Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, episode 105, Cressy.

Now I can feel a sense of panic coming back at me over the podcasting airwaves. We appear

to be slowing to a crawl. So what? Are we going to take two years to get to the end of

the Hundred Years' War? Well, hopefully not. As I keep reminding you all, I'm not a historian

just a bloke in a shed, so I'm allowed to indulge my personal predilections, or the

legal ones anyway, and spend loads and loads of time on glorious English victories. I think

we can count on the fact that I shall spend substantially less time when it comes to the

glorious French victories. So we'll catch up a little bit later.

Now, before we get to the Cressy campaign, a little backing up is required. We've heard

the success of Lancaster, but what a Britony. Command had been handed to William Bohoon,

the Earl of Northampton, and everything had started really well with the recapture of

the Channel Islands. The trouble is, that while Bohoon was an excellent commander, Montford

the Duke of Brittany was with him, and had to be seen to be in command, and sadly he

wasn't so great. Plus, Northampton's army was good, but very, very small. All in all

then, 1345 was not a vintage year in Brittany, and by September, Montford was dead, and Charles

of Boire was sitting pretty. The response from the English was a winter campaign in 1345

and in 1346, led by one Thomas Dagworth.

Here is another chapter in our continuing story of Edward III's Great Captains. In common

with many of the Englishmen who made their names and fortunes in the Hundred Years' War,

Dagworth didn't come out of the top draw of English nobility. He was the second son

of the minor lord, paying homage to the Bohoon family. And then, in 1344, a man described

by the chroniclers as elegant, made his big breakthrough, in the traditional medieval

...