A few months after Crecy a Scotch army marched over the border and faced on the seventeenth of October an English force at Neville's Cross.

But it was soon broken by the arrow-flight of the English archers, and the Scotch king David Bruce was taken prisoner.

The withdrawal of the French from the Garonne enabled Henry of Derby to recover Poitou.

Edward meanwhile with a decision which marks his military capacity marched from the field of Crecy to form the siege of Calais.

No measure could have been more popular with the English merchant class, for Calais was a great pirate-haven and in a single year twenty-two privateers from its port had swept the Channel.