I've been reading about the Battle of Crecy, but have found vastly different numbers from sources that all seem legitimate, so I'm curious if anyone knows the real estimates?
History.com says the French numbered only 12,000 (8,000 men at arms, 4,000 archers). Brittanica puts the number at 30,000 and other sources say the French outnumbered the English (who everyone seems to agree had about 14,000).
Who's right?
The numbers for both armies at Crécy are estimates, due to gaps in the documentary record. The estimates for the English are much reliable for the English, though, since we have recruitment targets for infantry and enough information to reconstruct the noble retinues with some degree of confidence.
English Estimate
Wales - 3500 spearmen and 3500 archers, 3550 of the total from Prince Edward's Welsh lands.
29 Shires south of the River Trent - 3900 foot archers, plus 50 mounted archers from Shropshire, Worcester and Hereford to act as a royal bodyguard.
From the towns - 1963 hobelars, ranging from 600 for London (500 hobelars and 100 men-at-arms) to two to Blandford. However, many of the towns were able to reduce their quotas by paying cash, appealing to the king's council or were ordered to keep men for local defense, so totals may have ranged from 500-1100, depending on the reduction to London's requirements, which are unknown.
Retinues - at least 2650 men-at-arms, but possibly as many as 3000, and 2476 mounted archers and hobelars.
The Welsh contingent may have been only 2/3s strong, around 5000, and the few records of county musters also suggest that only 2/3s were arrayed. However, these may have been outliers, since archers arrayed while the Crécy campaign was in progress, before the battle itself, had an over 90% turn out.
In total, therefore, the upper end for the English army is around 18 400 men and the lower somewhere around 13 200. The true total probably lies somewhere in the middle, around the 14 000-15 000 mark. 8000-10 000 would have been archers, both foot and mounted.
Edit: I should have stressed that the estimate of 14-15 000 men was for the start of the campaign, not the battle itself. Between casualties taken during the campaign and natural attrition, the real numbers at the battle were probably between 12-13 000 if we use our middle of the road estimate.
French Estimate
We have no documents that would allow us to even begin to estimate the French numbers. The most reliable estimate we have comes from a letter Edward III to Thomas Lucy, where he gave the number of French men-at-arms as 12 000, 8 000 of whom were knights and squires. The other 4000 are an unknown quantity, with Clifford Rogers arguing that they were mercenary crossbowmen and Andrew Ayton indicating that they were merely non-noble men-at-arms. I'm inclined to agree with Rogers here, given that the Storei Pistoresi gives Philip as having 8 000 cavalry and 4 000 crossbowmen and he is able to show a clear instance of crossbowmen being called men-at-arms in a roughly contemporary chronicle.
The number of crossbowmen is contentious but, given that only around 2000 had been employed in previous campaigns of similar scale, the 6 000 crossbowmen often quoted, based on Villani and Richard Wynkeley, is unlikely. It has been suggested that the number of crossbowmen might have been reinforced, but there's not any evidence for this. 2000-4000 seems the most likely figure, at least 2000 of whom would have been mercenaries, with the remainder drawn from the towns (Jean le Bel mentions that the French missile arm consisted of "Genoese and auxiliaries").
Infantry is always hard to estimate, but may have been anywhere between 8 000 and 15 000. This is purely an estimate of my own based on men-at-arms to civic militia ratios reported in chronicles, early 13th century town militia quotas and the limited range they were generally only required to serve, and the fact that not all contingents had arrived yet (one, of perhaps 2000 men, was wiped out the day after the battle as it came to join the French army).
I would therefore put the French numbers at somewhere between 20-27 000 men, of whom at least 8 000 were heavy cavalry and 4 000 were mounted, well armed professional soldiers.
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