By Steve Cast
The Battle of Crecy 1346 and ¾
Hello in Mesopotamian I hail, Bonjour in Swahili I hear you reply!
I hope this letter finds you and your families in good health.
Well, I finished the battle of Crecy on my new 6’ x 4’ table, this was therefore a ½ scale
game. I say finish but I actually finished early because it went on for four days and there was
still plenty of game left, so it was probably a bit too big for a solo game. However, it proved
a point in as much as I will be able to do Crecy on a 12’ x 6’ table and it also helped iron out a
few more wrinkles in the rules.
So, the plan was to set up the 15,000 English in their historical deployment and allow the
French to deploy as if they’d had time to do so and the French Nobility had agreed to do as
they were told! (Tu parles! or Fat Chance as we say in English).
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| The new gaming table |
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| English Deployment |
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| French Deployment |
The Knights and peasant dregs are off table. The crossbows are
commanded by Otto Doria and Carlo Grimaldi who I’d never heard of before. I thought they
were probably a couple of Seneschals but they turned out to be Genoese Nobility!
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| General panorama |
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| An unbelievable early success for the Irregular D Arrière-ban archers shaking up a unit of
English Longbows. |
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| Bored of sitting around doing nothing, the first of the impetuous Knights appear on the
table. All told about a third of the Knights decided to throw themselves piecemeal onto the
English lines with a few surprising results. |
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| French Knights burst through the lines of English archers and eventually pursue them off table and loot the English camp. |
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| Seeing an opportunity not to be missed another unit of Knights tries to jump the flank of some English Longbows |
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| Only to be stopped in their tracks. |
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| However, it was a different story when some other knights decided to take on the English dismounted Men at Arms |
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| Fooled you! Like an American GI trying to stop a Tiger tank with a club hammer the French Knights bounce off their dismounted English
counterparts in such a disorderly fashion that they’d make an Eaton mess look like a regiment of well drilled Grenadier Guards. |
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| French Knights caught perpetrating the heinous crime of fleeing the battlefield, sacre bleu!
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From my extensive research into this period I found that the punishment for this was to be
welded into your armour and riveted to a table for six months whilst a colony of ants was
slowly poured down your visor. If you survived this you were given your freedom in the form
of a nail file and told to cut your way out.
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| As with all French battlefields there was an emergency cowards exit and upon an
Englishman brandishing his longbow many of those with spines of Brie decided to make a
run for it! |
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| A general view of the battlefield at the end of the game. Note the rather large gap forming in the middle of the English lines. |
