How An Army of 100,000 Was Defeated With Sound

追加: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]The muddy fields of Crécy, northern France, late afternoon on August 26th, 1346.

[00:00:08]A Flemish observer named Jean le Bel was watching [music] the French cavalry prepare for their charge when he heard a sound that he would later describe as being like thunder rolling across the battlefield.

[00:00:19]English gunners had just fired their ribauldequins, strange cart-mounted weapons with multiple small iron barrels arranged side by side like the pipes of a church organ.

[00:00:31]The weapons belched [music] brilliant yellow and red sparks into the air, followed by billowing clouds of black smoke, and a deafening series of explosions that echoed across the valley.

[00:00:42]Then the observer saw something that shocked him even more than the noise itself.

[00:00:48]The massive French warhorses, which had been bred for generations to carry armored knights into battle [music] without flinching, were suddenly rearing up in absolute terror.

[00:01:00]Some of the animals leapt backwards as though they had been stung to madness.

[00:01:04]Others turned and bolted in blind [music] panic, throwing their heavily armored riders into the mud. Still more horses simply collapsed to [music] the ground and could not be made to rise again, no matter how much their riders [music] spurred them.

[00:01:18]The French cavalry charge, which had been meant to smash through the English lines with the overwhelming force of thousands of mounted knights, had been shattered before it even reached the enemy.

[00:01:30]The horses had been neurologically decoupled from their riders by nothing more than sound.

[00:01:36]This was the Battle of Crécy, which was one of the defining engagements of the Hundred Years' War between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of France.

[00:01:47]The conflict had begun in 1337 when King Edward III of England claimed the throne of France following the death of King Philip the fourth.

[00:01:59]In July of 1346, Edward landed an invasion force of approximately 14,000 men on the coast of Normandy.

[00:02:09]The English army had then marched northward through France, burning towns and plundering the countryside in what was known as a chevauchée, a destructive raid designed to demonstrate the French king's inability to protect his own subjects.

[00:02:25]King Philip the sixth of France had rallied an army to intercept the English before they could link up with allied Flemish forces or escape back to England.

[00:02:35]The French force was enormous, with contemporary chroniclers estimating that it numbered anywhere from 72,000 to 120,000 men, including approximately 8,000 heavily armored mounted knights and 4,000 hired Genoese crossbowmen.

[00:02:55]The English army, by contrast, was vastly outnumbered and was exhausted from weeks of marching.

[00:03:02]Edward chose to make his stand on a hillside near the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu.

[00:03:07]The position had several natural advantages.

[00:03:11]The left flank was anchored against the village of Wadicourt, while the right flank was protected by Crécy itself and the River Maye beyond, which made it difficult for the French to outflank the English position.

[00:03:23]While waiting for the French army to arrive, the English soldiers dug pits in front of their positions to disorder any attacking cavalry, and they set up several primitive gunpowder weapons.

[00:03:35]>> [snorts] >> The English king's plan was to provoke the French into launching a mounted charge uphill against his solid infantry formations of dismounted men-at-arms, who were backed by Welsh spearmen and flanked by thousands of longbowmen.

[00:03:50]Among the primitive gunpowder weapons that the English deployed were the ribauldequins, which were also known as organ guns because their multiple barrels resembled the pipes of a church organ.

[00:04:03]These weapons consisted of several small-caliber iron barrels that were mounted side by side on a wheeled cart.

[00:04:11]The ribauldequins could fire either large metal arrows or primitive grapeshot, but their primary tactical value was not their kinetic lethality.

[00:04:21]It was their capacity to generate acoustic terror.

[00:04:26]The Italian chronicler Giovanni Villani, who was a contemporary witness to the battle, wrote that the English guns made a noise like thunder and caused much loss in men and horses.

[00:04:38]Another chronicler named Mazzeri described the weapons as having struck terror into the French army, it being the first time they had seen such thundering weapons.

[00:04:50]The English strategy was brilliant in its simplicity.

[00:04:54]Instead of attempting to shoot through the thick steel armor of the French knights, which would have been nearly impossible with such primitive weapons, the gunners fired the ribauldequins specifically to generate blinding flashes of light and deafening unnatural thunderclaps.

[00:05:12]The massive and terrifying acoustics of the weapons instantly induced neurological shock and panic in the highly trained French warhorses.

[00:05:22]These were animals that had been bred and trained for years to charge into battle without fear, but nothing in their training had prepared them for the utterly alien sound of gunpowder explosions.

[00:05:34]The horses violently bucked and threw their riders, or they turned and fled in panic, or they simply collapsed in terror.

[00:05:43]The charge was completely decoupled from its momentum before the knights ever reached the English line. And the dismounted knights were then trapped in the deep [music] mud of the battlefield, where they became easy targets for the English longbowmen and infantrymen.

[00:05:58][music] The acoustic terror of the ribauldequins had transformed the invincible French cavalry into a disorganized mob of terrified animals and helpless men.