Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc
while the main army crosses the Seine at Poissy. The retreat is effected from Poissy northward to the victorious field of Crécy, and later from Crécy, on the same line, to the siege and capture of Calais.
The time occupied from the day of landing to the day of the Battle of Crécy inclusive, is but forty-six days, of which not quite two-thirds are taken up by advance, and rather more than a third by the retreat. The English troops landed on Wednesday, July 12th, 1346. They crossed the Seine at Poissy upon August 14th. They fought at Crécy upon Saturday, August 26th.
The total distance traversed by the main body in these two limbs of the campaign is instructive as showing the leisure of the first part, its advance, and the precipitancy of the second part, its retreat.
The distance by road as the army marched from St. Vaast, where it landed, across the river at Poissy, and so to Crécy, was a total of 345 miles. Of this the first part, or advance, was 215, the second part, or retreat, 130. The first part occupied, counting the day of landing and the day of crossing at Poissy, not less than 34 days, while the latter portion or retreat of 130 miles, including the day of battle itself, took up not more than 12 days, or, excluding the battle, only 11. The average rate of the advance was not more than 6¼ miles a day, the average rate of the retreat very nearly double.
It must not be imagined, of course, that the advance took place in prompt and regular fashion. It was, as we shall see, irresolute for many days, and irregular throughout, while the retreat was a hurried one upon all but one day of which the troops were pressed to their uttermost. But the contrast is sufficient to show the difference between the frames of mind in which Edward III. took up the somewhat hazy plan of an “invasion,” which was really no more than a raid, and that in which he attempted to extricate himself from the consequences of his original vagueness of intent. In the first, he was as slow as he was uncertain; in the second, he was as precipitate as he was determined.
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In the last days of June, 1346, Edward III. had gathered a force, small indeed for the purpose which he seems to have had in mind, but large under the conditions of transport which he could command. It was probably just under 20,000 actual fighting men. At this point, however, as it is of material interest to the rest of the story, we must pause to consider what these units meant. When we say a little less (or it may have been a little more) than 20,000 fighting men, we mean that the “men-at-arms” (that is, fully equipped, mounted men, for the most part gentlemen), together with not 4000 Welsh and Border Infantry, and approximately 10,000 Archers, bring us near to that total.
But an army of the fourteenth century was accompanied by a number of servants, at least equal to its mounted armed gentry: men who saw to the equipment and service of the knights. No man at arms was fit to pass through a campaign without at least one aide, if only for armouring; and for all the doubtfulness of the records, we know that the Yeoman Archers were also served by men who carried a portion of their equipment, and who saw to their supply in action. It is impossible to make any computation at all accurate of the extra rations this organisation involved, nor of what proportion of these uncounted units could be used in the fighting. We are perhaps safe in saying that the total number who landed were not double the fighting men actually counted, and that Edward’s whole force certainly was much more than 20,000 but almost as certainly not 40,000 men. We must imagine, all told, perhaps 5000 horses to have been assembled with the force for transport over sea: others would be seized for transport on the march. It is remarkable that Edward carefully organised certain small auxiliary bodies, smiths, artificers, etc., and took with him five cannon.1
It was not until Tuesday, the 11th of July, that the very large fleet which the King had pressed for the service was able to sail from the Solent and Spithead. It crossed in the night with a northerly breeze, and appeared upon the following morning off St. Vaast.
St. Vaast lies in a little recess of the north-eastern coast of the Cotentin, protected from all winds blowing from the outer Channel, and only open to such seas as can be raised in the estuary of the Seine by a south-easterly breeze. It was therefore, seeing the direction of the wind under which they had sailed, upon a calm shore that this considerable expedition disembarked. We may presume, under such circumstances, that though Edward had announced his decision of sailing for southern France, the point of disembarkation had been carefully settled, and that a course had been laid for it.
A small force composed of local levies had been raised to resist the landing. It was able to effect nothing, and was easily dispersed by a body of the invaders under the Earl of Salisbury, to whom that duty had been assigned.2
For nearly a week the army rested where it had landed, sending out detachments to pillage. Barfleur was sacked, Cherbourg was attacked, and the countryside was ravaged.
It was upon Tuesday, July the 18th, that the main body set out upon its march to the south and east.
No considerable body could meet them for weeks, and all the French Feudal Force was engaged near Paris or to south of it, and would take weeks to concentrate northward. Edward was free to raid.
The attempt to construct an accurate time-table of the march which Edward III. took through Normandy during his advance up the Seine as far as Poissy, and thence northward in retreat towards Picardy and the sea, has only recently been attempted.
Froissart, that vivid and picturesque writer who, both from his volume and his style, was long taken as the sole general authority for this war, is hopeless for the purpose of constructing a map or of setting down accurate military details. He had but the vaguest idea of how the march of an army should be organised, and he was profoundly indifferent to geography. He added to or subtracted from numbers with childlike simplicity, and in the honourable motive of pleasing his readers or patrons.
When, quite in the last few years, an attempt at accuracy in the plotting out of this march was first made, it was based upon not Froissart’s but contemporary records, and of these by far the most important are Baker’s Chronicle and the Accounts of the Kitchen, which happen to have been saved.
Baker’s Chronicle was finally edited by Professor Maunde Thompson in 1889. The work is a standard work and generally regarded as the best example of its kind. In making his notes upon that document, Professor Maunde Thompson compared the halting-places given by Baker and other authorities with those of the Accounts of the Kitchen, and established for the first time something like an exact record. But many apparent discrepancies still remained and several puzzling anomalies. I have attempted in what follows to reconstruct the whole accurately, and I think I have done so up to and including the passage of the Somme from Boismont, a point not hitherto established.
First, I would point out that of all the few bases of evidence from which we can work, that of the Clerk of the Kitchen’s accounts is by far the most valuable.
It should be a canon in all historical work that the unconscious witness is the most trustworthy.
I mean by “unconscious” evidence the evidence afforded by one who is not interested in the type of action which one is attempting to establish. Suppose, for instance, you wanted to know on exactly what day a Prime Minister of England left London for Paris upon some important mission. His biographer who sets out to write an interesting political life and to insist upon certain motives in him, will say it is the 20th of June, because Lady So-and-So mentions it in her diary, and because he finds a letter written by the Prime Minister in Paris on the 21st. Perhaps it is more important to the picturesqueness of the detail that the journey should be a hurried one, and without knowing it the biographer is biased in that direction. There may be twenty documents from the pens of people concerned with affairs of State which would lead us to infer that he left London on the 20th, and perhaps only five that would lead us to infer that he left on an earlier day, and, weighing the position and responsibility of the witnesses, the biographer will decide for the twenty.
But if we come across a postcard written from Calais by the Prime Minister’s valet to a fellow servant at home asking for the Prime Minister’s overcoat to be sent on, and if he mentions the