Part 1 (1/2)

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.

Scholars.h.i.+p 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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.