A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [174]
For France the result was the invaluable addition of Castilian sea power, and for England a renewed fear of invasion that cramped her effort overseas. Thereafter one mischance after another befell the English cause. The Black Prince was invalided by a contagious dysentery that spread among the English and Gascons and, in his case, gave way by a cruel irony to dropsy. With swollen limbs, he was “weighed down by so great infirmity of body that he could scarcely sit upon his horse,” and as he grew heavier and weaker could not mount and was confined to bed. For the paragon of battle, the man of action and incomparable pride, to be incapacitated at 38 by a humiliating disease was maddening, the more so when the situation he commanded was deteriorating. The Prince fell into rage and ill-temper. Before these came to a tragic climax, the next mischance arose.
In the wind of national feeling, French nobles were answering the crown, turning back transferred castles, forming small forces of 20, 50, or 100 men-at-arms to recover towns and strongholds in ceded territories. In one such skirmish early in 1370 at Lussac between Poitiers and Limoges, Sir John Chandos, seneschal of the region, with a company of about 300 clashed with a French force at a hump-backed bridge over the river Vienne. Dismounting to fight on foot, he marched to meet his enemies “with his banner before him and his company about him, his coat of arms upon him … and his sword in his hand.” Slipping on the dew-moistened ground of early morning, he fell and was struck by an enemy sword on the side of his blind eye so that he failed to see the blow coming. The sword penetrated between nose and forehead and entered the brain. For some unexplained reason, he had not closed his visor. Stunned to extra ferocity, his men beat off the enemy and, after blows and bloodshed, turned directly to tears with all the facility of medieval emotion. Gathering around the unconscious body of their leader, they “wept piteously … wronge their handes and tare their heeres,” crying, “Ah, Sir John Chandos, flowre of chivalry, unhappily was forged the glaive that thus hath wounded you and brought you in parell of dethe!”
Chandos died the next day without recovering consciousness, and the English in Guienne said “they had lost all on that side of the sea.” As the architect and tactician of English victories at Crécy, Poitiers, and Najera, Chandos was the greatest captain of his side if not of both sides. Although the French rejoiced at the enemy’s loss, there were some “right noble and valiant knights” who thought it a common loss, for an interesting reason. Chandos, they said, was “so sage and so imaginatyve” and so trusted by the King of England that he would have found some means “whereby peace might have ensued between the realms of England and France.” Even knighthood knew the craving for peace.
A few months later the Black Prince came to his last act of war. Territories were slipping from his hands, gnawed by forces under the Duc d’Anjou, the King’s energetic lieutenant in Languedoc, and by other forces under Du Guesclin. In August 1370 Charles’s policy of piecemeal negotiation with towns and nobles regained Limoges, whose Bishop, although he had taken the oath of fealty to the Black Prince, easily allowed himself to be bought back by the Duc de Berry, lieutenant for the central region. For a price of ten years’ exemption from excise taxes, the magistrates and citizens were glad to go along. Limoges raised the fleur-de-lys over its gates, and after due ceremony Berry departed, leaving a small garrison of 100 lances, too small to avert what was to follow.
Enraged by the “treason” and vowing to make the city pay dearly for it, the Black Prince determined to make an example that would prevent further defections. Commanding