Like a great drama, the Battle of Crécy had an extraordinary cast of characters, and it was this assemblage of persons — in particular, the losses among the cast — that dominated the headlines after the event: of the 81 sources gathered here, only 11 do not contain mention of someone prominent who died there. In fact, the vast majority of our fourteenth-century sources incorporate what typically amounts to a catalog of the dead, a listing of names that almost invariably forms a separate, distinctly delineated section of the narrative, usually at the conclusion of the account of the battle. Interestingly, this was true even from some of the earliest remembrances. In his letter to Thomas Lucy written on 3 September, for instance, Edward III reports essentially nothing about the tactics of the battle, or hardly anything specific about the location, the difficulty, or the course of the battle. Yet reporting the results is clearly worth his time:

Similar, though not usually identical, catalogs occur throughout our sources. In some cases, a catalog of the fallen is all that is preserved: Crécy was defined by its dead.

Only, as it happens, not all these men had died. True, the king of Bohemia was dead, but the king of Majorca would not pass away until 1349.