Who won the Battle of Crécy?
England under Edward III won a decisive victory at Crécy on 26 August 1346, when an outnumbered English army destroyed the finest chivalry in Europe in one of the opening battles of the Hundred Years' War. Some 1,500 French knights and lords died, against English losses of a few hundred at most, and the battle announced that massed archers could shatter the mounted knight who had ruled the battlefield for centuries.1
On 26 August 1346, near the village of Crécy in northern France, an outnumbered English army under Edward III destroyed the finest chivalry in Europe. It was one of the opening battles of the Hundred Years' War, and it announced that massed archers could shatter the mounted knight who had ruled the battlefield for centuries.2
The great raid
Edward III of England had already tried to invade France with German and Breton allies, without success. In July 1346 he sailed instead with an army made up entirely of his own subjects. Britannica estimates the fleet at 1,000 ships or more, carrying some 4,000 men-at-arms and 10,000 archers; Charles Oman, working from the surviving muster figures, adds several thousand Welsh foot. Even the soldiers did not know where they were going until the king, out of sight of land, ordered the fleet to steer for the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy.3
What followed was less a campaign of conquest than a great armed raid. The English marched through Normandy burning and plundering, stormed the rich, unwalled town of Caen on 26 July, and pushed up the Seine until they were burning villages within sight of Paris. Philip gathered what was probably the largest army in Europe, with some 12,000 mounted men-at-arms, and the French broke the Seine bridges to trap the invaders. Edward repaired the bridge at Poissy, crossed, and turned north toward Flanders with the French close behind.4
Trapped on the Somme
The next obstacle was the Somme. Every bridge was broken or held, and Edward's marshals failed at four crossings in turn, while Philip's army came up to Amiens. The English were boxed in between the river, the sea and the enemy. Then, the chroniclers say, a local man showed them a tidal ford below Abbeville, Blanchetaque, passable for a few hours at low water. On 24 August the English knights rode into the river while the archers shot over their heads, beat off the Picard troops holding the far bank, and got across before the tide came in and the French could follow.5
Two days later Edward reached Crécy-en-Ponthieu, a county that had come to his family as his grandmother's dowry, and decided to stand. "I am on the right heritage of the queen my mother," Froissart has him say; "I will challenge it of mine adversary Philip of Valois." He told his marshals to choose ground to his advantage, and the army spent the night in the fields.6
The English line
On the morning of Saturday 26 August, after mass, Edward sent the horses and baggage into a park of wagons behind the army and drew up his men on foot in three divisions, or battles. The first, nominally under his sixteen-year-old son Edward, the Black Prince, with the earls of Warwick and Oxford to guide him, held the right; the earls of Northampton and Arundel had the second on the left; the king kept the third in reserve and watched from a windmill on the high ground. In each division the dismounted men-at-arms stood in the center and the archers on the flanks. According to the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker, the archers also dug small pits in front of them to trip charging horses.7 › Longbow vs Crossbow
The king rode along the ranks with a white rod in his hand, telling every man to look to his right and his honor. Then he ordered them to eat and drink, and the soldiers lay down on the grass with their helmets and bows beside them to stay fresh until the enemy came.8
The French arrive in disorder
Philip's army left Abbeville that morning. His scouts advised him to halt for the night and attack the next day, and Philip agreed, but his orders never took hold: the men in front stopped while those behind kept pushing on, and the vanguard was pressed forward until it was in sight of the English. Philip found his army too close to the enemy to pull back, and, as Froissart says, there was no man, even one who was there, who could describe "the evil order that was among the French party."9
The battle began late, about four in the afternoon. A sudden thunderstorm drenched both armies, and then the evening sun came out, shining into the eyes of the French. Philip sent his Genoese crossbowmen forward first. Froissart gives 15,000, which Oman calls a ridiculous overstatement; he puts them at no fewer than 6,000. They had marched some six leagues that day and complained that they were in no state to fight.10
Arrows like snow
The Genoese advanced with shouts and opened fire, but their bolts fell short. Then, in Froissart's words, the English archers "stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so wholly and so thick, that it seemed snow." The crossbowmen broke; some threw away their weapons and cut their strings. The longbow could shoot about three times as fast as the crossbow, and the Genoese lost heavily before the real fighting had begun.11
Behind them the French men-at-arms under the Count of Alençon took the retreat for cowardice. "Slay these rascals," Philip is reported to have cried, and the knights rode straight into their own infantry, cutting them down. Horses and men piled up in a struggling mass at the foot of the slope while the arrows kept falling on them, and many who went down could not get up again in the press.12
Did the English also have guns at Crécy? Some versions of Froissart and the French royal chronicles say a few small cannon were fired to frighten the Genoese. Oman thought it unlikely that cannon had been dragged across France with the army, and no English chronicler mentions them, so the question remains open.13
Charge after charge
What followed was not one attack but a long series of them. As each new body of French horsemen reached the front, it charged the English men-at-arms and was shot down from the flanks by the archers; by the English count, Oman notes, there were 15 or 16 of them. Some got through to fight hand to hand with the Prince's division, which came under such pressure that his knights sent to the king for help.14
Edward asked whether his son was dead, wounded or unhorsed. Told he was not, but hard pressed, he answered that they should send no more to him "as long as my son is alive," and "suffer him this day to win his spurs." The Prince's division held, helped by Northampton and Arundel coming up on its flank. Oman notes that the king did quietly send thirty knights under the Bishop of Durham.15
Among the attackers was the blind King John of Bohemia, Philip's ally. He asked his knights to lead him far enough forward that he might strike one blow, and they tied their horses' reins to his and rode into the English line. The next day they were found dead around him, their horses still bound together. His son Charles left the field and lived to become Holy Roman Emperor.16
The attacks went on after dark, by some accounts until midnight. Philip had a horse killed under him and was wounded by an arrow; with only a handful of men left near him, John of Hainault took his bridle and led him away. At the castle of La Broye, Froissart says, the king called up to the gate: "Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune of France," though the better manuscripts make it "the unfortunate king of France."17
Counting the dead
The English did not leave their lines that night. Next morning, in thick fog, a force under the earls of Northampton and Suffolk swept the ground ahead and fell on French town militias and other troops still marching to join an army that no longer existed, killing many more. The heralds then went over the field and counted 1,542 knights and lords dead, among them the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Lorraine and the counts of Alençon, Flanders and Blois. No one counted the common soldiers; Froissart's report of more than 30,000 is clearly exaggerated, and Britannica gives some 14,000 French dead out of 35,000.18
The English losses were astonishingly light. Oman, following contemporary letters, puts them at two knights, a squire and some forty men-at-arms and archers, plus a few dozen Welsh who ran out between charges to plunder; Britannica gives about 200. Even allowing for exaggeration, the gap was enormous.19 › Battle of Poitiers, 1356
Calais and beyond
Edward did not march on Paris. He went north and laid siege to Calais, which held out for almost a year before hunger forced it to surrender in 1347. Six of its burghers offered themselves as hostages to save the town, an episode later immortalized by Auguste Rodin; their lives were spared. Calais remained English until 1558, a gateway to France for more than two centuries.20
A revolution in warfare
Crécy shocked Europe because a small, disciplined army fighting on foot had overwhelmed the most famous cavalry of the age, against the received wisdom that the larger force of horsemen would win. Oman argued that the real secret was the combination: dismounted men-at-arms holding the line while archers shot down the attackers from the flanks. The French learned to fear the English arrow and to send their own horses to the rear, but not yet how to beat the system.21
The same combination broke French armies again at Poitiers in 1356 and Agincourt in 1415. Crécy did not end knighthood overnight, but it announced that courage and noble blood were no longer enough against training, ground and a wall of arrows.22 › Battle of Agincourt, 1415
Where exactly was it fought?
Even the site of the battle is debated. The traditional location north of Crécy, toward Wadicourt, was fixed largely by the French mapmaker Cassini in 1757, who relied heavily on an old stone windmill on a hill. In a 2015 casebook on the battle, Michael Livingston argued that this site does not fit the sources and proposed one south of the town, beside the forest of Crécy, and Kelly DeVries suggested that such a site would explain why the French horsemen could not see what was happening to the Genoese in front of them. The question is still open.23 › Battle of Aljubarrota, 1385
