Crécy-en-Ponthieu in Picardy, a small town of the county of Ponthieu with a great forest behind it, which gave its name to the English victory of 26 August 1346 — a field traditionally placed between Crécy and Wadicourt, and relocated several miles away by an argument published in 2022.
Crécy-en-Ponthieu stands on the Maye in the north of Picardy, between the Somme and the Authie, with the forest of Crécy beginning a short distance to the south-west. The name is recorded as Crisciacum by the seventh century, a Gallo-Roman estate name formed from a personal name with the suffix -acum, and the Roman road called the Chaussée Brunehaut, which ran from Amiens towards Boulogne, passes within about two miles.
On 26 August 1346 Edward III of England fought and destroyed the army of Philip VI of France a short way outside the town, and the Battle of Crécy has carried its name ever since. The town itself was never the point: it was the nearest place with a name that the chroniclers knew, and the fighting happened in open country north-east of it.
Ponthieu was a small county on the Channel coast with Abbeville as its capital, and Crécy was one of its towns. Count William Talvas granted Crécy a charter of commune in 1194, and by 1210 Count William III had founded a hospital there. A count’s residence and the forest around it made the place a hunting seat as much as a market.
The county mattered to the war that came to it. Ponthieu passed to the English royal house in 1279, when Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I, inherited it from her mother Joan of Dammartin, and it descended to Edward II and Edward III. Philip VI confiscated it in 1337 as the quarrel over Aquitaine turned into the Hundred Years’ War. Edward III therefore campaigned in 1346 through country his own officials had administered within living memory, which is one reason his army moved as confidently as it did.
The forest of Crécy covers some 4,300 hectares and is the largest wood in the modern Somme department. Benedictine and Cistercian houses cleared parts of it in the central Middle Ages, and what remained was kept as hunting ground; Louis XI later maintained kennels there, and François I hunted in it.
The country between the forest and the sea is open, gently rolling chalk farmland cut by shallow valleys — ground that favours an army able to choose a slope and hold it. Its other feature decided the campaign of 1346: the Somme estuary to the south could be crossed on foot only at particular states of the tide, and on 24 August the English forced the tidal ford of Blanchetaque against a French guard, which let them out of the trap between the river and the sea two days before the battle.
By the account that has stood since the fifteenth century, Edward III drew up on a slope north-east of Crécy with his right resting on the town and the valley of the Maye and his left on the village of Wadicourt, so that the French, coming up from the direction of Abbeville late in the day, had to attack uphill into massed archery on a front they could not outflank. A windmill on the ridge is remembered as the place from which the king watched, and a wooden viewing tower was put up there in 1984.
The other monument on the field is the Croix de Bohême, a cross marking the spot where John of Bohemia, the blind king who had himself led into the fighting and was killed in it, is said to have died. The cross was restored in 1902. Neither monument rests on anything contemporary: both mark a tradition about where things happened rather than a recorded position.
The traditional site has been questioned. In 2022 Michael Livingston argued that the battle was fought several miles to the south-east, nearer the road from Abbeville by Domvast, on the grounds that the earliest narratives and a set of contemporary letters describe a line of march and a position that do not fit the slope above Wadicourt. The argument has been debated rather than settled, and other historians have defended the traditional ground.
Archaeology cannot yet decide the question: no assemblage of the kind that would identify a fought-over field has been recovered at either location, and the ploughed chalk of Picardy has been worked continuously for six hundred years. What is certain is the date, 26 August 1346, and the outcome; what is argued over is a stretch of countryside a few miles across.
The battle brought the town nothing but trouble. Crécy was burned in 1358 during the Jacquerie, the rising of the Beauvaisis peasantry, and it changed hands again in the last phase of the war: an English garrison held it in 1435 before the French captain Charles Desmarest took and burned the place.
It never grew into anything larger than a market town with a forest behind it, and that is why the field survives as farmland rather than suburb. The local museum now shows material from the battle alongside prehistoric and later finds, and the name has travelled further than the town: the carrot soup called potage Crécy takes it from the sandy fields around the place.