d for sluggishness. He was not
so much sluggish as apparently without plan. He did not know quite what
he was going to do next. His general intention seems to have been to make
sooner or later for his allies in Flanders, and meanwhile to take rich
towns and loot them, and to bring pressure upon the King of France by
ravaging distant and populous territories which the French army could not
rapidly reach. He therefore often makes a good and steady marching in this
advance, but he also lingers uselessly at towns, and intercalates very
short marches between the long ones. Thus he deliberately struck inland to
St Lo on his way to Caen, because St Lo was a fine fat booty, instead of
making by the short road which runs from Carentan through Bayeux. The
whole character of the advance clearly betrays the point I have already
made, that this early part of the Hundred Years' War was essentially a
series of raids.

At this stage it is well to point out to the reader two difficulties which
have confused historians. The first is the fact that the Clerk of the
Kitchen often takes a shot at a French name which he has either heard
inaccurately or which he attempts to spell phonetically, so that we have
to interpret him not infrequently to make sense of his record.

The second is the fact that the chronicler will give some particular spot
quite consonant with the marching powers of troops for one day, but
different from that given by the Clerk of the Kitchen.

This apparent discrepancy is due to the fact that an army marches if it
can upon parallel roads involving various halting-places for various
sections of it on the same night. An army upon a raid such as this also
throws out foraging parties and detachments, which leave its main body for
the purposes of observation or of plunder.

Again, we must always regard the King's household (and therefore the
Kitchen Accounts) as moving with what may be called "the staff." Often,
therefore, it will go much faster than the rest of the army, while at
other times it will lie behind or to one side of it. Thus, at the very end
of this campaign you have a transference of the King's quarters, twenty
miles to the north in one day, which would be a terribly long march for
the army as a whole, and which, as a fact, we can discover on other
evidence the army as a whole did not take.

With so much said, we can proceed to build up an exact account of the
advance and the retreat.

Upon Sunday the 23rd