ersed by a body
of the invaders under the Earl of Salisbury, to whom that duty had been
assigned.[2]

For nearly a week the army rested where it had landed, sending out
detachments to pillage. Barfleur was sacked, Cherbourg was attacked, and
the countryside was ravaged.

It was upon Tuesday, July the 18th, that the main body set out upon its
march to the south and east.

No considerable body could meet them for weeks, and all the French Feudal
Force was engaged near Paris or to south of it, and would take weeks to
concentrate northward. Edward was free to raid.

The attempt to construct an accurate time-table of the march which Edward
III. took through Normandy during his advance up the Seine as far as
Poissy, and thence northward in retreat towards Picardy and the sea, has
only recently been attempted.

Froissart, that vivid and picturesque writer who, both from his volume and
his style, was long taken as the sole general authority for this war, is
hopeless for the purpose of constructing a map or of setting down accurate
military details. He had but the vaguest idea of how the march of an army
should be organised, and he was profoundly indifferent to geography. He
added to or subtracted from numbers with childlike simplicity, and in the
honourable motive of pleasing his readers or patrons.

When, quite in the last few years, an attempt at accuracy in the plotting
out of this march was first made, it was based upon not Froissart's but
contemporary records, and of these by far the most important are Baker's
_Chronicle_ and the Accounts of the Kitchen, which happen to have been
saved.

Baker's _Chronicle_ was finally edited by Professor Maunde Thompson in
1889. The work is a standard work and generally regarded as the best
example of its kind. In making his notes upon that document, Professor
Maunde Thompson compared the halting-places given by Baker and other
authorities with those of the Accounts of the Kitchen, and established for
the first time something like an exact record. But many apparent
discrepancies still remained and several puzzling anomalies. I have
attempted in what follows to reconstruct the whole accurately, and I think
I have done so up to and including the passage of the Somme from Boismont,
a point not hitherto established.

First, I would point out that of all the few bases of evidence from which
we can work, that of the Clerk of the Kitchen's accounts is by far the
most valuable.

It sh