The legal power of the highest French military offices at the end of the Middle Ages is a topic which formed part of Gabriel Le Barrois d'Orgeval's monograph, Le tribunal de la connétablie en France du XIVe siècle à 1790, published in 1918. This study was the first specific one to be published on the subject. Since its publication, a few authors have made important contributions, especially M.H. Keen and, more recently, L. Cazaux. However, a major problem for scholars is that of documentary sources. We have to observe, indeed, that there is a distinct lack of legal records. Before the sixteenth century, French legal records – and especially those in the archive of the Parlement de Paris – contain no specific archive relating to military jurisdiction. The activities of the cour de la Connétablie and of the cour des maréchaux (the courts of the Constable and the Marshals of France) are not completely unknown, however. There exist some clear traces of both courts’ work, but these traces are widely scattered and have to be sought in a variety of categories of documents, especially in the letters and judgments of ordinary courts in which the judicial power of military office-holders is mentioned.

Moreover, there are a few ordinances and other normative texts which are particularly useful and of which the best known is entitled Les droiz du connétable. This document was registered by the king's Chambre des comptes in Paris. A copy was produced in January 1382 at the request of Olivier de Clisson, who was appointed Constable of France after the death of Bertrand du Guesclin in 1380. Unfortunately, the text does not describe the judicial powers of the Constable – not even briefly. It mentions only what interested Clisson: that is to say the Constable's authority, his military power and above all his financial rights.

The celebration of our great defeats is one of the oldest traditions in French historiography. And the battle of Crécy – as well as those of Poitiers and Agincourt – is one of the disasters that is deeply etched on our national memory. For a long time, French scholars have tried to explain this sad event. All too often they have contrasted the high quality of English military organisation with the disorder of a French ‘feudal army’, and in explaining the outcome of the battle have given precedence to political and social considerations over tactical and purely military ones. Typical of this is the following description from Lavisse and Rambaud's classic work, Histoire générale:

While being suffused with historical hindsight, this sentence also seems to overlook the fact that the English nobility of the fourteenth century was no less arrogant and romantic than its French counterpart. So, what kind of army did the French have at the battle of Crécy, and how was it organised? And what changes in French military structures and mentality were brought about by the battle? Let us look first at how the French troops were recruited.

Philip VI's army has frequently been described as being ‘feudal’, meaning that the king's vassals were the nucleus of his army. The military feudal system was indeed one of the bases of French military organisation, because, by virtue of their feudal obligations, vassals were obliged to serve, customarily for forty days, in the royal army at their own cost. But by the end of the thirteenth century, the king of France often paid for the ‘service d'ost’, that is to say ‘feudal military service’, and from the beginning of the fourteenth century there existed a special financial administration to collect money and use it for the prosecution of the king's war. This service involved the nobility of the whole kingdom. When the king of France thought it necessary, he convoked or summoned all his ‘vassaux’ and ‘arrière vassaux’ (vassals of his vassals).