Crecy.

by Hilaire Belloc.

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 "reconst.i.tute" 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 ma.n.u.script 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 Crecy 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 cert.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s of readers in the results rather than in the action of a battle, are but a few of these.

But though we have no s.p.a.ce for any full discussion, it is worth the reader's while to be informed of the general process by which scholarship attempts to reconst.i.tute an engagement, upon which it has such insufficient testimony; and as the Battle of Crecy 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 Crecy, is to tabulate our sources. These are of three kinds--tradition, monuments, and doc.u.ments.

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 doc.u.ments, and to the origin of laws. It is even of some a.s.sistance in establishing certain main points upon a military action, if doc.u.ments are in default. For instance, a firm tradition of the site of a battle is evidence not only in the absence of doc.u.ments, 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 Crecy, 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 Crecy, 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 doc.u.ments, then, that we must look, and, unfortunately for this action, our princ.i.p.al doc.u.ment 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 doc.u.ment proceeding from the pen of one "John the Fair," a canon of Liege. 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 doc.u.mentary 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 circ.u.mstances"

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 Crecy, 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 Crecy can be reconst.i.tuted.

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 acc.u.mulation 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 CIRc.u.mSTANCES

The Battle of Crecy 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 _Crecy_ 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 n.o.bles. 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 | | (_Crecy_) | | | | 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.