The Black Prince's Expedition by H. J. Hewitt

Author:H. J. Hewitt [Hewitt, H. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: new
ISBN: 9781844152179
Amazon: 1844152170
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Published: 2005-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

As already stated,14 it is not our plan to give an exhaustive account of the battle as a great military engagement. We shall, in fact, deal only briefly with those aspects which have formed the debating ground of military specialists and then pass to aspects which have received less attention.

Though legend pointed to a certain area as that of the battlefield and the finding of battle relics appeared to confirm the legend, doubts remained for very many years about the exact spot on which the battle of Poitiers had been fought. The prince said that it was one league from Poitiers. Most of the chroniclers gave no details of its position. Froissart, however, gave three points of reference. It was, he said, ‘near Poitiers in the fields of Beauvoir and Maupertuis’. But Maupertuis could not be identified. The word means ‘bad road’. It is a common enough term (there is a Maupertuis on King Edward III’s route of 1346 from Saint Lô to Caen), not necessarily a place-name, and it may be classed with the group of names of fields, enclosures, lands such as Mauchamp, Maucourt, Mauregard, or ‘passages’ such as Malpas, Maupas which have become place-names. A number of antiquaries and surveyors in the middle of the last century realized how aptly the chroniclers’ topographical details described the region to the north and west of the wood of Nouaillé and concluded that the little settlement long known as La Cardinerie must be Maupertuis. Their inference was embodied in the French état major 1 : 80.000 map and has been widely followed. More recently it has been argued that the inference is wrong. La Cardinerie, it is said, stands on the ‘bad road’ and, in the fourteenth century, Maupertuis was the name of the road and perhaps vaguely of the region through which it passed. This road runs no rth-south a little west of the wood of Nouaillé, crosses the stream called the Miosson at the Gué de l’Homme and joins the road from Nouaillé to Les Roches. It is to the east and west of this road, Maupertuis, that the battlefield lies.15

The battlefield may best be described as seen from the air from a point a mile south of the Bois de Nouaillé and looking northward. Below is the valley of the Miosson cut fairly deeply into the plateau and at this point taking a mainly westerly course but with many meanders. On the right, running south-east is the road from Poitiers to Limoges. Less to the right is the village of Nouaillé with the fortified enclosure of its abbey. In the middle, just north of this village lies the large wood of Nouaillé through the north-eastern corner of which a road runs northwards. This road crosses the Miosson by a bridge in Nouaillé, rises over a hummock near the present railway station, then crosses the old road, Maupertuis, near La Cardinerie.

Woods great and small still cover much of the extensive region visible from the air, but north and west of the wood of Nouaillé the surface is almost clear.

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