This man had done many things in the six weeks' course of the raid. He was a cavalry leader, great not only with his own talent, but with the political cause which he served, for of those lords under the Pyrenees he was the most resolute for the Plantagenets and against the Valois. The order Edward gave him was this: to take a little force all mounted, to make a long circuit, skirting round to the north and hiding its progress behind the spinneys and scrub-wood until he should get to the rear of the last French reserve that was coming forward, and when he had completed the circuit, to display his banner and come down upon them unexpectedly from behind. It was an exceedingly small detachment which was picked out for this service, not two hundred men all told. Rather more than half of them archers, the rest of them fully-equipped men-at-arms. Small as was this tiny contingent which the Black Prince could barely spare, it proved in the event sufficient.
That order given, the Black Prince summoned his standard-bearer--an Englishman whose name should be remembered, Woodland--set him, with the great banner which the French had seen three hours before disappearing into the river valley when Edward had been off watching the passage of the ford, at the head of the massed mounted force, and ordered the charge. The six thousand horse galloped against the dismounted armoured men of John down the little slope. The shock between these riders and those foot-men came in the hollow of the depression. The foot-men stood the charge. In the first few minutes gaps were torn into and through the French body by a discharge of the last arrows, and then came the furious encounter with dagger and sword which ended the Battle of Poitiers. It was the mounted men that had the better of the whole. The struggle was very fierce and very bewildered, a mass of hand-to-hand fighting in individual groups that swayed, as yet undetermined, backwards and forwards in the hollow. But those who struck from horseback had still the better of the blows, until, when this violence had continued, not yet determined, for perhaps half an hour, the less ordered and less armoured men who were the confused rearmost of John's corps heard a shout behind them, and looking back saw, bearing down upon them, the banner of St George, which was borne before the Captal, and his archers and his men-at-arms charging with the lance. Small as was the force of that charge, it came unexpectedly from the rear, and produced that impression of outflanking and surrounding which most demoralises fighting men. The rear ranks who pressed just behind the place where the heaviest of the struggle was proceeding, and where John's knights on foot were attempting to hold their own against the mounted Gascons and English, broke away. The Captal's charge drove home, and the remnant of the French force, with the king himself in the midst of it, found themselves fighting against a ring which pressed them from all sides.