The Battle of La Rocha Chouard: St. George's Day
On the eleventh day of April, the two armies drew up. They were about equally well-rested after the jockeying for position of the past few days, and the French had learned the dear-bought lessons of Crecy, with their crossbowmen drawn up behind pavises, forming a hard, bristling outer rank behind their turtle-shell of portable shields. The battlefield favored the defense, with the river running along one flank and the ground rising steeply along the other, obviously impassable to horse and probably impassable to man.
Save for a hard reserve that he held back at the castle, Edward dismounted his army from the Black Prince to the lowest footman. The reserve was commanded by Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster and one of the most dangerous fighters in Europe, and had been specifically selected from men who could afford to outfit their retainers on the great destriers, the King's lancers - the birth of one of the most elite formations in Europe. The first English line was made of billmen and pikes, men whose sole job was to fight at arm's length. Behind them were the archers - most of them, anyway. That morning, the two Edwards had realized that the battlefield, on both sides, was suited to a defense, and only a fool on the French side would have given up that edge. They had no expectation that all of the marshals of France were fools. Therefore, the black-clad Welshmen and the Englishmen who had been culled as expert bowmen were, in fact, nowhere to be found on that line. Most of the bow line was composed of England's second-rate archers.
The remaining archers - Welsh hill-men, pardoned poachers, out-of-work foresters like Matt Hastings - had been culled by the Prince of Wales and sent on a circuitous route away from the river and into the forested, steep-sided hills just after midnight. There were no torches to light their passage, and they had been forbidden under pain of death even to string their bows for fear that the bows might catch and distract them before the moment came. Cursing, creeping, only one hand free for climbing as the other gripped the bowstaff, they made their way to the high ground in the dark. Every now and then, there would be a sudden panic as a handful of pebbles slid out from under someone's feet, or a handhold would be missed, threatening to alert the entire French army. This would certainly guarantee a French retreat: the old Roman road was in a substantial cut, making it difficult to rise out of the river valley. However, the English did not want a French retreat. They wanted slaughter.
When dawn came, the two princes, Edward and John, took their respective place in the front of the English line, at opposite ends, two red-and-blue banners in a seething mass of men. They too had been up for hours, though not as long as the archers. Two hours before dawn, they rose, their squires began the arduous process of armoring them, and the priests had come down the lines, offering confession and the Eucharist. The archers had received this the night before; as Simon de Waterton, in Prince Edward's entourage, had remarked, "It would take a damned talented man to sin worth mentioning between now and dawn on that hill."
It was the French who began the battle in their usual way, with drums and trumpets. Their sole purpose was to disrupt the English communications; they made such a din that it was impossible even for Waterton, at Prince Edward's elbow, to speak to him without shouting, despite the French line being almost a mile distant. The French noise was a double-edged sword, though they themselves did not know it. The archers above them were able to creep lower, lower, ever closer to the old Roman road that provided the field its main axis. The Romans had been adamant that their roads would be straight, and so it was here, departing from the river to cut into the hillside. The limestone had been laid bare, and since grown over, providing concealment for the black-clad archers.
At a signal from King Edward, the English line began to advance, slowly, steadily, cautiously. It took them half an hour to cross the first half-mile, where they stopped, knowing they were in danger of coming into crossbow range. Even Prince Edward would not willingly advance into that on foot. In response, the pavises and the Genoese together inched forward on their side, funneled between river and road. The two of them sat there, at stalemate, and in the woods above the French, the archers waited and cursed. "What's stopping them, damn it?" asked John Hawkwood, scratching under his collar.
"Th' King doesn' wan' t'throw away th' first charge." Owain's voice was level, quiet, certain. He had been in a pitched battle before; none of them really counted the Dauphin's death, barely more than a rout, or the surprise capture of La Rocha Chouard. He drank from a waterskin before passing it down the line. "Drink up, be little enow time for it when we start." Matt sat there, utterly still, leaning against a tree that might just have been there when the Romans came through. His eyes were on the French line below, the men on horseback, stamping and impatient. "I know that look, Matt Hastings," Owain said conversationally. "Seen it at Crecy. Pickin' a man so soon?" Hastings snapped from his reverie and nodded once, gravely. He had already chosen his arrow, the best of the seventy-two that he carried. "The one in the red and black there. Mine, you hear." His voice was a low monotone, but the others nodded in amusement; the man in question was as far down the French line as a bow could possibly reach. "You make that shot, lad, I'll feed you for a week," Owain grunted.
In the end, it was Prince Edward who finally lit the fuse. Nerving himself up for what he knew was coming, he roared out "England and Saint George!" one last time, then charged. It was eight hundred yards, across soft ground, into the leveled crossbows, but it was obvious that the French were no more inclined to budge than he was. It was just as bad as he feared it would be. In full armor, it took the English men-at-arms eight minutes to cross that gap. In that time, the Italian crossbowmen could get off sixteen quarrels apiece. That first, terrible charge cost the English terribly; some of the finest knights in England lay scattered across the road and its verges, bleeding and screaming in the first growth of spring. Of the three thousand foot that Edward had charged with, a quarter fell in that first charge. Only bloodlust and fury propelled them, but when they reached the pavises, it was terrible.
Behind Edward's charge, the bowmen worked their strings, arrows arcing over the charging foot to slow the Genovese and force them behind the pavises. These archers, Edward's mobile cover, stayed a hundred yards behind his footmen, drawing from their arrow-bags on the march without ever stabilizing in place. This rolling barrage was all that kept the foot charge from being much, much worse than it could have been. As the English and French foot lines collided, the bows arched upward, seeking the rear rank of the French mass of foot, and a horn sounded at the English start-point, and the French horse began dying.
The hillside above them erupted in arrows. The ground, supposedly impassable, was thick with Welsh and English foresters, plying their bows with impunity. Matt Hastings was one of them, and knew that his first shot would have to count; that man in red and black would not stay still for long under the circumstances. He pulled the string back, shoulders and arms flexing mightily, the arrow pulling to the corner of his eye, then past, touching the tip of his ear with his fingertips. The wood creaked in protest, then snapped forward as he released, the string singing past his face and the arrow winging skyward before it arced back down.
The red-and-black knight jolted upright, startled, the arrow embedded in his shoulder. Even at three hundred yards, near the very limit of his reach, Matthew Hastings had hit his mark. The arrow would leave no medical evidence; it was wedged between gorget and pauldron, without actual penetration, but this should never have been part of the battlefield, and the French cavalry behaved accordingly, especially since there was nothing at all that they could do in response. Each English bowman had three sheaves of arrows, seventy-two arrows in all, and there were a thousand of them on that hillside. At this point, they could pick and choose their targets with leisure.
The French countercharge, which could have wrecked Edward's foot charge, was thus spoiled before it had a chance to ride. Prince Edward's banner dipped and nodded, a volley of flaming arrows leapt skyward, visible from the castle to the south, and a second horn sounded, long, high, and clear. The castle gate swung open, the portcullis lifted, and Henry of Grosmont was loosed. The horses were walked the majority of the distance to the battlefield, and a cheer went up from the beleaguered French infantry because Prince Edward's footmen began falling back. They fell back in good order, stepping back over the bodies of their friends and comrades across the terrible half-mile gap they had charged only an hour before, and, miracle of miracles, they swung like a gate, anchored by Prince John at the south end of the line. The Prince of Wales had to move the farthest, but the tall, awkward prince from Ghent had to do the most work, holding firm and not allowing his men to be overrun. He was not an inspiring figure, but like all of Edward's children, determined not to disappoint his father, and within minutes of the walkback beginning, he had found himself on the front line. Men who had been laughing at him the night before found themselves rallying to his side, shamed by the prince's stubborn determination to follow through.
The French were on the attack now; Edward's army was bent back on the hill. The few among them who thought through what was happening thought that they were trying to fall back upon the concealed archers, and indeed, the archers were trying to provide them cover with their bows. That was, however, not their objective. Their objective was to clear the Roman road for the Duke of Lancaster.
The ground shook as they hit the gallop, lances dropping. A roar traveled from Henry's position at the center to the edges, a long, ragged "EDWARD!" a clear signal to the princes and the French. The French marshal Arnoul d'Audrehem looked up from where he was trying to reorganize his horse. "God has deserted us," he whispered, and spurred for the knot of horse around the French king. "Your Majesty, you must ride! We will hold them, but you must not stay!"
For the first time in days, Jean de Valoys stiffened and threw his head back, leonine for all his hypochondria and melancholy. "And have it said that a King of France ran in shame?" He gathered the reins, nodded to the knights attired just as he was, and saw the barely-bearded Prince Philippe approaching. His smile tightened. "At least we die well-accompanied." This last reserve rode toward the sound of the fighting.
The sun was directly overhead now, and the slaughter continued unabated. Grosmont's cavalry charge scoured the French foot and rode down the Genovese as they broke from behind the pavises to support the footmen. The French horse, thrown into total disorder by the archers, never recovered their position properly. However, there were almost as many French horsemen on the field as there were Englishmen in total, so the charge, raking and terrible as it was, ran into the problem that every conroy feared. At the charge's end, they were embroiled in melee, fighting knee-to-knee with the flower of French chivalry. It was now the princes' turn once more. Prince Edward had by now traversed the length of the battlefield three times, but the English foot line, relieved of all pressure from the French, had reformed and advanced steadily into the French line.
Even now, totally shattered, the French had a substantial force left on the field, but the fight had totally gone out of them. King Jean's knot of armored men found itself toe-to-toe with Grosmont, who knew a rich ransom when he saw one. Eventually, Jean de Rochechouart shoved the king toward the rear, jabbing his sword into the horse's rump to still all argument. The horse bolted, and with the running king went the army. The twenty guards stayed and fought and fell and mostly died, Rochechouart included. Prince Philippe was captured, meaning that the already rich Duke of Lancaster would be even richer.
The papal legate, Grimoard, stayed in camp, unarmored and unarmed, relying on his status as a priest and his force of personality to keep him alive. Thus, he witnessed when the watered-silk Oriflamme was cut down, falling into the trampled, stirred-up mud of the camp, spattered with horse droppings and the accumulated filth of an army on the march before being paraded back to the castle, cheering, hung inverted beneath the dragon of Wessex. He was a prisoner, like Philippe, but he was alive. The same could not be said for the majority of the French host.
Jean did not stop at Limotges, where he fled first; what little of the army was left fled southward in panic, certain that the English were coming to slaughter them wholesale. They fled into the hills of Gascony, where the Earl of Hatfield waited for them, ready to avenge his retreat - never a defeat, he had killed his entire force's worth - and stopped them at spearpoint. Michael of Hatfield achieved what Grosmont had failed to do: he ransomed the King of France.
In those terrible first two months of spring, 1356, the French lost thirty-seven thousand men, ransomed, killed, or simply dispirited. In exchange, Edward of England, who had a mere twenty-one thousand men between all of his armies, had lost eight thousand. It was more than a third of his total force, but it was nothing compared to the open wound that La Rocha Choard inflicted on France. More terrible still, Grimoard acknowledged the results of the trial by combat. The Avignon Pope bowed out of the conflict on the same day that Michael of Hatfield captured the king of France. God had indeed deserted Jean de Valoys.