ning the English
soldiers going at large over the fields found and put to the sword lost
fragments of militia, came, as they tracked the flight, upon dead and
wounded lords, and cut off bewildered remnants, making they knew not
whither over the land.

The total French losses will never be known. The legend of disaster calls
them now ten, now twenty thousand. Of the mounted and armoured men of rank
the heralds made a precise account, and returned a list to King Edward of
1542 fallen and dead upon the front of the battle and in the first fields
of the retreat. To these due sepulchre was given. The mass of the fallen
were buried in common trenches, marks of which may be seen to this day;
and it is said that fires were lit to rid the ground of the dead.

The English loss was wholly insignificant. Its exact amount, like that of
its enemy, we cannot tell, because a list of but two knights, one squire,
and forty of the rest, not counting a few Welsh, is all that we are
given. But, even if this total (which hardly corresponds to the fierce
melee at the beginning of the action on the right) be below the true
number, we may be certain that that number was very small indeed. The line
was never pierced; the English fight was wholly defensive, and a defensive
maintained at range against troops which disposed, after the first rout of
the Genoese, of no missiles upon their side.

Upon the Monday morning, the 28th of August, the host set forth upon its
northern march, quite free now from any danger of pursuit. By the first
days of September it had sat down before Calais. All winter and all the
succeeding summer the blockade continued, and upon the 4th of August 1347,
nearly a year after Crecy, the town was taken and the lasting fruit of
that engagement was garnered. Calais remained an English bastion upon the
Continent for more than two hundred years.

Footnotes:

[1] We have this upon the evidence of a contemporary, Villani. It has, of
course, been denied by our modern academic authorities, but without
evidence.

[2] The theatrical character which attaches to warfare through the
fourteenth century appears at this very outset of the campaign. Edward
knighted the Black Prince and sundry other commanders on a hill
overlooking the fleet and the harbour just before the main body
disembarked. The Black Prince had already been knighted, and the ceremony
was mere parade.

[3] He did _not_ go to Rouen, or near it, as the map in M