Battle of Patay

Battle of Patay
Part of the Loire Campaign of the Hundred Years' War
The French and English clashing. The English, however, did not fight on horseback
Date 18 June 1429 Location Near Patay, slightly north of Orléans, France Result Decisive French victory
Belligerents
Kingdom of France	Kingdom of England
Commanders and leaders
La Hire Jean Poton de Xaintrailles	Sir John Fastolf John, Lord Talbot (POW) Thomas, Lord Scales (POW)
Strength
1,500	5,000
Casualties and losses
About 100	2,500 dead, wounded, or captured

The Battle of Patay (18 June 1429) was the culminating engagement of the Loire Campaign of the Hundred Years' War between the French and English in north-central France. It was a decisive victory for the French and decimated the corps of veteran English longbowmen. This victory was to the French what Agincourt was to the English. Although credited to Joan of Arc, most of the fighting was done by the vanguard of the French army as English units fled, and the main portions of the French army (including Joan herself) were unable to catch up to the vanguard as it continued to pursue the English for several miles.

Background

After the English abandoned the Siege of Orléans on 8 May 1429, the survivors of the besieging forces withdrew to nearby garrisons along the Loire. A month later, having gathered men and supplies for the forthcoming campaign, the French army, under the nominal command of the Duke of Alençon, set out to capture these positions and the bridges they controlled. On 12 June they took Jargeau by storm, then captured the bridge at Meung-sur-Loire and marched on, without attacking the nearby castle, to lay siege to Beaugency on 15 June.

An English reinforcement army under Sir John Fastolf, which had set off from Paris following the defeat at Orléans, now joined forces with survivors of the besieging army under Lord Talbot and Lord Scales at Meung-sur-Loire. Talbot urged an immediate attack to relieve Beaugency, but was opposed by the more cautious Fastolf, who was reluctant to seek a pitched battle against the more numerous French. The garrison of Beaugency, unaware of the arrival of Fastolf's reinforcements and discouraged by the reinforcement of the French by a Breton contingent under Arthur de Richemont, surrendered on 18 June. Talbot then agreed to Fastolf's proposal to retreat towards Paris. Learning of this movement, the French set off in pursuit, and intercepted the English army near the village of Patay.

The battle

In this battle, the English employed the same methods used in the victories at Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415, deploying an army composed predominantly of longbowmen behind a barrier of sharpened stakes driven into the ground to obstruct any attack by cavalry. On this occasion, however, the result was unusual.

Becoming aware of the French approach, Talbot sent a force of archers to ambush them from a patch of woods along the road. This ambush was discovered by scouts when a stag ran into the concealed longbowmen and they let out an excited shout. Talbot attempted to redeploy his men, setting up 500 longbowmen in a location which would block the main road. However, they were attacked before they had a chance to prepare their position by the vanguard of about 1,500 knights under La Hire and Jean Poton de Xaintrailles and swiftly overwhelmed, leading to the exposure of the other English units which were spread out along the road. Fastolf's unit attempted to join up with the English vanguard but the latter fled, forcing Fastolf to follow suit. The rest of the battle was a prolonged mopping-up operation against the fleeing English units, with little organized resistance.

In the rout and mop-up the English lost approximately 2,200 men out of a force of about 5,000, many of them the dreaded longbowmen, contrasted with the loss of only about one hundred Frenchmen. Fastolf, the only English commander who remained on horseback, managed to escape. Talbot, Scales and Sir Thomas Rempston were captured. Talbot later accused Fastolf of deserting his comrades in the face of the enemy, a charge which he pursued vigorously once he had negotiated his release from captivity. Fastolf hotly denied the charge and was eventually cleared of the charge by a special chapter of the Order of the Garter.

Consequences

The virtual destruction of the English field army and the loss of many of their principal veteran commanders (another, the Earl of Suffolk, had been captured in the fall of Jargeau, while the Earl of Salisbury had been killed at the siege of Orleans in December 1428), had devastating consequences for the English position in France, from which it would never recover. During the following weeks the French, facing negligible resistance, were able to swiftly regain swathes of territory to the south, east and north of Paris, and to crown Charles VII King of France in Reims on 17 July.

Bibliography

• Allmand, Christopher (1988). The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c. 1300–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-31923-4. 
• Barker, Juliet (2010). Conquest: The English Kingdom of France in the Hundred Years War. London: Abacus. ISBN 9780349122021. 
• Cooper, Stephen (2010). The Real Falstaff, Sir John Fastolf and the Hundred Years War. Pen & Sword Military. ISBN 9781848841239. 
• Devries, Kelly (1999). Joan of Arc: A Military Leader. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing. ISBN 0-7509-1805-5. 
• Richey, Stephen W. (2003). Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. ISBN 0-275-98103-7. 

See also

• Medieval warfare
• Patay
• Joan of Arc bibliography

External links

• Joan of Arc And The Loire Valley Campaign from history of Joan of Arc
• Dynamic maps of Joan of Arc's campaigns from Southern Methodist University