At Crécy, roughly 12,000 English troops, many armed with the six-foot longbow, cut down waves of French cavalry and Genoese crossbowmen. The battle, an early clash of the Hundred Years' War, exposed the vulnerability of heavily armored knights to disciplined ranged fire and marked a turning point in medieval warfare.
Edward III's army, outnumbered and far from supply lines, took a defensive position on a gentle slope near the village of Crécy in northern France. His longbowmen, drawn largely from Welsh and English yeomanry, could loose arrows far faster than the Genoese crossbowmen hired by the French, and their weapons carried enough force to punch through chainmail at range.
When the crossbowmen faltered under a sudden rain shower that slackened their bowstrings, Philip VI ordered his own cavalry to ride them down and charge the English lines anyway. What followed was carnage: charge after charge broke against the English positions, arrows falling like hail, horses screaming and collapsing, knights trampled by their own reinforcements. By nightfall an estimated 1,500 to 4,000 French nobles and thousands of infantry lay dead, against a few hundred English casualties.
The blind King John of Bohemia, fighting for France out of chivalric obligation, insisted on being led into the fray and died alongside his knights — a story so poignant that the Prince of Wales's motto, 'Ich Dien,' is traditionally traced to this battle. Crécy shattered the myth of knightly invincibility and heralded a new era of infantry-based warfare.