Poitiers 1356:The Capture of a King
The Battle of Poitiers generally sits in the middle of the Holy
Trinity of English longbow victories of the Hundred Years War,
flanked by Crecy and Agincourt. In some respects it was the most
devastating of the three for the losing side; the capture of
King John II triggered nearly a decade of political and social
crisis and brought the French Kingdom as near to irreversible
collapse as it was ever to come.
In other ways, though, it is the odd battle out. If Crecy and Agincourt can (albeit with a bit of fudging the historical record) credibly be presented as fitting a stereotype in which bone headed French aristocrats charge to their doom in a hail of English arrows, Poitiers is a bit different. English archery mattered, but there was much more scope for English (or more correctly Anglo-Gascon) knights and men-at-arms to show their chivalric accomplishments in close quarters confrontation with their peers.
The present book on this battle fits into the standard Osprey format; lavish illustrations, detailed maps of the campaign leading up to the battle and battle maps which make use of modern computer technology to give a three dimensional impression of the unfolding of the combat. In this scheme the illustrations are almost as important as the text since one important target audience is the war gaming fraternity. They are well done and the maps certainly clarify the rather confused preliminaries to the battle, which did little credit to the scouting and reconnaissance efforts of either side. I found the battle maps took a bit of getting used to; the very detail of the computer generated "countryside" does not entirely mesh with the more traditional depiction of armies and their sub units as static blocks of colour whose movements have to be shown by arrows.
The text naturally focuses on the battle and the campaign which led up to it; the sections designed to set it in the wider historical context (especially that which seeks to trace the consequences of the French defeat) are at times rather rushed and over compressed. Nicolle's review of the two armies also contains some surprising gaps; he makes no effort to estimate the proportion of Gascons in the Black Prince's force or to guess how many English longbowmen (as against Gascon crossbowmen, for instance) were present on the field (21). No doubt there are source limitations here but the impression given almost by default is that this was a primarily English victory when in reality it was Anglo-Gascon. His use of Lot's estimates for the size of the French forces (23) almost certainly underplays their numbers. Lot notoriously never saw a French medieval army whose size he did not want to diminish, though he rarely applied the same hypercritical approach to the enemy. Nicolle does however make some valuable points about the problems the English faced over high attrition rates of horses shipped to Bordeaux (11). Sadly he does not source the intriguing statement (23) that more French aristocrats died on the field of battle than from the Black Death in this period.
Nicolle's account of the battle (57-81) makes it very clear that the French commanders, contrary to legend, were learning lessons and trying to find ways of countering English archery. These included the employment of armoured horses in an initial cavalry assault on the wings and making the main attack on foot with shortened lances (the latter suggested by the Earl of Douglas, bringing Scottish experience to bear on the issue). If anything Nicolle slightly underplays the initial effectiveness of the armoured horses, which only faltered when the archers were able to shoot into their unprotected rumps. Nevertheless, as his account makes abundantly clear, this was no walk over and one can only speculate on the outcome had King John been prepared to allow the Dauphin's "battle" to continue pressing its attack a bit longer or had ordered the Duc d'Orleans to advance in its support. As it was, the retreat of the Dauphin's unit seems to have led Orleans and his men to quit the field with an abruptness which must have fuelled the subsequent claims that "Good King John" had been betrayed by the nobility.
Nicolle makes as much sense of a battle as is likely to be achievable given the sources, which are often contradictory on details . Within the limits of its genre this is a very useful and informative study of a battle which, despite the scale of the ultimate Anglo-Gascon triumph, fell into the category that a later victorious commander would describe as a "damned close run thing".