In 2024, my upcoming game Men of Iron Volume VII: Ermine was put onto the GMT P500 list, and reached its number relatively quickly. For those who don’t know, Men of Iron, created by Richard Berg is a hex and counter series of games focussed on medieval battles at the grand tactical scale.
Ermine covers a handful of smaller battles from the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. You’ve probably never heard of most of them – they’re all rather obscure and tend to be overshadowed by the likes of Poitiers, Crécy, and Agincourt. But they’re surprisingly varied and interesting in their own right.
These battles span the full range of classic Hundred Years’ War encounters: from Morlaix, where a small English force of longbowmen in a defensive position managed to hold off -and arguably defeat – a much larger cavalry army; to a daring night attack at La Roche-Derrien, where a small, plucky group of mounted men-at-arms broke a siege, captured the enemy commander, and snatched victory; to the full-on pitched battle of Auray, which was a close-run thing and could have gone either way.
It’s been a really interesting process to design these battles as their own, independent scenarios, and I want to write a post detailing each of them individually. In the meantime though, here’s a bit of a historical summary of the period, to give the subsequent posts a bit of context:
The War of the Breton Succession (1341–1364) was a dynastic conflict rooted in competing claims to the Duchy of Brittany following the death of Duke John III without issue. His half-brother, John de Montfort, asserted his right to the duchy against Joan of Penthièvre, supported by her husband Charles of Blois and the French crown. Hostilities opened with Montfort’s seizure of Champtoceaux in September 1341, but he was soon captured following a siege by royal forces. His wife, Joanna of Flanders, continued the resistance, rallying support from England. The arrival of English reinforcements led to the Battle of Morlaix (30 September 1342), where Anglo-Breton forces successfully repelled a larger Franco-Breton army through the use of field entrenchments and longbow fire, marking the conflict’s transformation into a broader Anglo-French proxy war.
Throughout the 1340s and 1350s, the war was punctuated by sieges and intermittent field engagements, with no side able to secure a decisive advantage. A turning point came at the Battle of La Roche-Derrien in 1347, where Charles of Blois was captured by English and Montfortist forces during a failed assault on the town, severely weakening his faction until his ransom in 1356. Meanwhile, the Battle of Mauron (14 August 1352) reinforced Montfortist momentum: English-led forces annihilated a larger Franco-Breton army, inflicting heavy casualties on the French nobility. Yet the conflict dragged on, and in 1364 French momentum revived after Bertrand du Guesclin’s victory at the Battle of Cocherel (16 May), where he defeated Navarrese-English forces in Normandy, allowing the French crown to refocus efforts on Brittany and emboldening Charles of Blois for a final push.
The war culminated in the decisive Battle of Auray on 29 September 1364. John de Montfort, now returned from English exile, laid siege to Auray, prompting Charles of Blois and Du Guesclin to attempt a relief. The Montfortist forces, well-positioned on high ground along the River L’och and reinforced by English contingents under John Chandos, repulsed the Franco-Breton attack. Charles of Blois was killed, and Du Guesclin taken prisoner. The defeat ended the Blois claim to the duchy, and the Treaty of Guérande (April 1365) recognised Montfort’s son as Duke John IV. Though the war resolved the immediate succession, it left Brittany politically fractured and firmly enmeshed in the wider struggles of the Hundred Years War.
The Battle of Champtoceux
Champtoceux is also the least well documented battle in the box. We don’t really know where it happened, and we don’t really know the makeup of the forces (outside of the leaders and that 2,000 Genoese crossbowmen were involved; those fellas crop up in quite a few of these battles). Here’s the historical background:
By September 1341, Charles de Blois had amassed 5,000 French soldiers, 2,000 Genoese mercenaries, and a substantial number of Breton troops in his military ranks. He stationed his forces at Angers in the Loire Valley, on the southern border of Brittany.
As October 1341 dawned, Charles de Blois prepared to advance, only to find that Jean de Montfort had already seized control of and fortified most of the castles and towns along Eastern and Central Brittany. Among Montfort’s stronghold possessions were the key towns of Rennes, Dinan, and the heavily fortified castle at Champtoceux, guarding the Loire Valley. Charles chose this stronghold as the first target for the French army’s march toward their ultimate destination, Nantes. Jean de Valois – France’s future King Jean II – joined Charles on this campaign, as did the Genoese mercenary leader Ottone Doria, who was famously scapegoated for the failure of the French army at Crécy 5 years later.
Charles, alongside Prince Jean of France, initiated a siege of Champtoceux, a key stronghold held by Montfortist forces. However, the besieging army faced severe logistical challenges due to Jean de Montfort’s strategic network of defensive outposts in the surrounding countryside, which disrupted supply lines and made sustaining the siege increasingly difficult.
In response to these disruptions, Charles de Blois took decisive action by leading a detachment of approximately 1,000 men to clear the countryside of Montfortist forces, hoping to reestablish secure supply routes. This maneuver, however, exposed him to counterattack. Jean de Montfort, seizing the opportunity, moved swiftly with his army to intercept Charles. The confrontation forced Charles and his men to retreat to a fortified farmstead, where they prepared to defend themselves under pressure from Montfort’s numerically superior force.
The situation became critical for Charles de Blois until reinforcements arrived under Prince Jean of France. These fresh troops bolstered the French position and launched a counteroffensive that nearly routed Montfort’s army. Despite the setback, Jean de Montfort managed to execute a disciplined withdrawal, preserving his forces.
I identified two main challenges in designing this scenario: the map, and how to reflect the flow of the battle. The only concrete detail in the sources is that the fight took place at a farmstead, so I took some creative license and added a few wooded areas to help break up the reinforcement line and create more tactical interest.
Capturing the flow of the engagement was equally tricky – it unfolds in two phases: an initial Montfortist attack on the scouting Blois forces, followed by the arrival of Blois reinforcements that turn the tide and force a Montfortist retreat off the map. There are a few ways of doing this in the Men of Iron system. The simplest way would be to simply reflect this through the Flight Point system; for those not familiar – the more units you lose, the more FPs you accrue, and once you hit your side’s FP limit, you lose, with your troops effectively scattering and running away. I didn’t like that though – as I thought that the most interesting part of this battle was the decision of Jean de Montfort to run away. Timing the retreat is key – as Jean has a real chance to kill or capture Charles de Blois and nip this whole succession crisis in the bud pretty early on. Before the reinforcements come to overwhelm him.
The other method, then, is to emulate the rules found in other Men of Iron entries. The Battle of Fornovo, found in Arquebus – Volume IV in the series – has a nice rule that encourages you to move your units off the map, effectively counting themas having retreated, but not counting towards your FP total. It doesn’t make it easier for de Montfort to win, but it does make it harder for de Blois to.
I and my developer and playtesters will be testing that for now – to see if it works well mechanically in this context, but also whether it fits narratively in the scenario. Next up, Morlaix.
