Chapter 2
By the last quarter of the thirteenth century archery had become a recognised military arm of great importance to England. The Royal Statutes compelled every person earning less than 100 pence per year to have in his possession a bow and arrows, officers being appointed by the Crown to see that all these weapons were in good order and ready for instant use. If the owners of the weapons lived within the confines of, or near to, the Royal Forests, an early conservation measure ruled that their arrows should be blunt ones. The archer was beginning to be recognised as a person of military importance, as can be seen from an ancient military ordinance:
‘And in special, at the first moustre, every archere shall have his bowe and arrowes hole, that is to wytte, in arrowes xxx or xxiv at the least, headed and in a sheaf. And furthermore, that every archere do sweare that his bowe and arrowes be his own, or his mastyres or captaynes. And also that no man ones moustered and admitted as an archere, alter or change himself to any other condition, without the Kinge’s special leave, upon payne of imprisonment.’
Poachers and outlaws in Sherwood Forest were offered a pardon on condition they served in the King’s army as archers. This was not simply a general or meaningless pardon either; the offence for which each man was pardoned is specified, clear indication of the value put upon them. These criminals (like their descendants in Wellington’s Peninsula army) amply vindicated England’s fighting capacity by gaining a notable victory at Halidon Hill in 1333. When it is considered just how serious poaching was viewed in those days, the pardoning comes into its correct perspective. Brief examination and a speedy fate awaited the luckless Saxon who loved a buck’s haunch more than he feared the penalties of the forest law, or whose wife and children’s piteous pleading for food spurred him to venture forth with bow and arrow amid the trees. A caballistic verse reveals the suspicious circumstances that could bring summary justice to the unfortunate man:
‘Dog draw,
Stable stand,
Black berond,
Bloody hand.’
Thus is indicated the four evidences by which, according to the old feudal laws, a man was convicted of deer-stealing. The first relates to an offender caught in a forest, drawing after a deer with a hound in leash; the second to him caught with a bent bow ready to shoot; the third to bearing away the venison on his shoulders and the fourth to him merely found with hand stained with blood.
Edward the Confessor’s Red Book contains the following caution:
‘Omnis homo abstest a venariis meis, super poenam vitae.’ (Let every man refrain from my hunting grounds on pain of death.)
A nearby tree would form a ready gallows, his own bowstring the halter by which they strangled him like a hound.
Realising that the necessary skill with the longbow could only be reached with constant and unremitting practice, the strictest means were taken to ensure that every able-bodied man got in his hours of practice shooting. Peers and churchmen were privileged by law, but no other persons, aliens excepted, could absent themselves from the public exercise ground without incurring what was then considered a serious penalty. So the independent franklin, the wealthy yeoman, the rude peasant and the unwashed artisan all congregated, distinction of rank lost sight of for the time, and adroitness alone giving title to superiority. The ancient public butts were so thronged with archers, particularly at holiday times, that they raked up the surrounding turf by the very arrows that missed, in such a manner that the grass would not grow again in the same spots. The continual tramping of feet as the bowmen circulated about the marks also contributed to destroy the turf and vegetation. In the vicinity of the large and populous towns the concourse must have been enormous and for this reason the archer used but a single arrow when practising. Besides the impossibility of getting in a second shot amid such confusion, he found it necessary to hurry away to the opposite butt in order to catch up his shaft before it was stolen or trodden under foot.
Notwithstanding all this activity, King Edward I complained by letter to the Sheriff of London that archery had fallen into a grievous condition; he said that skill with the bow was put aside in favour of useless sports and commanded that hereinafter the Sheriff should see to it that such idle practices were abandoned and that leisure time upon holidays should be spent in the noble recreation of archery.
It fell to Edward III to reap the full benefit of English bowmanship, but his grandfather, seen complaining above, planted and fostered in such a way the seed. Even before his first Welsh war, in 1277 Edward showed his interest in the Welsh longbow; in that year a special force of 100 picked men of Macclesfield in the King’s own lands, were purely archers unmixed with spearmen. They served from the first day of the war, which broke out later in that year, to the very last day at the then extraordinary wage of 3d. per day; whereas the other infantry came up only for short periods. The only other purely bow-armed force of this war came from Gwent and Crickhowell and that, too, served for a longer time than usual.
The early fourteenth century saw the evolution of a coherent military practice which used in a single tactical scheme the distinctive power of archery, the defensive solidarity of dismounted men-at-arms and, when necessary, the offensive power of mounted troops. Edward had discovered, or comprehended what was already apparent, first the virtues of archery in attack to break up a defensive infantry formation and, second, its power in defence when based on array of dismounted knights and men-at-arms. A beginning was made in the Welsh wars: at Orewin Bridge in 1282 and at Maes Maydog in 1295, the first against the men of Prince Llewelyn, who prepared to stand their ground in a defensive position. The English advanced against them, archers interposed with cavalry – the arrows inflicting sufficient loss on the Welsh troops to cause them to loosen their cohesion and fall into comparative disorder so that the cavalry were able to ride them down. In the second battle, near Conway, the Earl of Warwick used the same tactics. A contemporary report says:
‘The Welsh on the earl’s approach, set themselves fronting his force with exceeding long spears, which, being suddenly turned toward the earl and his company with their ends placed in the earth and their points upwards, broke the force of the English cavalry. But the earl well provided against them, by placing archers between his men-at-arms, so that by these missive weapons those who held the lances were put to rout.’
In later battles with the other hereditary enemy, the Scots, the effectiveness of combined archery and cavalry action against immobile infantry formations was shown. Such were the beginnings of the use of English infantry to be a power in war; the seventy years which followed the opening of Edward’s Welsh wars saw striking developments both in military organisation and tactics. Both led to the same culmination – those English victories which astonished Europe in the opening stages of the Hundred Years War. It remained for Edward I in his later campaigns, and for his grandson Edward III, to get the English to become expert in the use of the longbow by practice, and to learn to act as a disciplined corps. Yet even after the Battle of Halidon Hill the English had no military reputation whatsoever. Jehan le Bel is quite explicit in showing that their triumph at Crécy came as a complete surprise to the whole of Continental Europe.