Who won the Battle of Crécy?
England under Edward III won a decisive victory at Crécy on 26 August 1346, when an outnumbered English army destroyed the finest chivalry in Europe1 in one of the opening battles of the Hundred Years War. It announced that massed archers could shatter the mounted knight who had ruled the battlefield for centuries.
On 26 August 1346, near the village of Crécy in northern France, an outnumbered English army under Edward III destroyed the finest chivalry in Europe. It was one of the opening battles of the Hundred Years War, and it announced that massed archers could shatter the mounted knight who had ruled the battlefield for centuries.
The raid cornered
Edward had led a destructive raid across Normandy and was falling back toward Flanders2 when the far larger French army under King Philip VI caught up with him. Rather than run, Edward chose his ground on a gentle slope3 near Crécy and waited.
The longbow
He set his dismounted men-at-arms in the center with his longbowmen massed on the wings1, with pits dug across the approaches4. When the French sent forward their hired Genoese crossbowmen1, the longbowmen, loosing several arrows to every bolt, swept them away before the real attack had even begun.
The charges
The French knights charged anyway, again and again from late afternoon into the night14, riding over their own crossbowmen in their eagerness. Each wave rode into the arrow-storm, and each broke in bloody confusion. Among the dead was the blind King John of Bohemia5, who had asked to be led into the fight.
What the day decided
Crécy was a stunning victory against the odds and a turning point in the art of war. It carried Edward on to capture the port of Calais, which England would hold for two centuries6, and it taught Europe a lesson in the power of the common bowman that would be repeated at Poitiers and, most famously, at Agincourt.
A revolution in warfare
Crécy is often read as the day the armored knight met his match. For centuries the mounted noble had been the decisive arm of European war; at Crécy in 1346 a smaller English army of dismounted men-at-arms and massed longbowmen broke charge after charge by the flower of French chivalry. The lesson was not lost. The same combination shattered French armies again at Poitiers in 1356 and Agincourt in 14157, and across the next century disciplined infantry armed with missile weapons, and later with gunpowder, steadily displaced the heavy cavalry that had dominated the medieval battlefield. Crécy did not end knighthood overnight, but it announced that courage and noble blood were no longer enough against training, ground and a wall of arrows.
