This is Part 1 of a two-part series meant to be read together. It summarizes the arguments used by Michael Livingston against the traditional site of the Battle of Crécy and in favour of the site he and Kelly DeVries have proposed.

To read the second part of this series, about why he’s wrong, click here.

I also want to thank u/Valkine for reading these two posts when they were in draft and giving me feedback on them.

Introduction

The Battle of Crécy is one of the best known battles in the Hundred Years War, perhaps only second to the Battle of Agincourt. While it wasn’t as politically important as Poitiers or as ruinous to the ranks of the aristocracy as Agincourt, it was a stunning victory and the first time Edward III and Philippe VI had actually come to blows. The two campaigns of 1339 and 1340 had seen nothing but French countryside being laid waste and the naval battle at Sluys, and when the two kings had faced off near Ploërmel in late 1342 Philippe again chose to avoid conflict and organized another temporary truce.

While there were other victories in Brittany and Gascony - some of them, such as Auberoche, being magnificent feats of arms - they were nonetheless small and had not made any decisive gains. Auberoche might have been a crushing defeat for the nobility of Southern France, but within a year John, Duke of Normandy was besieging Aiguillon and, while he wasn’t very effective in his efforts, the English weren’t able to challenge him in the field either.

Crécy was a stunning victory for the English, upending the French, German and Italian perspectives on English military competency, and it generated more chronicle accounts than almost any other battle in the medieval period. There is also, despite a near lack of administrative sources for the French, an enormous wealth of administrative documents from England detailing the preparations Edward made for his campaign, how he raised and paid his army and how he shipped them.

It’s no surprise, then, that a lot has been written about Crécy. It’s an important battle in the mythology of the Hundred Years’ War, and there’s a nearly inexhaustible supply of material to discuss. In fact, because of the breadth of the evidence there are some minor topics that have received little or no attention to this day, such as the role Saint-Valery and Crotoy seem to have played in provisioning warships and how that might have played into the resupply of the English after crossing the Somme¹ .

What hasn’t received much attention since the mid 19th century is the location of the battle, except insofar as how suitable it was for the English. While there was some contention over whether the battle was fought at Crécy-en-Ponthieu or Estrées-lès-Crécy, or perhaps even Crécy-sur-Serre(!) and, if it was fought near Crécy-en-Ponthieu, whether or not it was fought on the ridge that runs to Wadicourt or some other nearby location. Although the location was pretty firmly put in the now-traditional location from the early 19th century by mapmakers, it wasn’t until the 1830s and 1840s that French writers managed to nail the current location into both popular and academic discourse² .

Part of this traditional location included the French attacking across the Vallée des Clercs and straight into the English position. This part of tradition, however, was completely overturned by Sir Philip Preston in 2005, when he revealed that a steep, vertical in some places, natural bank made up almost all of the Vallée des Clercs’s eastern side, so that any French attack would have to be made through a 300 yard gap between the bank and the River Maye³ . This didn’t pose any problem to Michael Prestwich or Andrew Ayton, who found that this revelation helped make sense of the chronicle descriptions of the battle, and the conclusion was that the traditional battlefield was still the best location based on the available evidence and fit the chronicle descriptions of the battle well⁴ .

Kelly DeVries, however, immediately began to have doubts. He knew the terrain and the sources well, having previously written on the battle, and over the course of the next decade worked on this problem, culminating in a book he co-edited with Michael Livingston. The Battle of Crécy: A Casebook contained almost every 14th century source on the battle in both original text and translation, and a number of chapters on different aspects of the battle. It also contained the revolutionary argument that the Battle of Crécy was fought not on the slope of the Vallée des Clercs, but just above Domvast, seven kilometres from the traditional battlefield⁵ .

When I first read the Casebook back in 2019, I was hooked. Here was an excellent use of sources to challenge a predominant narrative and it seemed to make so much sense. But…then I began to look a little more closely at the chosen site and realised that there were a few minor problems with it. No big deal, it might still be possible to find an alternate location that still matched Livingston and DeVries’ arguments. I didn’t think about it constantly, but I chewed on it a bit from time to time.

By the time Michael Livingston’s Crécy: Battle of Five Kings came out at the end of 2022, I had come back around to the traditional narrative. It was largely based on reading and rereading the sources and trying to wrap my head around the question of “where, if not Domvast or Crécy”, and I hadn’t looked into things like 16th and 17th century French histories of the battle or examined the Napoleonic cadastre in great detail.

Something about Battle of Five Kings didn’t sit well with me. Ayton, who I had reread recently, was misinterpreted in several places, and the new version of the battle - modified from the 2015 version - seemed even weaker, in one instance appearing to directly contradict several chronicles. So, I dug into the primary sources and looked at the translation of them, I looked at Napoleonic cadastre and 17th century French histories, and I read or reread every book published on Crécy that I could get my hands on.

The conclusion I came up with was that Livingston and DeVries were committing bad history in a big way. Between the bad faith interpretations of opposing views, misrepresentation of what the 18th century maps and 19th century cadastre tell us about the Domvast site, sweeping and baseless assumptions about when and why Crécy-en-Ponthieu became known as the site of the battle and the sheer effrontery of their claim that no one else has ever used the Kitchen Journal to study Crécy, it’s impossible for me to not write something about all this.

I’ve chosen Livingston’s 2022 book as the main focus of this post, both because he’s the more public advocate for their new battle site and because it contains the most recent attempt at justifying it. I’ll refer to it being being both of their opinions since, from their podcast, they both seem to be in agreement, and I’ll refer back to the 2015 Casebook for clarification or where I think the book explains a point better or in more detail, but this is primarily about Crécy: Battle of Five Kings.

I also want to say that I don’t think all of what Livingston and DeVries have written is bad. They’re some of the first to fully accept and explain the implications of Bertrand Schnerb’s arguments about the small size of the Genoese force at Crécy, and they pick up on references to both infantry going forward with the crossbowmen and to the Black Prince advancing out of position that have been too long neglected in scholarship. There’s some very solid and thoughtful work at play in their reconstruction of the battle, but it’s unfortunately let down by their decision to try and invent a new location for it, as you’ll see in Part 2 of this post.

With all that out of the way, let’s get on with summarising their arguments!

Part 1: Arguments Against Tradition

1 - Doubts about the Tradition

The oldest part of DeVries and Livingston’s skepticism comes from how the discovery of a steep escarpment changes the battle at the traditional battle site. It’s best illustrated in themap from Battle of Five Kings which shows a) the traditional positions of the French and English and how, because of the escarpment this is no longer viable, b) the route the French would need to have taken to redeploy their line in a way that matches tradition, c) an alternate version where the English and French face off against each other across the Maye and d) an easy way for the French to outflank the English by marching around them.

As you can see, the version presented would make the French look very foolish. The gap between the embankment and the Maye is, today, something in the order of 160 metres and would probably have been smaller in the 14th century, when the water table was about a metre higher⁶ . It’s worth quoting Livingston in full about this:

To preserve as much of the vulgato as they could, historians suggested that the French voluntarily marched through this chokepoint. Immediately after exiting this severe bottleneck, they made a 90-degree turn, riding north-east up the valley floor until they were situated below the English position. There, they wheeled through another 90-degree turn, re-formed their ranks, and charged up the hill at the enemy.

That way they could die in the proper position dictated by the vulgato.

It’s a complicated and strange set of manoeuvres. It’s quite unlike the tactics we see in any other battle of this kind. And not a single witness or later account on either side of the battle mentions the embankment, the closeness of the river, an unparalleled S-turn, or anything even remotely like it.

That said, given the terrain of the site, there was little other choice in light of the generations of assumptions about the battle’s location. I’ve marked this S-turn manoeuvre with a blue arrow on our map.

When we visited the site, my colleagues and I talked over these various problems. We walked along the embankment at the edge of the valley. We absolutely agreed that it was a mortal impediment to the traditional French charge from the east. We could also see that the proposed S-turn might have been undertaken while under the reach of English bowmen who shot first into the flanks of the French and then, after their second 90-degree turn, into their faces. This made the implausible border on the impossible, since the pinch points at the river would have been choked still further by arrow-riddled dead.

The S-turn also made the fate of the Genoese crossbowmen incomprehensible. If, after making their final turn to face Edward, they’d been forced into flight by the English arrows, they wouldn’t flee back along the same S-turn. It was every man for himself now. They’d go as directly away from death as possible. That meant they’d clamber up the escarpment that the horses couldn’t descend, or even fly towards the head of the valley. Either way, they wouldn’t have been overrun at all.

(Livingston, Battle of Five Kings, p189-190. Vulgato is just Livingston's pretentious way of saying “common” or “widely known”)

I don’t think I need to explain in detail why it’s not really viable for the English and the French to be facing off across the river, and Livingston dismisses it just as readily. The Maye is not a particularly significant stream today, but there’s good evidence that it was bigger in the 14th century, probably with swampy banks⁷ , so any attack across it would be a seriously bad idea. Besides which, that’s the kind of thing that would show up in at least one chronicle account.

The other issue presented by Livingston is the question of why the French didn’t just outflank the English. After all, it’s only really a march of a mile or so to get around to the English flanks, where you could attack on a line a thousand metres long across ground without any real obstacles. In fact, Philippe wouldn’t even need to attack: as at Cassel he could just wait for the English to run out of supplies and attack him⁸ . After all, no man is a fool, and that’s a key principle of Livingston’s method for reconstructing battles:

No man is a fool. Historians will often ignore the problems with their interpretations by waving them away with the excuse that one party or another didn’t know what they were doing.

It’s true that stupid happens. We all know that. But a battle reconstruction that requires one side to be stupid is, frankly, probably pretty stupid itself. Commanders want to win. Their soldiers don’t want to die. These ideas shouldn’t be surprising or terribly debatable, and they certainly can’t be ignored. A reconstruction should be considered suspect if it doesn’t have all parties making decisions that a reasonably intelligent person would have also made if they were subject to the same constraints of information. Those decisions might in retrospect have been tragically incorrect, but in the moment they must have seemed correct. Explaining how what seemed right was really wrong is an essential part of a working battle reconstruction

(Livingston, Battle of Five Kings, p167)

In his view, the traditional narrative is that Philippe first sent the Genoese off their high ground, across a valley and against the English. Then, on seeing them fail, the “cautious, careful king” became “so furious at the failure of his paid allies that he was planning to overrun them to get to the enemy”, even though this would disorder his cavalry charge within longbow range of the English. He proceeded to continue this wasteful method of assault, ignoring the easy possibility of a flank attack, and not only did none of the French try to stop this, but even his enemies didn’t point out what a fool he had been to attack in such a stupid manner⁹ .

2 - Traditions can be Invented

One of the ways that the traditional battle site was settled on firmly was all the place-name traditions that placed it there. Baron de Seymour’s military analysis might have convinced historians that the ridge was the best possible place for Edward to fight, but there were other things that pointed to this area.

Our earliest attestation of the traditional battle site on a map is Guillaume Delisle’s 1704 map of Picardy (see note 2), which Livingston believes was “was clearly used by Cassini” in his more famous 1757 map. It was this map, they believe that “enterprising minds” seized upon when young members of the English aristocracy began to visit France and wanted to look at the site of the battle¹⁰ . The site was scenic, well located next to a modest town, and the view from the windmill would have been awe inspiring. It was certainly much more likely to excite the interest of young English aristocrats than the site that Livingston and DeVries prefer.

And so, they argue, by 1818 when Hilaire Picard made his map of the battlefield, a number of suitable names had been developed for the locality. The small valley at the head of the valley, intersecting the ridge just below Wadicourt, became the Marché à Carognes [Path of the Dead], while the road that runs from the Croix de Pierre [Stone Cross] (today called the Croix de Bohéme [Cross of Bohemia]) to Wadicourt, across the head of the valley, is the Ancien Chemin de l’Armée [Ancient Road of the Army]¹¹ .

They point out several issues with these names. The Croix de Bohéme, for instance, is so far away from the battle that it’s almost certainly not set up to commemorate the fall of John of Bohemia. On a similar note, the Ancien Chemin de l’Armée, only shows up as a small path from Marcheville to the *Croix de Bohéme on the 1824 cadastral maps, rather than leading from the cross to Wadicourt¹² .

It’s the Marché à Carognes, however, that they use as the clincher for invented tradition. It’s quite far away from where the main bulk of the fighting was, and it makes little sense for that particular area to receive a special place name as opposed to, for instance, the area in front of the Black Prince, where over 1500 French men-at-arms died. And, of course, there was a good deal of invented tradition in the 19th century, with one late 19th century magazine waxing poetically over how the dew “curiously” remains longer on the furrows that have been plowed over the burial pits of the Marché à Carognes. Suggestions that it earned its name from the mass burial of horses is also dismissed as not only a logistical nightmare (dragging hundreds or thousands of horses a kilometre or more and burying them in enormous mass graves) but a practice not otherwise attested¹³ .

3 - No Archaeological Evidence

While there have been a number of items associated with the battlefield of Crécy since the 19th century - all now lost except an arrowhead and a cannonball - “repeated major archaeological investigations of the site” have failed to turn up any evidence of the battle. According to Livingston and DeVries, despite the discovery of “many” iron objects in the 1995 metal detector survey of the site, proponents of the traditional site have attempted to handwave the lack of evidence by claiming that soil conditions must have eroded the iron. Similarly, despite the evidence of Towton that stripping the dead creates recoverable artifacts rather than removes them, proponents have suggested that this stripping of the dead could explain the lack of evidence as well¹⁴ .

In the absence of what should have been tens or even hundreds of thousands of artifacts, DeVries and Livingston argue that it’s completely untenable to view the traditional battlefield as the actual site.

4 - What do the Chronicles Say?

The fourth pillar of doubt is what the chronicles say about where the location of the battle was. I’m going to reproduce the appendix from Battle of Five Kings in a comment here, which lists all the locational data.

Livingston views these 81 sources as having a “high level of agreement between them regarding the battle site” and goes on to remark that not a single one of these mentions Edward crossing the river Maye and seizing the town of Crécy, as Villani’s reference to fording of a “narrow but deep” river doesn’t fit what we know of the Maye¹⁵ . That they’ve up until now not been seen as pointing to anything other than the traditional site is put down to circular logic. That is, the site could only have been fought on the slope between Crécy and Wadicourt and, as a result, when translating the texts people have translated with that in mind.

As I found out in examining Poissy for the Essex Dogs badhistory post, if a translator has a particular view it’s entirely possible for them to not just chose one meaning of a word over the other, but to invent words or give them meanings that the original authors would never have thought of.

For Livingston, his equivalent is the association of “Westglyse” in Henry Knighton’s Chronicle with “Watteglise”, a small area about 1.5 miles north-west of the traditional site. Some translators have even replaced “Westglyse” with “Watteglise”, and attempts at placing small post-battle skirmishes there rather than the battle itself further distorts Knighton’s account, as he is quite clear that the battle was fought “on the field of Westglyse near Crécy”¹⁶ . He argues that “Westglyse” is, rather than a “linguistically unlikely” reference to Watteglise, a corruption of “ouest de l’eglise” (“west of the church”), which is how he says the fields near the location of his battle are known locally¹⁷ .

For the most part, however, their argument is that when words with multiple meanings have been translated, which meaning is used has been based on the traditional location, meaning that an alternate location is still plausible. Furthermore, they argue that since Edward III, Richard Wynkeley and Michael Northburgh all use directional terms such as “versus” (towards) and “devers” (towards) in relation to Crécy, the translation of other terms, where ambiguous, should use this as a guidestone¹⁸ .

Other sources support this. Robert de Dreux’s claim of recompense for horses lost at Crécy says they were killed “before Crécy in Ponthieu”, with Iolo Goch, the Lanercost Chronicle, Pseudo-Adam Murimuth, Geoffrey le Baker, the *Chronicle of Canterbury, the Eulogium historiarum, John of Reading, and the Prose Brut all saying much the same¹⁹ .

Then there are the sources which explicitly say that the battle was fought between Abbeville and Crécy. The most damning is the letter of Johann von Schönfeld, a knight fighting for Edward, who wrote that the battle was fought between “a certain diocese of Saint George and a town called Crécy”, which is probably a reference to parish of Saint George in Abbeville²⁰ . Giovanni Villani also mentions that the battle was fought “between Crécy and Abbeville”, as does the Chronicle of the Este Family²¹ . All three sources were written within two years of the battle, and one is from an eyewitness. The mention that Charles of Luxenbourg had last 26 of his own men, that only 40 of his father’s men remained and that only 416 of Philippe’s men had escaped in the Chronicle of the Este Family may even suggest a source who had direct knowledge of the French side of things²² .

5 - Scheduling Conflicts

This is the point where Livingston and DeVries believe that they’ve completely clinched the deal: the king’s cook, William Retford, kept a detailed journal that included not just what the king and his court ate and how much the food cost, but where the king stopped each night. And, for the 24th and 25th of August, it suggests to Livingston and DeVries that Edward was too far away from Crecy on the morning of the 26th of August to have reached the traditional site in time to prepare for a battle.

Retford records Edward being “beneath the forest of Crécy” on the 24th of August and being “in the forest of Crécy” on the 25th. The Cleopatra Itinerary says that the English were “beside the forest of Crécy” on the 24th and “at another edge of the forest”, which has generally been taken to mean that Edward was on the other side of the forest. Livingston points out, however, Edward’s letter of the 3rd of September says that after crossing the Blanchetaque, the army was in a defensive position near the Somme “the whole day and the next day, until the hour of Vespers”. That left precious little time for travel, and the English probably didn’t get past Sailly-Bray²³ .

As he notes, this arrangement was quite sound. Hugh Despenser had been dispatched to Crotoy to see if Edward’s reinforcements had arrived, and Edward needed to be sure Philippe couldn’t attempt a crossing. It makes little sense to move very far, especially as some other parts of the army are recorded in some accounts as chasing the defenders of the ford back to Abbeville, and after the long, rapid journey of the previous days and the battle at the ford a day of rest would be welcome²⁴ .

This creates a problem, however. An army takes time to move, and can’t move all at once. First the vanguard needs to depart, and then the main battle and then the rearguard. The roads are only so wide and so only a handful of men, and fewer carts, can travel abreast, so that even an army of 10 000 men marching 20 abreast (very rare) would take up at least 2500 ft (762 metres), not taking the wagons into consideration²⁵ . A more realistic estimate is that an army of 10 000 men would be 2-3 miles long, excluding baggage and spare horses.

The distance from Sailly-Bray to Crécy is a little under 20km, and our best sources agree that the two armies were already facing each other at nones (3pm). Since daylight on the 26th of August was almost 7am, the English had to march those 20km in 5 hours. Remember: even if the head of the army arrived at 12pm, the rest of the army still had to file up onto the ridge and take up defensive positions. That’s an average of 4km an hour.

The problem is, the English had never managed this speed before: their fastest day was August 5, when they made 32.5km on flat terrain and well maintained roads, an average of 2.2km per hour. Their average (and median) march rate was 1.3km per hour, far too little to reach Crécy in time to set up for battle. They could, however, just make it to the site above Domvast, a barely manageable 11km from Sailly-Bray, just in time to set up in preparation for Philippe²⁶ .

6 - King Philippe’s Plan

Even losing sides intend to win and have plans to achieve their aims and, according to Livingston’s revised version of the battle, Philippe had what was on the surface a brilliant plan: to race ahead of Edward and cut him off from Bethune, where Edward expected to find Flemish allies besieging the town. Philippe seems to have expected at least the possibility of this, sending almost 300 men to reinforce Hesdin as soon as Edward crossed the Somme, and Edward seems to have taken the Hesdin road rather than the closer road that led to Calais²⁷ .

Rather than rushing up the Hesdin road to block the English at Canchy, with all the risk of both sides running into each other before they were ready for battle or being ambushed by the English, Philippe instead marched from Abbeville to Saint-Riquier to take the Chaussée Brunehaut - an old Roman road still in good repair - so he could cut off the English where the Hesdin road meets the Chaussée Brunehaut near Dompierre. Edward’s scouts, meeting Philippe’s scouts, allowed Edward to realise that he was in danger, so he drew up his army in Livingston’s new location, just above Domvast, to wait in the best possible position he could hope for²⁸ .

Having achieved his aim of cutting off the English while he was still in the Maye valley, Philippe moved down it until he hit the Hesdin road and turned south along a section of road leading to Marcheville that is today known as the Ancien Chemin de l’Armée, coming out in front of the English position. In the meantime, he ordered the infantry who had been following, and much of which was only now arriving at Saint-Riquier, up the road to Domvast. This is how the Genoese, who had no place in the vanguard, were able to arrive before the cavalry of the vanguard²⁹ .

7 - The New Location

Here’s a screenshot of the map from the Battle of Five Kings, showing the positioning and approaches

Here’s a much clearer image of the map from the Casebook

We’ve now come to the topography of the new battle site itself and how it fits the battle. You can see already how Livingston believes it fits the movements of both armies, but how does the location fit the account of the battle?

From the 2022 map you can see that there are two important named areas: the herse and the Jardin de Genève, both of which are field names on the Napoleonic cadastre. The triangular field between three roads is a natural enough name for the field and doesn’t need to be related to the herse of Froissart, the Jardin de Genève is best translated as “the Garden of the Genoese”, and refers to a dip in the ground, exactly where you would expect the Genoese to be positioned, where they would be out of site from much of the French army coming up behind them. Although some critics have said that it should be translated as “the Garden of Junipers”, the 14th century word for the Genoese was Genevois, whereas the 14th century word for junipers was genévrier. There also aren’t any junipers around³⁰ .

There are other place name indications as well, as you can see from the second map. Behind the Jardin de Genève is a field known as l’Enfer (“Hell”) and, closer to Crécy and where fleeing men might find some escape, another called “le Paradis” (“Heaven”). On what would be one flank of the English is a field called Au Ravage (“To the Violence”), and across the front of the English position is the Chemin des Maillet (“Road of Hammers”), which all suggest some sort of violence or battle. There is also a mill on the proposed battle site according to the Cassini map of 1757³¹ . Taken all together, the place name evidence is as strong or stronger than at the traditional site.

From an English position, the site also has much to commend it. Both flanks are protected by woods, and on the south-eastern (Domvast) side there is a steep bank that would be difficult to attack up known as the Plant de la Folie (“The Foolish Plan”/”The Foolish Plantation”). Anyone who approaches from Domvast is faced by a sharp rise of 2-3 metres, lined with trees, that would be difficult (but not impossible) to attack up. This doesn’t last the whole front of the English, but it’s an important barrier and the trees would have helped conceal the disposition of his army. On the other wing, towards Marcheville there was less topographic protection, but through the use of wagons a substantial level of protection was still afforded. A single gap, about 1000 feet wide, was left between the two wings, where the men-at-arms would be stationed, funneling the French into a killing ground³² .

While English archers were lined up entirely on the flanks, as the Citizen of Valenciennes and Geoffrey le Baker both attest and other sources, like Villani and the Anonymous of Rome, imply, the English men-at-arms and other infantry formed up in three battles, one behind the other. The first, the vanguard, held the gap in the wagons, with the largest battle (the main battle) behind it and finally the rearguard, commanded by Edward for the duration of the battle, in the rear to watch the baggage and for any attack up the Hesdin road from Abbeville³³ .

Livingston doesn’t come to any strong conclusion as to whether Philippe ordered the attack, if it was driven by the eagerness of the French men-at-arms or if perhaps John of Bohemia angrily launched the attack after being called a coward, but ultimately seems to come down on the side of Philippe exercising some limited control at first³⁴ .

As already mentioned, Livingston believes the Genoese weren’t in the vanguard of the French army, as tradition dictates, but further back along the line of march. It was their great misfortune to arrive first of all the infantry, before the French vanguard, and it’s likely that Philippe, on seeing only some carts and a few archers on the English right flank, threw the Genoese at the “the weak side of the English wagenburg”³⁵ .

The Genoese advanced until they were in the natural hollow known as the Jardin de Génève. It had just rained, so the ground was muddy, and the English didn’t respond to the first volley but rather hid behind their wagons. While the Genoese struggled to reload in the mud, Philippe ordered his first line of cavalry to attack what he believed to be the suppressed lines of English archers. And then the English began to shoot³⁶ .

The Genoese, outnumbered and hampered by the mud, were completely unable to fight back. They broke and fled straight into the oncoming charge, which they couldn’t see because they were down in the bowl of the Jardin de Génève. By the same token, the French men-at-arms couldn’t see the Genoese and, as a result, ran headlong into them while both were still within arrow range. The result was a chaotic and horrifying pile up, where any Genoese deaths from the French side were likely accidents rather than deliberate killings. Livingston believes that, if any Genoese were killed deliberately, it was after the battle as it is highly unlikely he would commit more cavalry to the disaster purely to kill the Genoese on the suspicion of treachery³⁷ .

Philippe then managed to get some more control of his army, reorder what he could and attack across the entire English line. The English archery effectively kept the charge at bay, killing horses and making it hard for those behind to follow up. Some of the English archers on the left flank may even have left their positions for a better shot. So effective does the English archery seem to have been, that the French never managed to close with the English formation and instead the Black Prince left the formation to bring the battle to them³⁸ .

This wasn’t part of Edward’s plan but a rash decision on the part of the Prince, and it drove the French into a frenzy as they attempted to capture him. And, Livingston argues, they did. Exactly who captured him probably won’t be known - several sources suggest the Count of Flanders - but we do know that the Prince’s banner was down at one point and quite a few reliable sources indicate that the main battle also had to advance to protect the Prince, and others then have Edward leaving the wagenburg to finally crush the French. Livingston has him leaving via the left flank and then pushing the French back across the front of his lines, into the Jardin de Génève, where they were hampered by the Genoese as Villani relates, and finally back down into the valley where Domvast is³⁹ .

At this point the King of Bohemia made his final attack and was brutally killed, and Philippe knew the day was lost. It was night now, or nearly so, and Jean de Hainaut convinced Philippe to leave the battle and go to Labroye. It would be foolish to try and head back to Abbeville, with the English now cutting off that road, but Labroye had a good castle and was a safe distance from the English. In fact, according to Livingston, it makes much more sense than it does with the traditional location; there Philippe would have to pass “directly behind the enemy lines” to escape⁴⁰ .

There was one final bit of action that helped Livingston seal the deal: the next day there was an attack by the Duke of Lorraine, who was unaware of what had happened. If the traditional location was correct, and there was no English blocking the way back to Abbeville, how come the duke was “ignorant of the situation” and didn’t know of the French defeat? Furthermore, Villani says that Charles of Bohemia had rallied a sizable force of the defeated French on a “small salient near a wood”, likely the same place the French had originally attacked from. The two factors combined are just the icing on the cake for Livingston, more pieces of proof that his and Kelly DeVries have chosen the correct site⁴¹ .

Conclusion to Part 1

Hopefully I’ve laid out Livingston and DeVries’ arguments as close to how they would like them summarized, showing exactly why I originally bought into the argument and why so many enthusiasts now seem convinced by their case. I’ve left things out, either arguments that I don’t think carry any weight whatsoever - such as that references to the “Mount de Crécy” and valleys, because both locations have valleys and “mont” can refer to hills and ridgelines⁴² - or fragments of the wider argument that I’ll refer to in my rebuttals because it’s otherwise impossible to summarize over 50 pages of arguments in a single post. Nonetheless, I hope I’ve presented the strongest possible case for the new location, and as neutrally as possible.

To see why this is all wrong, it’s time to get to the second post: my rebuttal.