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By Root 1294 0

from a litter, he led a strong force, including two of his brothers and the elite of his knights, to assault Limoges. Miners tunneled under the walls, propping them with wooden posts which when fired caused sections of the wall to collapse. Plunging through the gaps, the men-at-arms blocked the city’s exits and proceeded on order to the massacre of the inhabitants regardless of age or sex. Screaming with terror, people fell on their knees before the Prince’s litter to beg for mercy, but “he was so inflamed with ire that he took no heed to them” and they passed under the sword. Despite his order to spare no one, some great personages who could pay ransom were taken prisoner, including the Bishop, upon whom the Prince cast “a fierce and fell look,” swearing to cut off his head. However, by a deal with the Prince’s brother John of Gaunt, the Bishop escaped to Avignon, carrying with him the fearful tale.

The knights who watched or participated in the slaughter were no different in kind from those who wept so piteously for Chandos, but the obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. Chandos was bewailed because he was one of themselves, whereas the victims of Limoges were outside chivalry. Besides, life was not precious, for what was the body, after all, but carrion, and the sojourn on earth but a halt on the way to eternal life?

In customary punishment, Limoges was sacked and burned and its fortifications razed. Though the blood-soaked story, spreading through France, doubtless cowed resistance for the moment, it fostered in the long run the hatred of the English that fifty years later was to bring Joan of Arc to Orléans.

A hero’s career ended in the vengeful reprisal at Limoges. Too ill to govern, the Prince turned the rule of Aquitaine over to John of Gaunt, and at the same time suffered the death of his eldest son, Edward, aged six. In January 1371 he left Bordeaux never to return. With his wife and second son, Richard, he went home to six more years of the helpless life of an invalid.

With France now holding the initiative, England’s military strategy was mainly negative. The object of Sir Robert Knollys’ savage raid through northern France in 1370 was to do as much injury as possible in order to damage the French war effort and hold back French forces from Aquitaine. His forces could rob villages and burn ripe wheat in the fields as they marched, but could take no fortified places nor provoke frontal battle. Without prospect of either ransoms or glory, his knights grew disaffected as they neared Paris, yet their threat was sufficiently alarming to cause the appointment of Du Guesclin as Constable in October.

A record of being four times taken prisoner suggests either a rash or an inept warrior, but Bertrand was not a reckless plunger of the type of Raoul de Coucy. On the contrary, he was cautious and wily, and a believer in wearing down the enemy by deprivation and attrition, which was why Charles chose him. His first act was to conclude a personal pact with a formidable fellow Breton, one-eyed Olivier de Clisson, called “the Butcher” from a habit of cutting off arms and legs in battle. The Breton team and its adherents harassed and pursued Knollys, and when his company was split by the defection of discontented knights, defeated it in combat on the lower Loire. Snapping and biting here and there, or buying off English captains too strongly installed, Du Guesclin’s forces liberated piece by piece the ceded territories.

Crucial advantage was won at sea in June 1372 by the Castilians’ defeat of an English convoy off La Rochelle. The English ships were bringing men and horses to reinforce Aquitaine and—more critically—£20,000 in soldiers’ pay, said to be enough to support 3,000 combatants for a year. Informed by his spies of the expedition, Charles called upon his alliance with King Enrique. The Castilian galleons of 200 tons propelled by 180 oars manned by free men, not chained criminals, were more maneuverable than the square-rigged English merchantmen,