Crécy

Reconstructing a medieval battle means working with incomplete records, and Hilaire Belloc makes that problem part of his account of Crécy in 1346. This short military history moves from political circumstances and the campaign to the battlefield's terrain and the action itself. Belloc compares chronicles, surviving monuments and local traditions, then uses distances, river crossings, weapons and ground conditions to test what the evidence can support.

Belloc follows Edward III's army to Boismont, where the widening marshes of the Somme and an approaching French force threaten its escape. A local prisoner, Gobin Agache, agrees to show the army a ford in return for gold and freedom for himself and companions. Such episodes give the study both movement and a close attention to practical constraints. Readers interested in medieval warfare will find an account concerned with how armies moved and how historians recover details from sparse testimony.