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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 should be a canon in all historical work that the unconscious witness is the most trustworthy.

But if we come across a postcard written from Calais by the Prime Minister's valet to a fellow servant at home asking for the Prime Minister's overcoat to be sent on, and if he mentions the weather which we find to correspond to the date, the 19th, and if further we have the postmark of the 19th on the postcard, then we can be absolutely certain that the majority of the fuller accounts were wrong, and that the Prime Minister crossed not on the 20th but on the 19th, for we have a converging set of independent witnesses none of whom have any reason to make the journey seem later than it was, all concerned with trivial duties, and each unconscious of the effect upon history of their evidence. It would be extraordinary if the servant had forged a date, and if we suppose him to have made a mistake, we are corrected by the equally trivial points of the postmark and the French stamp and the mention of the weather.

So it is with this manuscript record of the King's Kitchen expenses and of the several halting-places at which they were incurred. Wherever there is conflict, it must override all other evidence.

The Clerk of the Kitchen, to whom we owe this very valuable testimony, was one William of Retford. His accounts were kept in a beautifully neat, but not very legible, fourteenth-century hand, upon long sheets of parchment, and are now luckily preserved for our inspection at the Record Office.

The main army stayed at St Vaast, as I have said, for six days, that is, until Tuesday, July 18th, 1346. This was presumably done to recruit the horses and the men. Foraging parties went out in the interval, but the bulk of the force did not move.

On that Tuesday it struck inland for Valognes, a march of 10-1/2 miles. No proper coast-road existed even as late as the eighteenth century, let alone in the Middle Ages, and an army making for Paris or for the crossing of the Seine could not choose but to go thus slightly out of its way.

From Valognes there is a two days' march to Carentan, which town was the lowest crossing-place of the River Douves. We may naturally expect the halt between the two to have been about midway, and this would give us a town called Ste M?re l'Eglise, but the Clerk of the Kitchen puts down St Come du Mont. We conclude, therefore, that the King's staff did not follow the great road which had existed from Roman times, but went by bypaths to the east of it where St Come du Mont lies. It was a long day's march of over fourteen miles, but the next day's march, that of Thursday the 20th, to Carentan was a short one of not more than eight or nine . On Friday the 21st the King lay at Pont H?bert. This is another example of something very like a long march followed by a short one upon the morrow. St L? was the halting-place of the Saturday, and Pont H?bert is but four miles from St L?. Of a total, therefore, of nearly seventeen miles, over thirteen are covered upon one day, and but four upon the next.

At this point it is worth noticing the character of all the advance with which we are dealing. Edward had been blamed 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 L? on his way to Caen, because St L? 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 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.

The town of Caen was not properly defended. It had no regular walls, and was a very rich prey indeed. The Constable of France and the Chamberlain were in the town, and the castle was held by a handful of Genoese mercenaries. There was an armed force of militia and of knights in the streets of the town, of what exact size we do not know. The Prince of Wales with the advance guard occupied the outskirts of the city which lie beyond the branches of the Orne . There was sharp fighting at the bridge, at one moment of which the King ordered a retreat, but the Earl of Warwick disobeyed the order. The King followed him, and the bridge was taken. There was considerable slaughter in the streets of the city; the Constable and the Chamberlain were taken prisoners, and about one hundred of the wounded knights. The English loss, which was not heavy, fell mainly upon the Archers and Spearmen, and the total, including wounded, was but five hundred, and was mainly due to the resistance of the inhabitants of the houses. The town was given over to pillage, and Edward thought of burning it, but was restrained. It is characteristic of the march that a delay of four days from the morning of the 5th was occupied in the loot of Caen, from which town Edward sent back his plunder on board the Fleet which he dismissed.

The army marched out of Caen on Monday, the 31st of July, and undertook its three days' march to Lisieux, the next rich town upon this random advance, now deprived of support from the sea. Edward probably intended to force some passage of the Seine, preferably, it may be surmised, at Rouen, or a little higher up, with the vague object of making for the north-east and Calais. We are not certain of this. It is more than possible that the capture of Calais later on in the campaign gave rise to the story that some such plan was intended. Anyhow, we get two halts and three marches between Caen and Lisieux, a distance of only twenty-five miles, which could easily have been accomplished in two days had there been a really definite plan in the commander's head. We may be pretty certain that there was not.

The halts of the King himself on the 31st of July and the 1st of August were made at two places which read in the MS. as "Treward," and an abbreviated name which stands for "Leopurtuis." The first of these is Troarn at the crossing of the Dives river. Other forces halted on that night at Agences, four miles to the south. The second is L?aupartie, a mile or so from Rumenise, where one other column halted, while a second column camped about five miles to the south. Lisieux was entered upon the 2nd of August after a march of ten miles on the part of the King, and of eleven and twelve on the part of the other two bodies.

At Lisieux two Cardinals who were despatched to offer terms met King Edward and proposed this arrangement to complete the war: that he should have the Duchy of Aquitaine upon the same tenure as his ancestors had held it. He refused those terms, and, after wasting a day at Lisieux, continued his march eastward.

Leaving Lisieux on the morning of the 4th, he pitched his tent that evening at Duramelle, a march of nine miles, with at least one column a mile ahead at Le Teil. On Saturday the 5th he got something better out of his troops, or at any rate out of the vanguard, and made something like seventeen miles to Neubourg.

I confess here to a very considerable doubt. The entry in the Accounts of the Kitchen is hopelessly misspelt, but the "Lineubourg" does not correspond to any other possible place, and Le Neubourg would be a very convenient halting-place for the King himself, well provisioned and lodged. We cannot believe, of course, that the army covered the full distance, but there is no reason why the King and his household should not have pushed on ahead with mounted troops. What makes it more probable is that the King spent the whole day of Sunday the 6th at Le Neubourg, presumably for the bulk of the army to come up and make two days' march of the twenty odd miles which the most distant contingents had to cover.

It was on the next day, Monday the 7th, that he reached the Seine, and approached that river, as we may presume, with the object of crossing it. It was a ten-mile march, and the whole force could be on the banks before evening at Elboeuf. But the bridges were broken and it was impossible. It was from this point of Elboeuf that the raid turned to follow the valley of the Seine up towards Paris, always seeking some crossing-place, and always finding the bridges broken. The nearer he got to Paris the more dangerous became Edward's position, and the larger grew the forces of the French King in the neighbourhood of the capital which threatened him.

Tuesday the 8th was spent in ravaging the country. Pont de L'Arche was burnt in revenge for the destruction of its bridge; a detachment went round by Louviers, which was looted, but the King himself went forward by the river bank and lodged that night at Vaudreuil, ten miles on from Elboeuf . The bulk of the force halted at L?ry, a mile or two behind.

He was already across the borders of Normandy, and anxiety must have been growing upon him. He seized Mantes after some resistance. It was useless to his purpose, and he hurried on another six miles to Epone , making that day a really long march in his natural haste and compelling his escort to the same--sixteen miles. But he both fatigued his main army in that attempt, and it also lost some time in storming a fortified house on "the White Rock," because the next day he evidently had to wait for stragglers to come up, advancing but a couple of miles to Aubergenville, where we find him upon Saturday the 12th. Upon the 13th, the Sunday, he got his opportunity. A march of only eight miles brought the host to Poissy, and there, though the bridge was cut, the stone piles upon which its trestles had stood were uninjured. Edward at once began to take advantage of this and to put his artificers to work. All that Sunday and all the Monday the task proceeded, and during this delay parties were despatched to ravage. They burnt St Germain and St Cloud. An advance party entered the Bois de Boulogne. But there could, of course, be no thought of an attack on Paris with so small a force and without base or provision.

This day, Tuesday the 15th, is strategically the turning point of the campaign. In an attempt to note in history no more than the great raid of Edward up to the very walls of the Capital, and his rapid and successful retreat, the crossing of Poissy would form the central term of our story. As it happened, however, the great chance which occurred to Edward in that retreat upon the field of Cr?cy, and his magnificent use of it, has eclipsed the earlier story, and for many the interest of the campaign as a whole, and the importance of this rapid seizure and repair of Poissy, is missed.

While his army was crossing the river, Edward received the challenge of the King of France. It was native indeed to the time: a sort of tournament-challenge, offering the English monarch battle upon any one of five days, in that great plain between Paris and St Germains which the last siege of the French capital has rendered famous in military history. The French feudal levies for which Philip had been waiting were now fast gathering, especially those for which he had had to wait longest, the main forces which had been away down south in Guienne. Edward most wisely refused the challenge, for it would have been against great odds, and to accept, though consonant to the spirit of the time, would have been a ludicrously unmilitary proceeding. In place of such acceptation he sent back false news that he would meet Philip far to the south. He then proceeded to cross the river and make the best haste he could back northwards to the sea. The French King found out the trick; a day and a half late he started in pursuit with his large and increasing host. That host was gathered at St Denis when on the Wednesday night, the 16th, Edward had got his men to Grisy, well north of Pontoise, and something like seventeen miles by cross roads from his hastily repaired bridge across the Seine. What followed was a fine feat of marching.

On the next day, the 17th, he had got his forces more than another seventeen miles north and had camped them by Auneuil. In two more days, by the evening of Saturday the 19th, they were yet twenty-five miles further north as the crow flies , at Sommereux. Edward halted at Troussures to see it file by, and on the morrow, Sunday, August the 20th, he was at Camps in the upland above Moliens Vidame, another push of fifteen miles for mass of the force, and of more than twenty for himself and his staff.

At this point came the crux of his danger. All during that tremendous feat of marching the great host of Philip was pounding at his heels.

Now, if the reader will glance at the map at the beginning of this section, he will see that just as Edward had been under a necessity to cross the Seine in the first part of his raid, he was now under a still greater necessity of crossing the Somme. A force much larger than his own was pressing him against that river into a sort of corner, and his only chance of safety lay in reaching the Straits of Dover through the county of Ponthieu, which lay beyond the stream. Every effort had been made to press the march. The force appears to have been divided for this purpose and to have marched in parallel columns, and the single case of marauding had been punished with the death of twenty men.

To turn and meet his pursuers would have meant, so long as he was on this side of the Somme, no chance of retreat in case of defeat.

Every mile he went to the north the Somme valley, already a broad expanse of marsh upon his flank, grew broader and more difficult. The decision, therefore, which Edward took at this critical moment, at once perilous and masterly, showed that rapid grasp of a situation which, for all his lack of a general plan during this campaign, this great soldier could boast. In the first place, he himself rides forward no less than twenty full miles to the village of Acheux. He has behind him the whole army strung out in separate bodies parallel to the Somme. Himself, from the head of that long line of twenty miles, commands all that should be done along it. He next orders separate bodies to approach the valley and seek a crossing, first, if possible, up river, then, as they fail, lower and lower down, and each to be ready as it is foiled at each bridge to fall back north in concentration, and to group in gathering numbers further and further down the stream, and near to his place at the head of the line, Acheux.

The whole thing is a fine piece of sudden decision, and is at once a combination of the rapidity of the retreat and of the attempt to force the river, in this the fourth week of August 1346, which so nearly brought disaster to the English force.

Three days, the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, were taken up in this manoeuvre. The English flung themselves successively against the bridges: Picquigny, Long Pr?, Pont R?my. The hardest and first push was at Picquigny at the beginning or southernmost of the effort. The body detached for that effort was beaten back.

It was the same with the next blow lower down at Long Pr?: the same lower down still at Pont R?my. At no bridge were the English successful. Everywhere the valley was impassable to them, and as they attempted one place after another down the stream with its broadening marshland and now tidal water, to find a traverse seemed impossible.

At last, then, upon Wednesday the 23rd of August the whole host was gathered, foiled, round its King at Acheux. He marched on a few miles to BOISMONT, going on his way through Mons, and there, as it chanced, picking up a prisoner who proved invaluable: for that prisoner betrayed the ford.

As the English army lay at Boismont that night of the 23rd, the broad estuary of the Somme stretched to the north of them with no more bridges across it, cut or uncut, and apparently no fate but a choice between a desperate action against superior numbers and surrender.

Edward's only chance lay in the discovery across that mile of land of some kind of ford. Such a ford existed. With difficulty, but in the nick of time, it was discovered and used; the French force defending it upon the further side was overthrown, and the retreat and its dependent victory of Cr?cy were made possible.

Edward had had good faith that "God and Our Lady, and St George would find him a passage," and a passage he found.

The crossing of that ford and the advance to Cr?cy field must form the matter of our next section, "The Preliminaries of the Action."

The reader will note that in the latter part of the above I have wholly abandoned the more usual account of the last three days of the retreat from Poissy to the Somme, and that the reconstruction I have attempted includes several matters hitherto not suggested in any recent history, and is in contradiction with the view which has hitherto been most generally accepted.

The MSS. of Froissart are none of them original.

They vary among themselves with regard to this particular word, most of them giving "Oisemont," but one giving "Nysemont."

Even where all the MSS. agree with regard to a place, and where Froissart certainly mentioned it, he is wildly inaccurate, evidently going by hearsay, and often by a doubtful memory: thus he has no idea on which side of the Seine the town of Gisors stands, and he calls the village of Fontaine a "strong town," etc.

Even were he an accurate, he is not a contemporary authority. He had to depend entirely upon older accounts which we can prove that he misread, or did not read at all, but only heard spoken of, and very often botched horribly.

In this particular campaign he is particularly haphazard. Thus, upon the all-important point of the order in which the various crossings of the Somme were attempted, he gets them at sixes and sevens, describing the first last and the last first. He was a man always attending to picturesqueness of incident, and one who thought exactitude very negligible.

Those are the five points which weaken any positive evidence which Froissart may give. But it is the evidence independent of Froissart, and of his accuracy or inaccuracy, which is so overwhelming.

We know, as a matter of fact, that Philip, the King of France, was before the night of the 23rd abreast of Abbeville; a retreat upon Oisemont would therefore have been physically impossible to Edward.

Oisemont would have involved keeping in touch with bodies ten, twelve, fifteen, and twenty miles distant, even if Oisemont had been occupied for two days, whereas the only mention we have of that occupation represents it as taking place on the 23rd.

These three points render it, as to two of them morally impossible, as to one of them physically, that Edward could have been at Oisemont upon that night. But they are negative: we have positive points which clinch the whole matter. These are:--

We know that the traitor was captured at Mons, which, if Edward had been at Oisemont, would have meant that someone had not only caught him at that great distance from Oisemont, but had brought him back without previous knowledge that he was capable of the valuable information he only gave later and after offers.

There is no contemporary mention of Oisemont, but we do positively know from contemporary evidence that the King's household was, and had been for three days, at Acheux.

Now all this combined is quite conclusive. Oisemont is impossible. Boismont satisfies every part of the evidence. An hour's riding from it permits the attack on St Valery. Mons, where the traitor comes from, is only two miles off; the march from Boismont to the Ford is just such an advance as would take the dawn and sunrise of a day--whereas the advance from Oisemont, impossible for all those other reasons, would involve fourteen to fifteen miles of marching, and is utterly incompatible with the idea of two or possibly three heavy fights, and the long march succeeding it.

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