considerable army, with which he occupied the Norman capital.  Nothing but the Seine and a few miles of country separated the two forces.  But as at Buironfosse, at Tournai, and at Vannes, the French declined to attack, and Edward would not depart from his tradition of acting on the defensive.  The English slowly made their way up the left bank of the Seine, avoiding the stronger castles and walled towns, and devastating the open country.  The French followed them on the right bank, carefully watching their movements, and breaking all the bridges.  So things went until, on August 13, Edward reached Poissy, a town within fifteen miles of the capital.

The English advanced troops plundered up to the walls of Paris, whose citizens, watching in terror the flames that made lurid the western sky, implored their king to come to their help.  From Saint-Denis Philip issued a challenge to Edward to meet him in the open field on a fixed day, Edward, however, was not to be tempted by such appeals to his chivalry.  The day after Philip’s message was sent, he repaired the bridge at Poissy, crossed the Seine, sent a stinging reply to Philip’s letter, and moved rapidly northwards.  Avoiding Pontoise, Beauvais, and other towns, he was soon within a few miles of the Somme.  Long marching had fatigued his army, and he resolved to retreat to the Flemish frontier.  The French soon followed him by a route some miles further towards the east.  They reached the Somme earlier than the English, and were pouring into Amiens and Abbeville, while Edward’s scouts were vainly seeking for an unguarded passage over the river.  If the Somme could not be crossed, there was every chance of Edward’s war-worn army being driven into a corner at Saint-Valery, between the broad and sandy estuary of the Somme and the open sea.  When affairs had become thus critical, local guides revealed to the English a way across the estuary, where a white band of chalk, called the Blanche taque, cropping out of the sandy river bed, forms a hard, practicable ford from one bank of the river to the other.  “Then,” writes an official reporter, “the King of England and his host took that water of the Somme, where never man passed before without loss, and fought their enemies, and chased them right up to the gate of Abbeville.”  That night Edward and his troops slept on the outskirts of the forest of Crecy.  After traversing this, they took up a strong position on the northern side of the wood on Saturday, August 26.  There, in the heart of his grandmother’s inheritance of Ponthieu, Edward elected to make a stand, and, for the first time in all their campaigning, Philip felt sufficient confidence to engage in an offensive battle against his rival.