CRÉCY AND CALAIS FROM THE ARCHIVES
Such documents can flesh out our understanding of who went to war, for how long, how they got there, how much they were paid, and how the forces were organized into retinues and entourages. Chroniclers revelled in recording deeds of arms by great men, whose names fill their writing, but they took little to no notice of the aristocrats’ social inferiors, or of organizational details.
To understand the great benefit administrative records are to historians, and the degree to which they enhance our understanding of the past, let us look more closely at the surviving documents addressing the English 1346-1347 campaign of the Hundred Years’ War, which included both their victory at the Battle of Crécy and their successful siege of the city of Calais.
The archives are full of administrative documents pertaining to the preparation for and organization of the expedition. In August
