Battle of Verneuil, 1424: the second Agincourt

The Burgundian chronicler Jean de Wavrin, in a judgment the Victorian historian James Ramsay quotes, set Verneuil beside Agincourt and Cravant and called it the most dreadful and the best fought of the three. On a summer day in 1424 two armies of men in plate armor met on foot in the fields north of the town, and when the fighting ended the Scottish army in France had all but ceased to exist.²

Background: two kings of France

France in 1424 had two kings. By the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 the mad Charles VI had recognized Henry V of England as his heir and disinherited his own son, the Dauphin Charles, in whose presence the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, had been murdered at Montereau in 1419. When both Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422, Henry's claim passed to his son Henry VI, a baby less than a year old, while the Dauphin took the title of king and ruled from Bourges over most of France south of the Loire.³

The child's uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, became regent in France. His first task, as J. A. Cannon puts it in the Oxford Companion to British History, was to keep Henry V's gains and if possible extend them. The Dauphin, short of money and men, leaned heavily on Scottish soldiers. A Scottish army had been fighting in France since 1419, and at Baugé in March 1421 it had beaten the English and killed Henry V's brother, the Duke of Clarence.⁴ › Battle of Agincourt, 1415

Armies and commanders

Bedford was the dead king's brother. With him at Verneuil were the Earl of Salisbury and the Earl of Suffolk. His army was raised from fresh troops sent over from England and from the English garrisons of Normandy, with Burgundian allies alongside.⁵

The Dauphin's army was led by its Scottish commanders. Archibald Douglas, fourth Earl of Douglas, was a veteran of the wars with England who had lost an eye at Homildon Hill in 1402 and been taken prisoner again at Shrewsbury the next year. As a prisoner of the English he had helped negotiate for the release of the captive Scottish king, James I; Ramsay notes that he had even promised to serve Henry V if James were freed, a promise he did not keep. He came to France in the spring of 1424 with new Scottish troops, and the Dauphin made him Duke of Touraine. His son-in-law John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, was already Constable of France.⁶

Beside them stood the French nobility under the Duke of Alençon, the Count of Aumale and the Viscount of Narbonne, and a body of Italian mercenary men-at-arms hired from Milan, heavily armored horsemen whom BritishBattles.com describes as Lombards and Castilians and Ramsay as Milanese and Gascons.⁷

The numbers are uncertain. BritishBattles.com gives Bedford about 10,000 men and the Dauphinists about 15,000. The chroniclers, Ramsay notes, gave the French 18,000 to 20,000; he himself doubted that the English had more than a few thousand. All agree that the Franco-Scottish army was the larger.⁸

The battle in phases

Ivry and the ruse at Verneuil

In the summer of 1424 the English were besieging Ivry, west of Paris, whose garrison had agreed to surrender in mid-August if it was not relieved. The Dauphin's army marched north to save it, but its senior French commanders, mindful of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, did not want to face English archers in a pitched battle, and Ivry fell without a fight. Instead they turned on Verneuil and took it by a trick: Scots posing as English were let in at the gate.⁹

Bedford followed them. Before the battle he sent away his Burgundian allies; BritishBattles.com notes that the sources give no reason, while Ramsay records that their leader L'Isle-Adam was sent back to the siege of Nesle. In the Dauphin's camp the argument over whether to fight went on to the last. The older French commanders wanted to avoid battle; the Scots, confident after Baugé, and the younger French lords insisted on it.¹⁰

The two lines

On 17 August the Franco-Scottish army drew up on the open ground north of the town, across the road from Damville. Both sides fought on foot. Bedford placed his dismounted men-at-arms in the center, taking the right himself and giving the left to Salisbury, with his archers on the wings behind their sharpened stakes. The horses and baggage were packed together in the rear under a guard of archers. Opposite them the French and Scottish men-at-arms dismounted too, the Scots facing Salisbury; only the mercenary horsemen stayed mounted, on the wings.¹¹

The cavalry charge and the melee

The mercenary cavalry opened the battle, charging around the English flanks toward the baggage, and then, by every account, turned to plunder. BritishBattles.com says they scattered the archers of the rear guard and looted the camp; Ramsay, following Wavrin, says they could not break the living barricade of tethered horses and dispersed to loot elsewhere.¹²

Meanwhile the two lines of men-at-arms met head on, with war cries of "Saint George!" and "Saint Denis!", and fought with swords and axes once the spears were useless. Ramsay and HistoryNet's Jon Guttman both put the struggle at about three quarters of an hour. The French left gave way and fled toward Verneuil, where many drowned in the town moat because, Ramsay writes, the garrison would not open the gates.¹³

Turning point: the Scots surrounded

The Scots held on longest, against Salisbury's division. How they were broken depends on the source. In BritishBattles.com's account Bedford rallied his men at the moat and brought them back into the Scots' rear, while the regrouped archers struck their flank. In Ramsay's, the archers of the baggage guard, having beaten off the mercenary horse, fell fresh on the enemy's flanks, and the English broke the line at several points. Either way the Scots were caught between attacks from several sides, and the mercenary horsemen came back too late to help.¹⁴

The English gave the Scots no quarter, Guttman writes. Douglas, his son James and Buchan were killed with many Scottish knights. Of the French leaders, Aumale, Ventadour, Tonnerre and Narbonne died, and Alençon and Marshal La Fayette were taken prisoner. Narbonne's body was hanged on a gibbet on Bedford's orders, for his part in the murder at Montereau.¹⁵

Aftermath

The cost is given differently. Bedford, in a letter written two days after the battle, put the enemy dead at 7,262, a figure both Ramsay and BritishBattles.com cite; Guttman gives 6,000 of the enemy killed. For the English, Guttman and the estimates Ramsay reports agree on about 1,600 dead. Ramsay, wary of all the figures, concludes only that the slaughter was great and that Bedford, who had no men to spare, felt his own losses deeply.¹⁶

Verneuil was hailed at the time as a second Agincourt, and the Oxford Companion sums it up as the English archers repeating their success of nine years before. It crippled the Army of Scotland: Ramsay judges that with this defeat the substantial cooperation of the Scots in the Hundred Years' War came practically to an end. Bedford went on with the methodical conquest of Maine and Anjou.¹⁷

For the Dauphin it was a heavy blow. Rickard writes that it seriously weakened his position, and Britannica describes a king who after Verneuil was short of money, unable to reconquer his kingdom and unable to make peace with Burgundy. Alençon was ransomed at the cost of nearly everything he owned and later rode beside Joan of Arc.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

Within five years the war turned. The English laid siege to Orléans in October 1428, and the arrival of Joan of Arc the following spring began the recovery that ended with the English driven out of France. By then the Scots who had fought for the Dauphin since 1419 were no longer a major force in the war.¹⁹ › Joan of Arc

The Scottish dead were remembered in France. Britannica records that Douglas was buried in the cathedral of Tours, the capital of his short-lived duchy of Touraine, where a memorial to him and to Buchan, killed on the same field, can still be seen.²⁰