The Battle of Lewes

(from A Great and Terrible King, pp. 60-63)

Siege and counter-siege, raid and counter-raid: such was the normal method of medieval warfare. Skilled commanders moved their troops like pieces on a chess board, taking individual castles and knights as part of a developing strategy. Attrition and retaliation were the name of the game; direct confrontation was to be avoided at all costs. However daring a general might be, he would almost never commit to battle, because of the enormous risk involved. In the noise and confusion of a battle, everything could be lost in a few short hours. As a consequence, they were rare events: in the spring of 1264, there had been no battle in England for almost half a century. Montfort, a renowned warrior well into his mid-fifties, had never fought in one.

And yet it was battle that Montfort now sought. In recent weeks his range of options had diminished rapidly. After his retreat to London they had never seemed so limited or so bleak. Dover Castle, his only other significant asset, was now threatened by the arrival in the South of the royal army; once it fell, Montfort would be trapped. In strategic terms it was almost checkmate, but the earl was not a man readily to concede defeat. On 6 May, like a cornered animal, he came out fighting, marching his forces out of London in search of his enemies.

Henry and Edward were in Sussex when they received news of Montfort’s warlike approach, and quickly moved to nearby Lewes, where both the town walls and the castle offered a strong defensive advantage. When their enemy drew up his forces a few miles to the north, however, it seemed they had been unduly cautious. Montfort’s army, as contemporary chroniclers attest, was a tiny; modern estimates suggest that his cavalry may have been outnumbered by their royalist counterparts by as many as three to one. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there was little mood for negotiation in the king’s camp. Henry III himself was apparently ready to talk, but his son was bullishly dismissive: the Montfortians could have peace, Edward assured them, if they presented themselves with halters round their necks, ready for hanging. Exchanges between the two camps concluded on 13 May with the exchange of formal letters of defiance. ‘From this time forth’, wrote Edward and the royalists, ‘we will do our utmost to inflict injury upon your persons and possessions.'

Montfort was eager to fight at once, hoping to hasten his enemies into handing him an advantage. Lewes nestles in a gap in the South Downs, and the road to the north runs through a narrow defile. If the royalists could be lured in this direction, Montfort’s inferior numbers would matter less. Henry and Edward, however, refused to be rushed. The surrounding hills, as much as the town and the castle, were their protection. They would engage the earl on their own terms in the morning, assuming he was still there. In the meantime they went to bed.

They woke at dawn to discover Montfort and his army staring down at them. During the night, the earl had used the woods to the west of Lewes and the enveloping darkness to march his men, undetected, to the top of the Downs. He now had command of the high ground, and his troops were already ranged ready for battle. Formed into three divisions, their frontline stretched over half a mile.

The royalists, after a swift council of war, drew up their army in a similar formation, with three divisions arrayed according to the immediate position of their commanders. Henry III, lodged in the priory to the south of Lewes, led the division on the left; Edward, quartered in the castle to the north of the town, the one on the right. A third division, led by Henry’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, formed in the middle. This deployment, arrived at seemingly by chance, would determine the outcome of the battle.

The cavalry, at the front of each contingent, were first to engage, thundering towards each other and meeting in a clash of wood and steel. It is hard to imagine either Henry or his brother leading such an assault, but Edward knew his moment had come. ‘He was not slow to attack in the strongest places, fearing the onslaught of none’, wrote one eye-witness (and a Montfortian one at that) immediately after the event. All those long hours in the saddle since boyhood, and the more recent practice on the tournament field, now stood Edward in good stead. He and his friends defeated the horsemen on Montfort’s left flank with their first charge, capturing them or putting them to flight. That left only the infantry to the rear, and they too had begun to flee from the oncoming swords and lances.

Edward, however, was not about to let these foot-soldiers escape unscathed. By chance, the contingent facing his own had been chiefly comprised of Londoners – the same rabble that had attacked and abused his mother the previous year. Edward was now in a position to exact bloody revenge. Exhilarated by his initial success, he and his knights rode after the fugitives, pursuing them to the north for several miles, slaughtering as they went.

It was a fatal error. By the time they regrouped and returned to Lewes – probably around mid-morning – all was lost. Edward’s departure had given Montfort the essential opening he needed, with disastrous consequences for the royalists. Richard of Cornwall had been captured having taken refuge in a windmill (a cause of much amusement for his captors). Henry III, badly beaten, had escaped back in the direction of the town, but he too was trapped: Montfort’s forces were closing in on Lewes from all directions. And now it was Edward’s turn to suffer defeat. At his approach, a force of Montfortians rode out and attacked him, putting many of his followers to flight. Edward himself evaded capture and began searching for his father. He found the king, together with the remnant of his army, holed up in the priory.

The Battle of Lewes was clearly over, and Simon de Montfort was indisputably the victor. Against all odds, his small force of inexperienced young knights – many of them ennobled only on the eve of the conflict – had triumphed over the superior might of the royal army. It was, as contemporaries were quick to conclude, nothing short of miraculous: proof that the earl’s cause was just, and a sure sign that he and his followers were favoured by God.

And yet outright victory remained elusive. Until Montfort had custody of the king and his son, he could not translate triumph on the battlefield into the political settlement that was his ultimate goal. Nor would getting hold of the pair be easy. To begin with, the royalists were far from being an entirely spent force. Henry had retreated into Lewes Priory with some of his contingent, and Edward still had his redoubtable Marcher friends by his side. It was enough, according to one chronicler, for Edward at least to consider making a sortie. Montfort almost certainly had the strength to take the priory by storm, but that posed an altogether more awkward problem. The Battle of Lewes would make a song worthy of remembrance; the Siege of Lewes Priory would not. Attacking a house of God would compromise the earl’s credibility as a holy warrior and undermine the righteousness of his cause. For similar reasons, there was no real question of executing royalist prisoners like Richard of Cornwall (although Montfort did apparently make the threat). Aristocrats could kill their non-noble inferiors with impunity, as the case of the unfortunate Londoners had shown, but they did not kill or mutilate each other, even in battle. Capture, imprisonment, ransom and release – these were the long established conventions of thirteenth-century warfare. It was almost two hundred years since the last English earl had been executed, and not even Montfort, ruthless as he was, would dare to break such a taboo.

Both sides, therefore, recognized that a negotiated surrender by the royalists was the only way forward: terms were agreed that evening. Montfort’s superior position is evident from the fact that, on most points, he got his way. The restoration of the Provisions of Oxford had been the earl’s cry to arms, so it was no surprise that the reforms were now resurrected in their entirety. Henry III was once again obliged to accept the tutelage of a council that would ruled on his behalf. Montfort’s only concession on this matter was a promise to review the arrangement at a later date, but such promises he could easily contrive to ignore. On another front, however, the earl was forced to make a major concession that betrays the limits of his bargaining power. In return for the surrender of the king and his son, Montfort agreed to let the Marchers go free. This was a serious gamble, for these were dangerous men, whose number included not only Edward’s bellicose friends Roger Clifford and Roger Leybourne, but also Roger Mortimer, the man who had recently become Montfort’s hated rival. Accordingly, the earl imposed all manner of conditions and oaths on them, and sought further to guarantee their good behaviour by retaining two high-ranking hostages. Henry of Almain, the eldest son of Richard of Cornwall, was one. Edward was the other.