As to the character of the Black Prince, which so largely determined what is to follow, and especially his character in command, nothing is more conspicuous in the history of the Middle Ages. He was, partly from the influence of models, partly from personal force, the mirror of what the fighting, French-speaking nobility of that century took for its ideal conception of a captain. Far the first thing for him was the trade and the profession of arms, and the appetite for combat which this career satisfied certainly in its baser, but still more certainly in its nobler, effects in the mind of a virile youth. He had gone through the great experience of Crécy as a boy of sixteen. He was now, upon the eve of the Campaign of Poitiers, a man in his twenty-sixth year, thoroughly avid not only of honour but of capture, thoroughly contemptuous of gain, generous with a mad magnificence, always in debt, and always utterly careless of it. His courage was of the sort that takes a sharp delight in danger, and particularly in danger accompanied by strong action; he was an intense and a variable lover of women, an unwearied rider, of some (but no conspicuous) ability in the planning of an action or the grasp of a field, not cruel as yet (but already violent to an excess which later years, alas! refined into cruelty), splendidly adventurous, and strung every way for command. He could and did inspire a force, especially a small force, in the fashion which it was his chief desire to achieve. He was a great soldier; but his sins doomed him to an unhappy failure and to the wasting of his life at last.
PART I
THE CAMPAIGN
As the first of the great raids, that of Crécy, had been designed to draw off the pressure from Edward III.’s troops in the South of France, and to bring the French levies northward away from them, so the second great raid ten years later, which may be called by courtesy the “Campaign” of Poitiers, was designed to call pressure off the English troops in the north and to bring the French levies down southward away from them. As Edward’s march through Normandy had been a daring ride for booty, so was the Black Prince’s ride northward from Aquitaine; and as Edward from the neighbourhood of Paris turned and retreated at top speed from before the French host, so did the Black Prince turn from the neighbourhood of the Loire and retreat at speed from before the pursuit of the bodies which the King of France had gathered. And as the one great raid ended in the signal victory of Crécy, so did the other end in the signal victory of Poitiers.
But these parallel and typical actions, lying ten years apart, have, of course, one main point of resemblance more important than all the rest: each includes the complete overthrow of a large body of feudal cavalry by the trained forces of the Plantagenets; Crécy wholly, Poitiers partly, by the excellence of a missile weapon—the long-bow. Each shows also a striking disproportion of numbers: the little force on the defensive completely defeating the much larger body of the attack.
Those of my readers, therefore, who have made themselves acquainted with the details of Crécy must expect a repetition of much the same sort of incidents in the details of Poitiers. The two battles are twin, and stand out conspicuously in their sharpness of result from the mass of contemporary mediæval warfare.
In this opening section I will describe the great ride of Edward the Black Prince from the Dordogne to the Loire, and show by what a march the raid proceeded to its unexpected crisis in the final battle.
I have said that the Black Prince’s object (apart from booty, which was a main business in all these rapid darts of the time) was to draw the pressure from the English troops in the north.