Battle of Crécy

The Battle of Crécy was arguably the most important battle of the Hundred Years war.

Of all the battles of the Hundred Years War, both Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) are particularly famed for their strategic importance. But while Shakespeare wrote his most patriotic work about Henry V, culminating in the battle of Agincourt, he wrote nothing comparable about Edward III and Crécy. Consequently, Henry V and Agincourt have acquired a unique cultural significance: iconic symbols of an English victory won against the odds. Therefore the visitor coming to Crécy-en-Ponthieu is entitled to ask: what is the significance of this place? If Shakespeare had chosen to write about Edward III, would the English language ring with famous lines associated with Edward on the field of Crécy?

To answer this question it is necessary to know something about England in the fourteenth century. Edward III inherited a kingdom beset by two main zones of conflict: Aquitaine (South West France) and Scotland. It was therefore a turning point when he realised, in 1332, that the massed use of longbows could destroy a much larger army on the battlefield. Edward decided to resolve his political dilemmas through the use of thousands of longbowmen equipped with huge numbers of arrows.

Edward III’s purposeful development of massed longbows in the years between 1332 and 1346 was a profoundly important military revolution. Previously battles had been fought by infantry and groups of heavily-armoured knights fighting hand-to-hand. The main strategic advantages had been those of outnumbering the enemy, cutting off their supply lines, or having a better-equipped army. Edward realised that a far greater strategic advantage lay in killing the enemy before the hand-to-hand fighting began. A force of longbowmen could tackle a much larger enemy army, for the archers could each kill several men without danger of being hurt themselves. When Edward III put his new thinking to the test against the Scots at Halidon Hill in 1333, he had fewer men than the Scots; nevertheless, his archers massacred the Scottish army.

There was a third advantage to Edward’s archer-dominated armies. Longbowmen were much cheaper to employ and equip than aristocratic knights. Therefore it was possible for him to take an army of longbowmen deep into France itself, and show the French people how King Philip was unable to protect them.

The key to all of this was preparation. Edward needed experienced longbowmen. He also needed enough bows and arrows. He encouraged the practice of archery – and with it the continual manufacture of new equipment in peacetime as well as war. When in 1341 he wanted to lead an expedition to Brittany, he simply issued an order for 130,000 sheaves of arrows to be gathered – a total of 2,600,000 arrows. No king of France could ever have hoped to gather so many at short notice.

In July 1346 Edward landed at St Vaast-la-Hogue with about twelve thousand men and proceeded to fight his way across Normandy. He knew that a French army, when it gathered, was bound to outnumber him; but he knew that if he could force the French men-at-arms to charge uphill within range of his carefully arranged archers, he would be able to destroy them with the minimum of actual hand-to-hand fighting.

Edward’s victory over the French at Crécy on 26 August 1346 astounded all of Christendom. It was doubly astonishing, for it was not just unexpected, it had obviously been carefully planned. Edward had achieved a military superiority over all his enemies. In later campaigns in France and Scotland in the 1350s he sought to repeat his success; he was never defeated.

He came to be regarded as the greatest king that England had ever had. When his grandson, Henry IV, took the throne of England in 1399, the new king expressly stated that he wished to lead an army into France, in emulation of Edward III. Henry IV’s second son, Thomas, chose to land his army in 1412 at St Vaast-la-Hogue, where Edward himself had landed in 1346. And Henry’s eldest son, Henry V, sought to re-enact the battle of Crécy in 1415. He knew that if he won, then this would demonstrate that God wished him too to be king of both England and France – and no one then would be in a position to question his claim to either title.

Henry V followed Edward III’s 1346 campaign closely. His army was mostly composed of archers and he sought to entice a French army to attack him on a march through Northern France. He even tried to follow a similar route, planning to cross the Somme at Blanchetaque, as Edward III had done. However, the ambitious start to his campaign – beginning with a siege rather than ending with one (as Edward III had done at Calais) – almost stifled his campaign. And at Blanchetaque the French showed they had learned from their past mistakes; they blocked his way.

In the end, the very predictability of following in Edward III’s footsteps meant that Henry V had to fight his own battle. In the tense moments of fighting, no rule book could do; only the abilities, equipment and spirit of the fighting men mattered. But the principles upon which Agincourt was fought and won on 25 October 1415 were those established by Edward III. Archers were massed on the flanks, and a French army principally composed of heavily armoured knights and men-at-arms was slowed by the terrain and shot to pieces.

Contemporary English chroniclers welcomed Agincourt as a blessing from God. Their adulation did not lessen with Henry V’s early death in 1422, and his iconic military status began to rival that of Edward III. Agincourt was not only more recent than Crécy, it was associated in England with God’s blessing – and in an increasingly religious age, that mattered. By the time Shakespeare took up his pen, under the Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, Agincourt had come to be regarded as the greatest of all English victories. And Shakespeare immortalised it and its architect, despite knowing very little of the battle or the real Henry V.

In comparing the two battles, therefore, it is Edward III who deserves the credit for first having the vision of taking an army of longbowmen into France and organising them to shoot for victory. His development of projectile warfare – in which massed longbows prefigured the use of massed gunfire – set the pattern for battles up until the nineteenth century. Henry V made no comparable innovation but nevertheless deserves the credit for having had the vision and courage to re-enact Edward III’s great victory. And Shakespeare deserves some credit too – for immortalising Henry V and Agincourt in such a way that the more admirable qualities of those who fought such battles are not forgotten amid the brutality, fear and personal tragedies of the Hundred Years War.

Dr. Ian Mortimer