CRÉCY
[Illustration]
CRÉCY
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
MCMXII
STEPHEN SWIFT AND CO., LTD.
16 KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN
LONDON
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. THE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES
II. THE CAMPAIGN OF CRÉCY
III. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
IV. THE TERRAIN OF CRÉCY
V. THE ACTION
CRÉCY
INTRODUCTION
Between those last precise accounts of military engagements which
antiquity has left us in small number, and what may be called the modern
history of war, there lies a period of many centuries--quite 1400
years--during which the details of an action and even the main features of
a campaign are never given us by contemporary recorders.
Through all that vast stretch of time we are compelled, if we desire to
describe with any accuracy, and at any length, the conduct of a battle, to
"reconstitute" the same. In other words, we have to argue from known
conditions to unknown. We have to establish by a comparison of texts and
of traditions, and by other processes which will be dealt with in a
moment, a number of elements which, where a modern action is concerned,
numerous memoirs and official record often accompanied by elaborate maps
can put clearly before us.
We should note that the line of division between what we will call a
medieval battle and a modern one, though it cannot, of course, be
precisely established, corresponds roughly to the sixteenth century. The
battles of the seventeenth are for the most part open in detail to the
historian, from copious evidence afforded by contemporary writers and by
our considerable knowledge of the tactics and armament of the time. And
this, of course, is still truer of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth
centuries. Subsequent to the wide employment of printing, and throughout
the sixteenth century, the tendency shown by contemporaries to set down
detail steadily increases, but the whole of that century is transitional
in this matter.
The battles of the fifteenth, of the fourteenth, and earlier centuries,
differ entirely as to their evidence. We must gather it from manuscript
authorities, often rare, sometimes unique. Those authorities are, again,
not always contemporary. They never by any chance give us a map, and
rarely a definite topographical indication. They are summary, their
motive is ecclesiastical or civil rather than military, they present at
the best the picturesque side of an engagement, and at the worst they
preserve a bare mention of its date, or the mere fact that it took place.
Even in the elementary point of numbers, without some knowledge of which
it is so difficult to judge the nature of a field, we are commonly at a
loss. Where a smaller force upon the defensive has discomfited a larger
attacking force, the dramatic character of such a success (and Crécy was
one of them) has naturally led to an exaggeration of the disproportion.
The estimate of loss is very commonly magnified and untrustworthy, for
that is an element which, in the absence of exact record, both victors and
vanquished inevitably tend to enlarge. We are not as a rule given the
hours, sometimes, but not often, the state of the weather, and, especially
in the earlier cases, the local or tactical result is of so much greater
importance to the chronicler than the strategical plan, that we are left
with little more knowledge at first hand than the fact that A won and B
lost.
So true is this, that with regard to the majority of the great actions of
the Dark Ages no contemporary record even enables us to fix their site
within a few miles. That is true, for instance, of the decisive defeat of
Attila in 451, of the Mahommedans by Charles Martel in 732, and of the
final victory of Alfred over the Danes in 878.
Scholarship has established, with infinite pains and within small limits
of doubt, the second and the third. The first is still disputed. So it is
with the victory of Clovis over the Visigoths, and with any number of
minor actions. Even when we come to the later centuries, and to a more
complete knowledge, we are pursued by this difficulty, though it is
reduced. Thus we know the square mile within which the Battle of Hastings
was fought, but the best authorities have disputed its most important
movements and characters. Similarly we can judge the general terrain of
most of the Crusading fights, but with no precision, and only at great
pains of comparison and collation.
The battle which forms the object of this little monograph, late as was
its date, was long the subject of debate during the nineteenth century,
upon the elementary point of the English position and its aspect. And,
though that and other matters may now be regarded as established, we owe
our measure of certitude upon them not to any care upon the part of our
earliest informers, but to lengthy and close argument conducted in our
time.
There is no space in such a short book as this to discuss all the causes
which combined to produce this negligence of military detail in the
medieval historian: that he was usually not a soldier, that after the
ninth century armies cannot be regarded as professional, and that the
interest of the time lay for the mass of readers in the results rather
than in the action of a battle, are but a few of these.
But though we have no space for any full discussion, it is worth the
reader's while to be informed of the general process by which scholarship
attempts to reconstitute an engagement, upon which it has such
insufficient testimony; and as the Battle of Crécy is the first in this
series which challenges this sort of research, I will beg leave to sketch
briefly the process by which it proceeds.
The first thing to be done, then, in attempting to discover what exactly
happened during such a battle as that of Crécy, is to tabulate our
sources. These are of three kinds--tradition, monuments, and documents.
Of these three, tradition is by far the most valuable in most research
upon affairs of the Dark or Middle Ages, and it is nothing but a silly
intellectual prejudice, the fruit of a narrow religious scepticism, now
fast upon the wane, which has offered to neglect it.
Unfortunately, however, tradition is a particularly weak guide in this one
department of knowledge. In estimating the character of a great man it is
invaluable. It plays a great part in deciding us upon the nature of social
movements, in helping us to locate the sites of buildings that have
disappeared, and particularly of shrines; it gives us ample testimony (too
often neglected) to the authenticity of sacred documents, and to the
origin of laws. It is even of some assistance in establishing certain main
points upon a military action, if documents are in default. For instance,
a firm tradition of the site of a battle is evidence not only in the
absence of documents, but in negation of doubtful or vague ones, and so is
a firm tradition concerning the respective strength of the parties, if
that tradition can be stated in general terms. But for the particular
interest of military history it is worthless because it is silent. Even
the civilian to-day, and, for that matter, the soldier as well, who is
not accustomed to this science, would find it tedious to note, and often
impossible to recognise, those points which form the salient matters for
military history. There can be no tradition of the exact moments in which
such and such a development in a battle occurred, of contours, of range,
etc., save where here and there some very striking event (as in the case
of the projectile launched into the midst of Acre during the Third
Crusade) startles the mind of the onlooker, and remains unforgotten.
In the particular case of Crécy, tradition fixes for us only two
points--though these have proved of considerable importance in modern
discussion--the point where the King of Bohemia fell, and the point from
which Edward III. watched the battle.
Of monuments, again, we have a very insufficient supply, and in the case
of Crécy, hardly any, unless the point already alluded to, where the blind
king was struck down, and the cross marking it be counted, as also the
foundations of the mill, which was the view-point of the English
commander.
It is to documents, then, that we must look, and, unfortunately for this
action, our principal document is not contemporary. It is from the pen of
Froissart, who was but nine years old when the battle was fought, and who
wrote many years after its occurrence. Even so, his earlier version does
not seem to be familiar to the public of this country, though it is
certainly the more accurate.
Froissart used a contemporary document proceeding from the pen of one
"John the Fair," a canon of Liége. Of the lesser authorities some are
contemporary: notably Baker of Swynford, and Villani, who died shortly
after the battle.
But the whole bulk of material at our disposal is pitifully small, and the
greater part of what the reader will have set before him in what follows
is the result of an expansion and criticism of the few details which
writers of the period have bequeathed to us.
When the documentary evidence, contemporary, or as nearly contemporary as
possible, has been tabulated, the historian of a medieval battle next
proceeds to consider what may be called the "limiting circumstances"
within which the action developed, and these have much more than a
negative value. As he proceeds to examine and to compare them, they
illuminate many a doubtful point and expand many an obscure allusion.
For instance, in the case of Crécy, we carefully consider the contours,
upon the modern map, of a terrain which no considerable building
operations or mining has disfigured. We mark the ascertainable point at
which the Somme was crossed, and calculate the minimum time in which a
host of the least size to which we can limit Edward's force could have
marched from that to the various points mentioned in the approach to the
battle-field. We ascertain the distance from the scene of action to the
forest boundary. We argue from the original royal possession and
subsequent conservation of that forest its permanent limits. We can even
establish with some accuracy the direction of the wind, knowing how the
armies marched, how the sun stood relative to the advancing force, and
their impression of the storm that broke upon them. We calculate, within
certain limits of error, the distance necessary for deployment. We argue
from the known character of the armour and weapons employed certain
details of the attack and defence. We mark what were certainly the ancient
roads, and we measure the permanent obstacles afforded by the physical
nature of the field.
I give these few points as examples only. They are multiplied
indefinitely as one's study proceeds, and in the result a fairly accurate
description of so famous, though so ill attested, an action as this of
Crécy can be reconstituted.
With all this there remains a large margin which cannot be generally set
down as certain, and which even in matters essential must be written
tentatively, with such phrases as "it would seem," or "probably" to excuse
it. But history is consoled by the reflection that all these gaps may be
filled by further research or further discovery, and that each new effort
of scholarship bridges one and then another.
As to the critical power by which each individual writer will decide
between conflicting statements, or apparently irreconcilable conditions,
this must be left to his own power of discrimination and to the reader's
estimate of his ability to weigh evidence. He is in duty bound--as I have
attempted to do very briefly in certain notes--to give the grounds of his
decision, and, having done so, he admits his reader to be a judge over
himself: with this warning, however, that historical judgment is based
upon a vast accumulation of detail acquired in many fields besides those
particularly under consideration, and that a competent historian
generally claims an authority in his decisions superior to that reposing
upon no more than a mere view of limited contemporary materials.
I
THE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES
The Battle of Crécy was the first important decisive action of what is
called "The Hundred Years' War." This war figures in many history books as
a continued struggle between two organised nations, "England" and
"France." To present it in its true historical character it must be stated
in far different terms.
The Hundred Years' War consisted in two groups of fighting widely distant
in time and only connected by the fact that from first to last a
Plantagenet king of England claimed the Crown of France against a Valois
cousin. Of these two groups of fighting the first was conducted by Edward
III., and covers about twenty years of his reign. It was magnificently
successful in the field, and gave to the English story the names of
_Crécy_ and of _Poitiers_. So far as the main ostensible purpose of that
first fighting was concerned, it was unsuccessful, for it did not result
in placing Edward III. upon the French throne.
The second group of actions came fifty years later, and is remembered by
the great name of _Agincourt_.
This latter part of the Hundred Years' War was conducted by Henry V., the
great-grandson of Edward III. and the son of the Lancastrian usurper. And
Henry was successful, not only in the tactical results of his battles, but
in obtaining the Crown of France for his house. After his death his
success crumbled away; and a generation or so after Agincourt, rather more
than one hundred years after the beginning of this long series of fights,
the power of the kings of England upon the Continent had disappeared. As a
visible result of all their efforts, nothing remained but the important
bastion of Calais, the capture of which was among the earliest results of
their invasions.
When we say that the ostensible object of all this conflict from first to
last was the establishment of the Plantagenet kings of England as kings of
France in the place of their cousins the Valois, we must remember what was
meant by those terms in the fourteenth century, when Edward first engaged
in the duel. There was no conception of the conquest of a _foreign_ power
such as would lie in the mind of a statesman of to-day. Society was still
feudal. Allegiance lay from a man to his lord, not from a man to his
central political government. Not only the religion, the thoughts, and the
daily conduct of either party to the war were the same, but in the
governing society of both camps the language and the very blood were the
same. Edward was a Plantagenet. That is, his family tradition was that of
one of the great French feudal nobles. It was little more than one hundred
years before that his great-grandfather had been the actual and ruling
Lord of Normandy, and of France to the west and the south-west, for the
first Plantagenet, had though holding of the Crown at Paris, been the
active monarch of Aquitaine, of Brittany, of Anjou, Normandy, and Maine.
So much for the general sentiment under which the war was engaged. As to
its particular excuse, this was slight and hardly tenable, and we may
doubt whether Edward intended to press it seriously. He engaged in the war
from that spirit of chivalric adventure (a little unreal, but informed by
an indubitable taste for arms) which was the mark of the fourteenth
century, and which was at the same time a decline from the sincere
knightly spirit of the thirteenth.
The excuse given was this. The French monarchy had descended, from its
foundation in 987 right down to the death of Charles IV. in 1328, directly
from father to son, but in that year, 1328, male issue failed the direct
line. The obviously rightful claimant to the throne, according to the
ideas of those times--and particularly of Northern France--was Philip of
Valois, the first cousin of the king, Charles IV., who had just died.
Charles IV. had been the son of King Philip IV., and Philip of Valois was
the son of Charles of Valois, Philip IV.'s brother. Philip of Valois was
therefore the eldest in unbroken male descent of the house.
It might be claimed (and it was claimed by Edward III.) that the daughters
of elder brothers and their issue should count before the sons of younger
brothers. Now there were two female heiresses or their issue present as
against Philip of Valois. Charles IV., the king just dead, had a sister
Isabella, and Isabella was the mother of Edward III. of England.
But an elder brother to Charles IV., namely, Louis X., had himself left a
daughter, who was now the Queen of Navarre.
If this principle that the daughter or the issue of the daughter of an
elder brother should count before the male issue of a younger brother had
been granted in its entirety, Edward would have had no claim, because this
elder brother of Charles IV., Louis X., had had issue--that daughter,
Joan, the wife of the King of Navarre. So Edward qualified this first
general principle, that one could inherit through women, by another
principle, to wit, that, though the _claim_ to the throne should proceed
through the _daughters_ of _elder_ brothers rather than through the _sons_
of _younger_ ones, yet the _throne_ could _itself_ only actually be held
by a male!
By this tortuous combination Edward III. advanced his claim. His mother
had been the grand-daughter of Philip III. of France, and he was a male.
Her father was the elder brother of Philip of Valois' father, so he
claimed before Philip of Valois.
The whole scheme is apparent from the following table:--
Philip III. 1270-1285.
|
|
----------------------------------------------
| |
Philip IV. 1285-1314 Charles of Valois
| |
------------------------------------- |
| | | | |
Louis X. Philip V. Charles IV. Isabella=Edward II. Philip VI.
1314-1316 1316-1322 1322-1328 | 1328-1350
| | (_Crécy_)
| | |
| Edward III. |
Joan=King of Navarre | John
Edward the Black 1350-1364
Prince. (_Poitiers_).
But, I repeat, we must not take Edward's political claim too seriously.
His real object was not so much to establish himself upon the throne of
France and to create a great French-speaking united monarchy of French and
British under the single rule of the Plantagenets, as to try a great
adventure and to see what would come of it.
It was this that gave to Edward's wars the character not of campaigns with
a fixed object, but GREAT RAIDS, the very successes of which were
unexpected and only half fruitful. It was this, again, which made him so
uncertain and vacillating as to how he should use those successes when
they came; which made him suggest now this, now that basis for peace after
each victory, but never to insist very particularly, however surprising
and thorough his work in the field, upon the French throne.
It was this, again, which gave to the actual results of his battles
haphazard consequences, as it were, the most notable and permanent of
which was the English hold upon Calais. And it was this which always left
so huge a disproportion between the object he in theory desired to obtain
and the forces with which he set out to attain it. To sum up, we shall
only understand the victory of Crécy and the succeeding twin victory of
Poitiers ten years later, if we conceive of the whole business as
something of a tournament rather than a true political or even dynastic
struggle.
Further, we must always remember that the leaders upon both sides came of
one society, were of one speech and of one manner, often closely related
in blood. We must remember that it was no desertion for a French lord to
serve the King of England, and that even brothers would be found (as were
the two Harcourts) honourably attached, according to the ideas of the
time, to opposing forces.
Beneath this social aspect of the wars there was, of course, the growing
national sentiment of the French and of the English. Most of the men who
fought against Edward at Crécy, especially of the obscure men, thought of
Paris as the only possible seat of authority, and of the Valois as their
only possible king. All the Archers at Crécy, and many of the squires
there--and a good half even of the forces at Poitiers--were
English-speaking, and had no experience of life save that confined to this
island, up to the moment when they set out for the Great Raids upon the
Continent.
As the Hundred Years' War proceeded, as it approached its second phase in
which Henry V. was actually successful in obtaining the Crown of France,
or rather the reversion of it, the national feeling was growing rapidly
upon either side, and by the time of Joan of Arc's campaign and of the
subsequent loss of Normandy by the Plantagenets, everyone outside the
small governing class of either country had come to think of the business
as a national one upon either side. But with Crécy it was not so, and we
must approach the military problems of Crécy with the political provision
in mind that the whole affair of that battle and of its immediate
successors was a feudal occupation--one had almost said pastime--engaged
within the circle of that widespread French-speaking nobility, common to
and intermarried between Gaul and Britain, which, for three hundred years,
ruled society from the Grampians to the Mediterranean.
[Illustration]
II
THE CAMPAIGN OF CRÉCY
The Campaign of Crécy took place within a district of France contained by
an east and west base 200 miles in length and an eastern border north and
south 160 miles in length, and sketched in the map opposite.
The rectangular parallelogram so formed is nearly equally divided between
land and sea, the south-eastern half being a portion of Northern France,
and the north-western half the English Channel. The land half is thus
roughly triangular, having Paris at its extreme south-eastern corner,
Calais at its extreme north-eastern, the neighbourhood of Avranches with
St Malo Bay at its south-western corner. It includes part of the provinces
of Normandy, the Ile de France, Picardy and Artois, and part, or all, of
the modern departments of the Manche, Orne, Calvados, Eure, Seine-et-Oise,
Seine, Seine-Inférieure, Oise, Somme, and Pas-de-Calais.
It will be seen that this territory is nearly evenly divided by the River
Seine, and the campaign of Crécy is also divided by that river in the
sense that the English advance took place wholly to the west of it, and
the English retreat wholly to the east of it.
The campaign, as a whole, resolves itself (up to and including the Battle
of Crécy, which is the subject of this book, and excluding the
continuation of the march after Crécy, and the capture of Calais) into an
advance from the Channel coast to Paris, and a retreat from Paris to the
Channel again, the two portions being divided by the crossing of the Seine
at Poissy. The advance leaves the coast at the summit of that projection
of Normandy called the Cotentin, and proceeds a little south of east
towards Paris, the walls of which are reached by its outermost
skirmishers, while the main army crosses the Seine at Poissy. The retreat
is effected from Poissy northward to the victorious field of Crécy, and
later from Crécy, on the same line, to the siege and capture of Calais.
The time occupied from the day of landing to the day of the Battle of
Crécy inclusive, is but forty-six days, of which not quite two-thirds are
taken up by advance, and rather more than a third by the retreat. The
English troops landed on Wednesday, July 12th, 1346. They crossed the
Seine at Poissy upon August 14th. They fought at Crécy upon Saturday,
August 26th.
The total distance traversed by the main body in these two limbs of the
campaign is instructive as showing the leisure of the first part, its
advance, and the precipitancy of the second part, its retreat.
The distance by road as the army marched from St Vaast, where it landed,
across the river at Poissy, and so to Crécy, was a total of 345 miles. Of
this the first part, or advance, was 215, the second part, or retreat,
130. The first part occupied, counting the day of landing and the day of
crossing at Poissy, not less than 34 days, while the latter portion or
retreat of 130 miles, including the day of battle itself, took up not more
than 12 days, or, excluding the battle, only 11. The average rate of the
advance was not more than 6-1/4 miles a day, the average rate of the
retreat very nearly double.
It must not be imagined, of course, that the advance took place in prompt
and regular fashion. It was, as we shall see, irresolute for many days,
and irregular throughout, while the retreat was a hurried one upon all but
one day of which the troops were pressed to their uttermost. But the
contrast is sufficient to show the difference between the frames of mind
in which Edward III. took up the somewhat hazy plan of an "invasion,"
which was really no more than a raid, and that in which he attempted to
extricate himself from the consequences of his original vagueness of
intent. In the first, he was as slow as he was uncertain; in the second,
he was as precipitate as he was determined.
* * * * *
In the last days of June, 1346, Edward III. had gathered a force, small
indeed for the purpose which he seems to have had in mind, but large under
the conditions of transport which he could command. It was probably just
under 20,000 actual fighting men. At this point, however, as it is of
material interest to the rest of the story, we must pause to consider what
these units meant. When we say a little less (or it may have been a little
more) than 20,000 fighting men, we mean that the "men-at-arms" (that is,
fully equipped, mounted men, for the most part gentlemen), together with
not 4000 Welsh and Border Infantry, and approximately 10,000 Archers,
bring us near to that total.
But an army of the fourteenth century was accompanied by a number of
servants, at least equal to its mounted armed gentry: men who saw to the
equipment and service of the knights. No man at arms was fit to pass
through a campaign without at least one aide, if only for armouring; and
for all the doubtfulness of the records, we know that the Yeoman Archers
were also served by men who carried a portion of their equipment, and who
saw to their supply in action. It is impossible to make any computation at
all accurate of the extra rations this organisation involved, nor of what
proportion of these uncounted units could be used in the fighting. We are
perhaps safe in saying that the total number who landed were not double
the fighting men actually counted, and that Edward's whole force certainly
was much more than 20,000 but almost as certainly not 40,000 men. We must
imagine, all told, perhaps 5000 horses to have been assembled with the
force for transport over sea: others would be seized for transport on the
march. It is remarkable that Edward carefully organised certain small
auxiliary bodies, smiths, artificers, etc., and took with him five
cannon.[1]
It was not until Tuesday, the 11th of July, that the very large fleet
which the King had pressed for the service was able to sail from the
Solent and Spithead. It crossed in the night with a northerly breeze, and
appeared upon the following morning off St Vaast.
St Vaast lies in a little recess of the north-eastern coast of the
Cotentin, protected from all winds blowing from the outer Channel, and
only open to such seas as can be raised in the estuary of the Seine by a
south-easterly breeze. It was therefore, seeing the direction of the wind
under which they had sailed, upon a calm shore that this considerable
expedition disembarked. We may presume, under such circumstances, that
though Edward had announced his decision of sailing for _southern_ France,
the point of disembarkation had been carefully settled, and that a course
had been laid for it.
A small force composed of local levies had been raised to resist the
landing. It was able to effect nothing, and was easily dispersed by a body
of the invaders under the Earl of Salisbury, to whom that duty had been
assigned.[2]
For nearly a week the army rested where it had landed, sending out
detachments to pillage. Barfleur was sacked, Cherbourg was attacked, and
the countryside was ravaged.
It was upon Tuesday, July the 18th, that the main body set out upon its
march to the south and east.
No considerable body could meet them for weeks, and all the French Feudal
Force was engaged near Paris or to south of it, and would take weeks to
concentrate northward. Edward was free to raid.
The attempt to construct an accurate time-table of the march which Edward
III. took through Normandy during his advance up the Seine as far as
Poissy, and thence northward in retreat towards Picardy and the sea, has
only recently been attempted.
Froissart, that vivid and picturesque writer who, both from his volume and
his style, was long taken as the sole general authority for this war, is
hopeless for the purpose of constructing a map or of setting down accurate
military details. He had but the vaguest idea of how the march of an army
should be organised, and he was profoundly indifferent to geography. He
added to or subtracted from numbers with childlike simplicity, and in the
honourable motive of pleasing his readers or patrons.
When, quite in the last few years, an attempt at accuracy in the plotting
out of this march was first made, it was based upon not Froissart's but
contemporary records, and of these by far the most important are Baker's
_Chronicle_ and the Accounts of the Kitchen, which happen to have been
saved.
Baker's _Chronicle_ was finally edited by Professor Maunde Thompson in
1889. The work is a standard work and generally regarded as the best
example of its kind. In making his notes upon that document, Professor
Maunde Thompson compared the halting-places given by Baker and other
authorities with those of the Accounts of the Kitchen, and established for
the first time something like an exact record. But many apparent
discrepancies still remained and several puzzling anomalies. I have
attempted in what follows to reconstruct the whole accurately, and I think
I have done so up to and including the passage of the Somme from Boismont,
a point not hitherto established.
First, I would point out that of all the few bases of evidence from which
we can work, that of the Clerk of the Kitchen's accounts is by far the
most valuable.
It should be a canon in all historical work that the unconscious witness
is the most trustworthy.
I mean by "unconscious" evidence the evidence afforded by one who is not
interested in the type of action which one is attempting to establish.
Suppose, for instance, you wanted to know on exactly what day a Prime
Minister of England left London for Paris upon some important mission. His
biographer who sets out to write an interesting political life and to
insist upon certain motives in him, will say it is the 20th of June,
because Lady So-and-So mentions it in her diary, and because he finds a
letter written by the Prime Minister in Paris on the 21st. Perhaps it is
more important to the picturesqueness of the detail that the journey
should be a hurried one, and without knowing it the biographer is biased
in that direction. There may be twenty documents from the pens of people
concerned with affairs of State which would lead us to _infer_ that he
left London on the 20th, and perhaps only five that would lead us to infer
that he left on an earlier day, and, weighing the position and
responsibility of the witnesses, the biographer will decide for the
twenty.
But if we come across a postcard written from Calais by the Prime
Minister's valet to a fellow servant at home asking for the Prime
Minister's overcoat to be sent on, and if he mentions the weather which we
find to correspond to the date, the 19th, and if further we have the
postmark of the 19th on the postcard, then we can be absolutely certain
that the majority of the fuller accounts were wrong, and that the Prime
Minister crossed not on the 20th but on the 19th, for we have a converging
set of independent witnesses none of whom have any reason to make the
journey seem later than it was, all concerned with trivial duties, and
each unconscious of the effect upon history of their evidence. It would be
extraordinary if the servant had forged a date, and if we suppose him to
have made a mistake, we are corrected by the equally trivial points of the
postmark and the French stamp and the mention of the weather.
So it is with this manuscript record of the King's Kitchen expenses and of
the several halting-places at which they were incurred. Wherever there is
conflict, it must override all other evidence.
The Clerk of the Kitchen, to whom we owe this very valuable testimony, was
one William of Retford. His accounts were kept in a beautifully neat, but
not very legible, fourteenth-century hand, upon long sheets of parchment,
and are now luckily preserved for our inspection at the Record Office.
With every day's halt the place where victuals were bought for the King,
that is, where the King's household lay, has its name marked upon these
accounts; but unfortunately the abbreviations used in the MS., coupled
with the difficulty of distinguishing the short strokes [_e.g._ _m_ from
_ni_, _n_ from _u_, etc.] upon parchment which time has faded, and on the
top of that the indifference of the scribe to the foreign names
themselves, do not render the task particularly easy. The MS. has not, I
believe, ever been published. I have spent a good deal of time over it,
and I will give my conclusions as best I can.
The main army stayed at St Vaast, as I have said, for six days, that is,
until Tuesday, July 18th, 1346. This was presumably done to recruit the
horses and the men. Foraging parties went out in the interval, but the
bulk of the force did not move.
On that Tuesday it struck inland for Valognes, a march of 10-1/2 miles. No
proper coast-road existed even as late as the eighteenth century, let
alone in the Middle Ages, and an army making for Paris or for the crossing
of the Seine could not choose but to go thus slightly out of its way.
From Valognes there is a two days' march to Carentan, which town was the
lowest crossing-place of the River Douves. We may naturally expect the
halt between the two to have been about midway, and this would give us a
town called Ste Mère l'Eglise, but the Clerk of the Kitchen puts down St
Come du Mont. We conclude, therefore, that the King's staff did not follow
the great road which had existed from Roman times, but went by bypaths to
the east of it where St Come du Mont lies. It was a long day's march of
over fourteen miles, but the next day's march, that of Thursday the 20th,
to Carentan was a short one of not more than eight or nine (allowing in
both cases for the windings of the side-road). On Friday the 21st the King
lay at Pont Hébert. This is another example of something very like a long
march followed by a short one upon the morrow. St Lô was the halting-place
of the Saturday, and Pont Hébert is but four miles from St Lô. Of a total,
therefore, of nearly seventeen miles, over thirteen are covered upon one
day, and but four upon the next.
At this point it is worth noticing the character of all the advance with
which we are dealing. Edward had been blamed for sluggishness. He was not
so much sluggish as apparently without plan. He did not know quite what
he was going to do next. His general intention seems to have been to make
sooner or later for his allies in Flanders, and meanwhile to take rich
towns and loot them, and to bring pressure upon the King of France by
ravaging distant and populous territories which the French army could not
rapidly reach. He therefore often makes a good and steady marching in this
advance, but he also lingers uselessly at towns, and intercalates very
short marches between the long ones. Thus he deliberately struck inland to
St Lô on his way to Caen, because St Lô was a fine fat booty, instead of
making by the short road which runs from Carentan through Bayeux. The
whole character of the advance clearly betrays the point I have already
made, that this early part of the Hundred Years' War was essentially a
series of raids.
At this stage it is well to point out to the reader two difficulties which
have confused historians. The first is the fact that the Clerk of the
Kitchen often takes a shot at a French name which he has either heard
inaccurately or which he attempts to spell phonetically, so that we have
to interpret him not infrequently to make sense of his record.
The second is the fact that the chronicler will give some particular spot
quite consonant with the marching powers of troops for one day, but
different from that given by the Clerk of the Kitchen.
This apparent discrepancy is due to the fact that an army marches if it
can upon parallel roads involving various halting-places for various
sections of it on the same night. An army upon a raid such as this also
throws out foraging parties and detachments, which leave its main body for
the purposes of observation or of plunder.
Again, we must always regard the King's household (and therefore the
Kitchen Accounts) as moving with what may be called "the staff." Often,
therefore, it will go much faster than the rest of the army, while at
other times it will lie behind or to one side of it. Thus, at the very end
of this campaign you have a transference of the King's quarters, twenty
miles to the north in one day, which would be a terribly long march for
the army as a whole, and which, as a fact, we can discover on other
evidence the army as a whole did not take.
With so much said, we can proceed to build up an exact account of the
advance and the retreat.
Upon Sunday the 23rd of August Edward advanced from St Lô to a place
which the Clerk of the Kitchen calls "Sevances." The spelling is
inaccurate. The place intended is _Sept Vents_, twelve miles to the south
and east of St Lô. But other portions of the army halted elsewhere in the
neighbourhood, as we know from Baker. The next halt, that of the 24th, is
at Torteval, only five miles away, but a portion of the army got south of
Fontenay le Pesnel, which the King did not reach till the 25th, and which
the Clerk calls "Funtenay Paynel." Three days are thus taken between St Lô
and Caen, and the whole army arrives before the latter large town, the
capital of West Normandy, upon Wednesday, July 26th.
The town of Caen was not properly defended. It had no regular walls, and
was a very rich prey indeed. The Constable of France and the Chamberlain
were in the town, and the castle was held by a handful (300) of Genoese
mercenaries. There was an armed force of militia and of knights in the
streets of the town, of what exact size we do not know. The Prince of
Wales with the advance guard occupied the outskirts of the city which lie
beyond the branches of the Orne (the northern branch now runs mainly in
sewers under the streets from the Hôtel de Ville to the Church of St
Peter). There was sharp fighting at the bridge, at one moment of which the
King ordered a retreat, but the Earl of Warwick disobeyed the order. The
King followed him, and the bridge was taken. There was considerable
slaughter in the streets of the city; the Constable and the Chamberlain
were taken prisoners, and about one hundred of the wounded knights. The
English loss, which was not heavy, fell mainly upon the Archers and
Spearmen, and the total, including wounded, was but five hundred, and was
mainly due to the resistance of the inhabitants of the houses. The town
was given over to pillage, and Edward thought of burning it, but was
restrained. It is characteristic of the march that a delay of four days
from the morning of the 5th was occupied in the loot of Caen, from which
town (in communication with the sea by its river) Edward sent back his
plunder on board the Fleet which he dismissed.
The army marched out of Caen on Monday, the 31st of July, and undertook
its three days' march to Lisieux, the next rich town upon this random
advance, now deprived of support from the sea. Edward probably intended to
force some passage of the Seine, preferably, it may be surmised, at
Rouen, or a little higher up, with the vague object of making for the
north-east and Calais. We are not certain of this. It is more than
possible that the capture of Calais later on in the campaign gave rise to
the story that some such plan was intended. Anyhow, we get two halts and
three marches between Caen and Lisieux, a distance of only twenty-five
miles, which could easily have been accomplished in two days had there
been a really definite plan in the commander's head. We may be pretty
certain that there was not.
The halts of the King himself on the 31st of July and the 1st of August
were made at two places which read in the MS. as "Treward," and an
abbreviated name which stands for "Leopurtuis." The first of these is
Troarn at the crossing of the Dives river. Other forces halted on that
night at Agences, four miles to the south. The second is Léaupartie, a
mile or so from Rumenise, where one other column halted, while a second
column camped about five miles to the south. Lisieux was entered upon the
2nd of August after a march of ten miles on the part of the King, and of
eleven and twelve on the part of the other two bodies.
At Lisieux two Cardinals who were despatched to offer terms met King
Edward and proposed this arrangement to complete the war: that he should
have the Duchy of Aquitaine upon the same tenure as his ancestors had held
it. He refused those terms, and, after wasting a day at Lisieux, continued
his march eastward.
Leaving Lisieux on the morning of the 4th, he pitched his tent that
evening at Duramelle, a march of nine miles, with at least one column a
mile ahead at Le Teil. On Saturday the 5th he got something better out of
his troops, or at any rate out of the vanguard, and made something like
seventeen miles to Neubourg.
I confess here to a very considerable doubt. The entry in the Accounts of
the Kitchen is hopelessly misspelt, but the "Lineubourg" does not
correspond to any other possible place, and Le Neubourg would be a very
convenient halting-place for the King himself, well provisioned and
lodged. We cannot believe, of course, that the army covered the full
distance, but there is no reason why the King and his household should not
have pushed on ahead with mounted troops. What makes it more probable is
that the King spent the whole day of Sunday the 6th at Le Neubourg,
presumably for the bulk of the army to come up and make two days' march of
the twenty odd miles which the most distant contingents had to cover.
It was on the next day, Monday the 7th, that he reached the Seine, and
approached that river, as we may presume, with the object of crossing it.
It was a ten-mile march, and the whole force could be on the banks before
evening at Elboeuf.[3] But the bridges were broken and it was
impossible. It was from this point of Elboeuf that the raid turned to
follow the valley of the Seine up towards Paris, always seeking some
crossing-place, and always finding the bridges broken. The nearer he got
to Paris the more dangerous became Edward's position, and the larger grew
the forces of the French King in the neighbourhood of the capital which
threatened him.
Tuesday the 8th was spent in ravaging the country. Pont de L'Arche was
burnt in revenge for the destruction of its bridge; a detachment went
round by Louviers, which was looted, but the King himself went forward by
the river bank and lodged that night at Vaudreuil, ten miles on from
Elboeuf (which the Clerk of the Kitchen calls "Pount-Vadreel").[4] The
bulk of the force halted at Léry, a mile or two behind.
Upon Wednesday, August 9th, Edward lay at Angreville[5] (the "Langville"
of the accounts), just south of Gaillon, and on Thursday the 10th, having
burnt Vernon, where _again_ he found the bridge cut, at Jeufose, rather
more than eleven miles march up the river. ("Frevose," as I read it in the
MS.) His next hope for a bridge was at Mantes, and he was getting
perilously near the heart of the country and the gathering French forces.
That bridge was nine or ten miles along the road. He found it cut like all
the others.
He was already across the borders of Normandy, and anxiety must have been
growing upon him. He seized Mantes after some resistance. It was useless
to his purpose, and he hurried on another six miles to Epone ("Appone" in
the Accounts), making that day a really long march in his natural haste
and compelling his escort to the same--sixteen miles. But he both
fatigued his main army in that attempt, and it also lost some time in
storming a fortified house on "the White Rock,"[6] because the next day he
evidently had to wait for stragglers to come up, advancing but a couple of
miles to Aubergenville,[7] where we find him upon Saturday the 12th. Upon
the 13th, the Sunday, he got his opportunity. A march of only eight
miles[8] brought the host to Poissy, and there, though the bridge was cut,
the stone piles upon which its trestles had stood were uninjured. Edward
at once began to take advantage of this and to put his artificers to work.
All that Sunday and all the Monday the task proceeded, and during this
delay parties were despatched to ravage. They burnt St Germain and St
Cloud. An advance party entered the Bois de Boulogne. But there could, of
course, be no thought of an attack on Paris with so small a force and
without base or provision.
By Tuesday the 15th of August these ravaging parties were recalled, and
the whole host was streaming across the repaired bridge at Poissy.
This day, Tuesday the 15th, is strategically the turning point of the
campaign. In an attempt to note in history no more than the great raid of
Edward up to the very walls of the Capital, and his rapid and successful
retreat, the crossing of Poissy would form the central term of our story.
As it happened, however, the great chance which occurred to Edward in that
retreat upon the field of Crécy, and his magnificent use of it, has
eclipsed the earlier story, and for many the interest of the campaign as a
whole, and the importance of this rapid seizure and repair of Poissy, is
missed.
While his army was crossing the river, Edward received the challenge of
the King of France. It was native indeed to the time: a sort of
tournament-challenge, offering the English monarch battle upon any one of
five days, in that great plain between Paris and St Germains which the
last siege of the French capital has rendered famous in military history.
The French feudal levies for which Philip had been waiting were now fast
gathering, especially those for which he had had to wait longest, the main
forces which had been away down south in Guienne. Edward most wisely
refused the challenge, for it would have been against great odds, and to
accept, though consonant to the spirit of the time, would have been a
ludicrously unmilitary proceeding. In place of such acceptation he sent
back false news that he would meet Philip far to the south. He then
proceeded to cross the river and make the best haste he could back
northwards to the sea. The French King found out the trick; a day and a
half late he started in pursuit with his large and increasing host. That
host was gathered at St Denis when on the Wednesday night, the 16th,
Edward had got his men to Grisy, well north of Pontoise, and something
like seventeen miles by cross roads from his hastily repaired bridge
across the Seine. What followed was a fine feat of marching.
On the next day, the 17th, he had got his forces more than another
seventeen miles north and had camped them by Auneuil. In two more days, by
the evening of Saturday the 19th, they were yet twenty-five miles further
north as the crow flies (and more like thirty by the roads), at Sommereux.
Edward halted at Troussures (of which the clerk makes "Trusserux") to see
it file by, and on the morrow, Sunday, August the 20th, he was at Camps
in the upland above Moliens Vidame, another push of fifteen miles for mass
of the force, and of more than twenty for himself and his staff.
At this point came the crux of his danger. All during that tremendous feat
of marching (and what it meant anyone who has covered close on fifty miles
in three days under military conditions will know--there are few such) the
great host of Philip was pounding at his heels.