Crecy — Blog — Stuart Ellis-Gorman

Crécy is a battle I am both fascinated by and terrified of. I have read so much about this battle, and yet I still feel like I have only the most tenuous grasp on what happened that day in Ponthieu. It is one of the most famous and best recorded medieval battles, but the abundance of sources has produced such a confusing mess of contradiction and myth that untangling it could be the work of a lifetime. Many historians have offered their opinions on what happened, but there is still significant disagreement on elements of the chronology, the array of both armies, and even the battle’s location. Still, for all the hair pulling that thinking about Crécy causes me, I can’t help but be fascinated by it and the attempt to understand what happened at what might be the Hundred Years War’s most important battle (potentially rivaled only by Poitiers a decade later, really). If the English lost Crécy it is likely that they would not have been able to afford to keep the war going, but their dramatic victory, while it yielded only moderate success in its immediate aftermath, did much to sustain the war and encouraged Edward III to continue pursuing his claim to the French throne. With that fascination in mind, I decided to play a couple of games on Crécy that I had sitting on my shelf. Below are my general thoughts on both. As a note, I’m going to try and keep this brief because my options are really to skip over this topic lightly or to lose myself to it for months, and as much fun as the latter could be I simply haven’t the time.

Crécy: Battle of the Five Kings by Michael Livingston

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.