Battle of Poitiers

In 1356 the Black Prince was leading a raid back towards Gascony when King John II of France overtook him near Poitiers. The English took a strong position behind hedges and a vineyard, with archers on the flanks. French knights, many of them on foot, attacked in successive waves and were broken by arrow fire and a flank attack by a small mounted reserve. John himself fought on until he was surrounded and captured, along with his youngest son. The capture of a king sent the French government into crisis for years.

Poitiers is usually told as another triumph of the English longbow, and the archers did matter, but chroniclers differ on how much. Some give the decisive role to the mounted reserve under the Captal de Buch, and French numbers are hard to pin down because narratives written for the English and the French courts both had reasons to exaggerate. The exact ground is also not certain: the battle is named for Poitiers but was fought at Maupertuis, and the traditional site has been argued over by local historians. The political aftermath, including the Jacquerie peasant uprising of 1358 and the Treaty of Brétigny of 1360, is often treated as the true consequence of the day.