The father of King Richard the Second was a celebrated Prince of Wales, known in history as the Black Prince. The Black Prince, as his title Prince of Wales implies, was the oldest son of the King of England. His father was Edward the Third. The Black Prince was, of course, heir to the crown, and he would have been king had it not happened that he died before his father. Consequently, when at last his father, King Edward, died, Richard, who was the oldest son of the prince, and, of course, the grandson of the king, succeeded to the throne, although he was at that time only ten years old. The Christian name of the Black Prince was Edward. He was called the Black Prince on account of the color of his armor. The knights and warriors of those days were often named in this way from some peculiarity in their armor. Edward, being the oldest son of the king his father, was Prince of Wales. He was often called the Prince of Wales, and often simply Prince Edward; but, inasmuch as there were several successive Edwards, each of whom was in his youth the Prince of Wales, neither of those titles alone would be a sufficiently distinctive appellation for the purposes of history. This Edward accordingly, as he became very celebrated in his day, and inasmuch as, on account of his dying before his father, he never became any thing more than Prince of Wales, is known in history almost exclusively by the title of the Black Prince. But, although he never attained to a higher title than that of prince, he still lived to a very mature age. He was more than forty years old when he died. He, however, began to acquire his great celebrity when he was very young: he fought at the great battle of Crecy, in France, as one of the principal commanders on the English side, when he was only about seventeen years old. Crecy, or Cressy, as it is sometimes called, is situated on the banks of the River Somme, in the northeast part of France. The circumstances under which the battle in this place was fought are as follows. The King of England, Edward the Third, the father of the Black Prince, laid claim to the throne of France. The ground of his claim was that, through his grandmother Isabel, who was a daughter of the French king, he was the nearest blood-relation to the royal line, all the other branches of the family nearer than his own being extinct. Now the people of France were, of course, very unwilling that the King of England should become entitled to the French crown, and they accordingly made a certain Prince Philip the king, who reigned under the title of Philip the Sixth. Philip was the nearest relative after Edward, and he derived his descent through males alone, while Edward, claiming, as he did, through his grandmother Isabel, came through a female line.