(1330–1376). Son of Edward III of England. Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, known as the Black Prince, was the eldest son of Edward III and the father of Richard II. He was the chief English commander in France throughout the second phase of the Hundred Years’ War (1355–70) and from 1362, by his father’s creation, the ruler of Aquitaine, England’s greatest possession in France. Like his father first and foremost a warrior, he was regarded by his contemporaries as the model of chivalry and the greatest knight living. His personal prowess aside, he was a competent though not brilliant field commander and was victorious in a series of campaigns in France and Spain. Heir apparent all his life, he died a year before his father, and the throne went to his ten-year-old son, Richard.
Edward’s military career began at the age of sixteen, at his father’s greatest victory, the Battle of Crécy (1346). After a profitable chevauchée (or mounted raid) through Languedoc in 1355, Edward led another the next year into Poitou.
Although caught and forced to fight by John the Good, king of France, near Poitiers, he emerged victorious in one of the most spectacular English successes of the war. Outnumbered by perhaps 25,000 French, Edward’s 6,000 troops, mostly longbowmen, handily won the Battle of Poitiers on September 19, 1356, capturing thousands of prisoners, including the king of France himself. His second most notable victory, at Nájera (April 3, 1367), was the culmination of a campaign launched into Spain to settle the succession of Castile, and though it resulted in the temporary victory of the pro-English party there and the capture of Bertrand du Guesclin, the constable of France, it also seems to have been in this campaign that Edward contracted the disease that incapacitated him in the last years of his life.
His rule in Aquitaine cannot be called successful; he was never able to discipline the unruly Gascon nobility, and the taxation required for the campaign of Nájera sparked a revolt in 1369 that Edward met with great cruelty, the most notable example of which was the destruction of Limoges. In 1371, in bad health and unable to stem the encroachment of the French into Aquitaine, he returned to England, where he became involved in the domestic politics of the last years of his father’s reign until his premature death in 1376.
Chandos Herald. Life of the Black Prince by the Herald of Sir John Chandos, ed. and trans. Mildred K.Pope and Eleanor C.Lodge. Oxford: Clarendon, 1910.
Barber, Richard. The Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986.
Hewitt, Herbert J. The Black Prince’s Expeditions of 1355–1357. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958.
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