Read Online The Monks of War by Desmond Seward - Free Book Online Page A

smoke must have appalled those who had never experienced them.
    Surprisingly, some French knights reached the forward English divisions, where the men-at-arms hacked them down with axes and swords. Either in this charge or during a later one the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales was knocked off his feet, whereupon Richard de Beaumont, the standard-bearer, in a magnificent gesture covered the boy with the banner of Wales and fought off his assailants till the Prince could stand up. Froissart has a romantic tale of how when the Prince’s companions sent to Edward for help, the King refused, saying, ‘Let the boy win his spurs for I want him, please God to have all the glory.’ However another chronicler (Geoffrey le Baker) says that the King did in fact send twenty picked knights to relieve his son. They found the boy and his mentors leaning on their swords and halberds, recovering their breath and waiting silently in front of long mounds of corpses for the enemy to return.
    An enemy who reached the English lines was the blind King John of Bohemia. He ordered his attendant knights to lead him forward ‘so that I may strike one stroke with my sword’. Somehow the little party, tied to each other by their reins, managed to ride through the archers and then charge the English men-at-arms. There the Bohemians fell with their King, save for two who cut their way back to the French lines to tell his story. The bodies were found next day, still tied together. The Prince of Wales was so moved that he adopted the old King’s crest and motto—the three feathers with the legend Ich dien —I serve.
    The French charged fifteen times, ‘from sunset to the third quarter of the night’, each charge beginning as well as ending in hopeless disorder beneath the arrow-storm. Froissart says that no one who was not present could imagine, let alone describe, the confusion, especially the disorganization and indiscipline of the French. The slaughter was heightened by the Welsh and Cornish knifemen who ‘slew and murdered many as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights and squires’. The last French attacks were launched in pitch darkness. By then there were few French knights left—apart from those who were dead, many had been quietly slipping away since the onset of dusk. King Philip, who had been hit in the neck by an arrow and had had at least one horse killed under him, found that he could only muster sixty men-at-arms when he tried to mount a final desperate charge through the gloom. The Count of Hainault took hold of the King’s bridle and persuaded him to leave the field—‘Sir, depart hence, for it is time. Lose not yourself wilfully; if ye have loss at this time, ye shall recover it again at another time.’ They rode to the royal château of La Broye six miles away. When he arrived there, with only five companions, Philip shouted to the castellan, ‘Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune of France.’ The King only stopped to drink and then rode on through the night to find a safer refuge at Amiens.
    The English who, because of the dark, did not realize the fearful casualties which they had inflicted, slept at their positions, so relieved at having escaped annihilation that they prayed to God in thanksgiving. They had lost less than a hundred men themselves. Next morning they awoke in such thick fog ‘that a man might not see the breadth of an acre of land from him’. Edward forbade any pursuit. He sent out a scouting force, 500 men-at-arms and 2,000 archers under the Earl of Northampton, who soon found themselves facing some local militia and then a force of Norman knights who had arrived too late. Northampton’s men quickly routed these last opponents, killing many. The King now saw the extent of his victory and ordered heralds to count the slain. They identified the bodies of more than 1,500 lords and knights, among them the Duke of Lorraine and the Counts of Alençon, Auxerre, Blamont, Blois,