upon the following morning off St Vaast.

St Vaast lies in a little recess of the north-eastern coast of the Cotentin, protected from all winds blowing from the outer Channel, and only open to such seas as can be raised in the estuary of the Seine by a south-easterly breeze. It was therefore, seeing the direction of the wind under which they had sailed, upon a calm shore that this considerable expedition disembarked. We may presume, under such circumstances, that though Edward had announced his decision of sailing for southern France, the point of disembarkation had been carefully settled, and that a course had been laid for it.

A small force composed of local levies had been raised to resist the landing. It was able to effect nothing, and was easily dispersed by a body of the invaders under the Earl of Salisbury, to whom that duty had been assigned.[2]

For nearly a week the army rested where it had landed, sending out detachments to pillage. Barfleur was sacked, Cherbourg was attacked, and the countryside was ravaged.

It was upon Tuesday, July the 18th, that the main body set out upon its march to the south and east.

No considerable body could meet them for weeks, and all the French Feudal Force was engaged near Paris or to south of it, and would take weeks to concentrate northward. Edward was free to raid.

The attempt to construct an accurate time-table of the march which Edward III. took through Normandy during his advance up the Seine as far as Poissy, and thence northward in retreat towards Picardy and the sea, has only recently been attempted.

Froissart, that vivid and picturesque writer who, both from his volume and his style, was long taken as the sole general authority for this war, is hopeless for the purpose of constructing a map or of setting down accurate military details. He had but the vaguest idea of how the march of an army should be organised, and he was profoundly indifferent to geography. He added to or subtracted from numbers with childlike simplicity, and in the honourable motive of pleasing his readers or patrons.

When, quite in the last few years, an attempt at accuracy in the plotting out of this march was first made, it was based upon not Froissart’s but contemporary records, and of these by far the most important are Baker’s Chronicle and the Accounts of the Kitchen, which happen to have been saved.

Baker’s Chronicle was finally edited by Professor Maunde Thompson in 1889. The work is a standard work and generally regarded as the best example of its kind. In making his notes upon that document, Professor Maunde Thompson compared the halting-places given by Baker and other authorities with those of the Accounts of the Kitchen, and established for the first time something like an exact record. But many apparent discrepancies still remained and several puzzling anomalies. I have attempted in what follows to reconstruct the whole accurately, and I think I have done so up to and including the passage of the Somme from Boismont, a point not hitherto established.

First, I would point out that of all the few bases of evidence from which we can work, that of the Clerk of the Kitchen’s accounts is by far the most valuable.

It should be a canon in all historical work that the unconscious witness is the most trustworthy.

I mean by “unconscious” evidence the evidence afforded by one who is not interested in the type of action which one is attempting to establish. Suppose, for instance, you wanted to know on exactly what day a Prime Minister of England left London for Paris upon some important mission. His biographer who sets out to write an interesting political life and to insist upon certain motives in him, will say it is the 20th of June, because Lady So-and-So mentions it in her diary, and because he finds a letter written by the Prime Minister in Paris on the 21st. Perhaps it is more important to the picturesqueness of the detail that the journey should be a hurried one, and without knowing it the biographer is biased in that direction. There may be twenty documents from the pens of people concerned with affairs of State which would lead us to infer that he left London on the 20th, and perhaps only five that would lead us to infer that he left on an earlier day, and, weighing the position and responsibility of the witnesses, the biographer will decide for the twenty.

But if we come across a postcard written from Calais by the Prime Minister’s valet to a fellow servant at home asking for the Prime Minister’s overcoat to be sent on, and if he mentions the weather which we find to correspond to the date, the 19th, and if further we have the postmark of the 19th on the postcard, then we can be absolutely certain that the majority of the fuller accounts were wrong, and that the Prime Minister crossed not on the 20th but on the 19th, for we have a converging set of independent witnesses none of whom have any reason to make the journey seem later than it was, all concerned with trivial duties, and each unconscious of the effect upon history of their evidence. It would be extraordinary if the servant had forged a date, and if we suppose him to have made a mistake, we are corrected by the equally trivial points of the postmark and the French stamp and the mention of the weather.

So it is with this manuscript record of the King’s Kitchen expenses and of the several halting-places at which they were incurred. Wherever there is conflict, it must override all other evidence.

The Clerk of the Kitchen, to whom we owe this very valuable testimony, was one William of Retford. His accounts were kept in a beautifully neat, but not very legible, fourteenth-century hand, upon long sheets of parchment, and are now luckily preserved for our inspection at the Record Office.

With every day’s halt the place where victuals were bought for the King, that is, where the King’s household lay, has its name marked upon these accounts; but unfortunately the abbreviations used in the MS., coupled with the difficulty of distinguishing the short strokes [e.g. m from ni, n from u, etc.] upon parchment which time has faded, and on the top of that the indifference of the scribe to the foreign names themselves, do not render the task particularly easy. The MS. has not, I believe, ever been published. I have spent a good deal of time over it, and I will give my conclusions as best I can.

The main army stayed at St Vaast, as I have said, for six days, that is, until Tuesday, July 18th, 1346. This was presumably done to recruit the horses and the men. Foraging parties went out in the interval, but the bulk of the force did not move.

On that Tuesday it struck inland for Valognes, a march of 10½ miles. No proper coast-road existed even as late as the eighteenth century, let alone in the Middle Ages, and an army making for Paris or for the crossing of the Seine could not choose but to go thus slightly out of its way.

From Valognes there is a two days’ march to Carentan, which town was the lowest crossing-place of the River Douves. We may naturally expect the halt between the two to have been about midway, and this would give us a town called Ste Mère l’Eglise, but the Clerk of the Kitchen puts down St Come du Mont. We conclude, therefore, that the King’s staff did not follow the great road which had existed from Roman times, but went by bypaths to the east of it where St Come du Mont lies. It was a long day’s march