Crecy: Battle Of The Five Kings, by Michael Livingston

Revisionist history sometimes gets a bad name, because some people like revising what the author here calls the vulgato, the myth and the received wisdom of a given story for the sake of mere originality just to say something different than what came before. The author, though, following up on a work that he did with a historian I happen to know personally from my time at Norwich (Kelly Devries) that sought to reconstruct the best sources from close to the time of the Battle of Crecy, has written the sort of revisionist history that deserves a better name because it seeks to take sources seriously. This might seem to be an obvious thing, but it is not. One of the revelations for me of this particular book is the way it talks about the sources it uses, including Czech sources that seem connected to the politics about the Bohemian succession (blind King John of Luxembourg and his son, the King of the Romans of the Holy Roman Empire were two of the five kings involved in the battle, as well as the French king, the English King Edward III, and the King of Majorca), a poem written by an eyewitness, and a list of camping places by someone whose bill of larder for cooking for the king’s party places the army in key locations. The fact that such good sources as we have have been ignored is a great shame, given their interest and quality.

This book is a bit more than 250 pages and it is divided into three parts and thirteen chapters. The book begins with a foreword, preface, list of illustrations, and a list of maps. This is followed by an introduction which focuses on the Crecy dead and the problems in identifying the dead French. After this the first part of the book discusses the context of French and English history before 1346 (I), looking at the roots of war in the status of the King of England as a French vassal (1), Isabella’s relationship with her husband and son as the source of the claim on the French throne (2), the role of wine and wool in the march to war (3), and the beginning stages of the Hundred Years’ War (4). The second part of the book then discusses the Crecy campaign (II), with chapters on the beginning of the campaign (5), the sack of Caen (6), the attempt of Edward III to march on Paris (7), and the battle of Blachetaque (8). The third part of the battle shows the author’s revisionist aims (III), with a chapter on reconstructing battles (9), the approach of the armies to the battle (10), the struggle to locate the battlefield (11), and the first (12) and second (13) day of the battle. The Epilogue looks at the lack of decisiveness of the battle, after which the book ends with an appendix on the location of the battle, suggested reading and acknowledgements, endnotes, and an index.

What are we to make of Crecy? As far as a battle is concerned, it was a decisive battle, in that the outnumbered English slaughtered the French and forced them to retreat after battle over two days. But what was the larger result of the battle? The English ended up taking Calais–that is not included in this particular book–but otherwise the war itself did not resolve anything regarding Edward III’s claim of the French throne. The fact that the war involved took more than 110 years and ended up with an English comprehensive defeat that left them with no territory in France aside from Calais (which was lost a century or so later) makes the focus of books on the Hundred Years’ War on the battles that the English won like Crecy, Agincourt (review forthcoming), and Poitiers makes for a strange imbalance, in that English-reading audiences receive a large amount of books written about successful battles in a generally unsuccessful war, which perhaps gives the wrong idea about the glorious nature of such battles and the worth of winning battles in losing wars. Perhaps the cost of the war would have been less traumatic had the victories not been so stunning that it blinded people to the overall nature of the combat readiness of England and France. But that is a subject for another book, I think.