#OTD in 1297 the army of Edward I was defeated by the French at Bellegarde or Bonnegarde in southern Gascony. This was a bad start to a difficult year for the king, in which his forces suffered a more famous defeat at Stirling Bridge in Scotland, and he faced serious political opposition in England.
The Anglo-Gascon army was led by Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln. He was on his way to resupply Bellegarde, when he marched into a carefully laid French ambush in a wooded valley near the town. Lincoln might have been betrayed by a scout, though the sources are unclear.
Lincoln’s army was formed into three divisions. The first was led by John de St John, a former seneschal of Gascony. When the French appeared, he charged straight at them, apparently to try and give the rest of the army a chance to escape. After a hard fight, St John was captured and spent the next few years in a French prison.
The second and third divisions were quickly routed, although Lincoln managed to rally some of his knights and lead a desperate charge to try and kill the French commander, the Comte d’Artois. He couldn’t break through, and only nightfall saved the remains of his army. Lincoln spent the night wandering alone in a forest, while many of his knights were killed or captured.
Bellegarde was a very serious defeat: Lincoln had lost the only English field army in Gascony, which left the remaining Plantagenet strongholds exposed to attack. This explains Edward’s frenzied efforts to get over to Flanders later in the year, to split the French and lift the intense pressure on Gascony.
All this occurred at the same time as the revolt of Andrew Moray and William Wallace in Scotland. To save his beloved duchy, the last significant piece of the so-called Angevin Empire, Edward was quite prepared to let Scotland (or even England) go to blazes. Gascony came first.
However, these set-piece battles rarely proved decisive. Only a few weeks later, in February, the French agreed to a truce, suspending military operations. This gave the English time to ferry over supplies to the ducal bastions in Gascony, which held out until the duchy was formally restored to Edward in 1303.
On a side-note, I wrote a book about all this, which nobody bought. Screw it, then: the next one will be all about Wallace’s mum.
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