A Great and Glorious Adventure (11 page)

In addition to his warhorse, the armoured warrior would also have a palfrey, a hack to be ridden when not in battle and not encumbered by armour, and a packhorse to carry his kit. Fodder for a
minimum of three horses per man and rations for him and the host of camp-followers, to say nothing of the cost of horses and armour, made the armoured knight a very expensive fellow, but it was not
cost that forced his decline and eventual banishment from the battlefield altogether, but advances in technology and the quality of the infantry.

During the Welsh wars, the English began to have doubts about the merits of an army composed mainly of heavy cavalry: the hills and valleys of Wales did not lend themselves to flat-out charges
or to wide envelopment, and the Welsh infantry spearman was generally able to put up a stout defence unless surprised and scattered. There were other pointers: at Courtrai in 1302, a Flemish
infantry army had roundly defeated the flower of the French heavy cavalry by digging ditches across the approaches to their position and then standing on the defensive. The French duly charged, the
impetus was destroyed by horses falling into or breaking legs in the ditches, and the Flemish won the day. As far as the English were concerned, it was Bannockburn that began to bring it home to
thinking soldiers that well-organized and equipped infantry, however ill-bred, could see off the mounted host if they could bring their
enemy to battle on ground of their
choosing. There, on 23 June 1314, Robert Bruce’s Scottish army took up a dismounted position at one end of a flat field, with both his flanks protected by woods and marshes. His men dug holes
and ditches, three feet deep by three feet wide, across the inviting approaches, camouflaged them with wooden trellises covered with grass and leaves, and waited. Having had his vanguard repulsed
on that day while trying to move round the Scottish flank to reach Stirling and relieve its siege, Edward II ordered, as expected, a cavalry charge on 24 June. It was a disaster. The Scots infantry
did not flee, and by presenting a wall of pikes they prevented even those horsemen who did negotiate the obstacles from getting anywhere near them. Eight years later, Sir Andrew Harcla’s
wedge of pikemen supported by archers stopped Thomas of Lancaster’s infantry and cavalry getting across the only bridge over the River Ure at Boroughbridge, while an attempt to put cavalry
across by a nearby ford was stopped by archers alone.

Very few radical advances in tactics come all at once or are the product of one commander’s thinking. The shift towards reliance on infantry in England and Scotland was not a sudden one
but a product of experimentation and discussion at home and abroad. Many Scots took service as mercenaries in Europe and would have brought home ideas from Flanders, and the costs of the mounted
arm would have forced rulers to consider cheaper alternatives. But there can be little doubt that the rout of Bannockburn accelerated English thinking, while skirmishes at home gave scope for
trying out various combinations of archer, horse and foot.

That the English had absorbed the lessons of Bannockburn and Boroughbridge was duly confirmed at Dupplin Moor and Halidon Hill. At Dupplin Moor, six miles south-west of Perth, on 11 August 1332,
the 1,500-strong army of the Disinherited – nominally commanded by Edward Balliol but with English advisers there with the unofficial blessing of Edward III – defeated the Bruce army of
3,000 commanded by Donald, earl of Mar. The Disinherited lost two English knights and thirty-three men-at-arms. The Scots losses are unknown but included three earls and must have been many
hundreds. On 19 July the following year at Halidon Hill, two miles north-west of Berwick-upon-Tweed, an English army of around 4,000 led by Edward III in person roundly defeated Sir Archibald
Douglas’s 5,000-strong Scots army. Again, English losses were negligible
– one knight, one esquire and ten infantrymen of various sorts – while Douglas and
five Scots earls were killed and an unknown number of lesser nobles and soldiers, perhaps as many as 1,000 all told. After Halidon Hill, there was no one left in Scotland capable of raising an army
and Robert Bruce’s kingdom was effectively at an end.

Both Dupplin Moor and Halidon Hill had a number of factors in common which enabled English armies to inflict crushing defeats on greater numbers, and those factors were to be incorporated in
English military doctrine for the Hundred Years War. In each case, archers formed the largest portion of the armies and the victorious commanders chose to stand on a piece of ground where their own
flanks were secure and which restricted the frontage of the enemy. At Dupplin Moor, the Disinherited took up a defensive position at the head of a steep-sided valley, while at Halidon Hill
Edward’s right flank was covered by the sea and on his left was marshy ground with a river flowing through it. In both cases, English forces fought on foot, including Edward himself at
Halidon Hill, in two ranks with archers on the flanks, and in both cases the archers concentrated their arrow storms on the advancing Scots flanks, forcing them to close in towards their centre and
reducing their frontage and hence their shock effect still more. By the time the Scots finally reached the English infantry line (or failed to do so at Halidon Hill), they had suffered so many
casualties from the archers that their cohesion was broken and they were repulsed and fled. The pursuit was taken up by the English remounting their horses and following the defeated Scots. The
policy of dismounting and standing on the defensive on carefully chosen ground, using archers to prevent outflanking moves and to break up enemy attacking formations, and presenting a solid mass of
infantry in a two- or four-deep line to meet the attacking remnants was the recipe for the great English victories of the war. It was only when the English overreached themselves, and the French
finally began to learn from their own defeats, that English military supremacy began to wane.

Technology came in the shape of the longbow. Bows and arrows are as old as prehistoric man: simple missile weapons, they are depicted in Palaeolithic and Neolithic cave paintings, and
archaeological excavations have uncovered bows and arrows dating back to the third millennium
BC
.
⁸
Bows were in use by
Roman auxiliaries and light hunting bows were
used by both sides at Hastings in 1066. Quite how and where the short bow, drawn back to the chest and with its limited range
and penetrating power, mutated into the English longbow is uncertain: it would not have been a sudden change, and the longbow may have first been used by the southern Welsh in the second half of
the twelfth century, although the evidence is scanty. It was anyway gradually, and eventually enthusiastically, adopted by the English, and, as a reluctance to spend money on defence is not
confined to twenty-first-century British governments, its cheapness would have appealed. The longbow would become the English weapon of mass destruction; it was consistently ignored by
England’s enemies, who would consistently be slaughtered by it. From the time of Edward I’s Assize of Arms in 1285, all free men were required to keep weapons at home and to practise
archery regularly at the village butts, for the longbow was not something that could be picked up and used by anybody. Rather like Scottish pipers, archers began to develop their skills as
children, gradually increasing the size and ‘pull’ of their bows as they grew up. Exhumed bodies of medieval archers show greatly developed, or over-developed, shoulder and back
muscles.

The standard longbow was made of yew wood, either native English yew or imported from Ireland, Spain or Italy, and approximated in length to the height of the archer. Thus, there would not have
been very many that were six feet in length, as modern reproductions are. Rather, the average would have been around five feet two or three. While originally the same craftsman would manufacture
bows and arrows, this soon diverged into two trades, the bowyers who made bows and the fletchers who made arrows, each with their own guild. The bow had a pull of around 100 pounds and shot a
‘cloth yard’ arrow out to an effective range of about 300 yards. There is dispute over exactly how long a cloth yard was, the measurement being one used by Flemish weavers, many of whom
were encouraged to come to England by Edward III. Definitions vary from 27¼ to 37 inches, the latter supposedly codified by Edward VI, the short-lived son of Henry VIII, while some sources
describe an arrow as being an ell in length. As an English ell was 45 inches, this seems unlikely. Whatever the length of the arrow – and the shorter seems more realistic – its
construction was a skilled affair, requiring the fletcher to obtain good straight wood for the shaft, usually ash, to cut it to the correct length, and to affix the arrowhead
and the feathers to stabilize the arrow in flight. Three pinion feathers per arrow were required and generally came from a goose. As a goose only had six feathers that were suitable,
three on each wing, which regrew annually, and as many hundreds of thousands of arrows were ordered during the wars, the goose population in the kingdom must have been considerable.

Arrowheads came in two basic types: one to pierce flesh with broad barbs; the other, much narrower with a sharp point and no barbs, to penetrate armour. While the arrow was said to be capable of
going through an inch of oak at a hundred yards, it would not have gone through plate armour except at relatively close range and at a flat trajectory. The usual way of employing archers was to
mass them and have them shoot volleys at a 45-degree angle, thus obtaining maximum range and ensuring that they struck from above. While this might not immediately kill armoured cavalrymen, it
would wound them, panic their horses and generally discourage an enemy from pressing home his charge. As a competent archer was expected to be able to discharge ten arrows a minute, the 5,000 or so
archers that Henry V had at Agincourt in 1415 could produce a horrifying arrow storm of 25,000 arrows every thirty seconds.

The other missile weapon in general use was the crossbow. This was made of a composite of wood and horn, and even steel, and shot a bolt, or quarrel, of iron, steel or ash with more force to a
greater range and with more accuracy than the longbow; but the effort and the length of time needed to pull the bowstring back to engage with the trigger meant that its rate of discharge was only
around two quarrels a minute. The English generally only employed the crossbow as a defensive weapon in castles and fortified places. It could, however, be shot from behind cover, unlike the
longbow, and unlike the longbow required little training to use. In the field, crossbowmen carried a large shield, a pavise. As tall as a man and with an easel-type leg at the back allowing it to
stand up unsupported, this afforded the crossbowman cover while he reloaded. The French did have some longbowmen but presumably considered the training and development not to be worth the effort.
Still fighting their wars with a feudal host, they employed large numbers of mercenary crossbowmen, to their detriment as we shall see.

In England, contracts for very large numbers of bows and arrows were placed. In 1341, when the king had returned from France and was
gearing up for another foray there,
7,700 bows and 12,800 sheaves of arrows were purchased and stored in the Tower of London.
⁹
A sheaf was twenty-four arrows, so the astonishing total
of 307,200 arrows, with the feathers of 153,600 geese, was still only three minutes’ shooting for the 10,000 archers that Edward was intending to take to France. The rate of purchase
continued throughout the war, and, in 1421, the crown bought and stored in the Tower 425,000 arrows, to which 212,500 geese had contributed. A sheriff would receive written instructions from London
to obtain a certain number of bows, arrows and bowstrings from his bailiwick, and he would place the order with local craftsmen, receive the finished product, box them up and despatch them to the
Tower. Bows might be ‘white’ – that is, in natural wood – or painted, although this latter could refer to some form of preservative oil, as paint would soon flake off when
the bow was flexed. The accounts of the chamberlain of Chester Castle show that he paid one shilling and sixpence (£0.075) for a bow, and one shilling and fourpence (£0.064) for a sheaf
of arrows.
¹⁰
Today a replica longbow costs around £300 and arrows are £130 a sheaf. While in 1346 Edward would take foot and mounted
archers to France, thus reducing his speed of movement, the foot archers would be phased out over time, and by the following decade most archers would be mounted – that is, they would move on
horseback while dismounting to fight. Archers were protected by an iron or steel helmet and wore a ‘jack’, a short, quilted jacket sewn with iron studs. An archer-heavy army was ideal
for the English: bows and arrows were cheap, laws were enacted to ensure that the male population remained proficient in their use, and they were an early example of English armies using technology
as a force multiplier when opposed by far more numerous enemies.

The other major element of the English military machine was the man-at-arms, the successor of the heavily armoured mounted knight. Men-at-arms were mainly of gentle birth, ranging from actual
knights or those hoping to become knights to esquires or minor gentry, usually in the proportion of one knight to four others.
¹¹
Like the mounted
archers, they moved on horseback but fought on foot. As the transition from mounted to dismounted battle took place, the shield they carried grew smaller and eventually was dispensed with
altogether. Men-at-arms were still well protected, although, unlike their French equivalents, mainly in mail, rather than plate, armour. While they were equipped with swords – and a variety
of axes, maces and daggers were also carried – their main weapon was the halberd, or half-pike. The chronicles are lacking in details about exactly how the men-at-arms
fought, but it is likely that they were drawn up in two or four ranks, depending on the frontage to be covered, close together but not so close that they could not swing their weapons, with each
man taking up two-and-a-half feet or so of frontage. Another infantry element was the spearman, or light infantryman, many of whom were Welsh. They formed up in schiltrons or phalanxes to present a
hedge of spears to an attacker who, once impaled on a spear, would be finished off with what were described as knives but were in fact short swords. Finally, the infantry included skirmishers and
scouts, lightly armed with javelins and daggers, whose main occupation when not scouting seems to have been cutting the throats of enemy wounded. They were recruited from Wales, Cornwall and
Ireland, with a few renegade Scots.