Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Crecy, fought in 1346, a signal engagement of the Hundred Years’ War in which a small, long-bow armed English army under the command of Edward III and his son the “Black” Prince of Wales cut to pieces the much larger cavalry forces of France’s Philip VI.

When I remember this battle, I always think of Charles VI’s line from Act II of Henry V, in which he chides the Dauphin for dismissing Hal as a mere fly-weight:

Think we King Harry strong;
And, princes, look you strongly arm to meet him.
The kindred of him hath been flesh’d upon us;
And he is bred out of that bloody strain
That haunted us in our familiar paths:
Witness our too much memorable shame
When Cressy battle fatally was struck,
And all our princes captiv’d by the hand
Of that black name, Edward, Black Prince of Wales;
Whiles that his mountain sire, on mountain standing,
Up in the air, crown’d with the golden sun,
Saw his heroical seed, and smiled to see him,
Mangle the work of nature and deface
The patterns that by God and by French fathers
Had twenty years been made. This is a stem
Of that victorious stock; and let us fear
The native mightiness and fate of him.

Now the Bard might have been engaged in a bit of gratuitous Frog-bashing here, but I think his observation of the impact of the battle on the psychology of France’s rulers was perfectly legitimate: Crecy really was an outright disaster for France, a slaughter of a sizeable portion of the French nobility, as well as a harbinger of the downfall of the mounted knight as the supreme battlefield weapon. Of course, the fact that this took a long time to sink in on the French (because of complicated socio-political reasons) was demonstrated by their defeat at the hands of the English under similar conditions again at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and, of course, at Agincourt in 1415.