England won the Battle of Poitiers on 19 September 13561, one of the three great English victories of the Hundred Years War alongside Crecy and Agincourt. Edward the Black Prince, badly outnumbered, held a strong position and let his longbowmen break wave after wave of French attacks. When the last French division, led by King John II on foot, was thrown back, the king himself was taken prisoner, a humiliation that shook France for a generation.
Of all the disasters that fell on France in the Hundred Years War, few stung like Poitiers. On a September afternoon in 1356 an English raiding army less than half the size2 of the force sent to trap it not only escaped but shattered it, and carried off the King of France as a prisoner.
The raid and the trap
In the late summer of 1356 Edward, the Black Prince, son of Edward III of England, was leading a destructive raid, a chevauchee, across central France3. King John II gathered a large army and cut off the raiders near Poitiers. Loaded with plunder and heavily outnumbered, the Prince tried to negotiate his way out; when that failed, he chose his ground and prepared to fight.
The English position
The Prince drew up his army on a rise screened by hedges, vineyards and a sunken lane3, ground that forced the French to attack through narrow gaps. His men-at-arms fought on foot, and on the flanks he massed his English and Welsh longbowmen, the same weapon that had won Crecy ten years before.
Wave after wave
The French came on in successive divisions. The first, a mounted charge, was torn apart by arrows2 before it could close. The Dauphin's division fought a long, grinding fight on foot and pulled back exhausted. Then a third division, under the Duke of Orleans, withdrew from the field without fully engaging4, a failure of nerve that left the king to fight on with a shrinking army.
The king on foot
At last King John II led the final and largest division forward on foot, the sacred Oriflamme unfurled. As the two lines locked, the Black Prince threw in his reserve and ordered a mounted detachment under the Gascon lord Jean de Grailly, the Captal de Buch3, to sweep around and strike the French from behind. Caught front and rear, the French army broke. In the rout the king, fighting to the end with a small band around him, was surrounded and captured.
A king in captivity
King John II and his young son Philip were taken to Bordeaux and then to England, where the king was held in comfortable captivity. The price of his freedom was enormous. The Treaty of Bretigny in 1360 handed England a vastly enlarged Aquitaine and set the king's ransom at three million gold crowns6, about twice the annual revenue of the French crown. The ransom was never fully paid, and John died in London in 13641.
One of the great three
Poitiers stands with Crecy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) as the three great English longbow victories of the Hundred Years War, and it is the only one of the three at which the French king himself was taken prisoner. The humiliation drained France of money and prestige and helped tip it into the chaos of the Jacquerie peasant revolt and the rising in Paris. One caution for the curious: this is not the Battle of Tours of 732, sometimes also called the Battle of Poitiers, which was fought six centuries earlier between Charles Martel and the Umayyad Caliphate.