Four years later at Constance (1356) The French crossbowmen had their pavises this time and they wore their armor. So protected, the longbow fire was quite ineffective. They simply waited for the longbows to run out of arrows then they returned the fire. The longbowmen quickly hid behind their men at arms. With the French crossbowmen supporting the French dismounted attack, the English were defeated this time.

Nogent 1359, the French made their initial attack on horseback but had to fall back. Then, on foot, the French attacked the English bowmen. The French were so well armored and with them holding their shields a loft that English arrows could not hurt them. The French broke the archers position and when the archers broke and ran the French mounted men-at-arms rode the archers down and slaughtered the, Once more the English men-at-arms could not hold and were defeated.

The chroniclers who wrote about the battle of Auray clearly pointed out the English bowmen were quite ineffective. The French men-at-arms were too well armored and shielded. The French were finally defeated but they were defeated through a combination of English men-at-arms and Breton cavalry.

The longbow was a mature technology even when it appeared first on the battlefield. It could not keep up with the armor improvements. By 1415, at Agincourt, the armor of the French was so well developed they no longer needed their shields. What Constance showed was when crossbowmen were properly armored and had their pavises, the English longbowmen were no match for them.

Luckily for the English, the French raised their military forces a bit differently than did the English. The English military contracts specified how many men-at-arms and archers were to be raised. Thus, English forces were always composed of both arms. The French, on the other hand, contracted with men-at-arms separately from crossbowmen. There were a number of occasions in which French men-at-arms had to fight without crossbowmen simply because there was not enough money with which to raise units of crossbowmen.

The French men-at-arms were quick to improve their armor and make tactical changes. They adapted their attack tactics to include dismounted attacks and to carry their shields over their heads much in the manner of the Roman tortoise. The one thing the French couldn’t match was the steadiness of the English man-at-arms. When the English won, they won because of their men-at-arms not their longbowmen.

Some comments have been made about Robert Hardy. Here is my problem with Mr. Hardy:

“It had been hard to train him to his best; it proved impossible to keep him to it; but as his best there was no man in the world to beat him, no matter the odds against him; and his breed lasted long beyond the longbow; he used the musket and the rifle; he endured in 1915 the same, and worse, than his forefathers suffered in 1415. There has been a fashion lately to deride, not his kind, but his service to his nation as an exploitation by his rulers of his servitude and simplicity. Neither he nor his nation has ever taken kindly to servitude, and often his simplicity turns out to have been reticence, which once dropped when overt action has to be taken, is found by his enemies to have concealed both dogged and dashing courage, subtlety together with intransigence, and a total refusal to yield to pressures from outside his nation or from within it that are not acceptable to his not quickly formed but formidably defended attitudes. He will never entirely perish because, for all the sloth and the cantankerous emulation that lie side by side in his nature, he shares with the best of mankind, courage, clear sight and honesty. [p 56]”

“When two such armies met again ten years later at Poitiers there were almost no crossbows on the French side. They were remembered as useless. [p 75]”

His jingoism with regards the longbow and lack of historical foundation just irritates me. As a historian, I can’t take him serious.

Rich

http://www.recurvebow.org

I’ve been involved in shooting the longbow for only two years and I was amazed at the amount of continued debate about all aspects of the weapon among enthusiasts, bowyers, historians and archers. So little was recorded at the time that getting the “true” picture is like nailing jelly to the wall. The biggest “myth” isn’t the one you’re trying to bust but the actual draw weight of the medieval longbow used for battle, paticularly with respect to whether it could penetrate plate armour.

But firstly I think that if you were to view the massed archery techniques that the English armies employed during the Hundred Years War as a form of indirect artillery (which it was), it might make it clear as to why archery alone would not win a battle, but this type of archery in conjunction with dismounted men-at-arms would. World War I highlighted the fact that artillery fire alone could not win a battle. But it could affect it, and back in the 14th century the type of artillery offered by the longbow would not be felt on a battlefield for 400 hundred years after its demise.

This is important to remember because it was most effective against a cavalry charge due to the vulnerability of the horses. Even if an archer never even shot an arrow the presence of a group of longbow men would’ve been noted by the enemy and their tactics altered accordingly. This is perhaps an aspect that’s lacking from your conclusion particularly with respect to your comments about the Battle of Poitiers where first the French cavalry attacked the archers and the archers had to reposition before destroying the cavalry. With an intact French cavalry, a traditional unit that had been effective on the battlefield from the time of Charlemagne, who could say which way the Battle of Poitiers could have taken?

Secondly, as far a social status is concerned it’s perhaps clear by surviving contracts of indenture that a man’s pay was determined by his role within the army. A man-at-arms would earn more than a mounted archer. A mounted archer would earn more than a foot archer and it was certainly what kit they could bring to the field that initially determined this pay. I doubt whether it’s beyond the whit of anymone to realise that if you could afford it and really had the skills you could sign up as a man-at-arms (and certainly the Free Companies in the latter half of the 14th century seem to indicate such professional archers could and did become men-at-arms). As a “peasant” born man-at-arms you could even earn knighthood. But if you were an average yeoman (or franklin), why would you? The costs born by a man-at-arms are high when you factor in his armour, weapons, his horses (note the plural for horses!) but you should also include the time and money spent on training. An archer has significantly lower start up equipment costs and has already put in the practice time afforded to him, by law, on Sundays at the archery butts, since he was seven years old. His fellow villager with delusions of granduer doesn’t get the same amount of time to practice being a man-at-arms should he choose to. He has livestock and fields to tend. This is perhaps why those truly eligible persons for service deferred by paying the set costs to get a man-at-arms to do the job they wouldn’t. It perhaps was not just the startup equipment costs but the time needed to train. It’s also interesting to note that a significant number of criminals served in the army in return for pardons (on all strata’s, archers & men-at-arms) – a class of English society that’s missing altogether from your quote (read Terry Jones’ “Medieval Lives” for a great theory on why medieval England needed outlaws to function).

Finally, we come down to the only thing that matters. During the period we now call the Hundred Years War, as has been well documented, a vast amount of resources and time was put into training and equipping longbow archers. If they were not considered effective in battle their use would have been discontinued long before the introduction fire arms. This is perhaps among all the “myth busters” the ultimate myth to bust. I doubt whether busting it would piss off many modern Englishmen though as they’re more interested in soccer (King Edward III was perhaps showing extreme foresight by trying to ban soccer in 1363 so that Englishmen would spend their time ironically at the archery butts.)

No doubt tomorrow someone will unearth a scrap of paper, parchment or some other historical throw back proving my theories all wrong. Untill then …

Ralph, So I have to believe that in Henry’s eyes, archery was a decisive combat element. It may have had effects that facilitated victory in other ways besides killing enemy knights and men-at-arms.

I would say Henry thought the longbow was an important element. But how do you determine the decisiveness of a combat element when there are only two elements: bowmen and men-at-arms? By the way, most late medieval armies were composed of bowmen and men-at-arms. The exceptions would be like the Flemish civic armies which were composed of shock infantry, bowmen, and men-at-arms. One could say that Henry was only following the military convention of his day with an army composed of bowmen and men-at-arms.

As for Shakespeare, I think English society was far more hierarchically conscious in the late 16th and early 17 centuries that it was in the 14th century.