Edward the Black Prince

Edward of Woodstock won Poitiers and captured the king of France, and died a year before his father, so that England got a child king instead of him. He was the eldest son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, was made Duke of Cornwall at seven, the first English duke, and Prince of Wales at thirteen. He commanded the vanguard at Crecy in 1346 at sixteen, and the story that his father refused to send help so that the boy might win his spurs comes from Froissart. He was a founding knight of the Order of the Garter. In 1355 and 1356 he led destructive raids across southern France - the chevauchee was a deliberate method, burning the country to discredit the French king's ability to protect it - and at Poitiers in September 1356, heavily outnumbered and trying to withdraw, he broke a French army and took King John II prisoner, which produced a ransom of three million crowns and the Treaty of Bretigny. He ruled Aquitaine as prince from 1362. In 1367 he intervened in the Castilian civil war on behalf of Pedro the Cruel, won at Najera, and was never paid; the taxes he then levied in Gascony to cover the cost drove his subjects to appeal to Paris and restarted the war. He besieged Limoges in 1370 and the massacre there is the darkest entry against him, though the numbers Froissart gives are now doubted. He came home ill, probably with dysentery contracted in Spain, and spent six years dying. His tomb effigy is in Canterbury Cathedral and his son became Richard II.

• Lived: 1330 CE – 1376 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: military