Crecy

William of Stonham: This is a story about the English and the French and why the English hate the French. Which is because they eat frogs, they smell bad, and they're twenty five miles away.

Crécy; "The Death Of Chivalry", "How Nightmarishly Annoying Arrows Really Are", or "How Badass English Archers Made French Cunts Stop Invading England".

A short black & white comic by Warren Ellis published in 2007 about the historical Battle of Crécy.

Tropes used in Crecy include:

• Annoying Arrows: Crécy is all about how truly annoying arrows really are, as in how widespread archery put an end to medieval warfare. A lot of work was put into making arrows into incredibly lethal weapons. They discouraged crossbows as longbows could be quickly strung or unstrung - this meant drawstrings could be removed during rainstorms to keep them dry. Archers were trained to use them as Swiss Army Weapons; they carried three types of arrowheads - normal arrowheads, bodkins for piercing plate armor, swallowheads for killing horses. They sometimes applied the heads to the arrows with candlewax, but they usually just spit on the ends of the shaft to secure them - this ensured that trying to yank out the arrow would cause the head to detach, meaning that one would have to aggravate the wound in the process of removing it. Finally, they stuck the arrows in the dirt prior to firing them - this ensured that contaminants would be carried into the wound. English archers were thus able to take better care of their weapons than French crossbowmen, and those weapons were both more versatile and inherently more lethal.
  • The narrator points out the Genoese mercenary crossbowmen hired by the French were brutally lethal as well: they had the training and equipment to fire an arrow a hundred and fifty yard every seven and a half seconds, and the pavise they crouch behind renders them invulnerable save the exact moment they fire.
    • The catch is that the damned things weigh around twenty pounds each, meaning they're too heavy for a crossbowman to carry as part of his ruck while marching - they had to be brought to the battlefield by baggage train. And a good archer can fire a Trick Arrow two hundred and fifty yards every five seconds. Crossbowmen were meant to slaughter infantry, not exchange fire with people who can actually shoot back.

William of Stonham: These things may look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we're not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you, we simply don't have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.

• Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: It is pointed out that the French at the time were the Badass Army and the English were this trope (speculated to be parsnip eating surrender monkies). This comic is about The Heavily Outnumbered English Army giving France one of the most one-sided Curb Stomp Battles in History (guess who lost). With Annoying Arrows (annoying as they kill the fuck out of so many silly French kniggits that they eliminate the concept of knighthood).
• Country Matters: It features this gem:

In England, the word "cunt" is punctuation.

• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The book is a warts-and-all depiction of the famous Battle of Crécy in 1346. The narrator acknowledges the dissonance, describing himself as "a complete bloody xenophobe who comes from a time when it was acceptable to treat people from the next village like they were subhumans" and admitting that by modern standards his side have been "acting like evil pricks", but reminds the reader that the other side are even worse.
• Hundred Years' War
• Rain of Arrows: The comic explains how it's done in real life. Basically, you teach all your soldiers to shoot at the same range, then everyone fires together and something's bound to get hit.
• "V" Sign: The main character is an archer who does this at the end of the book. This refers to the urban legend that the offensive V-sign came from the French cutting off the fingers of captured English longbowmen.

I can kill you from three hundred yards away with these.