Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)At first I would to say that I have read all titles of this series from antiquity to the Renaissance and my favorite author is D. Nicholle. So, as I received my copy and saw that the artwork is from Graham Turner (my favorite artist; the cover looks different in reality than that depicted above) joyful reading seemed to be assured. But this book is, regarding formal aspects, the weakest I have read by Nicholle, due mainly to aspects which perhaps the author could not control. 1. On the battlefield maps troop units are constantly labelled wrongly (they are often mixed up, e.g. the black prince wing is labelled as the wing of the Earl of Northampton and vice versa), and, not so important, the arrow showing North is facing the wrong direction by 90°. This problem seems to me due to making the maps in the last possible moment before printing (they, too, look different than the cover illustration shown above). 2. eight pages of mostly superfluous wargaming tips deal at length with figure sizes and army scales which everyone could extract from the text themself. Plus, the author of these tips states that the French army is three times the size of the English army which is totally contrary to the book author Nicholle who writes that they are of comparable size. 3. The political reasoning and actual motivation of the campaign are dealt with in three pages which throws just a spot of light on many topics, like the battle of Sluys and the war in Gascony (I needed to the end of the book to find out that the Duke of Normandy was the French king's brother). So, four more pages wouldn't have hurt. 4. I am interested in the evolution of armor and, as many know, this is an important time for it, but you have to search mostly beyond the pictures for information regarding this topic. One or two more words on this in the text wouldn't have hurt anybody. But, to say something positive, the artwork by G. Turner is really great and if the book is revised soon the new points of view on this battle and good description of raising an army in feudal England and France could be more appreciated.
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The Battle of Crecy was the first major land battle of the Hundred Years War. It pitted the French army, then considered the best in Europe, and their miscellaneous allies against the English under King Edward III and the ‘Black Prince', who as yet had no great military reputation; this was the battle where he ‘wonhis spurs'. The Genoese crossbowmen were outshot by the English longbows and the pattern was set for the rest of the day: the French cavalry were committed piecemeal in fruitless charges against strong English positions, losing perhaps 10,000 men in the course of the fighting. After almost a millennium in which cavalry had dominated the field of battle, the infantryman, and particularly the longbowman, now ruled supreme.
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