Late Middle Ages

The Battle of Crécy (1346)

The Battle of Crécy, on 26 August 1346, was the first of the three great English battlefield victories of the Hundred Years’ War. The army of Edward III, returning from a long chevauchée through Normandy, was cornered on the ridge of Crécy-en-Ponthieu by an army of Philip VI of France. The English longbowmen, drawn up in a V-shape on the slope, opened fire on a massed French cavalry charge; the Genoese crossbowmen in the French vanguard were overrun; the second French line, made up of the great noblemen of the realm, was cut down in the mud. The disaster of Crécy, as the French chronicler Jean le Bel wrote, was “the greatest disaster the kingdom of France had ever suffered.” It was also the first of a long series of English victories that would, in the end, force the kingdom to reform itself.

The chevauchée of 1346

Edward III had come to the throne in 1327 at the age of fourteen, and had taken the royal authority into his own hands in 1330, deposing the regent Roger Mortimer at Nottingham Castle. The first campaigns in France — the diplomatic campaign of 1329, the brief “campaign” of 1339, the disaster of the Hainaut march of 1340 — had been inconclusive. The 1346 campaign was different. Edward had assembled a substantial army, raised by indenture from his magnates, contracted for the half-year from midsummer 1346, and a great train of English and Welsh archers. He landed at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue on 12 July 1346, marched south to Caen, sacked the city on 26 July, and turned east toward the Seine. The English army was probably some 12,000 to 14,000 men, of whom 4,000 were men-at-arms and perhaps 7,000 longbowmen. The remainder were pages, priests, and camp followers.

The English were operating in enemy territory. The duchy of Normandy was one of the richest parts of the kingdom, and Edward’s chevauchée was designed to terrorise the population and to force the French king to fight. The English, as Clifford Rogers has argued, were running a war of attrition. The French, under the constable Raoul de Brienne, duke of Athens, were gathering an army on the Seine; Edward slipped past them at Poissy, turned north toward the Somme, and crossed the river at the ford of Blanchetaque on 24 August. Two days later, on the ridge above the small town of Crécy, he turned to give battle.

Counting the dead: armies, numbers, and the chroniclers

The numbers in the chronicles are unreliable, and the older tradition, that of Jean Froissart, has been substantially revised. Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1405), writing in the 1370s and 1380s, did not personally witness the battle; his account, while it is the most readable, was drawn from veterans of the 1346 campaign and from Jean le Bel, and it is the worst possible basis for troop numbers. He claims, for example, that the French army numbered 120,000 men, and the English only 8,000; the modern estimate, based on the *Continuator of the Grandes Chroniques and the muster-roll evidence assembled by Andrew Ayton, is that the English had about 12,000 to 14,000 men and the French 20,000 to 30,000.

The numbers matter because they determine whether the battle is to be explained by the longbow or by something else. If the English were outnumbered four to one, the longbow had to do an unusual amount of work; if they were outnumbered only two to one, the French defeat could be explained by a combination of longbow fire and bad French leadership. Clifford Rogers, in War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (2000), has argued for the second reading. Andrew Ayton, in a series of studies published in the 1990s and 2000s, has argued for the first. The most we can say with confidence is that the French outnumbered the English and the longbow played a decisive role in the French defeat.

On the ridge: deployment and ground

Edward chose his ground with care. The English position, on a low rise just to the north of the town of Crécy, was about 1,000 paces wide and was bounded on each flank by woods. The army was drawn up in the classic English formation: the longbowmen in a V on the flanks, the men-at-arms dismounted in the centre, with a small body of mounted men-at-arms in reserve. The vanguard was under the command of the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, supported by the Earls of Warwick and Oxford; the second battle was under the Earl of Northampton; the third, in reserve, was under the king himself. The longbowmen had dug ditches and laid stakes, and the ground in front of them was broken with pits, designed to bring down the French cavalry.

The English army was, on 26 August 1346, a mixed force. The men-at-arms were the English gentry of the king’s household, with retinues under indentures; the longbowmen were Welsh, from the counties of the Welsh March, and English, from the West Country and the Home Counties. The men-at-arms were professional soldiers, paid for the half-year, and the longbowmen were the hard backbone of the army. Edward’s orders, according to the chronicler of the Annales Paulini and the Gesta Edwardi de Cariaco, were that the longbowmen should open fire on the Genoese, and the men-at-arms should hold their fire until the cavalry was in close combat.

Why the Genoese failed

The French army approached the English position in the early afternoon. The vanguard, made up of perhaps 6,000 Genoese crossbowmen under Antonio Doria and Carlo Grimaldi, led the way; the second line, the great noblemen of the realm — the Duke of Lorraine, the Count of Alençon, the Count of Blois, the Count of Flanders — followed at the rear. King Philip, with the third battle, was some distance behind. The French, having marched hard for two days and short of food, were tired. The order to attack, given in the early afternoon, was probably ill-advised.

The day, as the chroniclers of the Grandes Chroniques agree, was marked by a sudden storm of rain. The crossbowmen, who had been drawn up in the open air for some hours, found their bowstrings slackened; the longbowmen, who had sheltered their bows under their cloaks, were able to open fire at once. The Genoese, charging uphill, were met by a storm of arrows. The chronicler of the Vita Edwardi Secundi records that the English “shot so sharply that the birds fell from the air.” The Genoese, with their lighter ammunition and slower rate of fire, were cut down in the open; the second line, the noble cavalry, charged through the remnants of the first, became entangled in the crossbowmen and in the broken ground, and was then hit in turn by the longbow.

The French cavalry, in three successive charges, broke against the English position. The longbowmen fired at a rate that the chroniclers estimate at twelve to fifteen arrows a minute; the cavalry, in the mud, could not charge effectively. The second French line, the great chivalry of the realm, was destroyed. The Count of Alençon, the king’s brother, was killed by a thrust from the Black Prince’s banner-bearer; the Count of Blois was killed; the Duke of Lorraine was killed; the Count of Flanders was killed. King Philip, with the third battle, watched the second line go down and, as Jean le Bel wrote, “made no move to help them.” He withdrew to Amiens. The next morning, on 27 August, the king rode over the field and found his brother’s body, stripped of its armour, in a pile of dead.

Aftermath: Calais, Philip’s death, and the road to Poitiers

The English, having won the day, did not immediately follow up. Edward was as short of food as the French had been, and his army, exhausted by the march and the battle, needed a secure base. The English marched north, besieged the port of Calais, and took it on 3 August 1347, after a siege of eleven months. The fall of Calais, as the chronicle of Adam of Murimuth noted, was a “wound that would never be healed.” The Channel port remained in English hands until 1558, and from 1347 to the reign of Edward III’s successors, it was the bridgehead of the English monarchy on the continent.

King Philip VI returned to Paris and died at Nogent on 22 August 1350, of an infection contracted in the fighting; he was succeeded by his son John II. The new king, an able man and a much better soldier than his father, made two attempts to recover — the march on Poitiers in 1356 and the rescue of King John at the same battle — and was captured by the Black Prince on 19 September 1356. The loss of the king, the captivity of the best of the nobility, and the chaos of the provincial jacqueries (the Jacquerie of May 1358) and the Free Companies of the years that followed, brought France to the edge of disintegration. The Treaty of Brétigny of 8 May 1360 was the result: Edward III renounced his claim to the French throne in exchange for the full sovereignty of Aquitaine, the Ponthieu, and Calais, and a ransom of three million crowns for King John.

The historiography of Crécy is still active. Clifford Rogers has argued, against the older view of Desmond Seward and others, that the battle was a near-run thing and that the English could have lost it. Anne Curry has pointed out the importance of the French failure to choose a single commander. David Green, in The Battle of Crécy: A Casebook (2013), has assembled the documentary evidence. The most we can say is that on 26 August 1346, a combination of Edward’s preparation, the longbow, and French mistakes produced a great English victory. It was the first of three such victories, and it was the model on which the others were to be framed.

References and further reading

  • Clifford J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000).
  • Andrew Ayton, “The English Army at Crécy,” in The Battle of Crécy: A Casebook, ed. David Green (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).
  • David Green, ed., The Battle of Crécy: A Casebook (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).
  • Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, vol. I: Trial by Battle (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) and vol. II: Trial by Fire (1999).
  • Jonathan Sumption has been the standard historian; for the older view, see also Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337–1453 (London: Constable, 1978).