A New Account of the Battle of Crecy in a 14th-Century Roman Chronicle

The Cronica of the Anonimo Romano, written between late 1357 and the first months of 1358, is the only extant fourteenth-century Roman chronicle. In his preface, its author states that he used exclusively oral sources for his history wherever it concerned events he did not himself witness; nevertheless, written sources are likely to have been used on for portions of the work, particularly when dealing with matters from far afield. This paper focuses on the Cronica’s account of the battle of Crécy, where the Anonimo mentions no sources. This part of the Cronica offers a special perspective for the study of the Anonimo’s way of writing foreign history, since it can be compared with a wide range of different accounts of the battle are available to us for comparison, ranging from a matter-of-fact letter of Edward III to the wide and colourful accounts by Jean Froissart. These different accounts allows us to understand and fully assess the quality of the Anonimo as historian providing an insight into the way in which he used his written and oral sources, and into the transmission and reception of information around Europe at the time.