Siege Warfare During the Hundred Years War
Siege Warfare During the Hundred Years War
Once More unto the Breach...
Peter Hoskins
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by
PEN & SWORD MILITARY
An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd
Yorkshire Philadelphia
Copyright Peter Hoskins, 2018
ISBN 978-1-47383-432-3
eISBN 978-1-52671-585-2
Mobi ISBN 978-1-52671-584-5
The right of Peter Hoskins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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For Josephine
13 December 1942 to 11 January 2016
List of Maps and Plans
Maps
Northern France, 13371360
Flanders
South-west France, 13371360
Southern France, 13691389
Northern France, 13691389
Normandy, 14151422
Northern France, 14151422
Northern France, 14221429
France, 14291444
Normandy, 14291444
Normandy, 14491450
Aquitaine, 14501453
Plans
Harfleur in the fifteenth century
Caen, 1418
Rouen, 14181419
Orlans, 14281429
List of Plates
Carcassonne.
The castle at Arques-la-Bataille.
The keep at Vernon.
The barbican of Picquigny castle.
Angers castle.
Mangonel.
Springald.
Bricole.
Trebuchet.
Couillard.
Battering ram.
Belfry.
Bombard.
La Role castle.
The thirteenth-century watch tower in Calais.
Rodins sculpture of the Burghers of Calais.
The Rouen gate at Harfleur.
Graville Priory.
Caen castle.
The Tour St-Vigor at Pont-delArche.
The keep of Rouen castle.
Fcamp castle.
Dieppe castle.
The ramparts of St-L.
Bonport abbey.
The Porte du Prtre gate at Mantes-la-Jolie.
The perimeter tower of St Martin at Mantes-la-Jolie.
Ramparts in Beauvais.
The Chteau des Tourelles at Vernon.
Vestiges of Chiz castle.
Acknowledgements
First of all I should like to thank Rupert Harding at Pen & Sword for having the confidence to carry this project forward despite books on the medieval period being somewhat of a niche market. Thanks also to Scott Hall for his cover illustration for this the third of my books to which he has contributed. On matters of substance my thanks to a fine French historian, Guilhem Ppin, steeped in the history of Gascony and the Black Prince for his sharing with me his newly discovered information concerning the sack of Limoges in 1370. My thanks to Rebecca Sewell and Nicolas Savy for permission to use their photographs. Finally, and by no means least, thank you to Professor Anne Curry for her support in my endeavours over several years, and for passing me a copy of the transcription of the College of Arms MS M9, folios 3166v. Professor Anne Curry, Dr Andy King, Dr Craig Lambert and Dr Dan Spencer also generously made papers and articles available which had escaped me. I am also grateful to Anne and Andrew Vallance for their helpful reviews of my manuscript errors remain mine!
Preface
Siege warfare had a more important role during the Hundred Years War than one would believe in view of the attention given to dramatic set-piece battles such as Crcy and Agincourt. Shakespeares famous speech for King Henry in Henry V (act III, scene I) which begins Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead! is often associated with the battle of Agincourt. Indeed, the BBC used the speech to introduce an item on the 600th anniversary of the battle in October 2015. This is perhaps not surprising since Henry V in its entirety is widely associated solely with the battle. However, the span of action in the play is much broader, covering events in England before the English invasion of 1415 through the Battle of Agincourt to the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 and the marriage of Henry to Catherine de Valois. Henrys famous speech relates to the siege of Harfleur and not to the battle. This misunderstanding of the context of the speech is, however, no more than a reflection of the place of the great battles of the Hundred Years War such as Crcy, Poitiers and Agincourt in the popular imagination of the English.
Sieges, other than the stories of the burghers of Calais when the town surrendered in 1347 and of Joan of Arc at the siege of Orlans in 1429, garner little attention. However, sieges and the capture of castles and towns were far more numerous than pitched battles during the Hundred Years War, and the holding or loss of towns and castles proved in the end to be of greater strategic importance than battles. The conquest of Normandy and much of northern France by Henry V was due to his successful campaign of taking towns and castles in 1417 and the years that followed. He could not have launched that campaign without Agincourt under his belt, but it was the taking of the great towns of Normandy such as Caen and Rouen which brought the Normans and others in northern France into his allegiance, and not Agincourt.
Victories in pitched battles were, of course, important, and those of Crcy and Poitiers in particular with the capture of King John II were crucial in establishing the English ascendancy which resulted in the Treaty of Brtigny in 1360. On the French side it was the battle of Formigny in 1450 which finished all hope for the English of holding on to Normandy and that of Castillon in 1453 which led to the expulsion of the English from Aquitaine, leaving the English with nothing other than the Calais Pale. However, the disintegration of English power in the years before Castillon stemmed more from the French driving the English out of towns and fortresses than from victory on the battlefield. Earlier in the war the reversal from 1369 onwards of the English ascendancy was due to the French strategy of King Charles V of concentrating on the capture of towns and fortresses and avoiding pitched battle at almost all costs. Edward III, the architect of the English success in the first phase of the Hundred Years War, is much more famous for his victory at Crcy in 1346 than for his capture of Calais after almost a year of siege. Yet the taking of Calais had a more lasting importance for the English prosecution of the war than the somewhat ephemeral victory at Crcy the year before.
