If you were to ask me to explain the Battle of Crécy to you, I would most likely make some kind of sucking noise, stare into the middle distance, and say something like “Oh boy, where do I even start?” Despite, or possibly because of, being one of the most famous battles of the Middle Ages, the story of Crécy is hopelessly difficult to unpack. The sources describing the battle are so extensive that Michael Livingston and Kelly DeVries published an entire book, the invaluable Crécy Sourcebook, that just contained ones from the roughly fifty years after the battle. There is so much information around Crécy and so much of it contradictory that putting together a coherent narrative is a challenge for even the greatest of scholars. That also means that it is a battle ripe for reinterpretation. Enter Michael Livingston, of the aforementioned sourcebook, and his new history of the battle, Crécy: Battle of the Five Kings. This is a new popular history of the battle wherein Livingston advances some probably quite contentious views on the history of Crécy.
The first half to two-thirds of Crécy is essentially a history of “how we got here”. It covers, in brief, the origins of the Hundred Years War, stretching back all the way to Hastings in 1066 and navigating a variety of thorny political and inheritance issues that brought everything to a head in 1337. While not exactly breaking new ground, this is a very approachable account of what was at stake in the Hundred Years War and why exactly it can be such a confusing mess when you try and explain it. There are a lot of moving parts and Livingston does a good job at untangling them in a manner that should be entertaining to most readers.
Once the background is out of the way Livingston moves on to the events of 1346 - most importantly the campaign leading up to Crécy and the battle itself. His account of the campaign, of Edward III’s landing near what is now Utah Beach, his capture of Caen, and his race to cross the Seine and Somme rivers are well written and easy to follow. There are certainly nits to pick, particularly around his description of the battle at Blanchetaque ford, but these are fairly minor areas of scholarly dispute.
In terms of how to analyze Livingston’s account of the battle itself, I really need to separate my overall feelings about how the book handles the subject matter from Livingston’s dramatic claim that underpins a lot of the book. Let’s start with the big claim first, and then circle back to how I feel about the latter part of the book’s structure as a whole.
Livingston’s bold claim is that the traditional site of the Battle of Crécy is incorrect and that the battle was actually fought some distance to the south, more in the woods rather than near the village of Crécy. I will come right out and say that I’m generally skeptical of the accurate locating of medieval battles, especially without ample archaeological evidence. The archaeological evidence for the traditional battle site is thin, although Livingston does seem to discount without mention evidence mentioned in A.H. Burne’s venerable work on the subject, so I am amenable to it being potentially incorrect. That said, convincing me of an alternative site would require no small feat. While I am sympathetic to Livingston’s objections to the traditional site, both those objections and his arguments for the new site rely far too much on arguments of “what would make the most sense” and not hard evidence. I also find that Livingston relies too much on how many sources support points he is trying to make and not the quality of those sources - traditionally one would rank the accounts of someone like Geoffrey le Baker, who was at the battle, far above chronicles written decades later in far flung parts of Europe by people who had never even been to northern France. That’s not to say that I disagree with Livingston on the idea that these sources have value, all sources have value, but rather that I’m not entirely convinced by his use of them here. I cannot dispute that he knows the source material, I’m just not in agreement with how he has applied it.
Overall, I wasn’t wowed by Livingston’s account of the battle. Avant-garde reinterpretation of the battle site, and the restructuring of the battle narrative that follows, aside, I just found it hard to follow. He gets lost in the weeds at busting myths, some of which are so old I’m surprised anyone still believes them, and pushing forward his alternative interpretations that he doesn’t ever lay out a clear foundation of how exactly the battle played out. This account would have benefited enormously from a high level overview of just the sequence of events as Livingston sees them before digging into the weeds. His desire to sort of spring his alternative theories on the readers might make for punchy writing but it also makes it hard to follow.
In terms of other nits I have to pick with Livingston’s account, I think he vastly overestimates the power of the English longbow. Part of his dismissal of the traditional battle site is based on the notion of the French having to advance too close to the English, but this requires a vast overestimation of the effective range of the longbow. The attention he pays to the fact that the Black Prince probably advanced from his original position to attack the disordered French is excellent, if a bit undermined by a lack of clarity on where he is advancing much needed changes to modern scholarship and where he is contradicting early modern myths, but it goes a little far in terms of how critical he is of the Black Prince’s decision. It somewhat implies that he thinks the archers would have defeated the French on their own, which does not line up with what we know of the longbow’s power nor the supply of arrows available to them. The Black Prince may not have made the optimal strategic move, but a commander advancing to attack their enemy at their most disordered only to be repulsed in turn when the opponent commits their reserves is hardly a new event in the annals of military history. Livingston’s somewhat exaggerated writing might make for exciting reading, but I don’t love it for historical interpretation.
I think Livingston and I probably subscribe to very different philosophies of how to study medieval military history. In Chapter 9, Livingston outlines his “Four Maxims of Battle” that he uses to guide much of his reconstruction of the events at Crécy. Two of these in particular I found it very hard to agree with. The first was “A battle is its ground.” While in theory I agree with the notion that the physical ground a battle was fought on plays a very important role in determine its key events, my point of disagreement stems from the practicality of locating medieval battlegrounds. Crécy is far from unique in having a contentious traditional location, very few medieval battles have a generally agreed upon site, and that means I am generally skeptical of a history that relies extensively upon the physical geography of the battleground to explain the events. That does not mean that I believe we should assume all battles took place in a blank, featureless field. Instead, I think we should let the written narratives of the battle ground guide our reconstruction more than we should rely upon the conditions of our chosen ground where we believe the battle occurred.
My greater disagreement, though, is with his point “No man is a fool.” Again, I agree in principle that medieval people were no more foolish than we are now and largely behaved in manners they considered rational. That said, I found the application of this principle to skew very close to A.H. Burne’s controversial idea of Inherent Military Probability - where Burne would use his own judgement as a modern British officer to fill in the gaps in the sources with what he would have done in that situation. The thing is, no man may be a fool, but also humans are fallible. War is confusing, complicated, and chaotic. Mistakes happen all the time. Livingston seems to assume a degree of detached objectivity in medieval commanders that I cannot see aligning with the behavior of actual humans. It can both be true that Philip VI was an overall competent military commander and that he made a mistake on one day in August 1346. I think in deciding to push against ancient myths about Crécy Livingston overcorrects and presents a battle narrative that seems to be executed by automatons.
I don’t want to make it sound like this is a bad book, but it is a bit of an odd duck. Much of the book is a very engaging introductory history of the battle, but the radical reinterpretation Livingston proposes makes the book’s ending more like a contentious piece for academic debate rather than something aimed at the average layperson. I think this is a book that someone who is already familiar with the Crécy source material will get a lot more out of than someone for whom this is their first book on the subject. If you don’t already know who all of Geoffrey le Baker, Jean le Bel, and Froissart are, well the book isn’t going to do much to teach that to you and it will probably be important to your ability to appreciate its arguments. This is absolutely a valuable addition to the corpus of material on the Battle of Crécy, even if it didn’t totally convince me, but at the same time I’d be reluctant to recommend it to people as a first book on the subject. For my money, Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston’s The Battle of Crécy, 1346 remains the best book on the battle in no small part because of Ayton’s masterful introduction of the key sources for the battle, including their many strengths and weaknesses. While Ayton and Preston’s book is aimed squarely at an academic audience, and thus not as friendly for a general audience, I think it will do far more to upend people’s understanding of the battle than Livingston’s even if its overall claims are more conservative. Livingston’s book does an admirable job in parts by breaking down the work of a military historian and showing part of the sausage making process, as it were, but I think he could have gone a lot further by introducing the readers to more of his sources. I’m glad I read Livingston’s book, it was certainly thought provoking if not always entirely convincing, but despite its approachable writing I don’t think I will be recommending it to non-specialists any time soon.
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