Bowmen of England

by Donald Featherstone

  Edward’s army had regular rates of pay; there is a record of the Prince of Wales’s retinue:

  7 bannerets at 4s. a day (a banneret was a knight entitled to carry a banner – each banneret was expected to find an archer for each man-at-arms he provided).

  136 knights at 2s. a day.

  143 esquires (rank-and-file men-at-arms) at 1s. a day.

  900 mounted archers at 6d. a day.

  Foot archers seem to have got sums ranging from 2d. to 4d. per day.

  Chapter 4

  Their Way of Fighting

  The age of the knight in armour will always possess a colour and glory because of its code of honour hallowed and revered by the upper classes in their attempts to render themselves worthy of their exceptional privileges. But much of the outward display and the class-conscious conventions on which such chivalry had always rested were swept away by the exigencies of serious warfare when the Hundred Years War brought national conflict between France and England. With such vast disparities of population – France had over ten million and England only three to four million2 – the English leaders had to make the best use of the material at their disposal and were highly satisfied if their methods enabled them to beat the enemy. These commanders who made such good use of archery as a national tactic had no real conception of the fact that in terminating the ascendancy in war of the mailed horseman they were putting an end to the feudal regime and all that it entailed. Regarding themselves as the very flower of chivalry, Edward I, Edward III and the Black Prince might have paused in their efforts had they realised that their successful tactics meant the end of so-called chivalrous warfare. It could be that the needs of the moment prevented them having such thoughts, just as the fullest implications of Hiroshima were not realised in 1945.

  Before archery became of supreme importance in warfare there existed a lengthy and tactically stagnant epoch when the mail-clad feudal horseman reigned supreme. Because the feudal organisation of society made every man of gentle blood a fighting-man, but not necessarily a soldier, a feudal army presented an unbelievable collection of unsoldierlike qualities. Although arrogance, stupidity and great courage coloured the activities of these armies, their inability to replace skill and experience made tactics and strategy impossible. The knight had no conception that discipline and tactical skill were as important as courage; it was always possible that at some inopportune and critical moment a battle might be precipitated or a carefully laid plan ruined by the incredibly foolish bravery of some petty knight with lust for only personal glory. Social status rather than professional experience led to command, so that the noble with the largest following was always superior to the skilled veteran with only a few lances to lead.

  When a number of tenants-in-chief, all blindly jealous of each other, had been collected together with great difficulty they formed an unwieldy, unmanoeuvrable host ready to melt away from the standard the moment their short period of war-service was over. They recognised no superior but the King, and, unless he were a leader of uncommon skill, he was often powerless to control them, so that the radical vice of insubordination continued unchecked. Their very formation encouraged this in many ways; confined to a single pattern, they were formed into three great masses or battles and then launched at the enemy; there could really be no other way because the troops were neither disciplined nor accustomed to act together so that combined movements of small bodies were impossible.

  Keeping a reserve in hand was a refinement practised by very few commanders, partly because it would have been very difficult to persuade a feudal chief to stay out of the front line of battle so that he incurred the risk of missing some of the hard fighting. Regarded as a model of military efficiency if he could sit his charger steadily and skilfully handle a sword and lance, nothing could restrain him when the enemy came in sight. His shield would be shifted into position, the lance dropped into rest, the spur plunged into the charger and the mail-clad line would ponderously roll forward. Thundering on as they gained speed, they had little regard for anything that might lie before them; as often as not the formation dashed themselves against a stone wall or tumbled into a ditch; painfully floundered in a bog or surged futilely around a wall or palisade. If the enemy were similar to themselves the two forces would meet with a fearful shock, men and horses tumbling in all directions, and then a chaotic mêlée would follow, sometimes lasting for hours. This meant that most engagements were nothing more than a huge, sprawling scuffle and scramble of men and horses over a patch of bare land or a hillside. Sometimes, as if by general agreement, both parties would laboriously wheel to the rear, halt for a while as their horses regained breath, and then rush at each other again until one side was worsted and fled from the field. The most elementary military tactics, such as preselecting a battle position, or using a reserve to take the enemy in rear or flank, were considered examples of exceptional military skill. The commendation of the age boiled down to striking individual feats of arms rather than any efforts at real leadership.

  Great battles did not take place very often, simply because opposing armies often completely lost each other because they neglected to keep in touch by vedettes or outposts and patrols. It was usually the existence of some topographical objective, such as a road, ford or bridge, which precipitated a conflict; with maps non-existent and geographical knowledge both scanty and inaccurate, it was easy for armies to stray away and lose sight of each other. A recognised manner in which this last contingency was prevented lay in the opposing generals solemnly sending and accepting challenges to meet in battle at a given place and on a definite date.

  There was little for the infantry to do, no important part for them to play; they accompanied the armies for no better purpose than to perform the menial camp duties and assist in the numerous sieges of the period. Now and then, as a sort of overture, they were used to demonstrate ineffectually at the opening of a battle, but if they presumed to prolong these demonstrations, their lords, affronted by such presumption, would end the skirmishing by riding into and over their luckless followers. The half-armed peasants and burghers who had unwillingly joined the levy because it was the duty of every able-bodied man to do so were incapable of combining to withstand a cavalry charge; lacking adequate weapons and without discipline, they were ridden down and crushed.

  The only infantry who commanded any respect were those bodies who were armed with more or less uniform equipment and weapons; the chief cause of the military unworthiness of infantry generally can be said to have been due primarily to the miscellaneous nature of their armament. The Scottish lowlanders, with their long spears, and the Saracen auxiliaries, plying their crossbows, stood out as troops capable of putting up good performances on foot and without all the benefits of high birth. The few infantry successes which occurred towards the end of the feudal period were exceptional and served to foreshadow the new era of co-ordinated dismounted warfare.

  When a feudal host came up against a force or a commander capable of exercising even the most simple and rudimentary tactics on the field of battle they invariably took a hiding. With each commander making his own speed into the attack, followed by his supporters, the feudal force arrived at the scene of battle in small scattered groups. This meant that the battle was made up of a number of detached and unco-ordinated cavalry combats and a systematic enemy could defeat each of these groups in detail so that the sum total of the small routs added up to a great defeat. In this way a skirmish, a street fight or the bogging-down of a group of heavily armed horsemen could overthrow an entire force.

  With such an unscientific method of warfare, resembling nothing more than a huge tilting-match, it only needed one side to bring into the field a factor that would prevent their opponents from approaching near enough to break a lance for the whole concept of then-known warfare to break down. By introducing auxiliaries like the English archer against a military caste too hidebound and blind to alter its losing methods throughout almost the whole of a hundred-year period, the
English commanders could hardly fail to bring to earth the flower of French chivalry. French chivalry was to receive an early and striking lesson when the peasant-archer faced the high-born knight at Crécy in 1346. It was a lesson that was to be unheeded, in spite of finding himself unable to approach the position from which the deadly arrow reached him, the knight still clung to the tradition which gave the most honourable name in war to the mounted man. Thus were cavalry, whose day had really passed, perpetuated for another century; a system so intimately bound up with mediaeval life and customs would take more than a single disaster, or the dozen others to follow, before being irretrievably smashed.

  Chapter 5

  The English Archer

  ‘We’ll all drink together

  To the grey goose feather,

  And the land where the grey goose flew.

  What of the men?

  The men were bred in England,

  The Bowmen, the yeomen,

  The lads of dale and fell.

  Here’s to you and to you

  To the hearts that are true,

  And the land where the true hearts dwell.’

  Marching Song of the White Company

  Conan Doyle

  The whole history of English warfare from the middle of the twelfth century to the end of the fifteenth century proves that the flower of her infantry was the archers. The bow was put in the hand of every English boy at the age of seven and it did not cease to furnish him with sport and occupation until the years had deprived his arm of strength and his eye of skill. From the Conquest down to the general introduction of the musket, the use and practice of the longbow were enforced by some form or other of English legislature. The English archer was not only a singular man of war, he also possessed a singular status unlike anything else in Continental Europe; it was a status that made him the fighting man he was, capable of standing to the death if ordered or making a sudden flank attack on his own initiative when the situation demanded. He was not a peasant bound to someone superior in birth and position, he was a freeman, a yeoman who gave his valuable fighting services in return for a contract setting out his rate of pay and term of service.

  History and fiction give many descriptions of the archer; most of them picture him as a Robin Hood-like man dressed in Lincoln green and wearing a hat of a well-known shape, with a fancy feather rising from its side. In the pages of his Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer shows us his archer:

  ‘And he was clad in cote and hood of grene;

  A sheefe of pecock-arrowes brighte and keene

  Under his belt he bar ful thriftily;

  (Wel coude he dresse his taken yemanly;

  His arrowes drouped nought with fetheres lowe,)

  And in his hand he bar a mighty bowe;

  A not-heed haddle he, with a broun visage.

  Of wodecraft wel coude he al the usage.

  Under his arm he bar a gay bracer,

  And by his syde a swerd and a bokeler,

  And on that other syde a gay daggere,

  Harneised wel, and sharp as point of spere;

  A Cristofre on his brest of silver shene.

  A horn he bar, the baudrick was of grene.’

  Less colourful, but of a more warlike nature, is the description of the English archer given by one Ralphe Smithe:

  ‘Captains and officers should be skilful of that most noble weapon, and to see that their soldiers according to their draught and strength, have good bows, well nocked, well strynged, everie strynge whippe in their nock, and in the middles rubbed with wax; baser and shooting-glove; some spare strynges as aforesaid. Everie man one shefe of arrows with a case of leather, defensible against the rayne; and in the same foure-and-twenty arrows, whereof eight of them should be lighter than the residue to gall or astonye the enemy with the hail-shot of light arrows. Let everie man have a brigandine, or little cote of plate; a skull [cap], or hufkin; a maul of lead, five feet in length; and a pike, and the same hanging by his side, with a hook and dagger. Being thus furnished, teach them by their masters to march, shoote and retyre, keeping their faces to the enemy. Some time put them in great nowmbers, as to battell appertayneth, and thus use them oftentymes till they be perfecte; for those men in battell or skirmish cannot be spared.’

  It seems reasonable to assume, because of the physical training that their practice entailed, that the archers were strong, muscular men; tall, sinewy, brown, clear-eyed and hard-visaged – middle-sized or tall men of big and robust build, with arching chests and extraordinary breadth of shoulder. The older soldiers were grizzled and lean, with fierce puckered features and shaggy bristling brows, skin tanned and dried by the weather. The younger men had fresh, English faces, with beards combed out and hair curling from under their close, steel hufkins. Their profession was proclaimed by the yew or hazel stave slung over their shoulder, plain and serviceable with the older men but gaudily painted and carved at either end when belonging to younger archers. Steel caps, mail brigandines, white surcoats with the red Lion of St. George, and sword or battleaxe swinging from their belts completed the equipment. In some cases the murderous maule or five-foot mallet was hung across the bow-stave, being fastened to their leathern shoulder-belt by a hook in the centre of the handle. When they went to war, spare bow-staves were taken, plus three spare cords allowed for each bow and a great store of arrow-heads.

  According to his strength and height, so the archer equipped himself. The tall and muscular man of six feet and upwards found that a powerful bow of seven feet was best suited to his purpose and his arrows were a cloth-yard, besides the head. His smaller comrade would use a six-foot bow and shorter arrows, reducing them to the correct length if they were too long for him, although it appears to have been quite usual for archers to fix loose arrow-heads to their own shafts. It is said that at Agincourt the army of Henry V consisted of such tremendous archers that most of them drew a yard. Tall men, with strength and length of arm, could draw the clothyard shaft, others adapted themselves to the arrow lengths they could handle. Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, author of an old history of arms and armour, wrote:

  ‘With respect to the size of the bow, the string ought to be the height of the man, and the arrow half the length of the string. Now, as from that, to the top of the middle finger, is equal to half his whole height, it must be equal also to the length of his arrow; and the left hand, therefore, being clenched round the bow, will leave just room for the arrow-head beyond it. From this it will appear that a man six feet high must shoot with a clothyard arrow and vice versa.’

  English archers carried into the field a sheaf of twenty-four barbed arrows, buckled within their girdles. A portion of them, about six or eight, were longer, lighter and winged with narrower feathers than the rest. With these flight arrows, as they were called, they could hit a mark at a greater distance than with the remaining heavy sheaf arrows. The advantages occasionally derived from this superiority of range, when directed by a skilful leader, have led to very important results such as that at Towton. Unfledged arrows cannot fly far and are greatly affected by the wind. Ascham, the ‘Izaak Walton of archery’, says: ‘Neither wood, horn, metal, parchment, paper nor cloth but only a feather is fit for a shaft.’ There must have been a great consumption of goose feathers; an army needed at least 20,000 sheaves of arrows, requiring a million and a half goose feathers. Peacock feathers were used as well as those of the grey goose:

  ‘With everie arrowe an ell long,

  With peacocke well y dyght.’

  The archer had to find a style which was reasonably natural and which consequently came fairly automatically; if the English archers shot by instinct then it was in the knowledge of how much force to use that this instinct came in. But it was not really an innate skill, it was one nurtured and fostered by years of practice, beginning at about seven to nine years of age. Then the lad would hold out a round stick in his left hand, arm stiff and straight from the shoulder; as silent and still as a small statue, the lad would hold out the stick
until his arm was as heavy as lead – in this way the left arm was trained to have a steady grasp of the bow. When he became older and could bend a war-bow so as to be able to bring down a squirrel at a hundred paces, then a boy was ready to be considered suitable to become an archer in the King’s army. Even then it was still necessary to practise – in fact, it was compulsory.

  During their off-duty periods the young archers would throw aside their coats of mail or leather hauberks, set down their steel skull-caps, and turn back their jerkins to give free play to their brawny chests and arms. Standing in line, they would each loose a shaft in turn, while the older, experienced bowmen lounged up and down the line with critical eyes and words of rough praise or curt censure for each marksman. Now and then they could cry out advice:

  ‘Loose it easy, steady and yet sharp!’

  ‘Don’t wink with one eye and look with the other! Nay, lad! You don’t need to hop and dance after you shoot – that won’t speed it on its way! Stand firm and straight, as God made you. Move not the bow-arm and steady with the drawing hand.’

  The scarred and grizzled veterans knew that it was one thing to shoot at a target-shield, but another thing when there was a man behind that shield, riding at you with a wave of sword or lance, and eyes glinting from behind a closed visor – then it became a less easy mark!

  Representations of the old longbowmen in the ancient illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries identify the old stance and practice with the modern. A pen-and-ink drawing by John de Rous, a bowman as well as a contemporary biographer of the Earl of Warwick, shows the necessary slight inclination of the head and neck – this ‘laying of the body into the bow’ – the drawing with two and with three fingers, are correctly delineated. This drawing is among the MSS. at the British Museum. A sixteenth-century verse says: