The English army spent the night before the battle beyond the Miausson, but in the morning the prince, fearing an ambuscade behind the hill of Nouaille on the east bank, abandoned his original position and crossed the stream in order to occupy it.  He divided his forces into three “battles,” led respectively by himself, Warwick, and William Montague, since 1343 by his father’s death Earl of Salisbury.  Though he found no enemy there, he remained with his “battle” on the hill, because it commanded the slopes to the north over on which the French were now advancing.  His remote position threw the brunt of the fighting upon the divisions of Warwick and Salisbury.  They were stationed side by side in advance of him on ground lower than that held by him, but higher than that of the enemy, and beset with bushes and vineyards which sloped down on the left towards the marshes of the Miausson.  Some distance in front of their position, a long hedge and ditch divided the upland, on which the “battles” of Warwick and Salisbury were stationed, from the fields in which the French were arrayed.  At its upper end, remote from the Miausson, where Salisbury’s command lay, the hedge was broken by a gap through which a farmer’s track connected the fields on each side of it.  The first fighting began when the English sent a small force of horsemen through the gap to engage with the French cavalry beyond.  While Audrehem, on the French right, suspended his attack to watch the result, Clermont made his way straight for the gap, hoping to take Salisbury’s division, on the upper or right-hand station, in flank.  Before he reached the gap, however, he found the hedge and the approaches to the cart-road held in force by the English archers.  Meanwhile the mail-clad men and horses of Audrehem’s cavalry had approached dangerously near the left of the English line, where Warwick was stationed.  Their complete armour made riders and steeds alike impervious to the English arrows, until the prince, seeing from his hill how things were proceeding, ordered some archers to station themselves on the marshy ground near the Miausson, in advance of the left flank of the English army.  From this position they shot at the unprotected parts of the French horses, and drove the little band of cavalry from the field.  By that time Clermon’s attack on the gap had been defeated, and so both sections of the first French division retired.

Then came the stronger “battle” of the eldest son of the French king.  The fight grew more fierce, and for a long time the issue remained doubtful.  The English archers exhausted their arrows to little purpose, and the dismounted French men-at-arms, offering a less sure mark than the horsemen, forced their way to the English ranks and fought a desperate hand-to-hand conflict with them.  At last the Duke of Normandy’s followers were driven back.  Thereupon a panic seized the division commanded by the Duke of Orleans, which fled from the field without measuring swords with the enemy.  The victors