Kings and Generals, that YouTube channel pumping out 100% accurate DOCUMENTARIES, released a video yesterday on the Battle of Crecy. As they say, this is not the first video the channel has put out on Crecy, but as the old one was "extremely outdated", they decided to redo the video and start a series on the Hundred Years War at the same time. As the channel doesn't put sources in the video description, I can't evaluate how well the research was conceptualized or carried out, but whatever research was done definitely wasn't enough to bring the video up to date.

In this post I will focus almost entirely on the battle, tackling just two errors made before the battle is discussed, because I'm running short of time this week and because the preamble is mostly adequate. It should, however, be noted that K&G should have spent more time discussing the Siege of Aiguillon and the Flemish attack on the French, both events that shaped the French response to Edward's attack. The channel mentions the Earl of Lancaster's success in 1345 (14:08-14:28), but neglects to inform the viewers that the vast majority of French field forces were besieging Aiguillon in the south, and had eaten up much of the French financial and ready manpower resources. Probably 15-20 000 paid men were employed in the siege, and in addition to heavy and unpopular taxation in excess of £55 000 English pounds (372 000 florins) were borrowed from the Pope alone¹ .

This meant that, when Philip began to expect an invasion of Normandy, rather than Brittany or Gascony, as he had prepared for, a whole new army had to be raised at extremely short notice and on a shoestring budget² . The Flemish army, although the French payed less attention to it, was an ever present threat in the rear of the French lines that the French had to consider in every move they made³ . Leaving out all of this context makes the French look far more incompetent than they were. There were sound reasons for suspecting that the English would attack elsewhere, and some strengthening of garrisons - as well as hiring thirty war galleys from Genoa - was undertaken in order to help defend the other areas.

Also, just a little housekeeping in case any Kings and Generals fans find this: I am not a professional historian, and while I have started university this year, none of the sources I use here have been obtained through my university. This is research anyone with an interest in the subject can do, and if you're going to call something a "documentary", you should put in the effort to make sure the details are actually up to spec. I'm also, as a show of good faith, not discussing issues such as the positioning of the archers where there is room for ambiguity and interpretation in the scholarship. Got it? Good.

4:50-5:20 - Salic Law was not, as the video suggests, used to justify choosing Philip Valois over Edward III for the English throne. This was an excuse that cropped up about 1413 and gained traction from there. In point of fact, the reason Edward III was denied the throne (the French not wanting him aside), was that Philip V had bent tradition through force of will and a large armed following and had established the precedent that daughters no longer inherited their father's lands and position. From here, the French argued that this could not be transmitted, rather than calling on an ancient and outdated law that was irrelevant to them at that point in time⁴ .

15:40-15:50 - The claim is made here that, despite Edward III accepting the surrender of Caen, the English "raped, plundered, torched and killed without quarter". Firstly, yes, the sack of Caen was horrific for the inhabitants, as was any sack of a city, but the city was stormed and sacked, not sacked after surrendering. The townspeople of Caen fought a bitter battle with the English in the streets, setting up barricades, dropping rocks and logs on the English from upper stories of the houses and just generally doing their utmost to defend themselves. Part of the garrison surrendered, when it was cut off and in danger of all being killed, but there were still three hundred men in the castle, which wasn't taken, and both the garrison and the surviving population soon slaughtered the 1500 man strong garrison left behind to hold the important town^ 5.

17:00-17:30 - A couple of issues here. In the first place, the video presents the scenario as though Edward suddenly found the French close by him and hurriedly turned to fight the French. If that was the case, as Clifford J. Rogers puts it, why did he move so slowly in the days before the battle⁶ ? As it happens, I am an advocate of the notion that Edward III was surprised on the march, following the essence of Michael Livingston and Kelly DeVries' recent challenge to the traditional battlefield and course of events^7, but this is a minority view. A.H. Burne, Livingstone and Witzel, Rogers, Andrew Ayton and Richard Barber all argue that the English deliberately chose to fight at Crecy rather than continue north to Calais or Flanders⁸ . I'm not sure whether the channel had heard of the new theory - their work doesn't otherwise show evidence of it - or if they misinterpreted their sources, but regardless some acknowledgement needs to be made that Edward scrambling to find a good defensive position is a minority view.

Secondly, as touched on above, the site of Crecy has been recently challenged. Michael Livingston and Kelly DeVries, using the primary sources and looking at the movements of the English, have suggested that the actual battle took place just above Domvast, where the land rises steeply to a ridge and the names of a number of fields in Napoleonic maps appear to show evidence for the battle⁹ . Both the idea that the English had not arrived at the town of Crecy by the evening of the 25th of August and the specific location chosen by the authors have been criticised¹⁰ , but the basic idea holds water and needs to at least be acknowledged in any video on the topic.

Thirdly, the old idea that the English lined up along the whole length of the ridge between Crecy and Wadicourt has not been current for some time. From Sumption on, the early sources referring to the use of wagons in the rear of the English have been accepted¹¹ , and the view has increasingly become that one or two "battles" of men-at-arms were deployed in the center of the wagenburg, with archers on the wing, and a much narrower formation overall¹² .

Finally, the video has the French approaching from Fontaine-sur-Maye. This was the old opinion, and was held down to 2005 when Sir Philip Preston, who had examined the battlefield in detail, pointed out that "a tall, steep and almost sheer bank", with a drop of 2.5-5.5 meters, ran the entire length of the eastern side of the valley. It is so steep that horses would be unlikely to safely make their way down even when unburdened, let alone with a rider, and functionally makes it impossible for the French army to have approached from this direction¹³ . Instead, if the battle was fought in the traditional location, any French army coming from the direction of Fontaine-sur-Maye must have navigated the narrow gap between the bank and the marshy River Maye, then running higher than it does today, or else cross the river from the south¹⁴ . This would have funneled the French into a comparatively small area and prevented them from easily bringing their full numbers to bear.

17:31-17:57 - A few minor points. Firstly, the knights and men-at-arms were the same kind of soldier, and the implication that the knights normally fought mounted while the men-at-arms fought dismounted is wrong. They were both heavily armoured cavalry who could fight on horseback or on foot, as the need arose. Secondly, they weren't wearing just "chain-mail". Although effigies, brasses, inventories and the testimony of Jean le Bel show that the English were almost exclusively equipped with mail prior to 1330, between 1330 and 1340 the English knights and men-at-arms completely modernised, wearing "a helm, bascinet, aventail, collar, pairs of plates, cuisses, lower leg, defences, vambraces, rerebraces and gauntlets, mail paunces and sleeves". Even sailors would be issued with pairs of plate and other plate defences for arms and legs (albeit sometimes of leather) in the late 1330s and the 1340s¹⁵ . Thirdly, there were 3250 "hobelars and mounted archers", not 3250 "light cavalry known as hobelars". Because both types of soldier served for the same pay, our truncated surviving accounts frequently lump them together and it's not possible to determine how many of each type there were¹⁶ .

18:00-18:20 - Here we have some typical teaboo mythmaking. While Edward I's Statute of Winchester in 1285 did list bows as mandatory equipment for those with £2-5 of income, this was just a slight modification of his father's 1230, 1242 and 1253 Assizes of Arms, which were in turn modifications of Henry II's 1181 Assize of Arms, which did not include archery equipment for the English subjects of the Angevin kings¹⁷ . I could hardly deny that Edward I's usage of the Commissions of Array did not have a role to play in the militarisation of English society during the late 13th and early 14th centuries, but archery practice wasn't mandatory until 1363 - nearly a decade after the last major battle in the Edwardian phase where archery played a significant role¹⁸ . Additionally, what evidence we do have in relation to the status of archers mustered via Commissions of Array, or at least recorded as being available for mustering, shows that they were almost uniformly in the £2-5 class, which was a relatively wealthy class of landowners and points to limited motivation for every man to own and practice with a bow¹⁹ .

Ayton does suggest that many of the arrayed archers might be substitutes, servants or poorer members of the community, and that may well have reduced the overall quality of the archers. Complaints of this nature were certainly not unheard of in the years between 1315 and 1346, and there's no reason to think that the massive army raised for Crecy was any different²⁰ , so the praising of the English archers as some kind of universal peasant ubermensch is misplaced. Also importantly, the artistic and archaeological evidence suggests that, even though English bows were consistently "long" by the time of Crecy, were much lighter than the bows of the 15th and 16th century, more in the realm of 90-120lbs which, again, should lower your expectations of performance²¹ .

19:27-19:35 - We don't know how many men the French had at Crecy, but we can be reasonably sure that they didn't have 12 000 knights. English sources do record that there were 12 000 "helmets" or "hommes d'armes", the Edward III also clarifies that only 8000 of these were "gentlemen, knights or esquires"²² . Who the other 4000 were is something of a mystery, with Rogers arguing they were mounted crossbowmen and the possibility remaining open that they were valet arme, whose equipment was on par or better than that of the English hobilars and who might be considered "armed men" by the early definition²³ . Similarly, few now accept the old figure of 6000 Genoese crossbowmen, as the French had never previously employed so many - even at the siege of Aiguillon, where just 1400 were in service - and there doesn't seem to be any avenue for so many to have reached France in time, especially given the tensions that had been present prior to 1346²⁴ .

20:15-20:24 The good old "Genoese crossbows were ruined by the rain" trick. Look, Ralph Payne-Gallwey soaked a crossbow with a waxed string for a day and a night without seeing any difference, and this has been known since 1903, so I don't feel the need to cite it. In any case, the best and most likely reasons for the poor showing of the Genoese at Crecy - their lack of armour and pavises aside, is the fact that they were being shot at and the mud made it hard to get sufficient purchase when spanning their crossbows²⁵ .

The remainder of the video is based off the foundation of errors listed above, and I don't think it's worth breaking the video any further. For the 1950s the video would be pretty good, but in light of more recent scholarship, the video falls very short of where it should be. Hopefully when the channel does the next videos they'll try and get up to date with the scholarship.

Footnotes

¹ Sumption, Jonathan. The Hundred Years War, Volume 1: Trial by Battle, (Faber and Faber Ltd.: London, 2010) pp. 854-861

² ibid., pp. 880-881, 889-890

³ ibid., 910-913. c.f. Rogers, Clifford J. War Cruel and Sharp (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2014) pp. 227-228

⁴ Taylor, Craig. "The Salic Law and the Valois Succession to the French Crown" French History, Vol 15 No. 4, pp.358-377; Sumption, pp. 180-184

⁵ Sumption, pp. 902-909, 945; Livingstone, Marilyn and Witzel, Morgen. The Road to Crecy: The English Invasion of France 1346, (Pearson Education Limited: Harlow, 2005) pp. 152-166

⁶ Rogers, pp. 264.

⁷ The Battle of Crecy: A Casebook, ed. Livingston, Michael and DeVries, Kelly,(Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2015). c.f. "The Location of the Battle of Crecy", by Michael Livingston, pp. 415-438. My personal view is that Edward III intended to fight at the traditional battle site but was interrupted on the way there. I have not sorted out my thoughts on the exact site yet, but it was either between the Forest of Crecy and the Bois de But, blocking the road from Abbeville, or between the Forest of Crecy and the Bois de Crocq, cutting off both the roads to Abbeville and St. Ricquier, depending on where the French were advancing from.

⁸ Livingstone and Witzel, pp. 262-265; Rogers, pp. 264-267; Andrew Ayton, "The Crecy Campaign", in The Battle of Crecy, 1346, ed. Andrew Ayton and Sir Philip Preston. (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2007) pp. 106-107); Barber, Richard. Edward III and the Triumph of England, (Penguin Global: ???, 2014) pp. 183; Burne, A.H. The Crecy War (Frontline Books: Barnsley, 2016 [1955]), pp. 160-161, 168-169

⁹ Livingston, "Location", pp. 415-438.

¹⁰ Ayton, Andrew. "Book Review: The Battle of Crécy. A Casebook by Michael Livingston and Kelly DeVries (eds)" War in History. 2017; 24(3) pp. 386-389.

¹¹ Sumption, pp. 934-935; Rogers, pp. 266-267

¹² Prestwich, Michael "The Battle of Crecy", in The Battle of Crecy, 1346, ed. Andrew Ayton and Sir Philip Preston. (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2007) pp. 145-146; Barber, pp. 188-200, 432-436; DeVries, Kelly, "The Tactics of Crecy", in The Battle of Crecy: A Casebook, ed. Livingston, Michael and DeVries, Kelly, (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2015) pp. 447-468

¹³ Sir Philip Preston, "The Traditional Battlefield of Crecy", in The Battle of Crecy, 1346, ed. Andrew Ayton and Sir Philip Preston. (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2007) pp. 122-130

¹⁴ ibid., pp. 130-132; Prestwich, pp. 142

¹⁵ The medieval inventories of the Tower armouries 1320–1410, unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, pp. 50-69; The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel, tr. Nigel Bryant, (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2011) pp. 78

¹⁶ Andrew Ayton, "The English Army at Crecy", in The Battle of Crecy, 1346, ed. Andrew Ayton and Sir Philip Preston. (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2007) pp. 177-178

¹⁷ Wadge, Richard. Who Were the Bowmen of Crecy? (The History Press: Stroud, 2012), Kindle Edition, Location 461-534

¹⁸ ibid., Location 203-236

¹⁹ Ayton, "English Army" pp. 218-224

²⁰ Wadge, Richard. Arrowstorm (The History Press: Stround, 2009) pp. 32

²¹ Wadge, Bowmen of Crecy, Chapter 9; Loades, Mike, The Longbow (Osprey Publishing: Oxford, 2013) pp. 16

²² Casebook, pp. 52, 57

²³ Rogers, pp. 265; Ordonnances des roys de France de la troisième race Quatrième volume, Contenant differents suppléments pour le règne du roy Jean et les ordonnances de Charles V données pendant les années 1364, 1365 et 1366 ed. Denis-François Secousse, 1734, pp. 67

²⁴ Bertrand Schnerb, "Vassals, Allies and Mercenaries: The French Army before and after 1346", in The Battle of Crecy, 1346, ed. Andrew Ayton and Sir Philip Preston. (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2007) pp. 265-272; Kelly DeVries and Niccolo Capponi, "The Genoese Crossbowmen at Crecy", The Battle of Crecy: A Casebook, ed. Livingston, Michael and DeVries, Kelly, (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2015) pp. 445. For the Genoese at Aiguillon, see Sumption, pp. 861, and cf. also pp. 950fn.49 for the low rates of casualties on the contracted ships and the implication that the crews could not have fought at Crecy. For relations between Genoa and France, see Livingstone and Titzel, pp. 76, but cf. their suggestion that "Genoese" was a generic term for "Italian".

²⁴ Casebook pp. 117, 171