History of the British Army (Vol.1&2). J. W. Fortescue
The maker of the English archers died, and under his feeble son the English army learned at Bannockburn an ignominious lesson in tactics. The Scotch army, forty thousand strong, was composed principally of pikemen, who were drawn up, as at Falkirk, in four battalions, with the burn in their front and broken ground on either flank. Their cavalry, numbering a thousand, a mere handful compared to the host of the English men-at-arms, was kept carefully in hand. Edward opened the action by advancing his archers to play on the Scottish infantry, but omitted to support them; and Bruce, seeing his opportunity, let loose his thousand horse on their flank and rolled them up in confusion. The English cavalry then dashed in disorder against the serried pikes, failed, partly from want of space and partly from bad management, to make the slightest impression on them, and were driven off in shameful and humiliating defeat. So the English learned that their famous archers could not hold their own against cavalry without support,[13] and they took the lesson to heart. The old system of dismounting the men-at-arms had been for the moment abandoned with disastrous results; the man who was to revive it had been born at Windsor Castle just two years before the fight.
1327.
1333.
Thirteen years later this boy ascended the throne of England as King Edward the Third, and almost immediately marched with a great host against the Scots. The campaign came to an end without any decisive engagement, but on the one occasion when an action seemed imminent, the English men-at-arms dismounted and put off their spurs after the old English fashion. Peace was made, but only to be broken by the Scots, and then Edward took his revenge for Bannockburn at Halidon Hill. The English men-at-arms alighted from their horses, and were formed into four battalions, each of them flanked by wings of archers, the identical formation adopted two centuries later for the pikemen and musketeers. The Scots, whose numbers were far superior, were also formed on foot in four battalions, but without the strength of archers. "And then," says the old historian,[14] "the English minstrels blew aloud their trumpets and sounded their pipes and other instruments of martial music, and marched furiously to meet the Scots." The archers shot so thick and fast that the enemy, unable to endure it, broke their ranks, and then the English men-at-arms leaped on to their horses for the pursuit. The Scotch strove gallantly to rally in small bodies, but they were borne down or swept away; they are said to have lost ten thousand slain out of sixty thousand that entered the battle.
The mounting of the men-at-arms for the pursuit gave the finishing touch to the English tactical methods, and the nation was now ready for war on a grander scale. Moreover, there was playing round the knees of good Queen Philippa a little boy of three years old who was destined to be the victor of Poitiers. It is therefore time, while the quarrel which led to the Hundred Years' War is maturing, to observe the point to which two centuries and a half of progress had brought English military organisation.
Authorities.—By far the best, so far as I know the only, account of the rise of English tactics and of English military power is to be found in Die Entwickelung des Kriegswesens in der Ritterzeit, by Major-General Köhler, vol. ii. pp. 356 sq., and vol. v. pp. 97 sq., a work to which my obligations must be most gratefully acknowledged. The authorities are faithfully and abundantly quoted. Freeman's Norman Conquest, Mr. J. H. Round's Feudal England, Hewitt's Ancient Armour, Oman's Art of War in the Middle Ages, Grose's Military Antiquities, and Rymer's Fœdera are authorities which will occur to every one, as also the Constitutional Histories of Hallam, Stubbs, and Gneist.
CHAPTER II
Attention has already been called to the defects of the feudal system for military purposes, and to the shifts whereby successive sovereigns sought to make them good. With Edward the Second resort was made to a new device. Contracts, or as they were called indents, were concluded by the King with men of position, whereby the latter, as though they had been apprentices to a trade, bound themselves to serve him with a force of fixed strength during a fixed term at a fixed rate of wages. In some respects this was simply a reversion to the old practice of hiring mercenaries; but as Edward the Third placed his contracts for the most part within his kingdom, the force assumed a national character. The current ideas of organisation were still so imperfect that the contractors generally engaged themselves to provide a mixed force of all arms; but as they naturally raised men where they could most easily get hold of them, that is to say in their own neighbourhoods, there was almost certainly some local or personal feeling to help to keep them together. For the rest the contractor of course made his own arrangements for the interior economy of his own particular troops, and enjoyed in consequence considerable powers, which descended to the colonels of a later day and have only been stripped from them within the last two generations. It is not difficult to imagine that men thus enlisted should presently, when released from national employment, have sold their services to the highest bidder and become, as they presently did become, condottièri. It is characteristic of the commercial genius of our race that England should be the cradle not only of the soldier but of the condottière;[15] in other words, that she should have set the example in making warfare first a question of wages, and next a question of profit. But her work did not end here; for these reforms created the race of professional soldiers and through them the renascence of the Art of War. In short, with the opening of the Hundred Years' War the British army quickens in the womb of time, and the feudal force sinks into ever swifter decay.
But there is another side to this picture of feudal inefficiency. Moral not less than physical force is a mighty factor in war; and it was precisely the military defects of the English feudal system that first made her a military power. Though the growth of a caste of warriors was checked, it was to make room for that which was worthy to overshadow it, a fighting nation. For in England there was not, as in other countries, any denial of civil rights to the commons of the realm. Below the ranks of the peerage all freemen enjoyed equality before the law; nay, the peerage itself conferred no privilege except on those who actually possessed it, the sons of peers being commoners, not as elsewhere noble through the mere fact of their birth. In England there were and are nobility and gentry: in other countries nobility and gentry were merged in a single haughty exclusive caste, and between them and other freemen was fixed a great and impassable gulf. Thus the highest and the lowest of the freemen were in touch with each other in England as nowhere else in Europe. More than two centuries later than Creçy, so great and gallant a gentleman as Bayard could refuse with disdain to fight by the side of infantry. In England, whatever the pride of race, the son of the noblest peer in the land stood shoulder to shoulder with his equal when the archer fell in by his side, and where the son stood the father could feel it no shame to stand. No other nation as yet could imitate this; no other could recall a Hastings where all classes had stood afoot in one battalion. Other nations could indeed, when taught by experience, dismount their knights and align cross-bowmen with them, just as at this day they can erect an upper and lower chamber and speak of a constitution on the English model; but then as now it was the form only, not the substance, that was English.
So far for the commercial and political influence that helped to mould our military system; there remains yet another great moral force to be reckoned with. Chivalry, which had been growing slowly in England since the Third Crusade, burst in the fourteenth century into late but magnificent blossom. The nation woke to the beauty of a service which gave dignity to man's fighting instincts, which taught that it was not enough for him to be without fear if he were not also without reproach, and that though the government of the world must always rest upon force, yet mercy and justice may go hand in hand with it. The girding on of the sword was no longer a social but a religious act; it marked not merely the young man's entrance into public life, but his ordination to a great and noble function. Concurrently there had arisen a sense of the charm of glory and adventure. Hitherto the English knights had gained no repute in Europe. Hatred and jealousy had held the Saxon aloof from his Norman master; now there was no more Saxon and Norman, but the English, united and strong, a fighting people that thirsted for military fame.
Let us now briefly consider the composition and organisation of the armies that were to work such havoc in France. The cavalry was drawn for the most part from the wealthier classes, though, as has been seen, there was one division of the freemen