In 1370 the most celebrated English soldier of his age could no longer sit a horse. Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III and known to history as the Black Prince, was governing the English lands in south-western France. He was ill and getting worse. That September he had himself carried on a litter to a French city that had betrayed him, and what his army did there stained his name for six centuries. How badly it stained it is still argued over.
The Horror
Limoges had been under English control. In August 1370 it surrendered to the French Duke of Berry. The chronicler Jean Froissart says the city’s bishop, Jean de Cros, had a large part in this. Froissart also says Edward fell into a “violent passion” and swore to retake the place and punish it. One popular account calls the bishop a friend of the Prince and godfather to his son. That claim appears only in a secondary summary of a magazine article, so treat it as tradition.
Edward left Cognac with about 4,000 men. By then his health had collapsed, and he was too ill to ride, so he travelled in a litter. The English siege began in the second week of September. The town fell by storm on September 19, 1370, after miners brought down a section of the wall. Sources disagree on the detail. One of them credits the Prince with leading the siege, another gives John of Gaunt a command role, and Wikipedia’s Limoges article does not mention mining at all. The mine itself is reported in more than one place, but the popular detail that the miners burned their timber props to bring the wall down is standard siege-craft rather than something confirmed for Limoges.
Then comes Froissart. His account is a massacre: three thousand inhabitants killed, men, women and children, the Prince watching unmoved from his litter. He says it broke the rules of chivalry. He also says the Prince’s anger was only turned from the bishop by the intervention of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, a detail that appears in the Black Prince’s Wikipedia entry on the authority of Froissart and the Victorian historian William Hunt.
The figure of three thousand is the weakest part. The evidence that survives points the other way:
- Richard Barber cites a contemporary source from Limoges itself that records about 300 civilian casualties.
- Jonathan Sumption is reported to say the toll “may have been” 300 civilians and 60 members of the garrison.
- A letter from the Prince to Gaston Fébus, Count of Foix, was published only recently. It records 200 prisoners and, as Wikipedia reports it, no civilian deaths. Only the abstract of the scholarly article that publishes it is available, which says the letter was written three days after the sack and that the article reassesses the casualty figures. The letter and the article’s conclusions have not been seen.
- Michael Jones gives a range of 200 to 400 killed and captured, citizens and garrison together, and dismisses Froissart’s version as a slur.
- Jim Bradbury does not dispute that civilians died but calls Limoges “not an exceptional atrocity” for the war.
Wikipedia flags the claim that Froissart was swayed by a French bias as needing a citation, so the reason for his large number is not settled either. What the sources agree on is that the city was stormed, people who should not have died did die, and the Prince’s own camp wrote of prisoners rather than of mass slaughter. The best reading is a real and brutal sack with a death toll in the hundreds, set inside a style of war that routinely burned and plundered the countryside. Even three hundred is not nothing. Limoges stands out because of who did it: the champion of Poitiers, against a city he felt had betrayed him.
The three French knights are the one clear counter-image. Wikipedia says they pleaded with Gaunt and the Earl of Cambridge to be treated according to the law of arms, and they were taken prisoner. No source says what became of them afterwards.
It was among the last things Edward did in the field. He withdrew to Angoulême and then to Bordeaux, and in 1371 his doctor advised him to go back to England. Wikipedia’s list of possible diagnoses is long: P. vivax malaria, brucellosis, inflammatory bowel disease, or complications of acute dysentery. The popular line that it was “almost certainly dysentery” from the Spanish campaign is more than the evidence allows. He died at Westminster Palace on June 8, 1376, aged 45, a year before his father. His son therefore inherited the throne as Richard II.
The Modern Relic
The Black Prince lies in Canterbury Cathedral. His tomb stands close to the shrine of Becket, not in the crypt, as his will directed. On it lies a gilt copper-alloy effigy in full armour beneath a painted wooden tester showing the Trinity. French verses around the monument begin, in one English rendering, “Such as thou art, sometime was I”, and go on to warn the reader that wealth, beauty and strength all end the same way.
Above the tomb hang modern copies of his heraldic achievements: shield, helm and crest, jupon, scabbard and gauntlets. The originals, which the Canterbury Archaeological Trust says are now in a glass case nearby, hung over the tomb for centuries. Sources differ on exactly which items are replicas, so check the cathedral’s current display before you go.
No monument to the sack at Limoges has been confirmed. The Wikipedia article on the siege mentions none. The coordinates here point at the old episcopal quarter of the city, the “Cité” where the bishop’s cathedral stands, rather than at a marked site of the breach.
So there are two Limoges. Froissart’s has three thousand dead and a merciless prince. The historians’ has a few hundred, and a dying man who watched it from a litter. The central image is the same in both: the greatest warrior of his generation, too weak to stand, carried to the walls of a city he meant to break.
