The marriage between his mother and father was arranged by his grandmother, Isabella of France, to get financial and military aid from the Count of Hainault for her own benefit to depose her husband, Edward II.

The prince accompanied his father to Sluys on 3 July 1345, and the king tried to persuade the burgomasters of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres to accept his son as their lord, but the murder of Jacob van Artevelde put an end to this project.

Both in September and in the following April the prince was called on to furnish troops from his principality and earldom for the impending campaign in France, and as he incurred heavy debts in the king's service, his father authorised him to make his will and provided that, in case he fell in the war, his executors should have all his revenue for a year.

[12] Then he "made a right good beginning", for he rode through the Cotentin, burning and ravaging as he went, and distinguished himself at the taking of Caen and in the engagement with the force under Sir Godemar I du Fay, which endeavoured to prevent the English army from crossing the Somme by the ford of Blanchetaque.

[14] When Edward learned that his son was not wounded, he responded that he would send no help, for he wished to give the prince the opportunity to "win his spurs" (he was in fact already a knight), and to allow him and those who had charge of him the honour of the victory.

The prince was thrown to the ground and was rescued by Sir Richard FitzSimon, his standard bearer, who threw down the banner, stood over his body, and beat back his assailants while he regained his feet.

[29] When the king embarked at Winchelsea on 28 August 1350 to intercept the fleet of La Cerda, the Prince sailed with him, though in another ship, and in company with his brother, the young John of Gaunt, Earl of Richmond.

The men of the earldom offered to pay him a heavy fine to bring the assize to an end, but when they thought they had arranged matters the justices opened an inquisition of trailbaston, took a large sum of money from them, and seized many houses and much land into the prince's, their earl's, hands.

[31] When Edward III determined to renew the war with France in 1355, he ordered the Black Prince to lead an army into Aquitaine while he, as his plan was, acted with the king of Navarre in Normandy, and the Duke of Lancaster upheld the cause of John of Montfort in Brittany.

The Count of Armagnac tried to intercept him, but a small body of French having been defeated in a skirmish near Toulouse the rest of the army retreated into the city, and the prince returned in peace to Bordeaux, bringing back with him enormous spoils.

[39] On 6 July 1356 Prince Edward set out on another expedition, undertaken with the intention of passing through France to Normandy, and there giving aid to his father's Norman allies, the party headed by the king of Navarre and Geoffrey d'Harcourt.

In Normandy he expected to be met by his father,[40] He crossed the Dordogne at Bergerac on 4 August,[41] and rode through Auvergne, Limousin, and Berry, plundering and burning as he went until he came to Bourges, where he burnt the suburbs but failed to take the city.

From 14 to 16 September he was at Châtellerault, and on the next day, Saturday, as he was marching towards Poitiers, some French men-at-arms skirmished with his advance guard, pursued them up to the main body of his army, and were all slain or taken prisoners.

[43] When Prince Edward knew that the French army lay between him and Poitiers, he took up his position on some rising ground to the south-east of the city, between the right bank of the Miausson and the old Roman road, probably on a spot now called La Cardinerie, a farm in the commune of Beauvoir, for the name Maupertuis has long gone out of use, and remained there that night.

Considering the position in which the prince then was, it seems probable that the French might have destroyed his little army simply by hemming it in with a portion of their host, and so either starving it or forcing it to leave its strong station and fight in the open with the certainty of defeat.

The English front was well covered by vines and hedges; on its left and rear was the ravine of the Miausson and a good deal of broken ground, and its right was flanked by the wood and abbey of Nouaillé.

As they prepared to charge he cried: "John, get forward; you shall not see me turn my back this day, but I will be ever with the foremost", and then he shouted to his banner-bearer, "Banner, advance, in the name of God and St.

[60] During the rest of the year he was occupied in preparing for his departure to his new principality, and after Christmas he received the king and his court at Berkhamsted, took leave of his father and mother, and in the following February sailed with his wife, Joan, and all his household for Gascony, landing at La Rochelle.

[58] As the leaders of the free companies which desolated France were for the most part Englishmen or Gascons, they did not ravage Aquitaine, and the prince was suspected, probably not without cause, of encouraging, or at least of taking no pains to discourage, their proceedings.

A body of his knights, which he had sent out to reconnoitre under Sir William Felton, was defeated by a skirmishing party, and he found that Henry had occupied some strong positions, and especially Santo Domingo de la Calzada on the right of the river Ebro, and Zaldiaran mountain on the left, which made it impossible for him to reach Burgos through Álava.

The vanguard, in which were three thousand men-at-arms, both English and Bretons, was led by Lancaster, Chandos, Calveley, and Clisson; the right division was commanded by Armagnac and other Gascon lords; the left, in which some German mercenaries marched with the Gascons, by Jean, Captal de Buch, and the Count of Foix; and the rear or main battle by the prince, with three thousand lances, and with the prince was Peter and, a little on his right, the dethroned James of Majorca and his company; the numbers, however, are scarcely to be depended on.

Peter IV made a treaty with him, and when Charles of Navarre heard of it he agreed to allow the prince, the Duke of Lancaster, and some of their lords to pass through his country; so they returned through Roncesvalles, and reached Bordeaux early in September 1367.

[80] The immense cost of the late campaign and his constant extravagance had brought the prince into financial difficulties, and as soon as he returned to Bordeaux he called an assembly of the estates of Aquitaine (Parliament) to meet at Saint-Émilion to obtain a grant from them.

[81] Prince Edward caused the messengers to be imprisoned, and in revenge for this the Counts of Périgord and Comminges and other lords set on Sir Thomas Wake,[83][d] the high-steward of Rouergue, slew many of his men, and put him to flight.

[88] However, modern scholarship, including the historian Richard Barber writing in 2008 in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and drawing on a wider range of evidence, places casualties much lower than Froissart did – around 300 garrison soldiers and civilians in total.

[90] On his return to England, the prince was probably at once recognised as the natural opponent of the influence exercised by the anti-clerical and Lancastrian party, and it is evident that the clergy trusted him; for on 2 May he met the convocation of Canterbury at the Savoy, and persuaded them to make an exceptionally large grant.

[94] Richard Lyons, the king's financial agent, who was impeached for gigantic frauds, sent him a bribe of £1,000 and other gifts, but he refused to receive it, though he afterwards said that it was a pity he had not kept it, and sent it to pay the soldiers who were fighting for the kingdom.

[110] In both instances, Leland is summarising earlier works – respectively, the 14th-century Eulogium Historiarum and the late 15th-century chronicle attributed to John Warkworth – but in neither case does the name appear in his source texts.

[116] Other French writers made similar associations, and Peter Hoskins reports that an oral tradition of L'Homme Noir, who had passed by with an army, survived in southern France until recent years.

[119] Joshua Barnes claimed in 1688 that it was from the time of the Battle of Crécy that "the French began to call [him] Le Neoir, or the Black-Prince", appearing to cite a record of Richard II (i.e. 1378–9); but his reference is insufficiently precise to be traceable.