Who Was the Black Prince?
Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall (1330–1376), known to posterity as the Black Prince, was the eldest son and heir of Edward III and the most famous English soldier of the Hundred Years’ War. He fought at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, where he commanded the English vanguard at the age of sixteen; he led the army at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, where he captured King John II of France; he governed the duchy of Aquitaine from 1362 to 1372; and he died in 1376, a year before his father, bequeathing to his son Richard II a succession crisis that would end the Plantagenet line.
The epithet “Black Prince” is later than the man. The earliest known use in English is in a manuscript of the early sixteenth century; the French and Spanish sources of his own lifetime call him simply the Prince of Wales, the Prince of Aquitaine, or, mockingly after 1372, the Prince of Bordeaux. The most common explanation of the name is that it referred to the dark armour he was said to have worn at Crécy; another is that it referred to the vengeance he exacted on the Limousin in 1370. Neither is supported by any contemporary evidence.
Early years and Crécy
Edward of Woodstock was born on 15 June 1330 at Woodstock Palace in Oxfordshire, the eldest son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault. He was created Earl of Chester in 1333, Duke of Cornwall in 1337 (the first English duke), and Prince of Wales in 1343. He was brought up in the household of the chancery, was educated in arms, and was married to Joan of Kent, the “Fair Maid of Kent,” in 1361.
The prince’s first major engagement was the Battle of Crécy on 26 August 1346. Edward III had invaded Normandy in July, conducted a chevauchée through the duchy, and was retreating north to the English-held territory of Ponthieu when the French king, Philip VI, caught him near the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu. The English army, perhaps 9,000 strong, was substantially outnumbered; the king divided it into three divisions and gave the vanguard, the most exposed position, to his son. The Black Prince was sixteen. The French attacks broke against the longbow and the dismounted men-at-arms; the prince’s division was hard-pressed, and a messenger was sent to the king asking for help. Edward’s reply, in the Froissart tradition, was that he would not lift a finger: the boy must win his spurs. The boy did.
The story may be the invention of a generation that wanted to celebrate the young prince, but the political fact it records is real. The prince had commanded an army in a major battle, and the English aristocracy treated him as a proven captain. The Froissart of the later books, working from eyewitnesses, treats the prince’s behaviour at Crécy as the model of a young man who had learned the trade of war.
Poitiers and the French king
The Battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356 was the prince’s masterpiece. He was returning from a chevauchée through southern France with perhaps 6,000 men, heavily outnumbered by the army of King John II, when the French caught him near the village of Maupertuis, south of Poitiers. The prince, advised by John Chandos and the Captal de Buch, chose a defensive position behind a sunken road and a hedge-line, dismounted his men-at-arms, and waited. The French attacked in successive waves, and the longbow, fired in disciplined volleys, broke each attack in turn. The king himself was captured on the field and led to the prince’s tent. The prince, in the most-cited gesture of the war, received John with reverence: he served the captive king at supper and escorted him on the long ride to Bordeaux, calling him “my lord” throughout.
The political consequences were enormous. The ransom of King John was set at 4 million écus; the Treaty of Brétigny of 1360 was the ransom settlement; the English crown gained, on paper, full sovereignty over Aquitaine, Ponthieu, and Calais. The prince returned to England in 1357, was given a hero’s welcome, and began the long political career that would end in Aquitaine.
Prince of Aquitaine
In July 1362 Edward III granted his son the duchy of Aquitaine in full sovereignty. The prince moved to Bordeaux, set up a brilliant Anglo-Gascon court, and governed the duchy for ten years. The principality was, on paper, one of the most extensive and most prosperous in Christendom. It was also one of the most difficult to govern: a duchy held of the French crown, populated by French-speaking subjects who were politically English and who resented both the English tax-collectors and the longbowmen garrisoned in their towns.
The prince’s regime in Aquitaine was, by the standards of the time, energetic and unpopular. He maintained a large standing army, financed by a fouage (hearth tax) and by the ransoms of French and Castilian prisoners. He intervened in the Castilian civil war in 1367 — the campaign of Najera, in support of Pedro the Cruel — and returned with a Pyrrhic victory. The Aquitanian barons complained to Charles V of France. In 1369 Charles reopened the war.
The prince’s last campaign was the relief of Limoges in September 1370. He took the city by storm, sacked it, and earned a reputation for cruelty that, more than his armour, may have given rise to the later epithet. He returned to England in January 1371, ill, and retired to his estates. The illness — chronic diarrhoea, possibly amoebic dysentery, possibly a recurrence of the infection contracted in Castile — did not lift. He died at Westminster on 8 June 1376, aged 45.
The reputation of the Black Prince
The reputation of the Black Prince is one of the great acts of construction in English memory. Froissart, who knew the prince’s household and the veterans of his campaigns, treats him as the model of the chivalric prince. Thomas Walsingham, writing in the next generation, gives a more critical portrait, blaming the prince for the disasters of the 1370s. The Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon and the Gesta Henrici Quinti place the prince in the dynastic propaganda of the reign. The Victorian cult of the Black Prince — chivalric, pious, doomed — is the version of the story that has come down to English popular memory, and it is the one that Shakespeare inherited.
The modern historiography is more sceptical. Jonathan Sumption, in the second and third volumes of The Hundred Years’ War (1999, 2009), treats the prince as a brilliant but ultimately disastrous figure: a soldier whose victories were personal, whose political judgment was poor, and whose fiscal exactions ruined the duchy he was supposed to defend. Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp (2014) is more sympathetic, but emphasises the strategic cost of Najera. The consensus of recent scholarship is that the Black Prince won three of the great English battles of the war and lost the war.
The Black Prince’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral — his effigy, with the surcoat and the gauntlets, and the heraldic quartering of England, France, Aquitaine, and Chester — is the principal physical monument. The site treats the prince within the Edwardian phase, the Edward III cluster, and the Najera long-tail article.