I woke up this morning and asked myself what is the greatest mischief I can get into today? Then it came to me. I could get a whole country pissed off at me. Now you have to admit that is ambitious. How am I going to piss off a whole country you ask? By attacking one of the great mythic shibboleths of the English people: the longbow. First let me say I have never met an Englishman that I didn’t like. I think they are delightful people. However, someone has to do this dastardly deed and it might as well be me.
Here is a passage from the book Battle. It was published in 2003 and was written by a major early modern military historian. What I mean to say is it reflects what is currently believed by many military historians today. I say this because I don’t want to be charged with creating ‘straw dogs’ or ‘straw men’ or ‘straw hippos’ or whatever straw being one is accused of when creating a false argument.
During the Hundred Year’s War, French chivalry fell victim at Crecy (1346) to new English tactics that took advantage of the peasant longbow in defensive positions that supported dismounted knights. A decade later the French responded at Poitiers (1356) not by confronting the problem [p 339] posed by English longbowmen but by mimicking the English knights and dismounting. It was as though they could only interpret their earlier defeat as being wrought by their social equals, the English knights. The result was that the longbowmen enjoyed even better targets. Sixty years later, at Agincourt (1415), the French repeated their aristocratic mistake. [p 340]
Look closely at how our historian describe the combatants. Peasants use longbows and knights don’t. Notice the social interpretation of the combatants. What the author is using here is an outworn stereotypic social order and placing it anachronistically over the fourteenth and fifteenth century military order. Were there peasants at this time? Of course. Were there knights? Again, of course. However, these two facts are almost irrelevant. There were knights among the men-at-arms in the English army but they were always a minority. At one point they only made up 5% of the army. One might say the term ‘knight’ was used in a more generic sense to represent the nobility even the lower nobility. Again, irrelevant. Mounted troops were not raised on the basis of their nobility.
Men-at-arms were raised on the basis of property. It didn’t matter if the property owner was noble or not. If he held the requisite amount of property, he was to be armed with the accoutrements of a man-at-arms. The raising of cavalry had little to do with knighthood.
At this time, many of the landowners in England were non-noble and were known as franklins (yeoman of a latter period). Investigations into several counties showed franklins were on the same financial level as squires. This meant men-at-arms would have been raised from franklin estates as from estates of the squirarchy. As such, men-at-arms were composed of both groups: non-nobles and minor nobles. To equate men-at-arms with knights is an error. To describe them as knights is to falsify reality.
To return to longbowmen, they were peasants only in the sense they were farmers. Specifically, they were property owning franklins. Franklins who owned property but not enough to warrant supplying a man-at-arms had to supply an archer on horseback. Franklins supplied both men-at-arms as well as archers. The only difference is the amount of property owned by a particular franklin. As a result archers and men-at-arms were as likely as not to came from the same property owning group. To superimpose a social order which had no relevance to the military reality is to fail to understand the military social realities of the times.
Our author has posited two ideas. Men-at-arms and bowmen represented two different cultures: knights and peasants. He goes on to assert the problem the French had is that they reacted to their social equals rather than the real danger: the archers. Here he presents the second idea: the longbow was the real danger on the late medieval battlefield.
As time went on, the French came to copy the English system of raising cavalry. Edward III, writing to Sir Thomas Lucy, wrote that when they had arrived at Crecy, the enemy appeared with 12,000 men-at-arms of which 8,000 were gentlemen, knights, and squires. This leaves 4,000 non-noble men-at-arms. Property not nobility became the determining factor. Therefore, it is logical to assume that French cavalry came from the same property owning groups as the English, French men-at-arms probably represented both noble property owners and non-noble property owners. This was hardly a group vastly different from those property owners who were the bowmen. To force a cultural perspective vastly different between archers and men-at-arms is not a functional approach to understanding the military realities of the Hundred Year’s War.
Let us now take up the issue of what our author thinks to be the real threat in these wars. Here we come to the beloved myth of the English longbow. The myth of the longbow rests upon the holy trinity. Not that Holy Trinity. It is the holy trinity of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt.“ It must be said that the battle of Crecy was won in great measure to the longbow working in conjunction with dismounted men-at-arms. This was the classic infantry versus cavalry engagement. Poitiers was not.
At Poitiers the English fought from an enclosed position difficult for cavalry to fight through. The French dismounted and attacked on foot. They were finally defeated by a small unit of mounted English men-at-arms who outflanked the French. There is the account of archers firing on a French mounted force but they had to be reposition because their firing was ineffective. Other than this event, there is no indication the longbows effected the battle at all. Then we have the classic attack by French cavalry at Agincourt to open the battle. Once the cavalry van was defeated there is no indication that longbow fire contributed at all in defeating the enemy. Some sources say the archers dropped their bows and arrows to join in the fray. Others say the archers had run out of arrows and then joined the fray. Either description highlights the ineffectiveness of the longbow. In the event that both bow and arrows were dropped, such a thing would only have happened because that archers saw the ineffectiveness of their fire. If the archers had run out of arrows, it would have been a clear indication that the archery fire was unable to influence the course of the foot battle.
Viewing all three battles a pattern clearly emerges. Bow fire is effective against mounted attacks but much less so against dismounted attacks. Our author’s comments that by slavishly following the example the English men-at-arms, the French, by dismounting, were failing to acknowledge the real threat of the longbow does not bear out. The longbow’s failure was in meeting the threat of the dismounted attack. When viewed in this manner, the longbow was not the uber weapon that modern English speaking historian make it out to be.
Then how did the myth of the longbow come to be. I believe this myth gained strength in the first half of the twentieth century. I think in part it was a reflection of historical influences by some Marxist thoughts melding with the early growth of the social sciences of this time. The idea arose that historical change was the product of conflict between the oppressed and their oppressors. It was easy to see the peasants as the oppressed and the knights as the oppressors. Historical change reflected the growth in power of the oppressed. Gradually it was the archers, as representative of the oppressed, that became the heroes. Thus the myth of the longbow was created.