Infantry - A Summary

The French men-at-arms charged through the crossbowmen by the king’s orders, spearing and trampling them, but they were themselves shot down by English arrows, or overthrown by one another in the press. As King Edward wrote, there died more than 1500 knights and esquires in the part of the field where the armies first came together. Nevertheless “the battle was very tough and lasted long, for it lasted from before the hour of vespers till evening, and the enemy bore themselves very nobly and often rallied.”  They made three main attacks, directing their efforts against the English, and apparently neglecting the archors. The Prince’s ” battle ” was so hard pressed that Northampton moved up to its assistance, and the king also sent some twenty or thirty knights in reply to an urgent appeal. But the “battles” remained unbroken, the English losses were trifling, and in the course of the night the French army melted away, leaving many thousands on the field.

It was not the first time that crossbow and longbow had been pittied one against the other, but the conditions at Crecy made the most of the advantages which bel opged to the lat ter. The six-foot bow had longer range than the ordinary crossbow, and three or four times tEielrate15T Hre. A good archer could shoot two arrows . in a minute ; he would seldom miss at 2:0 yards (the standard practice range) and could send his arrows twice that distance. On the other hand, the crossbow required less strength and skill; it could be used lying down or Uadeir cover; its bolts were much cheaper than arrows, and much more plentiful. The archer in the field had only his sheaf of twenty-four arrows, and in provisioning a place for a siege the allowance of bolts for each crossbow was ten times that of arrows for each longbow. At .short ranges the crossbow was reckoned the more accurate weapon, and Edward III. told the Sherifi’s of London in 1349 to encourage the use of it, as well as the use of the longbow.

The French learnt at Crecy that they must be ready to fight on foot; but they did not learn to choose the defensive, nor did they provide themselves with better shot. In the army of 50,000 men with which Philip’s successor, John, attacked the Black Prince near Poitiers (September 19, 1356) there seem to have been only 2000 crossbowmen, and their shooting had no great fi-o.t Fdward was returning from his raid to the loS: Hetad only BOOO men (English d Gas.n of whom 3000 were men-at-arms and 2000 archers Findtg himself overtaken, he chose a strong position on the richt bank of the Miosson, ” among hedges, vines ad bush;.” The English were short of food and migh Tave been starved out, if John had sent a force to he left side of the stream to bar their hne of retreat. Appth n ive of this, they were in the act of crossing the r’am when the battle began, and the rearguard was continuous hedge along front of  position except for one gap where the road o the ford pa sed trough it. The hedge was lined with archer . Td a stone-rthrow behind the gap Salisbury’s men-at ..0.S were drawn up on foot, with their archers n f.n of them ” in manner of a herse.” On the left was War ik’ “battle,” while that of the Prince was held m eserve The French army was also in three mam bod es the right under Orleans, the left under Normandy, afd L reserve under the king. Most of the men arms were dismounted, but mounted corps of a few Tndred men on barded horses were sent aW t “, th. archers The horse-armour proved ot httle eTvL r he :hers extended and struck the horses rrnk They became unmanageable, and caused conLion n the rinks of foot behind them The Prince made better use of his cavalry, sending -a 1 corps f to charge the enemy in flank and rear, while they were en.ageS There were collisions between the bodies of UsXntecl men-at-arms, but on a narrow front where personal strength told for more than  English were nearly worn out by repeated assaults and many of the archers had spent all their arrows, before the battle was won.’

According to Baker of Swynbrook, the archers were placed, not in front of the men-at-arms, but at the sides of the king’s army, like wings, so that they might not get in the way of the men-at-arms, nor meet the enemy face to face, but discharge their arrows at his flanks. Similarly a Valenciennes chronicler says that King Edward “ne fist que deux batailles d’archiers a deux costes en la maniere d’un escut ; et au milieu d’eulx se tenoit le prince de Galles.”  Froissart, on the contrary, says of the Prince’s “battle” that the archers were placed in front in the form of a “herse,” and the men-at-arms at the back. He mentions that in the course of the fight some of the French knights went round the archers, and others broke through them, and fought hand to hand with the Prince’s men-at-arms. King Philip would gladly have done the same, but there was such a great hedge of archers and men-atarms in front that he could not.

Sir John Smythe, who wrote when archers were still to be seen in the field, and described how they were drawn up by “our most skilful and warlike ancestors,” helps us to reconcile these conflicting statements. He says they were formed ” into hearses  that is broad in front and narrow in flank, as for example if there were 25, 30, 35, or more or fewer archers in front, the flanks did consist but of seven or eight ranks at the most. . . . They placed their hearses of archers either before the front of their armed footmen, or else in wings upon the corners of their battles, and sometimes both in front and wings.”  A contemporary plate of the battle of Pinkie (1547) shows the archers extended across the whole front of the three corps which are advancing to attack the Scots. George Monk, writing during the Civil War, shows how musketeers forming wings to a body of pikemen should be moved forward and spread out across its front for more eft’ective fire. We may conclude that the archers at Crecy were formed by companies of 100 men in oblongs not more than eight men deep, with open ranks and files, that their normal position was on the flanks of the men-at-arms and a little in advance of them, but that they may also have formed a continuous screen in their front, at all events at the beginning of the action. Shallow pits were dug in front of the line of battle, and would give the archers some protection from charging horsemen. ‘

It was late in the afternoon when the French army came up, but the impetuosity of the lords, each eager to be foremost, disregarded Philip’s orders to halt. The Genoese crossbowmen were sent forward, weary from a long march, and their bowstrings wet from rain, for they could not be taken off’ and put under cover like the string of the longbow. As they came on they gave great shouts at intervals to scare the English, and when they reckoned themselves within range they shot fiercely; but their bolts fell short. ” Then the English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so wholly and so thick that it seemed snow. When the Genoese felt the arrows piercing through heads, arms, and breasts, many of them cast down their crossbows and did cut their strings and returned discomfited.”

Such considerations as these, together with his previous experience at Halidon Hill, led Edward III. to make his Knight s dismount, when he turned to offer battle to Philip of Valois at Crecy (1346).’ Hejiad about 4000 cavalry, but nearly half of these were ” hobelars,” light-armed men mounted on little nags : and of the men-at-arms only one-fourth were ” knights ” in the restricted sense which the word had reached by that time. The rest were variously described as squires, sergeants, &c. In Philip’s army there were 12,000 men-at-arms, of whom two-thirds were “gentils gens,” and about 60,000 foot, mainly communal troops, but including 6000 Genoese crossbowmen and other mercenaries. The English army was under 20,000 men all told, but there were 10,000 archers, of whom one-fourth were mounted.

To make up for the disproportion of numbers an advantageous position was chosen between Crecy and Wadicourt, fronting south-cast. The right flank was covered by the forest of Crecy. There was a shallow valley in front, and in rear there was a small wood, by the side of which the king caused a park to be made, “and there was set all carts and carriages, and within the park were all their horses, for every man was afoot ; and into this park there was but one entry.” i The men-at-arms were formed in three “battles” with corps of archers, as_ at Halidon Hill ; that of the Prince of Wales was in front, that of Lord Northampton (rather weaker than the others) was in immediate support “on a wing,” and that of the king was in reserve on higher ground. Thus they were in echelon right in front.

At the battle of Bouvines (1214) the French cavalry were told  “One knight should not make another his shield; draw up so that all the knights may be in the front line.”  It seems likely that this was the general rule, and that at Crecy (as at Agincourt) the English men-at-arms were four deep. Behind them there would be hobelars, and other men less well armed, ” rascals that went afoot with great knives,” Welsh or Irish. Villani says that the English, when fighting on foot, formed a compact body, almost round (like a Scottish schildron), and that each lance was held by two men. An eighteen-foot lance was unwieldy for a single man on foot, but the common practice was to cut it down to a length of five feet, that dimension referring no doubt only to the part in front of the hand-grip.

It was by no means a new departure for English knights to fight on foot. To say nothing of the times before the Conquest, Henry I. won two victories with dismounted knights: Tenchebrai (1106) over his brother Robert, and Bremule (1119) over Louis VI. of France. At Tenchebrai he followed Robert’s example in making his knights dismount “ut constantius pugnarcnt,” but he kept a small body of French knights on horseback and posted them at some distance on his right, to charge the flank and rear of the enemy. At Bremule (according to Ordericus Vitalis) he dismounted 400 knights out of 500 in an open plain, and awaited the charge of the French knights, who as usual preferred to fight on horseback. They won some success at first, perhaps against Henry’s mounted detachment, but they could not break the men on foot ; many of their horses were killed, and the riders made prisoners ; the rest fled, including Louis himself. The Anglo-Norman knights remounted, and pursued them so vigorously that the French king was driven to take refuge in a wood, and his horse and banner were captured.

Again at the Battle of the Standard (1138) the EngHsh knights fought on foot, drawn up with the Yorkshire levies of spearmen and archers that had been brought together to check the Scotti.sh invasion. The Highlanders refused to let King David’s knights lead the way, and claimed the front place. Their wild rush made only a momentary impression on the armoured spearmen, and they bristled like hedgehogs, we are told, from the arrows of the archers. Their ardour was quenched, and  the Scottish army melted away to the rear, in spite of some success achieved by a small body of mounted knights.

Three years later, at the battle of Lincoln, Stephen fought on foot with the greater part of his knights and with the burghers of the city. He had two bodies of horsemen, but they were routed and driven off” the field, and the horse and foot of the two earls (Gloucester and Chester) then combined against the king’s corps, the foot charging it in front, while the horse fell upon its flanks and rear. After a stout resistance it broke up, many of the men seeking refuge in the city, and Stephen, who continued fighting by his standard, was overthrown and made prisoner.

Considering the weight of armour, it must have been a disagreeable necessity for knights to fight on foot. There seem to have been two motives for it : to encourage and stiffen bodies of less well-armed footmen which had been brought into the field, or to make a stand against an enemy to whom they were unequal as cavalry, either in numbers or quaUty. The French knights were said to be terrible on horseback, but little to be feared on foot. The Germans were described as unskilful horsemen, and better able to strike with the sword than to thrust with the lance, and it became recognised as a Teutonic custom to dismount in grave emergencies. But probably it was a question of horses rather than of men. Matthew Paris speaks of English knights being mounted ” in equis satis bonis, licet non Hispanis, vel Italicis, vel aliis preciosis.”  William the Conqueror had a Spanish charger, and the infusion of Arab blood made the horses of Southern Europe generally sought after ; but in England only the richest barons and knights could afford them. In the thirteenth century plate armour began to come into use, superseding mail. As it developed the weight to be carried by a barded war-horse increased, and became s omething over 25 sto ne. Flanders and the north of France produced the animals best suited to such heavy loads; they could not move rapidly for any distance, but men on lighter horses were at a great disadvantage in direct collision.

According to Giraldus Cambrensis, the South Welsh, especially the men of Gwent, excelled in archery. They had bows of elm so stout that they would serve for cudgels, and could send the point of an arrow through a three-inch door.i It became a rule in later days that the length of a bow should equal the archer’s reach with his arms outstretched, and Welshmen are abnormally long in the arm. Three hundred Welsh archers formed part of the first expedition to Ireland ; and the secret of success in Irish warfare, Gerald says, lay in mixing archers with the troops of knights. The spear was the weapon of the men of North Wales. The South Welsh were Edward’s allies, and in the first war against Llewelyn (1277) there were special corps of sagittarii nearly all of whom came from Gwent.

At Falkirk (1298) five-sixths of the foot in Edward’s army were Welsh. They numbered more than 10,000 men. Falkirk was a repetition of Hastings. y’allace’s horsemen and light troops were soon driven away, and the solid rings or ” schlldrons ” of his spearmen were at length demoralised and broken by the combined action of the English heavy cavalry and archers. At Bannockburn  a much larger English army hough its numbers must have been vastly exaggerated by the chroniclers  was less skilfully handled and met with disaster. The Scottish and English accounts differ, and may be best reconciled by supposing that Baker describes what took place on the English right, Barbour what occurred on the left. On the right, then, the English cavalry advanced along the Roman road with bogs on either side of them, and floundered into the pits or trenches which the Scots had dug in front of their position covered with grass and brushwood. The archers whom they had left behind, were brought up to help them, but did more harm than good ; for being in rear instead of on a flank, most of their arrows fell short of the enemy and wounded their own horsemen. On the left there was firmer ground, and there the archers were thrown out on the flank, after crossing the burn, to prepare and support the advance of the knights. But they were rolled up and swept away by a well-timed charge of a small body of light horsemen.

At Halidon Hill (1333) the tables were turned. Edward III. was besieging Berwick ; the Scots marched to its relief, and were obliged to be the assailants. Adopting a plan which had proved successful the year before at Dupplin Muir, Edward made his knights dismount, and formed them in three bodies or ” battles ” with wings of archers. The archers were posted in marshy ground which probably secured them from direct attack. The Scots were blinded by the rain of arrows as they advanced, and though they began to mount the slope on which the men-at-arms were drawn up, their courage failed, and they fled. Edward remounted his men and pursued them for several miles. The chronicler says: “Ibi didicit a Scotis Anglorum generosilas dextrarios reservare venacioni fugienciuin et contra antiquatum morem suorum patruni, pedes pugnare.”

For the foot English kings depended mainly on county levies. Military service, which was tending to become a matter of privilege abroad, was insisted on as the duty of all freemen. The arms and equipment which they were bound to have, according to their means, were specified by Henry II. in the Assize of Arms of 1181. The rules were revised by Henry III. in 1252, and by the Statute of Wmchester (1285); the bow was introduced among the weapons, and periodical inspection of arms was provided for. When a war broke out, commissioners of array were sent to the counties to take over from the sherifts the number of men called for, and to see that they were well chosen. Acts of Parliament provided that men sent abroad on the king’s service should be at the king’s wages (1344), and that no one should be forced to serve without the sanction of Parliament, unless he was bound by the terms of his tenure (1351). The foot were formed into bands of a score, a hundred, or a thousand, under vintcnars, centenars, and millenars. The muster rolls of 1339 show that out of a levy of 11,200 men (exclusive of men-at-arms) half were armed with hand weapons and the other half were archers.”

The bow was little used in England before the Conquest. It always played an important part in naval warfare, and just as the Athenians and the Genoese were quick to recognise its value, so the Vikings of the north made it one of their weapons, and prided themselves on their skill with it.i They seem to have dropped it when they settled in England. The ” huscaiies ” or bodyguard of Canute were armed with the two-handed Danish axe, and that weapon largely superseded the Saxon spear. At Hastings Harold’s best troops fought in the Danish fashion, on foot, armed with axes, and awaiting attack behind a stockade.They may have hung their shields on the stockade, as was done on the bulwarks of ships. But William was well provided with bowmen and crossbowmen, as well as with mailed horsemen, and it was by the co-operation of archers and cavalry that the battle was won. ” The Saxon mass was subjected to exactly the same trial which befell the British squares in the battle of Waterloo  incessant charges by a gallant cavalry mixed with a destructive hail of missiles.”  The stockade gave little protection against the curved flight of arrows, especially when they were aimed high, as the duke directed. Darts, axes, and stones made a feeble reply to them ; and sorties upon the assailants, sometimes provoked by feigned flights, ended in the rout of the men who made them. At length the Norman horsemen forced an entrance, and the English broke up.

From that time forward archers formed an important part of English armies, and archery was encouraged as a national sport. Fitzstephen speaks of it as one of the pastimes of Londoners in the time of Henry 11. Richard I. took a thousand bowmen with him when he went to Palestine. Henry III. m the Assize of Arms of 1252 required all forty-shilling freeholders to provide themselves with bow and arrows, and arrows were sometimes exacted for the tenure of lands. But the Norman bow was under live feet in length, and had no great range or penetration. The early Plantagenets preferred the crossbow. The six-foot long-bow with its cloth-yard shaft dates from the time of Edward I, and probably from his wars in Wales.

The coming of the Normans brought depression of the peasantry. A good deal of the land became the lord’s domain-land, and “churls” mostly saiak into “villeins,” serfs bound to the soil. Nevertheless, the divisions between classes were less sharp than in France. Between lords and villeins there were sokemen, who were freemen and freeholders in a limited sense; they served in the wars, and formed the yeoman class, described by Raleigh as “an order of men which generally have composed our better sort of foot soldiers, and with which few parts of the world besides England are acquainted.”  The Norman kings were not obliged or disposed to give their great vassals the independence and power which they enjoyed in France. William and his successors always had mercenary troops in their pay, which might be used against rebellious lords, and they encouraged the payment of scutage in lieu of military service as it furnished them with the means of hiring knights. Private war was restricted, and few nobles had strong castles except during the years of anarchy which preceded the rule of Henry II. The barons, when resisting aggressions of the crown, and the king, when upholding the royal authority, felt the need of help from the lower classes, and had to buy it by concessions. As time went on the status of the villeins improved, the services due from them to their lords were defined, they became well-to-do, and were able to commute their obligations for money which was readily accepted by lords bound on Crusades or distant expeditions. By the middle of the fourteenth century a large proportion of the peasantry had become hired labourers instead of villeins. There is a ring of good fellowship which would have seemed strange to a French prince in the speech of the Black Prince to his archers before the battle of Poitiers.

The armies which Edward III. led to France were national armies of paid soldiers. The drawbacks of feudal service had been keenly felt by Edward I. m his Welsh and Scottish wars. It yielded an ill-trained and undisciplined host which was not bound to remain more than forty days in the field. The twelfth century alternative, to accept scutage and hire foreign mercenaries, had been checked by Magna Carta, and could only be adopted on a small scale, as in the case of Gascon crossbowuien. The king might bargain with his vassals that they should furnish him with a reduced number of knights for an increased period, and so obtain a more useful force ; but this method did jiot prove sufficient, and Edward I. introduced thesystem of payment in spite of the opposition of the greater lords.i Of the 2400 men-at-arms which he took with him to Scotland in 1298, more than half were receiving wages from him.In the fourteenth century this developed into the indenture system, under which tEe king made contracts with certain leaders to furnish so many men at fixed rates of pay.

In England armies had passed through the same changes as in France, but the soil was less congenial to feudalism. Jutes and Anglo-Saxons came over in bands from different districts, and were only by slow degrees amalgamated into a nation. The Britons were mostly driven westward, instead of forming a subject population. The “folk” of each tribe controlled its affairs, and imposed restrictions on the right of private war. For war with other tribes, or defence against a foreign enemy, there was a general levy, the ” fyrd.” ” The folk-moot was in fact the war-host, the gathering of every freeman of the tribe in arms. . . . But the strength of an English army lay not only in these groups of villagers. Mingled with them were the voluntary war bands that gathered round distinguished chiefs.” ^ These bands of retainers were better equipped and more serviceable than the men of the fyrd, and superseded it in the time of stress caused by the inroads of the Norsemen. The sufferings of the people added to the power of the kings, who gave grants of land to their companions or ” thegns,” subject to the obligation of military service. The larger landlords made similar grants to their ” cnihts ” ; ‘^ sometimes weapons were provided as well as land. In Alfred’s time it was enacted that all owners of 5 hides of land. In England “knight” came to stand for the highest class of soldiery, while in Germany it dropped down to campfollowers. The knight was miles, not cqucs, while his equivalent abroad was ” Ritter ” or ” chevalier.” (probably 600 acres) should be reckoned as thegns and bound to thegn service, while smaller owners must combine to furnish an armed man for every 5 hides.

In England as in France, danger led the smaller land^ owners tojlace themselves under the protection of greater men, and to take an oath of fealty pledging themselves to be faithful and true, to love all that their lord loves and eschew all that he eschews.* The overlords took a similar oath to the king, and the king looked to them to bring the due number of armed men into the field. In this way something very like the feudal system was to be found in England before the Conquest, but it was developed by William I., who made grants to his followers on feudal tenure, and fixed the number of knights they were to furnish without much regard to hidage, by units of five or ten. The feudal force of England a century after the Conquest is estimated at 5000 knights.

The victories of Cceur de Lion were due to skilful cooperation of heavy cavalry and crossbowmen, whose bolts were further ranging and more deadly than the Turkish arrows.*^ So deadly were they that in 1139 A.D. the second Lateran Council condemned the use of the crossbow, except against infidels ; but it spread nevertheless, especially in France, Italy, and Germany. Borrowed from the balista, it seems to have been made available as a hand weapon only about the beginning of the eleventh century.

About this time a burgher militia began to grow up in the French towns. They obtained charters, either by purchase from their lords, who were in want of money for Crusades, or by appeals to the king. “The king has been said to be the founder of the communes, but the reverse is more nearly the truth ; it is the communes that established the king,” says Michelet. They were enabled by their charters to maintain a well-armed force, which was liable to be summoned for the king’s service, though it was seldom willing to go far from home. The towns of Picardy sent companies of crossbowmen to the army with which Philip Augustus won the battle of Bouvines (1214 a.d.). But he owed his victory to his men-at-arms. The French communal troops proved no match for the Flemish foot. The men who distinguished themselves most were some Braban9on mercenaries in King John’s pay, who refused to surrender and were cut to pieces.

The wealthy and turbulent cities of Flanders provided a sturdy militia, whose reputation gained greatly by their victory at Courtrai (1302 a.d.). It was something new and marvellous, as Villani says, for a feudal army of 50,000 men, including 7500 cavalry and 10,000 crossbowmen, to be beaten by 20,000 burghers. The result was due to that arrogance and eagerness to be foremost which was so often fatal to the French chivalry. The flanks as well as the front of the Flemings were covered by a ditch. The leaders of the Italian mercenaries proposed to march round and post their men where they could intercept supplies. ” The Flemings,” they said, ” are great eaters and drinkers ; if we keep them long fasting, they will grow faint. They will quit their ground ; and then the cavalry can charge and rout them without risk.” But these ” Lombard counsels ” were scouted. The foot were not to be allowed to have the honour of the victory. The men-at-arms dashed to the front, floundered into the ditch, and were speared or struck down by ” godendags,” long-handled maces with iron spikes, like the Swiss ” morning-star.” *

But two years afterwards it was shown near Lille that a much larger number of Flemish burghers was no match for a feudal army properly handled, and this was confirmed at Cassel in 1328, and again at Roosebecke in 1382, when Van Artevelde was killed with 25,000 men. If infantry was to recover its old position it must combine excellence in the use of missiles with excellence in handto-hand fighting, and it was the association of the English archer with the dismounted man-at-arms that gave the first real shock to the feudal military system.

Something more mobile and efficient was required to meet sudden descents of the Danes upon the coasts which formed the chief danger to the peace of the kmgdom. In 86G a.d. Charles the Bald issued an edict that all freeholders who had or might have horses should jom the host mounted, but by the end of the tenth century it had become exclusively a feudal host, made up of the contingents of lords who had received grants of land as fiefs or benefices, and were under contract to bring their quota of mounted men into the field.

Fiefs and offices (dukes, counts, &c.) which were at first revocable or for life only, became hereditary, and the inroads of the Northmen gave the holders of them an opportunity to buUd strongholds in which they could defy the king himself. CivU wars among the Carolingian prmces weakened their authority, and enabled some of their vassals to become stronger and more independent. In the general struggle for existence the weaker lords sought safety by “commending themselves” to the stronger lords, surrendermg their lands, and receiving them back as fiefs. The freemen of the conquered (GalloRoman) race fared worse. Some of them were allowed to contmue to hold land subject to a quit-rent, but the bulk of them became serfs. After a time there was no land without its lord, and the lords took care not to aive arms or training to an alien and oppressed peasantry. Froissarts description of the Jacquerie^ shows how the pea.sants, unarmed as they were except with knives and staves, would now and then rise, and revenge themselves on theulords by fearful outrages.

Besides the valets of the men-at-arms, foot archers and crossbowmen were required, especially for garrisons and sieges. These were mostly mercenaries drawn from various quarters, and the term solidarii (soldiers) came into use for hired men early in the eleventh century .^ The army of adventurers with which William of Normandy invaded England comprised not only bowmen, but some mail-clad infantry armed with spears and swords. The Crusader armies also were largely composed of foot, and they had the more need for missile weapons as they had to deal with an enemy skilled in the use of the bow. The, earlier Crusaders suffered much from their inferiority in this respect. In 1104 a.d. they met with a disaster on the very ground, near Carrhie, where the Parthians had routed Crassus’s legions.