The Battle of Poitiers (1356): The Capture of a King
The Battle of Poitiers, fought on 19 September 1356 near the village of Maupertuis, a few miles southeast of the city of Poitiers, was the second great English victory of the Edwardian phase and the engagement that produced the most consequential single ransom of the Middle Ages. An English army of perhaps 6,000 men under Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, returning from a chevauchée through southern France, defeated a French force more than three times its size commanded by King John II in person. King John was captured and held to ransom in England until the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360. Modern estimates of French losses cluster around 2,500–3,000 of all ranks, with the heaviest casualties among the men-at-arms of the second and third French lines; English losses are conventionally given as low, perhaps a few hundred.
The standard modern account is Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vol. II (1999), which is unusually detailed on the battle. Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp (2014) gives the most rigorous tactical analysis.
The campaign of 1355–1356
The Black Prince had been appointed Prince of Aquitaine in 1362, but the campaign of 1356 belongs to the wider Edwardian strategy. The English had opened a second front in 1355, with the Black Prince conducting a chevauchée from Bordeaux into Languedoc, and Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, leading a smaller force into Normandy. The Black Prince’s chevauchée was a major operation: he marched from Bordeaux in August 1355, sacked a number of towns including Carcassonne and Narbonne, and withdrew to Bordeaux in November. The chevauchée of 1356 was a smaller affair, intended to test the French response.
The French response was substantial. King John, who had been on the throne since the death of his father Philip VI in 1350, was determined to bring the Black Prince to battle and to avenge Crécy. The French army that assembled at Chartres in the late summer of 1356 was probably the largest the Valois monarchy had put into the field: 12,000–20,000 men by the most cautious modern estimates, perhaps more.
The battlefield
The two armies came into contact on 18 September, near Maupertuis, a few miles southeast of Poitiers. The Black Prince’s position was not of his choosing; he had been retreating toward Bordeaux, and the French had intercepted him. The English deployed behind a hedge and a sunken road, on a slight rise, with a wood on one flank and a stream on the other. The constricted front, as at Crécy, neutralised the French numerical advantage. The Black Prince’s senior advisors, John Chandos and the Captal de Buch, urged the position; the Black Prince took the decision.
The Black Prince’s army was perhaps 6,000 strong: 2,000–3,000 men-at-arms (the dismounted English force) and 3,000–4,000 longbowmen. The army was professional, well-trained, and had campaigned together for years. The Black Prince himself, twenty-six years old, was a charismatic commander whose personal courage and tactical judgement were the key.
The battle
The battle opened on the morning of 19 September with a series of English feigned retreats, designed to draw the French forward. The first French attack, by the vanguard under the Duke of Orléans, was repulsed by longbow fire. The second attack, by the main body under the Duke of Normandy (the king’s eldest son, the future Charles V), was broken on the English position. The third attack, by the king’s own division, was the decisive one.
King John, fighting on foot and surrounded by his bodyguard, refused to surrender. According to the chronicle accounts, when Sir Denis de Morbecke, a French knight who had entered English service, called on him to yield, the king struck him down; when Chandos offered him quarter, the king asked Chandos to identify himself. The formal surrender was made to the Captal de Buch. The Black Prince, receiving his royal captive, served him at dinner that evening and refused to take advantage of his misfortune. The story of the courteous treatment of the captive king is one of the durable chivalric images of the war, and Froissart, who had access to the chronicle tradition on both sides, made it the centrepiece of his account.
The dead and the prisoners
The French losses at Poitiers were severe among the upper nobility, though less concentrated than at Agincourt. The constable of France, Jacques de Bourbon, was killed; the Bishop of Châlons was killed; the Count of Vaudemont, the Count of Joigny, the Count of Sancerre, and a substantial proportion of the French chivalric class were among the dead. The ransom of King John, fixed by the Treaty of London in 1359, was the largest ransom the Middle Ages would ever see: 4 million écus, in instalments, against hostages.
The political consequences of the capture were immediate. The French government collapsed into faction: the Dauphin (the future Charles V) tried to govern, the Estates-General met in October 1356 and refused further taxation, and in 1358 the Jacquerie, a major peasant rising in the Île-de-France, was brutally suppressed by Charles of Navarre. The English, with the king of France in the Tower, were in a stronger position than at any point in the war.
The ransom and the treaty
King John’s captivity lasted four years. He was held at the Savoy Palace in London, then at Somerton Castle in Lincolnshire, and was allowed a reasonable degree of freedom for a captive monarch. The Treaty of Brétigny, signed on 8 May 1360, settled the war on English terms: full sovereignty over Aquitaine, Ponthieu, and Calais, in exchange for Edward III’s renunciation of the French throne and a reduced ransom. The English, however, did not have the institutions, the money, or the population to occupy so much territory, and the treaty was unenforceable. Within a decade Charles V, advised by du Guesclin, was recovering what Edward had won.
John himself did not return to France. He was released in 1360 on condition that one of his sons be returned to captivity when the ransom was in default, and when his son Louis of Anjou escaped, John honourably returned to London and died there in 1364. The English held his body briefly and then released it for burial in France. The story of his honour-bound return is one of the durable chivalric images of the war.
The significance
Poitiers was the high-water mark of the Edwardian phase. The English longbow, deployed from a chosen position, had broken a French army for the second time in a decade, and the capture of the king gave Edward III a political asset he had never had before. The strategic consequences are treated in the Edwardian phase and Treaty of Brétigny articles.
The battle has been the subject of more durable chivalric mythology than almost any other engagement of the war. The courtesy of the Black Prince to his captive, the ransom system, the Jacquerie that followed, the long captivity and the king’s honourable return — all are part of the legend. The historical substance, as Sumption argues, is that Poitiers was the moment when the English war effort reached the limit of what the longbow and a small professional army could achieve on French soil, and the moment when the French monarchy began the long, patient work of recovery that would, in 1453, win the war.