Bergerac 1345

[Dave Knight]

According to Gribit in Henry of Lancaster's Expedition to Aquitaine 1345-46 the sequence of events in the first part of the taking of the town was as follows:

He laid a trap for the defenders by parading captured Frenchmen and cattle before the city walls
'1600 men came forth'
The French and English Men at Arms were both mounted and charged through each other as Lancaster's men 'opened their formation'
The English Archers, arrayed behind their cavalry and on their flanks then shot the French to pieces 'Almost all the French were either killed or captured'

The initial disposition of the English seems rather odd, but it was an ambush so the archers may have been hidden in some way?  The English knights then letting the French pass through them seems incredibly well disciplined.

This is one of those occasions when simply reading the words seems to make sense, but then trying to translate them into a battlefield scenario for a wargame makes me seriously challenge the account as inherently unlikely.

Any thoughts or observations?

[Erpingham]

Bergerac is a battle with conflicting sources.  They don't agree who the French were - a sally from the town or a retreating force from the siege of Montcuq.  Froissart gives a more conventional version of the action, with the archers engaging first and the cavalry following up.  Gribbit's version (and that of Clifford Rogers in his 2004 paper) is based on the St Omer chronicle version, which is much closer to contemporary. 

While it is always risky to construct plans based on what happened, it would certainly appears that the English cavalry baited the trap, allowing the French cavalry to charge through to be caught disordered by archers.  They then rallied and charged the disordered remains of the French.  If Froissart is right, the cavalry still provided the bait but the French had to run a gauntlet between two flanking archer forces to get to them.

Hope that helps?