The Battle of Crécy 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 Crécy 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 nobles. 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
| | (Crécy)
| | |
| 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.
It was this, again, which gave to the actual results of his battles
haphazard consequences, as it were, the most notable and permanent of
which was the English hold upon Calais. And it was this which always
left so huge a disproportion between the object he in theory desired to
obtain and the forces with which he set out to attain it. To sum up, we
shall only understand the victory of Crécy and the succeeding twin
victory of Poitiers ten years later, if we conceive of the whole
business as something of a tournament rather than a true political or
even dynastic struggle.
Further, we must always remember that the leaders upon both sides
came of one society, were of one speech and of one manner, often
closely related in blood. We must remember that it was no desertion for
a French lord to serve the King of England, and that even brothers
would be found (as were the two Harcourts) honourably attached,
according to the ideas of the time, to opposing forces.
Beneath this social aspect of the wars there was, of course, the
growing national sentiment of the French and of the English. Most of
the men who fought against Edward at Crécy, especially of the obscure
men, thought of Paris as the only possible seat of authority, and of
the Valois as their only possible king. All the Archers at Crécy, and
many of the squires there—and a good half even of the forces at
Poitiers—were English-speaking, and had no experience of life save
that confined to this island, up to the moment when they set out for
the Great Raids upon the Continent.
As the Hundred Years' War proceeded, as it approached its second
phase in which Henry V. was actually successful in obtaining the Crown
of France, or rather the reversion of it, the national feeling was
growing rapidly upon either side, and by the time of Joan of Arc's
campaign and of the subsequent loss of Normandy by the Plantagenets,
everyone outside the small governing class of either country had come
to think of the business as a national one upon either side. But with
Crécy it was not so, and we must approach the military problems of
Crécy with the political provision in mind that the whole affair of
that battle and of its immediate successors was a feudal
occupation—one had almost said pastime—engaged within the circle of
that widespread French-speaking nobility, common to and intermarried
between Gaul and Britain, which, for three hundred years, ruled society
from the Grampians to the Mediterranean.
[Illustration].