ly for the Black
Prince, it developed within a very few minutes of his setting off to
superintend Warwick's passage of the ford. Had it come an hour later, when
the mass of the force was in column of route and making for Nouaille, he
might have had to record not a triumph but a disaster.

The French camp was, as I have said, rather more than two miles away from
the defensive position of Maupertuis. It lay on all that open land which
now forms the fields of La Miletrie farm and lies to the south-west of
that steading, between the great Lussac road and that country road to
Nouaille along which the march of the French army had proceeded, and
across which, further along, the Black Prince's command lay astraddle.

King John had no accurate knowledge of his enemy's dispositions. In spite
of the coming and going of the day before, he still knew no more than the
fact that somewhere two or three miles ahead down the road, and between
him and Nouaille, the Black Prince's force was gathered. He appears to
have made no effort to grasp things in greater detail upon that Monday
morning, and when he marshalled his host and set out, it was with the
intention (which he pursued) of merely going forward until he found the
enemy, and then attacking. The host was arranged in four bodies; three
main "battles" or lines, comparable to the English three lines--it was the
universal formation of a mediaeval army--were brought up in column for the
advance, to deploy when the field should be reached. The first was
commanded by the heir to the throne, the Dauphin, Charles, Duke of
Normandy; the second by the Duke of Orleans, the king's brother; the
third was commanded by the king himself, and was the largest of the three.

The attempt to estimate the numbers which John could bring against his
enemy as he set out on that Monday morning is beset with difficulties, but
must nevertheless be made.

Froissart, with his quite unreliable and (let us be thankful) romantic
pen, speaks of over 40,000. That is nonsense. But it is not without some
value, because, like so many of Froissart's statements, it mirrors the
tradition of the conflict which future years developed. If we had no other
figures than Froissart's we should not accept them, but we should accept,
and rightly, an impression of great superiority in numbers on the part of
the attack.

On the other hand, we have the evidence of a man who wrote from the field
itself, and who wrote from the Englis