"Revisionist" Crecy 1346 (NOT what you think....!)
Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 3:36 am
Regarding the Battle of Crecy on 26 August 1346, “There are no fewer than four different possibilities depicted in sketches by various historians,” according to Christian Teutsch in his excellent book Victory at Poitiers, The Black Prince and the Medieval Art of War (Copyright © Christian Teutsch 2010 Pen & Sword Military, an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd., Great Britain). Thanks to a recommedation by a fellow FoGr, I became aware of this book.
Crecy has been a historian’s nightmare– a muddle of sourcing reliability and disparate scholarly interpretation for centuries, as I truly discovered myself when I first tried to game this battle. The stated focus of Teutsch’s book is the Battle of Poitiers, but he also examines in some detail “The Lessons of Crecy” in pages 21-45 of the aforementioned edition. He discovers "a fifth possibility" and, in my estimation, does that convincingly, marshaling solid research and analysis, together with plausible inference.
This "revisionist" version of Crecy Field draws a considerable amount of guidance from Teutsch’s book. The intricacies of game design and the need to balance historical description (such as it is) with the need for playability, did not allow for a full or too detailed recreation of this fifth possibility. One example is the position of the Welsh spearmen, which Teutsch places, if I understood correctly, at the base of their assigned slope and in front of the longbowmen. The place of the Welsh spearmen in this game version is behind the longbows. Due to design exigencies, the Impassable hexes and the Open Field squares are made to represent the medieval town of Crecy, for gaming purposes.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40593264/Revisi ... 0Crecy.zip
For my complete description and explanatory notes on this version, including with captioned screenshots, please download the following Word document. Beware! It contains some "spoilers":
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40593264/Regard ... 201346.zip
Crecy has been a historian’s nightmare– a muddle of sourcing reliability and disparate scholarly interpretation for centuries, as I truly discovered myself when I first tried to game this battle. The stated focus of Teutsch’s book is the Battle of Poitiers, but he also examines in some detail “The Lessons of Crecy” in pages 21-45 of the aforementioned edition. He discovers "a fifth possibility" and, in my estimation, does that convincingly, marshaling solid research and analysis, together with plausible inference.
This "revisionist" version of Crecy Field draws a considerable amount of guidance from Teutsch’s book. The intricacies of game design and the need to balance historical description (such as it is) with the need for playability, did not allow for a full or too detailed recreation of this fifth possibility. One example is the position of the Welsh spearmen, which Teutsch places, if I understood correctly, at the base of their assigned slope and in front of the longbowmen. The place of the Welsh spearmen in this game version is behind the longbows. Due to design exigencies, the Impassable hexes and the Open Field squares are made to represent the medieval town of Crecy, for gaming purposes.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40593264/Revisi ... 0Crecy.zip
For my complete description and explanatory notes on this version, including with captioned screenshots, please download the following Word document. Beware! It contains some "spoilers":
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40593264/Regard ... 201346.zip