The road to Poitiers

What a chevauchée was for

The 1355 raid was not sent to take ground. It was sent to make Languedoc unaffordable.

A medieval king paid for war out of the taxable wealth of his provinces. Burn the mills, the barns, the cloth towns and the vineyards, and you are not looting, you are removing a line from your enemy's ledger. The Prince's army carried no siege train, which told every veteran in it what kind of campaign this was going to be before it left Bordeaux. You do not need siege engines to burn a windmill.

Windmills were priority targets. No mills, no flour, no war taxes.

Sir John Wingfield, who ran the Prince's business affairs, wrote the campaign up afterwards with the damage itemised in money. It is the chevauchée's own bookkeeping, in a clerk's voice, and it is the coldest document of the lot. He was not reporting an atrocity. He was reporting a return.

The route, 1355

5 October, Bordeaux. The army marches at first light: somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 men, roughly 15,000 horses, moving up the Garonne valley in three columns so it can forage across a wider belt of country.

11 October, Arouille. Contact with the Count of Armagnac's territory. The army shakes out.

12 October. The burning begins, systematic and methodical, three columns abreast across a scorched belt miles wide.

22 October, Mirande. Eleven days of it. The Count of Armagnac, stronger on paper, refuses battle and falls back on Toulouse.

26 to 28 October, the crossings. The French had broken the bridges over the Garonne and the Ariège and put an army inside Toulouse, on the reasonable assumption that no commander would walk past a city full of soldiers and cross two rivers under its walls. The Prince crossed both, south of the city, wagons and all, at fords the French had left unwatched. It is the best piece of soldiering in the campaign and almost nobody outside the period has heard of it.

29 October, Montgiscard. The army is east of Toulouse in the Lauragais, the richest farmland in the south, and the French army is behind it on the wrong side of two rivers.

3 to 5 November, Carcassonne. The lower town is taken. The citizens offer an enormous ransom for it and the Prince refuses. The army rests three days, and in the town it finds the royal tax records, which tell it precisely what it has been costing France. Then the town is burned to the walls of the citadel.

8 November, Narbonne. Taken and sacked. The citadel holds out and fires cannon at the English, which in 1355 is close to novel. Two papal envoys arrive to sue for a truce. The Prince keeps them waiting two days and then tells them to take it up with his father, who is also in France.

10 November. The army leaves. It has to: the horses have eaten the country bare. It feints at Béziers, finds it too strong, and turns west for home.

14 November, Pennautier. Back into the country it burned on the way out. The army is now foraging in its own ash.

15 November. Four more large towns burned, and a meeting with Gaston Fébus, Count of Foix, who is Armagnac's enemy and therefore briefly the Prince's friend. He grants passage, sells supplies, and lets his men join the looting.

18 November, Carbonne. The army crosses the Garonne and the Ariège again, in foul weather, to local astonishment. The same day, James of Bourbon finally talks Armagnac into marching out to block the English at the River Save.

20 November, the Save. Advance guards clash and the French vanguard is beaten. It is the first real fighting in six weeks.

22 November. The two armies camp within sight of each other. The French are larger. Overnight they remember what English archers do to mounted men and withdraw. Dawn shows the English an empty field.

28 November. The army crosses back into Gascon territory, and the Gascon contingents, home and rich, begin peeling away to their own castles. The machine dissolves by contract rather than by defeat.

2 December, La Réole. March over. 675 miles in 59 days, two major rivers crossed twice under the enemy's nose, no battle lost, and a province's war economy burned to the waterline.

The route, 1356

6 July. The Prince leaves Bordeaux. He dates it himself as the vigil of the Translation of St Thomas.

4 August, Bergerac. The army crosses the Dordogne and turns north, intending a raid and hoping to join Lancaster somewhere beyond the Loire.

30 to 31 August, Romorantin. The town is stormed. The citadel does not fall with it, and Amaury de Craon and Jean le Maingre, called Boucicaut, are inside it.

1 to 4 September. Five days spent reducing the citadel. Craon and Boucicaut are taken. So is the campaign's margin: while the army sat at Romorantin, the King of France marched.

7 to 10 September, opposite Tours. Every bridge over the Loire is broken and every crossing watched. Lancaster cannot come. Four days of watching an uncrossable river while a much larger army closes from the north. The Prince turns for Bordeaux.

8 September. Jean II crosses the Loire at Meung and comes south at forced-march speed: Loches on the 13th, La Haye on the 14th, Chauvigny on the 15th.

17 September. Contact. The English are caught short of Poitiers with the forest of Nouaillé on their flank and the King behind them.

19 September, Nouaillé-Maupertuis. Cardinal Talleyrand rides between the armies in the morning. The Prince offers to give back his prisoners, his towns and his plunder and swear a seven-year truce. The King's reported price is the Prince himself and a hundred knights. Refused.

Then: the marshals' charge dies at the hedge gap. The Dauphin's division comes uphill on foot and breaks. Orléans' division marches off the field entirely. In the lull the English are hurt and short of arrows, watching the largest French division of the three dress its lines. The Prince then gambles twice in the same hour, sending the Captal de Buch with a few score horse around into the French rear and taking his whole army downhill into the King's advance.

Jean II, King of France, surrendered his gauntlet that afternoon with his fourteen-year-old son beside him.

19 September, evening. The Prince served the King of France at dinner as his prisoner-guest, and waited on him personally.

2 October, Bordeaux. He brought the King of France into the city, and everyone believed the war was as good as won.

What the record says, and where I chose

A day-by-day chronology of a fourteenth-century campaign has holes in it. Chroniclers record what they thought mattered, which is not what a novelist needs. So the spine the book is built on tags every entry: secure in the record, secure event with an approximate date, disputed between historians, or no surviving record at all.

The novel lives in the last category. It is only fair to say where.

The route past Carcassonne on the way home is disputed. Historians differ on whether the army returned north or south of the city. The book follows the southern reading, which is Hoskins's, argued from toponymy, topography, and an assessment of time and distance set against the Prince's own letters and Wingfield's. Clifford Rogers made the same case before him.

The choice is not only geographic. North implies the Prince was avoiding battle. South implies he was hunting Armagnac, and crossed the Montagne d'Alaric in pursuit. So the reading decides what kind of commander this book's Prince is, which is a larger thing to inherit from a line on a map than it looks.

Hewitt, who is in the source list below, argues the other way. I told you to check them.

Whether guns were used at Romorantin is disputed. The chronicles variously credit cannon, Greek fire, or both against the citadel walls. The book uses it sparingly for that reason.

The starving march home is inference. That the army returned across country it had already burned is in the record. The specific misery of those five days, what the men ate and what the horses did, is not. I wrote it from the constraints: a chevauchée army of that size covers ten to twenty miles a day, cannot halt more than three days anywhere without its horses starving, and had removed its own food supply on the way out. The arithmetic is sound. The scene is invented.

And the protagonist is invented, though what happens to him is not. In September 1355 the army assembling at Bordeaux bought and impressed everything an army eats, including skilled hands. Farriers, smiths, carters, engineers and mill-wrights were gathered up with or without enthusiasm. That practice is documented. The particular man taken in that window is mine.

That is the whole trick of writing this sort of book. The frame is real and load-bearing. The man walking around inside it is not. I would rather tell you which is which than have you wonder.

The sources

Contemporary

Geoffrey le Baker. A Staffordshire clerk writing within living memory of the campaigns. The closest thing the period has to a careful reporter, and the backbone of the 1356 chronology.

The Eulogium and Malmesbury chroniclers. Monastic voices. They supply the itinerary detail the flashier chronicles skip, because monks wrote down days and distances when knights only wrote down glory.

Sir John Wingfield's letter. The Prince's business manager accounting for the raid in money. The coldest document of the lot, and the one that tells you what the chevauchée was for.

The Prince's own letters. He dates his own movements in his own words. When the Prince and a chronicler disagree about where the army was, the Prince wins.

Froissart. The one everyone knows. Later, literary, assembled from interviews with men who were there. Unmatched for colour, to be handled with care on particulars.

The Chandos Herald. A verse life of the Prince written by a man in Chandos's own household. Eyewitness-adjacent, proud of it, and the best single voice for the 1356 campaign.

Modern

Hoskins. The man who walked the route. Ground truth, literally. Where the chronicles are vague, his boots are not.

Hewitt. The standard modern study of the expedition, sober and thorough. The frame everything else hangs on.

Sumption. The strategic picture at full scale. What the raid meant, cost, and changed, in the long ledger of the war.

They are listed because you should check them. If you find I have got something wrong, tell me.