The battle of Limoges

Limoges and Béarn (2)

On 8 August 1273 the armies of the Queen of England and the Viscomtesse of Limoges faced each other on an open plain between Aixes and the town of Limoges. It is tempting to say that both ladies were present and in command, but it seems not. Eleanor of Castile’s Gascons were led by Luke de Tany, seneschal of Gascony, while the French were led by Géraut de Themines, governor of Limoges.

The battle that followed, totally ignored by English chroniclers, was described by the Chronica Majora of Limoges:

“In the same year, on the day following the feast of Saint Sixtus, the king of England's seneschal, who had come to the aid of the citizens of Limoges against the viscountess of Limoges, had a great victory over her army, between Aixe and the town of Limoges. He wounded and captured many of them, killing a nobleman and many others, without loss to him or his allies, at which the townsfolk rejoiced greatly. Moreover, they captured the banner of Girbert de Tamines. On the feast of Saint Laurence following [two days later] one of the viscountess's men was found dead and many horses on both sides too, but the viscountess lost many more.”*

The arms of William de Valence (1225-1296)

Edward I’s seneschal had won a battle for his master, and the bourgeois of Limoges celebrated their deliverance. On 27 August the king’s uncle, William de Valence, arrived with letters from Edward requesting the inhabitants of the town to swear an oath of fealty to him as Duke of Aquitaine. This went against previous judgements of the court of Paris, but the bourgeois agreed wholeheartedly. The service of the oath took place on 3 September, in the abbey of Saint-Martial, in the presence of the consuls and of all the community. 

The fighting continued. On 16 September the bourgeois won another skirmish, and were so encouraged they decided to try a second attack upon Marguerite’s castle at Aixe. They marched on Sunday morning, with drums and trumpets, crossed the ford of Vienne and burnt the borough of Saint-Priest. They also roughed up the local priest and carried off the silver chalice, missal and candles from the church. At the gates of Aixe panic set in, and the mob fled in all directions, throwing away their weapons and hiding in the woods. A few days later Marguerite sent her men to burn the vineyards near Saint-Martial.

Edward could not move from Gascony. In September, even as war raged in the Limousin, Gaston de Béarn raised his head again.

*Thanks to Rich Price for the translation.

Els Bels

Limoges and Béarn (1)

In 1273 the Limousin was a disputed land between France and Aquitaine, torn by an exceptionally bloody civil war. The commune of Limoges was on one side, and on the other the Viscomtesse Marguerite: she claimed the city was hers by right, while the commune argued they were not her men at all, but owed direct homage to the king of France.

Limoges

Thrown into the mix was the Plantagenet claim to Limoges, left outstanding after the Treaty of Paris. There were suspicions in Paris that the commune preferred to be ruled by the English. A local annalist wrote:

“They [the French] hated us because…those who had raised the spirits of the King and of his advisers against us claimed wrongfully that we love the English best.”

King Philip ordered the Viscomtesse to stop attacking the people of Limoges. She ignored him and gathered an army at Chalusset, from where her soldiers rode to plunder, mutilate cattle, scatter wheat and perform “all kinds of wickedness.”

Philip seemed to cave to her pressure: at the Paris parlement of Pentecost 1273, he reversed his earlier decision and announced that the city of Limoges should give their homage to Marguerite. To add insult to injury, he ordered the citizens to release soldiers of the Viscomtesse they had taken prisoner, but did not order Marguerite to release her prisoners.

The enraged bourgeois of Limoges rose in arms and, on 5 July, attacked Marguerite’s castle at Aixe. They were thrashed out of sight by her troops and suffered terrible casualties. In desperation they now appealed to Edward I of England, who had gone from Paris to Gascony, and asked him to be their overlord. A fragment of their appeal survives (attached, second pic) expressed in the usual grovelling terms:

“To the most excellent lord Edward, by the grace of God, illustrious King of England, lord of Ireland and Aquitaine, king of the swingers, God-Emperor of Mars, high priest of all the things and rightful seigneur of sexy times…(etc etc)…”

Edward I & Eleanor of Castile

Perhaps Edward couldn’t resist the notion of galloping to the rescue; he did technically have right on his side, since the French should have coughed up Limoges back in 1259. For the present he was too busy in Gascony, so he sent his wife Eleanor of Castile with an army of Gascons to help the bourgeous of Limoges.

Els Bels arrived on 25 July and was led in procession to Saint-Martial “with great honours”.

Vivat imperator Edwardus

“All the Anglo-French conflicts, during the end of the 13th century, resulted from the Treaty of Paris as necessary consequences.”

- Charles Victor Langlois, biographer of Philippe le Hardi

The Hundred Years War is generally thought to have started in the reign of Edward III and ended in the collapse of Plantagenet Aquitaine in 1453. It could arguably be backdated to the aftermath of the Treaty of Paris in 1259, whereby Henry III of England resigned most of his dynastic claims in France. He was left with the duchy of Gascony and a handful of other territories, which the French were reluctant to concede.

Specifically, the treaty stated that Louis IX would:

“give us and our heirs and our successors all the right that he has and holds in these three bishoprics and in the cities, namely, of Limoges, Cathors and Périgueux, in fief and domain…”

In October 1271, the ailing Henry III sent envoys to Paris to “ask and receive” the above lands, as well as Quercy, the Agenais and Saintonge. He also complained that French agents were harassing the officers of his heir, the Lord Edward, about the homage of the city of Limoges.

The new French king, Philippe le Hardi, put off the English envoys with vague answers. He was probably hoping for Henry to die, which he did on 30 November 1272.

Henry’s successor was on his way back from the Holy Land. He landed in Italy in January 1273 and then passed through Lombardy; disturbingly (from a French point of view), the Italians and Lombards shouted “Long live the Emperor Edward!” The Milanese gave him gifts of horses, and on 25 June the Count of Savoy swore homage to the young English king. A lord of the kingdom of Arles, who had plundered the English army on its way to the Holy Land, was also brought before Edward and made to swear homage and fealty. 

Edward then descended from the mountains of Burgundy and took part in a chaotic tournament at Chalons, where he humiliated the Comte d’Auxerre in single combat and set fire to the town. His truimphal procession ended in Paris, where he knelt before Philip and swore homage for his lands in France. Like his father, Edward was perfectly aware that the French had not fulfilled their side of the Treaty of Paris. For that reason he couched the oath in ambiguous terms: he did homage for all the lands he held of Philip, as well as the lands he ought to hold:

“Dominus rex fado vobis homagium pro omnibus terris, quas debeo tenere de vobis.”

The price of peace

Henry III’s expedition to Gascony in 1253-4 ended in a series of treaties. He prolonged the truce with the French and arranged peace talks with the d’Albret family, the counts of Comminges and Armagnac and finally the rebel-in-chief, Gaston Moncada of Béarn. Gaston would raise his head again, but the d’Albret remained fiercely staunch Plantagenet loyalists until Edward II drove them into the the arms of Philip le Bel. 

Bordeaux

The war was concluded by a treaty with King Alfonso of Castile. Henry’s heir, Prince Edward, was to marry Alfonso’s half-sister Eleanor, and Alfonso would also have the honour of knighting the prince. Alfonso also wanted a generous dower for his sister - without providing anything himself - and for Edward to be endowed with lands woth £10,000 a year.

Edward and Eleanor

This was a hefty price for peace, but worth it to neutralise the threat of future invasions. Bonifacio Calvo, the Genoese poet who had encouraged Alfonso to conquer Gascony, was not impressed. He had earlier sung the praises of his master as a warrior-king. Now he accused Alfonso of being a bit of a weed:

“But too much he seems asleep, which displeases me; for I see his followers discourage and less courageous there - for if now the affair is new and does not comfort his men, there may come from it such misfortune and such loss to him that he will do well if he restores it within ten years.”

Like so many chroniclers and poets, Bonifacio wanted blood; provided it was someone else’s, of course. Once the war was over, Henry set about settling the communes in Gascony and pardoning those who had rebelled against him. The tricky part was reconciling the Solers, one of the wealthiest families in the faction-ridden city of Bordeaux. They had joined Alfonso during the war, and were not permitted to return to Bordeaux until August.

The king then had to reconcile the family with the Colombines, their main rivals inside the city. To achieve this Henry had to pay compensation to the Colombines for the murder of the mayor, William Gondemer, shot dead by a supporter of the Solers. Henry banished the assassin for life, and for good measure banished for five years a man who had been present when the crossbow bolt was discharged.

In camp before Brigelac

In the summer of 1254, towards the end of the conflict in Gascony, the future Edward I tasted his first experience of warfare.

Bergerac on the Dordogne

The cause was a succession crisis over the lordship of Bergerac, east of Bordeaux. Henry III had promised it to a cadet branch of the Rudell family, which had run out of male heirs in the direct line. One of the women married Renaud Pons, a vassal of the King of France, who claimed the lordship by right of his wife. The citizens of Bergerac supported Renaud and took up arms on his behalf.

Henry refused to accept Renaud’s homage, so the Frenchman treacherously seized a band of English nobles as they passed through Pons (in Poitou) on their way home. One of them, Gilbert de Segrave, was so badly mistreated he died in prison. On 12 May the enraged English king ordered all goods, wines and people coming from Bergerac to be seized, and exactly a month later summoned knights and militia from Gascon towns.

Edward had arrived in Gascony to join his father in June. Together they went to deal with Renaud, and were ‘in camp before Brigelac’ by 10 July. On that day, while the siege was in progress, Edward confirmed a grant of land in Connaught in Ireland to his kinsman, Geoffrey Lusignan. The witness list is a formidable set of names, implying the Bergerac affair was taken seriously: the bishops of Bath and Wells and Hereford were present, as were Robert Walerand, the earl of Warwick, the king’s half-brother William de Valence, and various other bigwigs.

The siege lasted only a few days and ended with Renaud being taken captive, presumably after he threw in the towel. He was Edward’s prisoner until January 1255, when he and all the other competing heirs to Bergerac were brought before the prince’s court to judge the case. Edward subsequently learned a lesson in distorted legalism, as Renaud and his wife Marguerite made one excuse after another to avoid appearing in court. Marguerite even appears to have feigned pregnancy, a short-term strategy if ever there was one.

There the matter rested until 1259, when the gruesome twosome popped up at the French court to urge King Louis to restore their inheritance. They persuaded the queen of France to award them the lordship, though it wasn’t until June 1267 that King Henry finally accepted her decision.

Putting one's house in order

The siege of Benauges in Gascony lasted from 1 October-5 November 1253, weeks that Henry III put to good use. While the king was encamped before the walls, his men went off to seize lesser castles. On 26 October, for instance, a Gascon named William Ernaldi de Marchan swore to hold the castle of Lubylly for the king and do him faithful service.

When Benauges finally surrendered, a part of Henry’s army moved on to besiege the other main rebel stronghold at La Réole. The king himself went to St Macaire and Bazas, retraced his steps to Benauges and then returned to Bazas. It seems he was still taking submissions and putting his house in order. On 28 November the communes of Marenne, Marencin, Gosse and Seyniaus were ordered to provide men ‘to ride against the king’s enemies’, whenever Henry saw fit. Two days later, 1 December, he received the submission of Amanieu de la Brett, a rebel knight.

While Henry was busy, Gaston Moncada de Béarn rose up in the south and attempted to seize the port of Bayonne. The pro-royalist faction inside the town drove him out and punished those conspirators who had tried to surrender Bayonne to the rebels. It may be that the leader of the conspirators was Peter Rosset, whom Simon de Montfort had appointed mayor the previous year. Certainly, he was imprisoned in the August of that year and only pardoned by the incercession of the king of Castile.

Bayonne

The people of Bayonne were consistently loyal to the Plantagenet regime. Renowned pirates, they have been described as the ‘Genoese of the northern seas’. Their sailors formed part of a maritime union which linked them with English-held ports from Bristol to Dublin and Berwick; in time of war the Bayonnais generally made common cause with English sailors against the Normans and other subjects of the French crown. Back in 1206 they had developed a collective organisation known as the Societas navium baioensiom, a guild of merchants, shipowners, shipmasters and silors. This was a powerful confraternity, and their badge can still be seen on the roof-bosses of Bayonne cathedral.

The lord king to Gascony

“Memorandom that on 6 August 1253, 37 Henry III, the King crossed to Gascony.”

Thus the official memo announced the lord king’s crossing to Gascony, to crush the rebellion of Gaston Moncada de Béarn and his allies. Henry was seen off by his fourteen-year old son Edward, who sobbed his eyes out until the royal flagship had vanished over the horizon.

Benauges

The king arrived to find the revolt well underway, with La Réole and the castle of Benauges as the focal points. Apart from the troops he brought over from England, Henry relied on the aid of loyalist barons and what support he could get from the towns. He also benefited from the support of his Lusignan half-brothers, who supplied an extra 100 knights from Poitou.

Some of the towns were annoyed with the king for having seized or detained their wine in England. A few, such as the Solers family of Bordeaux, were angry enough to join the standard of Alfonso X of Castile, who laid claim to the duchy. Henry was still able to call on the military services of the communes: he demanded 300 men from the town of Bazas, for example, while Bordeaux was ordered to send 3000 crossbowmen to Rions. These towns were also required to supply wine, armour, cord, weapons and other supplies for the king’s use.

Apart from Bordeaux, the chief town in the south was the port of Bayonne. In September the king ordered the Bayonnais to seize all the goods of Gaston de Béarn and his subjects within their jurisdiction. He also required large sums of money from the communes, and obtained loans from Bayonne, Dax, St-Sever and other places.

Henry’s first tactical move was to march on La Réole. He was in camp outside the walls for just three days, 8-11 September, and then moved on to Gironde, St Macaire, Loupiac and Rions. Presumably he was taking the submission of rebels in these towns, and there was some damage: on 22 September he paid compensation to one Garsias Aken, a citizen of St Macaire, whose vineyards had been destroyed by the royal army.

On 1 October Henry arrived outside the walls of rebel-held Benauges (pictured), an impressive castle located on a high bank of the Gironde.