The first of the four columns into which the Scottish army was divided was led by John, Earl of Moray, assisted by John and Simon Fraser of Oliver Castle; the second by the Steward of Scotland, a boy of sixteen years but assisted by his uncle, Sir James Stewart; the third was led by Douglas himself, having with him the Earl of Carrick, and the fourth column, in reserve, was led by Hugh, Earl of Ross. The numerical strength of the Scots army is variously recorded by the historians. It is believed to have been larger than the English, and the Continuator of Hemingford, a contemporary chronicler, gives it as 14,655 fighting men. These consisted of 55 knights, 1,100 mounted men-at-arms, and 13,500 lightly armed foot soldiers.
It was noon on the 19th of July 1333 when this force moved forward to decide the fate of Berwick, and possibly Scotland. They received an early set-back when they came up to the English position, finding that it was posted in such a way as to be impossible to attack with cavalry. The whole of the Scottish knights and men-at-arms therefore dismounted, sent their horses to the rear with their pages and prepared to fight on foot. The order was given to advance and the force ponderously lurched forward; up the slope of Halidon Hill they plodded, heads down and sheltered by their upraised forward shoulder. Nevertheless they were severely galled by the fierce fire of the English archers. In spite of this, they managed to reach the marsh, spreading before the English position without losing their order, but here the disasters of the day began. The soft, boggy ground exacted its toll upon the heavily clad men, impeding them and slowing them down so that the stronger pressed forward and the weaker lagged back and the ranks became broken. All the time, without cessation, the archers poured in their volleys from the crest of the hill; they fired with certain aim and fatal effect at such close range. An ancient writer, quoted by Tytler, says: ‘These arrows flew as thick as motes in the sunbeam.’
The struggling Scots began to fall in their dozens, scores and then hundreds; but the still-strong survivors battled their way through the marsh to struggle laboriously and wearily forward. Their long pikes held in front of them, levelled points unwavering, they gained encouragement from the now-nearness of the English. Mustering their strength, they made a furious uphill charge. The impact was noisy and breathtaking, so furious was it that the English line momentarily wavered and stepped back. It was, however, only as if they had stepped back in admiration of the strength and courage of the Scots, whom they now found to be breathless and disordered by their climb and struggle through the marsh so that their fighting was but briefly fierce and spasmodic. The ill-fated and ill-led Scots were unable to sustain their initial impetus and in a short and sharp struggle were remorselessly borne back in a slow pageant of desperately struggling men, to be finally forced back into the deadly embrace of the cloying marsh.
The Earl of Ross led the reserve to attack the wing of the English army led by Baliol, but he was soon killed and the attack petered out. Fighting in the van, Douglas received a mortal wound and was captured, together with the Earls of Sutherland and Monteith. The Scots now were beginning to give way on all sides; to make matters worse, the pages at the foot of the hill, seeing the day going against their masters, panicked and fled with the horses; the weary knights and men-at-arms now had no means of escape as they were too spent to run far in their armour. This meant that very few of the nobles or men-at-arms escaped in the bloody pursuit that followed; it only ended when 4,000 or more Scots lay dead on the slopes of Halidon Hill and in the fields around it. English historians of the day claim that the English lost only one knight, one esquire and twelve foot soldiers.
‘Nor will this appear incredible,’ said Lord Hailes, ‘when it is remembered that the English ranks remained unbroken and that their archers, at a secure distance, incessantly annoyed the Scottish infantry.’
The town and castle of Berwick surrendered on the 20th of May, according to the agreement.
After the dust had died down at Bannockburn, nineteen years before, it was realised that it need never have been such a dreadful defeat; that the English possessed the tactical combination to destroy the advance of the Scottish spearmen. In the years between Bannockburn and Crécy there was a decisive difference, a difference ably exploited at Halidon Hill. It was a tactic that utilised the old method of receiving the enemy’s attack by dismounted men-at-arms drawn up to exploit the advantages of mass and density, coupled with the innovation of having archers drawn up on the flanks to inflict maximum damage on the advancing enemy before he could come to grips. As early as 1322, Andrew Harcia, fighting for Edward II, had used archers and dismounted men-at-arms when disputing the passage of the river Ure with Thomas of Lancaster and the Earl of Hereford. Ten years later Edward Baliol, invading Scotland to claim the throne, stood on the defence on Dupplin Moor; the shooting of his archers from the flanks enabled his dismounted centre to win the day. Halidon Hill, in 1333, gave Edward III the opportunity of practising the same tactics but with greater elaboration; the King was soldier enough to know what he had at his disposal.
The means had been devised to overthrow the schiltrons – if the Scottish spearmen stood firm they were decimated by archery until the English men-at-arms came into the assault.
If the Scots attacked they were beaten by dismounted men-at-arms, flanked by archers. In these early years of Edward III the essential military conditions of success in the Hundred Years War, both in tactics and in organisation, had already been prepared.
Chapter 10
The Archer at Sea: Sluys – 1340
The English victories over the Scots seem to have made no impression whatsoever upon those responsible for military affairs in France. As though to give the French a last chance of assessing the new English tactics by parading before them in victory the archers, the backbone of the successful methods, the opening notes of the long Anglo-French conflict rang out first over water. Philip of France was well aware of Edward’s designs on his throne and, as part of his preparations, he gathered together a large fleet of Norman and Genoese ships-of-war. These he assembled in Sluys harbour, from where they could emerge to cut communications with the English fleet when they made for Antwerp or ports of Flanders.
Hearing of this, Edward collected from ports both in the north and south of his kingdom a fleet to face the French; numbers on both sides are greatly at variance in the different chronicles, some going so far as to state that the French had 400 vessels to the English 260 sail – at least the proportionate sizes are probably correct! Edward in person commanded the English fleet, which was fought by 4,000 men-at-arms and 12,000 archers – large numbers of men for the time. The English appeared off Sluys on the 24th of June 1340; they entered the harbour at about noon when the tide was high, to see the French ships in four lines, bound and clamped together with ropes and chains to form four gigantic floating platforms. Sea battles, being contested by land armies, had to have battlefields.
Edward displayed that genius for the art of war which always characterised him, giving the necessary orders and forming his lines as if he had been bred to the sea. The English ships formed into two lines, the first consisting of the largest and stoutest ships to bear the brunt of the encounter, each alternate ship being filled with archers, supported by men-at-arms. The second line was almost a reserve, to be drawn upon if necessary. The English line-up was literally a ‘Crécy-formation’ on the high seas.
Each English vessel clamped itself by grappling-irons to its opposite French number, until the harbour resembled a vast floating raft of fighting ships. At such close range the archers had ‘sitting targets’ and their arrows whirred in a deadly sleet among the massed ranks on the French decks. The bowmen were shooting at a range which was so short as to enable a clothyard shaft to pierce through mail coats or transfix a shield, even if it were an inch thick. When they closed at first, the English could see the French ships’ decks crowded with massed figures, waving arms, exultant faces; in a few minutes it had been replaced with a blood-soaked shambles, with bodies piled three-deep upon
each other, the living cowering behind the dead to shelter themselves from the sudden storm-blast of death. With the enemy dead piled high, the English men-at-arms warily clambered across the gap between the vessels and on to the French decks, to mingle with the enemy so closely that it was impossible for the archers to draw string to help them. It was a wild chaos where axe and sword rose and fell, dagger and pike lunged and pierced home; Englishman and Frenchman staggered and slipped on decks cumbered with bodies and slippery with blood. The clang of blows, the cries of the stricken, the short deep shouts of the men-at-arms and the archers, who had dropped their bows and entered the mêlée with swords and mauls, rose together in a deafening tumult. Remorselessly, the English men-at-arms carried on the slaughter begun by the archers, slowly but decidedly they pushed their opponents across the treacherous decks, step by step, until they plummeted into the sea below – to sink like stones in their armour. Others rushed with wild screams and curses, diving under the sails, crouching behind booms, huddling into corners like rabbits when the ferrets are upon them, as helpless and as hopeless. They were stern days, and the ordinary soldier, too poor for a ransom, had no prospect of mercy upon the battlefield, even when it was at sea.
Only the rear squadron of twenty-four French ships escaped, the remainder being captured or destroyed. Edward personally claimed that 30,000 French had been killed, but a more reasonable estimate would be something like 10,000 or 12,000; the English lost about 4,000 and one great ship, a galley from Hull, was sunk with all hands by a shower of stones, a somewhat singular broadside but common in those days.
Edward kept at sea for three days with all his banners flying, to put his victory beyond all dispute. It is recorded that only one man in France dared tell King Philip the terrible story of the loss of his fleet – the court buffoon, who exercised the traditional licence given to the fool. Coming into the King’s presence in an apparent passion, he exclaimed: ‘Cowardly Englishmen! Dastardly, faint-hearted Englishmen!’ Philip enquired why he so called them. ‘Because,’ replied the jester, ‘they durst not leap out of their ships into the sea, as the brave Frenchmen did!’
‘The name of Edward III,’ says Sir Harry Nicolas, ‘is more identified with the naval glory of England than of any other of her sovereigns; for though the sagacious Alfred and the chivalrous Richard commanded fleets and defeated the enemy at sea, Edward gained in his own person two signal victories, fighting on one occasion until his ship actually sank under him, and was rewarded by his subjects with the proudest title ever conferred on a British monarch – ”King of the Sea”.’
The victory at Sluys seems to have so raised the ardour of the English parliament that they were eager for the prosecution of the war and gave Edward every possible aid.
Another foretaste of what was to come occurred when Edward sent Sir Walter Manny with a small force to raid the Flemish island of Cadzand; this was a reprisal for a French raid on Portsmouth and the South Coast. There is quite a modern flavour about this small action in which the archers were used as ‘artillery’ to cover an infantry landing. Froissart writes: ‘The archers were ordered to draw their bows stiff and strong go and set up their shouts; upon which those who guarded the haven were forced to retire, whether they would or not, for the first discharge did great mischief, and many were maimed or hurt.’ Landing under cover of the arrow-barrage, the infantry then formed up in line with the archers massed in two bastions at the ends of the line. This later-to-become-familiar formation achieved a signal success and the archers had ushered in the long, long war.
Chapter 11
Morlaix – 1342
The longbow had as yet been employed principally in defensive warfare and against an enemy inferior in cavalry to the English. But when Edward III led his invading force into France the conditions of war were entirely changed for the English. Now they were up against a country to be invariably superior in the numbers of their horsemen, so while the tactics of the archer were to remain defensive, they also had to be varied to meet the new threat. But the yeoman with his longbow was soon to find that the charging squadron presented an even better mark for his shaft than the stationary mass of infantry formed by the Scots schiltron. At the beginning of the Hundred Years War, in the early 1340’s, the Continental world had not yet learned that it was almost hopeless for cavalry to try to force, in a frontal attack, a position defended by men-at-arms supported on their flank by archers.
The French had learned nothing from what had already transpired in Scotland and at Sluys and Cadzand; in fact they learned nothing from the battles that were to follow and were still making the same mistakes eighty years later! When the now well-tried technique was used in a battle near Morlaix in 1342, a few years before Crécy, it seems to have taken the French completely by surprise, as it did a short space of four years later on the fatal field of Crécy.
Morlaix was the first pitched land battle of the Hundred Years War; it proved that Bannockburn and Halidon Hill had taught the English something. In fact Halidon Hill formed the prototype for Morlaix and all the other great battles of the war – except the last. The Earl of Northampton, with an army of about 3,000, was besieging Morlaix in September 1342; he was suddenly threatened by a relieving army of between 15,000 and 20,000 under Charles de Blois. Realising that he must not permit his army to be caught between Charles on the one side and the town on the other, Northampton marched out to find a suitable position in which he could accept battle. He was looking for a ridge or hill which would allow of a position with a forward slope giving a long view to the front, preferably striding the road upon which the enemy was expected to approach. If he had a wood in his rear, then it was ideal, for the position could not be effectively flanked by cavalry and the wood was a useful baggage-park.
On the road to Lanmeur, about four miles from Morlaix, he found what he sought – a position astride the road on the beginning of a gentle slope into a dip about 300 yards in front, with a wood immediately in rear of the position. The English line, about 600 yards in length, was about 50 yards in front of this wood, with a trench dug about 100 yards from the wood. Taking a lesson from the ‘pots’ of the Scots at Bannockburn, the English covered the trench with grass so that it served as a booby-trap for the enemy horsemen. The English men-at-arms were dismounted and in the centre of the line, with the archers stationed on the flanks. The Count of Blois drew up his army in three huge columns, one behind the other with a space between each; the leading column, formed of local levies, being dismounted.
The French advanced straight down the hill, into the slight dip and up the other side towards the waiting English. As soon as they were within range, the column was sent reeling back down the hill by a hail of arrows; they did not even reach the hidden trench. The second column, of mounted men, were launched at the English; they rode forward colourfully, impetuously and unsuspectingly, to plunge into the hidden trench in a tangled confusion of horses and men. Here they were bedevilled and distracted by arrows as they tried to sort themselves out and get back into some sort of order; but the attack had lost its momentum, it had come to a halt. With the exception of about 200 horsemen who did go forward and reach the English line, to be killed or captured, the second attack dribbled back.
Now a pause ensued, whilst the French licked their wounds and considered their next course of action. Northampton prayed that they would retreat, but to his dismay they showed no signs of this and he could see their third column, bigger than his whole army, drawn up on the ridge facing him. The English commander knew that he was still in peril although he had already repulsed two columns each greater than his own small force. More worrying, his archers were desperately short of arrows and had no further source of supply. The third column showed signs of movement, it began ponderously to lurch forward. The English murmured in apprehension – they could see that the battered and almost filled-in trench would be of little aid to them on this occasion. Moreover, the French mass was large enough to extend beyond the English flanks and so
threaten the position from the sides.
Northampton courageously decided upon a manoeuvre almost unprecedented for the era: he withdrew his force in order back into the shelter of the wood so that they formed a hedgehog or defensive line along the edges of the trees, facing in each direction. Reserving their scanty ammunition until the French came close, the English managed to prevent them from penetrating their new position at any point. Marksmanship was the order of the day and the droning of massed arrows was replaced by single ‘whirrs’ as individual shafts found their marks and, with a crash, a French man-at-arms would collapse from his startled horse.
Night was approaching, and the Count de Blois, discouraged and with his men deserting on all sides, began to withdraw slowly back to Lanmeur. Seeing this, Northampton gathered together his small band and, in a defensive formation, left the wood to return to the siege of Morlaix. He had the great satisfaction of knowing that he had achieved his purpose of setting to flight the relieving army, although it outnumbered him by four or five to one. But, more than that, he had perpetuated, knowingly it must be assumed, future tactics from the lessons learned at Bannockburn and Halidon Hill – the men-at-arms fighting dismounted, the trench in front forming an obstacle (a marsh at Halidon); the defensive position on a ridge, the skilful use of the archer’s fire-power in co-operation with supporting heavy troops. All these factors co-ordinated to defeat the mounted attack, together making notable a battle claimed by those who fought in them all to have been even more desperately contested than Halidon Hill, Crécy or Poitiers.
The defeated Charles de Blois is again encountered in June 1346, when, with a force greatly superior in numbers, he came up with Sir Thomas Dagworth’s small army at St. Pol de Léon, north-west of Morlaix, on 9th June 1346. As at Morlaix four years previously the first attack of Charles was repulsed, then his second line came in to overlap the tiny English force on three sides. The English held their ground and poured in such deadly hails of arrows that the French were sent reeling back; after a little of this they fled from the field. There is no record that Charles was dismayed by the disastrous repetition, the further exhibition of the power of the English longbow coming just in time to add to the morale and prestige of the archers at Crécy.
Bowmen of England Page 8