Castillon-la-Bataille et le monument Talbot

Castillon-la-Bataille

Charles VII had taken Guyenne in 1451; the lords of Bordeaux, who wanted nothing of French taxation, called the English back, and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, an old captain of the war in Normandy, landed in October 1452. The following spring, a royal army came up the Dordogne and laid siege to Castillon; the master of artillery, Jean Bureau, had a camp entrenched in the plain of Colles, upstream of the town, and ranged there, the chronicles say, some three hundred pieces. Pressed by the people of Bordeaux, Talbot marched to meet the French and, misled, according to the traditional account, by the dust of a movement of servants which he took for a retreat, attacked the camp head-on, on 17 July 1453, without armour, the chronicles say, to honour the oath he had sworn to the king of France during an earlier captivity. The Anglo-Gascon columns were mown down in enfilade by the cannon; the arrival of the Breton cavalry completed the rout; Talbot, whose horse had been killed by a cannonball, was finished off on the ground, and his son fell near him. His body was laid the next day in the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Colles, on the riverbank, before being brought back to England in 1493. Bordeaux capitulated on 19 October. A column today marks the site of the chapel; it is called the Talbot monument. It is the only place in France where one can say that the Hundred Years' War ended.

Wikipédia — Castillon-la-Bataille ↗

Getting there : By the D 936 between Libourne and Bergerac. Castillon keeps remains of ramparts and a gate; the Talbot monument is three kilometres to the east (distance to be checked), in the commune of Lamothe-Montravel, route du Monument-Talbot, on the bank of the Dordogne: a commemorative column, freely accessible, in the middle of the cultivated land, said to be flood-prone, that was the battlefield and that nothing else marks. In summer, an association puts on over several evenings a great open-air spectacle on the battle, with horsemen and pyrotechnics; booking required. Allow an hour for the town and the monument.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound