Mentor: Wietse de Boer, Ph.D.

In the summer of 1346, the kingdoms of England and France were at war. This feud of the Plantagenet (England) and Valois (France) dynasties, known as the Hundred Years’ War had begun less than a decade before 1346 and it would continue to rage until 1453. That summer, the king of England, Edward III set sail to invade France’s northern coast of Normandy. This invasion (figure 1) would become known as the Crécy Campaign after the momentous clash between Edward III and the king of France Philip VI near the Picard town of Crécy-en-Ponthieu on August 26th, 1346. Scholars of the Campaign have made this battle the focus of their attention and analysis. This has placed a critical group who were integrally involved in the Campaign into the background: non-combatants. Non-combatants (meaning those who did not participate in the military activity of the campaign) and their communities were the deliberate target of English forces who scorched large tracts of territory, stole enormous sums of wealth, and killed scores of the non-combatants living in Northern France. This project hopes to remedy the lack of scholarship on non-combatants during the campaign by investigating the violence, terror, and brutality they experienced in 1346.

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