1356

forced them to advance with their visors down, and each arrow blow, even if it did not pierce armour, was like being hit with a hammer, but the evidence suggests that the plate armour of the French was sufficient protection. The same thing was to happen at Agincourt. The French attacks there were inundated with arrows, yet still the men-at-arms reached Henry V’s line to engage in hand-to-hand fighting. And, of course, archers were formidable opponents in such fighting. The huge bodily strength needed to draw a longbow made them lethal when they wielded a pole-axe or any other hand weapon.
    The English prevailed at Poitiers. There were two main reasons. First, the Anglo-Gascon command was efficient. The army had mostly been together for more than two years, their commanders were experienced, and though there was undoubtedly some rivalry, those commanders cooperated and, above all, trusted each other. The Earl of Warwick began the day expecting to lead his battle in retreat, but changed his tactics when events dictated a change, and did it quickly and effectively. The young Earl of Salisbury commanded the defence of the English right with admirable stubbornness and a personal display of bravery. The final cavalry charge, ordered by the prince, was timed to perfection and was devastating. In contrast, the French command was clumsy in the extreme. King Jean fed his troops piecemeal into a battle from which many fled without orders, and there was bitter rivalry between some of his senior commanders.
    But the main reason for the Anglo-Gascon success was their discipline. They did not break the line. One man, Sir Humphrey Berkeley, did choose to leave the ranks and pursue the dauphin’s retreating men, presumably in hope of securing a rich prisoner, and was captured himself. His ransom was £2,000, a fortune, but he was the only captive taken by the French, while the English had a glut of high-ranking prisoners: the king himself, his son, the Archbishop of Sens, the Duke of Bourbon, Marshal Audrehem, the Counts of Vendôme, Dammartin, Tancarville, Joigny, Longueville, Eu, Ponthieu, Ventadour, and between two and three thousand French knights. Among the French dead were the Duke of Athènes, the Duke of Bourbon, Geoffrey de Charny (who carried the oriflamme), Constable Walter de Brienne, Marshal Clermont, the Bishop of Châlons, and some sixty or seventy other notables. Statistics for medieval battles are notoriously difficult, but it seems likely that the Anglo-Gascon army was about six thousand strong, of which one-third were archers, and that the French numbered about ten thousand. After the battle, heralds counted two and a half thousand French dead and a mere forty English or Gascons. The figure for the French appears credible, but are so few Anglo-Gascon casualties believable? There may have been some exaggeration by the winners, but the disparity also suggests that the greatest killing occurred after the French panicked. So long as men were in line, protected by their armour and supported by their neighbours, their chances of survival were high, but as soon as the line broke and men fled for their lives they became easy targets. There were certainly far too many bodies to be dealt with by the victors because, apart from those great nobles who could be identified, the rest were left on the field to rot, and stayed there till February when at last their remains were collected and buried.
    Between two and a half and three thousand Frenchmen were captured. The less important prisoners and those who were badly wounded were paroled, meaning they were allowed to go home on a promise not to fight against the English until their ransom was settled, but any man worth a large fortune was taken back to England and kept there till the ransom was paid. Warwick Castle, in its present form, was largely constructed on the ransoms of Frenchmen. Jonathan Sumption, in his indispensable book,
Trial by Fire
, reckons the total ransoms collected from Poitiers amounted to around £300,000. It is almost impossible to offer an equivalent value in today’s currencies, though one measure might be the price of ale, which today costs three thousand times what it did in the 1350s, so sufficient to say that many men became enormously wealthy. King Jean II’s ransom was set at six million gold écus, much of which was paid before his death in London in 1364.
    The name
la Malice
is an invention, and her connection with Saint Junien, whose body