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confident to strike south and complete the conquest of Maine and Anjou, although he knew that the enemy had gathered another army and was intending to launch a full-scale offensive He assembled 10,000 troops at Rouen and sent the Earl of Suffolk to retake Ivry which had fallen to the Dauphinists. Suffolk captured the town quickly enough but the garrison held out in the citadel, expecting to be relieved by the Dauphin’s new army. Before the army could reach Ivry, Bedford came up with the main body of his troops and the citadel surrendered. The enemy commanders—the Duke of Alençon, the Count of Aumale and the Viscount of Narbonne, had too many unfortunate memories of Agincourt to want a battle, but their Scots allies insisted on fighting. They compromised, deciding to capture some towns while avoiding a pitched battle in the field. On 14 August they appeared before the English town of Verneuil on the Norman border with prisoners tied to their horses’ tails ; the townsmen, thinking these were English captives and that Bedford must have been defeated, promptly opened their gates, only to discover that the ‘prisoners’ were Scots. Meanwhile Bedford had left Ivry for Evreux, where reconnaissance troops informed him that the enemy had taken Verneuil. Next day he set out for Verneuil, so sure of himself that he ordered 3,000 Burgundians to leave him and return to the siege of Nesle.

On 17 August the Regent drew up his army on the road from Damville to Verneuil where it emerged from a forest on to the plain in front of Verneuil. He had about 9,000 men. He used the same formation employed at Poitiers and Agincourt, with his men-at-arms at the centre and archers on the wings ; the men-at-arms were in two ‘battles’, the right commanded by himself, the left by Salisbury. He also posted a reserve of 2,000 mounted bowmen a quarter of a mile behind. As an added refinement, he fortified his baggage-train, laagering the wagons in a hollow square still further back; the horses were tethered head and tail, three or four deep, in a circle round the square to serve as an extra barrier. The Dauphinist army was further down the road towards Verneuil, about 17,000 troops formed into two divisions of dismounted men-at-arms linked by archers, their wings being protected by mounted men-at-arms who were meant to deal with any flanking attacks by English bowmen. One division was commanded by the Count of Aumale ; the other, consisting of 6,000 Scots, was under the Earls of Douglas and Buchan who sent a message to the English that they intended to give no quarter.

Neither side wanted to attack. From dawn until about 4 o’clock in the afternoon both armies sweltered in their armour beneath a blazing sun without moving. At last Bedford ordered his men to advance. After kneeling and kissing the ground and shouting ‘St George ! Bedford !’ they did so at a slow steady pace, giving deep, deliberate roars of defiance. Simultaneously some mounted Dauphinist men-at-arms charged the archers on Bedford’s right flank, riding through and past them until they were stopped by the bowmen in reserve; many English turned and ran. Bedford’s division continued to march grimly towards that of Aumale, which was also advancing, shouting ‘Montjoie ! Saint Denis !’ The two gleaming masses of faceless steel robots, war-cries booming hollowly from beneath their helmets, met with a loud crash to begin a hand-to-hand combat whose ferocity astounded even contemporaries. Wavrin, who fought in the battle himself, remembered how ‘the blood of the dead spread on the field and that of the wounded ran in great streams all over the earth’. For three-quarters of an hour English and Dauphinists hacked, battered and stabbed each other without either side gaining any advantage. The Regent, swinging a two-handed pole-axe, did fearsome execution and killed many men—‘He reached no one whom he did not fell.’ (Such weapons smashed open an expensive armour like a modern tin can, the body underneath being crushed and mangled before even the blade sank in.) Finally the enemy began to falter, to