A Critical Analysis of the Sack of Limoges (1370) according to Jean Froissart

Despite his French origins, Froissart actually admired the Black Prince and so his account of the Sack of Limoges is interesting in painting the Black Prince in a very negative light. One view on this is the possibility that the important fact was that the Black Prince ‘ordered a pointless massacre’ rather than the number of dead. Even so Hubert Cole amongst others has suggested that Froissart multiplied the number of dead tenfold. Whereas Froissart gives the figure of ‘more than three thousand persons...’ were killed, a contemporary local chronicler at the Saint Martial Abbey recorded that ‘The city was taken and burned and more than three hundred persons put to death’. If this is the figure, then it has been suggested that this number was less than the number estimated for the number of military militia. What is interesting on the matter of the amount of deaths is that some sources do not mention it at all. Both Papal and French records which have been said to have been ‘purely factual’ with the references to the destruction of property but neither have records with regards to the number of dead. In fact even the English chronicler, Walsingham does mention the inhabitant’s deaths, Edward and his forces ‘...killed all those he found there, a few only being spared their lives and taken prisoner.’ So whilst Froissart is certainly not the only chronicler to tell of a vast massacre it is very telling that official records make no mention of it at all.  As aforementioned, with the sack of Limoges being the last military action in Aquitaine (as well as in his life), this very fact helps to contribute to that fact that his character is viewed in such a negative light. In fact it has been suggested that it was due to the sacking that the Black Prince got his name of ‘Black’. This can be seen in Froissart and one reason for this could be that this manuscript could have been written for a French patron. Palmer has written that the French, being the suppressed victims of the Black Prince within the early part of the Hundred Years’ War, has a point of view that is more ‘unreasonably’ hostile towards the English with a prime example being the sack of Limoges. Barber has suggested that this could have come from the French or Papal courts (Pope Gregory XI’s nephew, Roger de Beaufort had been taken captive at Limoges). However if it has, we are yet to find a record of it today, suggesting either it has been lost or it has come from elsewhere, if not from his own opinions.

Slightly more significant is the facts surrounding the supposed ‘massacre’. It was a standard convention at the time that if the attackers of a fortress had offered the opportunity for the defenders to surrender who refused, then if the attackers took the fortress (which normally needed to have high walls and artillery) then the defenders belonged to the victors, who could do as they pleased with their captives. The precedent for this was Calais in 1347. Furthermore, Limoges was not a city waiting to be relieved by their Lord but were resisting their oath made to the prince; ‘the sanctity of the oath was central to chivalry’, so it could be argued that what the Black Prince did was in defence of his chivalric ideals. Even so the actions did lead to him being accused of lacking the chivalric virtue of pity. This was in despite of the fact that ‘according to the laws of war, a city that refused to submit to a prince insulted his majesty and should be punished accordingly.’ Therefore with all of this information available to us, we should find it no surprise that the Black Prince behaved the way he did. It was not the first time that such an incident had occurred but was perhaps merely the most known simply because it seemed to go against the Black Prince’s reputation for being chivalrous.

        One key theme within the period and therefore can easily be found as a theme within the chronicles is chivalry. We find this in several points within Froissart’s account.         Closely connected to the idea of chivalry is the sense of morality that can be found. The morality is primarily Froissart’s own. After all he is writing it. The first sense you get of this is when Froissart mentions that ‘the Bishop and the chief citizens knew that they had acted very wrongly...and they regretted it bitterly.’ This adds to the drama of the larger picture that Froissart paints. It is apart of the lesson in morality that Froissart gives in how it would be these people who would be punished and ‘killed’ whilst the Bishop, who was the Black Prince’s son’s godfather and a close adviser of the Black Prince, and the men who were in charge, Sir Hugues de la Roche, Sir Jean de Villemur and Roger de Beaufort end up unpunished. When they eventually surrender in their fights against the English nobles, when they say, ‘“...treat us according to the laws of arms”’, we find that the Duke of Lancaster, the Black Prince’s brother, seems shocked at such a statement, ‘“By God, Sir Jean, we would never dream of doing anything else”’. The use of the rather blasphemous ‘By God’ signals that it was simply unthinkable for a noble to murder or mistreat a fellow noble, despite the differences between them and the fact that they were fighting against each other. The sense of a joint brotherhood was too strong, it was the theory that the nobles of France and English felt they had a lot more in common with each other, much more so than they felt that they had with their fellow Englishmen or Frenchmen. This can be seen as morality wrong just in the case that these men, who were the cause of the rebellion are relatively unpunished whereas the citizens within the city, who would have had no choice but to accept what the leaders stated, were slaughtered. Froissart does make a distinct difference between the Black Prince and his soldiers; his condemnation is solely for the Black Prince for giving the orders to kill and is not towards those soldiers who were following their orders to kill ‘indiscriminately’. It would not be expected in this age for anyone to disobey their orders, hence the whole commotion of the people of Limoges breaking their oath towards the Black Prince.

         Modern scholars have agreed that at the sack of Limoges, the Black Prince was probably carried in a litter as it was his ‘first substantial journey’ for two years. He had enough troubles on his hands already; he was gravely ill as well as the ‘political, military and financial’ troubles he was facing in Aquitaine which Hewitt has argued were already strong enough to ‘disturb the balance of his mind’. This possibly made him worse in his judgement and so it might be no surprise if innocent people were in fact killed. Froissart however does not make too much mention of this fact other than that the Black Prince being unable to ride a horse, was taken via litter. Froissart does seem to make it seem like the Black Prince was in a bad state of mind and yet at the same time in a sane one. If we are to believe Froissart, then upon finding out that Limoges had turned, the Black Prince ‘swore on the soul of his father- an oath which he never broke...’ that before doing anything else, he would gain the city back and make the traitors pay dearly. The fact that he would make this oath could suggest that the Black Prince was in a sound state of mind and yet with Froissart going on to write about the sack and the alleged murder of innocent civilians, it very much suggests that the Black Prince was in a very poor state of mind. On the other hand, we can infer that he still had some wit about him. Upon learning of the size of the garrison, the Black Prince does realise that Limoges would not fall to an assault. The subsequent use of miners also then suggests that he was able to think out a strategy. It should be noted that we infer from Froissart that it was he, the Black Prince, set the miners to work after bringing them with him, even if it is not directly stated.

        Another issue that modern scholars now disagree with is the length of time that the siege is said to have lasted. Within Froissart we are told that the miners dug there tunnel for around a month and during this time there were no skirmishes or assaults allowed by the Black Prince. Even though we must be wary in using Emerson, writing in 1976 when new evidence could have been found later, (for example, she claims that the walls were brought down via canon fire) it is nevertheless interesting that she claims that there was a month of daily skirmishes. Of course, when reading Froissart, we learn that the Black Prince forbade it, there is no mention of whether it did subsequently happen. On the siege itself, we learn from modern scholars that the mining took just four days; Cole for example writes that the Black Prince arrived at Limoges on the 14th September 1370 and on the 18th the miners reported that the work was finished. The 18th being a significant date for being the anniversary of the Poitiers victory. Therefore we have to ask ourselves, why was it the Froissart said no more than a month? One obvious possibly is that he got his information from elsewhere that wished to make the siege last longer to give more significance to the power of the invaders. This would highly likely to be of French origin. Froissart himself who may have been writing for a French patron with this particular manuscript might have decided to make this small change and might have known exactly how long the siege lasted but wished to please his patron by making the French look better than they actually were.

Therefore, by looking at Froissart’s piece, we can see that it is a very valuable document. It is important as historian’s that we look back to history and at events with the attitudes, values and ideas that were prevalent at the time rather than looking back with our own. Froissart can provide a valuable insight into this. With his different patrons from both sides of the channel and his subsequent differing manuscripts, it can be inferred what French and what English points of view might have been. We can use Froissart in conjugation with his contemporaries or near-contemporaries to infer this fully and hence can see why the Sack of Limoges was viewed in such a negative light. Chivalry was everything and the Black Prince has been said to be the epitome of the chivalric age. Hence it can be shocking that he could do an action such as the murder of the ‘innocent’ in the city, regardless of the facts surrounding it which would mean that the Black Prince had every right to go in and subject the rebels to his mercy. They were after all rebels against his rule following their switching of alliance. However for all the value of Froissart, we must remember the bias he would have had in favour of recalling the events in his chronicles to suit his patron. We must remember it is possible he fabricated the truth with the details involved such as the number of dead and the length of time the siege took. Therefore the document can only tell us a limited scope of the history of the time without us looking at contemporaries. All in all though, the Sack of Limoges according to Jean Froissart is a very important historical document.

Words: 2,761.

Bibliography

The Sack of Limoges (1370), according to Froissart.

R. Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine: A biography of the Black Prince, (Woodbridge, 1978)

R. Barber, ‘Jean Froissart and Edward the Black Prince’, in J.J.N. Palmer (ed.),         Froissart: Historian         (Woodbridge, 1981)

H. Cole, The Black Prince, (London, 1976)  

A. Curry, The Hundred Years War, (2nd Ed., Basingstoke, 2003)

B. Emerson, The Black Prince, (London, 1976D. Green, Edward, The Black Prince, (Harlow and London, 2007)

H.J. Hewitt, The Organisation of War under Edward III, 1338-62. (New York, 1966)

J.J.N. Palmer (ed.),         Froissart: Historian         (Woodbridge, 1981)

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