A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [254]
As French lances pierced and axes hacked at the solid mass of bodies, many of whom lacked helmet or cuirass, the dead piled up in heaps. French foot soldiers, penetrating between the men-at-arms, finished off the fallen with their knives, “with no more mercy than if they had been dogs.” Under the attack of the Bourbon-Coucy wing, the Flemish rear turned and fled, throwing away their weapons as they ran. Philip van Artevelde, fighting in the front ranks, tried to rally them, but from his position could exercise no effective command. He lacked the assurance of the Black Prince at Poitiers to retain control from a hilltop above the battle. Borne backward by the mass as the rout spread, he was trampled and killed under the feet of his own forces, as was his banner-bearer, a woman named Big Margot.
Bourbon and Coucy, mounting their horses, led their battalion in pursuit of the fugitives, and in a fierce fight routed 3,000 Flemings from a wood where they had gathered for a final defense. The debacle was complete. While their battalion pursued and killed as far as Courtrai, Coucy and Bourbon rode back to Roosebeke, where the King “welcomed them joyously and praised God for the victory which, through their efforts, He had given.” The battle was over in the space of two hours. Many Flemish bodies were found without wounds, crushed to death under their companions’ pressure, but so many thousands were killed by French weapons that “the ground was inundated by blood.” The number of dead “miscreants” was reported in figures of fantasy, but agreement was general that few of the Flemish army survived. Fit only to be the “prey of dogs and crows,” the bodies were left unburied, so that for days afterward, the stench of the battlefield was insupportable.
While being divested of his armor in his scarlet pavilion, the King expressed a wish to see Artevelde dead or alive. For a reward of 100 francs, searchers found his body, which was taken before the victors, who stared at it for a while in silence. The King gave it a little kick, “treating it as a villein.” Then it was taken away and “hanged upon a tree.” Artevelde’s image was subsequently woven into a tapestry depicting the battle, which the Duke of Burgundy commissioned and used as a carpet because he liked to walk on the commoners who had attempted to overthrow the ordained order.
The sack of Courtrai was merciless, in revenge for defeat in the Battle of the Spurs eighty years before. Citizens fled vainly to cellars and churches to escape the soldiers; they were dragged into the streets and killed. On his knees Louis de Male begged mercy for the town, but was ignored. Every house was ransacked and even nobles of the town and their children carried away for ransom. The Duke of Burgundy, with a Valois eye for the best, dismounted the cathedral clock, finest in Flanders, and transported it by ox wagon to Dijon (where it still is). When the King departed, Courtrai was set on fire at his command, “so that it should be known ever after that the French King had been there.” Clisson, restored to his normal ferocity, was thought to have had a hand in the order.
The totality of victory had one major exception. Ghent, the main objective, was never taken. At first news of their army’s defeat, the people were stunned and despairing, so that if the French had come to their gates in the several days after the battle “they would have suffered them to enter without resistance.” But medieval war had a tendency to stop short of political objective. Weary of cold and rain, occupied with profit and revenge in the immediate aftermath of Roosebeke, and confident that Ghent would surrender on demand, the French did not go north.
Peter van den Bossche, despite his wounds, had himself carried to Ghent and re-inspirited the city, insisting the war was not over, that the French would