At last, then, upon Wednesday the 23rd of August the whole host was gathered, foiled, round its King at Acheux. He marched on a few miles to Boismont, going on his way through Mons, and there, as it chanced, picking up a prisoner who proved invaluable: for that prisoner betrayed the ford.
As the English army lay at Boismont that night of the 23rd, the broad estuary of the Somme stretched to the north of them with no more bridges across it, cut or uncut, and apparently no fate but a choice between a desperate action against superior numbers (nor any retreat open) and surrender.
Edward’s only chance lay in the discovery across that mile of land (flooded at high tide, and at low tide a morass) of some kind of ford. Such a ford existed. With difficulty, but in the nick of time, it was discovered and used; the French force defending it upon the further side was overthrown, and the retreat and its dependent victory of Crécy were made possible.
Edward had had good faith that “God and Our Lady, and St George would find him a passage,” and a passage he found.
The crossing of that ford and the advance to Crécy field must form the matter of our next section, “The Preliminaries of the Action.”
The reader will note that in the latter part of the above I have wholly abandoned the more usual account of the last three days of the retreat from Poissy to the Somme, and that the reconstruction I have attempted includes several matters hitherto not suggested in any recent history, and is in contradiction with the view which has hitherto been most generally accepted.
The evidence upon which I rely for this description of the retreat on Acheux and subsequently on Boismont will I hope be found set out in detail in the number of the English Historical Review for October 1912. Meanwhile, I owe it to my readers, who may use this book for purposes of school or university work, to state briefly the way in which the matter has hitherto been set forth, and my reason for adopting this new version.
Most Froissart MSS., which have misled history in this regard, say that King Edward was at Oisemont upon the evening of the 23rd. Lingard, the father of all modern English historical writing, and a man whom every historian begins by reading (though very few go on by acknowledging him), expanded this mere reference into a whole phrase, and wrote that Edward “had the good fortune to capture the town of Oisemont, and so find a night’s lodging.” A neglect of military conditions, or of the map, or of both, has perpetuated the error. Edward was never at Oisemont. The argument against it, and in favour of Boismont, is dependent upon a number of converging proofs, which I will very briefly recapitulate.
(1) The MSS. of Froissart are none of them original.