Hi my name's Kevin Hicks and welcome to my Youtube channel the History Squad. Well I've been at it
again, I've been making models. Now what I'm going to do in the future is I'm actually going to cover
the for instance the black death and also the campaigns the chevauchées that went down Gascony,
Brittany and cover some of the sieges now just to note uh a great fun series to read is the Grail
Quest series of Bernard Cornwall. I was actually used by Bernard as some of the research for um
those books, those series of books, so you could actually look at me and think
yes it's an older version of Thomas of Hookton, you've got it yeah? Now I must make a note that
there will be included in this entire series, victories of the French over the English yeah
I'm working my way through them but at the moment we're going to cherry pick now we're going to go
for the battle of Poitiers yeah this is a major battle, uh 19th of September 1356. so
let's have a look so before we begin let's have a look at the commanders for the English side of
course you have Edward Prince of Wales then you have de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, Salisbury,
Oxford and then a character who I might do an extra film on he's the Captal de Buch,
Jean III de Grailly, he was one of the most noted uh commanders of the Poitiers campaign but he was
not English he was ne pas Anglaise he was a Gascon yeah, which is of course in modern day France.
Uh this army at Poitiers was an Anglo-Gascon army right, so there was a mixture and just out of
interest, just to let you know amongst the Gascons on our side there were crossbowmen. So in my model
you will actually see long bowmen and crossbowmen. Now we'll have a look at the French commanders we
have the French King Jean II, known as Jean the Good, and then the Crown Prince Charles,
he was known as the dauphin, yeah? Then we have Philip Duke of Orleans, yeah and finally I'm going
to mention two uh gentlemen who were actually killed in the battle uh Jean de Clermont and
Gautier de Brienne. This is going to be a fight to the actual bone yeah, so let's have a look and see
what happened leading up to the battle. So let's have a look at the numbers involved the French
army 35,000 but Froissart, the man of the time said 60,000, but the French had 8,000 cavalry. Now
Jean the Good, the king of France was learning. He dismounted all but six hundred of his cavalry
but those six hundred were heavily armoured and their horses were heavily armoured. At the front,
this is important to note, now the job of the cavalry is to go on the left and the right flanks
the French itself had three main divisions. Under the Dauphin was the first one the Crown
Prince then Duke of Orleans and then finally the main battle will be the king himself the King
of France, Jean the Good. On the English side um there was between seven thousand and ten thousand
we'll never know the truth and the way they were deployed was in the gaps in this hedge that
seems to line the road. On the top of Poitiers field is this hedge it's so high and thick and
impenetrable and then you've got the woods behind the English it’s, it's quite a defensive position
but there are big gaps and the French are going to aim for those gaps. Now those gaps will be covered
by heavily armed, men at arms and also they will be protected by archers, and just to note
on the left flank of the English this is where the Earl of Warwick is and the Earl of Oxford,
there is a marsh and this marsh is impenetrable to the horses and it's going to play
an important part. But how did they get to this hill of Poitiers? You see what had happened was
the English had a three-point chevauchée, they're going to bring the King, Edward III,
he's going to come out of Calais move south but he's beaten back the French are too strong
and this is a little note here. Recruits were getting rare because don't forget while this
is going on we're suffering from the effects of the the bubonic plague, the black death
anything up towards of half of the population of Europe the modern uh people say meanwhile
yeah the Duke of Lancaster he is down here and he is going to doing a chevauchée into Languedoc
and he is under orders that if the Prince of Wales is threatened he must join him yeah, but that
joining didn't happen because lots of French down here. Now the French plan was very simply,
they're going to keep the English back they're going to keep the English away from the Loire
river and when the English have to turn around and retreat to Gascon, the French plan which is sound
is they're going to outpace them and cut them off from Gascony and bring them to battle, and that
battle ended up being Poitiers. Now the English are short on supplies. Now I do know on the top
of that hill one of the supplies they were short of was water now there is a river down the hill so
they're going to bring up supplies yeah but it's going to be tough. So let's get to the battle.
So the battle begins there was mass said in the morning and everybody gets ready
and the French begin the battle, they send their cavalry round on the flanks
and they go straight for some of the gaps in the hedges meanwhile the main French army advances
you have the Crown Prince, the Dauphin’s division, he advances up the hill, crossbowmen on his flank
they are learning how to engage. The crossbows apparently had pavises, I haven't got any
uh fixed yet for my uh model but interestingly the crossbowman were the Genoese again John the II,
John the Good, the King of France he said it's no good uh recruiting your local militia crossbowmen
because they are like snow in summertime they melt away, interesting eh? And they also had uh
some alpine troops some Italian alpine troops with them so you can see the French army is quite a
mixture German you've got Scots you've got French and also Italian but as they advance up the hill
the uh Orifame is revealed so every English and Gascon on that hill know that the French are not
going to take any prisoners. And I always think that's a bit counterproductive, but what happens
on the left flank of the English when the cavalry charge, the bowmen shoot straight into them
and one of the eyewitness account said the arrows smashed on the armour or deflected on the armour
of the horses and the knights, went high up into the air and then dropped down on friend and foe
alike. Now it's here that the Earl of Oxford ordered his bowmen to run out into the marsh
and these bowmen some of them up to their knees literally wade out into the marsh
and begin to shoot into the sides of the horses and the knights. They're heavily armoured at the
front the horses, this causes chaos, it not only stops the charge and fetches men down
yeah, the Earl of Douglas, Robbie Douglas by the way, who was commander here the Scotsman
he is severely wounded but he will be later removed from the field by his
men. The cavalry being broken up on the right flank now scatter and many of the horses charge
across the front of the Dauphin’s battle that's moving up the hill and some of them smash into it
breaking it up slightly. Now the bowmen are pouring in arrows onto these divisions and on
the French left flank the horses have got to go up quite a steep hill and the bowmen there are
well protected and they can fetch the arrows in from the flank so the cavalry charges are failing
as the French march forward now and engage they're constricted by the gaps and this horrendous
hand-to-hand fighting but the way the English and the Gascon men at arms did this is, they didn't
stand on the hedge line, they were slightly back which allows the French army in but only a row
at a time. If you've only got a frontage that'll fit into that gap which is eight,
ten men, as they come forward there are English and Gascon men at arms on either side of them
and at the front and they're going to be hammered to hell and as soon as those men begin to fall,
the men behind can't get at them so the sheer carnage going on here. Now the king,
Jean the Good, the King of France can see what's happening so he orders that his son's division
be withdrawn and leave the field and he takes his younger brothers with him
and there's a, what we would call in England, a bit of a cock up here because the second division,
under the Duke of Orleans also retires from the battlefield
so that's two-thirds of the strength of the French they are being harried by arrows as they
pull away, but many of them return to the field. We'll never know the exact reason why Orleans
actually left, he may have got the wrong orders, or got orders mixed up we will just never know
but what happens now is many of the men at arms and knights and soldiers from those divisions
that left the battlefield now join the king's battle. Now the fight is really gonna go some.
They advance up Jean the Good, King of France, he's going to go straight for the Prince of Wales.
With the king by the way he's one of his sons I understand he was 14
right and he's right behind his father. This is quite wow this shows courage and this is
something I've always maintained you know people say why don't you include uh the French victories,
well at the moment we're dealing with these main battles and one thing in all of these battles the
French have been so incredibly brave yeah? It's just their tactics but they're beginning to learn
as they're advancing up the hill the bowmen now because they're on the flank can actually inflict
heavy casualties on the crossbowmen who are hiding behind their pavise. As the king comes up the hill
his men are suddenly greeted by the Prince of Wales division who charge straight out of the gap
because the Captal de Buch with his 600 horses has gone right the way around the battlefield
and has come in and attacked King Jean of France's division from the rear and from the flank smashing
in to the weakest part at the back of a battle you have the weaklings, the guys who aren't that keen
to fight and as soon as the Captal de Buch hits them the king's battle begins to disintegrate.
So what happens now is uh bowmen who are pretty much out of arrows throw down their longbows
and together with men at arms from along the line actually charge into the flanks of the French army
the French King Jean the Good and his men are surrounded they fight so bravely, they really do,
but when the Oriflame is hacked down and collapses to the ground the French themselves see that the
fight is lost and the actual surrender of the French King is is quite something. And
I'm going to have to read this because it's from an original account so just bear with me it was a
young knight from St Omer, he was in the service of the King of England. He’d, uh in a melee or
a bit of a fight he'd murdered somebody when he was younger and was lost all of his property in
France and was expelled so he was in the service of the King his name was Denis de Morbeck, and
he actually went to the king and says you know in very good French obviously,
sir surrender, sire surrender, and the French King said who are you, and he introduced himself
and the French king says ‘where's my cousin the Prince of Wales?’ and this uh Denis,
he says he's not here, surrender to me sir and I will lead you to him and the French King then
gave him his right gauntlet. It's interesting because what happens now is there is a rush
to get prisoners and the poor old Denis de Morbeck loses the French King for a while because
the battle fever is up, the red mist is up and uh he is beaten out of the way of the
French King but eventually the French King is handed over to the Prince of Wales. Now with the
scramble for prisoners, um some archers apparently had up to six prisoners and they're stripping the
dead they're looking for valuables, but there's an eyewitness account talks about the what happened
once the trumpets have sounded it was over yeah, um and it it's quite
quite lovely it’s, it's le Baker's account and he says um, they noticed gaps in their ranks and
you know friends were missing so they went to look for them and they brought them back to the English
lines or the Gascon lines whether they were dead or where they were alive, and one badly injured
knight Sir James Audley was taken on a shield back into the the baggage train there and laid
in the shade near the tentage of the Prince of Wales and they gently stripped off his armour
cleaned his wounds, and the more serious wounds they sewed up.
So it wasn't just a case of scramble leave everybody and so on and so forth,
if your mate was down you went to find him and if he was wounded you brought him back. Now I've
never seen that mentioned before and I think it's quite a wow, because once that was done
the army then simply put up its tents all over the battlefield and went to sleep or had food
and then the next day the armies will move on onto the next part of their chevauchée.
This is quite an episode because the flower of France died on this battlefield, it's incredible.
It's interesting to note that the nobility of France lost more men to
the battle of Crecy and Poitiers than actually succumbed to the Black Death
this is how incredible some of these battles really were.
Well I hope you enjoyed the film and if you did, like share and subscribe. And if you're already
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