1356 (Special Edition)

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.

The main battle was fought on foot. The Lord of Douglas advised this, knowing that archers were much less effective against foot soldiers than against horses, which makes it ironical that Douglas was probably wounded while on horseback. The archers at Poitiers were decisive in the defeat of the two French cavalry charges, but made little impression on the main battles, who attacked on foot. The arrows were certainly a huge nuisance to the French. The arrow storm forced them to advance with their visors down, and each arrow blow, even if it did not pierce armour, was like being hit with a hammer, but the evidence suggests that the plate armour of the French was sufficient protection. The same thing was to happen at Agincourt. The French attacks there were inundated with arrows, yet still the men-at-arms reached Henry V’s line to engage in hand-to-hand fighting. And, of course, archers were formidable opponents in such fighting. The huge bodily strength needed to draw a longbow made them lethal when they wielded a pole-axe or any other hand weapon.

The English prevailed at Poitiers. There were two main reasons. First, the Anglo-Gascon command was efficient. The army had mostly been together for more than two years, their commanders were experienced, and though there was undoubtedly some rivalry, those commanders cooperated and, above all, trusted each other. The Earl of Warwick began the day expecting to lead his battle in retreat, but changed his tactics when events dictated a change, and did it quickly and effectively. The young Earl of Salisbury commanded the defence of the English right with admirable stubbornness and a personal display of bravery. The final cavalry charge, ordered by the prince, was timed to perfection and was devastating. In contrast, the French command was clumsy in the extreme. King Jean fed his troops piecemeal into a battle from which many fled without orders, and there was bitter rivalry between some of his senior commanders.

But the main reason for the Anglo-Gascon success was their discipline. They did not break the line. One man, Sir Humphrey Berkeley, did choose to leave the ranks and pursue the dauphin’s retreating men, presumably in hope of securing a rich prisoner, and was captured himself. His ransom was ?2,000, a fortune, but he was the only captive taken by the French, while the English had a glut of high-ranking prisoners: the king himself, his son, the Archbishop of Sens, the Duke of Bourbon, Marshal Audrehem, the Counts of Vendome, Dammartin, Tancarville, Joigny, Longueville, Eu, Ponthieu, Ventadour, and between two and three thousand French knights. Among the French dead were the Duke of Athenes, the Duke of Bourbon, Geoffrey de Charny (who carried the oriflamme), Constable Walter de Brienne, Marshal Clermont, the Bishop of Chalons, and some sixty or seventy other notables. Statistics for medieval battles are notoriously difficult, but it seems likely that the Anglo-Gascon army was about six thousand strong, of which one-third were archers, and that the French numbered about ten thousand. After the battle, heralds counted two and a half thousand French dead and a mere forty English or Gascons. The figure for the French appears credible, but are so few Anglo-Gascon casualties believable? There may have been some exaggeration by the winners, but the disparity also suggests that the greatest killing occurred after the French panicked. So long as men were in line, protected by their armour and supported by their neighbours, their chances of survival were high, but as soon as the line broke and men fled for their lives they became easy targets. There were certainly far too many bodies to be dealt with by the victors because, apart from those great nobles who could be identified, the rest were left on the field to rot, and stayed there till February when at last their remains were collected and buried.

Between two and a half and three thousand Frenchmen were captured. The less important prisoners and those who were badly wounded were paroled, meaning they were allowed to go home on a promise not to fight against the English until their ransom was settled, but any man worth a large fortune was taken back to England and kept there till the ransom was paid. Warwick Castle, in its present form, was largely constructed on the ransoms of Frenchmen. Jonathan Sumption, in his indispensable book, Trial by Fire, reckons the total ransoms collected from Poitiers amounted to around ?300,000. It is almost impossible to offer an equivalent value in today’s currencies, though one measure might be the price of ale, which today costs three thousand times what it did in the 1350s, so sufficient to say that many men became enormously wealthy. King Jean II’s ransom was set at six million gold ecus, much of which was paid before his death in London in 1364.

The name la Malice is an invention, and her connection with Saint Junien, whose body still lies behind the altar of the abbey church at Nouaille-Maupertuis, is entirely fictional. All four gospels tell the story of Saint Peter drawing a sword in Gethsemane on the night of Christ’s arrest, then using the blade to slice off the ear of the high priest’s servant. The English have an old tradition that Joseph of Arimathea brought the sword to Britain and gave it to Saint George, but the Archdiocese of Pozna?n, in Poland, has a much better claim to the weapon, indeed the sword is one of their most precious possessions, and is on display in the Archdiocesan Museum. Is it the real thing? A sword in first century Palestine was most likely to have been a gladius, a Roman short sword, while the weapon in Poznan is a falchion, a broad-tipped long sword. Still, there it is, and folk can believe it to be the genuine article if they wish.

I could not have written the novel without the help of several books, chief among them Jonathan Sumption’s Trial by Fire, which is the second volume of his history of the Hundred Years War. Peter Hoskins gallantly walked the complete length of both the Black Prince’s chevauchees, and his story of those campaigns is told in his book In the Steps of the Black Prince. The best biography of Edward of Woodstock is Richard Barber’s The Black Prince. By far the most authoritative account of the longbow and its effect is The Great Warbow by Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy. Robert Hardy was generous in pointing me towards J. M. Tourneur-Aumont’s massive La Bataille de Poitiers, 1356. The most intimate picture of everyday life in fourteenth- century France is provided in Ann Wroe’s enchanting book A Fool and His Money. Other notable books are David Green’s The Battle of Poitiers, 1356, The Black Prince’s Expedition by H. J. Hewitt, The Reign of Edward III by W. Mark Ormrod, and Edward III by the same author. I owe thanks to all those historians.

The Prince of Wales owed thanks to his men and offered it in annuities and outright gifts of money. Many of the archers received grants of timber or rights of pasturage. In France there was shock and outrage at the battle’s outcome, which was vented on the nobility. Poitiers was a disaster, propelling France into bankruptcy, chaos, and revolution. No wonder that Edward III, receiving the news of his son’s triumph, proclaimed ‘We rejoice in God’s bounty’.

The war would continue, through Agincourt in 1415 and beyond, until eventually the French prevailed. But that is another story.

Two Chronicles of Poitiers

It was the Duke of Wellington who remarked that one might as well try to write the story of a battle as write the history of a formal ball; every dancer will have a different recollection of the event, and rarely will two such recollections match. The difficulty of discovering what happened in a medieval battle is compounded by the dearth of memoirs. No participant of the battle of Poitiers left a description, though there are letters from such men, but the letters tend to announce the result of the battle rather than its course. The most interesting of those letters are reprinted in Richard Barber’s book Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince (Boydell Press, 1979), and that book also has long excerpts from the era’s chroniclers. It was those chroniclers who tried to record the history of their own times, but sadly none was present at the battle of Poitiers and so their descriptions are