As I have updated the dialogue spoken by the characters in this novel from the Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Old French that they would have spoken into modern English and French, I have also up-dated the names into more familiar forms. Thus the names de Floland and Montagu become Holland and Montague, while Martin Kemp, had he not been illiterate, would have spelled his name ‘Martyn Kempe’. At the same time, I have used fourteenth-century diminutives rather than their modern equivalents in order to capture the feel of the period: thus Daw rather than Dave for David, and Hal rather than Alf for Alfred (Hal as a diminutive for Henry came at a later date). In the case of non-English characters, I have used the form native to their own country, unless they are so well-known that it would be ludicrous to change their name so much. Thus Godfrey Harcourt becomes Godefroi d’Harcourt, but Philip of Valois does not become Philippe, and Sir Walter Manny, a knight from Hainault, does not become Sir Gautier; as a naturalised Englishman, he would probably have been known by that name anyway. However, since ‘Manny’ is now widely agreed to be the result of a misreading of ‘Mauny’, I have made that change, on the assumption that Sir Walter Mauny will remain recognisable to those who have already heard of him, while ‘Sir Gautier de Mauny’ is so far removed from ‘Sir Walter Manny’ as to be all but unrecognisable.
To avoid peppering this book with parentheses and footnotes, I have replaced terms in use at the time with terms more readily understood by the modern reader, even when the latter are not strictly accurate. Thus the fourteenth-century term ‘arrowstring’ has been replaced by its modem equivalent, ‘bowstring’. English archers were largely formed into units of one hundred men (centaines) subdivided into units of twenty men (vintaines), whilst a large formation on the march or on the battlefield was called a ‘battle’. These terms I have loosely translated into ‘company’, ‘platoon’ and ‘battalion’, which while not being entirely accurate are more easily recognisable to the modern reader.
To confuse the issue further, I have also used the word ‘company’ to describe a body of men commanded by a knight, not necessarily one hundred strong, in anticipation of Kemp’s future adventures, in which the word ‘company’ will come to describe a band of mercenaries. The word ‘companion’ derives ultimately from the Latin word panis, ‘bread’; literally, a companion is someone with whom one shares bread, and thus a company is a group of men who eat together. This terminology was originally used to describe an association of merchants who worked together for mutual aid and protection; its subsequent application to bands of mercenaries seems particularly apt in view of the fact that both companies of merchants and companies of mercenaries worked together to achieve the same end: making money. One of the most distinguished mercenary captains of the Hundred Years War was Sir Robert Knollys, who openly boasted that he fought neither for the king of England nor for the king of France, but for himself. At a time when professional soldiers were raised under terms of indenture to fight for pay – not dissimilar to the condotta system for hiring mercenaries in Italy at that time – the distinction between the men who fought for their kings and the men who fought for themselves was blurred, especially when one remembers the vast profits to be made from booty. Mercenary companies were led by captains, and to this day a company of regular soldiers is commanded by a captain.
A vintaine was commanded by a vintenar (literally, ‘twentieth man’); once again I have exercised a certain amount of artistic licence by translating vintenar as ‘serjeant-at-arms’. Strictly speaking, by medieval terminology a serjeant-at-arms was any man-at-arms who was not a knight, a concept I have already translated simply as ‘man-at-arms’; I have, rather synthetically perhaps, used the term ‘serjeant-at-arms’ to describe something closer to what we think of as an army serjeant today.
I make no apologies for these and other conscious misusages. This book is intended to be an accurate portrayal of warfare under Edward III in general, and an account of the Crécy campaign in particular; but first and foremost it is a piece of fiction intended to entertain before it educates, and thus my main priority was to create something that would be readily accessible to the general reader without resorting to the use of footnotes or a glossary.