shown in the frontispiece of this volume.

The general frame within which the battle took place must be regarded as a
parallelogram corresponding to the exterior limits of that map, not quite
four miles in length from east to west, and some 2-1/2 miles in breadth
from north to south, having the town of Crecy a little to the north of the
medial line, and a good deal on the left or western side of the area. But
the emplacement of the troops and the actual fighting, including the
partial pursuit by the victors, is wholly contained within a smaller area,
which lies aslant, with its major axis pointing north-west, its minor axis
pointing north-east, and surrounding the dip called "the Val aux Clercs."

The aspect of this countryside is that of so many in the north-east of
France. The passage of six and a half centuries has not greatly modified
it. The limits of the Royal Forest of Crecy are what they have been
perhaps from Roman, certainly from early medieval, times. The
characteristic hedgeless, rolling, ploughed land, which is the normal
landscape of all French provinces and of many others, has been disturbed
by no growth of modern industrialism, and its contours remain unmodified
by any considerable excavations of the soil. The villages attaching to the
battlefield, Estrees, Wadicourt, Fontaine, are in extent, and even in
appearance, much what they were when the armies of the fourteenth century
occupied them, and the little market-town of Crecy has not appreciably
extended its limits.

Even minor features such as the small groups of woodland and the spinnies
seem, judged by our remaining descriptions of the battle, to be much the
same to-day as they were then.

The terrain of Crecy offers, therefore, an excellent opportunity for the
reconstruction of the medieval scene, and I will attempt to bring it
before the eyes of my readers.

Ponthieu is a district of low, open, and slightly undulating fertile
lands, whose highest ridges touch such contours as 300 feet above the sea,
and the depressions in which, very broad and easy, do not commonly fall
more than a 100 feet or so below the higher rolls of land. In the
particular case of the field of Crecy we shall have to deal with figures
even less marked. The crests from which the opposing armies viewed each
other before the action average full 200 feet above the sea; the broad,
shallow depression between its confronting ridges descends to little more
than sixty feet below th