The Battle of the Herrings
Thursday, April 16, 2020
The Hundred Years' War (which actually lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453) had, by one count, 56 major battles. The "Battle of the Herrings" is one of them.
It took place in France on February 12, 1429, during the far more famous Siege of Orleans (October 12, 1428 to May 8, 1429), from which Joan of Arc gained her nickname, "The Maid of Orleans." It happened at Rouvray, just north of Orleans, when French and Scottish forces attempted to intercept a convoy of supplies destined for the English army during the siege.
One historian wrote that the convoy, which had started out from Paris, was made up of "some 300 carts and wagons, carrying crossbow shafts, cannons and cannonballs but also barrels of herring." Herring is a kind of fish; Lent was approaching, a time during which good Catholics would give up meat and eat fish (and all Europeans at the time were Catholics, since the Protestant Reformation was still nearly a century in the future). To be fair, the encounter is also called "The Battle of Rouvray," but the more popular name is the one with the fish.
The battle took place on a plain, when 3,000 to 4,000 French (with their Scottish allies) attacked perhaps 1,600 Englishmen. The English "circled the wagons," that is, arranged them as a fortification, and placed sharpened spikes around them to discourage cavalry charges by the French, forcing the French to rely on the relatively-new tactic of bombardment from a distance using artillery.
Against orders, the 400 or so Scotsmen attacked anyway, causing the French to cease firing for fear of killing their own allies. Nevertheless, the poorly-armored Scots were easy prey for the English archers. The English launched a counterattack and put the French and Scottish forces to flight. The convoy reached its destination, raising the English morale considerably--and damaging that of the French and Scottish.
The leader of the English that day was an honorable and effective knight named Sir John Fastolf. Despite his solid reputation, he became a laughingstock when parodied by Shakespeare in some of his history plays as the braggartly drunken buffoon Sir John Falstaff.