnumbered the captured was evidence of valiant fighting, but, unfortunately for France, the living who fled made a greater impression than the dead who fought. The Grand Chronique admits openly that battalions “fled shamefully and cravenly,” and the Chronique Normande somberly concludes, “The mortality of this battle was not so great as the shame.”

  That was the great debris of Poitiers. Citizens watching from the city walls witnessed inglorious retirement and hectic flight, and their report spread throughout France. The retreat of Orléans’ battalion which lost the day is hardly explicable except by the disaffected mood of nobles antagonized by the King. Certainly many were present that day who would not have grieved at misfortune to the monarchy, and it would have taken the shouts of only a few to induce panic. Whatever the cause, the effect was to deepen and spread mistrust of the noble estate and loosen confidence in the ordained structure of society.

  Popular sentiment showed itself at once against lords returning to raise their ransoms. They were so “hated and blamed by the commoners,” reports Froissart, that they had difficulty in gaining admittance to the towns and sometimes even to their own estates. Peasants of a village in Normandy belonging to the Sire de Ferté-Fresnel, seeing their seigneur come riding through with only a squire and a valet and without his sword, raised the cry, “Here is one of the traitors who fled from the battle!” They rushed upon the three riders, pulled the lord from his horse, and beat him up. He returned a few days later, better armed, to take vengeance, killing one villager in the process. Though this small outburst was quickly crushed, it was an omen. Many seigneurs returned to face gibes or sudden hostility and had trouble raising the traditional aid for the lord’s ransom. To find the funds, many were forced to sell all their furnishings or free their serfs for payment. A residue of ruined knights was a by-product of Poitiers.

  The cry of “Traitor!” was not a local voice only, but a bewildered people’s explanation of the inexplicable. It was the eternal cry of conspiracy, of stab in the back. How else could the great King of France have been taken and the great host of French chivalry defeated by a handful of “archers and brigands” except by betrayal? A contemporary polemic in verse called “Complaint of the Battle of Poitiers” explicitly charges,

  The very great treason that they long time concealed

  Was in the said host very clearly revealed.

  The author, an unknown cleric, accuses certain persons of having by “their cupidity sold secrets of the Royal Council to the English” and, on being discovered and “kicked out of the Council by the King,” of conspiring to destroy him and his children. The flight of these false men, “treacherous, disloyal, infamous and perjured,” was a planned betrayal; in them the nobility was dishonored and France too. They have denied God; they are men of pride, greed and haughty manners,

  Of bombast and vainglory and dishonest clothes,

  With golden belts and plumes on their heads

  And the long beard of goats, a thing for beasts.

  They deafen you like thunder and tempest.

  The beard complained of, originally a mark of penitence, had lately been worn in narrow forked style as a worldy fashion and now became an object of satire linked with running away.

  The “Complaint” has only praise for Jean II, who fought to the end with his little son beside him. In public opinion he became a hero. However inept as sovereign and captain, his personal valor, poignantly emphasized by the “little son,” glorified him in the eyes of his subjects and gave France a focus for the recovery of honor. The “Complaint” hopes that God will send “good men of great power” to avenge the defeat and bring back the King, and concludes significantly:

  If he is well advised, he will not forget

  To lead Jaque Bonhomme and all his great company

  Who do not run from war to save their lives!

  After the citizens of Poitiers had buried the bodies outside, the Mayor proclaimed mourning for the captured King and forbade celebration of any feast day or festival. In Languedoc the Estates General prohibited for the space of a year, so long as the King was not delivered, the wearing of gold, silver, or pearls, ornamented or scalloped robes and hats, and entertainment by minstrels and jongleurs. The Dauphin and his brothers, though judged unfavorably in comparison with young Philip, were not included in the blame of the nobles. Charles on his return to Paris “was received with honor by the people, grief-stricken by the capture of his father the King.” They felt, according to Jean de Venette, that somehow he would bring about the King’s release “and the whole country of France would be saved.”

  Why the flight? Why the defeat? To Villani in Italy the extraordinary event seemed “unbelievable”; Petrarch, learning about it in Milan on return from a journey, was no less
stunned; the English themselves thought their victory a miracle, and succeeding generations have found it hard to fathom. Militarily, French numerical superiority was nullified by a failure of command. The 2,000 Genoese crossbowmen, according to some reports, were not even used, although others report the contrary. The comparative ineffectiveness of French archery throughout the century is a puzzle. Towns and villages of France maintained companies of archers who were encouraged by special privileges, and men of the Beauvaisis, adjoining Picardy, considered themselves in individual skill the best in the world. Yet they were never properly combined in action with knights and men-at-arms, because French chivalry scorned to share its dominance of the field with commoners.

  Separatism in Normandy and Brittany, failure to resist the Black Prince’s raid in Languedoc, and the intrigues and betrayals of Charles of Navarre were aspects of the disunity that lost the Battle of Poitiers. The right of independent withdrawal, which the Order of the Star and the ordinance of 1351 had tried to suppress, had not been yielded by the nobles in their own minds. The defeat at Poitiers was a pyrrhic triumph of baronial independence.

  It was also, on the English side, a victory of generalship that made up for fatigue and inferior numbers. The Prince could give orders that were obeyed and, with moral leadership more secure than Jean’s, and battalion chiefs on whom he could rely, could control what happened. He kept himself where he could view the battle and direct movements, he was served by toughened, experienced soldiers, and he had two essentials for winning: no possibility of retreat and a will that goaded men to the last ounce of fight. As a commander, in Froissart’s words, he was “courageous and cruel as a lion.”

  Spent by combat and eager to bring his royal prize out of reach of any rescue attempt, the Prince made no further effort toward a juncture with Lancaster, but turned south at once for Bordeaux, dragging added baggage wagons filled with luxurious fittings including furred mantles, jewels, and illuminated books from the French camp. Released by the Dauphin after the defeat, the French nobles scattered to protect their own domains; none rallied to attempt a rescue of the King along the 150-mile march to Bordeaux. The Cardinals followed there to renew pressure for peace, and while terms of a settlement were under negotiation, English and Gascons engaged in a massive commerce of buying and selling prisoners and shares in ransoms with heated disputes over who had captured whom, and no little ill-will generated in the process. Complaints were heard that the archers had killed too many who might have been held for ransom. When the Prince proposed to take the King of France to England as a prisoner, the Gascons angrily claimed a share in his capture and had to be appeased by a payment of 100,000 florins, raised from a first offer of 60,000 they had spurned.