A Great and Glorious Adventure (17 page)

Philip knew that the English were somewhere in the vicinity of Crécy, and on the morning of 26 August the French army began to move north in that direction. Ahead of them went a small
reconnaissance party of four knights to report the location, strength and intentions of the English. They reported back that the English army was deployed on the ridge between Crécy and
Wadicourt, that they looked as if they were prepared for a battle, and that there were no indications that they might move off. Furthermore, the leader of the reconnaissance party suggested that it
would be a sensible idea for the French army to concentrate and rest until the following day, when they would be in a much better position to destroy the English upstart. This very sound advice was
echoed by Philip’s senior commanders and accepted by him. Many French units were still on the march from Abbeville, others were still coming in from other parts of the country, and a large
allied contingent from Savoy would not arrive until sometime the next day. Philip was always a cautious commander – in hindsight too cautious perhaps – but he was absolutely right to
heed the advice given and to issue orders that the army was to advance no farther but to bivouac and be prepared for battle the next day. By now, the leading French units
had reached the valley, about 1,000 yards from the English position. They could see the English and the English could see them. It was late in the day (probably not as late as
Froissart thought – Vespers or dusk – but perhaps 1700 or 1800 hours), and the English would have been watching more and more French soldiers of various types crowd onto the field. Even
the greenest Welsh spearman could do the maths, but, as Edward rode along the lines shouting words of encouragement, his men were quite confident in their ability to hold off the French host.

As Philip’s orders to hold hard were delivered to the troops in the vanguard, they obediently halted, but, as the orders were relayed farther back, the recipients were unhappy: they wanted
to get forward where they could see the enemy, and then they might halt. The result was a scrum of major proportions, as those behind pushed and shoved to get forward and those in front tried to
hold their positions. In an aristocracy-heavy army, where every man felt himself the equal of every other and instant obedience to orders was an extraordinary concept, there was a general feeling
of wanting to get on with the battle – at least among the mounted element who had let their horses do the work of the march from Abbeville. It was soon apparent to Philip and his marshals
that the task of holding the army back was an impossibility, and so the battle might as well start now.

The crossbowmen were ordered forward to lead the French advance. Unlike archers, who except at very close range shot their arrows at a high angle and so could be arrayed in ranks all shooting at
the same time, crossbowmen fired on a flat trajectory and, as they could only reload standing up, were obliged to shoot one rank at a time. Tactically, the intention was that volleys of bolts from
the crossbowmen would so disorganize the enemy line, not least by killing large numbers of men in it, that those who remained would become easy prey for a charge by the mounted knights and
men-at-arms. While we do not know exactly how the crossbowmen were deployed, it is logical to suppose that they would have acted in the same way as did men armed with matchlocks in a later age. If
the rate of discharge was two quarrels a minute, the front rank could discharge its weapons and then move to the rear to reload while the next rank stepped forward and did the same. A formation
three ranks deep could therefore loose a volley every ten seconds. If the French army’s
crossbowmen did advance in this way, then, allowing a yard of front per man,
the 2,000 crossbowmen would have covered a frontage of around 700 yards. In view of what happened to them, it is likely that they did not bring their pavises with them. These may have still been in
the baggage train; alternatively, given that the crossbowmen were ordered to move forward rather than shoot from a defensive line, they may have found their shields too cumbersome to bring with
them.

The trumpets sounded and the drums pounded as the crossbowmen began to move towards the English line. Crossing the floor of the valley and beginning to climb the gentle slope, they would have
halted as soon as they were within range, perhaps 200 or 250 yards away. The English probably allowed them to discharge their first one or two volleys, but, shooting uphill and with the setting sun
in their eyes, they cannot have hit very much. Then the English archers replied. The captains and the vintenars would have bellowed ‘Nock – draw – loose!’ and the deadly
arrow storm began. Within thirty seconds, the astonishing number of 15,000 arrows would have come raining down from the sky. The archers did not have to hit a specific target; they simply had to
ensure that their arrows landed within what a later age would describe as a beaten zone – an area that encompassed the lines of crossbowmen. Relatively densely packed as the Genoese would
have been, it is not unreasonable to posit that one in three arrows hit something; and that being so, it would not have taken very long before the crossbowmen were thrown into confusion –
some dead, many wounded, and with no cover and no escape except backwards.

The crossbowmen would not have been helped by the arrival of one of those sudden and violent summer thunderstorms common in this part of France, which would have wet their bowstrings and caused
them to stretch, thus reducing considerably the propulsive power of their weapons.
³⁹
For them to stand where they were and shoot back would plainly have
been suicide, but even those at the rear who were more able to move would have found their retreat blocked by the packed lines of mounted knights. As it
was, the obvious
chaos and, to French eyes, cowardice of these despised foreign and low-born mercenaries encouraged the commander of the leading French battle, the count of Alençon, to order a charge.
Whether he actually ordered his men to ride over the crossbowmen, as some of the chronicles allege, or whether what happened was simply collateral, is irrelevant: the wretched crossbowmen could not
get out of the way of big heavy men on heavy horses, and many were trampled underfoot or knocked flying.

A horse will go to almost any lengths to avoid stepping on anything alive,
⁴⁰
but, packed closely as they were and with head and face armour
restricting their vision, the animals had little option. Allowing three feet of frontage per horse, that first French charge may have begun with 300 or 400 riders. After they had negotiated their
way past the fleeing crossbowmen or galloped through them, their cohesion was lost and, instead of coming on in a controlled line at the canter, they were now a mob of individuals, all anxious to
strike the first blow. And then the arrow storm began again. Clouds of arrows coming down at an angle out of the sky might not have killed many riders, but it would have unnerved them and it would
certainly have panicked their horses. Again, an arrow whacking into a horse’s unprotected quarters would not kill it, but it would very likely make it rear and dump its rider, or whip round,
bolt and take him into the next county, and that is exactly what happened. Those riders who managed to stay aboard and keep their horses pointing in the right direction then had to face archers
shooting directly at them. At 100 yards or less, a bodkin point – the needle-like arrowhead designed for just this purpose – would go through armour or, with just a bit of luck, could
penetrate through the slit in a visor and kill its wearer.

The French launched charge after charge, and the archers shot volley after volley, with runners replenishing their arrows from the baggage train. As more and more Frenchmen fell and more and
more terrified loose horses galloped screaming hither and thither, what had originally been a smooth and open approach to the English line became an obstacle course
of dead
and wounded men and horses. Welsh spearmen, meanwhile, laid down their lances to come out and kill the wounded. Some French men-at-arms did get as far as the English lines, and occasionally
fighting was fierce, but the defensive line held, and the pole arms – halberds and short lances – wrought great slaughter among those unlucky enough to be hooked by them. Edward had
specifically said that the dead were not to be looted and that no prisoners were to be taken: he did not want to risk men leaving the line tempted by fat ransoms.

We can probably dismiss the tale of a knight of the Prince of Wales’s retinue coming to the king and asking for help, as his son was hard pressed, to be met by a refusal and the
admonition: ‘Let the boy win his spurs.’ It is surely inconceivable that the king would refuse to support the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne when he had an uncommitted reserve to
hand. On the French side, we can probably also dismiss the blindness of the king of Bohemia, whose badge of three feathers and motto
Ich dien
was adopted by the Prince of Wales and has
been the crest of Princes of Wales ever since. John, count of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, claimant to the thrones of Poland and Hungary and elector of the Holy Roman Empire, lost one eye from
disease in 1336, but it is almost certain that he could see perfectly well with the other. He was killed at Crécy, aged fifty, supposedly having demanded that his household knights take him
into the thick of the battle so that he could strike a blow with his sword. His son was also present but survived, having wisely scarpered when it was evident that all was lost, to become the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles IV.

The furious battle went on through the evening, but, by the time darkness fell, there were precious few French knights or men-at-arms left. Those who had not been killed were slipping away, and
even Philip had to accept the hopelessness of the cause when his advisers insisted that he too should quit the field. He went, leaving the oriflamme of Saint-Denis – the royal banner of the
kings of France, only taken out of the Abbey of Saint-Denis in time of war – abandoned on the ground.
⁴¹
He paused first at the château of La
Broye, where he is said to have hammered on the gate shouting (according to Froissart): ‘
Ouvrez
,
ouvrez
,
chastelain
–
ç’est l’infortuné roi de France
’ (‘Open, open, it is the unfortunate king of France’). Now, in the gloaming of that August night,
the heralds and the priests moved down into the valley to identify the dead – hence the name later bestowed on it: the Vallée des Clercs.

It was a great and glorious victory. The flower of French chivalry lay dead on the field, and, while numbers are imprecise, it is clear that at least 1,500 and perhaps as many as 2,000 of the
nobility were killed, and many thousands of the infantry levies and crossbowmen. Among the dead were at least eight members of the extended royal family, including the count of Alençon,
whose impetuosity was a major contribution to the disaster, the counts of Blois, Harcourt (whose brother was one of the senior commanders in the English army) and Flanders, and the duke of
Lorraine. Only the figures for the dead English men-at-arms have survived – forty – and we might extrapolate that to perhaps 150 archers and spearmen as well. It was certainly a
remarkably cost-effective battle.

It is easy to say that, rather than the English winning the battle, the French lost it. Certainly, their lack of cohesion, the confused command arrangements, the failure to allow the whole army
to assemble out of sight of the English lines, the misuse of the crossbowmen, and the impetuosity of individual commanders and knights were major factors in the result of the battle. Having said
that, the English had deliberately selected a position which allowed them to fight the battle in the way they did best: protected flanks, a narrow frontage, the use of missile weapons to break up
the enemy assault, and a dismounted infantry defence (and commanders who could not depart the field because they had dismounted could only boost the morale of the soldiers under their command).
These principles were vital, and significant, for they formed the basis of English tactical doctrine for the whole of the war. English armies moved on horseback but fought on foot; provided they
could do so on ground of their choosing, they were unbeatable until, very late in the day, the French were able to develop field artillery that could counteract the hitherto overwhelming firepower
of the longbow. Above all, perhaps, it was the discipline and teamwork of a professional or quasi-professional army under a respected and charismatic leader that won the day – and would have
won the day even if the French had had a coherent plan and had been commanded as they should have been.
Crécy was a seminal battle. It proved that an English army
properly deployed and well led could defeat a far larger host that clung to the now-outmoded feudal system. The lessons were there for the French to see; that they failed to do so would cost them
dear in the years ahead.

The tomb of ‘blind’ King John of Bohemia in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Luxembourg. Erected in the mid-seventeenth century over the original grave,
the inscription points out that John was the son of the [Holy Roman] Emperor Henry VII, the father of Emperor Charles IV and the grandfather of Emperors Wenceslas and Sigismund. He was, of course,
killed at Crécy in 1346, not in 1340 as shown.