by
our considerable knowledge of the tactics and armament of the time. And
this, of course, is still truer of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth
centuries. Subsequent to the wide employment of printing, and throughout
the sixteenth century, the tendency shown by contemporaries to set down
detail steadily increases, but the whole of that century is transitional
in this matter.

The battles of the fifteenth, of the fourteenth, and earlier centuries,
differ entirely as to their evidence. We must gather it from manuscript
authorities, often rare, sometimes unique. Those authorities are, again,
not always contemporary. They never by any chance give us a map, and
rarely a definite topographical indication. They are summary, their
motive is ecclesiastical or civil rather than military, they present at
the best the picturesque side of an engagement, and at the worst they
preserve a bare mention of its date, or the mere fact that it took place.

Even in the elementary point of numbers, without some knowledge of which
it is so difficult to judge the nature of a field, we are commonly at a
loss. Where a smaller force upon the defensive has discomfited a larger
attacking force, the dramatic character of such a success (and Crecy was
one of them) has naturally led to an exaggeration of the disproportion.
The estimate of loss is very commonly magnified and untrustworthy, for
that is an element which, in the absence of exact record, both victors and
vanquished inevitably tend to enlarge. We are not as a rule given the
hours, sometimes, but not often, the state of the weather, and, especially
in the earlier cases, the local or tactical result is of so much greater
importance to the chronicler than the strategical plan, that we are left
with little more knowledge at first hand than the fact that A won and B
lost.

So true is this, that with regard to the majority of the great actions of
the Dark Ages no contemporary record even enables us to fix their site
within a few miles. That is true, for instance, of the decisive defeat of
Attila in 451, of the Mahommedans by Charles Martel in 732, and of the
final victory of Alfred over the Danes in 878.

Scholarship has established, with infinite pains and within small limits
of doubt, the second and the third. The first is still disputed. So it is
with the victory of Clovis over the Visigoths, and with any number of
minor actions. Even when we come to the later centuries, and to a more
co