the country full and gay, the rooms adorned with carpets
and draperies, the caskets and chests full of fair
jewels. But nothing was safe from these robbers.
They, and especially the Gascons, who are very greedy,
carried off everything.” Glutted by the
sack of Carcassonne and Narbonne the plunderers fell
back to Bordeaux, “their horses so laden with
spoil that they could hardly move.” Worthier
work awaited the Black Prince in the following year.
In the plan of campaign for 1356 it had been arranged
that he should march upon the Loire, and there unite
with a force under the Duke of Lancaster which was
to land in Britanny and push rapidly into the heart
of France. Delays however hindered the Prince
from starting from Bordeaux till July, and when his
march brought him to the Loire the plan of campaign
had already broken down. The outbreak in Normandy
had tempted the English Council to divert the force
under Lancaster from Britanny to that province; and
the Duke was now at Cherbourg, hard pressed by the
French army under John. But if its original purpose
was foiled, the march of the Black Prince on the Loire
served still more effectively the English cause.
His advance pointed straight upon Paris, and again
as in the Crecy campaign John was forced to leave
all for the protection of the capital. Hasty
marches brought the king to the Loire while Prince
Edward still lay at Vierzon on the Cher. Unconscious
of John’s designs, he wasted some days in the
capture of Romorantin while the French troops were
crossing the Loire along its course from Orleans to
Tours and John with the advance was hurrying through
Loches upon Poitiers in pursuit, as he supposed, of
the retreating Englishmen. But the movement of
the French army, near as it was, was unknown in the
English camp; and when the news of it forced the Black
Prince to order a retreat the enemy was already far
ahead of him. Edward reached the fields north
of Poitiers to find his line of retreat cut off and
a French army of sixty thousand men interposed between
his forces and Bordeaux.
If the Prince had shown little ability in his management
of the campaign, he showed tactical skill in the fight
which was now forced on him. On the nineteenth
of September he took a strong position in the fields
of Maupertuis, where his front was covered by thick
hedges and approachable only by a deep and narrow
lane which ran between vineyards. The vineyards
and hedges he lined with bowmen, and drew up his small
body of men-at-arms at the point where the lane opened
upon the higher plain on which he was himself encamped.
Edward’s force numbered only eight thousand men,
and the danger was great enough to force him to offer
in exchange for a free retreat the surrender of his
prisoners and of the places he had taken, with an
oath not to fight against France for seven years to
come. His offers however were rejected, and the
battle opened with a charge of three hundred French
knights up the narrow lane. But the lane was soon