In closing the coupled and twin stories of Crécy and Poitiers it is
not without advantage to describe the aspect which they would have
presented to an onlooker of their time; and in doing this I must not
only describe the general armament of Western European men in the
middle of the fourteenth century, but that contrast between weapons and
methods which gave the Plantagenets for more than a generation so
permanent an advantage over their opponents.
You would have seen a force such as that of the Black Prince or of
King John camped before a battle, a white town of tents crossing the
fields, with here and there a vivid patch of colour where some great
leader's pavilion was of blue or red and gold. The billeting of men
upon householders was a necessary feature of a long march, or of the
occupation of a town. But when there was question of occupying a
position, or when an army was too large to lodge under roof, it
depended upon canvas. But it must be remembered that not the whole of a
force by any means enjoyed that advantage; a large portion, especially
in a considerable body, was often compelled to bivouac.
Further, the reader must represent to himself a heavier impediment
of vehicles than a corresponding force would burden itself with to-day:
a far heavier impediment than a quite modern army would think
tolerable. There were no aids whatsoever to progress, save those which
the armed body carried with it. No commandeering of horses upon any
considerable scale; no mechanical traffic, of course; and, save under
special circumstances where water carriage could relieve the
congestion, no chances of carrying one's booty (then a principal
concern), one's munitions, and one's supplies, save in waggons.
On the other hand, the enormous supply of ammunition which modern
missile warfare demands, and has demanded more or less for three
hundred years, was absent. There was no reserve of food; an army lived
not entirely off the country, for it always began with a reserve of
provisions, but without any calculated reserve for a whole campaign,
and necessarily in such times without any power of keeping essential
nourishment for more than a few days.
Say that your fourteenth-century corps was more burdened upon the
march by far, but by far less dependent upon its base than a modern
force, and you have the truth.
You must therefore conceive of the marching body, be it 7000 or be
it 30,000 or more, as a long column of which quite one-half the length
will usually consist of waggons.
The first thing that would strike the modern observer of such a
column would be the large proportion of mounted men.
Even the Plantagenets, who first, by an accident about to be
described, discovered, and who by their genius for command developed, a
revolution in missile weapons, marched at the head of columns which
were, not only for their spirit and their tradition and command, but
for all their important fighting units, mounted.
Tradition and the memory of a society are all-important in these
things. From the beginning of the Dark Ages until well on into the
Middle Ages, say, from the end of the fifth century to the beginning of
the fourteenth, a battle was essentially a mounted charge; and the
noble class which for generation after generation had learnt and
gloried in the trade of those charges was the class which organised and
enjoyed the peril of warfare.
The armoured man was always an expensive unit. His full equipment
was the year's rent of a farm, and what we should to-day call a large
country estate never produced half a dozen of him, and sometimes no
more than one. He needed at least one servant. That was a mere physical
necessity of his equipment. Often he had not one, but two or three or
even four. He and his assistants formed the normal cell, so to speak,
of a fourteenth-century force. And on the march you would have seen the
thousands of these “men-at-arms” (the term is a translation of the
French “gensdarmes,” which means armed people) surrounded or followed
by a cloud of their followers.
Now their followers were more numerous than they, and yet far more
vulnerable, and they form a very difficult problem in the estimation of
a fourteenth-century force.
When I say, as I have said with regard both to Crécy and to
Poitiers—though it is truer of Crécy than of Poitiers—that the number
of combatants whom contemporaries recognised as such was far less than
the total numbers of a force, I was pointing out that, by our method of
reckoning numbers, it would be foolish to count Edward III.'s army in
1346 as only 24,000, or the Black Prince's ten years later as only
7000. The actual number of males upon the march who had to be fed and
could be seen standing upon the field was far larger. But, on the other
hand, the value for fighting purposes of what I may call the domestics
was very varied. Some of those who served the wealthiest of the
men-at-arms were themselves gentry. They were youths who would later be
fully armed themselves. They rode. They had a sword; they could not be
denied combat. Even their inferiors were of value in a defensive
position, however useless for offensive purposes. When we hear of A
making a stand against B though B was “three times as strong” as A, we
must remember that this means only that the counting combating units on
B's side were three times A's. If A was holding a defensive position
against B, B would only attack with his actual fighting units, whereas
A could present a dense mass of humanity much more than a third of B,
certainly two-thirds of B, and sometimes the equal of B, to resist him,
though only one-third should be properly armed. While, on the other
hand, if B should fail in the attack and break, the number of those cut
down and captured in the pursuit by the victorious A would be very much
greater than the fighting units which B had brought against A at the
beginning of the combat. All the followers and domestics of A's army
would be involved in the catastrophe, and that is what accounts for the
enormous numbers of casualties which one gets after any decisive
overthrow of one party by the other, especially of a large force
against a small one. It is this feature which accounts for the almost
legendary figures following Crécy and Poitiers.
The gentry, who were the nucleus of the fighting, were armed in the
middle of the fourteenth century after a fashion transitional between
the rings of mail which had been customary for a century and the plate
armour which was usual for the last century before the general use of
firearms, ornamental during the century in which firearms established
themselves, and is still the popular though false conception of
mediæval accoutrement. From immemorial time until the First Crusade and
the generation of the Battle of Hastings and the capture of Jerusalem,
fighters had covered their upper bodies with leather coats, and their
heads with an iron casque. From at least the Roman centuries throughout
the Dark Ages, a universal use of metal rings linked together over the
leather protected the armed man, and our word mail is French for
links, and nothing else. In time, the network of links came to be used
separate from the leather, and so it was put on like a shirt of
flexible iron all through the great business which saved Europe during
the ninth century against the Northmen in Gaul and Britain, against the
Moor in Spain. It was the armour of the knights in Palestine, of the
native armies which drove the Germans from Italy, and of the Norman
Conquest.
But with the end of the thirteenth century, which for simplicity and
virile strength was the flower of our civilisation, armour, with many
another feature of life, took on complexity and declined. Men risked
less (the lance also came in to frighten them more). The bascinet,
which had protected the head but not the face (with later a hinged
face-piece attached), was covered or replaced by a helmet protecting
head and face and all. At the knees, shoulders, elbows, jointed plates
of iron appeared. Scales of iron defended the shin and the thigh,
sometimes the lower arm as well. The wealthier lords covered the front
of every limb with plates of this sort, and there was jointed iron upon
their hands. The plain spur had rowels attached to it; the sword
shortened, so did the shield; a dagger was added to the sword-belt upon
the right-hand side.
We must further see in the picture of a fourteenth-century battle
great blazonry.
The divorce of the gentry from the common people (one of the fatal
eddies of the time) developed in the wealthy this love of colour, and
in their dependants the appetite for watching it. Of heraldry I say
nothing, for it has nothing to do with the art or history of soldiers.
But banners were a real part of tactics and of instructions. By banners
men had begun to align themselves, and by the display of banners to
recognise the advent of reinforcement or the action at some distant
point (distant as fields were then reckoned) of enemies or of friends.
Colour was so lively a feature of those fields that shields, even the
horses' armour, cloths hung from trumpets, coats, all shone with it.
Now to the feudal cavalry with their domestics, to the gentry so
armed whose tradition was the soul and whose numbers the nucleus of a
fourteenth-century army, one must add, quite separate from their
domestics and squires, the foot-soldiers; and these were trained and
untrained.
At this point a capital distinction must be made. Armies defending a
whole countryside, notably the French armies defending French territory
during the Hundred Years' War, levied, swept up, or got as volunteers
masses of untrained men. Expeditions abroad had none such: they had no
use for them. Edward had none at Crécy and his son had none at
Poitiers; and what was true of these two Plantagenet raids was true of
every organised expedition made with small numbers from one centre to a
distant spot, throughout the Middle Ages. It is important to remember
this, for it accounts for much of the great discrepancies in numbers
always observable between an expeditionary force and its opponents, as
it does for the superior excellence of the raiding tens against the
raided hundreds.
But if we consider only the trained force of foot-men in an army of
the fourteenth century, we discover that contrast between the
Plantagenet and the Valois equipment with which I desire to conclude.
England had developed the long-bow. It is a point which has been vastly
overemphasised, but which it would be unscholarly and uncritical to
pass over in silence. A missile weapon had been produced and perfected
by the Welsh, the art of it had spread over the west country; and it
was to prove itself of value superior to any other missile weapon in
the field throughout the fourteenth and even into the early fifteenth
centuries. Outside these islands it was imperfectly understood as a
weapon, and its lesson but imperfectly learnt. When it was replaced by
firearms, the British Islands and their population dropped out of the
running in land armament for two hundred years. The long-bow was not
sufficiently superior to other weapons to impress itself dramatically
and at once upon the consciousness of Europe. It remained special,
local, national, but, if men could only have known it, a decisive
element of superiority up to the breakdown of the Plantagenet tradition
of government and of Plantagenet society.
I have described in the writing of Crécy how superior was its rate
of delivery always, and often its range, to other missile weapons of
the time. We must also remember that capital factor in warfare, lost
with the Romans, recovered with the Middle Ages, which may be called
the instruction of infantry.
The strength of an armed body consists in its cohesion. When the
whole body is in peril, each individual member of it wants to get away.
To prevent him from getting away is the whole object of discipline and
military training. Each standing firm (or falling where he stands)
preserves the unity, and therefore the efficacy, of the whole. A few
yielding at the critical point (and the critical point is usually also
the point where men most desire to yield) destroy the efficacy of nine
times their number. Now, one of the things that frighten an individual
man on foot most is another man galloping at him upon a horse. If many
men gallop upon him so bunched on many horses, the effect is, to say
the least of it, striking. If any one doubts this, let him try. If the
men upon the horses are armed with a weapon that can get at the men on
foot some feet ahead (such as is the lance), the threat is more
efficacious still, and no single man (save here and there a fellow full
of some religion) will meet it.
But against this truth there is another truth to be set, which the
individual man would never guess, and which is none the less
experimentally certain—which is this: that if a certain number of men
on foot stand firm when horses are galloping at them, the horses will
swerve or balk before contact; in general, the mounted line will not be
efficacious against the dismounted. There is here a contrast between
the nerves of horses and the intelligence of men, as also between the
rider's desire that his horse should go forward and the horse's
training, which teaches him that not only his rider, but men in
general, are his masters. What is true here of horses is not true of
dogs, who think all men not their masters, but their enemies, and
desire to kill them, and what is more, can do so, which a horse cannot.
A charge of large mounted dogs against unshaken infantry would succeed.
A charge of mounted horses against unshaken infantry, if that infantry
be sufficiently dense, will fail.
To teach infantry that they can thus withstand cavalry, instruction
is the instrument. You must drill them, and form them constantly, and
hammer it into them by repeated statement that if they stand firm all
will be well. This has been done in the case of men on foot armed only
with staves. It is easier, of course, to inculcate the lesson when they
are possessed of missile weapons; for a continued discharge of these is
impossible from charging riders, and an infantry force armed with
missile weapons, and unshaken, can be easily persuaded by training, and
still more by experience, that it can resist cavalry. Under modern
conditions, where missile weapons are of long range and accurate, this
goes without saying; but even with a range of from fifty to eighty
yards of a missile that will bring down a horse or stop him, infantry
can easily be made sufficiently confident if it is unshaken. Now, to
shake it, there is nothing available (or was nothing before the art of
flying was developed) save other men, equally stationary, armed with
other missiles. The long-bowman of the Plantagenets knew that he had a
missile weapon superior to anything that his enemy could bring against
him. He therefore stood upon the defensive against a feudal cavalry
charge unshaken, and he was trained by his experience and instruction
to know that if he kept his line unbroken, the cavalry charge would
never get home. That is the supreme tactical factor of the Plantagenet
successes of the Hundred Years' War.