England crushes French chivalry at Crecy and Agincourt
Welsh and English longbows shatter two generations of French knights
Quick facts
- Location
- Crecy and Agincourt, northern France
- Key people
- Edward III, Henry V
- Conflict
- Hundred Years' War (1337-1453)
What happened
At Crecy on 26 August 1346, Edward III's smaller English army used massed longbowmen to break repeated charges by a much larger French force, killing thousands of French knights and nobles including the blind King John of Bohemia, who insisted on being led into the fighting. Nearly seventy years later, on 25 October 1415, Henry V's army, weakened by dysentery and outnumbered, won an even more lopsided victory at Agincourt using the same longbow tactics against French cavalry bogged down in mud, killing a large share of the French nobility present including three dukes. Both battles came during the Hundred Years' War, the long dynastic conflict over the French throne that ran intermittently from 1337 to 1453.
Why it matters
The two defeats devastated the French aristocracy and exposed the vulnerability of heavily armored cavalry to disciplined missile troops, forcing French military reform, and Agincourt in particular so weakened the French crown that it accepted the humiliating Treaty of Troyes in 1420, disinheriting the French dauphin in favor of the English king.
How we know
The chronicler Jean Froissart wrote a detailed eyewitness-informed account of Crecy within Book I of his Chronicles, while the French chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet documented Agincourt from the French side, giving historians two contemporary narratives of the English longbow's battlefield effect.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Battle of Crecy · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- De Re Militari (Society for Medieval Military History). The Battle of Crecy (1346), according to Jean Froissart · Primary source (author-declared)deremilitari.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Battle of Agincourt · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- De Re Militari (Society for Medieval Military History). Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Battle of Agincourt, 1415 · Primary source (author-declared)deremilitari.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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