The Battle of Poitiers, 1356 (review)

The battle of Poitiers was one of the most important in European history. The capture of King Jean II of France inevitably, though not immediately, brought victory in the first stage of the Hundred Years' War to England. Even more importantly and indirectly, the king's ransom demanded in the subsequent Treaty of Brétigny provided the impetus for a new tax structure that laid the foundations for the rise of a strong and relatively "absolutist" central French state. Coming near the end of a period that may have been the high-point of the chronicle genre, the battle was recorded with a richness of detail that only a few other medieval combats can match. The various contemporary accounts, however, are very difficult to reconcile with one another in any convincing way. Consequently, modern historians have given widely divergent narratives of what happened in the fight and in the campaign leading up to it (compare, for example, the recent and independent treatments in my War Cruel and Sharp and Jonathan Sumption's Trial by Fire.)

David Green's new book, despite its title, is not a focused examination of the battle itself, or an attempt to consider and resolve the points in dispute concerning it. Only one chapter—eighteen pages (and four good maps)—treats the engagement directly; other chapters cover the Black Prince's grande chevauchée from Bordeaux to Narbonne a year earlier; the operations of winter 1355-56; the Poitiers campaign leading up to the battle; and the aftermath and consequences of the combat. There is also a ten-page appendix on wargaming the battle and (reflecting Green's doctoral dissertation) a thirty-five-page dramatis personae of the Anglo-Gascon army's leaders, with a few Frenchmen thrown in. The text, richly illustrated with a mix of medieval and new artwork, is comparable to one of the better Osprey campaign studies: the book does not purport to be a research monograph, but neither is it simply a summary or simplification of other secondary literature on the subject. Green is a trained medieval historian; he has read the sources in their original languages as well as the recent works on his topic, and he is able to draw his own conclusions. Sometimes, as with his proposed English deployment at Poitiers, these conclusions are quite original and interesting, if not necessarily persuasive. Other times, as with his treatment of the First Treaty of London (which follows the analysis of John Le Patourel), he is in my opinion clearly wrong. Quite often, however, he declines to reach any determination on a point of debate, merely noting the divergence of opinion without offering the reader the benefit of his own expertise in resolving the disagreements.

The Battle of Poitiers is well written, and accessible to the general reader or the undergraduate student (aside from a few untranslated French quotations). This book will not, however, allow serious students to dispense with earlier narratives, such as Sumption's or H. J. Hewitt's, which despite their much wider focus offer better-documented and fuller treatments of the military events of 1355-56 in Aquitaine.