Cadzand was nothing in itself. A scatter of fishing huts on saltmarsh, ringed by tidal channels, valuable to no king and to most maps barely worth a name. But it sat just across a narrow channel from Sluys, the wealthy Flemish port whose merchants paid taxes to a French-aligned count. That was the point. Sir Walter Manny, commanding the English vanguard from his base in Hainaut, understood his orders precisely. He was not there to take territory. He was there to make a wound the Sluys garrison would feel obligated to bandage. The thirty-seven hundred sailors and soldiers he landed on 9 November had failed in a quick probe against Sluys town itself. They turned instead on the villages of Cadzand.

The medieval chroniclers reach for the word chevauchee, the polite French term for what English armies did when they wanted to terrorize a region without the cost of a siege. The honest description is uglier. For several days, English troops looted, raped, and burned their way through fishing hamlets whose inhabitants had no walls to retreat behind and no garrison to call. There are no names of victims in the surviving records. There rarely are. What the chroniclers do preserve is the strategic logic: the suffering was the point, because suffering loud enough would force the Sluys garrison out from behind its walls. The villagers were bait, and they were used as bait was used in the fourteenth century, which is to say without mercy and without later apology.

Sir Guy de Rickenbourg, illegitimate son of Louis, Count of Flanders, commanded the Sluys garrison. He could not let an English raiding force pillage Flemish villages within sight of his town and keep his honor or his job. He crossed the channel. Manny was waiting. The English had chosen their ground carefully, formed up in a defensive position the Flemish had to attack uphill and into bowfire. No detailed account of the fighting survives, but historians read between the lines confidently: this was an early demonstration of the English longbow against close-packed continental infantry, the same weapon and the same arithmetic that would later destroy French knights at Crecy and Agincourt. A handful of Flemings made it back across the water. The rest were killed where they stood. Guy of Flanders was captured along with the other noblemen worth ransom.

Manny abandoned Cadzand to its survivors within days. Strategically the raid had done its job: Edward's continental allies were impressed, French border regions were intimidated, and the war that would last until 1453 had its opening blow. The unintended consequence was uglier. King Philip VI of France, convinced that only Flemish treachery could explain the defeat, launched waves of terror and executions across Flanders that continued for the rest of his reign and steadily alienated the very subjects he was trying to keep loyal. Ten years later, after Flanders rose against French rule and became England's ally, Edward III himself was forced to apologize for ordering the raid and pay symbolic reparations to communities whose ancestors his soldiers had butchered.

Three years after Cadzand, in June 1340, Edward III's fleet sailed back into these same waters and crushed the French navy at the Battle of Sluys, sinking or capturing nearly the entire enemy fleet and effectively giving England command of the Channel for a generation. Today there is no island of Cadzand. Centuries of silting and reclamation have welded it to the mainland Netherlands as a quiet corner of Zeelandic Flanders, all dunes and seaside villas. The channel where the Flemish levies drowned trying to flee is dry land planted with sugar beets. The war that began here would outlive Edward, his son the Black Prince, his grandson, his great-grandson, and Joan of Arc.