What Was the Battle of Verneuil?
The Battle of Verneuil, fought on 17 August 1424, was a major English victory in the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years’ War, won by John, Duke of Bedford, regent of France for the infant Henry VI, over a Franco-Scottish army led by John Stewart, Earl of Buchan (the French constable) and Archibald Douglas, 4th Earl of Douglas. The French and Scottish losses were disproportionate to the size of the engagement: the Scottish contingent was effectively annihilated, and the English gained a breathing space of four years before the French recovery began in earnest. The English themselves called it a “second Agincourt,” and the comparison was not absurd.
The strategic situation in 1424
The two years after Henry V’s death on 31 August 1422 had been years of consolidation. Bedford, the third son of Henry IV and the most capable English commander of the war after Henry V’s own death, had secured Normandy and the Channel coast, sealed an alliance with Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1423, and was pressing the Dauphin’s forces south of the Loire. The Dauphin Charles, the future Charles VII, controlled a rump kingdom centred on Bourges and the Auvergne. His position was weak, but his legitimacy — he was the disinherited heir of Charles VI by the Treaty of Troyes — was intact.
The French response was to seek fresh military support. The Auld Alliance of 1295 was renewed in the form of a substantial Scottish expedition. The earl of Buchan, the French constable since 1425, brought perhaps 6,000–7,000 men, including a contingent of French men-at-arms and a substantial number of Scottish knights, men-at-arms, and archers. Archibald Douglas, 4th Earl of Douglas, brought the largest single component — a Scottish force of perhaps 4,000–5,000, hardened by recent campaigning in the Anglo-Scottish war. Jean, Duke of Alençon, brought a smaller French contingent. The combined force moved into Normandy in mid-August 1424 and camped near the town of Verneuil-sur-Avre, in the Lieuvin, intending to threaten the English-held routes into the duchy.
The opposing forces
The English force at Verneuil was smaller in numbers — perhaps 6,000–8,000 — but it was the best field army England had put in the field since Agincourt. Bedford himself commanded, with the earl of Salisbury (the son of the Salisbury killed at Orléans in 1428) and Lord Talbot, the future Earl of Shrewsbury, leading the vanguard. The army was composed of veterans of Agincourt and the Norman campaigns, with the usual English mix of dismounted men-at-arms and longbowmen. A small Burgundian contingent under the count of Aumale was attached.
The Franco-Scottish army was heterogeneous, and the command structure was complicated. Buchan was the constable of France and the senior officer; Douglas, a proud and experienced soldier, was the de facto field commander of the Scottish contingent. The two had not worked together before, and the command arrangements were improvised. The army deployed with the Scottish in the centre and on the right, the French under Alençon on the left, and the archers — both French crossbowmen and the more dangerous Scottish archers — in a thin screen in front.
The battle
Bedford, advised by his experienced captains, chose his ground carefully. He deployed his army in a strong position along a hedge-lined lane that ran from the town of Verneuil to a clearing in the forest of Bourgthéroulde, with a broad ditch in front and the town of Verneuil in his rear. He ordered the houses of a hamlet in his front to be demolished, opening the killing ground to his archers. The deployment, as Anne Curry notes, was essentially the Agincourt deployment adapted to a defensive battle.
The Franco-Scottish army attacked on the morning of 17 August. The Scottish archers opened the engagement with a hail of arrows; the English longbowmen replied. The dismounted Scottish men-at-arms, on the right, drove into the English line with great ferocity. The fighting was hand-to-hand for several hours, and the outcome was in doubt. The turning point was the failure of the French under Alençon to support the Scottish attack: Alençon’s division was driven back by an English counter-attack led by Salisbury, and the duke himself was killed on the field. The Scottish contingent, unsupported, was gradually enveloped. Douglas himself was killed, fighting on foot in the thick of the English line. Buchan, the French constable, was captured, as was a substantial proportion of the French and Scottish leadership.
The slaughter at the end of the battle was unusual even by the standards of the war. The English cavalry, having been held in reserve, were now committed to the pursuit; the chroniclers record that almost no Scottish knight survived the rout. The English losses were light, perhaps a few hundred; the Franco-Scottish losses ran into the low thousands, and the Scottish army in France effectively ceased to exist as a coherent force.
The political consequences
The English treated Verneuil as the equivalent of Agincourt. The duke of Bedford was given a pension of 1,000 marks a year by the English parliament in recognition of the victory; the war-weary commons voted a subsidy in November 1424 on the strength of the news. The French position, by contrast, was now catastrophic. The duke of Alençon was dead; the constable of France was a prisoner in England; the Scottish army, on which Charles had relied for a generation, was destroyed; the Dauphin’s best remaining commanders were being hunted through central France. For four years the English controlled the war.
The longer consequences were less favourable. The Scottish losses at Verneuil — perhaps a quarter of the Scottish nobility in a single afternoon — were a wound that did not heal. James I of Scotland, released from English captivity in 1424, made his peace with Henry VI in 1428; the Auld Alliance was effectively suspended. The English, by destroying the Scottish army, had removed their own best justification for an invasion of France from the north. When the French recovery began in 1429, the English would not be able to count on a diversion from Scotland.
The historiography
The English sources are the Gesta Henrici Quinti continuator, the Brut chronicle, and the Annales of John Strecche; the French side is represented by the Bourgeois de Paris and by Enguerrand de Monstrelet’s Chroniques. The standard modern treatment in English is Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History (2005) and her The Battle of Agincourt: An Anatomy (2020), both of which place Verneuil in the larger context of the Lancastrian war effort. Jonathan Sumption’s fourth volume, Cursed Kings (2015), is the indispensable single account. The site treats Verneuil within the Lancastrian phase and within the Bedford regency cluster.