Battle of Poitiers, 1356: the day England took a king

On the evening of 19 September 1356 a tired, hungry English army that had been trying for days to get away from the French sat down to supper in a field of vines and hedges near Poitiers. At the head of the table, by Froissart's account, sat a prisoner: John II, King of France. The young prince who had beaten him would not sit with him, but served him with his own hands. Few battles of the Middle Ages ended in so complete a reversal of fortune.²

Background: the prince's raids

Ten years after Edward III's victory at Crécy, the Hundred Years' War flared up again. Talks for a lasting peace had broken down, the truce ran out in 1355, and the English attacked France from several directions at once. Edward III's eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales, was sent to English-held Aquitaine with his own command.³

In the autumn of 1355 the prince led a great raid, a chevauchée, from Bordeaux deep into southern France, plundering and burning the undefended towns of one of the richest regions of the French crown. The aim was loot and the ruin of the enemy's revenues rather than conquest.⁴

In the summer of 1356 he set out again, northward through central France toward the Loire. At Romorantin he stormed a castle that refused to surrender. But King John II had gathered a large army and crossed the Loire to cut the English off from Bordeaux, and the prince turned south through Touraine and Poitou, slowed by his baggage and his plunder.⁵

John moved faster. On 17 September English scouts ran into French men-at-arms in the woods, and from the prisoners they took the prince learned that the king's army was already between him and home. He could not slip away without a fight. That night his men camped in a strong place among hedges, vines and bushes a few miles from Poitiers.⁶

Armies and commanders

The prince was 26 years old, a veteran of Crécy, where as a youth he had won his spurs. With him were seasoned captains: the Earls of Warwick, Suffolk and Salisbury, Sir John Chandos and Sir James Audley, and Gascon lords such as the Captal de Buch. Britannica credits Warwick with planning the English order of battle.⁷

King John II, then 37, had his four young sons with him, among them Charles, Duke of Normandy, the Dauphin and future Charles V. Under him served his brother the Duke of Orléans, the Duke of Bourbon, the Constable and two marshals of France and a great part of the French nobility. Froissart writes that no knight or squire dared stay at home for fear of dishonor.⁸

The numbers are uncertain, and the sources differ widely. Froissart has the prince's company at no more than 8,000 men, and his French scouts counted about 2,000 men-at-arms, 4,000 archers and 1,500 others; Louise Creighton gives 2,000 men-at-arms and 6,000 archers. Britannica gives about 12,000 English, adding that some historians put them at only about 7,000. For the French, Froissart wrote of 60,000, Creighton of 50,000, and Britannica estimates 40,000, or about 30,000 by some modern counts. On any reckoning the French outnumbered the English several times over.⁹

The battle in phases

The cardinal's truce. On Sunday 18 September, as the French formed for battle, the papal legate, Cardinal Talleyrand of Périgord, rode out from Poitiers and begged the king to let him try for peace. All day he went back and forth between the armies. The prince, short of food, was ready to talk if his honor was saved, but John would accept nothing less than the surrender of the prince and a hundred of his knights. The English used the day to dig ditches and throw up banks around their archers.¹⁰

The position. The prince's men stood on a slope among vineyards and thorny hedges. A single sunken lane, so narrow that only three or four horsemen could ride abreast, led up to them between hedges lined with archers. The weakest side of the position was closed off with the wagons.¹¹

The French plan. On the advice of Eustace de Ribemont, who had scouted the English line, the king dismounted almost his whole army. The men-at-arms cut their lances down to five feet and took off their spurs; only a picked body of some three hundred horsemen under the two marshals was to stay mounted and break the archers. Oman later called the idea of storming a hill with dismounted knights a fatal misreading of Crécy.¹²

The marshals' charge. On Monday 19 September the fighting began, perhaps when the French saw part of the English army moving and thought the prince was escaping; the prince himself wrote afterwards that his army had set off to march around the enemy. The marshals' horsemen rode into the lane, and the archers behind the hedges shot down their horses, which reared, turned and threw their riders. Sir James Audley, keeping a vow to be among the first into the fight, fought in the front rank with four squires, and the first French division was destroyed before it reached the prince.¹³

The Dauphin's division. The second division, under the Dauphin, came on foot up the slope. Here the sources part ways. Britannica describes a long, hard struggle in which the French almost broke through until the prince brought up his reserves. Froissart, followed by Creighton, has the division shaken by the rout in front of it and by English horsemen and archers falling on its flank, so that many of its knights mounted and rode away. The king's young sons were led off the field by their guardians.¹⁴

Orléans leaves the field. The third division, under the Duke of Orléans, did not fight at all. It withdrew from the field, and many knights went with it. Oman reckoned that about two thirds of the French army left without waiting for further attacks.¹⁵

Turning point: the king's last stand

That left King John and his own division, on foot, facing the whole English army. When the English men-at-arms saw the French divisions broken or gone, they took to their horses. Froissart gives Chandos the words that sent the prince forward: “Sir, take your horse and ride forth; this journey is yours.” At the same moment a few hundred horsemen and mounted archers, sent round under cover of the hill, struck the French in the flank and rear.¹⁶

The king fought bravely with an axe in his hands, his youngest son Philip, still a boy, at his side. Around them the French were surrounded and cut down or taken. At last a crowd of English and Gascon soldiers pressed around the king, each eager to claim him. He gave himself up to Denis de Morbeke, a knight from Artois banished from France who served the King of England, handing him his right gauntlet, and was nearly torn apart in the quarrel over his capture until the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cobham brought him to the prince.¹⁷

The pursuit went on to the gates of Poitiers, which the townspeople shut against the fleeing French, and many were killed in the street before them. That evening the prince gave the supper for his royal prisoner, served the king himself and praised his courage.¹⁸

Aftermath

Britannica puts the losses at about 1,000 English dead, and 2,500 French dead and 2,600 captured; Creighton writes of 6,000 French dead and seventeen counts among the prisoners. So many prisoners were taken that many were released on their word to bring their ransoms later. The prince led his army and his captives back to Bordeaux, where they spent the winter.¹⁹

In the spring of 1357 John was taken to England, where he was lodged in the Savoy palace in London and treated as an honored guest rather than a prisoner. France, meanwhile, fell into crisis. The Dauphin ruled in his father's name against the reformers of the Estates General and the Paris provost of merchants, Étienne Marcel; bands of discharged soldiers plundered the countryside; and in May 1358 the peasants of the north rose against the nobility in the Jacquerie, a revolt crushed in blood within weeks.²⁰

Peace came in 1360. By the Treaty of Brétigny, sealed in May and ratified at Calais in October, John's ransom was set at three million gold crowns, and France gave up Aquitaine and much of the southwest to Edward III. John was released, with hostages, among them his own sons, held in England as surety for the payments. When one of them, the Duke of Anjou, broke his parole and escaped, John returned to captivity in England of his own accord, and he died in London in April 1364.²¹

Legacy and memory

Poitiers stands with Crécy and Agincourt among the great English victories of the Hundred Years' War, and Britannica calls it the most significant engagement of the early war after Crécy. It is the only one of the three at which a King of France was taken. For Charles Oman it was a splendid tactical triumph won by a well-chosen position and the use of the archers, and it taught the French a hard lesson: for the rest of the war, he wrote, they did not again meet the English in a pitched battle, and under Charles V and Bertrand du Guesclin they won back by sieges and raids what John had lost.²² › Longbow vs crossbow

The victory made the prince the most famous soldier in Europe, but his later years were less glorious. As Prince of Aquitaine he ruled his principality badly, and the Spanish campaign that ended in his victory at Nájera in 1367 ruined his health and his finances. He died in 1376, before his father, and was buried in Canterbury Cathedral, where his tomb with his effigy in armor still stands.²³

Visiting the battlefield today

The battle was fought in the countryside southeast of Poitiers, around the village of Nouaillé-Maupertuis in the Vienne. Its fortified abbey, with Romanesque and classical buildings and a garden of medieval plants, is the place to start: the battlefield can be reached from the abbey site by road or through the woods along the Miosson stream, and walking routes start from the village. A long-distance footpath of the Poitiers tourist office runs from Poitiers past the abbey.²⁴ › 19 September in military history