Chapter 6

The English loss was wholly insignificant. Its exact amount, like that of its enemy, we cannot tell, because a list of but two knights, one squire, and forty of the rest, not counting a few Welsh, is all that we are given. But, even if this total (which hardly corresponds to the fierce mêlée at the beginning of the action on the right) be below the true number, we may be certain that that number was very small indeed. The line was never pierced; the English fight was wholly defensive, and a defensive maintained at range against troops which disposed, after the first rout of the Genoese, of no missiles upon their side.

Upon the Monday morning, the 28th of August, the host set forth upon its northern march, quite free now from any danger of pursuit. By the first days of September it had sat down before Calais. All winter and all the succeeding summer the blockade continued, and upon the 4th of August 1347, nearly a year after Crécy, the town was taken and the lasting fruit of that engagement was garnered. Calais remained an English bastion upon the Continent for more than two hundred years.

Footnotes:

[1] We have this upon the evidence of a contemporary, Villani. It has, of course, been denied by our modern academic authorities, but without evidence.

[2] The theatrical character which attaches to warfare through the fourteenth century appears at this very outset of the campaign. Edward knighted the Black Prince and sundry other commanders on a hill overlooking the fleet and the harbour just before the main body disembarked. The Black Prince had already been knighted, and the ceremony was mere parade.

[3] He did _not_ go to Rouen, or near it, as the map in Mr Fortescue's work (vol. i. p. 37) presumes. Rouen was, he found, too strongly held. There is no time for the big loop of twenty miles which Mr Fortescue introduces, and no evidence for it.

[4] This is not N. D. de Vaudreuil, as Professor Thompson suggests, but St Cyr just beyond where the bridge is.

[5] This point has also proved puzzling. Thus Professor Thompson calls it "difficult to find." What the clerk heard and set down was the peasants' term "L'Angreville."

[6] This, as Professor Thompson rightly says, is not on the modern maps. It stood just above _Nezel_ near the modern Chateau between that village and Falaise or "The Cliff."

[7] So I read the meaningless rigmarole of the Clerk of the Kitchen. But I may be wrong. Professor Thompson inclines to Ecquevilly, a mile or two further on.

[8] Or _six_, if we read Ecquevilly. The main army halted at Flins.

[9] The low tide after the full moon occurred on that 24th of August at about half past-six o'clock in the open sea and nearer eight o'clock in the estuary, or even later; for we must allow quite seven hours' ebb to five hours' flow in that funnel in its old unreclaimed state.

[10] _Antiq. de Pic._, vol. iii. pp. 131, etc.

[11] The parish boundaries are not absolutely straight, as, after the fashion of modern French communal boundaries, they follow the corners of the oblong strips of peasant cultivation, but the aggregate of straight lines, all in one continuous direction, marks a quite unmistakable trajectory.

[12] The traveller going by rail to-day from Paris to Calais or Boulogne, may note at the second station after Abbeville a wood upon the heights to his right, and upon his left the reclaimed valley of the Somme. The next station he passes is that of Port, with the church of the village upon his right as he leaves it, and the embankment which he sees crossing the valley floor upon his left, a mile further on, marks the passage by which Edward III. and his army forced the then broad estuary of the river.

[13] See p. 45.

[14] Not to be confounded with the other Noyelles upon the Somme, ten miles away.

[15] It was at this moment that news was brought to King Edward of his son's peril, and that he replied "Let the child win his spurs"--sending the messenger back empty, but having care immediately afterwards to despatch reinforcement.