1356

still lies behind the altar of the abbey church at Nouaillé-Maupertuis, is entirely fictional. All four gospels tell the story of Saint Peter drawing a sword in Gethsemane on the night of Christ’s arrest, then using the blade to slice off the ear of the high priest’s servant. The English have an old tradition that Joseph of Arimathea brought the sword to Britain and gave it to Saint George, but the Archdiocese of Pozna´n, in Poland, has a much better claim to the weapon, indeed the sword is one of their most precious possessions, and is on display in the Archdiocesan Museum. Is it the real thing? A sword in first century Palestine was most likely to have been a
gladius
, a Roman short sword, while the weapon in Poznan is a falchion, a broad-tipped long sword. Still, there it is, and folk can believe it to be the genuine article if they wish.
    I could not have written the novel without the help of several books, chief among them Jonathan Sumption’s
Trial by Fire
, which is the second volume of his history of the Hundred Years War. Peter Hoskins gallantly walked the complete length of both the Black Prince’s
chevauchée
s, and his story of those campaigns is told in his book
In the Steps of the Black Prince
. The best biography of Edward of Woodstock is Richard Barber’s
The Black Prince
. By far the most authoritative account of the longbow and its effect is
The Great Warbow
by Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy. Robert Hardy was generous in pointing me towards J. M. Tourneur-Aumont’s massive
La Bataille de Poitiers, 1356
. The most intimate picture of everyday life in fourteenth-century France is provided in Ann Wroe’s enchanting book
A Fool and His Money
. Other notable books are David Green’s
The Battle of Poitiers, 1356
,
The Black Prince’s Expedition
by H. J. Hewitt,
The Reign of Edward III
by W. Mark Ormrod, and
Edward III
by the same author. I owe thanks to all those historians.
    The Prince of Wales owed thanks to his men and offered it in annuities and outright gifts of money. Many of the archers received grants of timber or rights of pasturage. In France there was shock and outrage at the battle’s outcome, which was vented on the nobility. Poitiers was a disaster, propelling France into bankruptcy, chaos, and revolution. No wonder that Edward III, receiving the news of his son’s triumph, proclaimed ‘We rejoice in God’s bounty’.
    The war would continue, through Agincourt in 1415 and beyond, until eventually the French prevailed. But that is another story.

 

 
     
    It was the Duke of Wellington who remarked that one might as well try to write the story of a battle as write the history of a formal ball; every dancer will have a different recollection of the event, and rarely will two such recollections match. The difficulty of discovering what happened in a medieval battle is compounded by the dearth of memoirs. No participant of the battle of Poitiers left a description, though there are letters from such men, but the letters tend to announce the result of the battle rather than its course. The most interesting of those letters are reprinted in Richard Barber’s book
Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince
(Boydell Press, 1979), and that book also has long excerpts from the era’s chroniclers. It was those chroniclers who tried to record the history of their own times, but sadly none was present at the battle of Poitiers and so their descriptions are coloured by their sources (and possibly by their imaginations too).
    Jean Froissart, a Frenchman, is the most famous of such chroniclers. He wrote an enormous amount and is an important source for the history of western Europe between 1320 and 1400, but the modern consensus is that he made frequent mistakes! He wrote for an aristocratic audience and so accentuates chivalry, and his description of Poitiers was written long after the event. It might not be accurate, but it does illustrate how the battle was perceived by literate Europeans in the fourteenth century. So here, in a shortened and edited version, is his account of the battle of Poitiers:
     
    When the prince saw that he should have battle he said to his men: ‘Now, sirs, though we be but a small company (compared) to the puissance of our enemies, let us not be downhearted; for the victory lies not in the multitude of people, but as God will send it. If fortune says that the (day) be ours, we shall be the most honoured people of all the world; and if we die in our right