THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE

The immediate results of the victory of Poitiers consisted, first, in the immensely increased prestige which it gave to the House of Plantagenet throughout Europe.

Next, we must reckon the local, though ephemeral, effect upon the opinion of Aquitaine, through which the Black Prince was now free to retreat at his ease towards Bordeaux and the secure territories of Gascony.

But though these results were the most immediate, and though the victory of one monarch over the other was the most salient aspect of the victory for contemporaries, as it is for us, there was another element which we must particularly consider because it illustrates the difference between the political conditions of the fourteenth century and of our own time.

The real point of the success was the capture of the king’s person. The importance of the action lay, of course, to some extent, in the prestige it gave to the Black Prince personally; though that point was lost a very few years afterwards in the subsequent decline of the Plantagenet power in the south. In so far as an action in those days could carry a national effect that is, could be regarded by distant civilian populations as proof of strength or weakness in contrasting races and societies Poitiers had not even the claim of Crecy; for it was not principally an archers’ but a knights’ battle, and the knights were mainly the gentry of the South of France, while those who had been broken by the only cavalry movement of the engagement were not even French knights, but levies of German, Spanish, and other origin. But the capture of the King of France at that particular moment of chivalry, that last fermentation of a feudal society which was reaching its term, had a vast positive effect, as well as an almost incalculable moral effect.

There is nothing in modern times to which such an accident can be accurately paralleled. Perhaps the capture of the capital city would be the nearest thing; but there is this grave difference between them, that the capture of the modern capital must mean prolonged and decisive success in war, whereas the capture of John was an accident of the field. The victory would have been less by far if the whole of the king’s command had fled, with the king himself at the head of the rout.

A modern parallel more nearly exact would be the transference in the midst of a conflict of some great financial power from one side to the other; or again, in a naval war, the blowing up of so many capital ships by contact mines as would put one of the two opposing fleets into a hopeless inferiority to the other. To capture a king was to capture not so much a necessary part of the mechanism of government as the most important and the richest member of a feudal organisation. It meant the power to claim an enormous feudal ransom for his person. It meant, more doubtfully, the power to engage him, while he was yet a prisoner, to terms that would bind his lièges: “more doubtfully,” because the whole feudal system jealously regarded the rights both of individual owners and of custom from the peasant to the crown. Finally, to capture the king was to get hold of the chief financial support of an enemy. A feudal king had vast revenues in the shape of rents, not competitive, but fixed, which came to him as they did to any other lord, but in much greater amount than to any other lord. The king was the chief economic factor in that autonomous economic federation which we call the feudal organisation of Gaul.

The fact that his capture was an accident in no way lessened the result; it was regarded in the military mind of those days much as we regard the crippling of a modern financial power by some chance of speculation. It was only a bit of good fortune on the one side, and of bad fortune on the other, but one to be duly taken advantage of by those whom it would profit.

The immediate result of that capture was twofold: an admission on the part of John of the Plantagenet claim, and a corresponding spontaneous movement in France which led to the defeat of that claim; the signing (ultimately) of a treaty tearing the French monarchy in two; and, finally, the rejection and nullifying of that treaty by the mere instinct of the nation. But these lengthy political consequences followed by the further success of the Black Prince’s nephew at Agincourt, and again by his successor’s loss of all save Calais do not concern this book.