Chevauchée of the Black Prince (1356) Chevauchée of the Black Prince (1356) The Chevauchée of the Black Prince in 1356, which began on 4 August 1356 at Bordeaux and ended with the Battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356, was a devastating raid of Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales (known as the Black Prince), the eldest son of King Edward III of England. This expedition of the Black Prince devastated large parts of Bergerac, Périgord, Nontronnais, Confolentais, Nord-Ouest, Limousin, La Marche, Boischaut, Champagne Berrichonne, Berry, Sologne, south of Touraine and Poitou. In the spring of 1356, the Black Prince assembled at La Réole, a force
Edward the Black Prince burnt, and that 3,000 persons of all ranks and ages were massacred. 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. The prince returned to Cognac; his sickness increased, and he was forced to give up all hope of being able to direct any further operations and to proceed first to Angoulème and then to Bordeaux. The death of his eldest son Edward, which happened at this time, grieved