Part 4 (1/2)
The advantage of that position which upon emerging from the forest Edward had immediately seized, will be dealt with in the ensuing section; meanwhile we must return to inquire what was happening to the French pursuit.
We must not consider the French army as one united body. Had it been that, it would not have been defeated, and, what is more, the particular place of Crecy in military history, and its lesson of the contrast between the older feudal and the newer regular levies, would never have been taken; for Crecy, as we shall see, was largely a victory of things then new over things then old. No records give us precisely the positions, number, or routes of the King of France and his allies, but we know the following points, from which we can construct a general picture.
First: The commands were various and disunited. That personal system which had arisen five hundred years before, and more, when the old Roman tradition of the Frankish monarchy gradually transformed itself into a series of summonses to lords who should bring their va.s.sals, was still the method by which a French host was tardily and irregularly summoned. For general and lengthy expeditions it was sufficient. For the prosecution of the innumerable local conflicts of the Middle Ages it was actually necessary. Upon occasion at long distances from home, and after long companions.h.i.+p in the field, if there were also present a very leading character among the feudal superiors, and especially if that character were clothed with t.i.tular rank, it could achieve something like unity of command. But Philip's army, the last contingents of which were still in act of joining him, enjoyed no such advantages. At least five separate great bodies, four of which were largely subdivided, were loosely aggregated over miles of country, gathering as they went chance reinforcements, and losing by chance defections.
Secondly: A certain proportion of regular paid men, including the foreign mercenaries, accompanied the King of France. These were in part with the King himself, in part detached to watch the pa.s.sages of the river.
Thirdly: The King, with a considerable personal force, and with some of his mercenaries as well, was up in the neighbourhood of Saigneville upon the noon and early afternoon of the Thursday. He retraced his steps towards Abbeville, and recrossed the river there himself either upon the Thursday evening, or more probably upon the Friday.
Fourthly: Round about Abbeville the bulk of the incongruous force was gathered when the King reached it, and very considerable bodies lay in the suburbs to the north of the town.
Finally, we know that on the Sat.u.r.day morning the King heard Ma.s.s and took Communion at the Church of St Stephen (now demolished).
From all this we can construct a fairly accurate view of the French advance, especially when we consider where the French forces lay when they reached the field. From Abbeville to the field of Crecy is, as the crow flies, ten miles. A great main road (along the further part of which the English had marched on the Friday) led to the neighbourhood of the field and past it: the main road which goes from Abbeville to Hesdin. By this road, breaking up probably rather late upon the Sat.u.r.day morning, the largest of the loosely gathered French contingents marched. Far to the right of them over the countryside would be advancing the other feudal levies under the King of Bohemia and John of Luxembourg, the exiled Count of Flanders, the ex-King of Majorca, and other friends, connections, and va.s.sals whom Philip had summoned with their arrays. It is to be presumed that certain bodies on the extreme right went up by the Roman road which misses Abbeville coming from the south, and makes for Ponches, bounding the battlefield of Crecy on its extreme eastern side.
Following this chaotic advance of the dispersed host, gathered in a jumble, the wholly untrained peasant levies which had been swept up from the villages on the advance proceeded in disorder. And it was thus without regular formation, save among the Genoese mercenaries (some 15,000 in number at the outset of the campaign, though we do not know of what strength on the field itself), that the first lines of mounted men caught sight from the heights of Noyelles[14] and Domvast of the English line on the ridge of Crecy three miles away.
It was early in the afternoon before that sight was seen. The wind was from the sea, and gathering clouds promising a storm were coming up before it, and hiding the sun.
Before these advance lines of the French army, and between it and Edward's command, the ground fell gradually away in low, very gentle slopes of open field towards the shallow depression above which a somewhat steeper and shorter bank defended the line, a mile and a half long, upon which Edward had stretched his men.
There was an attempt at some sort of deployment, and the first of three main commands or ”battles” were more or less formed under Alencon, the French King's brother. Immediately before it were deployed the trained mercenaries, including the Italian cross-bowmen under their own leaders, Dorio and Grimaldi. Behind was a confused ma.s.s of arriving horse and foot, the King himself to the rear of it, and much of it German and Flemish separate commands. We do not know their composition at all. Still further to the rear, and stretched out for miles to the south, straggling up from Abbeville, came, that late afternoon, the rest of the ill-ordered host at random. Before the action was begun, the whole sky was darkened by the approaching storm, and violent pelting rain fell upon either host. The clouds pa.s.sed, the sky cleared again, but it was nearly five o'clock before the first attack was ordered.
In order to explain what followed we must next grasp the nature of the terrain, and the value of the defensive position upon which Edward had determined to stand.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
IV
THE TERRAIN OF CReCY
The action decided upon the field of Crecy developed wholly within the central s.p.a.ce shown in the frontispiece of this volume.
The general frame within which the battle took place must be regarded as a parallelogram corresponding to the exterior limits of that map, not quite four miles in length from east to west, and some 2-1/2 miles in breadth from north to south, having the town of Crecy a little to the north of the medial line, and a good deal on the left or western side of the area. But the emplacement of the troops and the actual fighting, including the partial pursuit by the victors, is wholly contained within a smaller area, which lies aslant, with its major axis pointing north-west, its minor axis pointing north-east, and surrounding the dip called ”the Val aux Clercs.”
The aspect of this countryside is that of so many in the north-east of France. The pa.s.sage of six and a half centuries has not greatly modified it. The limits of the Royal Forest of Crecy are what they have been perhaps from Roman, certainly from early medieval, times. The characteristic hedgeless, rolling, ploughed land, which is the normal landscape of all French provinces and of many others, has been disturbed by no growth of modern industrialism, and its contours remain unmodified by any considerable excavations of the soil. The villages attaching to the battlefield, Estrees, Wadicourt, Fontaine, are in extent, and even in appearance, much what they were when the armies of the fourteenth century occupied them, and the little market-town of Crecy has not appreciably extended its limits.
Even minor features such as the small groups of woodland and the spinnies seem, judged by our remaining descriptions of the battle, to be much the same to-day as they were then.
The terrain of Crecy offers, therefore, an excellent opportunity for the reconstruction of the medieval scene, and I will attempt to bring it before the eyes of my readers.
Ponthieu is a district of low, open, and slightly undulating fertile lands, whose highest ridges touch such contours as 300 feet above the sea, and the depressions in which, very broad and easy, do not commonly fall more than a 100 feet or so below the higher rolls of land. In the particular case of the field of Crecy we shall have to deal with figures even less marked. The crests from which the opposing armies viewed each other before the action average full 200 feet above the sea; the broad, shallow depression between its confronting ridges descends to little more than sixty feet below them.
All this wide expanse of fertile land, affording from one lift of its undulations and another great even views for miles and miles, is cut by streams which run parallel to each other in trenches five to seven miles apart, and make their way by curiously straight courses north-westward to the neighbouring sea. These are the Conche, the Authie (the crossing of whose marshes by the great Roman road formed those _pontes_ which, as we have seen, give the district its name of Ponthieu), and the Maye.