What Was a Chevauchée?
A chevauchée was a mounted military campaign conducted with the deliberate intention of devastating the enemy’s territory. The word comes from the Old French chevauchier — to ride a horse — and it referred in the 14th century to a particular kind of operation in which a small, mobile English army would ride through the enemy’s lands, burning crops, sacking towns, and gathering plunder. The object was not, in the first instance, the occupation of territory. It was the destruction of the enemy’s economic base, the demonstration that his government could not protect his subjects, and the provocation of a battle on terms favourable to the attacker. The chevauchée was the principal English strategic instrument of the Edwardian phase. Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (2014) is the modern standard.
The English chevauchée of 1346
The most famous chevauchée of the war was Edward III’s campaign of 1346. Edward landed at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, on the Cotentin peninsula, on 12 July 1346, with an army of perhaps 12,000 men. The army rode south through lower Normandy, sacked the city of Caen on 26 July, and then turned north-east toward the English-held territory of Ponthieu. The English army covered perhaps 250 miles in three weeks, systematically devastating the Norman countryside.
The campaign was, in part, a piece of strategic theatre. The English government was bankrupt. The war in Aquitaine was making no progress. A chevauchée through the heart of Normandy, the most valuable French province, was a way of demonstrating that the war was not over and that the English crown was still capable of action. The French king, Philip VI, was forced to assemble a large army in pursuit, and the two armies came into contact at the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu on 26 August 1346. The rest is the history of one of the most decisive battles of the Middle Ages.
The 1346 chevauchée, in the standard reading, is the model for the English chevauchée of the Edwardian phase. The campaign was conducted with discipline; the army moved as a unit, with scouts and a rear guard; the devastation was systematic, not random. The object was not only plunder but also the provocation of a battle on ground favourable to the English.
The Black Prince in 1355–1356
The most ambitious English chevauchée of the war was the Black Prince’s campaign of 1355–1356. The Black Prince, who had been appointed Prince of Aquitaine in 1362 — to the rear of the campaign — was in 1355 the lieutenant of Aquitaine and was already the most experienced English field commander of the war. He had planned a campaign in three columns: one from Aquitaine northward through the Saintonge and Poitou, one through the Auvergne, and one through the Bazadais. The chevauchée was conducted in October–December 1355 and the spring of 1356, and it brought the English army as far north as the Loire.
The campaign was a disaster in the operational sense and a success in the strategic sense. The army failed to bring the French to a decisive battle in 1355, and the chevauchée of 1356 was forced to retreat to Bordeaux after the engagement at Poitiers on 19 September 1356. The capture of King John II, however, transformed the political situation; the Treaty of Brétigny of 8 May 1360, by which the English acquired Aquitaine in full sovereignty, was the long-term consequence of the campaign.
The French counter-strategy
The French response to the English chevauchée, developed by Charles V and Bertrand du Guesclin in the Caroline phase, was a strategy of avoidance. The French refused the pitched battle that the English wanted, harried the chevauchée with a flying column of routier companies, and used the time bought by the avoidance to recover the territory that the English had occupied. The strategy was highly successful. By the truce of Leulinghem in 1389, the French had recovered all the territory ceded at Brétigny except Calais and a thin coastal strip around Bordeaux.
The French counter-strategy is sometimes described as a “scorched-earth” policy. The description is misleading. The French did not, in general, destroy their own crops. They refused to give battle, withdrew their garrisons into the fortified towns, and waited for the English chevauchée to exhaust itself in a hostile countryside. The strategy was, in the standard reading of Rogers, the most important military innovation of the Caroline phase. It made the English chevauchée of the Edwardian style impossible.
The chevauchée as total war
The chevauchée has sometimes been described as a form of total war, in which the civilian population is the deliberate target of military operations. The description is partly correct and partly misleading. The chevauchée did, in fact, target the civilian population: the burning of crops, the sacking of towns, the taking and ransoming of prisoners were all features of the operation. The English army, however, was not acting in the modern sense of total war. The army was disciplined, the operations were conducted under the rules of the chivalric code, and the principal object of the devastation was to provoke a battle and to gather plunder, not to annihilate the enemy’s population. The chevauchée was a form of economic warfare, designed to force the enemy’s government to make concessions. The destruction of the enemy’s resources was a means, not an end.
The decline of the chevauchée
The chevauchée declined in importance in the Lancastrian phase, as the development of professional armies, the increasing use of gunpowder artillery, and the changing strategic objectives of the war made large-scale cavalry operations less effective. The English campaign of 1415, Henry V’s march from Harfleur to Agincourt, has some of the features of a chevauchée, but the operation was conducted on a much smaller scale than the Edwardian chevauchées, and the principal object was the provocation of a battle, not the devastation of the French countryside. The long French reconquest of the 1440s and 1450s was a campaign of sieges, not of chevauchées.
Significance
The chevauchée is the English strategic instrument that explains both the successes and the limits of the Edwardian phase. The system was highly effective in conditions in which the English army was disciplined, the French refused battle, and the political object was the destruction of the enemy’s will to fight. The system was much less effective in conditions in which the French adopted a strategy of avoidance, in which the English army was operating in hostile country without secure lines of communication, and in which the political object was the occupation of territory. The system, in the standard reading of Rogers and Sumption, was the reason the Edwardian phase ended where it did. The French counter-strategy was the reason the Caroline phase ended where it did.