Today is the anniversary of the battle of Castillion. A year ago today I submitted the final draft of my manuscript for Castillon: The Final Battle of the Hundred Years War to my editor. Now, once again on the anniversary of the battle, my book is out and I thought it would be interesting to write something about the experience of writing it.
If I’m honest, though, I feel kind of disconnected from the book now. I finished it over a year ago, and while I’ve re-read it in that time as part of proofreading and making the final tweaks to the text, as a project it has felt finished for a long time. In the intervening time I moved to South Korea and started a new job, and I haven’t had much time to think about what that day in 1453 might mean to me still.
I’ve been fascinated with the Hundred Years War for a long time. It may have something to do with the Arthurian romances I read as a child, that are nominally set in the Early Middle Ages but inevitably use the trappings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or maybe I just always loved castles and plate armor. When I was looking for research subjects at the end of my undergraduate degree and going into my PhD I was dissuaded from studying the Hundred Years War because it was apparently overly saturated with scholars, so it would be hard to stand out. While to some degree I think this assessment was true for the fourteenth century, in my work on Castillon I found that (at least in English) there is not nearly enough coverage of the fifteenth century, especially the period after the death of Henry V. Still, I think this advice was good as my skill set (at the time at least) proved better suited to the PhD I did on military technology than it would have been in diving deep into French archives.
After I finished The Medieval Crossbow I was searching around for a new project. That book had developed naturally from my PhD research, but for a second book I would be starting largely from scratch. I was interested in revisiting early gunpowder history, something that was dropped from my PhD in an attempt to make the overall scope more manageable. There is a lot of excellent scholarship being done on early gunpowder weapons right now, work that I didn’t necessarily want to (poorly) replicate, so instead I looked for something where my background would prove useful but would also push me to try new things.
I landed on the Bureau brothers, Jean and Gaspard. These sons of the merchant class rose to nobility as Charles VII’s masters of artillery at the end of the Hundred Years War. They’re a fascinating duo, and I thought they would be a great topic for a joint biography. However, I didn’t feel like I was familiar enough with the Hundred Years War and especially its final decades to jump straight into this project. Instead, I decided to look for a good stepping stone project.
I had also always wanted to write a classic battle history. While my taste in military history has decidedly drifted away from battles, I still cannot deny a certain charm to dedicated histories of a single moment in a conflict. It elicits some kind of childlike fascination in me. At the time I started my project there was no English language history of Castillon, which seemed criminal given its overall importance in Anglo-French history. Also, both Bureau brothers were participants in the battle (some books I read even claimed that Jean was in command at the battle, but I have come to doubt that). This, then, was a project that felt less ambitious than the joint biography but would give me a familiarity with the foundational scholarship and sources for future research projects on the end of the Hundred Years War.
I foolishly thought that Castillon would be easier to write than my last book. Sure, I knew that in the case of The Medieval Crossbow I had already done a PhD on crossbows, but I also wrote that book during Covid while working full time and parenting a small baby. It wasn’t exactly easy mode. What I failed to appreciate is that actually parenting a four-year-old is not easier than a baby, and in fact is maybe more disruptive to my writing attempts. I had done a lot of writing during baby nap times, usually while gently bouncing the child in her chair. This was a quiet writing time no longer available to me, as the four-year-old was supremely uncooperative. In the end, what I imagined as an 18 month project took 2.5 years.
I started by reading a bunch of overall histories of the Hundred Years War. This was actually a lot of fun. I enjoyed seeing different interpretations of events and how scholarship had changed over the decades. While I had read some books on the Hundred Years War in the past, this encouraged me to read a lot more deeply and widely than I would for a topic I have a casual interest in. This helped me to gain a firmer grip on the basic timeline of the war, its phases, and its key characters. From there I read more focused histories, mostly on the fifteenth century or on Gascony in particular, as I quickly decided that the book should also center Gascony within the conflict since that’s where Castillon was fought and it is often overlooked in histories of the war.
At this time, I was also writing the first sections of the book. These would introduce the Hundred Years War and set the stage for Castillon. Since Castillon was the final battle of the war, I felt like to really understand it you needed some basic grasp of the war as a whole. It was also a pivotal moment in the history of Gascony, so for this section I included a fairly extensive history of how Aquitaine (later Gascony… it’s complicated) came to the English royal family and the messy history it had.
Once I felt like I had a firm grounding in the secondary literature it was time to start digging into the primary sources. First, this involved identifying what sources there were. Mostly this meant searching through fifteenth-century chronicles and seeing if they had much to say about Castillon, but I also found letters written in the aftermath of the battle and references in some other works. Ideally, I would also have been able to spend time in archives looking for information in financial records and other places, but alas the life of an independent scholar rarely provides the money or time for such work. I will have to hope that some future scholar will be inspired to do this deep digging. For this section I also acquired several books in French that covered this period or the battle, which were very valuable in directing me as the final moments of the Hundred Years War are often neglected in English language material.
Delaying my book from 18 to 30 months came with a silver lining as two very important works came out in the interval after I requested a new deadline. The first was the final volume in Jonathan Sumption’s enormous five-part history of the Hundred Years War, the one which covered the exact period I was writing about. Having my book come out after this but without any reference to it would have been…undesirable. The second was Peter Hoskin’s book on Castillon, beating me to the punch of being the first book on the subject. Again, not including material from the only other English language book on the battle in my one would have been an almost criminal oversight.
I now feel some level of disconnection with Castillon. I can vividly remember working on it, but at time of writing it has been more than a year since I seriously worked on this project. I struggle to remember exactly what motivated me, what I found the most exciting, or even how to neatly summarize its contents. Whenever I think of trying to write a short post explaining the battle or its importance, I inevitably just want to point at the book as containing all my thoughts on the topic. As if the act of writing them down has removed any such ideas from my mind forever, enshrining them on paper at the cost of removing them from my memory.
My idea of what a history of Castillon should be changed a lot over the course of writing it. The final book is many things. In some ways it is a brief history of the whole of the Hundred Years War. In others it is a detailed examination of what we know about the Battle of Castillon and how we can try and reconstruct the events of the 17th of July 1453. It is also a book about the memory of the battle and how modern media has (or hasn’t) represented it. Lastly, though, and maybe my favorite part to work on, is the appendix, which takes a sort of prosopographical look at the battle.
Prosopography is, basically, writing a biography of a large group of people about whom we may not know very much individually but as a collective we can learn a lot about their lives as each scrap of evidence tells us more. It has most famously, for late medievalists at least, been used in the Medieval Soldier project. What I was doing wasn’t quite prosopography – I was looking at lesser nobles about whom we do know a few things rather than the common soldier or peasant. However, in many cases we didn’t know a lot about these men, and there was even some disagreement about who exactly they were, so I had a lot of fun doing my best to reconstruct biographies of the lesser commanders who fought at Castillon. It’s not quite reaching down to the common soldier and understanding their view, but I think looking at the lives of the lower ranking commanders gives a lot of insight into what this battle meant and who fought in it.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t identify every named participant. In several cases primary sources gave titles but not names and identifying who held an obscure Gascon title in 1453 was beyond my means. Hopefully future archival research will turn up more, and those biographies can be expanded upon.
I’ve copied a few of my favorite mini-biographies at the end of this post, to give a taste of what they’re like. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed researching and writing them. I have picked two Gascon nobles who supported the English king and who lived very different lives after Castillon. I have also selected two Breton nobles who fought with the French, whom I particularly love because they are from opposite sides of the Breton civil war that was so important to the Hundred Years War in the fourteenth century. Yet here they are, fighting side by side for the King of France.
I am not sure what my next project will be. When I started Castillon I had envisioned a three book project. First would be Castillon, of course, and second would be a history of the Battle of Formigny (1450) – the final battle in Normandy during the Hundred Years War and another battle that somehow lacks an English language history. Then I would finally tackle my Bureau project. Part of me still wants to write that Formigny book, and to spend time with the Bureaus, but Castillon took a lot longer than expected and I’m now on a different continent from my research materials, so it may have to sit on a back burner for longer than I had planned. I have developed a significant interest in the study of historical memory, so I may end up doing something with that.
If you found this interesting, my book came out this week in the UK and Europe. It is available for preorder in America with an expected release day in September. I hope you’ll check it out, I’m really proud of the work I did on it.
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Available now from the Pen and Sword website in the UK. Coming soon on Amazon and other retailers, as well as on the Pen and Sword US site.
The Gascons
Gaillard IV de Durfort, Lord of Duras
Gaillard de Durfort (d.1481) inherited the title of Lord of Duras as a minor due to his father’s early death in 1444. He was one of the most senior members of the Gascon nobility, a prominent landholder in the Garonne valley and in the Médoc, and a loyal servant of the Duke of Aquitaine, i.e. the English king.
He was one of the signatories of the agreement surrendering Bordeaux to Jean de Dunois on 12 June 1451.26 Three months later he swore allegiance to Charles VII, and thus kept his lands rather than choosing exile.
He was intimately involved in the campaign to bring Talbot to Gascony in1452. It is not clear whether he participated in the Battle of Castillon, but he certainly recruited troops for the expedition and was responsible for the defence of Blanquefort during Charles’ subsequent campaign to take Bordeaux after Talbot’s defeat. Ironically, his castle of Duras was held by his uncle, Aimeric de Durfort, who sided with the French and ultimately fought against him. Gaillard was named, along with Pierre de Montferrand, as one of the twenty traitors by Charles VII and with the fall of Bordeaux he was sent into exile. He was granted a pension by the English crown to endure until ‘he be restored to his said lordships in the duchy of Gascony.’
He became a Yorkist and served as governor of Calais under Edward IV and was elected to the Order of the Garter. In 1470 he became chamberlain to Charles the Bold, Duke Burgundy and functioned as a bridge between the duke and the English king. He also helped negotiate an agreement between Francis II of Brittany and Charles the Bold. In 1474 he was one of the negotiators of the Treaty of London that set the stage for Edward IV’s invasion of France. In 1475 he travelled to Calais and joined Edward’s army on its ultimately fruitless campaign.
In 1476, perhaps upset at Edward IV’s abandonment of any plans to retake Gascony, he reconciled with King Louis XI, who granted him his old titles in Gascony. Durfort died in 1481 while fighting against the Burgundians he had once served.
Pierre II de Montferrand, Lord of Lesparre (or l’Espaire)
Pierre II, Lord of Lesparrre (c.1410–54), was a Gascon nobleman, the son of Bertrand III de Montferrand and Isabelle, Lady of Landiras. Pierre claimed the title of Lord of Lesparre due to rights his mother had held but Henry VI granted the title to John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon. He served for some time as governor of Blaye and led the defence of the town in 1451. He was a staunch English ally and even married Mary of Bedford, the Duke of Bedford’s illegitimate daughter. He did not receive his dower due to Bedford’s premature death, which made him dependent on Henry VI for support. This dependence made it impossible for him to challenge Henry’s choice to grant Lesparre to Holland. He was captured at the Siege of Blaye and as part of his ransom he surrendered five of his other castles and had to swear an oath of allegiance to Charles VII.
He reneged on that oath and was possibly involved in the embassy to persuade the English to send Talbot to Gascony. More likely he stayed behind in Gascony and was partly responsible for opening the gates of Bordeaux to Talbot in October 1452. He was one of the principal Gascon commanders in Talbot’s field army when it marched out to confront the French at Castillon. Henry VI chose to pardon Pierre for his earlier oath to Charles VII on 24 July 1453, only a week after the disaster at Castillon and before news of it had reached the English court.
He survived the defeat at Castillon and successfully fled back to Bordeaux and served along with Roger Camoys in the defence of the city. He was listed among the twenty traitors that Charles VII demanded be punished for their betrayal of Bordeaux and was eventually exiled from France. He likely fled to England with Camoys after the fall of Bordeaux.
He returned to Gascony in June 1454 with a small landing party, hoping to stir up another rebellion against King Charles but was quickly found out and captured. He was dragged to Poitiers and placed in front of a special commission where he was quickly sentenced to death and executed.
The Bretons
Francis II, Count of Étampes
Francis II (1435–88) was the son of Richard d’Étampes and grandson of Duke John IV of Brittany, part of the powerful Montfort family. His mother was Margaret of Orléans, sister of the Duke of Orléans, which meant that Francis was also a blood relative of the House of Valois. He represented the Montfort family on the campaign to retake Gascony when he was only 18 years old, commanding Breton troops in place of Duke Peter II. When Peter II died without heir he was succeeded by his uncle Arthur de Richemont, who also died without heir, resulting in the title of Duke of Brittany passing to Francis II. Francis’ rule was challenging. He was frequently in conflict with the kings of France, most notably with Louis XI, and was also host to the Lancastrians when they were in exile during the ascendancy of Edward IV.
He was determined to preserve Brittany’s independence from French royal control, and steered the duchy as best he could through turbulent times. In the end, he was the last male ruler of the duchy from the House of Montfort. He had no legitimate son when he died, and his daughter Anne inherited the title. Through her and her daughter’s marriages to French kings, Brittany was eventually incorporated into the French royal lands.
I will note that I was initially led astray in identifying who was present at Castillon, as at least one source said that the Duke of Brittany was a participant. If you look up who was duke in 1453 you will find that it was Peter II. However, that’s not what the author meant. The author meant that the person who was duke at time of writing was at Castillon, by which he meant Francis II, who was Count of Étampes at the time, but Duke of Brittany later
Jean, Count of Penthièvre
Jean (d.1454), also known as Jean de L’Aigle, was probably born in the late fourteenth century or possibly very early in the fifteenth century. He was the second son of Jean I, Count of Penthièvre, and in 1404 was granted the lordship of L’Aigle in Normandy. His family was in dispute with the ruling Montfort dynasty in Brittany over who had the true claim to the ducal title. In 1420 his elder brother Olivier and younger brother Charles, along with his mother Margaret de Clisson, invited Jean V, Duke of Brittany, to a dinner where they captured him. Jean intervened to negotiate for the duke’s release in exchange for the release of his youngest brother William, who the duke had prisoner. However, Jean V eventually reneged on this agreement and William remained in captivity until 1448.
In 1433 his brother Olivier died, and Jean inherited Penthièvre as well as his family’s claim to be dukes of Brittanny. In 1437 he purchased the title of Count of Périgord from Charles, Duke of Orléans, who was still in English captivity. He eventually reconciled with the successor Duke of Brittanny, Francis I, which allowed him to claim his Breton lands in 1448 and secure the release of his youngest brother.
While his elder brother had been an Armagnac partisan during the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War, it is not clear if Jean actively supported Charles VII before the resumption of the war in 1449. Despite holding lands mostly in the north of France, Jean primarily fought in Gascony. He served there in 1450 and 1451, and then he joined the campaign to reconquer the duchy again in 1453, participating in the siege and battle of Castillon.
He died without issue in 1454 and split his titles between his niece, Nicole, and his younger brother William. The former, the daughter of his younger brother Charles, inherited Penthièvre while his brother inherited Périgord.
Second fun fact, while these two prominent Breton noblemen were at Castillon, neither were leading the soldiers of the Duke of Brittany, which were led instead by Jean de Montauban and Gilles de Tournemine de la Hunaudaye, two minor nobles. These men both served with their own contingents.
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