A Distant Mirror (29 page)

His trumpets sounded, and their echo, thrown back by the stone walls of Poitiers, rang through the woods “so that you would think the hills had called out to the valleys and that it had thundered in the clouds.” The English charge, in whole or in part on horseback, rushed down upon the King’s unit “like the wild boar of Cornwall.” The battle reached climactic fury “and none so hardy” wrote Chandos Herald, “whose heart was not dismayed.” “Beware, Father, to the right! Ware, to the left!” Philip cried as the blows descended. Knights grappled in personal combat, “each thinking of his own honor.” Attacked by the Prince’s charge in front and the Captal’s horsemen from the rear, the French fought in ferocious despair. Bleeding from multiple wounds, Geoffrey de Charny was cut down and killed still holding the
Oriflamme. The King’s guard, surrounding him in a mighty wedge, tottered under the assault. “Some, eviscerated, tread on their own entrails, others vomit forth their teeth, some still standing have their arms cut off. The dying roll about in the blood of strangers, the fallen bodies groan, and the proud spirits, abandoning their inert bodies, moan horribly.” The slain piled up around the flailing battle-ax of the King, who with his helmet knocked off was bleeding from two wounds on his face. “Yield, yield,” cried voices, “or you are a dead man!” In the midst of hoarse shouts and fierce contention to seize him, a French exile, Denis de Morbecque, banished for manslaughter and now serving the English, pressed forward and said, “Sire, I am a knight of Artois. Yield yourself to me and I will lead you to the Prince of Wales.” King Jean handed him his glove and surrendered.

With the loss of the King, the remaining French forces disintegrated, those who could flying for the gates of Poitiers to escape capture. English and Gascons of all ranks pursued wildly, greed overmastering exhaustion, and scrambled for prisoners under the very walls of the city. Some of the French turned in flight and captured their pursuers.

The defeat swept France of its leadership. In addition to the King, the Constable and both Marshals, and the bearer of the Oriflamme, who were either dead or taken, the victors captured one fighting archbishop, 13 counts, 5 viscounts, 21 barons and bannerets, and some 2,000 knights, squires, and men-at-arms of the gentry. Too many to be taken back, most were released on a pledge to bring their ransoms to Bordeaux before Christmas.

The number of killed, a different figure in every account, was at least several thousand, of whom 2,426 were of the nobility. The fact that they equaled or outnumbered the captured was evidence of valiant fighting, but, unfortunately for France, the living who fled made a greater impression than the dead who fought. The
Grand Chronique
admits openly that battalions “fled shamefully and cravenly,” and the
Chronique Normande
somberly concludes, “The mortality of this battle was not so great as the shame.”

That was the great debris of Poitiers. Citizens watching from the city walls witnessed inglorious retirement and hectic flight, and their report spread throughout France. The retreat of Orléans’ battalion which lost the day is hardly explicable except by the disaffected mood of nobles antagonized by the King. Certainly many were present that day who would not have grieved at misfortune to the monarchy, and it
would have taken the shouts of only a few to induce panic. Whatever the cause, the effect was to deepen and spread mistrust of the noble estate and loosen confidence in the ordained structure of society.

Popular sentiment showed itself at once against lords returning to raise their ransoms. They were so “hated and blamed by the commoners,” reports Froissart, that they had difficulty in gaining admittance to the towns and sometimes even to their own estates. Peasants of a village in Normandy belonging to the
Sire de Ferté-Fresnel, seeing their seigneur come riding through with only a squire and a valet and without his sword, raised the cry, “Here is one of the traitors who fled from the battle!” They rushed upon the three riders, pulled the lord from his horse, and beat him up. He returned a few days later, better armed, to take vengeance, killing one villager in the process. Though this small outburst was quickly crushed, it was an omen. Many seigneurs returned to face gibes or sudden hostility and had trouble raising the traditional aid for the lord’s ransom. To find the funds, many were forced to sell all their furnishings or free their serfs for payment. A residue of
ruined knights was a by-product of Poitiers.

The cry of “Traitor!” was not a local voice only, but a bewildered people’s explanation of the inexplicable. It was the eternal cry of conspiracy, of stab in the back. How else could the great King of France have been taken and the great host of French chivalry defeated by a handful of “archers and brigands” except by betrayal? A contemporary polemic in verse called “
Complaint of the Battle of Poitiers” explicitly charges,

The author, an unknown cleric, accuses certain persons of having by “their cupidity sold secrets of the Royal Council to the English” and, on being discovered and “kicked out of the Council by the King,” of conspiring to destroy him and his children. The flight of these false men, “treacherous, disloyal, infamous and perjured,” was a planned betrayal; in them the nobility was dishonored and France too. They have denied God; they are men of pride, greed and haughty manners,

The beard complained of, originally a mark of penitence, had lately been worn in narrow forked style as a worldy fashion and now became an object of satire linked with running away.

The “Complaint” has only praise for Jean II, who fought to the end with his little son beside him. In public opinion he became a hero. However inept as sovereign and captain, his personal valor, poignantly emphasized by the “little son,” glorified him in the eyes of his subjects and gave France a focus for the recovery of honor. The “Complaint” hopes that God will send “good men of great power” to avenge the defeat and bring back the King, and concludes significantly:

After the citizens of Poitiers had buried the bodies outside, the Mayor proclaimed mourning for the captured King and forbade celebration of any feast day or festival. In Languedoc the Estates General prohibited for the space of a year, so long as the King was not delivered, the wearing of gold, silver, or pearls, ornamented or scalloped robes and hats, and entertainment by minstrels and jongleurs. The Dauphin and his brothers, though judged unfavorably in comparison with young Philip, were not included in the blame of the nobles. Charles on his return to Paris “was received with honor by the people, grief-stricken by the capture of his father the King.” They felt, according to Jean de Venette, that somehow he would bring about the King’s release “and the whole country of France would be saved.”

Why the flight? Why the defeat? To Villani in Italy the extraordinary event seemed “unbelievable”; Petrarch, learning about it in Milan on return from a journey, was no less stunned; the English themselves thought their victory a miracle, and succeeding generations have found it hard to fathom. Militarily, French numerical superiority was nullified by a failure of command. The 2,000 Genoese crossbowmen, according to some reports, were not even used, although others report the contrary. The comparative ineffectiveness of French archery throughout the century is a puzzle. Towns and villages of France maintained companies of archers who were encouraged by special privileges, and men of the Beauvaisis, adjoining Picardy, considered themselves in individual skill the best in the world. Yet they were never properly combined in action with knights and men-at-arms, because French chivalry scorned to share its dominance of the field with commoners.

Separatism in Normandy and Brittany, failure to resist the Black Prince’s raid in Languedoc, and the intrigues and betrayals of Charles of Navarre were aspects of the disunity that lost the Battle of Poitiers. The right of independent withdrawal, which the Order of the Star and the ordinance of 1351 had tried to suppress, had not been yielded by the nobles in their own minds. The defeat at Poitiers was a pyrrhic triumph of baronial independence.

It was also, on the English side, a victory of generalship that made up for fatigue and inferior numbers. The Prince could give orders that were obeyed and, with moral leadership more secure than Jean’s, and battalion chiefs on whom he could rely, could control what happened. He kept himself where he could view the battle and direct movements, he was served by toughened, experienced soldiers, and he had two essentials for winning: no possibility of retreat and a will that goaded men to the last ounce of fight. As a commander, in Froissart’s words, he was “courageous and cruel as a lion.”

Spent by combat and eager to bring his royal prize out of reach of any rescue attempt, the Prince made no further effort toward a juncture with Lancaster, but turned south at once for Bordeaux, dragging added baggage wagons filled with luxurious fittings including furred mantles, jewels, and illuminated books from the French camp. Released by the Dauphin after the defeat, the French nobles scattered to protect their own domains; none rallied to attempt a rescue of the King along the 150-mile march to Bordeaux. The Cardinals followed there to renew pressure for peace, and while terms of a settlement were under negotiation, English and Gascons engaged in a massive commerce of buying and selling prisoners and shares in ransoms with heated disputes over who had captured whom, and no little ill-will generated in the process. Complaints were heard that the archers had killed too many who might have been held for ransom. When the Prince proposed to take the King of France to England as a prisoner, the Gascons angrily claimed a share in his capture and had to be appeased by a payment of 100,000 florins, raised from a first offer of 60,000 they had spurned.

With the French King in their hands, the English were in a position to drive a crushing bargain. But though the French negotiators were prisoners themselves and the Dauphin at home was beleaguered by events in Paris, the French balked at the hard terms proposed. The winter passed with no agreement reached except for another truce to last two years. In May 1357, seven months after the battle, the Black Prince took King Jean with his son and other noble prisoners back to London, while in the aftermath of defeat the Third Estate grasped for control in Paris.

Chapter 7

L
ong exasperated by the anarchy of royal finance and the venality of royal ministers, the Third Estate of Paris seized upon the decapitation of the monarchy to try to impose some form of constitutional control. The summoning of an Estates General to grant money for defense in the crisis provided their opportunity. As soon as the 800 delegates could meet in Paris in October, the inexperienced Dauphin, humiliated and frightened by the defeat at Poitiers, had to report the battle’s shameful outcome and ask the Estates for aids to deliver the King and defend the realm. The bourgeois, chief creditors of the state, made up half the delegates and listened coldly while King Jean’s Chancellor, Pierre de la Forêt, supported the request. After voting themselves into a standing Committee of Eighty, including nobles and clergy, and allowing the rest gratefully to go home, the Estates prepared to confront the Dauphin with their demands. They asked to speak to him privately, believing that without his councillors he would be more easily cowed.

The major figure among them, who was to be the moving spirit of the coming eruption, was the Provost of Merchants, Etienne Marcel, a rich draper whose post was equivalent to that of Mayor of Paris. He had been the spokesman when the Estates of 1355 made manifest their mistrust of the royal government. Marcel represented the mercantile magnates of the Third Estate, the producers and businessmen of medieval society who over the last 200 years had achieved an influence, in practice if not in status, equal to that of the great prelates and nobles.

His first demand on behalf of the Estates was dismissal of the seven most notoriously venal of the royal councillors whose property was to
be confiscated and who were to be barred forever from holding public office. In their place a Council of Twenty-eight, consisting of twelve nobles, twelve bourgeois, and four clerics, was to be appointed by the Estates, and on that understanding the Estates agreed to grant certain taxes in aid of the war. A final condition, which they would have done better to avoid, was the release from prison of Charles of Navarre.

They wanted him because his potential for trouble would put pressure on the Dauphin and because Navarre had an ally among them, a plotter like himself, who was the gray eminence of the reform movement. This was Robert le Coq, Bishop of Laon, a cleric of bourgeois origin and “dangerous” eloquence who through the avenue of the law had risen to favor and high office as King’s Advocate under Philip VI and to the Royal Council under Jean II. He owned a library, large for its time, of 76 books, of which 48 dealt with civil and canon law, reflecting his concern with problems of government, and seven were collections of sermons used for models of the oratorical art. Style and language were a medieval preoccupation of which Le Coq made himself a master. Appointed Bishop of Laon, he had stage-managed the exquisite reconciliations of Jean II and Charles of Navarre, whose ambitions he saw as the chariot of his own. He wanted to be Chancellor and hated both the King for not giving him the office and the existing Chancellor for having it.