For a generation the French feared John Talbot. He was the Earl of Shrewsbury, the most aggressive English commander of the late Hundred Years’ War, known to his enemies as “the English Achilles” and, in the field, as “le roi Talbot”. In 1453 he was in his mid-sixties and fighting for a cause that was already lost.
The Horror
By 1453 the war had turned. The French under Charles VII were winning, and in July 1453 a French force held a position at Castillon, east of Bordeaux, which Talbot marched to attack.
The French camp had been laid out by Jean Bureau, the king’s ordnance officer. It was an artillery park: a trench and an earth wall reinforced with tree trunks, its line shaped so that the guns could fire along the length of an attacking force. It held up to about 300 guns.
Talbot attacked it on 17 July 1453. He had been led to think the French were retreating. The dust he saw was, according to the modern account, camp followers leaving, not the army. He pressed on to catch an enemy that was not running away.
He was also, by his own earlier promise, an unusual attacker. After being taken hostage at Rouen in 1449, he had promised never again to wear armour against the French king. At Castillon he was the only Englishman still mounted and he wore none.
The guns broke the attack. A report from the time, treated as report rather than proven fact, says a cannon shot killed his horse, which fell and pinned him, and that a French soldier then killed him with an axe. The circumstances of his death are debated. His son, John Talbot, Viscount Lisle, was killed in the same battle. Desmond Seward’s account says a single shot could kill six men at a time, a figure that is reported rather than verified.
The English garrison of Castillon surrendered on 19 July. Bordeaux fell to the French on 19 October. Of the English holdings on the French mainland, only Calais remained. It is often said that the news helped trigger the collapse of Henry VI’s mind in late 1453. That is speculation.
The Legend
The story of Talbot’s identification is well known. His body was said to be so disfigured that his own herald knew it only by a missing tooth. This comes from the chronicler Mathieu d’Escouchy, as relayed by the Dictionary of National Biography. The further details sometimes added, such as the herald’s forty years of service, kissing the corpse and weeping, are not confirmed by the sources consulted here.
The Modern Relic
Talbot’s remains were moved to St Alkmund’s Church in Whitchurch, Shropshire, towards the end of the fifteenth century. His chest tomb stands in the south wall of the Lady Chapel, with a praying effigy and dogs at its feet, the talbot hound being his family emblem. His embalmed heart is recorded as buried under the church porch. The effigy is set in a nineteenth-century tomb chest and arch.
On the French side, a monument was raised on the field by the victors. A chapel known as “la chapelle de Talbot” over a tumulus is recorded as standing there until the Revolution. Whether anything of it survives today is unconfirmed.
