The English commanders, with the traditions of Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt and a host of similar but smaller battles behind them, disliked taking the offensive. When the opposing commanders refused to attack them in their carefully chosen position where they stood deliberately prepared but held off until such time as they could assail when least expected, then the English began to lose battles. A situation began to arise where the English forces were always liable to a sudden onslaught – Patay, fought on the 18th of June 1429, is a fair example of the sort of conflict that now took place.
Patay occurred at a time when the French, inspired by Joan of Arc, had recently raised the siege of Orléans and were endeavouring to capture those Loire towns still in English hands. An English force under Lord John Talbot and Sir John Fastolf, numbering perhaps 3,000 men, were retreating towards Patay after an unsuccessful attack on the Loire bridge at Meung, eighteen miles south. Hot on their heels in pursuit were the mounted vanguard of the Duke d’Alençon, moving considerably faster than the English, who were regulated by the speed of their baggage-train. In their attempts to make contact with the English, Alençon had patrols scouting in all directions; the English had similar groups in their rear to warn them of the arrival of the enemy. The word eventually came – the French advance-guard was close on their heels; at about the same moment the French discovered the whereabouts of the English, who revealed their position by characteristically raucous ‘Halloos!’ as a stag burst through their ranks!
Halting at a point where their track diverged from the old Roman road over which they had been marching, the English looked in a hurry for a good defensive position. The country was dotted with small clumps of trees and hedges, some of which bordered the road and were ideal for lining with archers; in a slight dip in the ground, Talbot stood with about 500 men. Fastolf deployed the main body on a ridge south-east of Patay, about 200 yards behind Talbot.
Topping the slight rise, the mounted French advance-guard saw the English drawn up in the dip in front of them; the archers were hammering their stakes into the ground and preparing their bows. Composed of specially selected men, well mounted and led by La Hire and Poton de Xantrailles, two of the most experienced commanders in the French army, it was a force alight with fervour imparted to the whole army by the Maid of Orléans. Pausing only to take in the situation, the cavalry thundered down the slope in a wild torrent to burst upon the startled archers before a bow could be drawn upon them, hitting them frontally and in flank. The lightly armed infantry stood no chance whatsoever; they were overwhelmed in a matter of seconds and cut down where they stood, the few who did manage to scramble away only adding to the confusion and dismay that covered Fastolf’s men on the ridge.
Well might they be dismayed; their deployment on the ridge had been slow and they were far from completing their formation. They were not a particularly well-trained or experienced bunch of men, besides being dispirited by the retreat from Meung. They were able to do practically nothing before the French were through Talbot’s force and upon them. The situation was made even more grave by the rapid arrival of the French main body, right on the heels of their advance-guard. It was all over very quickly; Talbot and most of the other leaders were captured, but Fastolf managed to get away, leaving behind his baggage and guns.
His escape was a little epic in itself, consisting of marching sixty miles in a day and a night, formed up in a stout body of archers who fought off every attack with arrows and then, when they were all gone, taking to the sword before reaching safety. But their weary steps were dogged with confusion and bewilderment – never before had they experienced anything like the French cavalry’s headlong charge; they found it difficult to fathom this dramatic transition from the usual French prudence tinged with apprehension.
It was a bewilderment that was to grow. For more than 100 years the tactical employment of the English archer had brought success and each battle can be said to have favourably influenced the battle that followed. Crécy had been won because of the experience gained at Halidon Hill; Agincourt was, in its turn, influenced by Crécy and Poitiers. Now the wheel was turning. The side that had always won were prevented from continuing their victorious path because their opponents no longer played the game to the heavily loaded English rules. And the wheel turned in another inverse manner – -just as the French had been continuously beaten through a slavish adherence to outmoded tactics, now came an anomalous turn. English commanders were being defeated by the improved military skill of the French because they persisted in slavishly applying the defensive tactics of Edward III and Henry V. For more than a century the French had been desperately trying to discover a method or a tactic that would minimise the deadly longbow; now the English were forced to think hard. They had to come up with some new system as successful as the longbow to deal with the superior numbers of the French, otherwise the English were foredoomed to defeat by their numerical inferiority.
In 1450, on the 15th of April, the English lost the Battle of Formigny because their commanders were unintelligently influenced by the tactics of Agincourt, coupled with the fact that the French no longer made gross blunders at every engagement. It was the last battle but one to be fought in the Hundred Years War – a small-scale engagement, but one that decided the fate of all Normandy. At Caen the Duke of Somerset, commander of all the English armies in France, was threatened by an overwhelming force, led by King Charles of France in person. To open the way to him, an English army of about 4,000 men had been scraped together by stripping Norman fortresses of their garrisons and bringing some 2,500 reinforcements from England, under the command of Sir Thomas Kyriell. It was a force made up of a few hundred men-at-arms, about 1,500 archers and the remainder were billmen.
At first the force had some successes; by mid-April they had come to the area around the village of Formigny, where they found themselves confronted by a French corps under the young Count of Clermont. It was one of several French divisions that had been sent out to arrest the progress of the English force; it consisted of about 3,000 men, thus being numerically inferior to the English force. Nevertheless, the English commander refused to assume the initiative; he grouped his force in the little valley containing the village, with their backs to a small brook lined with orchards and plantations well calculated to cover their rear. The veteran English commander, experienced in the defensive battles that had previously brought success, forgot the need to push forward; he awaited Clermont’s attack and made every preparation to defeat it when it came. His archers, with plenty of time at their disposal, planted their stakes, dug ditches and potholes in front of their line to impede the enemy cavalry – it was a throw-back of over a century. Kyriell formed his men up on a frontage of about 1,000 yards in a thin line of dismounted men-at-arms, with three groups of archers projecting forward in bastions; it was Henry V’s formation at Agincourt thirty-five years before.
At about three o’clock in the afternoon, the French force came marching straight up the road; they deployed in three lines to the right and left so that they faced the English, who were about 500 yards away. There both sides stood, eyeing one another. The French noted with some apprehension that the English were still improving their already substantial defences. The French commanders went into conference – in the old days they would have rushed forward in a headlong attack, but the new-style French army did things differently. Actually, the young and inexperienced Clermont was all for the immediate attack – he burned with the impetuosity of youth. However, he was sufficiently malleable to listen to his more experienced officers, who warned him, through long experience, to be wary of the English in a prepared position. Anyway, why hurry? Was not the Constable de Richemont near at hand with reinforcements?
So, for two or three hours some aimless skirmishing went on; it was a period of far more use to the French than to the English, for their reinforcements drew nearer by the minute. Some French attacks, on foot, were put in to feel out the flanks, but all were repulsed, as were some ha
lf-hearted mounted attacks also on the flanks. From their position behind stakes and pot-holes, the archers took a heavy toll of the enemy. De Richemont still had not arrived when Clermont recalled that he had brought guns with him; he ordered Giraud, Master of the Royal Ordnance, to drag up his two culverins. Under the eyes of the possibly apprehensive English, willing hands dragged the heavy guns to a spot outside bow range from which they could enfilade the English line.
After the usual fussy, technical preparations beloved of gunners throughout the ages, they opened fire. It was a galling, nagging bombardment, shots regularly arriving in irritating succession until the archers were so frustrated that they broke their ranks and rushed out from behind their stakes. Aided by a wing of the billmen, they charged headlong at the guns and a fierce but brief mêlée took place around them until the French were routed and reeled away, leaving the precious pieces silent and in the hands of the English.
The battle would have been won had Kyriell advanced his whole force at this crucial moment. The French, dispirited by their losses, were beginning to melt away from the field and the archers were triumphantly trying to drag the heavy guns back to their own lines, not knowing how to ‘spike’ them. But the English commander, obsessed by his defensive tactics, would not move an inch; he did not even send out aid to the archers who had seized the guns but were themselves now under great pressure, having been attacked by one of the flank ‘battles’ of French dismounted men-at-arms. A desperate struggle was taking place around the artillery pieces, archers and billmen battling to hold off their attackers whilst others strained and sweated in their efforts to get the guns away. It was an uneven struggle; the more lightly armed English were slowly but remorselessly pushed back by their heavier opponents, whilst their comrades looked on sullenly a few hundred yards away. Eventually the English infantry had to abandon the guns altogether as they fought for their very lives.
The very resistance of the archers proved disastrous to the English in their strong position, because the French pushed them back before them in a slow and progressive advance towards the stakes, so that the archers were unable to use their bows to harass the enemy for fear of hitting their own men. Soon the fighting was taking place immediately in front of the stakes, and the rest of the French force, seeing the battle going their way, had moved forward all along their line so that fierce fighting was taking place at all points. But the English superiority in numbers began to tell, and the French were showing signs of wavering when de Richemont arrived on the skyline with his reinforcements. They came from a direction that immediately threatened the English left flank and rear.
Kyriell was now in dire straits; he had no reserve, so was forced to bend his line back into a right-angle, or rough semicircle, to fight on the two fronts. The arrival of the new troops brought heart to Clermont’s weary men so that they found new strength; but the fatigued and discouraged English began to crumple under the shock. Fighting hard, they gave ground until they were forced into several fiercely fighting but isolated groups, which fought on stubbornly and died hard with no quarter being given or asked. One party of 500 archers are said to have fought to the very last man, in the bloody, muddy ground of a garden by the brookside. A few hundred archers escaped, but Kyriell and his infantry were surrounded and annihilated, the commander himself being spared and captured. Four-fifths of the English force were killed in this major disaster to English arms. By the use of intelligent offensive tactics it was a battle that could have been won before it even began, and then won again halfway through its course.
Part V
The Last Victories
Chapter 20
The Wars of the Roses – 1461
At the time of the expulsion of the English from their Continental possessions, no blame was laid at the door of the longbow, nor did there seem to be any permanent discrediting of its power. Nevertheless, as future events proved, in spite of the triple victories of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, to say nothing of many lesser successes, archery as a weapon of war was on the downgrade in the mid-fifteenth century. The bow still retained its supremacy as a missile weapon over the clumsy arbalest, with its complicated array of wheels and levers. In fact, the testimony of all Europe was given in favour of the longbow – Charles of Burgundy considered a corps of 3,000 English bowmen to be the flower of his infantry; thirty years before, Charles of France had made the archer the basis of his new militia in a vain attempt to naturalise the weapon of his enemies beyond the Channel. After a similar endeavour, James of Scotland had resigned himself to ill success and so turned the archery of his subjects to ridicule. Before that, however, he had ordered a law to be passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1424:
‘That all men might busk thame to be archares, fra they be 12 years of age; and that at ilk ten pounds worth of land, thair be made bow makres, and specialle near paroche kirks, quhairn upon hailie days men may cum, and at the leist schute thrusye ab out, and have usye of archarie; and whassa usis not archarie, the laird of the land sail rais of him a wedder, and giff the laird raisis not the same pane, the kings shiref or his ministers sail rais it to the King.’
In England Edward IV proclaimed that every Englishman and Irishman living in England must have of his own a bow of his own height ‘to be made of yew, wych, or hazel, ash or auborne or any other reasonable tree, according to their power’. The same law provided that buttes or mounds of earth for use as marks must be erected in every town and village, and listed a series of penalties for those who did not practise with the longbow.
Richard III was one of the kings who recognised the value of the archer; Shakespeare makes him say, just prior to the Battle of Bosworth: ‘Draw archers, draw your arrows to the head!’ There are also records telling that Richard sent a body of 1,000 archers to France to aid the Duke of Brittany. Henry VII also provided anti-crossbow legislation and sent large levies of English archers to fight for the Duke of Brittany. During this entire period English longbowmen served in many parts of the then-known world.
The introduction of gunpowder was the beginning of the end for the archer; although over 400 years were to pass before the bow and arrow were finally overcome by gun-fire, the seeds were sown in the fourteenth century at Crécy and Sluys. The making of a skilful archer was a matter of years, but an adequate gunner could be produced in a few months – it was far too easy to attain a certain amount of proficiency with the new weapons for the bow to remain highly popular. At first the longbow was vastly superior to the newly invented handguns and arquebuses, which did not attain any great degree of efficiency before the end of the fifteenth century. When they did, the bow – the weapon par excellence of England – fell into disuse, although the archer could discharge twelve or fifteen arrows while the musketeer was going through the lengthy operation of loading his piece. The longbow could be aimed more accurately and its effective range of 200 – 240 yards was greater; the hitting-power of a war-arrow, weighing about two ounces, was far greater than that of a musket-ball, weighing from one-third to half an ounce. Archers could be lined up as many as ten deep and shoot together over each other’s heads to put down an almost impassable barrage; and it was a terrifying barrage that could be seen descending. It is not outside the bounds of possibility to claim that the musket used at Waterloo in 1815 was inferior to the longbow used at Agin-court in 1415, both in range and accuracy.
Early firearms were reasonably good weapons of defence when they could be rested upon ramparts and their powder kept dry, otherwise they were far less deadly than the longbow in competent hands. In 1590 Sir John Smyth, a formidable military writer of the time, in his work The Discourse presented a wholesale condemnation of the new weapons, the mosquet, the caliver and the harquebus. The book was hastily suppressed by English military authorities; the stern, lone voice, crying for a return to the older and more effective ways of the longbow did not coincide with current military thinking. One also had to consider that the merit of early firearms lay in the prestige which they brought to t
he princes who armed their men with them.
In many of the battles of the Wars of the Roses, artillery was combined with archers, so that the enemy was put in a position where he had either to fall back or to charge in order to escape missile fire – just as similar tactics had won the field of Hastings for William in 1066. Edgecott Field was notable as a renewed attempt of spearmen to stand against a mixed force of archers and cavalry. Here the Yorkists were entirely destitute of light troops, their bowmen having been drawn off by their commander, Lord Stafford, in a fit of pique. This meant that Pembroke and his North Welsh troops were left unsupported. The natural result followed; in spite of the strong position of the King’s son, the rebels, by force of archery fire, quickly caused them to descend from the hill into the valley, where they were ridden down by the Northern horse as they retreated in disorder.
During the period of this war, armour had possibly reached its elaborate peak, as an old description of a knight arming for the Battle of Tewkesbury indicated: ‘… and arming was an elaborate process then, as the knight began with his feet, and clothed himself upwards. He put on first, his sabatynes or steel clogs; secondly, the greaves or shin-pieces; thirdly, the cuisses, or thigh-pieces; fourthly, the breech of mail; fifthly, the tuillettes; sixthly, the breastplate; seventhly, the vambraces or arm-covers; eighthly, the rerebraces, for covering the remaining part of the arm to the shoulder; ninthly, the gauntlets; tenthly, the dagger was hung; eleventhly, the short sword; twelfthly, the surcoat was put on; thirteenthly, the helmet; fourteenthly, the long sword was assumed; and, fifteenthly, the pennoncel, which he carried in his left hand.’
Bowmen of England Page 16