Chapter 5
‘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 TalesGeoffrey 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:
‘Who thought it then a manlie sight and trim
To see a youth of clean, compacted limb,
Who with a comely grace, in his left hand,
Holding his bow, did take his steadfast stand,
Setting his left foot somewhat forth before,
His arrow with his right hand nocking sure,
Not stooping, nor yet standing straight upright,
Then, with his left hand little ‘bove his sight,
Stretching his arm out, with an easy strength,
To draw an arrow of a yard in length.’
The English longbowmen might well have appeared to aim instinctively because it was quicker, but they really took careful aim, using their judgment to determine the height of their aim. Over the course of hundreds of years it has been proven that the best manner of using a bow is to use the same force for every shot regardless of whether the target is close or far away. This is exactly what the English archer did – he used the full power of his bow every time, never instinctively using more or less of it in order to reach his mark. The bow being held perpendicularly to the ground, their stance was sideways on to their target; in this way the best use could be made of the muscles needed for drawing a war-bow into such a position that the arrow in the bow lay under the eye. This stance also meant that they could stand closer together, thus better concentrating their volleys, which were made even more effective by the rear ranks being able to fire over the heads of the men in front of them.
The best archers looked comfortable and free from awkwardness – a good stance was always graceful and never ugly – competent archery lends itself admirably to the statuesque position. With the bow held out by one arm pointing towards the mark or target, the head was turned in the same direction only as far as was comfortable. The other hand, drawing the string back with the arrow ‘nocked’ on to it, was brought to such a position under or alongside the chin that the tail of the arrow was at a point under the aiming eye. To make sure that the arrow was brought back to the same point under the eye every time, the string would touch one point on the face – on the chin, the lips or the nose. The chin, either right in the middle or at some spot on the side, was the commonest; the lips were the most sensitive and made it possible to detect more easily any slight variation to one side of the proper place. The drawing-hand was, at the same time, brought back firmly to its ‘anchor-point’ (a definite ‘anchor-point’ was of the utmost importance as it very largely influenced the accuracy of the aim for elevation). If the knuckle at the base of the first finger came up against the angle of the jaw, an almost foolproof anchor-point was obtained.
After reaching the full-draw position there was a brief pause before the arrow was sent on its deadly way; during which the aim was finally taken. Now was the time when practice, instinct, innate ability, and all the other factors that made one archer better than another, came into play. Instinctively, the bowman checked all the other vital points in his stance – his bodily balance, the pressure of the fingers of both hands, the position of the elbows, the anchor-point, the angle of the bow, but especially the length of the draw.
The more expert the archer, the shorter the period of holding; and it was always the same length of time – every fraction of a second over his normal holding period, with the bow held at full draw, took something away from the cast of the bow and caused the arrow to fall short. During the whole act of shooting, from the beginning of the draw until after the arrow was loosed, the archer held his breath, with lungs just normally filled. The action of shooting was not hurried, the same time was taken with each arrow; the English archer acquired a regular rhythm. He would rather come down and start again if he were not satisfied – better that than to take a chance with what he knew to be a bad arrow.
When the whole body was under tension at full-draw, concentration reached its peak as the slight final movement of the bow-arm was made to complete the aim. Rather than force their arms to move fractionally in their sockets, some archers would shift their body weight a trifle on to the rear foot. All knew that it was best to bring the bow-hand up to the required elevation just before or at the moment the draw was completed; in this way only a very minute adjustment was needed after the shaft-hand had been finally anchored. Every archer developed some little characteristic action or movement that distinguished him from his fellows; he sought to settle down into a style which suited him best, because it was comfortable and automatic, bringing maximum success.
When Henry V addressed his archers before Agincourt he endeavoured to fire them by dwelling on the cruelties in store for them should they fall into the hands of the French, who, he said, had sworn to amputate their first three fingers so that they would never more slay man or horse. Many an English archer, captured by French or Scots, could ruefully hold up two hands to show that the thumbs and first two fingers had been torn away from each. His comrades set a vengeful value on them – twenty enemy lives for the thumbs and half a score for the fingers. From this, the importance of the archer’s fingers is emphasised – every archer sought for a ‘sharp loose’; acquired by an apparent, although not actual, feeling of increasing the pull of the fingers on the string until it suddenly and instantaneously slipped off the fingers without any sign of creeping, or any feel that the fingers had relaxed. Most of the feel of drawing should be put into the first finger; the string starting quite close up to the first joint on that finger and sloping away across the middle of the first joint of the second finger, finishing up almost at the tip of the third finger, which will then be prevented from doing too much. A very ‘sharp loose’ could be got in this way, as the first finger, the lazy one, was under better control.
The first finger was the strongest but the laziest; the second was also strong and not noticeably temperamental, it would generally follow the first finger; the third finger was the weakest, but it was also the most willing and could be hurt if it did more than its proper share of drawing.
The older archers endeavoured to instil into the beginners the need to lay the body to the bow, to draw from the thigh and hip as much as from the arm. To learn to shoot with a dropping shaft was essential; an arrow will go a certain distance up into the air before it falls towards its mark – when an arrow has its point directly on the target to be hit there is only one distance at which the arrow will fall on to the mark itself. This is ‘point-blank’ range and for an average man drawing a bow of, say, forty-two-pound draw-weight (under half that of the old English archer) that distance will be somewhere between 80 and 100 yards. An adjustment had to be made in the aim for elevation when shooting at a distance longer or shorter than point-blank range, bearing in mind that the bow was always drawn to the same extent so that the same power was used each time. This was done by selecting a point at which to aim either, for shorter distances, on the ground short of the target, or, for longer distances, in a tree or some other tall object above and behind the target. In the latter case, this often meant that the mark was obscured by the bow-hand, but the line of the arrow was constantly under observation.
An archer was often called upon to shoot straight and fast; but often he had to deal with an enemy hiding behind a wall or an arbalastier with his mantlet (a wooden shield) raised – the only way in which such protected men could be hit was to fire in such a manner that the shaft fell upon them straight from the clouds. Even as early as Richard I’s siege of Messina, the archers drove the Sicilians from the walls in this manner – ‘for no man could look out of doors but he would have an arrow in his eye before he could shut it’.
It is evident from the fact that they wore no defensive armour that the archers were designed to be light infantry, swift and mobile, skilful and deadly with their weapons. The name of Edward I must ever be memorable in history for the encouragement he gave to the longbow. But we seek in vain for the man who founded the tradition that the English, whatever their weapon, should always be good shots – the English archer was reputed to be able to draw and discharge his bow twelve times in a single minute, at a range of 250 yards, and if he once missed his man in these twelve shots he was but lightly esteemed.
Here it is difficult to separate fact from fiction; the old chroniclers ventured away from accuracy when describing the feats of the English archer, that is highly possible – but, to counter it, there are many modern archers who can emulate and best the reputed feats of Robin Hood and his men! For a weary and sick army of less than 6,000 men to defeat over 25,000 French at Agincourt must indicate that the archers could notch with a shaft every crevice and joint of a man-at-arms’ harness, from the clasp of his bascinet to the hinge of his greave. With that in mind, can we calmly discount the story of the Genoan crossbowman who raised his arm over his mantlet and shook his fist at the English, a hundred paces from him? Twenty of the English bowmen immediately loosed shafts at him, and when the man was afterwards slain, it was found that he had taken eighteen shafts through his forearm. Or, the account of two English archers firing at the hempen anchor-cord of the captured English cog Christopher held in Calais harbour – at 200 paces the archers in four shots had cut every strand of the cord so that the boat went on to the rocks!
Well authenticated fiction about the period, with copious use of the chronicles of such as Froissart, can tell much about the performances of these semi-legendary characters who so moulded mediaeval English history. One can read in The White Company by A. Conan Doyle of a contest between a crossbowman of Brabant and an English archer who says:
‘To my mind, the longbow is a better weapon than the arbalest; I will venture a rover with you, or try the long butts or hoyles.’ The veteran selects a Scotch bow, recognisable because the upper nock is without and the lower within – ‘A good piece of yew, well nocked, well strung, well waxed and very joyful to the feel.’ He is very careful about the arrows that he uses ‘… I love an ash arrow pierced with cornel-wood for a roving shaft.. it has been my mind to choose a saddle-backed feather for a dead shaft and a swine-backed for a smooth flier …’
The crossbowman, impatient at such slow and methodical actions, drew his moulinet from his girdle and, fixing it to the windlass, draws back the powerful double cord until it clicked into the catch. Then from his quiver he drew a short thick quarrel, which he placed with the utmost care upon the groove. Before he could fire at the nominated mark, a large grey stork flapped heavily into view with a peregrine falcon poised over its head, awaiting its opportunity of darting down on its clumsy victim. When the pair were a hundred paces from them the crossbowman raised his weapon to the sky and there came the short, deep twang of his powerful string. His bolt struck the stork just where its wing meets the body, and the bird whirled aloft in a last convulsive flutter before falling wounded and flapping to the earth. At the instant that the bolt struck its mark, the old archer, hitherto standing listless with arrow on string, bent his bow and sped a shaft through the body of the falcon. Whipping another arrow from his girdle, he sent it skimming a few feet from the earth to strike and transfix the stork for a second time before it could touch the ground.
In this way the archer proved that the longbow could do what the crossbow could not, for even the most expert arbalestier could not speed another shaft skywards before the bird had reached the ground, as did the archer.
In the nature of trick-shooting probably of little use in actual warfare is the shooting of an arrow so that it covers vast distances – a mile in three flights is recorded, as is a length of 630 paces. To do this the archer would use a bow of exceptional size and strength; sitting down upon the ground he would place his two feet at either end of the stave. With an arrow fitted, he then pulled the string towards him with both hands until the head of the shaft was level with the wood. The great bow would break and groan and the cord vibrate with the tension; the archer raised his two feet, with the bow-stave on their soles, and his cord twanged with a deep rich hum that could be heard for a considerable distance as the arrow sped on its way.
During the contest between the archer and crossbowman that has already been mentioned, both fire at a shield made of inch-thick elm with a bull’s hide over it. The bolt from the crossbow is driven deeply into the wood; the archer carefully greases his shaft and sends it towards the shield. On inspection, the shield has a round clear hole in the wood at the back of it, showing that the arrow has passed through it.
English archers tried to avoid fighting with the sun in their front, considering the dazzling splendour of a summer’s day to be very unfavourable to shooting. At Crécy, when the sudden gleam of sunshine after the rain burst forth behind the English, its beams, besides dazzling the eyes of the enemy, flashed upon their polished shields and corselets with a lustre so brilliant that the archers discharged their first flight of arrows with more than usual certainty of aim. Wind and weather will likewise exercise a certain influence upon even the most superbly directed arrow; for shooting in boisterous weather, a comparatively heavy arrow does best.
In addition to being incomparable with his missile weapon, the English archer would frequently discard his bow and fight on foot with sword, axe or maul. When a knight was seated on a horse it was almost impossible to get any power into a swing with a sword, so that he had to stand up to deliver his blow. Standing in the stirrups, he left exposed the one unprotected part in his whole armoured body – his seat. This was the target of the nimble archers and they seldom missed with their keen swords as they dodged on light feet in and out of the horse and foot mêlée.
Well might Sir John Fortescue say:
‘The might of the realme of England standyth upon archers.’