Poitiers

by Hilaire Belloc

You must therefore conceive of the marching body, be it 7000 or be it 30,000 or more, as a long column of which quite one-half the length will usually consist of waggons.

The first thing that would strike the modern observer of such a column would be the large proportion of mounted men.

Even the Plantagenets, who first, by an accident about to be described, discovered, and who by their genius for command developed, a revolution in missile weapons, marched at the head of columns which were, not only for their spirit and their tradition and command, but for all their important fighting units, mounted.

Tradition and the memory of a society are all-important in these things. From the beginning of the Dark Ages until well on into the Middle Ages, say, from the end of the fifth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, a battle was essentially a mounted charge; and the noble class which for generation after generation had learnt and gloried in the trade of those charges was the class which organised and enjoyed the peril of warfare.

The armoured man was always an expensive unit. His full equipment was the year’s rent of a farm, and what we should to-day call a large country estate never produced half a dozen of him, and sometimes no more than one. He needed at least one servant. That was a mere physical necessity of his equipment. Often he had not one, but two or three or even four. He and his assistants formed the normal cell, so to speak, of a fourteenth-century force. And on the march you would have seen the thousands of these “men-at-arms” (the term is a translation of the French “gensdarmes,” which means armed people) surrounded or followed by a cloud of their followers.

Now their followers were more numerous than they, and yet far more vulnerable, and they form a very difficult problem in the estimation of a fourteenth-century force.

When I say, as I have said with regard both to Crécy and to Poitiers—though it is truer of Crécy than of Poitiers—that the number of combatants whom contemporaries recognised as such was far less than the total numbers of a force, I was pointing out that, by our method of reckoning numbers, it would be foolish to count Edward III.’s army in 1346 as only 24,000, or the Black Prince’s ten years later as only 7000. The actual number of males upon the march who had to be fed and could be seen standing upon the field was far larger. But, on the other hand, the value for fighting purposes of what I may call the domestics was very varied. Some of those who served the wealthiest of the men-at-arms were themselves gentry. They were youths who would later be fully armed themselves. They rode. They had a sword; they could not be denied combat. Even their inferiors were of value in a defensive position, however useless for offensive purposes. When we hear of A making a stand against B though B was “three times as strong” as A, we must remember that this means only that the counting combating units on B’s side were three times A’s. If A was holding a defensive position against B, B would only attack with his actual fighting units, whereas A could present a dense mass of humanity much more than a third of B, certainly two-thirds of B, and sometimes the equal of B, to resist him, though only one-third should be properly armed. While, on the other hand, if B should fail in the attack and break, the number of those cut down and captured in the pursuit by the victorious A would be very much greater than the fighting units which B had brought against A at the beginning of the combat. All the followers and domestics of A’s army would be involved in the catastrophe, and that is what accounts for the enormous numbers of casualties which one gets after any decisive overthrow of one party by the other, especially of a large force against a small one. It is this feature which accounts for the almost legendary figures following Crécy and Poitiers.

The gentry, who were the nucleus of the fighting, were armed in the middle of the fourteenth century after a fashion transitional between the rings of mail which had been customary for a century and the plate armour which was usual for the last century before the general use of firearms, ornamental during the century in which firearms established themselves, and is still the popular though false conception of mediæval accoutrement. From immemorial time until the First Crusade and the generation of the Battle of Hastings and the capture of Jerusalem, fighters had covered their upper bodies with leather coats, and their heads with an iron casque. From at least the Roman centuries throughout the Dark Ages, a universal use of metal rings linked together over the leather protected the armed man, and our word mail is French for links, and nothing else. In time, the network of links came to be used separate from the leather, and so it was put on like a shirt of flexible iron all through the great business which saved Europe during the ninth century against the Northmen in Gaul and Britain, against the Moor in Spain. It was the armour of the knights in Palestine, of the native armies which drove the Germans from Italy, and of the Norman Conquest.

But with the end of the thirteenth century, which for simplicity and virile strength was the flower of our civilisation, armour, with many another feature of life, took on complexity and declined. Men risked less (the lance also came in to frighten them more). The bascinet, which had protected the head but not the face (with later a hinged face-piece attached), was covered or replaced by a helmet protecting head and face and all. At the knees, shoulders, elbows, jointed plates of iron appeared. Scales of iron defended the shin and the thigh, sometimes the lower arm as well. The wealthier lords covered the front of every limb with plates of this sort, and there was jointed iron upon their hands. The plain spur had rowels attached to it; the sword shortened, so did the shield; a dagger was added to the sword-belt upon the right-hand side.

We must further see in the picture of a fourteenth-century battle great blazonry.