mplete knowledge, we are pursued by this difficulty, though it is
reduced. Thus we know the square mile within which the Battle of Hastings
was fought, but the best authorities have disputed its most important
movements and characters. Similarly we can judge the general terrain of
most of the Crusading fights, but with no precision, and only at great
pains of comparison and collation.

The battle which forms the object of this little monograph, late as was
its date, was long the subject of debate during the nineteenth century,
upon the elementary point of the English position and its aspect. And,
though that and other matters may now be regarded as established, we owe
our measure of certitude upon them not to any care upon the part of our
earliest informers, but to lengthy and close argument conducted in our
time.

There is no space in such a short book as this to discuss all the causes
which combined to produce this negligence of military detail in the
medieval historian: that he was usually not a soldier, that after the
ninth century armies cannot be regarded as professional, and that the
interest of the time lay for the mass of readers in the results rather
than in the action of a battle, are but a few of these.

But though we have no space for any full discussion, it is worth the
reader's while to be informed of the general process by which scholarship
attempts to reconstitute an engagement, upon which it has such
insufficient testimony; and as the Battle of Crecy is the first in this
series which challenges this sort of research, I will beg leave to sketch
briefly the process by which it proceeds.

The first thing to be done, then, in attempting to discover what exactly
happened during such a battle as that of Crecy, is to tabulate our
sources. These are of three kinds--tradition, monuments, and documents.

Of these three, tradition is by far the most valuable in most research
upon affairs of the Dark or Middle Ages, and it is nothing but a silly
intellectual prejudice, the fruit of a narrow religious scepticism, now
fast upon the wane, which has offered to neglect it.

Unfortunately, however, tradition is a particularly weak guide in this one
department of knowledge. In estimating the character of a great man it is
invaluable. It plays a great part in deciding us upon the nature of social
movements, in helping us to locate the sites of buildings that have
disappeared, and particularly of shrines; it gives us