French commoners at Crecy 1346

[kujalar]

I started to make a scenario for a battle of Crecy 1346 and would like to hear opinions of what kind of troops should French have?
I am mainly interested of those commoners I cannot find much of reference what they were.

This far I have a french army of
20xknights (12 000 mounted men)
14xGenoese xBow (5600 xbow)
and
almost 50 groups of commoners, mostly medium infantry (20000men)

that makes a total of 37 000 for French.
I base these numbers mostly to the book "armies of the middle ages, volume 1" by Ian Heath.

I am mostly qurious, what should I put for French Commoners? All the texts I have found this far from the internet, speak only of
genoese and french knights and not much of else, expect that the french commoners seemed to suffered quite a huge losses also.

I have come up this far.
of commoners 2000 men are now average armored german spearmen fighting for King John of Bohemia.
The rest are french militia, medium infantry, 1/3 of them carry crossbows and 2/3 of them carry defensive spears and all are poorly equipped and have
poor morale. These are just a guess and based on one reference talking of bohemian spearmen and another talking of french militia that should carry crossbows, but often didn't because crossbows were expensive.

French knights I plan to put only armored, because horses were not armored at this time.

English longbowmen do not carry stakes, but they have made half of hexes in front of their slope as ditches.

Genoese crossbows are also made as poor because they were force marched without rest to the battlefield and ordered to attack. That was not enough, there was also a sudden rain and crossbows are propably more affected by water than longbows.

The scenario time limit will also be such that French do not have much of time to maneuver their last commoners around the flanks given the terrain and a distance.

[petrus58]

Kujalar,

Looking at what I think is the best secondary source for Crecy (and the campaign) - Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston's The Battle of Crecy, 1346 (Woodbridge, 2005), I think that your numbers for French (and allied) men-at-arms and Genoese crowwbowmen are probably right. We will never have the same detail as we do for the English army as French financial records are lost. The foot contingent seems to have comprised some relatively well trained (and presumably equipped) Allied troops, French sergeants, with most being made up those provided by the arriere ban summons, who are described as ill-trained and unreliable. Not much help, but probably some of the French foot should be well trained and equipped, with the rest rabble!

In 1340, when more relaible information is available, the French army operating in the Flanders area consisted of 22,500 men-at-arms, 2,500 foot sergeants and 200 crossbowmen.