Bertrand du Guesclin: The Eagle of Brittany

Bertrand du Guesclin (c. 1320–1380) was Constable of France from 1370 until his death in July 1380 and the principal architect of the French reconquest of the Caroline phase of the Hundred Years’ War. A Breton by birth, he rose to prominence during the civil wars of Charles V’s minority and was appointed constable after the Battle of Cocherel in 1364. He pursued a strategy of methodical siege warfare and deliberate refusal of pitched battle that, by the truce of Leulinghem in 1389, had reduced the English possessions in France to a coastal strip around Bordeaux. He was killed by a projectile at the siege of Châteauneuf-de-Randon in the Auvergne and was buried, in a tomb decorated with the captured banners of his enemies, in the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Saint-Denis.

The standard biographical treatment is Contamine’s La Vie et les lettres de Bertrand du Guesclin (published as part of the Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, 2002), drawing on Cuvelier’s verse biography and on the chronicle tradition. The most useful scholarly edition of Cuvelier is that of Jean-Claude Faucon (2003). Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vol. II (1999), treats du Guesclin’s campaigns in detail.

The Breton background

Du Guesclin was born c. 1320 at the castle of La Motte-Broons, near Broons, in Brittany, the son of a minor noble family with a long military tradition. He grew up in the duchy of Brittany during the Breton War of Succession (1341–1364), one of the longest civil wars in medieval Europe, in which the count of Montfort (backed by the English) and Charles of Blois (backed by the French) fought for the duchy. Du Guesclin served in the Blois faction; he was captured at the siege of Vannes in 1342 and held for several years before being ransomed. The experience of the Breton civil war shaped his tactical instincts: a war of raids, of small actions, of careful sieges, never of unnecessary pitched battle.

Du Guesclin distinguished himself in a series of minor actions in the 1350s and 1360s, including the defence of Rennes against Henry of Grosmont in 1356–1357. His reputation was already established when, in 1364, the young Charles V came to the throne and the politics of the Breton succession came to a head.

Cocherel and the making of a constable

The Battle of Cocherel, fought on 16 May 1364 near the eponymous village in Normandy, was the engagement that made du Guesclin’s reputation. A small French force under du Guesclin, perhaps 1,600 strong, defeated an Anglo-Navarrese army under John Chandos and Charles the Bad of Navarre, perhaps four times its size. Du Guesclin used a feigned retreat to draw the Anglo-Navarrese vanguard onto unfavourable ground, then turned to attack with the rest of his force. The Anglo-Navarrese army was broken; the Captal de Buch and Chandos’s brother-in-law were captured.

Cocherel was tactically modest and strategically decisive. It established du Guesclin as the coming man of French arms, and it discredited the Navarrese claim to be the dominant French aristocratic faction. In October 1364 du Guesclin was appointed Constable of France by the new king, Charles V, the highest military office in the kingdom. He held it for ten years.

The strategy of avoidance

The strategy du Guesclin pursued as constable has been the subject of more historical writing than any other element of his career. The standard account, set out by Contamine and developed in the modern literature, is that du Guesclin was the first French commander to make a coherent system out of the negative lesson of Crécy and Poitiers: the longbow, deployed from a prepared position, was decisive; a French army that met the English in pitched battle on chosen ground would lose.

Du Guesclin’s response was to refuse that battle. His method combined siege warfare (a slow, patient reduction of English-held towns), attrition (a deliberate exhaustion of English finances), and diplomacy (the careful cultivation of the Aquitanian nobility, who were prepared to submit to the French crown if their privileges were respected). The English chevauchée, the central strategic instrument of the Edwardian phase, was countered by a French strategy of “chevauchée avoidance”: the French army would shadow the English raid, deny it supplies, and never give battle.

The strategy worked. The English were forced to garrison the towns they held, the garrisons were expensive, the French re-took the towns one by one, and by 1389 the English had been reduced to a small coastal strip. The Caroline War, opened in 1369 with the French revocation of the Treaty of Brétigny, was effectively over.

The reconquest of Aquitaine

The principal theatre of the Caroline War was Aquitaine, the duchy that Edward III had been granted in full sovereignty at Brétigny. The duchy was a complex patchwork of counties and lordships, and its nobles had long resented the centralising fiscal policies of the Black Prince’s principality. Du Guesclin, advised by Charles V, pursued a policy of selective clemency: those who submitted were confirmed in their privileges; those who held out were besieged and reduced.

The reconquest was methodical. Du Guesclin took town after town: Limoges (1370), after a famous siege in which the Black Prince sacked the town in retaliation; Bergerac (1377); a string of smaller places. By 1377 the English Aquitaine had been reduced to a coastal strip around Bordeaux. By 1389, when the truce of Leulinghem was signed, only that strip and Calais remained.

Najera and the Black Prince

The one major English victory of du Guesclin’s constabulary was the Battle of Najera (3 April 1367), in which the Black Prince, intervening in the Castilian civil war on behalf of Pedro the Cruel, defeated a Franco-Castilian army under du Guesclin and Henry of Trastámara. Du Guesclin was captured in the rout and held for a substantial ransom, paid by the French king. Najera was the last major English field victory of the war, but it was also a strategic disaster for the English: the campaign in Castile drained English Aquitaine of men and money and accelerated the process of recovery that du Guesclin would direct after his return.

The death at Châteauneuf-de-Randon

Du Guesclin died on 13 July 1380 at the siege of Châteauneuf-de-Randon, in the Auvergne, of wounds received in an assault on the town. According to Cuvelier’s verse biography and the standard chronicle tradition, the town surrendered the day after du Guesclin’s death, and the keys of the town were presented, with great ceremony, to the constable’s body as it lay in state.

The body was taken to Saint-Denis for burial. Du Guesclin’s tomb, decorated with the captured banners of his enemies, was destroyed in the Revolution, but his heart was sent, according to his instructions, to Dinan in Brittany. The tomb at Le Puy-en-Velay mentioned in some older sources is a confusion; his body rested at Saint-Denis.

The reputation

Du Guesclin’s reputation has fluctuated. The chronicler Jean Froissart, who knew him personally, praised his military skill and his chivalric virtues. The English chroniclers, who had no reason to be kind to the man who had undone the Edwardian conquests, regarded him as treacherous and unchivalric. Modern historians, from Perroy’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1945) onwards, have been more positive: du Guesclin was a brilliant and innovative commander whose strategy was essential to the French recovery, and the Caroline War is the central case study of the medieval “strategy of avoidance.”

The strategic logic of du Guesclin’s approach — the refusal of pitched battle, the systematic use of siege warfare, the patient exploitation of demographic and economic superiority — was the model for the French recovery of the Lancastrian phase. The Bureau brothers, Arthur de Richemont, and Charles VII’s later commanders were, in a real sense, the heirs of du Guesclin.