Hilaire Belloc - The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc

In this opening section I will describe the great ride of Edward the Black Prince from the Dordogne to the Loire, and show by what a march the raid proceeded to its unexpected crisis in the final battle.

I have said that the Black Prince’s object (apart from booty, which was a main business in all these rapid darts of the time) was to draw the pressure from the English troops in the north.

As a fact, the effort was wasted for any such purpose. Lancaster, who commanded in the north, was already in retreat before the Black Prince had started, but that commander in the south could not, under the conditions of the time, learn the fact until he had set off. Further, the Black Prince hoped, by this diversion of a raid up from the south through the centre of France, to make it easier for King Edward, his father, to cross over and prosecute the war in Normandy. As a fact, the King of England never started upon that expedition, but his son thought he was about to do so, and said as much in a letter to the Mayor of London.

The point of departure which the Black Prince chose for this dash to the north was Bergerac upon the Dordogne, and the date upon which he broke camp was Thursday, the 4th August 1356.

His force was an extremely small and a very mobile one; 3500 men-at-arms—that is, fully armoured gentlemen—were the nucleus of it; 2500 archers accompanied them, and it is remarkable that these archers he mounted . Besides these 6000 riding men, he took with him 1000 lightly armed foot-soldiers, and thus, with a little band of no more than 7000 combatants all told, he began the adventure. He had no intention of risking action. It was his desire to take booty, to harry, to compel the French king to come south in his pursuit, and when that enemy should be close upon him, at whatever stage this might be in his own northern progress, to turn and ride back south as rapidly as he had ridden north. Thus he would draw the French feudal levies after him, and render what he had been told was the forthcoming English expedition to Normandy an easy matter, free from opposition. As things turned out, he was able to ride north as far as the Loire before his enemy was upon him, and it gives one an idea of the scale on which this great raid was planned, that from the point on the Dordogne whence he started, to the point on the Loire where he turned southward, was in a straight line no less than a hundred and fifty miles. As a fact, his raid northward came to much more, for he went round to the east in a great bend before he came to the neighbourhood of the French forces, and his total advance covered more than two hundred miles of road.

Of the 7000 who marched with him, perhaps the greater part, and certainly half, were Gascon gentlemen from the south who were in sympathy with the English occupation of Aquitaine, or, having no sentiment one way or the other, joined in the expedition for the sake of wealth and of adventure. Of these were much the most of the men-at-arms. But the archers were for the most part English.

Raid though it was, the Black Prince’s advance was not hurried. He proposed no more than to summon southward the French king by his efforts, and it was a matter of some indifference to him how far northward he might have proceeded before he would be compelled by the neighbourhood of the enemy’s forces to return. His high proportion of mounted men and the lightness of his few foot-soldiers were for local mobility rather than for perpetual speed; nor did the Black Prince intend to make a race of it until the pursuit should begin. Whenever that might be, he felt secure (though in the event his judgment proved to be wrong) in his power to outmarch any body the King of France might bring against him. He must further have thought that his chance of a rapid and successful retreat, and his power to outmarch any possible pursuers, would increase in proportion to the size of the force that might be sent after him.

The raid into the north began and was continued in a fashion not exactly leisurely, but methodically slow. It made at first through Périgueux to Brantôme. Thence up through the country of the watershed to Bellac. It turned off north-westward as far as Lussac, and thence broke back, but a little north of east, to Argenton.

It will be evident from the trace of such a route that it had no definite strategic purpose. It was a mere raid: a harrying of the land with the object of relieving the pressure upon the north. It vaguely held, perhaps, a further object of impressing the towns of Aquitaine with the presence of a Plantagenet force. But this last feature we must not exaggerate. The Black Prince did not treat the towns he visited as territory ultimately to be governed by himself or his father. He treated them as objects for plunder.

The pace and method with which all this early part of the business was conducted in the first three weeks of August may be judged by the fact that, measured along the roads the Black Prince followed, he covered between Bergerac and Argenton just on a hundred and eighty miles, and he did it in just under eighteen marching days. In other words, he kept to a fairly regular ten miles a day, and slowly rolled up an increasing loot without fatiguing his horses or his men.

From Argenton, which he thus reached quite unweakened on the 21st of August, he made Châteauroux (rather more than eighteen miles off, but not nineteen by the great road) in two days, reaching it on the 23rd. Thence he turned still more to the eastward, and passed by Issoudun towards Bourges. This last excursion or “elbow” in the road was less strategically motiveless than most of the march; for the Prince had had news that some French force under the son of the French king was lying at Bourges, and to draw off such a force southward was part of the very vague plan which he was following. Unlike that string of open towns which the mounted band had sacked upon their way, Bourges was impregnable to them, for it was walled and properly defended. They turned back from it, therefore, down the River Yevre towards the Cher Valley again, and upon the 28th of August reached Vierzon, having marched in the five days from Châteauroux the regulation ten miles a day; for they covered fifty miles or a little more.

This point, Vierzon, is an important one to note in the march. The town lies just to the south of a curious district very little known to English travellers, or, for that matter, to the French themselves. It is a district called the “Sologne,” that is, the “Solitarium” or “Desert.” For a space of something like forty miles by sixty a great isolated area of wild, almost uncultivatable, land intervenes between the valley of the Cher and that of the Loire. Only one road of importance traverses it, that coming from Paris and Orleans, and making across the waste for Vierzon to the south. No town of any size is discoverable in this desolate region of stagnant pools, scrub, low forest, and hunters.

It was such a situation on the outer edge of the Sologne which made Vierzon the outpost of Aquitaine, and having reached Vierzon, the Prince, in so far as he was concerned with emphasising the Plantagenet claim over Aquitaine, had reached his northern term. But his raid had, as we know, another object: that of drawing the French forces southward. And, with the characteristic indecision of feudal strategic aims, it occurred to the Black Prince at this stage to immix with that object an alternative, and to see whether he could not get across the Loire to join Lancaster’s force, which was campaigning in the West of France on the other side of that river.

At Vierzon Edward’s men came across the first resistance. A handful of John’s forces, irregulars hired by the French king under a leader most charmingly named “Grey Mutton,” skirmished to their disadvantage against the Anglo-Gascon force.