f Arc's campaign and of the
subsequent loss of Normandy by the Plantagenets, everyone outside the
small governing class of either country had come to think of the business
as a national one upon either side. But with Crecy it was not so, and we
must approach the military problems of Crecy with the political provision
in mind that the whole affair of that battle and of its immediate
successors was a feudal occupation--one had almost said pastime--engaged
within the circle of that widespread French-speaking nobility, common to
and intermarried between Gaul and Britain, which, for three hundred years,
ruled society from the Grampians to the Mediterranean.

[Illustration]

II

THE CAMPAIGN OF CRECY

The Campaign of Crecy took place within a district of France contained by
an east and west base 200 miles in length and an eastern border north and
south 160 miles in length, and sketched in the map opposite.

The rectangular parallelogram so formed is nearly equally divided between
land and sea, the south-eastern half being a portion of Northern France,
and the north-western half the English Channel. The land half is thus
roughly triangular, having Paris at its extreme south-eastern corner,
Calais at its extreme north-eastern, the neighbourhood of Avranches with
St Malo Bay at its south-western corner. It includes part of the provinces
of Normandy, the Ile de France, Picardy and Artois, and part, or all, of
the modern departments of the Manche, Orne, Calvados, Eure, Seine-et-Oise,
Seine, Seine-Inferieure, Oise, Somme, and Pas-de-Calais.

It will be seen that this territory is nearly evenly divided by the River
Seine, and the campaign of Crecy is also divided by that river in the
sense that the English advance took place wholly to the west of it, and
the English retreat wholly to the east of it.

The campaign, as a whole, resolves itself (up to and including the Battle
of Crecy, which is the subject of this book, and excluding the
continuation of the march after Crecy, and the capture of Calais) into an
advance from the Channel coast to Paris, and a retreat from Paris to the
Channel again, the two portions being divided by the crossing of the Seine
at Poissy. The advance leaves the coast at the summit of that projection
of Normandy called the Cotentin, and proceeds a little south of east
towards Paris, the walls of which are reached by its outermost
skirmishers, while the main army crosses the Seine at Poissy. T