by Dan Davis
It was hard fought for a while but then the French fled and our entire army, including all our scores of wagons and thousands of horses, made it across in a single tide which may just have been the most remarkable moment of the whole campaign.
For a day or so we stayed on the river because the French army had come up and thousands upon thousands of them stared across at us from the other side. They could have forded the river, for they had the numbers on us, and we waited for them to attack.
In the end, they quietly went away again. My men shouted their thanks for the day of rest across the river at the retreating French, to much laughter. In truth, our army was still exhausted and low on supplies.
We marched on, hoping to drive on through and join with the Flemish.
But it was not to be.
King Philip had finally acted decisively to pin us in place with his numbers and so Edward found an excellent position to defend.
The ridge between the villages of Crecy and Wadicourt, with a slope at our front and to the flanks and woods behind.
“This will do very nicely,” I had said to Thomas from atop the hill after the King had made his decision.
He shook his head. “It is unseemly to be so cheerful when so many Christians will likely die in this valley.”
“I have known you too long, sir,” I replied, “and watched you too often rejoice in the blood you have spilled to believe that your disapproval runs deep.”
Thomas spluttered in protest. It was his French blood that made him so melancholic but that was understandable considering we were going to be fighting his countrymen. Having said that, John and Hugh did not appear overly concerned that morning as John went amongst my men to jokingly berate them for their lax standards. I watched from afar how the squire Hugh followed closely at John’s side, all the while gazing at him in adoration.
They had both been very young men when Thomas and I had rescued them from a French gaol, saving them from execution. It had been about thirty-five years since that night and yet in many ways they had both retained their youthful manner. Thomas had been old when he had become one of us so perhaps that better explained his grim mood.
The mortals in my company seemed happy enough, although, being commoners, they lacked the depth of character necessary for considering such things and so it was to be expected. They wanted to win, to fight well in the eyes of their friends, the King, and God, in that order, and then to plunder the dead or take a man for ransom. They were not troubled by the whys and wherefores.
And so, after a night of preparation and my brief morning meeting with the King, we stood ready to face the onslaught of the massed ranks of French nobility.
The common archer and man-at-arms knew one thing as well as any knight amongst them.
That if we broke, we would be slaughtered to a man.
3. Crecy
Every Englishman was ordered to fight on foot. King Edward himself walked amongst us, speaking to the men-at-arms, the archers and even the occasional Welshman.
What is more, he took the time to personally adjust our dispositions even within the individual battles. Many of the knights and lords who trailed after him also engaged the men in similar fashion and so the bonds of friendship and loyalty and duty were strengthened before the horror of the battle was to begin.
The army’s priests went from man to man, blessing them. Our soldiers would be hard pressed by the massing ranks of the French knights and if any of us broke, we would all certainly be lost because it was only when an army fled that a right slaughter could occur. We needed to hold against whatever onslaught we suffered, no matter how long and how terrible it was.
For all of our recent victories against towns and small detachments, none of us was under any illusion about the enemy that day. The Frankish knight, armoured and mounted and delivering a thunderous combined charge with their enormous war horses, was the most devastating force on Earth. They were famed as Christendom’s finest troops right across Europe and far beyond. Nothing could stand against the French knight when used properly. Not massed ranks of savage pagan Lithuanians in the north, nor the horse armies of the Turks of the East.
King Edward took his position near the top of the ridge, with the huge windmill behind. His bodyguards, lords, messengers, marshals, secretaries, heralds, and servants surrounded him. Each of the lords had their own men on hand, so that there were scores of men about the King in the centre of the rear battle. My company was many yards down the hill and I would certainly not be within earshot of the King unless I moved back.
“The men will stay here,” I said to Thomas and the other key men of the company, “and you shall accompany me further up the hill.”
The first of the French standard bearers arranged themselves in the valley a couple of miles away to the south, their colourful fabrics rippling in the wind. Behind them, thousands upon thousands of soldiers emerged from the roads and deployed in formation. Even after midday, they were still deploying.
“By God, sir,” Rob Hawthorn, the leader of my archers said to me. “How many of them are there?”
“A good few, Rob, a good few. But we should have an arrow or two for each of them, what say you?”
He frowned. “Aye, that may be, sir.”
We had fought smaller battles before, my company and I, while in Brittany, and one or two of them had begun with similar respective positions, writ small. A few hundred English against a thousand or two French. And we had always come away from them rather well.
But however keenly they are fought, a small scrap is a world away from a mass battle. It is often a slower affair on account of the masses of men and horses that must be arranged but the momentousness of the occasion stirs men’s hearts, for good and for ill.
On that ridge by Crecy we held an advantageous position and yet it was by no means unassailable. What passes for hills in that part of France would not count as a molehill in Derbyshire.
The men knew it was to be the sort of battle they had heard of all their lives but had never really fought. These men had battled for their lives in Scotland, Wales, or Brittany, climbed town walls as the denizens fought to resist, forded freezing rivers while under attack, faced down charges from mounted men-at-arms. And all of those events were filled with moments that they would boast of when drunk, or weep for when very drunk, or recall in silence before the next action.
And yet that morning outside Crecy, there was a feeling in the air. Every man knew that his king’s fate hung in the balance. And so, England’s fate hung in the balance.
I wondered if the French felt that also. Indeed, they would have felt the desecration we had committed against the sanctity of their God-given lands and the people who served them. A knight’s duty was to protect his lord, his king, and his people and the French had been held back from us for so long. They must have been desperate to do their duty and run us down.
“Will they come?” Thomas asked, looking at the sky.
John laughed. “Of course they will, brother. How can they not?”
Walt scratched his armpit through the mail there. “Why do you say it so certain, sir?”
John shrugged. “They must, that is all. They simply must.”
I knew what he meant. It was what knights had lived for, since the days of Charlemagne. To charge the enemies that despoiled the earth with their presence.
The bannerets of France were rich and prominent knights who had made a career of war and commanded sections of cavalry in battle and flew their banner, which was a rectangular flag bearing their arms as opposed to the triangular pennon of an ordinary knight.
These men too often recruited their own companies and some did so among their dependents and neighbours like we did in England. But that was unusual. Most of the French army was made up of hundreds or thousands of individual noblemen and gentlemen, each one with his own personal retinue of a squire and a page and often no more than that.
When they mustered in France, they would line up wearing thei
r armour ready for inspection by the officers of the Crown. The archers had to show they could use their bows. Horses were valued and branded so they could not be swapped for poor ones later, with the useless horses sent away and the man rebuked or fined. These men were then assigned to one great nobleman or another for the duration of the campaign. This meant that they would be fighting alongside men they did not know.
But despite all these weaknesses in organisation when compared to our superbly professional armies, the ordinary French peasant and the knights and lords, all threw themselves into the army with great heart for they loved the Crown and wished to do their duty.
Although King Philip himself was not loved, the idea of kingship had to be served. Our hearts compelled us to do so. Of course, the hope for financial reward and personal glory was just as important for some men.
Knighthood was yet a glorious thing, especially for the French. The ballads of the day yet celebrated knighthood as an idea, an ideal, more than it did the act of war. Not just knights but the common folk were able to recognise the banners and blazons of the most famous knights of the realm. Membership of the chivalric orders was much coveted by French and English alike.
Before every great battle, young men-at-arms queued up in their scores or even in their hundreds to be knighted on an occasion that would do them great honour if they survived and they sought to cement their newly-won status by challenging enemies to jousts between the lines.
Men wanted to be knights even if they did not want to be a soldier because they knew it would win them respect from their peers. The ideals of knighthood were perhaps rarely reflected in the practice of war itself but it was a knight’s greatest duty to fight in a war for his king and fulfilling that duty felt truly glorious. Riding amongst your brother knights with the cacophony of horses’ hoofs and armour and the trumpets and kettle drums, the brilliant colours of the pennants and banners snapping in the wind above your head. There was nothing like it for feeling right and true and powerful.
But changes were already on the horizon. Indeed, many were already present and being felt.
Men who were not knights still became great soldiers. Of course, our great armies were always commanded by the King, or a duke, a count, or an earl. But an experienced English squire could find himself leading a company and commanding knights even when he himself had not been dubbed. And, indeed, a mere knight could find himself in command of counts and barons if the King so ordered it. Something unthinkable in my youth. And men like Black Walter, who never wanted nor expected nor deserved to be knighted, could fight alongside them and be as skilled as any of them and just as well equipped.
Again, in my youth, we had a far greater expectation that battles would be decided by knights fighting knights from horseback under agreed and understood codes of behaviour. But the lessons learned over the years, especially from combat against the horse archers of the Steppe and the slippery Saracen cavalry, meant that we came to favour mobility and victory over honour. And so all of the men and even the archers used horses for mobility but all would dismount for combat itself. Most of my men had coursers, light and swift and trained for war. We needed at least two and ideally three horses each. The archers tended to ride rounceys or hobbies which could vary in quality from the sublime to the God awful.
When I was young, swords were worn and used by what would later be known as gentlemen whereas commoners were more likely to be armed with no more than spears and bows. But even archers had swords by the time we were fighting in France, though plenty preferred axes, maces or hammers and could afford to buy or loot whatever they liked.
Armour, too, had changed almost beyond recognition. Once, we had worn mail from head to toe, with a surcoat over the top in our colours. But by Crecy, we knights and lords mostly wore steel breastplates and back-pieces, along with close fitting plate covering our limbs and only the insides and exposed parts protected by pieces of mail. The steel would discolour and rust something terrible and pages and servants had to scrub them every night that they could to keep them in good order.
Our helms had changed from the old style to a lighter, rounded one called a basinet which protected the top and back of the head and was fitted with a gorget to protect the throat. A movable, conical visor hinged at the top or side meant one could open the helm to breathe, speak and see clearly. A basic style of basinet was worn by almost everyone, even the spearmen and garrison troops. Though for the rest of their armour they often wore a habergeon, which was a mail jacket that a man could shrug on by himself. Some men could only afford, or simply preferred, to fight in a layered linen coat which was easily good enough to stop all but the most terrible of cuts.
Their trumpets sounded in the distance, the blasts brought to us on the wind and calling in ever more of them from miles around.
The foremost of them was an enormous mass of crossbowmen, growing ever larger.
“There be the Genoese, sir,” Rob said, unnecessarily pointing at them with his unstrung bow.
Black Walt pointed down the hill at the numerous cannons being prepared on the flanks of the archers at the extreme ends of the battlefield. “What do you reckon our smoking monsters will make of them?”
The dozens of small cannons were protected by a line of parked wagons on either flank, the bizarre, squat things pointing out between them. Most were ribalds, cannons constructed from clusters of narrow iron barrels attached to a wooden frame that fired out iron rods. Some had four, or eight, or a dozen barrels. There were a handful of bombards amongst them, which were single, more substantial, iron barrels that shot out larger iron arrows or clusters of balls.
“The cannon will do nothing,” I said, confidently. “A cacophony of thunder, belching foul smoke and nothing to show for it other than to frighten the birds. Same as we saw in Scotland.”
Thomas coughed and spoke under his breath. “That was over twenty years ago, Richard.”
Most of my men had been babes in arms or barely much older at the time.
“These devices are ever improved by the cunningest Italian minds, Richard,” John said, his smile wide. “One day soon we shall see these ribalds or the bombards wreaking havoc upon an enemy army, mark my words, sir.”
“Nonsense, John,” I replied. “I have heard those very same words for how many years past? And, let me tell you, the Tartars used trebuchets to launch barrels filled with oil, naphtha, black powder, and the like which would explode upon impact with the ground and throw terrible fire directly onto the men nearby. I have urged the King to seek out these proven weapons but, sadly, he has fallen for the deceits of these Italians who have promised devastation for decades and yet who deliver only smoke and belch out ever more vague promises.”
My men chuckled at me, for they had heard it all before. What I could never tell the mortals amongst them was that I had witnessed the effects of these Eastern weapons with my own eyes.
Some part of me still enjoyed being well-regarded and respected by other men. It was a terrible weakness of character and one I would soon seek to eradicate altogether, but I even drew satisfaction from the approval of commoners like Rob Hawthorn and Black Walter, men who served me and would be far beneath me in every sense even had I been a mortal knight
Our own trumpeters sounded the call to arms once more, as if there was an Englishman in all France who was not prepared and ready to meet the enemy.
“God Almighty,” Rob said, “they don’t half love their bleating.”
“It is a wonderful sound,” I said, loudly. “It rather stirs the blood, does it not?”
“What’s the point of stirred blood if we be all the way back here?” I heard Black Walter mumble. I chose not to respond to his grumbling.
“There’s too many of them to assemble properly before nightfall,” Thomas said, with what was possibly more hope than judgement. “Do you not see, Sir Richard?”
I looked at the height of the Sun and held out my fingers to measure the distance between what was probably the hori
zon and the Sun itself. “There is a good few hours yet. All depends on how keen they are.”
A little while later, it clouded over and a light but steady rain began to fall.
“Surely,” Thomas said, “surely, they will not attack this evening.”
Men cried out up and down the line as the French trumpets sounded, the kettledrums resounded and the Genoese crossbowmen began marching forward, closing the distance toward our forward battles.
Our archers, on the flanks of the battles, began stringing their bows from their horned nocks and readying their arrows. Their linen arrow bags were coated with wax to keep the arrows dry. Those bags were bulky things, stiffened by a wicker frame so that the fletchings did not crush each other.
They wore their lords livery over their brown, russet, or undyed tunics. The surcoats displayed the yellows, reds, blues, or greens of their lord’s colours, scores of different styles from every county and hundred in England. But all were faded and most filthy with mud and food and wine stains.
As the Genoese came within the farthest range of their weapons, in groups they began to shoot their bows. Once they had shot, they would reload and advance further. In this way, they made their way closer and closer while unleashing a steady stream of bolts at us.
Sadly for them, their bolts mostly fell short of our lines.
The English bowmen, however, were in their element. Those men could shoot a dozen arrows a minute, if they had to and if they had enough arrows. They rarely did shoot at such a rate. Doing so would use tens of thousands of arrows in a couple of minutes and although that would cause an orgy of destruction it would also use up wagonloads of ammunition and leave the archers with little to do. What they tended to do instead was loose a mass volley of one or two shots and then they would pick their targets, being mindful of how many arrows they had left and how many enemies were on the field.