The Battle of Crécy in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of Froissart's Chronicles
Crécy, 26 August 1346, illuminated by Loyset Liédet more than a century later for a manuscript of Froissart. English archers face Genoese crossbowmen; the armour and the ships are of the illuminator's own day, which is how fifteenth-century readers expected the past to look.
Froissart wrote a generation after the battle from the testimony of men who had been there, and the manuscripts of his chronicle were illuminated a century after that. Neither is an eyewitness record. What Crécy demonstrated, and what the sources agree on, is the rate of fire: a trained archer could loose ten or more arrows in the time a crossbowman managed two, and the English had thousands of them behind stakes on rising ground. The manuscript is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. See Crécy and the longbow revolution.
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