Battle of Verneuil, 1424: the second Agincourt

When Henry V died in 1422, his conquests in France passed to a son less than a year old. The first task of the child's uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, regent in France, was to keep those gains and if possible extend them, as J. A. Cannon puts it in the Oxford Companion to British History. Opposing him was the disinherited Dauphin, the future Charles VII, who held the lands south of the Loire and relied heavily on Scottish soldiers. A Scottish army had been fighting in France since 1419, and at Baugé in 1421 it had beaten the English and killed Henry V's brother, the Duke of Clarence.²

Two armies converge

In the summer of 1424 Bedford set out to conquer Anjou and Maine. According to BritishBattles.com he gathered about 10,000 men from fresh troops sent over from England and from the English garrisons of northern France. The Dauphin's side had been reinforced that spring by Archibald, Earl of Douglas, who brought new Scottish troops and was made Duke of Touraine, a rank no other foreigner received in that century. With John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, already Constable of France, and with 2,000 heavily armored horsemen hired in Lombardy and Castile, the Dauphin's army reached about 15,000 men.³

The two armies were drawn toward the castle of Ivry, west of Paris, whose French garrison had promised to surrender if it was not relieved by 14 August. The French commanders, mindful of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, did not want to face English archers in open battle. Instead they took Verneuil by a ruse, when Scots posing as English were let in at the gate. Bedford followed them south. On the eve of the battle he sent away his Burgundian allies, about 3,000 men, a decision BritishBattles.com notes has never been explained.⁴

The battle on the Damville road

In the Dauphin's camp the argument over whether to fight went on until the last moment. The Scots, confident after Baugé, insisted on battle, and on 17 August the army marched out a mile north of Verneuil and formed astride the road to Damville. The Scots stood to the right of the road, the French men-at-arms under the Count of Aumale to the left, both on foot. The Lombard and Castilian riders, unwilling to fight dismounted, stayed mounted on the wings.⁵

Bedford formed two divisions of dismounted men-at-arms with archers on the flanks, taking the right himself and giving the left to the Earl of Salisbury. The baggage was drawn up behind in a square of wagons with a guard of about 2,000 archers. The armies faced each other from dawn until about four in the afternoon. When the English advanced, their archers drove in the sharpened stakes they carried, but the mercenary horsemen charged around the flanks, scattered the archers of the rear guard and fell to looting the baggage.⁶

Meanwhile the dismounted lines met in a fight BritishBattles.com calls as fierce as any in the war, and HistoryNet's Jon Guttman describes as a climactic 45-minute struggle on foot. The French left gave way first and fled toward Verneuil, where many drowned in the town moat. Bedford rallied his men at the ditch and led them back against the Scots, who were still holding Salisbury's division. Attacked in front, in flank by the regrouped archers and in the rear by Bedford, the Scots were overwhelmed. The mercenary cavalry came back from the baggage too late and was driven off.⁷

No quarter for the Scots

The English gave the Scots no quarter, Guttman writes, and most of the dead were Scottish. Douglas, his son James and Buchan were killed, along with many Scottish knights. Of the French leaders, Aumale and the viscount of Narbonne died, and the Duke of Alençon was taken prisoner. Guttman counts about 200 French nobles captured and later ransomed. A tradition repeated by BritishBattles.com holds that only 40 men of the Scottish army survived.⁸

The numbers differ by source. BritishBattles.com cites Bedford's own letter, in which his heralds counted 7,262 Dauphinist dead on the field, and gives English losses as reported at 2,000 killed. Guttman puts the toll at 6,000 of the enemy for 1,600 Englishmen. In the Oxford Companion's short verdict, the English archers repeated their success at Agincourt, nine years earlier.⁹

After Verneuil

Hailed at the time as a second Agincourt, Verneuil crippled the Army of Scotland for the rest of the war. Bedford went on with the methodical conquest of Maine and Anjou. The surviving Scottish men-at-arms were taken into the Dauphin's new Scottish bodyguard, and Alençon, ransomed at the cost of nearly everything he owned, later rode beside Joan of Arc. For the English, Verneuil marked the high point of their power in France. Within five years the siege of Orléans and the arrival of Joan would turn the war the other way.¹⁰