News of what happened near the woods of Crécy on 26 August 1346 spread fast and far across medieval Europe. We have here collected over eighty sources dating from the time of the battle to the year 1400, a trail of textual remains that traces the dissemination of news not only in the expected English, French, and Latin, but also in Czech, Dutch, German, Italian, and Welsh. The Battle of Crécy, like few events in the generations before or after it, was international not only in the background of its participants but also in the scope of its impact on the memorialization of history.

It is hardly surprising that this is the case. Depending on how one counts them, there were five kings present on the field that fateful day: the kings of England and France were joined by the monarchs of Bohemia, Majorca, and (at least nominally) the Romans. The addition of dukes, earls, counts, and lesser lords provided an astounding array of nobility from multiple nations and nations-in-waiting, in addition to the uncountable thousands of fighting men who would die for their causes when the slaughter began.

And a slaughter it was. When the armies came together the bloodletting was so ferocious, confined in so small a space, that identifications of the dead were often made through the materials they left behind — fragmented coats of arms on broken shields, on tattered banners, on torn surcoats, or even on the pommels of swords (Item 3.471–73). So great a blow was struck against the knights and nobles of the French elite in the hours of the battle that only a week afterward it was already being said that at Crécy “the flower of the whole knighthood of France” had been cut down (Item 4.58), many of them swept into destruction by the newly revealed power of the English longbow, which factors heavily in so many of our early accounts.