The Campaign of Crécy took place within a district of France
contained by an east and west base 200 miles in length and an eastern
border north and south 160 miles in length, and sketched in the map
opposite.
The rectangular parallelogram so formed is nearly equally divided
between land and sea, the south-eastern half being a portion of
Northern France, and the north-western half the English Channel. The
land half is thus roughly triangular, having Paris at its extreme
south-eastern corner, Calais at its extreme north-eastern, the
neighbourhood of Avranches with St Malo Bay at its south-western
corner. It includes part of the provinces of Normandy, the Ile de
France, Picardy and Artois, and part, or all, of the modern departments
of the Manche, Orne, Calvados, Eure, Seine-et-Oise, Seine,
Seine-Inférieure, Oise, Somme, and Pas-de-Calais.
It will be seen that this territory is nearly evenly divided by the
River Seine, and the campaign of Crécy is also divided by that river in
the sense that the English advance took place wholly to the west of it,
and the English retreat wholly to the east of it.
The campaign, as a whole, resolves itself (up to and including the
Battle of Crécy, which is the subject of this book, and excluding the
continuation of the march after Crécy, and the capture of Calais) into
an advance from the Channel coast to Paris, and a retreat from Paris to
the Channel again, the two portions being divided by the crossing of
the Seine at Poissy. The advance leaves the coast at the summit of that
projection of Normandy called the Cotentin, and proceeds a little south
of east towards Paris, the walls of which are reached by its outermost
skirmishers, while the main army crosses the Seine at Poissy. The
retreat is effected from Poissy northward to the victorious field of
Crécy, and later from Crécy, on the same line, to the siege and capture
of Calais.
The time occupied from the day of landing to the day of the Battle
of Crécy inclusive, is but forty-six days, of which not quite
two-thirds are taken up by advance, and rather more than a third by the
retreat. The English troops landed on Wednesday, July 12th, 1346. They
crossed the Seine at Poissy upon August 14th. They fought at Crécy upon
Saturday, August 26th.
The total distance traversed by the main body in these two limbs of
the campaign is instructive as showing the leisure of the first part,
its advance, and the precipitancy of the second part, its retreat.
The distance by road as the army marched from St Vaast, where it
landed, across the river at Poissy, and so to Crécy, was a total of 345
miles. Of this the first part, or advance, was 215, the second part, or
retreat, 130. The first part occupied, counting the day of landing and
the day of crossing at Poissy, not less than 34 days, while the latter
portion or retreat of 130 miles, including the day of battle itself,
took up not more than 12 days, or, excluding the battle, only 11. The
average rate of the advance was not more than 6-1/4 miles a day, the
average rate of the retreat very nearly double.
It must not be imagined, of course, that the advance took place in
prompt and regular fashion. It was, as we shall see, irresolute for
many days, and irregular throughout, while the retreat was a hurried
one upon all but one day of which the troops were pressed to their
uttermost. But the contrast is sufficient to show the difference
between the frames of mind in which Edward III. took up the somewhat
hazy plan of an “invasion,” which was really no more than a raid, and
that in which he attempted to extricate himself from the consequences
of his original vagueness of intent. In the first, he was as slow as he
was uncertain; in the second, he was as precipitate as he was
determined.
* * * * *
In the last days of June, 1346, Edward III. had gathered a force,
small indeed for the purpose which he seems to have had in mind, but
large under the conditions of transport which he could command. It was
probably just under 20,000 actual fighting men. At this point, however,
as it is of material interest to the rest of the story, we must pause
to consider what these units meant. When we say a little less (or it
may have been a little more) than 20,000 fighting men, we mean that the
“men-at-arms” (that is, fully equipped, mounted men, for the most part
gentlemen), together with not 4000 Welsh and Border Infantry, and
approximately 10,000 Archers, bring us near to that total.
But an army of the fourteenth century was accompanied by a number of
servants, at least equal to its mounted armed gentry: men who saw to
the equipment and service of the knights. No man at arms was fit to
pass through a campaign without at least one aide, if only for
armouring; and for all the doubtfulness of the records, we know that
the Yeoman Archers were also served by men who carried a portion of
their equipment, and who saw to their supply in action. It is
impossible to make any computation at all accurate of the extra rations
this organisation involved, nor of what proportion of these uncounted
units could be used in the fighting. We are perhaps safe in saying that
the total number who landed were not double the fighting men actually
counted, and that Edward's whole force certainly was much more than
20,000 but almost as certainly not 40,000 men. We must imagine, all
told, perhaps 5000 horses to have been assembled with the force for
transport over sea: others would be seized for transport on the march.
It is remarkable that Edward carefully organised certain small
auxiliary bodies, smiths, artificers, etc., and took with him five
cannon.[1]
It was not until Tuesday, the 11th of July, that the very large
fleet which the King had pressed for the service was able to sail from
the Solent and Spithead. It crossed in the night with a northerly
breeze, and appeared upon the following morning off St Vaast.
St Vaast lies in a little recess of the north-eastern coast of the
Cotentin, protected from all winds blowing from the outer Channel, and
only open to such seas as can be raised in the estuary of the Seine by
a south-easterly breeze. It was therefore, seeing the direction of the
wind under which they had sailed, upon a calm shore that this
considerable expedition disembarked. We may presume, under such
circumstances, that though Edward had announced his decision of sailing
for southern France, the point of disembarkation had been
carefully settled, and that a course had been laid for it.
A small force composed of local levies had been raised to resist the
landing. It was able to effect nothing, and was easily dispersed by a
body of the invaders under the Earl of Salisbury, to whom that duty had
been assigned.[2]
For nearly a week the army rested where it had landed, sending out
detachments to pillage. Barfleur was sacked, Cherbourg was attacked,
and the countryside was ravaged.
It was upon Tuesday, July the 18th, that the main body set out upon
its march to the south and east.
No considerable body could meet them for weeks, and all the French
Feudal Force was engaged near Paris or to south of it, and would take
weeks to concentrate northward. Edward was free to raid.
The attempt to construct an accurate time-table of the march which
Edward III. took through Normandy during his advance up the Seine as
far as Poissy, and thence northward in retreat towards Picardy and the
sea, has only recently been attempted.
Froissart, that vivid and picturesque writer who, both from his
volume and his style, was long taken as the sole general authority for
this war, is hopeless for the purpose of constructing a map or of
setting down accurate military details. He had but the vaguest idea of
how the march of an army should be organised, and he was profoundly
indifferent to geography. He added to or subtracted from numbers with
childlike simplicity, and in the honourable motive of pleasing his
readers or patrons.
When, quite in the last few years, an attempt at accuracy in the
plotting out of this march was first made, it was based upon not
Froissart's but contemporary records, and of these by far the most
important are Baker's Chronicle and the Accounts of the Kitchen,
which happen to have been saved.
Baker's Chronicle was finally edited by Professor Maunde
Thompson in 1889. The work is a standard work and generally regarded as
the best example of its kind. In making his notes upon that document,
Professor Maunde Thompson compared the halting-places given by Baker
and other authorities with those of the Accounts of the Kitchen, and
established for the first time something like an exact record. But many
apparent discrepancies still remained and several puzzling anomalies. I
have attempted in what follows to reconstruct the whole accurately, and
I think I have done so up to and including the passage of the Somme
from Boismont, a point not hitherto established.
First, I would point out that of all the few bases of evidence from
which we can work, that of the Clerk of the Kitchen's accounts is by
far the most valuable.
It should be a canon in all historical work that the unconscious
witness is the most trustworthy.
I mean by “unconscious” evidence the evidence afforded by one who is
not interested in the type of action which one is attempting to
establish. Suppose, for instance, you wanted to know on exactly what
day a Prime Minister of England left London for Paris upon some
important mission. His biographer who sets out to write an interesting
political life and to insist upon certain motives in him, will say it
is the 20th of June, because Lady So-and-So mentions it in her diary,
and because he finds a letter written by the Prime Minister in Paris on
the 21st. Perhaps it is more important to the picturesqueness of the
detail that the journey should be a hurried one, and without knowing it
the biographer is biased in that direction. There may be twenty
documents from the pens of people concerned with affairs of State which
would lead us to infer that he left London on the 20th, and
perhaps only five that would lead us to infer that he left on an
earlier day, and, weighing the position and responsibility of the
witnesses, the biographer will decide for the twenty.
But if we come across a postcard written from Calais by the Prime
Minister's valet to a fellow servant at home asking for the Prime
Minister's overcoat to be sent on, and if he mentions the weather which
we find to correspond to the date, the 19th, and if further we have the
postmark of the 19th on the postcard, then we can be absolutely certain
that the majority of the fuller accounts were wrong, and that the Prime
Minister crossed not on the 20th but on the 19th, for we have a
converging set of independent witnesses none of whom have any reason to
make the journey seem later than it was, all concerned with trivial
duties, and each unconscious of the effect upon history of their
evidence. It would be extraordinary if the servant had forged a date,
and if we suppose him to have made a mistake, we are corrected by the
equally trivial points of the postmark and the French stamp and the
mention of the weather.
So it is with this manuscript record of the King's Kitchen expenses
and of the several halting-places at which they were incurred. Wherever
there is conflict, it must override all other evidence.
The Clerk of the Kitchen, to whom we owe this very valuable
testimony, was one William of Retford. His accounts were kept in a
beautifully neat, but not very legible, fourteenth-century hand, upon
long sheets of parchment, and are now luckily preserved for our
inspection at the Record Office.
With every day's halt the place where victuals were bought for the
King, that is, where the King's household lay, has its name marked upon
these accounts; but unfortunately the abbreviations used in the MS.,
coupled with the difficulty of distinguishing the short strokes [
e.g. m from ni, n from u, etc.] upon
parchment which time has faded, and on the top of that the indifference
of the scribe to the foreign names themselves, do not render the task
particularly easy. The MS. has not, I believe, ever been published. I
have spent a good deal of time over it, and I will give my conclusions
as best I can.
The main army stayed at St Vaast, as I have said, for six days, that
is, until Tuesday, July 18th, 1346. This was presumably done to recruit
the horses and the men. Foraging parties went out in the interval, but
the bulk of the force did not move.
On that Tuesday it struck inland for Valognes, a march of 10-1/2
miles. No proper coast-road existed even as late as the eighteenth
century, let alone in the Middle Ages, and an army making for Paris or
for the crossing of the Seine could not choose but to go thus slightly
out of its way.
From Valognes there is a two days' march to Carentan, which town was
the lowest crossing-place of the River Douves. We may naturally expect
the halt between the two to have been about midway, and this would give
us a town called Ste Mère l'Eglise, but the Clerk of the Kitchen puts
down St Come du Mont. We conclude, therefore, that the King's staff did
not follow the great road which had existed from Roman times, but went
by bypaths to the east of it where St Come du Mont lies. It was a long
day's march of over fourteen miles, but the next day's march, that of
Thursday the 20th, to Carentan was a short one of not more than eight
or nine (allowing in both cases for the windings of the side-road). On
Friday the 21st the King lay at Pont Hébert. This is another example of
something very like a long march followed by a short one upon the
morrow. St Lô was the halting-place of the Saturday, and Pont Hébert is
but four miles from St Lô. Of a total, therefore, of nearly seventeen
miles, over thirteen are covered upon one day, and but four upon the
next.
At this point it is worth noticing the character of all the advance
with which we are dealing. Edward had been blamed for sluggishness. He
was not so much sluggish as apparently without plan. He did not know
quite what he was going to do next. His general intention seems to have
been to make sooner or later for his allies in Flanders, and meanwhile
to take rich towns and loot them, and to bring pressure upon the King
of France by ravaging distant and populous territories which the French
army could not rapidly reach. He therefore often makes a good and
steady marching in this advance, but he also lingers uselessly at
towns, and intercalates very short marches between the long ones. Thus
he deliberately struck inland to St Lô on his way to Caen, because St
Lô was a fine fat booty, instead of making by the short road which runs
from Carentan through Bayeux. The whole character of the advance
clearly betrays the point I have already made, that this early part of
the Hundred Years' War was essentially a series of raids.
At this stage it is well to point out to the reader two difficulties
which have confused historians. The first is the fact that the Clerk of
the Kitchen often takes a shot at a French name which he has either
heard inaccurately or which he attempts to spell phonetically, so that
we have to interpret him not infrequently to make sense of his record.
The second is the fact that the chronicler will give some particular
spot quite consonant with the marching powers of troops for one day,
but different from that given by the Clerk of the Kitchen.
This apparent discrepancy is due to the fact that an army marches if
it can upon parallel roads involving various halting-places for various
sections of it on the same night. An army upon a raid such as this also
throws out foraging parties and detachments, which leave its main body
for the purposes of observation or of plunder.
Again, we must always regard the King's household (and therefore the
Kitchen Accounts) as moving with what may be called “the staff.” Often,
therefore, it will go much faster than the rest of the army, while at
other times it will lie behind or to one side of it. Thus, at the very
end of this campaign you have a transference of the King's quarters,
twenty miles to the north in one day, which would be a terribly long
march for the army as a whole, and which, as a fact, we can discover on
other evidence the army as a whole did not take.
With so much said, we can proceed to build up an exact account of
the advance and the retreat.
Upon Sunday the 23rd of August Edward advanced from St Lô to a place
which the Clerk of the Kitchen calls “Sevances.” The spelling is
inaccurate. The place intended is Sept Vents, twelve miles to
the south and east of St Lô. But other portions of the army halted
elsewhere in the neighbourhood, as we know from Baker. The next halt,
that of the 24th, is at Torteval, only five miles away, but a portion
of the army got south of Fontenay le Pesnel, which the King did not
reach till the 25th, and which the Clerk calls “Funtenay Paynel.” Three
days are thus taken between St Lô and Caen, and the whole army arrives
before the latter large town, the capital of West Normandy, upon
Wednesday, July 26th.
The town of Caen was not properly defended. It had no regular walls,
and was a very rich prey indeed. The Constable of France and the
Chamberlain were in the town, and the castle was held by a handful
(300) of Genoese mercenaries. There was an armed force of militia and
of knights in the streets of the town, of what exact size we do not
know. The Prince of Wales with the advance guard occupied the outskirts
of the city which lie beyond the branches of the Orne (the northern
branch now runs mainly in sewers under the streets from the Hôtel de
Ville to the Church of St Peter). There was sharp fighting at the
bridge, at one moment of which the King ordered a retreat, but the Earl
of Warwick disobeyed the order. The King followed him, and the bridge
was taken. There was considerable slaughter in the streets of the city;
the Constable and the Chamberlain were taken prisoners, and about one
hundred of the wounded knights. The English loss, which was not heavy,
fell mainly upon the Archers and Spearmen, and the total, including
wounded, was but five hundred, and was mainly due to the resistance of
the inhabitants of the houses. The town was given over to pillage, and
Edward thought of burning it, but was restrained. It is characteristic
of the march that a delay of four days from the morning of the 5th was
occupied in the loot of Caen, from which town (in communication with
the sea by its river) Edward sent back his plunder on board the Fleet
which he dismissed.
The army marched out of Caen on Monday, the 31st of July, and
undertook its three days' march to Lisieux, the next rich town upon
this random advance, now deprived of support from the sea. Edward
probably intended to force some passage of the Seine, preferably, it
may be surmised, at Rouen, or a little higher up, with the vague object
of making for the north-east and Calais. We are not certain of this. It
is more than possible that the capture of Calais later on in the
campaign gave rise to the story that some such plan was intended.
Anyhow, we get two halts and three marches between Caen and Lisieux, a
distance of only twenty-five miles, which could easily have been
accomplished in two days had there been a really definite plan in the
commander's head. We may be pretty certain that there was not.
The halts of the King himself on the 31st of July and the 1st of
August were made at two places which read in the MS. as “Treward,” and
an abbreviated name which stands for “Leopurtuis.” The first of these
is Troarn at the crossing of the Dives river. Other forces halted on
that night at Agences, four miles to the south. The second is
Léaupartie, a mile or so from Rumenise, where one other column halted,
while a second column camped about five miles to the south. Lisieux was
entered upon the 2nd of August after a march of ten miles on the part
of the King, and of eleven and twelve on the part of the other two
bodies.
At Lisieux two Cardinals who were despatched to offer terms met King
Edward and proposed this arrangement to complete the war: that he
should have the Duchy of Aquitaine upon the same tenure as his
ancestors had held it. He refused those terms, and, after wasting a day
at Lisieux, continued his march eastward.
Leaving Lisieux on the morning of the 4th, he pitched his tent that
evening at Duramelle, a march of nine miles, with at least one column a
mile ahead at Le Teil. On Saturday the 5th he got something better out
of his troops, or at any rate out of the vanguard, and made something
like seventeen miles to Neubourg.
I confess here to a very considerable doubt. The entry in the
Accounts of the Kitchen is hopelessly misspelt, but the “Lineubourg”
does not correspond to any other possible place, and Le Neubourg would
be a very convenient halting-place for the King himself, well
provisioned and lodged. We cannot believe, of course, that the army
covered the full distance, but there is no reason why the King and his
household should not have pushed on ahead with mounted troops. What
makes it more probable is that the King spent the whole day of Sunday
the 6th at Le Neubourg, presumably for the bulk of the army to come up
and make two days' march of the twenty odd miles which the most distant
contingents had to cover.
It was on the next day, Monday the 7th, that he reached the Seine,
and approached that river, as we may presume, with the object of
crossing it. It was a ten-mile march, and the whole force could be on
the banks before evening at Elboeuf.[3] But the bridges were broken and
it was impossible. It was from this point of Elboeuf that the raid
turned to follow the valley of the Seine up towards Paris, always
seeking some crossing-place, and always finding the bridges broken. The
nearer he got to Paris the more dangerous became Edward's position, and
the larger grew the forces of the French King in the neighbourhood of
the capital which threatened him.
Tuesday the 8th was spent in ravaging the country. Pont de L'Arche
was burnt in revenge for the destruction of its bridge; a detachment
went round by Louviers, which was looted, but the King himself went
forward by the river bank and lodged that night at Vaudreuil, ten miles
on from Elboeuf (which the Clerk of the Kitchen calls
“Pount-Vadreel").[4] The bulk of the force halted at Léry, a mile or
two behind.
Upon Wednesday, August 9th, Edward lay at Angreville[5] (the
“Langville” of the accounts), just south of Gaillon, and on Thursday
the 10th, having burnt Vernon, where again he found the bridge
cut, at Jeufose, rather more than eleven miles march up the river.
(“Frevose,” as I read it in the MS.) His next hope for a bridge was at
Mantes, and he was getting perilously near the heart of the country and
the gathering French forces. That bridge was nine or ten miles along
the road. He found it cut like all the others.
He was already across the borders of Normandy, and anxiety must have
been growing upon him. He seized Mantes after some resistance. It was
useless to his purpose, and he hurried on another six miles to Epone
(“Appone” in the Accounts), making that day a really long march in his
natural haste and compelling his escort to the same—sixteen miles. But
he both fatigued his main army in that attempt, and it also lost some
time in storming a fortified house on “the White Rock,”[6] because the
next day he evidently had to wait for stragglers to come up, advancing
but a couple of miles to Aubergenville,[7] where we find him upon
Saturday the 12th. Upon the 13th, the Sunday, he got his opportunity. A
march of only eight miles[8] brought the host to Poissy, and there,
though the bridge was cut, the stone piles upon which its trestles had
stood were uninjured. Edward at once began to take advantage of this
and to put his artificers to work. All that Sunday and all the Monday
the task proceeded, and during this delay parties were despatched to
ravage. They burnt St Germain and St Cloud. An advance party entered
the Bois de Boulogne. But there could, of course, be no thought of an
attack on Paris with so small a force and without base or provision.
By Tuesday the 15th of August these ravaging parties were recalled,
and the whole host was streaming across the repaired bridge at Poissy.
This day, Tuesday the 15th, is strategically the turning point of
the campaign. In an attempt to note in history no more than the great
raid of Edward up to the very walls of the Capital, and his rapid and
successful retreat, the crossing of Poissy would form the central term
of our story. As it happened, however, the great chance which occurred
to Edward in that retreat upon the field of Crécy, and his magnificent
use of it, has eclipsed the earlier story, and for many the interest of
the campaign as a whole, and the importance of this rapid seizure and
repair of Poissy, is missed.
While his army was crossing the river, Edward received the challenge
of the King of France. It was native indeed to the time: a sort of
tournament-challenge, offering the English monarch battle upon any one
of five days, in that great plain between Paris and St Germains which
the last siege of the French capital has rendered famous in military
history. The French feudal levies for which Philip had been waiting
were now fast gathering, especially those for which he had had to wait
longest, the main forces which had been away down south in Guienne.
Edward most wisely refused the challenge, for it would have been
against great odds, and to accept, though consonant to the spirit of
the time, would have been a ludicrously unmilitary proceeding. In place
of such acceptation he sent back false news that he would meet Philip
far to the south. He then proceeded to cross the river and make the
best haste he could back northwards to the sea. The French King found
out the trick; a day and a half late he started in pursuit with his
large and increasing host. That host was gathered at St Denis when on
the Wednesday night, the 16th, Edward had got his men to Grisy, well
north of Pontoise, and something like seventeen miles by cross roads
from his hastily repaired bridge across the Seine. What followed was a
fine feat of marching.
On the next day, the 17th, he had got his forces more than another
seventeen miles north and had camped them by Auneuil. In two more days,
by the evening of Saturday the 19th, they were yet twenty-five miles
further north as the crow flies (and more like thirty by the roads), at
Sommereux. Edward halted at Troussures (of which the clerk makes
“Trusserux") to see it file by, and on the morrow, Sunday, August the
20th, he was at Camps in the upland above Moliens Vidame, another push
of fifteen miles for mass of the force, and of more than twenty for
himself and his staff.
At this point came the crux of his danger. All during that
tremendous feat of marching (and what it meant anyone who has covered
close on fifty miles in three days under military conditions will
know—there are few such) the great host of Philip was pounding at his
heels.
Now, if the reader will glance at the map at the beginning of this
section, he will see that just as Edward had been under a necessity to
cross the Seine in the first part of his raid, he was now under a still
greater necessity of crossing the Somme. A force much larger than his
own was pressing him against that river into a sort of corner, and his
only chance of safety lay in reaching the Straits of Dover through the
county of Ponthieu, which lay beyond the stream. Every effort had been
made to press the march. The force appears to have been divided for
this purpose and to have marched in parallel columns, and the single
case of marauding (the burning of the Abbey of St Lucien outside
Beauvais) had been punished with the death of twenty men.
To turn and meet his pursuers (who were evidently in contact with
him through their scouts) would have meant, so long as he was on this
side of the Somme, no chance of retreat in case of defeat.
Every mile he went to the north the Somme valley, already a broad
expanse of marsh upon his flank, grew broader and more difficult. The
decision, therefore, which Edward took at this critical moment, at once
perilous and masterly, showed that rapid grasp of a situation which,
for all his lack of a general plan during this campaign, this great
soldier could boast. In the first place, he himself rides forward no
less than twenty full miles to the village of Acheux. He has behind him
the whole army strung out in separate bodies parallel to the Somme.
Himself, from the head of that long line of twenty miles, commands all
that should be done along it. He next orders separate bodies to
approach the valley and seek a crossing, first, if possible, up river,
then, as they fail, lower and lower down, and each to be ready as it is
foiled at each bridge to fall back north in concentration, and to group
in gathering numbers further and further down the stream, and near to
his place at the head of the line, Acheux.
The whole thing is a fine piece of sudden decision, and is at once a
combination of the rapidity of the retreat and of the attempt to force
the river, in this the fourth week of August 1346, which so nearly
brought disaster to the English force.
Three days, the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, were taken up in this
manoeuvre. The English flung themselves successively against the
bridges: Picquigny, Long Pré, Pont Rémy. The hardest and first push was
at Picquigny at the beginning or southernmost of the effort. The body
detached for that effort was beaten back.
It was the same with the next blow lower down at Long Pré: the same
lower down still at Pont Rémy. At no bridge were the English
successful. Everywhere the valley was impassable to them, and as they
attempted one place after another down the stream with its broadening
marshland and now tidal water, to find a traverse seemed impossible.
At last, then, upon Wednesday the 23rd of August the whole host was
gathered, foiled, round its King at Acheux. He marched on a few miles
to BOISMONT, going on his way through Mons, and there, as it chanced,
picking up a prisoner who proved invaluable: for that prisoner betrayed
the ford.
As the English army lay at Boismont that night of the 23rd, the
broad estuary of the Somme stretched to the north of them with no more
bridges across it, cut or uncut, and apparently no fate but a choice
between a desperate action against superior numbers (nor any retreat
open) and surrender.
Edward's only chance lay in the discovery across that mile of land
(flooded at high tide, and at low tide a morass) of some kind of ford.
Such a ford existed. With difficulty, but in the nick of time, it was
discovered and used; the French force defending it upon the further
side was overthrown, and the retreat and its dependent victory of Crécy
were made possible.
Edward had had good faith that “God and Our Lady, and St George
would find him a passage,” and a passage he found.
The crossing of that ford and the advance to Crécy field must form
the matter of our next section, “The Preliminaries of the Action.”
* * * * *
The reader will note that in the latter part of the above I
have
wholly abandoned the more usual account of the last three days
of the
retreat from Poissy to the Somme, and that the reconstruction
I have
attempted includes several matters hitherto not suggested in
any
recent history, and is in contradiction with the view which
has
hitherto been most generally accepted.
The evidence upon which I rely for this description of the
retreat on
Acheux and subsequently on Boismont will I hope be found set
out in
detail in the number of the English Historical Review
for October
1912. Meanwhile, I owe it to my readers, who may use this book
for
purposes of school or university work, to state briefly the
way in
which the matter has hitherto been set forth, and my reason
for
adopting this new version.
Most Froissart MSS., which have misled history in this regard,
say
that King Edward was at Oisemont upon the evening of
the 23rd.
Lingard, the father of all modern English historical writing,
and a
man whom every historian begins by reading (though very few go
on by
acknowledging him), expanded this mere reference into a whole
phrase,
and wrote that Edward “had the good fortune to capture the
town of
Oisemont, and so find a night's lodging.” A neglect of
military
conditions, or of the map, or of both, has perpetuated the
error.
Edward was never at Oisemont. The argument against it, and in
favour
of Boismont, is dependent upon a number of converging
proofs, which
I will very briefly recapitulate.
(1) The MSS. of Froissart are none of them original.
(2) They vary among themselves with regard to this particular
word,
most of them giving “Oisemont,” but one giving “Nysemont.”
(3) Even where all the MSS. agree with regard to a place, and
where
Froissart certainly mentioned it, he is wildly inaccurate,
evidently
going by hearsay, and often by a doubtful memory: thus he has
no
idea on which side of the Seine the town of Gisors stands, and
he
calls the village of Fontaine a “strong town,” etc.
(4) Even were he an accurate, he is not a contemporary
authority. He
had to depend entirely upon older accounts which we can prove
that he
misread, or did not read at all, but only heard spoken of, and
very
often botched horribly.
(5) In this particular campaign he is particularly haphazard.
Thus,
upon the all-important point of the order in which the various
crossings of the Somme were attempted, he gets them at sixes
and
sevens, describing the first last and the last first. He was a
man
always attending to picturesqueness of incident, and one who
thought
exactitude very negligible.
Those are the five points which weaken any positive evidence
which
Froissart may give. But it is the evidence independent of
Froissart,
and of his accuracy or inaccuracy, which is so overwhelming.
(1) Oisemont lies actually ten miles back from Abbeville
upon the
line of the retreat. To occupy Oisemont was to incur a
deliberate
running into that danger which it was all Edward's effort to
avoid.
(2) We know, as a matter of fact, that Philip, the King of
France,
was before the night of the 23rd abreast of Abbeville; a
retreat upon
Oisemont would therefore have been physically impossible to
Edward.
(3) Oisemont would have involved keeping in touch with bodies
ten,
twelve, fifteen, and twenty miles distant, even if Oisemont
had been
occupied for two days, whereas the only mention we have of
that
occupation represents it as taking place on the 23rd.
These three points render it, as to two of them morally
impossible,
as to one of them physically, that Edward could have been at
Oisemont
upon that night. But they are negative: we have positive
points which
clinch the whole matter. These are:—
(1) Edward marched with his whole army to the ford or it
could not
all have crossed, therefore it was concentrated before he
marched.
The march was a very short one. Even Froissart says that “he
started
at the break of day” and reached the ford “a little after
sunrise.”
It must also have been short because we know as a matter of
positive
history that the soldiers who took that morning march waited
some
time for the tide to ebb, then fought a sharp and
successful action
upon the northern bank of the river, and again on the same day
stormed certainly one and possibly two defended places: also
that
their total march before the night, and beyond the river, was
quite
ten miles, including the actions just mentioned.
(2) We also know that there was an assault on St Valery, which
was
actually twenty miles from Oisemont by the nearest
roads!
(3) We know that the traitor was captured at Mons, which, if
Edward
had been at Oisemont, would have meant that someone had not
only
caught him at that great distance from Oisemont, but had
brought him
back (a total ride of twenty-four miles) without previous
knowledge
that he was capable of the valuable information he only gave
later
and after offers.
(4) There is no contemporary mention of Oisemont, but we do
positively know from contemporary evidence that the King's
household
was, and had been for three days, at Acheux.
Now all this combined is quite conclusive. Oisemont is
impossible.
Boismont satisfies every part of the evidence. An hour's
riding from
it permits the attack on St Valery. Mons, where the traitor
comes
from, is only two miles off; the march from Boismont to the
Ford is
just such an advance as would take the dawn and sunrise of a
day—whereas the advance from Oisemont, impossible for all
those
other reasons, would involve fourteen to fifteen miles of
marching,
and is utterly incompatible with the idea of two or possibly
three
heavy fights, and the long march succeeding it.
One last piece of evidence would be conclusive even if we had
not all
the rest. There is contemporary record of the Mayor of
Abbeville
watching from the heights of Caubert Hill the English army
streaming
northward to concentrate round the advanced position of the
King.
From that height such an advance could be discerned crossing
the
plateau which leads to Acheux, to Mons, and to Boismont. You
could no
more see a concentration on Oisemont from it than you could
see a
concentration on Greenwich from Camden Hill.
[Illustration: Sketch showing Estuary of the Somme at BLANCHETAQUE
in. 346]