by Hugh Bicheno
English military superiority and democratic institutions both owed much to the longbow. Used en masse, its rapid shooting rate (as many as eight aimed arrows per minute) made it an awesomely effective battlefield weapon, while knowledge that common men could puncture their hauberks (mail coats) may have done much to convince the Norman-French ruling class they should not push the English-speaking majority too far. It was the latent power of the independent yeoman class, the distinguishing glory of English social history.
Many other societies had similar weapons, but nowhere else were they as powerful as in the hands of the English. The technique of using the whole body, not just the arms, to draw the bow was first developed in Wales, where Edward I had found it necessary to clear the forests 100 yards on either side of roads to prevent deadly sniping by the Welsh. From there, the technique spread throughout England.
Boys in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England grew up training with bows of increasing power to accustom their bodies to their demands, and forensic anthropologists have no difficulty identifying medieval archers from their skeletal remains. Constant practice also made them deadly accurate, and their tremendous upper body strength served them well in hand-to-hand combat, when they commonly used the lead-headed mauls also used to drive in the stakes with which they protected their shooting positions.
Properly deployed, massed longbowmen removed cavalry as well as skirmishing by light troops from the battlefield equation. Plate armour evolved to protect those who could afford it, and fully armoured knights could march into an arrow storm with a reasonable expectation of coming to hand strokes, although they had to lean into it, heads down to hide their eye-slits. However, even if the rain of arrows did not find the proverbial chink in their armour, their punishing impacts sapped the strength of the men enduring it.
Longbowmen also greatly diminished enemy command and control. A commander who lifted his visor to look around or to shout orders risked an arrow in the face, as happened to both Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy and to the future Henry V at Shrewsbury in 1403. The most effective use of the longbow was direct fire with heavy arrows at 50 yards or less, comparable to the crossbow but with an overwhelmingly faster shooting rate.*1
Armour (‘harness’) was worn over and attached to padded garments (‘arming jacks’) with fabric or leather laces at the appropriate places. The wealthy wore bespoke harness made in England, which would have been brightly polished hardened steel, with an outer garment (tabard) bearing the heraldic device of the wearer (hence ‘coat of arms’). ‘Off the peg’ hardened steel armour generally came from Italy, while those of more limited means might wear cheaper armour, painted to combat corrosion.
Steel armour of any kind was valuable and common soldiers often wore partial harness looted from enemy casualties. These trophies aside, foot soldiers and archers wore thickly padded fabric jacks with detachable sleeves, some with strips of armour incorporated, or a canvas garment reinforced with rivets called a brigandine. Either could be worn over a hauberk, although multiple layers of fabric alone are surprisingly effective.
Although some preferred the two-handed sword, the man-at-arm’s premier weapon for close-quarter battle was the poleaxe, a reinforced wooden shaft 4–5 feet in length, with a steel head comprising a spike, an axe and a war hammer. Either weapon could be used to lunge, or like a quarterstaff to defend and attack the upper body, but with the poleaxe you could hook an opponent’s feet from under him. He could then be dispatched with a jab between plates by the spike on the butt of the shaft, or with a swing of the war hammer.
Billmen used longer-shafted weapons topped with a wide range of variations on the basic agricultural billhook. Most combined a spike, a blade and some kind of hook to drag men off their feet. The principal role of the billmen was area denial, to prevent opponents getting around the men-at-arms from different directions. To finish off the fallen, all would have had daggers in their belts, with pommels to permit a two-handed punch through mail.
Hand-to-hand fighting was exhausting, and battle lines would ebb and flow as combatants backed off from each other to take a breather. As far as we know, there was no formal procedure for men in the rear ranks to relieve those at the front when they grew tired, but it certainly took place continuously during a battle, causing a rippling effect. Fighting in full harness was also hot and thirsty work, and several cases are known of knights killed with arrows through the throat when they removed their bevors (armour worn to cover the lower face and neck under a half-helmet called a sallet) to take a drink.
Although the era of decisive heavy cavalry charges was over, a significant proportion of an army was still mounted. The knights and men-at-arms all rode, as did mounted archers and hobilars (mounted spearmen who rode and fought with the archers). Light cavalry performed essential functions. Lancers (prickers) scouted ahead of an army, as did foragers and harbingers, whose job was to source supplies and to identify places for the army battalions (the contemporary term was ‘battles’) to bivouac.
These men would be concentrated in the leading battalion (Vanward/Vanguard) on the march, but would revert to their parent battalions, the Main (often, confusingly, called ‘the Battle’) and the Rearward/Rearguard, when the time came to fight. As in every war, the vast majority of casualties were inflicted on a broken army as it ran away, when the winning side’s men-at-arms, hobilars and mounted archers would regain their horses to harry the fleeing men. Pursuit would end at the enemy baggage train, because looting trumped everything.
In England, the bulk of the rank-and-file came from levies raised under commissions of array, a royal order sent to county sheriffs, usually through a local magnate, to summon all adult males for a period of military service. They had an obligation of thirty days’ annual service, paid for by their communities, and were expected to muster with the weapons appropriate to their station. This was a fairly well oiled system, as the levies were often summoned for inspection and basic training.
The obligation was for service at home only. Overseas service was voluntary and involved contracts known as indentures. This was ruinously expensive, and lack of money was the main reason the English were so easily bundled out of France. However, even though the wage bill for a campaign at home was reduced, a commander still had to pay surgeons, armourers, bowyers, fletchers, farriers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, saddlers, masons and carpenters.
Added to which would be the cost of several hundred wagons to carry tens of thousands of arrows, supplementary feed for horses, several days’ hard rations for the troops, anvils, tools and tents. If required, siege guns, their specialist crews and ammunition were an additional expense and increased the number of wagons required; but their greater cost was that they slowed the army’s progress, adding further to the per diems.
Two means of reducing the cost of warfare were denied to commanders during the Wars of the Roses. One was the chevauchée, which was expected to be profitable as well as self-supporting through plunder once it entered enemy territory. During the Wars of the Roses neither side could afford to plunder the people whose best interests both claimed to represent. The other was ransoms paid by captives, but civil wars are notoriously savage, and chivalrous conventions died at St Albans.
While not entirely dictated by financial considerations, the English way of war diverged from the continental norm by its willingness to stake all on a climactic battle. The exemplar for all the commanders during the Wars of the Roses was fierce old John Talbot. His death and the destruction of his army, attacking artillery-equipped fieldworks at Castillon, cast doubt on the continuing validity of the paradigm and was taken to heart by, in particular, the Duke of Buckingham. But overall the emphasis remained on seeking a decision as quickly as possible.
*1 For a full assessment see Mike Loades’ splendid The Longbow.
XVIII
* * *
Marguerite’s Army
Starting from Middleham, Salisbury had to pass through the royalist heartland to join York at
Ludlow in the Middle March. He had to move fast, and would have marched around the Clifford stronghold of Skipton (Craven) to regain what I have called the Western Spur of the Great North Road (Map 4) before it reached Halifax. If he then chose to continue east of the section of the Pennines we now call the Peak District, he would necessarily have had to turn west at Derby or Nottingham and march through the Lancastrian Midlands.
However inappropriate as a location from which to rule the country, the Midlands were ideal in military-strategic terms. In the light of the highly fragmented and dispersed distribution of the main estates of the king, the queen, the Prince of Wales and the principal magnates, generalizations about areas of influence need to be made with caution (see Map 2). Still, the queen’s fortress triangle of Tutbury, Kenilworth and Leicester gave her the interior lines beloved of strategists, and in 1459 they worked as the textbooks say they should.
Believing that Salisbury did intend to march through the Midlands, on 20 September the king marched from Coventry through Market Harborough to Nottingham. He had earlier made a circuit from Coventry to Nuneaton, Burton upon Trent, Lichfield and Coleshill to rally supporters. This was the main royalist army, and he would have been accompanied by the peers most identified with his cause, with the exception of Somerset and Devon in the West Country, and Shrewsbury in the Welsh Marches.
Salisbury had knights from Lancashire, Cheshire and Shropshire in his entourage, but none from Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire. Accordingly there is no reason to believe he ever contemplated marching east of the Pennines. Instead, he marched west from Halifax and then turned south to skirt the western side of the Peak District, with royalist Lancashire on his right flank. Given that Thomas, Baron Stanley, the local commander of the king’s forces, was married to Salisbury’s daughter Eleanor, and that his younger brother William rode with Salisbury along with the Cheshire knights Robert Bold and Henry Radford, probably as guides, it is fair to assume a laissez-passer had been arranged in advance.
Stanley’s treachery is another illustration of the adverse fortuna that dogged Marguerite. His namesake father, handpicked by the queen for her son’s Council, had died in February, aged only 54. There are no grounds for doubting the elder Stanley’s loyalty to the crown. If he had lived, the outcome of the Blore Heath campaign would have been very different.
Armies commonly bivouacked outside towns for the night, and Hyde, Macclesfield and Newcastle under Lyme are plausible candidates for stopping-points for Salisbury’s army. At Newcastle under Lyme, at latest, his scouts would have informed him that he was in the middle of a closing ring of royalist armies. Following him at a prudent distance were Stanley’s Lancashire men, while the king was marching west from Nottingham, the queen and her Midlands retainers were approaching from the south, and barring his way were Lords Audley and Dudley with the ‘Queen’s Gallants’ of Cheshire.
Fifty-nine-year-old John Sutton, 1st Baron Dudley, has cropped up at regular intervals in preceding chapters. Originally one of the courtiers who became part of the king’s inner circle as a member of Suffolk’s affinity, he remained close to the king after his mentor’s fall and was wounded by his side at St Albans. A member of the prince’s council, he had limited military experience dating back to the 1420s. Sixty-one-year-old James Tuchet, 5th Baron Audley, had considerably more experience, but had last commanded troops in 1431. The queen trusted him, but he also owed his appointment to the retainers he could draw from his estates in Cheshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire.
The list of ninety-nine known or probable royalist casualties compiled by Blore Heath guru Mark Hinsley is revealing. One would have assumed the Cheshire army came mainly from the queen’s and the Prince of Wales’s lands, with some drawn from Audley’s and Dudley’s estates, in particular Dudley’s manor of Malpas, through which the army marched on its way from Chester to Market Drayton. Yet thirty-six of the named casualties came from the manor of Gawsworth outside Macclesfield, held by the Fitton family since 1316, among them Thomas Fitton and eight of his kin. He must have marched to join Audley before it was known that Salisbury had crossed the Pennines.
Estimates of the numbers on either side vary too widely to be useful, but something like 8,000 versus Salisbury’s 5,000 seems likely. As to quality, although Robert Ogle and his tough Northumbrians remained in the north, experienced Marcher soldiers once again formed the core of Salisbury’s force. They were trumped on the Lancastrian side by thousands of Cheshire archers, famed for their deadliness during the Hundred Years War, formed up along a hedgerow running down from Blore village – much of which still exists.
A battle has at least four identities. The closest to reality is the mosaic of participants’ perceptions, soon subsumed into the second, which is a body of accepted facts to which memories retrospectively conform. The third is the canonical version, coloured by the propaganda use to which it is put at the time and later. The fourth seeks to rediscover the first, but is shaped by the intellectual climate of the time in which it is written. There are few accounts from either of the first two categories of the battles of the Wars of the Roses, and the third category source for Blore Heath is the The Attainder of Richard Duke of York and others, from the rolls of the Parliament that met in Coventry two months after the battle.
The Burgundian Jehan de Wavrin wrote the closest fourth category account in about 1470. It is wildly inaccurate in many respects, yet so curiously exact in its description of the battlefield that it is reasonable to assume he had spoken with participants. This does not mean what they told him was accurate with regard to the tactical calculations of the rival commanders. The most influential history has been Edward Hall’s The Union of the Noble and Ilustre Famelies of Lancastre and York, first published in 1548, republished in 1809 as Hall’s Chronicle. He drew on oral family history: his grandfather, one of York’s councillors, would have heard accounts of the battle from Salisbury’s men when they arrived at Ludlow.
Men in combat understandably focus on their immediate surroundings. Even for modern battles, with dozens of ‘I was there’ memoirs to draw on, the only dependable witness remains the terrain. Although the battlefield of Blore Heath is almost pristine, the standard account of the battle is two-dimensional, and points the finger of blame at Audley for tactical incompetence. He is supposed to have abandoned an impregnable position to make a mounted charge across the brook to utterly predictable destruction, supposedly tricked into doing so by a feigned retreat by Salisbury’s right wing. He did not.
The valley of the Wemberton Brook was described as ‘not very broad, but somewhat deep’. As it is today, so in 1459 the brook itself would have been lined with bushes and trees. Even after 556 years of erosion, the modern contours answer a number of questions. The road Salisbury wished to follow would have taken him across a steep-sided ford that would have slowed deployment to a crawl, up a long slope overlooked by the royalist right wing commanded by Audley himself, his banners visible on the Blore village plateau.
This was also the logical place for his guns. The ridge and the hedgerow not only concealed Audley’s numbers, but at the western end also permitted troops to move behind the lines without being seen by Salisbury, who would have been with his reserves on the high ground at the edge of Rounhay Wood, between the Newcastle under Lyme and Eccleshall roads.
Salisbury’s situation could hardly have been more unfavourable. He knew the queen and her retainers were at Eccleshall, 9 miles to the south-east, with the king and the main royalist army not far behind. He also knew the complicity of his Stanley son-in-law would not extend to permitting him to fall back through Newcastle under Lyme, and that he would come off the fence against him if a Lancastrian victory seemed assured.
He was trapped, yet any assault across the brook would certainly be annihilated. Worse, Audley’s left wing extended beyond the Hemp Mill pond to another crossing where the contour lines open up and the brook bed becomes less of an obstacle. This is the point where modern roads cross the bro
ok, and is certainly the passage described by Wavrin, where an outflanking move by mounted men was practicable.
Even if he could not see them, Salisbury would have assumed, correctly, that the Lancastrians would have a strong force concentrated on their left wing. Thus the most likely sequence is that he paused at the top of the hill while he brought up the wagons and guns, and then sent them together with the Van towards the lower crossing. At the same time the Main and Rear advanced down the hill to form a line within bowshot of the brook and the track along its northern bank. The wagons and guns went to form an artillery fort beyond the mill pond, to cover the crossing and to anchor his right flank. His left flank was reasonably secure behind the steeper slopes to the east of the upper ford, and he would have had an outpost at Netherblore, covering the approach from Eccleshall.
Why did the Lancastrians not interfere with this deployment? Probably because their plan was to stop Salisbury while reinforcements closed in on him. In the usual preliminary parleys they would have called on Salisbury to capitulate on terms. With these rejected and Stanley dawdling at Newcastle under Lyme, Audley and Dudley would have been in a quandary. The queen had given them explicit instructions to bring her Salisbury, dead or alive. If he slipped away during the night they were sure to be branded as cowards for not seeking battle with the odds so greatly in their favour.
The defensive strength of their position worked against offensive action. Bearing in mind the terrain and the fact that all contemporary armies were organized in three ‘battles’, an interpretation that does not assume Audley was a blunderer would run as follows. The Van on the right wing would advance downhill towards the upper ford to fix Salisbury’s left. Audley would then charge with the Main at a diagonal to cross the brook east of the mill pond, the first wave being mounted men-at-arms who would have ridden rapidly down to the brook, hoping to gain tactical surprise. Nobody had ridden into an arrow storm since the early years of the Hundred Years War, and nobody (bar the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava) ever launched a cavalry charge uphill. Therefore, they dismounted and the advance to contact was made on foot, angling towards Salisbury’s right flank.
