There can be no doubt of the fact that England's successes in the Hundred Years' War were attributable almost solely to the combination of longbowmen and dismounted men-at-arms that she field on almost every occasion, a combination which had evolved from experience gained in the field in actions against the Scots during the early decades of the 14th century. Bannockburn and similar encounters had taught them the uselessness of cavalry when confronted by determined, close-order, spear-armed infantry, and soon they began to emulate the Scottish practice of dismounting their men-at-arms. The same bitter experiences also taught them to appreciate and fully utilize the devastating power of the longbow, which led in turn to the evolution of the characteristic English battle formation, of dismounted men-at-arms between forward-angled bodies of archers, that was was employed for the entire duration of the war.
Geoffrey le Baker's chronicle, written 1357-60, includes the observation that the English had been mostly accustomed to fighting on foot, imitating the Scots, ever since Stirling' (by which he means Bannockburn), and despite a contradictory statement elsewhere in his work that Halidon Hill was the 'first battle where the English men-at-arms fought on foot, in conscious imitation of the Scots', it is clear that the English had begun to dismount by the 1320's at the latest; the Lanercost chronicler says that the practice began in 1322, at Boroughbridge, while Froissart records of Edward III's 1327 expedition that, encountering the Scots, the English were ordered to dismount and take off their spurs, and drew up in 3 battles'. That, once dismounted, they drew up in close array, tighter than that of the French, is evident from remarks in contemporary sources, such as Froissart, who says of the English formation at the minor engagement of Nogent-sur-Seine (1359) that 'they kept so closely together that they could not be broken'; similarly, at the the Combat of the Thirty the Anglo-Bretons fought shoulder to shoulder so tightly that the French were unable to separate them. As for the depth of their formation, at Agincourt they drew up 4-deep, but presumably where more men were available deeper formations might be utilized.
.....cavalry were thereafter [after Poitiers] little used in battle in France or England, though they finally underwent something of a revival in the 15th century, largely brought about, it has been argued, by the adopt of the arret de cuirasse [it is a place in your armor to rest your lance butt]; this gave the lance greater rigidity on impact, thereby imparting greater penetration, which was necessary to counter the heavier armor being worn for protection against arrow-fire. Regardless, however, of whether or not they remained in the saddle once they reached the battlefield, heavy cavalry remained the nucleus of most European armies throughout this period.
As already stated, English men-at-arms drew up in bodies of archers positioned on their flanks. This formation seems to have been first employed at Dupplin Muir in 1332 and proved such as success that it was once repeated at Halidon Hill the next year, but with the significant difference that instead of there being just one such body the army was instead divided into 3 divisions (the traditional 3 'battles' of all medieval armies), each with its own forward-angled flanking archers so that when drawn up side by side wedges of archers were established, as can be seen in the diagrams below:
This was the formation used virtually unchanged thereafter for the duration of the war. It was usually drawn up before or between woods or hedgerows so that it was difficult for horsemen to attack from the flank or rear, and occasionally small holes were dug to the front as a further defensive measure, another trick probably learnt from the Scots. Baker says that Crecy the English 'dug a large number of pits in the ground near their front line, each a food deep and a foot wide, so that if the French cavalry approached, their horses would stumble in the pits'. This same precaution was still being employed even in the war's closing stages, being utilized, for example, at Formigny in 1450.
The word 'herce' which appears on the diagrams was one used by contemporary chroniclers to describe the wedge-shaped formation of English archers - Froissart uses it, for instance, to describe their array at Crey. Its derivation is uncertain, and though it is generally thought to have been named after the continental harrow another possible derivation is the from the French hericion, meaning a bristly fence or hedgehog. The wedge-like form of the herce of archers is confirmed by a French chronicle, which describes the archers at Crecy as drawn up 'in the shape of a shield'.... The particular advantages of this formation, of course, were that (a) attacking troops, with their heads down in the face of the arrow storm, tended to veer away from the archers and were thus channeled towards the waiting men-at-arms, and (b) it enabled the archers to enfilade the enemy as he approached and engaged the said men-at-arms - Geoffrey le Baker specifically says that by being placed on the wings of each battle the archers 'did not hinder the men-at-arms, nor did they meet the enemy head-on, but could catch them in the crossfire.' This also allowed a reasonable amount of flexibility. To quote J.E. Morris: 'The archers are not to be regarded as animated dummies; they could spread out in lines parallel to their men-at-arms, gall the enemy as he approached, or by their galling volleys compel him to approach, and then fall back into their wedge-like formation as his charge was pressed home.' A continuous, concentrated hail of arrows could therefore be laid down.
The range and rate of fire of the longbow are points on which few authorities seem to entirely agree. However it seems probably that its maximum range with the lightest possible type of arrow was around 300 yards (Shakespeare, in 'King Henry IV, part II', records 280-290 yards as a notable feat) and its effective range around 200 yards, though in a trial carried out in 1550 an arrow was actually shot through an inch thick seasoned timber at about 250 yards. Modern tests indicate that a 100 lb bow could have fired a bodkin (armour-piercing) arrow some 240 yards, and a heavier broadhead arrow about 200, though these ranges could be increased by the use of heavier bows or lighter arrows. This was nevertheless well short of a crossbow's range - 15th century sources give 210 yards as effective crossbow range, and 370-380 yards as maximum range - but the real advantage of the longbow was not its range but rather its rate of fire. Robert Hardy, a noted expert on the longbow as well as a fine actor, states in his book 'Longbow' that it is quite possible to fire 15 'reasonably aimed arrows' in a minute, while in the mid-19th century Prince Louis Napoleon was of the opinion that an archer who, having fired 12 shots in a minute, once missed his target, 'was very lightly esteemed.' Certainly it is possible to fire 6 individually aimed arrows within a minute, and this is the rate of fire that most authorities have settled on, though Hardy prefers 10 and Fowler, in 'The Age of Plantagenet and Valois', says 10-12. The crossbow, by comparison, could fire only one or two shots per minuted because of the length of time involved in reloading. The latter figure actually tallies with the estimate of the Italian chronicler Giovanni Villani if we accept 6 arrows per minute as being the longbow's rate of fire, for he says that longbows could fire 3 arrows for each one crossbow bolt. Froissart says only that 'archers are much more rapid in shooting than crossbowmen.' At such high rates of fire the longbowman's ammunition would not last very long, of course (he normally entered battle with a minimum of one or two sheaves - 24 or 48 arrows - though probably a hundred or so per archer were available if we include those carried in the baggage train, which were undoubtedly issued prior to battle); at Hardy's rate of 10 arrows a minute even a hundred would soon be used up. However, it is unlikely that a prolonged barrage was very often called for. The Monk of Malmesbury tells us that 'after the third or fourth, or at very most the sixth, draw of the bows men knew which side would win', which implies that it took between 3-6 volleys to break a charge. Arrows could also be retrieved between charges, as they were at Poitiers where, Baker tells us, after the defeat of the first two French battles the archers 'hastened to pull their arrows out of wretches who were still half-alive'.
Such was the maelstrom into which the French resolutely hurled their attacks, at first on horseback, later on both horse and foot. At Crecy their cavalry reputedly charged the English line as many as 15 or 16 times amid a storm of arrows 'flying in the air as thick as snow, with a terrible noise, much like a tempestuous wind preceding a tempest, they did leave no unarmored part of man or horse unstricken'. Indeed, such concentrated fire wreaked terrible execution among unarmored horses... Yet despite such experiences the French continued to retain at least some of their men-at-arms mounted in battle, normally as wings ahead of the vanguard, for the set purpose of flanks. At Agincourt, for instance, some 2,300 mounted men-at-arms were detailed for this task, thought few survived to charge home (the 800 on the left were whittled down to 140 before they closed). Those at Poitiers, 'ordered to attack the archers at the beginning of the battle', fared somewhat better, being mounted on armored horses which 'offered the archers as a target only their forequarters, which were well protected by steel plates and leather shields, so that the arrows aimed at them either shattered or glanced heavenwards, falling on friend and foe alike.' (The Earl of Oxford, observing the ineffectiveness of his fire, led his archers out to one side and ordered them to aim at the horses' unprotected hindquarters which, thus wounding them, caused them to throw their riders and stampede off through their own ranks, wreaking 'not a little slaughter among their masters.') Despite such disasters, however, it is clear that this tactic could sometimes be successful as, for example, at Mauron in 1352. As late as 1434 Christine de Pisan, in her 'Fays d'armes et de Chevalerie', still records that 'a troop of men-at-arms should remain mounted to disorganize the enemy's formation.'
The English, in fact, still deemed such cavalry detachments enough of a threat during the Agincourt campaign in 1415 to introduce an extra defensive measure, ordaining that each archer henceforth carry with him a stake. This was to be 6 feet long and sharpened at both ends; in battle each man was to 'fix his before him in front, and those who were behind him, other stakes intermediately, one end being fixed in the ground towards them and the other sloping towards the enemy, higher than a man's waist from the ground'. The resultant barricade proved it worth in the ensuing engagement, where several of those few cavalry who survived the arrow storm were impaled on the stakes (we know that at least 3 horses were brought down this way; this was exceptional since usually a horse will refuse to gallop at such an obviously dangerous obstacle). Thereafter English archers were always equipped with such stakes on campaign, and before long the French and Burgundians were copying them. Commynes mentions the Burgundians using stakes at Montl'hery in 1465, for example, implying that they had probably done so since 1435 at the latest, and probably since 1423. The French were probably somewhat slower, but were certainly occasionally using stakes by 1449 at the latest.
Once the enemy had actually closed the archers would cease fire and instead get stuck-in with hand weapons. The Sire de St Remy, who fought for the English at Agincourt, records how there the archers 'quitted their stakes, threw down their bows and arrows and, seizing their swords, axes and other weapons, sallied out upon them, and ... killed and disabled the French'. Baker, describing the Battle of Poitiers, gives a good account of the closing moments of a French advance: 'Flying spears cascaded from polished shields, their points finding their mark like thunderbolts. Then the threatening mob of crossbowmen darkened the sky with a dense mist of bolts, and the archers replied with a hail of arrows from the English side, who were now in a state of desperate fury. Ashwood javelins flew through the air to greet the enemy at a distance, and the dense troops of the French army, protecting their bodies with joined shields, turned their faces away from the missiles. So the archers emptied their quivers in vain, but, armed with swords and shields, they attacked the heavily-armored enemy'.
An ordinance issued by the English before Cravant in 1423 ordered that in battle horsemen were to dismount on pain of death, and their horses were to be left half a league (about 1.5 miles) to the rear on pain of confiscation of any horse found nearer than the prescribed distance.
[French experimenting tactics, trying to counter the English tactics, cavalry detachments etc]
Another tactical measure experimented with by the French at much the same date was the adoption by their infantry of large shields called pavises: Froissart describes how at Nogent-sur-Seine such infantry 'broke through the line of archers and flung them in disorder; for their shields were so strong the arrows made no impression on them.' Similarly, we are told that at the Battle of Cocherel (1364) the archers 'shot fiercely together, but the Frenchmen were so well armed and so strongly pavised that they took but little hurt... and so entered in among the English and Navarrese', and again at Auray 'the English archers shot well, but their arrows hurt not, as the French were well armed and shielded from them'.
[now some information on Genoese crossbowmen, how they were on the ultimate flanks of French armies, how French armies drew up in columns instead of the English lines.]
Christine de Pisan records that it was the usual practice of 15th century French armies to draw up in 3 battles, of which the first had men-at-arms in the centre and 'all manner of shooters... as well gunners as crossbowmen and archers' on the flanks. A Burgundian ordinance of 1417 similarly advised that 'all the archers and crossbowmen... should be mustered under 2 small standards in 2 wings in front of the vanguard.'
[some information, supported by Christine de Pisan and records of Agincourt, about how larger armies are harder to control, harder to retreat, and how smaller armies are much more efficient. It goes on to point out that the French fielded no more armies in excess of 10,00 men from about 1430 until the latter part of the century]
All in all it was therefore the English who retained the morale ascendancy, from the 1340's right up until the coming of Joan of Arc in 1429, prior to whom, as the Comte de Dunois himself admitted, '200 English would put to flight 800 or 1,000 Frenchmen'. |
Battle Rules, Unit Changes, Building Changes
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Originally Posted by Pontifex Maximus
