Sir J. W. Fortescue

CHAPTER I

The history of the British Army is commonly supposed to begin with the year 1661, and from the day, the 14th of February, whereon King Charles the Second took over Monk's Regiment of Foot from the Commonwealth's service to his own, and named it the Coldstream Guards. The assumption is unfortunately more convenient than accurate. The British standing army dates not from 1661 but from 1645, not from Monk's regiment but from the famous New Model, which was established by Act of the Long Parliament and maintained, in substance, until the Restoration. The continuity of the Coldstream regiment's existence was practically unbroken by the ceremony of Saint Valentine's day, and this famous corps therefore forms the link that binds the New Model to the Army of Queen Victoria.

But we are not therefore justified in opening the history of the army with the birth of the New Model. The very name indicates the existence of an earlier model, and throws us back to the outbreak of the Civil War. There then confronts us the difficulty of conceiving how an organised body of trained fighting men could have been formed without the superintendence of experienced officers. We are forced to ask whence came those officers, and where did they learn their profession. The answer leads us to the Thirty Years' War and the long struggle for Dutch Independence, to the English and Scots, numbered by tens, nay, hundreds of thousands, who fought under Gustavus Adolphus and Maurice of Nassau. Two noble regiments still abide with us as representatives of these two schools, a standing record of our army's 'prentice years.

But though we go back two generations before the Civil War to find the foundation of the New Model Army, it is impossible to pause there. In the early years of Queen Elizabeth's reign we are brought face to face with an important period in our military history, with a break in old traditions, an unwilling conformity with foreign standards, in a word, with the renascence in England of the art of war. For there were memories to which the English clung with pathetic tenacity, not in Elizabeth's day only but even to the midst of the Civil War, the memories of King Harry the Fifth, of the Black Prince, of Edward the Third, and of the unconquerable infantry that had won the day at Agincourt, Poitiers, and CreÇy. The passion of English sentiment over the change is mirrored to us for all time in the pages of Shakespeare; for no nation loves military reform so little as our own, and we shrink from the thought that if military glory is not to pass from a possession into a legend, it must be eternally renewed with strange weapons and by unfamiliar methods. This was the trouble which afflicted England under the Tudors, and she comforted herself with the immortal prejudice that is still her mainstay in all times of doubt,

"I tell thee herald,

I thought upon one pair of English legs

Did march three Frenchmen."

The origin of the new departures in warfare must therefore be briefly traced through the Spaniards, the Landsknechts, and the Swiss, and the old English practice must be followed to its source. CreÇy gives us no resting-place, for Edward the Third's also was a time of military reform; the next steps are to the Battle of Falkirk, the Statute of Winchester, and the Assize of Arms; and still the English traditions recede before us, till at last at the Conquest we can seize a great English principle which forced itself upon the conquering Normans, and ultimately upon all Europe.

This then is the task that is first attempted in this book: to follow, however briefly and imperfectly, the growth of the English as a military power to the time of its first manifestation at CreÇy, and onward to the supreme day of Agincourt; then through the decay under the blight of the Wars of the Roses to the revival under the Tudors, and to the training in foreign schools which prepared the way for the New Model and the Standing Army. The period is long, and the conditions of warfare vary constantly from stage to stage, but we shall find the Englishman, through all the changes of the art of war unchangeable, a splendid fighting man.

---

The primitive national army of the English, as of other Teutonic nations, consisted of the mass of free landowners between the ages of sixteen and sixty; it was called in the Karolingian legislation by the still existing name of landwehr, and known in England as the fyrd. Its term of service was fixed by custom at two months in the year. The force was reorganised by King Alfred or by his son through the division of the country into military districts, every five hides of land being required to provide an armed man at the king's summons, and to provide him with victuals and with pay. Further, all owners of five hides of land and upwards were required to do thane's service, that is to say, to appear in the field as heavily-armed men at their own charge, and to serve for the entire campaign. The organisation of the thanes was by shires. With the conquest of England by Canute a new military element was introduced by the establishment of the royal body-guard, a picked force of from three to six thousand Danish troops, which were retained by him after the rest of the army had been sent back to Denmark, and were known as the house-carles.

It was with an army framed on this model—the raw levies of the fyrd and the better trained men of the body-guard—that King Harold, flushed with the victory of Stamford Bridge, marched down to meet the invasion of William of Normandy. The heavily-armed troops wore a shirt of ringed or chain-mail, and a conical helmet with a bar protecting the nose; their legs were swathed in bandages not wholly unlike the "putties" of the present day, and their arms were left free to swing the Danish axe. They carried also a sword, five missile darts, and a shield, but the axe was the weapon that they loved, for the Teutonic races, unlike the Latin, have ever preferred to cut rather than to thrust. The light-armed men, who could not afford defensive armour, came into the field with spear and shield only. Yet the force was homogeneous in virtue of a single custom, wherein lies the secret of the rise of England's prowess as a military nation. Though the wealthy thanes might ride horses on the march, they dismounted one and all for action, and fought, even to the king himself, on their own feet.[2]

The force was divided into large bands or battalions, of which the normal formation for battle was a wedge broadening out from a front of two men to a base of uncertain number; the officers and the better armed men forming the point, backed by a dense column of inferior troops. It was with a single line of such wedges, apparently from five-and-twenty to thirty of them, that Harold took up his position to bar the advance of the Norman army. Having no cavalry, he had resolved to stand on the defensive, and had chosen his ground with no little skill. His line occupied the crest of a hill, his flanks were protected by ravines, and he had dug across the plain on his front a trench which was sufficient to check a rapid advance of cavalry. Moreover, he had caused each battalion to ring itself about with sharp stakes, planted into the ground at intervals with the points slanting outwards, as a further protection against the attack of horse.[3] The reader should take note of these stakes, for he will find them constantly reappearing up to the seventeenth century. There then the English waited in close compact masses, a wall of shields within a hedge of stakes, the men of nine-and-twenty shires under a victorious leader. There is no need to enter into details of the battle. The English, as has been well said,[4] were subjected to the same trial as the famous squares at Waterloo, alternate rain of missiles and charges of cavalry, and as yet they were unequal to it. Harold's orders had been that not a man should move, but when the Normans, after many fruitless attacks, at last under William's direction simulated flight, the order was forgotten and one wing broke its ranks in headlong pursuit of the fugitives. Possibly, if Harold had been equal to the occasion, a general advance might have saved the day, but he made no such effort, and he was in the presence of a man who overlooked no blunder. The pursuing wing was enveloped by the Normans and annihilated; and then William turned the whole of his force against the fragment of the line that remained upon the hill. The English stood rooted to the ground enduring attack after attack, until at last, worn out with fatigue and choked with dead and wounded, they were broken and cut down, fighting desperately to the end. Indiscipline had brought ruin to the nation; and England now passed, to her great good fortune, under the sway of a race that could teach her to obey.

But the English had still one more lesson to learn. Many of the nobles, chafing against the rule of a foreigner, forsook their country and, taking service with the Byzantine emperors, joined the famous Varangian Guard of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus. At Durazzo they for the second time met the Normans, under the command of Robert Guiscard. True to their custom, they dismounted and fought on foot, a magnificent corps, the choicest of the whole army. As at Hastings, the Normans attacked and were repulsed, and as at Hastings, the undisciplined English broke their ranks in pursuit. Robert Guiscard saw his opportunity, hurled his cavalry on to their flank, and then surrounding them on all sides cut them down, in spite of a furious resistance, to the very last man. So perished these untameable, unteachable spirits, the last of the unconquered English.

The Conquest was immediately followed by the institution of knight-service. But this system, as introduced into England, differed in many material respects from that which reigned on the continent of Europe. It was less distinctly military in character, and far less perfect as an organisation for national defence. The distribution of England into knight's fees, however clearly it might be mapped out on paper, was a work of time and not to be accomplished in a day. Moreover, there was disloyalty to be reckoned with; for the English were a stiff-necked people, and were not readily reconciled to the yoke of their new masters. We find, therefore, that in very early days the practice of accepting money in lieu of personal service crept in, and enabled the Norman kings to fight their battles with hired mercenaries. For this reason England has been called the cradle of the soldier; the soldier being the man who fights for pay, solde, solidus, or, as we may say by literal translation of the Latin, the man who fights for a shilling.

The sole military interest therefore of the reigns of the Norman kings is to follow the breakdown of the feudal system for military purposes, and the rapid reversion to the Saxon methods and organisation. William Rufus was the first to appeal to the English to arm in his cause, and he did so twice with success. But in the seventh year of his reign he played them a trick which lost him their confidence for ever. The fyrd had furnished twenty thousand men for service against the Norman rebels in France, and had provided every man, at the cost of his shire, with ten shillings for the expenses of his journey or, to use a later expression, for his conduct-money. William met them at the rendezvous, took their two hundred thousand shillings from them to hire mercenaries withal, and dismissed them to their homes. This Rufus has been selected by an historian of repute as the earliest example of an officer and a gentleman; he should also be remembered as the first officer who set the fashion, soon to become sadly prevalent, of misappropriating the pay of his men. The reader should note in passing this early instance of conduct-money, for we shall find in it the germ of the Queen's shilling.

1106.
1116.
1125, 25th March.

The reign of Henry the First is interesting in that it shows us English knights serving in the field against Robert of Normandy under the walls of Tenchbrai. We find that the old order of battle, the single line of Hastings,[5] has disappeared and has given place to the three lines of the Byzantine school, but that, strange to say, the Saxons have forced their peculiar principle upon the Normans. Henry caused his English and Norman knights to dismount, formed them into a solid battalion and placed himself at their head, keeping but one small body still on their horses. The enemy's cavalry attacked Henry's mounted men and dispersed them; but the phalanx of the dismounted remained unbroken, pressed on against the rabble of hostile infantry, broke it down and almost annihilated it. The victory was hailed by the English as atonement for the defeat at Hastings, so bitter even then was the rivalry between ourselves and our gallant neighbours across the channel. Ten years later the English were again in France, fighting not only against rebellious Norman barons but against their ally, the French King Louis the Sixth. A long and desultory war was closed by the action of Brenville. Again Henry dismounted four hundred out of five hundred of his knights and following the tactics of Tenchbrai won, though not without hard fighting, a second victory. A third engagement, known as the battle of Beaumont, saw the old English practice repeated for the third time with signal success; but here must be noticed the entry of a new force, a company of archers, which contributed not a little to the fortunate issue of the day. For as the Norman cavalry came thundering down on the English battalion, the archers moved off to their left flank and poured in such a shower of arrows that the horsemen were utterly overthrown. These archers must not be confounded with the famous English bowmen of a later time, for most probably they were merely copied, like the order of battle, from the Byzantine model; but they taught the English the second of two useful lessons. Henry had already discovered that dismounted knights could hold their own against the impetuous cavalry of France; he now learned that the attack of horse could be weakened almost to annihilation by the volley of archers. This, at a time when cavalry held absolute supremacy in war, was a secret of vital importance, a secret indeed which laid the foundation of our military power. Henry, evidently alive to it, encouraged the practice of archery by ordaining that, if any man should by accident slay another at the butts, the misadventure should not be reckoned to him as a crime.

1141.

The miserable reign of Stephen, so unsatisfactory to the general historian, possesses through the continued development of English tactical methods a distinct military interest. The year 1138 is memorable for the Battle of the Standard, the first of many actions fought against the Scots, and typical of many a victory to come. The English knights as usual fought on foot, and aided by archers made havoc of the enemy. Here is already the germ of the later infantry; we shall find lances and bows give way to pikes and muskets, but for five whole centuries we shall see the foot compounded of two elements, offensive and defensive, until the invention of the bayonet slowly welds them into one. At the battle of Lincoln, on the other hand, we find the defensive element acting alone and suffering defeat, though not disgrace; for the dismounted knights who stood round Stephen fought with all the old obstinacy and yielded only to overwhelming numbers. Thus, though two generations had passed since the Conquest, the English methods of fighting were still in full vigour, and the future of English infantry bade fair to be assured.

Nor was the cavalry neglected; for amid all the earnest of this turbulent reign there was introduced the mimic warfare known as the tournament. This was an invention of the hot-blooded, combative French, and had been originally so close an imitation of genuine battle, that the Popes had intervened to prohibit the employment therein of any but blunt weapons. The tournament being not a duel of man against man, but a contest of troop against troop, was a training not only for individual gallantry, but for tactics, drill, discipline, and leadership; victory turning mainly on skilful handling and on the preservation of compact order. Thus by the blending of English foot and Norman horse was laid, earlier than in any other country of Europe, the foundation of an army wherein both branches took an equal share of work in the day of action.

1181.

The next in succession of our kings was a great soldier and a great administrator, yet the work that he did for the army was curiously mixed. Engaged as he was incessantly in war, he felt more than others the imperfection of the feudal as a military system. The number of knights that could be summoned to his standard was very small, and was diminished still further by constant evasion of obligations. He therefore regulated the commutation of personal military service for payment in money, and formed it, under the old name of scutage, into a permanent institution. Advantage was generally taken of the system, and with the money thus obtained he took BrabanÇon mercenaries, the prototypes of the landsknechts of a later time, permanently into his pay. When he needed the feudal force to supplement these mercenaries, he fell back on the device of ordering every three knights to furnish and equip one of their number for service; and finally, driven to extremity, he re-established the old English fyrd as a National Militia by the Assize of Arms. This, the earliest of enactments for the organisation of our national forces, and the basis of all that followed down to the reign of Philip and Mary, contained the following provisions:—

Every holder of one knight's fee shall have a coat of mail,[6] a helmet, a shield, and a lance; and every knight as many coats of mail, helmets, shields, and lances as there are fees in his domain.

Every free layman having in chattels or rent to the value of sixteen marks shall keep the same equipment.

Every free layman having in chattels or rent ten marks, shall keep an habergeon,[7] a chaplet[8] of iron, and a lance.

All burgesses and the whole community of freemen shall have a wambais,[9] a chaplet of iron, and a lance.

It is noteworthy that neither the bow nor the axe appear in this list of the national weapons, an omission for which it is difficult to account, since the bow was evidently in full use at the time. Possibly the temptation to employ it for purposes of poaching may have been so strong as to make the authorities hesitate to enjoin the keeping of a bow in every poor freeman's house. The influence of the poacher will be found equally potent when the time comes for the introduction of firearms.

Richard the Lion-Heart, like his predecessors, preferred to employ mercenaries for his wars, while even the knights who accompanied him to the Crusade were in receipt of pay. Were it not that his achievements in the Holy Land had left little mark on English military history they would be well worthy of a detailed narrative, for Richard was beyond dispute a really great soldier, a good engineer, and a remarkably able commander. The story of his march from Joppa to Jerusalem and of his victory at Arsouf is known to few, but it remains to all time an example of consummate military skill. A mixed force compounded of many nations is never very easy to control, and it was doubly difficult when the best of it was composed of knights who hated the very name of subordination. Yet it was with such material, joined to a huge body of half-disciplined infantry, that Richard executed a flank march in the presence of the most formidable of living generals, and repulsed him brilliantly when he ventured, at an extremely trying moment, to attack. The plan of the campaign, the arrangements and orders for the march, the drill and discipline imposed on the knights, and the handling of the troops in the action are all alike admirable. Yet, as has been already stated, the lessons of the Crusades wrought little influence in England, mainly because she had already learned from her own experience the value of a heavily armed infantry, and of the tactical combination of missile and striking weapons. In the rest of Europe they were for a time remembered but very soon forgotten;[10] and England was then once more left alone with her secret.

Two small relics of the Crusades must however find mention in this place. The first is the employment of the cross as a mark for distinguishing the warriors of different nations, which became in due time the recognised substitute for uniform among European soldiers. Each nation took a different colour for its cross, that of the English being at first white, which, curiously enough, is now the regular facing for English regiments of infantry. The second relic is the military band which, there seems to be little doubt, was copied from the Saracens. In their armies trumpets and drums, the latter decidedly an Oriental instrument, were used to indicate a rallying-point; for though at ordinary times the standards sufficed to show men the places of their leaders, yet in the dust of battle these were often hidden from sight; and it was therefore the rule to gather the minstrels (such was the English term) around the standards, and bid them blow and beat strenuously and unceasingly during the action. The silence of the band was taken as a proof that a battalion had been broken and that the colours were in danger; and the fashion lasted so long that even in the seventeenth century the bandsmen in all pictures of battles are depicted, drawn up at a safe distance and energetically playing.

1214.

The reign of King John accentuated still further the weak points of the English feudal system as a military organisation. The principle introduced by the Conqueror had been to claim for the sovereign direct feudal authority over every landholder in the country, suffering no intermediate class of virtually independent vassals, such as existed in France, to intercept the service of those who owed duty to him. Of the advantages of this innovation mention shall presently be made elsewhere, but at this point it is necessary to dwell only on its military defects. The whole efficiency of the feudal system turned on the creation of a caste of warriors; and such a caste can obviously be built up only by the grant of certain exclusive privileges. The English knights possessed no such privileges. There were no special advantages bound up with the tenure of a fief. Far from enjoying immunity from taxation, as in France and Germany, the knights were obliged to pay not only the imposts required of all classes, but scutage into the bargain. Again the winning of a knight's fee lay open to all ranks of freemen, so that it could not be regarded as the hereditary possession of a proud nobility. Yet again, the grant of the honour of knighthood was the exclusive right of the sovereign, who converted it simply into an instrument of extortion. Briefly, there was no inducement to English knights faithfully to perform their service; the sovereign took everything and gave nothing; and at last they would endure such oppression no longer. When John required a feudal force, in the year 1205, he was obliged to arrange that every ten knights should equip one of their number for service. Moreover, the knights who did serve him showed no merit; the English contingent at Bouvines having covered itself with anything but glory. Finally, came mutiny and rebellion and the Great Charter, wherein the express stipulation that fiefs should be both alienable and divisible crushed all hopes of an hereditary caste of warriors for ever.

1252.

After the Charter the national force was composed nominally of three elements, the tenants in chief with their armed vassals, the minor tenants in chief, and the freemen subject to the Assize of Arms, the last two being both under the orders of the sheriffs. It made an imposing show on paper, but was difficult to bring efficient into the field. No man was more shameless than Henry the Third in forcing knighthood, for the sake of the fees, upon all free landholders whom he thought rich enough to support the dignity; yet, when the question became one not of money but of armed men, he was forced to fall back on the same resource as his greater namesake. He simply issued a writ for the enforcement of the Assize of Arms, and ordered the sheriffs to furnish a fixed contingent of men-at-arms, to be provided by the men of the county who were subject thereto.

1282.

The defects of feudal influence in military matters were now so manifest, that Edward the First tried hard to do away with them altogether. Strictly speaking the feudal force was summoned by a special writ addressed to the barons, ordering them to appear with their due proportion of men and horses, and by similar directions to the sheriffs to warn the tenants in chief within their bailiwicks. The system was however, so cumbrous and ineffective that Edward superseded it by issuing commissions to one or two leading men of the county to muster and array the military forces. These Commissions of Array, as they were called, will come before us again so late as in the reign of Charles the First.

1285.

But, like all his predecessors, Edward was careful to cherish the national militia which had grown out of the fyrd. The Statute of Winchester re-enacted the Assize of Arms and redistributed the force into new divisions armed with new weapons. The wealthiest class of freemen was now required to keep a hauberk[11] of iron, a sword and a knife, and a horse. The two lower classes were now subdivided into four, whereof the first was to keep the same arms as the wealthiest, the horse excepted; the second a sword, bow and arrows, and a knife; the third battle-axes, knives, and "other less weapons," in which last are included bills;[12] and the rest bows and arrows, or if they lived in the forest, bows and bolts, the latter being probably less deadly to the king's deer than arrows. Here then was the axe of Harold's day revived, and the archers established by statute. It is evident, from the fact that they wore no defensive armour, that the archers were designed to be light infantry, swift and mobile in their limbs, skilful and deadly with their weapons. The name of Edward the First must be ever memorable in our history for the encouragement that he gave to the long-bow; but we seek in vain for the man, if such there was, who founded the tradition, still happily strong among us, that the English whatever their missile weapon shall always be good shots. Even at the siege of Messina by Richard the First the archers drove the Sicilians from the walls; "for no man could look out of doors but he would have an arrow in his eye before he could shut it."

1297.
1298.

The bowmen had not long been a statutory force before they were called upon for active service. The defeat of the English by William Wallace at Cambuskenneth had summoned Edward from France to take the field in person against the Scots; and he met them on the field of Falkirk. The Scottish army consisted for the most part of infantry armed with pikes, not yet the long pikes of eighteen feet which they were to wield so gallantly under Gustavus Adolphus, but still a good and formidable weapon. Wallace drew them up behind a marsh in four circular battalions ringed in with stakes, posting his light troops, which were armed principally with the short-bow, in the intervals between them, and his one weak body of horse in rear. The English knights were formed as usual in column of three divisions, vanguard, battle and rearguard, and with them was a strong force of archers. Untrue to its old traditions, the English cavalry did not dismount, but galloped straight to the attack. The first division plunged headlong into the swamp (for the mediÆval knight, in spite of a hundred warnings, rarely took the trouble to examine the ground before him), did no execution, and suffered heavy loss. The second division, under the Bishop of Durham, then skirted the swamp and came in sight of the Scottish horse. The Bishop hesitated and called a halt. "Back to your mass, Bishop," answered one contemptuous knight. His comrades charged, dispersed the Scottish cavalry, and drove away the archers between the pikemen; but the four battalions stood firm and unbroken, and the knights surged round them in vain. Then the king brought up the archers and the third division of horse. Pushing the archers forward, he held the cavalry back in support until an incessant rain of arrows had riddled the Scottish battalions through and through, and then hurling the knights forward into the broken ranks, he fairly swept them from the field. It was the old story, heavy fire of artillery followed by charges of cavalry, the training of the Scots as Hastings had been of the English, for the trial of Waterloo.

1314.

It is interesting to note that Edward made an effort even then for the constitutional union of the two countries which had so honourably lost and won the day at Falkirk, but he was four centuries before his time. The war continued with varying fortune during the ensuing years. 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 Foedera 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 under the statute of Winchester which was called upon to do mounted service. The more important branch, the men-at-arms, was composed of two elements, knights and squires. From the first institution of the feudal system, the number of men required from the greater vassals had forced them to equip their sons and serving-men, who after many changes were finally in the thirteenth century merged together under the generic name of servientes, a term which was soon corrupted into its present form of sergeants. In the year 1294 these servientes were dignified by the higher title of servientes equites, mounted sergeants, which was six years later abandoned for the familiar name of squires. These squires must not, however, be confounded with a different class of the same appellation, namely, the apprentices who were the personal attendants of the knights. The squire of which I now speak was rather a knight of inferior order corresponding to the bachelier (bas chevalier) of France. The word knight itself gives us a hint of this inferiority, being the same as the German knecht, whereas ritter is the German term that expresses what is generally understood as a knight in English. The inner history of chivalry is the story of the struggle of the sergeants to rise to an equality with the knights of the first order, and in the fourteenth century they were not far from their goal. Even now they were considered the backbone of the English army, and were equipped in all points like the class above them.

Men-at-arms, an expression derived from the French, were so called because they were covered with defensive armour from top to toe; but as the middle of the fourteenth century is a period of transition in the development of armour, it is difficult to describe their equipment with any certainty. Their offensive arms were the lance, sword, dagger, and shield. Trained from very early youth in the handling of weapons they were doubtless proficient enough with them; but they do not seem to have been great horsemen, and indeed it is recorded that they were sometimes tied to the saddle. Monstrelet, writing in the year 1416, tells us of the astonishment which certain Italians created among the French because they could actually turn their horses at the gallop. It is probable that the bits employed were too weak, and that the cumbrousness of the saddle and the weight carried by each man were sad obstacles to good horsemanship; but it is worth remembering in any case that, as this passage plainly shows, men-at-arms in the saddle were reduced to one of two alternatives, to move slowly and retain control of their horses, or to gallop for an indefinite period wherever the animals might choose to carry them.

The favourite horses, alike for speed, endurance, and courage, were the Spanish, which, as they could only reach England by the journey overland through France, were not always very easily obtained. Philip the Bold in 1282 refused to allow one batch of eighty such horses to be transhipped to England; but from a contract still extant, of the year 1333, it appears that Edward the Third still counted on Spain to provide him with remounts. These horses, however, were only bestridden for action, being committed on the march to the care of the shield-bearers or squires, who led them, as was natural, on their right-hand side, and thus procured for them the curious name of dextrarii.[16] The usual allowance of horses for a knight was three, besides a packhorse for his baggage, the smallest of which, named the palfrey, was that which he rode on ordinary occasions; in fact, to put the matter into modern language, a knight started on a campaign with a first charger, a second charger, and a pony. The first charger was always a stallion; the rest might be geldings or mares. From the year 1298 the practice of covering horses with defensive armour was introduced into England, an equipment which soon came to be regarded as so essential that one branch of the cavalry, and that the most important, was reckoned by the number of barded horses.

The personal retinue of the knights was made up of apprentices or aspirants to the rank which they held. The squire or shield-bearer took charge of the knight's armour on the march, and was responsible for maintaining it in proper order; and it is worth remarking that the English squire took a pride in burnishing the metal to the highest pitch of brilliancy, thus early establishing those traditions of smartness which are still so strong in our cavalry. It was also the squire's duty, among many others, to help his master to don his harness when the time for action came, beginning with his iron shoes or sollerets, and working upwards till the fabric was crowned by the iron headpiece, and the finishing touch added by the assumption of the shield. The reader will readily understand that a really efficient squire must have been invaluable, for if an engagement came in any way as a surprise there was an immediate rush for the baggage, and a scene of confusion that must have beggared description. Fortunately, the fact that both sides were generally alike unready, and the punctiliousness of chivalric courtesy, permitted as a rule ample time not only for the equipment of all ranks, but for the marshalling of the host.

In the matter of administrative organisation the men-at-arms were distributed into constabularies, being commanded by officers called constables. The strength of a constabulary seems to have varied from five-and-twenty to eighty; and this variety, together with the absence of any tactical unit of fixed strength, makes it impossible to state how many constabularies were included in the next tactical division. This was called the banner, and was commanded by a banneret, a rank originally conferred only upon such as could bring a certain number of followers into the field. Promotion to the degree of banneret was marked by cutting off the forked tail of the pennon which was carried by the ordinary knight, and leaving the remnant square. So at the present day, the pennons of lances are forked, the square being reserved for the standards of squadrons and regiments.

The independent employment of small bodies in action was almost unknown, the rule being to pack an indefinite number of men-at-arms, hundreds or even thousands, into a close and solid mass, its depth almost if not quite as great as its frontage. The haye, or thin line, is of much later date. Ordinarily some modification of the wedge was the formation preferred; that is to say, that the frontage of the front rank was somewhat less than that of the rear; the mass of that particular shape being judged to be less liable to disorder and better adapted for breaking into a hostile phalanx. The relative strength of the front and rear ranks depended entirely on the numbers that were packed in between them, and it may readily be supposed that the evolutions which so unwieldly a body could execute were very few. Probably, until the moment of action came, sufficient space was maintained to permit every horse to turn on his own ground, after the Roman fashion, to right, left, or about; but for the attack ranks and files were closed up as tightly as possible, and all other considerations were sacrificed to the maintenance of a compact array. It was said of the French knights who marched with Richard the Lion-Heart that an apple thrown into the midst of them would not have fallen to the ground. We must therefore rid ourselves of the popular notion of the knight as a headlong galloping cavalier. The attack of men-at-arms could not be very rapid unless it were made in disorder; and though it comes strictly under the head of shock-action, the shock was rather that of a ponderous column moving at a moderate pace than of a light line charging at high speed. By bearing these facts in mind it will be easier to understand the failure of mounted men-at-arms to break a passive square of infantry.

Next after the men-at-arms came a species of cavalry called by the name of pauncenars,[17] which was less fully equipped with defensive armour, but wore the habergeon[18] and was armed with the lance.

Lastly came the light cavalry of the fyrd, originally established to patrol the English coast. These were called hobelars, from the hobbies or ponies which they rode, and were equipped with an iron helmet, a heavily padded doublet (aketon), iron gloves, and a sword.

Turning next to the infantry, there were Welsh spearmen, carrying the weapon which gave them their name, but without defensive armour. Indeed it should seem that they were not overburdened with clothes of any kind, for they were every one provided at the King's expense with a tunic and a mantle, which were by express direction made of the same material and colour for all. These Welsh spearmen therefore were the first troops in the English service who were dressed in uniform, and they received it first in the year 1337.[19] The colour of their clothing unfortunately remains unknown to us.

Next we come to the peculiar strength of England, the archers. Though a certain number of them seem generally to have been mounted, yet, like the dragoons of a later day, these rode for the sake of swifter mobility only, and may rightly be reckoned as infantry. As has been already stated, the archers wore no defensive armour except an iron cap, relying on their bows alone. These bows were six feet four inches long; the arrows, of varying length but generally described as cloth-yard shafts, were fitted with barb and point of iron and fledged with the feathers of goose or peacock. But the weapon itself would have gone for little without the special training in its use wherein the English excelled. "My father," says Bishop Latimer (and we may reasonably assume that in such matters there had been little change in a hundred and fifty years), "My father was diligent in teaching me to shoot with the bow; he taught me to draw, to lay my body to the bow, not to draw with strength of arm as other nations do, but with the strength of the body. I had my bows bought[20] me according to my age and strength; as I increased in these my bows were made bigger and bigger." The principle was in fact analogous to that which is taught to young oarsmen at the present day. The results of this training were astonishing. The range of the long-bow in the hands of the old archers is said to have been fully two hundred and forty yards, and the force of the arrow to have been such as to pierce at a fair distance an inch of stout timber. Moreover, the shooting was both rapid and accurate. Indeed the long-bow was in the fourteenth century a more formidable weapon than the cross-bow, which had been condemned by Pope Innocent the Second as too deadly for Christian warfare so far back as 1139. It was at no disadvantage in the matter of range, while it could be discharged far more quickly; and further, since it was held not horizontally but perpendicularly to the ground, the archers could stand closer together, and their volleys could be better concentrated. Thus the long-bow, though the cross-bow was not unknown to the English, was not only the national but the better weapon. In action the archers were ranked as deep as was consistent with the delivery of effective volleys, the rear ranks being able to do good execution by aiming over the heads of the men before them. It may be imagined from the muscular training undergone by the archers that they were physically a magnificent body of men.

Strictly speaking the archers were the artillery of the army, according to the terminology of the time,[21] the word artillator being used in the time of Edward the Second to signify the officer in charge of what we now call the ordnance-stores. But to avoid confusion we must use the word in its modern sense, the more so since we find among the stores of the custodian[22] of the King's artillery in 1344 the items of saltpetre and sulphur for the manufacture of powder, and among his men six "gonners." Gun, it should be added, was the English, cannon the French name for these weapons from the beginning. It will presently be necessary to notice their first appearance in the field.

As to the general organisation of the army, the whole was divided into thousands under an officer called a millenar, subdivided into hundreds, each under a centenar, and further subdivided into twenties, each under a vintenar. The commander-in-chief was usually the King in person, aided by two principal officers, the High Constable and the Marshal, whose duties were, roughly speaking, those of Adjutant and Quartermaster-General. For tactical purposes the army was distributed into three divisions, called the vanguard, battle and rearguard, which kept those names whatever their position in the field or on the march, whether the host was drawn up, as most commonly, in three lines, or in one. Trumpets were used for purposes of signalling, though so far as can be gathered they sounded no distinct calls, and were dependent for their significance on orders previously issued. The failing in this respect is the more remarkable, inasmuch as the signals of the chase with the horn were already very numerous and very clearly and accurately defined.

The pay of all ranks can fortunately be supplied from the muster-roll of Calais in 1346, and although I shall not again encumber these pages with a pay-list I shall for once print it entire:

The Prince of Wales	20s.		aday.
The Bishop of Durham	6s.	8d.	" "
Earls	6s.	8d.	" "
Barons and Bannerets	4s.		" "
Knights	2s.		" "
Esquires, Constables, Captains, and Leaders	1s.		" "
Vintenars		6d.	" "
Mounted Archers		6d.	" "
Pauncenars		6d.	" "
Hobelars		6d.	" "
Foot-Archers		3d.	" "
Welsh Spearmen		2d.	" "
" Vintenars		4d.	" "
Masons, Carpenters, Smiths, Engineers, Miners, Gunners, 10d., 6d., and 3d.

It is melancholy to have to record that even so early as in 1342 corruption and fraudulent dealing had begun in the army. The marshals were ordered to muster the men-at-arms once a month, and to refuse pay for men who were absent or inadequately armed or indifferently mounted. We shall see the practice of drawing pay for imaginary men and the tricks played on muster-masters increase and multiply, till they demand a special vocabulary and a certain measure of official recognition. A favourite abuse among men-at-arms was the claim of extortionate compensation for horses lost on active service, leading to an order in this same year that all horses should be valued on admission to the corps, and marked to prevent deception. Thus early was the road opened that leads to the broad arrow. The taint of corruption, indeed, clings strongly to every army, with the possible exception of the Prussian, in Europe. War is a time of urgency and stress, which does not admit of strict audits or careful inspections, and poor human nature is too weak not to turn such an opportunity to its profit. It is an unpleasant thought that dishonesty and peculation should be inseparably associated with so much that is noble and heroic in human history, but the fact is indisputable, and must not be lightly passed over. Moreover the days when English cavalry shall go to war on their own horses may not yet be numbered; and it may be useful to remember that the mediÆval man-at-arms would mount himself on his worst animal in order to break him down the quicker, and claim for him the price of his best. It is only by constant wariness against such evils that there can be built up a sound system of military administration.

Authorities.—As for previous chapter.

CHAPTER III

Having now sketched the composition of the English forces, let us move forthwith to the scene of action. We must omit the early incidents of the war, and the assumption by Edward of the famous motto wherein he consecrated his claim to the crown of France, Dieu et mon droit. We must pass by the famous naval action of Sluys, where the English commanders in their zeal to follow the precepts of Vegetius, thought it more important to have the sun in the enemy's eyes than the wind in their own favour, and where the archers, acting as marine sharp-shooters, were the true authors of the English victory. We must overlook likewise the innumerable sieges, even that of Quesnoy, where the English first came under the fire of cannon, merely remarking that owing to their ignorance of that particular branch of warfare, the English were uniformly unsuccessful; and we must come straight to the year 1345, when Henry of Lancaster, Earl of Derby, landed at Bayonne with a force of three thousand men for a campaign in Gascony and Guienne. The name of our first artillery-officer has been given; attention must now be called to our first engineer, this same Earl of Derby, who had lately been recalled from service with the Spaniards against the Moors at the siege of Algesiras, and was the first man who taught the English how to take a fortified town.

Derby then with his little army harried Gascony and Guienne for a time, until the arrival of a superior French force compelled him to retire and gave him much ado to defend himself. Accordingly, in June 1346 Edward the Third impressed a fleet of innumerable small vessels, none of them exceeding sixty tons burden, embarked thereon four thousand men-at-arms, ten thousand archers and five or six thousand Welsh spearmen, and sailed for the coast of France. On the 12th of July he put into St. Vaast de la Hogue, a little to the east of Cherbourg, dispersed a French force that was stationed to oppose him, and successfully effected his landing. Six days were allowed to recruit men and horses after the voyage, and the army then moved eastward to the Seine, leaving a broad line of ruin and desolation in its wake, and advanced up the left bank of the river. King Philip of France had meanwhile collected an army at Rouen, whence he marched parallel to the English along the right bank of the Seine, crossed it at Paris, and stood ready to fall upon Edward if he should strike southward to Guienne. But Edward's plans were of the vaguest; his diversion had already relieved Derby, and he now crossed the Seine at Poissy and struck northward as if for Flanders. Philip no sooner divined his purpose than he too hastened northward, outmarched the English, crossed the Somme at Amiens, gave orders for the occupation of every bridge and ford by which the English could pass the river, and then recrossing marched straight upon Edward's right flank.

The position of the English was now most critical, for they could not cross the Somme and were fairly hemmed in between the river and the sea. At his wits' end Edward examined his prisoners, and from them learned of the ford of Blanche Tache in the tidal water about eight miles below Abbeville. Thither accordingly he marched, and after waiting part of a night for the ebb-tide, forced the passage in the teeth of a French detachment that had been stationed to guard it, and sending six officers to select for him a suitable position pursued his way northward through the forest of CreÇy. On the morning of the 26th of August he crossed the river Maie, and there swinging his front round from north to south-east he turned and stood at bay.

The position was well chosen. The army occupied a low line of heights lying between the villages of CreÇy and Wadicourt, the left flank resting on a forest, the right on the river Maie. Edward ordered every man to dismount, and parked the horses and baggage waggons in an entrenched leaguer[23] in rear. The army was too weak to cover the whole line of the position, so the archers were pushed forward and extended in a multitude of battalions along the front, and backed with Welsh spearmen. Echeloned in rear of them stood the three main divisions of the army; foremost and to the right the vanguard of twelve hundred men-at-arms under the Black Prince, next to it the battle of as many more under the Earl of Arundel, and behind it, covering the extreme left, the rearguard, consisting of fifteen hundred men-at-arms and six thousand mixed archers and infantry under the King. The country being rich in provisions Edward ordered every man to eat a hearty meal before falling into his place, for he knew that the Englishman fights best when he is full. When the host was arrayed in order he rode round the whole army to cheer it; and then the men lay down, the archers with their helmets and bows on the ground before them, and waited till the French should come.

Philip meanwhile had crossed the Somme at Abbeville on the morning of the 26th, and turned eastward in the hope of cutting off the English. Finding that he was too late, he countermarched and turned north, at the same time sending forward officers to reconnoitre. The afternoon was far advanced, and the French were wearied with a long, disorderly march when these officers returned with intelligence of the English. Philip ordered a halt, but the indiscipline and confusion were such that the order could not be obeyed. The noblest blood in France was riding on in all its pride to make an end of the despised English, and a mass of rude infantry was waiting to share the slaughter and the spoil. So they blundered on till they caught sight of the English lying quietly down in order of battle; and therewith all good resolutions vanished and Philip gave the order to attack.

It was now nearly five o'clock, and the heaven was black with clouds, which presently burst in a terrific thunderstorm. The English archers slipped off their bowstrings to keep them dry, and waited; while six thousand Genoese cross-bowmen, jaded by the long march, drenched and draggled with the rain that beat into their faces, conscious that they were almost disarmed by the wetness of their bowstrings, shuffled wearily into their stations along the French front. Their leaders complained that they were unfairly treated. "Who cares for your rabble?" answered the Count of AlenÇon. "They are nothing but useless mouths, more trouble than help." So the cross-bowmen sulkily took their position, and the rest of the French army, from twelve to twenty thousand men-at-arms and some fifteen thousand infantry, ranged themselves in three massive lines behind them. A vast flight of ravens flew over the opposing arrays, croaking loudly over the promised feast of dead men.

Then the storm passed away inland into France, and the sun low down in the west flashed out in all his glory full in the faces of the French. The Genoese advanced and raised a loud cry, thrice repeated, to strike terror into the English: the archers over against them stood massive and silent. The loud report of two or three cannon, little more harmful than the shouts of the Genoese, was the only answer; and then the archers stepped forward and drew bow. In vain the Genoese attempted to reply; they were overwhelmed by the torrent of shafts; they shrank back, cut their bowstrings and would have fled, but for a line of French mounted men-at-arms which was drawn up in their rear to check them. The proud chivalry of France was chafing impatiently behind them, and Philip would wait no longer. "Slay me these rascals," he said brutally; and the first line of men-at-arms thundered forward, trod the hapless Genoese under foot, and pressed on within range of the arrows. And then ensued a terrible scene. The great stallions, maddened by the pain of the keen barbed shafts, broke from all control. They jibbed, they reared, they swerved, they plunged, striking and lashing out hideously, while the rear of the dense column, carried forward by its own momentum, surged on to the top of the foremost and wedged the whole into a helpless choking mass. And still the shower of pitiless arrows fell swift as snow upon the thickest of the press; and the whole of the French fighting line became a confused welter of struggling animals, maimed cross-bowmen, and fallen cavaliers, crippled by the weight of their armour, an easy prey to the long, keen knives of the Welsh.

Nevertheless some few of the French men-at-arms had managed to pierce through the archers. The blind king of Bohemia had been guided by two faithful knights through the centre, AlenÇon had skirted them on one flank, the Count of Flanders on the other, and all had fallen upon the Black Prince's battalion. The danger was greatest on the left flank; but the Earl of Arundel moved up the second line of the echelon to his support, and the English held their own. Then the second line of the French advanced, broke through the archers, not without heavy loss, and fell likewise upon the English men-at-arms. The Prince of Wales was overthrown, and was only saved by the devotion of his standard-bearer, but the battalion fought on. It was probably at this time that Arundel sent a messenger to the King for reinforcements. "Is my son dead or hurt?" he asked. "No, sire, but he is hard beset." "Then return to those who sent you and bid them send me no more such messages while my son is alive; tell them to let the boy win his spurs." The message was carried back to the battalion, and the men-at-arms fought on stoutly as ever. The archers seem also to have rallied and closed on the flank and rear of the attacking French. AlenÇon's banner could still be seen swaying behind a hedge of archers, and Philip, anxious to pour his third and last line into the fight, had actually advanced within range of the arrows. But the power of the bowmen was still unweakened, the ground was choked with dead men and horses, and the light was failing fast. He yielded to the entreaties of his followers and rode from the field; and the first great battle of the English was won.

When morning dawned the country was full of straggling Frenchmen, who from the sudden change in the direction of the advance had lost all knowledge of their line of retreat; the few that retained some semblance of organised bodies were attacked and broken up. Never was victory more complete. The French left eleven great lords, eighty-three bannerets, over twelve hundred knights and some thousands of common soldiers dead on the field. It was a fortunate issue to a reckless and ill-planned campaign. It is customary to give all credit for the victory to the archers, but this is unjust. Superbly as they fought they would have been broken without the men-at-arms, even as the men-at-arms would have been overwhelmed without the archers. Both did their duty without envy or jealousy, and therein lay the secret of their success.

The siege and capture of Calais followed, and then by the mediation of the Pope peace was made, and for a time preserved. Petty hostilities however never ceased in Brittany, and finally in 1355 the war broke out anew. Three armies were fitted out,—one of a thousand men-at-arms under the Black Prince for operations in Guienne, a second under the Earl of Derby for Brittany, and a third under the personal command of the King. Little, however, was effected in the campaign of 1355. The King was recalled to England by an invasion of the Scots, and the operations of 1356 in Brittany were checked by the appearance of the French King in superior force. But at the close of July the Black Prince suddenly started on a wild raid from the Dordogne in the south to the Loire. His object seems to have been to effect a junction with Derby's forces at Orleans; but it is difficult to see how he could have hoped for success. He had reached Vierzon on the Cher when he heard that the King of France was on his way to meet him in overwhelming strength. Unable to retreat through the country which he had laid waste on his advance, he turned sharp to the west down the Cher and struck the Loire at Tours. There for four days he halted, for what reason it is difficult to explain, since the delay enabled the French to cross the Loire and seriously to threaten his retreat.

There was now nothing for the Prince but to retire southward with all haste. The French were hard on his track, and followed him so closely that he was much straitened by want of supplies. On the 14th of September the English were at Chatelheraut and the French at La Haye, little more than ten miles apart, and on the 15th the French made a forced march which brought them fairly to southward of the Prince, and between him and his base at Bordeaux. All contact however had been lost; and the French King, making sure that the Prince had designs on Poitiers, swung round to the westward and moved straight upon the town. On the 17th, while in full march, his rearguard was suddenly surprised by the advanced parties of the Prince. As in the movements after the Alma, each army was executing a flank march, quite unconsciously, in the presence of the other. The French rearguard pursued the reconnoitring party to the main body of the English, and after a sharp engagement was repulsed with heavy loss. The French army had actually marched across the line of the Black Prince's retreat, and left it open to him once more.

Edward lost no time in looking for a suitable position, and presently found it at Maupertuis some fifteen miles south-west of Poitiers. There to the north of the river Miosson is a plain seamed with deep ravines running down to that stream; and behind one of these he took his stand, facing north-east. The sides of the ravine were planted with vineyards and blocked by thick hedges, so that it was impossible for cavalry to cross it except by a track which was broad enough for but four horsemen abreast; and these natural advantages the Prince improved by repairing all weak places in the fences and by digging entrenchments. One exposed spot on his left flank he strengthened by a leaguer of waggons as well as with the spade. He then told off his archers to line the hedges which commanded the passage across the ravine, and drew up his men-at-arms, all of them dismounted, in three lines behind it. The first line he committed to the Earls of Warwick and Suffolk, the rearmost to the Earl of Salisbury, and the centre he reserved for himself. His whole force, augmented as it was by a contingent of Gascons, did not exceed six or seven thousand men, half of whom were archers.

So passed the day of the 18th of September on the English side. The French on their part, instead of blocking up their retreat to the south and reducing them by starvation, simply moved down from Poitiers to within a league of the English position and halted for the night. Their force amounted to sixty thousand men, and they might well feel confident as to the issue of an action. Indeed, when the Black Prince, fully alive to the desperate peril of his situation, negotiated for an evacuation of the country, they imposed such terms that he could not in honour accept them. They therefore reconnoitred the English position, and laid their plans for the morrow. Three hundred chosen men-at-arms, backed by a column of German, Italian, and Spanish knights, were to charge down the ravine upon the archers, disperse them, and attack the English men-at-arms on the other side. Three lines, each of three massive battalions containing from three to four thousand men-at-arms, with lances shortened to a length of five feet, were to follow them afoot, and the English were to be crushed by their own tactics.

It is hardly surprising that in the night the Black Prince's heart failed him. He resolved while he could to place the Miosson between him and the French, and at dawn began his retreat, leaving the rearguard, however, still in the position at Maupertuis in case withdrawal should be impossible.[24] He also sent two knights to watch the French army, who however approached too closely to it and were captured. His first line had already crossed the Miosson when intelligence reached him that the French had advanced, and that the rearguard was engaged. He at once ordered the vanguard to return, and himself hastening back with his own division, despatched three hundred mounted men-at-arms and as many mounted archers without delay to strengthen his right wing. The French meanwhile had moved forward, gaily singing the song of Roland, to find the way blocked by the hedges and vineyards of the ravine. Undismayed they plunged down into the narrow track; and then the English archers behind the hedges opened at close range a succession of frightfully destructive volleys. The foremost of the horsemen fell headlong down, the rear plunged confusedly on the top of them, and the pass was blocked with a heaving, helpless crowd, on which the arrows hissed down in an eternal merciless shower. The supporting column of foreign cavalry was unable to act in the confusion; it was already under the fire of the archers, and before it could move the English mounted men on the right wing came down full upon its left flank, and killed or captured every man.

And now the wounded French horses, mad with pain and terror, many of them riderless and all beyond control, dashed back on to the first line of the dismounted French men-at-arms. It was a charge of mad animals, the most terrible of all charges, and the huge battalion fell into confusion before it. Edward was watching the battle keenly from his position; he had already ordered his men-at-arms to mount, and now Sir John Chandos, whose name must always be linked to Edward's as that of Collingwood to Nelson, broke out aloud with, "Forward, sire, forward, and the day is yours!" "Aye, John," answered the Prince, with a thought perhaps of the morning's retreat, "No going backward to-day. Forward banner, in the name of God and St. George!" The preliminary attack of the mounted men on the right had already cleared the way for them. The English cavalry scrambled in haste down into the ravine on the right, and fell upon the French men-at-arms. The front and centre divisions, already much shaken, were easily broken and dispersed; the third and strongest still remained, and against this, which resisted desperately, the whole force of the English was turned. The lesson of Falkirk was remembered. The mounted archers made the gaps and the men-at-arms rode into them. The division was broken, the King was captured, and the mass of the fugitives making for Poitiers found the gates closed against them and were cut down by hundreds. The action began at six in the morning, and lasted till late into the afternoon. The French losses were enormous. Over and above the King and many great lords two thousand men-at-arms were captured, and two thousand five hundred more were left dead on the field; the number of the unhappy foot-men that were slain it is impossible to state. The English loss is variously set down, the reports ranging from half the force to sixty-four men. The battle, from the disparity between the strength of the two sides, must remain ever memorable in the annals of war. To the English, who had but lately risen above the horizon as a military power, it gave a prestige that has never been lost.

The peace of BrÉtigny closed the war, and the English army was disbanded. But the soldiers, like the ten thousand Greeks who returned from Cunaxa, were too deeply bitten with their profession to abandon it for the tedium of peace. They therefore formed themselves into independent bodies, or Free Companies, and for years were the scourge of France, their chamber as they called it, which they plundered and ravaged at their pleasure. The greatest of their leaders was John Hawkwood, of whom something more must presently be said, but these bands, in less or greater numbers, were constantly to be found fighting for hire against the French. Thus three hundred of them fought for the King of Navarre against the King of France at Cocherel. The numbers engaged were little more than fifteen hundred on each side, but the action is interesting as showing the efforts of the French to meet the peculiar tactics of the English. In order to have no more trouble with unruly horses the French men-at-arms dismounted and fought on foot, and now for the first time the archers found themselves outdone. The armour of the French was so good that it turned the cloth-yard shafts; and being slightly superior in numbers the French men-at-arms forced their enemy off the field. It was but a slight success, but a defeat even of a small body of English was such a rarity in those days that it gave the French great hopes for the future, hopes which were soon to be dashed to the ground.

In the following year a quarrel as to the succession to the Duchy of Brittany between Charles of Blois and John of Montfort brought the English again into the field. The French King Charles the Fifth sent assistance to support the former, whereupon John of Montfort at once appealed to the English. John Chandos and several more of the garrison in France, eager for fresh battle against their old enemies, asked permission to join Montfort as volunteers. "You may go full well," answered the Black Prince. "Since the French are going for Charles of Blois, I give you good leave." The English, both volunteers and mercenaries, accordingly hurried to the scene of war; and at Auray they fought the action which decided the campaign. The numbers engaged did not exceed four thousand in either army. Both sides dismounted, and the French men-at-arms discarding the lance as unfit for fighting afoot equipped themselves with battle-axes, so that there promised to be a stubborn fight. The English archers as usual opened the engagement, but as at Cocherel their shafts could not penetrate the armour of the French; whereupon with great deliberation they threw down their bows, and boldly advancing to the French men-at-arms plucked their axes from their hands and plied the weapons against their astonished owners with terrible effect. The whole proceeding furnishes so good an example of the thoughtless, thick-headed gallantry of the English soldier, that one can only marvel that the battle of Auray should be practically unknown to Englishmen. The intensely ludicrous picture that can be conjured up of a series of detached struggles between the brawny active Englishmen in their doublets and hose, and the unhappy Frenchmen cased stiffly in their mail, the panting, the staggering, and the rattling, the agonised curses from behind the vizor, and the great broad laugh on the honest English face—this alone should have saved it from oblivion. The English men-at-arms came quickly to the support of the bowmen, and after a long and desperate engagement, for the noble and gallant Bertrand du Guesclin was in command of the French, the English drove their enemy from the field and as usual finished the pursuit on horseback. There was no question in the action of superior archery or advantage of position, though Chandos indeed handled his reserve in a masterly fashion, but it was simply a matter of what the Duke of Wellington called bludgeon-work; and at this too the English proved themselves the better men.

By this time the oppression of the Free Companies had become so insufferable that, in order to rid the country of them, Charles the Fifth ordered Bertrand du Guesclin to take a certain number of them into service and march with them to fight for the bastard Henry of Trastamare against Pedro the Cruel of Castile. It would be a mistake, we must note in passing, to look upon these companies as composed simply of low ruffians; they seem on the contrary to have been made up largely of the class of esquires, while there were poor noblemen serving even among the archers. On entering Spain they took to themselves a white cross, the old English colour of the Crusades, as their distinctive mark, and were apparently the first English troops that introduced this substitute for uniform. Further, they called themselves the White Company, and were in this respect the forerunners of the Buffs and Blues. They did little profitable work under du Guesclin, and were presently dismissed, just in time to be re-enlisted to the number of twelve thousand by the Black Prince, who, dreading an alliance of France with Spain, was preparing an expedition for the rescue of Peter the Cruel. The vassals of Aquitaine and Gascony were also summoned to the Prince's standard, a reinforcement under the Duke of Lancaster was sent from England to Brittany, whence it marched overland to the south, and by December 1366 thirty thousand mounted troops were concentrated on the frontier of Navarre. It was by general consent admitted to be the finest army that had ever been seen in Europe; so rapid had been the growth of military efficiency in England under the two great Edwards. It was organised in the usual three divisions, the vanguard being under command of the Duke of Lancaster, with Sir John Chandos at his side. The battle was under the command of the Prince himself, and the rearguard under a Gascon noble and famous soldier, the Captal de Buch. Every man wore the red cross of St. George on a white surcoat and on his shield, a badge which henceforth became distinctive of the English soldier for two centuries. The Spaniards, it is worth noting, wore a scarf, a fashion which, already two generations old, was destined to last through our great Civil War, and to survive, in the form of a sash, to the present day.

On Monday the 22nd of February 1367 the first division crossed the Pyrenees by the Pass of Roncesvalles. The next two followed it on the two succeeding days, and the whole force was reunited at Pampeluna. The Prince had now two lines of operations open to him, both leading to his objective, Burgos; the one by Vittoria and Miranda on the Ebro, the other by Puente la Reyna and Logrono. He chose the former, the identical line followed in the contrary direction by Wellington in chase of the beaten French, and sent only a small detachment of volunteers under Sir Thomas Felton along the latter route. This party of Felton's deserves mention as the first body of English irregular cavalry under a reckless and daring officer. No exploit was too hare-brained for them and they did excellent service, for they were the first to find contact with the Spanish army, at Navarete, and having obtained it they preserved it, keeping the Prince admirably informed of the enemy's movements. Henry of Trastamare, on learning the advance of the English, crossed the Ebro and marched on Vittoria, but finding that the Black Prince had been beforehand with him fell back on Miranda. Felton's volunteers stuck to him so persistently and impudently during this retreat that the Spaniards at last lost patience and attacked them in overwhelming force. The English, a mere hundred men, were too proud to retire but stood firm on the hill of Arinez, the very spot where Picton broke the French centre in the battle of the 21st of June 1813, and were killed to a man. Henry then recrossed the Ebro to his first position at Navarete; the Black Prince crossed the same river at Logrono, and on the 3rd of April the two hosts stood face to face on the plain between Navarete and Najera.

It is not easy to ascertain the force engaged on each side, but it is certain that the Black Prince, with about ten thousand men-at-arms and as many archers, was superior in numbers and very decidedly superior in the quality of his troops. Nevertheless the force had suffered much hardship, and the men were individually enfeebled by want of food. The Spanish army was distributed into four divisions. The first of these, consisting of dismounted knights, was placed under the command of Bertrand du Guesclin and formed the first line. The remaining three formed the second line; the largest of them, composed of mounted men-at-arms and a rabble of rude infantry, being drawn up in rear of the vanguard, while the other two, made up chiefly of light cavalry copied from the Moorish model, were drawn up on either flank slightly in advance of the second and in rear of the first line. The arrangement of the Black Prince's army was similar but more massive; first came the vanguard under John Chandos, then a second line with two flanking divisions pushed slightly forward, as in the Spanish army, and lastly the third line in reserve. Every man in the English host was dismounted. The battlefield was a level plain; and the sight of the two armies advancing against each other, armour and pennons glancing under the morning sun was, in Froissart's words, great beauty to behold.

The English archers as usual opened the engagement, and then the divisions of Chandos and du Guesclin, the two most gallant and chivalrous soldiers of their day, met in full shock. In spite of a furious resistance the English, weakened by privation, were for a moment borne back. Chandos was overthrown and went near to lose his life. But meanwhile the English archers in the flanking divisions had driven off the light horse that stood before them, and now wheeling inward enveloped du Guesclin's devoted band on both flanks. The bastard Henry strove gallantly to save the day with the second line, but the Black Prince brought up not only a second line but a third, and the battle was soon over. Then the English men-at-arms flew, as at Poitiers, to their horses, and the defeat was turned into a rout. A rapid torrent, spanned by but a single bridge, barred the retreat of the fugitives; the narrow passage was choked by the press of the flying, and thousands were taken or slain.

This battle marks the zenith of early English military power. But the campaign was after all a failure. The ill faith of Pedro the Cruel forced the Black Prince to tax Gascony heavily for the expenses of the war; the province appealed to the King of France, and the Prince was summoned to be judged before his peers at Paris as a rebellious vassal. He shook his head ominously when he received the message. "We will go," he said, "but with helmet on head and sixty thousand men at our back." The war with France broke out anew, and petty operations were soon afoot all over the country; but now noble after noble in Aquitaine and Gascony forsook his allegiance and revolted to the French. Disaster came thick upon disaster. The Earl of Pembroke, a new commander, disdaining the help of the veteran Chandos, was defeated, and Chandos himself, while advancing to his relief, was slain in a skirmish, to the grief alike of friend and of foe. The Prince, already sickening of a mortal disease, turned in fury upon the insurgent town of Limoges, besieged it, took it, and ordered every soul in it to be put to the sword. Three thousand men, women, and children were cut down, crying "Mercy, mercy!" but the stern man, too ill to ride, looked on unmoved from his litter, till at the sight of three French knights fighting gallantly against overwhelming odds his heart softened, and he gave the word for the slaughter to cease.

A few weeks later his little son, but six years old, the boy upon whom the great soldier had lavished all that was tender in his nature, died suddenly at Bordeaux. The blow aggravated the Prince's sickness, and the physicians ordered him to England, in the faint hope that he might get better at home. He returned, hid himself in strict seclusion in his house at Berkhampstead, and waited for the end. Meanwhile things in France went from bad to worse. A great naval defeat before Rochelle cost England the command of the sea, and with the loss of the sea Guienne and Gascony were lost likewise. An expedition under John of Gaunt landed at Calais and marched indeed to Bordeaux, but lost four-fifths of its numbers through sickness on the way. By 1374 the English possessions in France were reduced to Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne; so swiftly had victory passed away with the withdrawal of the master's hand.

At length, in 1376, the Prince came up to Westminster to attend, even in his sick-bed, the deliberations of Parliament. This was his last effort. Two months later, on the 8th of June, he summoned his faithful comrades to his chamber to bid them farewell, and as they filed past he thanked them for their good service and asked their pardon for that he could not reward them as he wished. Then he entreated them to be faithful to his son as they had been to himself: and they swore it, weeping like women, with all their hearts. The end came with a flash of the imperious soldier's spirit. Observing that a knight who had offended him had come in with the rest, the Prince instantly bade him begone and see his face no more; and then the noble heart cracked, and with a last ejaculation that he forgave all men as he hoped to be forgiven, the Black Prince, the hope and pride and treasure of England, sank back and died. Two months later he was buried with military pomp in the cathedral at Canterbury; and over his tomb were hung, and still hang, his helmet, his surcoat, his gauntlets, his crest, his shield, and his sword,[25] the veritable arms worn by the first great English soldier.[26] For a great soldier he was and a great commander. He could be stern and he could be merciless, but those were stern and merciless times, and the man whose last thoughts were for his comrades-in-arms was a chief who could hold men to him and a leader whom they would follow to the death. Men no longer pray for his soul in the chapel which he founded in the crypt of the cathedral; but morning and evening the voice of the trumpet, calling English soldiers to their work and dismissing them to their rest, peals forth from the barracks without and pierces faintly into the silence of the sanctuary, no unfitting requiem for the great warrior who, waiting for the sound of a louder trumpet, sleeps peacefully beneath the shadow of his shield.

CHAPTER IV

The works of the Black Prince lived after him. Not that we must look for them immediately in England, where we now enter on forty years of intestine division and civil strife. We do indeed find that Richard the Second, on his invasion of Scotland in 1385, adopted for his army the organisation that had been taught by his father at Navarete; but we discover no trace of military progress. Far more instructive is it to look to the continent of Europe and watch the spread of English military ideas there. It has already been seen that the French, not daring to meet the English archers on horseback, adopted the English system of dismounting for action; and it is interesting to note that the same fashion spread to Germany and Italy, steadily tending to overthrow the supremacy of cavalry wrought by the feudal system, and to make a revolution in the art of war. Not one of the nations, however, seems to have grasped the pith of the English tactics, the combination of the offensive and defensive elements in the infantry. The French indeed, under King Charles the Sixth, strove to raise up archers, and with all too good success, for they became so efficient that they were esteemed a menace to the nobility, and were soon effectively discouraged out of existence. Perhaps the most striking example of the misapplication of the English system is the conduct of the Austrian commander at Sempach, who by dismounting his knights deliberately gave away every advantage to the Swiss, and thus helped forward that nation on the way to make its infantry the model of Europe; a very significant matter in the history of the art of war.

But the truest disciples of the Black Prince were the English Free Companies, from whom there descended to England, and indeed to Europe, a legacy of a remarkable kind. These companies were military societies framed very much on the model of the ancient trade-guilds, and had as good a right to the name as they. A certain number of adventurers invested so much money in the creation of a trained body of fighting men, and took a higher or lower station of command therein, together with a larger or smaller share of the profits, according to the proportion of their venture. If any man wished to realise his capital he could sell out, provided that he could find a buyer; if any one partner seemed to the rest to be undesirable they would buy him out and take in another. Thus grew up what was known as the purchase-system. The abuse of their monopoly by these companies drove the sovereigns of Europe after a time to issue commissions to their subjects to raise companies for their own service only; but even so the commercial basis of the company remained unchanged, being only widened when the time came for the amalgamation of companies into regiments. These military adventurers taught the nations the new art of war, and the nations could not but follow their model.

The greatest leader of free companies was an Englishman, a pupil of the Black Prince but greater even than his master, John Hawkwood. It is true that he did his work for foreign nations and in a foreign land, but even so his name must not be omitted from a history of the British Army. The company which he commanded, English almost to a man, was the terror of Italy, and not only the most formidable in the field but the smartest to the eye, for its arms were burnished till they shone like silver. Hawkwood, though a mercenary, was celebrated as the only one who never broke faith, and as a general his reputation was European. The action which he fought at Castagnaro, when, in spite of great inferiority in numbers, he deliberately laid his plans for a sudden counterstroke, after the manner of Poitiers, extorts the admiration even of modern generals. Still more remarkable is his once famous retreat in the face of an overwhelming force from the Adda to the Adige, and perhaps greatest of all was the closing scene of that retreat. For, as he lay encamped in the plains by the Adige, the enemy broke the dykes of the river and turned the whole flood of its waters upon his army. It was night, and the men were encamping, weary after a hard day's march, when the deluge came upon them. Everything conspired to create a panic, but Hawkwood's coolness and confidence were equal to the danger. He bade every horseman take up one of the foot-men behind his saddle, and then placing himself at their head he led them through ten miles of the trackless waste of water, never less than girth-deep, and brought them out by sheer sagacity, not indeed without loss but without heavy loss, to the dry bed of the river. This was in his last campaign, when he was past seventy years of age; and Florence, the state which he had long faithfully served, voted him a pension for life and a monument even during his lifetime. He was making arrangements to return to England when he died; and King Richard the Second begged the city of Florence that the bones of so famous a warrior might be returned to his native land. The request was gracefully granted by the citizens, but the last resting-place of Hawkwood is now unknown. His monument in the Cathedral at Florence records that he was the most skilful general of his age, a height of military fame that has been reached by one other Englishman only, John, Duke of Marlborough.

Yet another action must be briefly noticed to show the value set on English military skill. During the invasion of Portugal by the King of Castile, in 1385, the Portuguese were joined by a party of about five hundred English adventurers, whose leaders appear to have directed most of the operations. It was under their guidance that the decisive battle of Aljubarotta, of which the Portuguese are still proud, was finally fought; and it is worthy of remark that, finding no advantageous position to hand, they deliberately constructed by means of abattis an imitation of the position of Poitiers, making it unassailable from the front except through a narrow strait, which was purposely left open and lined with archers. Marvellous to relate, the Spaniards and the French, who were fighting with them, rushed straight into the trap, and were of course utterly overthrown; whereupon, in due accordance with precedent, the Portuguese made their counter-attack and won a complete victory.[27] All this was due, as Froissart says, to the counsel of the English; and indeed, little though we may be conscious of it, it is doubtful whether even after Waterloo the prestige of English soldiers was greater than at the end of the fourteenth century.

But while the English military doctrines were thus spreading themselves over Europe, fresh innovations, which were destined to render them obsolete, were already making rapid progress. Artillery in the hands of the Germans was tending more and more to lose its cumbrous character and to take new form in mobile and practicable weapons. The heavy bombards, which could be neither elevated nor traversed, had before the close of the fourteenth century given place to lighter guns of smaller bore fixed on to the end of a shaft of wood and supported on a fork or hook, whence they derived their name of HakenbÜchse, a word soon corrupted by the English into hackbut, hagbush, and finally harquebus. A later improvement had fitted guns with a stock like that of the cross-bow, which could be brought up to the shoulder, thus more readily aligning the barrel to the eye. The step from this to the hand-gun, which could be served out as the individual weapon of a single man, was but a short one and was soon to be taken. But as the traditions of Wellington and the Peninsula were to be tried once more at Alma and Inkerman before they finally perished, so the system of the two great Edwards was to be revived forty years after Navarrete at Agincourt.

It is unnecessary to dwell on the pretensions which were put forward to excuse the wanton aggression of Henry the Fifth against France. Ambitious, like Frederick the Great, of military glory he made his will the true ground for his action, counting on the spirit of a people that was never strongly averse from a French war. The military devices introduced by the Edwards, the commissions of array,[28] and the system of indentures, were still in good working order, while the discipline of the Black Prince, like his order of battle, was stereotyped in a written code of Ordinances of War. All the old machinery was therefore to hand; and perhaps the most noteworthy change that had come over the English military world was the doubling of the archers' wages from threepence to sixpence a day. Parliament voted the King a large sum of money, which however proved to be insufficient, for, significantly enough, not a contractor would furnish his contingent of men without security for the repayment of his expenses. The crown jewels were pledged in all directions, ships were hired in Holland and in England, seamen were impressed, artisans of every trade, from the miner to the farrier, were engaged, and on the 7th of August 1415 the army embarked at Southampton and the adjacent ports, and sailed for the Seine. The whole fleet numbered some fourteen hundred vessels, and the army is reckoned at thirty thousand men, men-at-arms with their attendants, and archers both mounted and afoot, all distinguished by the red cross of St. George. Further, there was a great train of the newest and best artillery, great guns called by pet names such as the London and the King's Daughter, the whole under the charge of four German gunmasters.

On the second day out the fleet anchored before Harfleur. A day was taken up by the disembarkation, which was unhindered by the French; and by the 19th of August the town was fully invested. Then came a month of siege, wherein the art that was dying blended strangely with that which was just coming to birth; wooden towers and quaint engines that might have been employed by the Romans plying side by side with sap and mine and countermine and the latest patterns of German artillery. The French made a most gallant defence, and dysentery breaking out in the English camp swept off thousands of the besiegers; but at length the heavy guns prevailed. The garrison begged for terms, praying that the King would make his gunners to cease, "for the fire was to them intolerable." On the 22nd of September the capitulation was agreed on, and Harfleur received an English garrison. It was the first town that the English had reduced by the fire of cannon.

But Henry was not yet satisfied. Two-thirds of his force had melted away, dead or invalided, but he had no intention of re-embarking at Harfleur. He devoted a fortnight to the repair of the defences of the captured town, and then collecting provisions for eight days he marched northward for Calais with an army, or, as we should now call it, a flying column, of nine thousand men.

Meanwhile the French, disorganised though they were by the insanity of their king, Charles the Sixth, began to bestir themselves, and collecting an army of sixty thousand men, fourteen thousand of them men-at-arms and several thousand archers and cross-bowmen, determined to hold the line of the Somme and bar Henry's passage of the river. Henry's idea, dictated like the whole of his campaign by the precedent of Edward the Third, had been to cross the Somme by the ford of Blanche Tache. He now learned that the passage was defended by the French in force. He wheeled at once to the right, and following the left bank of the river upward, tried in vain to find a crossing-place. Every bridge was broken down and every ford beset. It was plain that he was more effectually entrapped even than his predecessor Edward.

The eight days' supply of provisions was now consumed, and the position of the English became most critical. Retreat Henry would not, force the passage of the Somme he could not. He decided to follow the river upward to its head-waters, and on reaching Nesle learned from a countryman of a ford, the access to which lay across a morass. Two causeways that provided a footing over it had been broken down by the French, but these were quickly repaired with wood and faggots and straw till they were broad enough to admit three horsemen abreast. Henry himself was indefatigable in the work. He took personal charge of one end of the passages, and appointed special officers to attend to the other. The baggage was carried over along one causeway, and the men by the second. Thus the passage both of morass and river was accomplished between eight in the morning and an hour before dusk of an October day. The French, who were lying in force at Peronne, now for some unexplained reason retreated towards the north-west, but sent, according to custom, a challenge to Henry to fix time and place for battle. "I am marching straight to Calais through open country," he replied. "You will have no difficulty in finding me." And he continued his advance.

At Peronne the English struck the line of the French march and looked for an immediate engagement. The force moved in order of battle, every man armed and ready for action, while the archers by Henry's order carried a stake, eleven feet long and pointed at both ends, to make them defence against cavalry. To their surprise no enemy appeared; and Henry was presently able to disperse his force along a wider front, with the advantage alike of obtaining easier supply of victuals and surer information of the enemy. The English were much distressed by want of bread: other provisions were abundant, but grain was absolutely undiscoverable. Nevertheless discipline was most strictly enforced, and the order of the columns, as the speed of the march can avouch, was quite admirable. Robbery of churches or peasants, the slightest irregularity on the march or in the camp, the presence of women in the camp, all offences alike were visited with the severest punishment. One man, whom Shakespeare has immortalised as Bardolph, was detected in the theft of a pyx: he was paraded through the army as a criminal and hanged. Even French writers admit that the English dealt more mercifully with them than their own countrymen. The King himself avoided anything that might seem to indicate the slightest discouragement. One night he missed the camping-ground assigned to his division and took up that of the vanguard. "God forbid that in full armour I should turn back," he said; and pushing the vanguard further forward, he halted for the night where he stood.

On the 24th of October, Henry, who was lying at Frevent on the river Canopes, was informed by his scouts that the French were moving forward from St. Pol and must inevitably get ahead of him. He pushed on to Blangy, crossed the river Ternoise there, and advancing to Maisoncelle drew up his army in battle order before it. The whole French army was before him at Ruisseauville, but as dusk fell without an attack he withdrew for the night to Maisoncelle, and conscious of his desperate situation opened negotiations with the French, offering to restore Harfleur and make good all injuries if he might be permitted to evacuate France in peace. His overtures were rejected and he was warned to fight on the morrow. On the same evening the French moved down to a narrow plateau between the villages of Tramecourt and Agincourt, and there, cramped into a space far too narrow for sixty thousand men, they halted till the morrow within less than a mile of the English position.

The night was spent in very different fashion in the two camps. The French, doubtless much inconvenienced by the straitness of their quarters, were shouting everywhere for comrades and servants as noisily as a mob of sheep; while some, forgetting the lesson of Poitiers, gambled for the ransom of the prisoners that they were to take in the morrow's battle. Huge fires were kept burning round their banners, for the rain was incessant, and the English could see everything that passed among them. They too began shouting like the French till sternly checked by the King; and then the English camp fell silent, and the men, forbidden to forget their situation in the din of their own voices, sat down to face it in all its stern reality. They could be excused if they felt some misgiving. They had covered over three hundred miles in a continuous march of seventeen days, often in hourly expectation of a fight; for four days they had not tasted bread; and now, after a few short hours more of waiting in the ceaseless pattering rain, they were to meet a host outnumbering them by five to one. Arms and bowstrings were overhauled and repaired; and the priests had little rest from the numbers that came to them for shrift. But in the discipline of that silence lay the promise of success.

At dawn of the next morning Henry was astir, fully armed but bare-headed, riding a gray pony. Presently he led the army out of Maisoncelle to a newly-sown field, which was the position of his choice, and drew it up for battle. Every man was dismounted, and horses and baggage were parked in the rear under the protection of a small guard. But the numbers of his army were so weak that the favourite formation of the Black Prince could not be followed. The vanguard under the Duke of York became the right, the battle under the King the centre, and the rearguard under Lord Camoys the left of a single line, which even then was ranked but four men deep. It was a first example of English line against French column. Henry made the men a short speech, recalling to them the deeds of their fathers, and then the whole host kneeled down, thrice kissed the ground, and rose upright again into its ranks.

Meanwhile not a sign of attack came from the French. Their order of battle had been determined many days before, but it was ill adapted to so narrow a position. It was evident that only the vanguard could possibly come into action, and such was the indiscipline that every man of rank wished to command it. Finally the whole of the magnates were placed in the vanguard, and its strength was made up to about seven thousand men-at-arms, every one of them dismounted. On each flank was a wing of twelve hundred more dismounted men, and on their flanks again two small bodies of cavalry, three hundred on the right, and eight hundred on the left, which were designed to gallop down upon the archers. This was the first French line. The second was also made up of about eight thousand dismounted men-at-arms; while the remainder, who were ordered to dismount but would not, composed the third line. The whole stood on ploughed ground, soaked by the rain of the previous night and poached deep by the trampling of innumerable feet.

The French took advantage of the delay to give their men breakfast, an example which Henry immediately followed. Then seeing that the enemy remained motionless he prepared to attack. A gray old warrior, Sir Walter Erpingham, galloped forward with two aides-de-camp to make the necessary changes of formation. The archers were deployed in front and flanks, and when all was ready old Sir Walter tossed his baton into the air and sang out "Now strike." Then galloping back to the King's battalion he dismounted and took his place in the ranks. The King, already dismounted, gave the word "Forward banner," and the English answered with a mighty cry, the forerunner of that "stern and appalling shout" which four centuries later was to strike hesitation into so fine a soldier even as Soult. Then the whole line advanced in close array, with frequent halts, for the ground was deep, and the archers in their leathern jackets and hose, ragged, hatless, and shoeless after two months of hard work, could easily wear down the men-at-arms in their heavy mail. Artillery in such a sea of mud could not be brought into position on either side, and the German gunners took no part in the fight. The French on their side stood firm and closed up their ranks. They were so heavily weighted with their armour, always heavier than that of the English, that they could hardly move, and their front was so much crowded that they could not use their archers; so they broke off their lances as at Poitiers to the length of five feet, and stood in dense array, thirty-one ranks against the English four.

Arrived within range the archers struck their stakes slantwise into the ground, and drew bow. The French vanguard then shook itself up and advanced slowly, while the cavalry on their flanks moved forward against the archers. The division of three hundred lances on the right made but a poor attack; little more than half of them really came on, and even these their horses, maddened as at CreÇy by the pain of the arrows, soon carried in headlong confusion to the rear. The stronger division on the left charged home, and the leader and one or two others actually reached the line of stakes; but the stakes had no firm hold in the mud; the horses tripped over them and fell, and not one rider ever rose again. The remainder had as usual been carried back by their wounded horses upon their comrades in rear, and thence with them upon the wings of dismounted men-at-arms in which they tore terrible gaps. The centre of the French vanguard fared little better. Dazzled by the eastern sun that shone full in their eyes, and bending their heads before the sleet of arrows, they lost all idea of their direction, and became so clubbed together that they could not use their weapons. By sheer weight they forced back the English men-at-arms a lance's length, and for a time they fought hard. King Henry was twice struck heavily on the helmet, one blow lopping a branch from the crown that encircled it. But meanwhile the archers had noted the gaps torn by the horses in the wings of the French fighting line. They dropped their bows, and with whatever weapon—axe, hammer, or sword—that hung at their girdle, they fell, light and active, upon the helpless, hampered men-at-arms and made fearful havoc of them. The French centre, exposed by the defeat of the wings to attack on both flanks, gave way before the King's battalion, and their first line was utterly defeated. There was no question of flight among the French men-at-arms, for the unhappy men could not move. The English simply took off the helmets of their prisoners, and, leaving them thus exposed, pressed on against the second line. This, however, was already shaken by the defeat of the vanguard; and though one leader who had arrived late in the field, the Duke of Brabant, set a gallant example, he was quickly cut down, and the defeat of the second line followed quickly on his fall. The third line still remained, but being mounted, contrary to orders, had no mind to stay and fight, but turned and fled, leaving some few of their leaders alone to redeem French honour by a hopeless struggle and a noble death.

This battle was hardly won when word was brought to Henry that his baggage, with all his treasure as well as all the horses, was in the hands of plunderers. The guard in fact had been unable to resist the temptation to join in the fight, and had left the baggage to take care of itself. The momentary confusion hereby caused gave some of the French time to rally, and Henry, not knowing how great the danger might be, ordered every man to kill his prisoners. The English hesitated, less possibly from humanity than from reluctance to lose good ransom, whereupon Henry told off two hundred archers for the duty, which was promptly carried out. He can hardly be blamed, for the fight had been won less by the slaughter than by the capture of the men-at-arms; and the risk of undertaking a new attack in front with some thousands of unwounded prisoners in rear, was serious. Be that as it may, the deed was done. Henry then advanced against the rallied French and quickly broke them up; and at four o'clock, the victory being at last complete, he left the field. The French loss in nobles alone numbered from five to eight thousand men killed, exclusive of common men. A thousand prisoners and a hundred and twenty banners were taken. The losses of the English are uncertain, but probably did not exceed a few hundreds, the most distinguished of the fallen being the Duke of York.

So ended the great fight which King Harry himself decreed to be called by the name of Agincourt.[29] It sums up in itself the leading features of CreÇy, Poitiers, and Cocherel, in a word of all the finest actions of the Edwards. But it was, as fate ordained, but the afterglow of the glory of the Plantagenets, not the light of a sun new risen like a giant to run his course.

To attempt to follow the later campaigns of Henry the Fifth in France would be alike tedious and unprofitable. To the last he stuck to the principles of the Black Prince, but his military talents ripened year after year, and while he lived France trembled under his sword. Finally, torn to pieces by the strife of Burgundian and Armagnac, France by the Treaty of Troyes surrendered her kingship into his hand. The contempt of the English for their enemy was such that the men once assaulted and captured a town without orders. But in the very next year came a reverse that boded ominously for the future. The Duke of Clarence was defeated at BeaugÉ, less by the French than by a body of Scottish auxiliaries, who had been sent to their assistance under the Earl of Buchan. Henry had hoped that the Scots would not fight against him, and ordered them henceforth to be treated as rebels, but it was to no purpose. The reader should take note of this fateful year 1421, for it marks the permanent entrance of the Scots into the service of France, a fact full of import for both countries. Moreover, he will in due time see a regiment, still called the Royal Scots, withdrawn from the French army to become the first of the English Line.

The return of King Henry to France after BeaugÉ soon re-established the ascendency of the English arms; and then, while still in the prime of life, he sickened even in the midst of his operations and died. He was but thirty-four years of age, a great administrator, a great captain, and above all a grand disciplinarian. Yet he was no brutal martinet; nay, when once he had cast his wild days behind him he never even swore. "Impossible," or "It must be done," was the most that he said. But "he was so feared by his princes and captains that none dared to disobey his orders, however nearly related to him, and the principal cause was that if any one transgressed his orders he punished him at once without favour or mercy."[30] He and the army that fought with him at Agincourt are the true precursors of Craufurd and the Light Division. His body, borne with mournful pomp from the castle of Vincennes, still rests among us in Westminster Abbey, and above it still hang his saddle, his shield blazoned with the lilies of France, and the helmet, deeply dinted by two sword-cuts, which he wore at Agincourt. Not for three centuries was another soldier to rise up in England of equal fame with the Black Prince, John Hawkwood, and King Harry the Fifth.

CHAPTER V

It is now our sad duty to watch the military glory of the Plantagenets wane fainter and fainter, until it disappears, to be followed by a period of darkness until the light is slowly rekindled at the flame of foreign fires. The decline of our supremacy in arms was not at first rapid. John, Duke of Bedford, possessed a combination of military and administrative talent little less remarkable than that of his brother the late King, and as Regent of France he took up the reins of government and command with no unskilful hand. Everything turned upon the maintenance of existing factions in France. England working with Burgundy, the red cross of St. Andrew with the red cross of St. George, could preserve the English dominion; otherwise that dominion must inevitably fall. The French, after the lull created by Henry's death, gathered an army together of which the kernel was three thousand Scots, and marched into Burgundy to besiege Crevant. A body of four thousand picked English and Burgundians at once hastened after them, and although outnumbered, and compelled, by the advance of a second French army in their rear, to fight their battle and win it at whatever cost, they defeated the enemy completely and cut the Scots to pieces almost to a man. All was still done as King Harry had done it. English tactics were forced, on pain of death, upon English and Burgundians[31] alike, and discipline was most strictly preserved. It was not a promising beginning for the French, but Scotland was ready to furnish more men, and France not less ready to receive them; and so the extraordinary struggle of French against French, and English against Scots was renewed once more.

Early in 1424 ten thousand Scottish men-at-arms, under Archibald, Earl of Douglas, arrived at Rochelle, and were welcomed with eagerness by the French. Douglas was created Duke of Touraine, and all went merrily until on the 17th of August French and English, with their allies, met under the walls of Verneuil. The French and Scots numbered close on twenty thousand men, the English twelve thousand, of whom eight thousand were archers. Contrary to the hitherto accepted practice, the French formed their army into a single huge central battalion of dismounted men, with cavalry on each wing, the mounted men being designed to fall upon the English flanks and rear. Bedford, who commanded the English, imitated the enemy in forming only a single battalion, but dismounted the whole of his force, covering his front and flanks with archers, who as at Agincourt carried stakes as a defence against the attack of horse. His baggage he parked in rear, the horses being tied collar to tail that they might be the less easily driven off; and he appointed as baggage-guard no fewer than ten thousand archers.

For the whole morning the two armies stood opposite to each other in order of battle, each waiting for the other to attack; but at last, at three in the afternoon, the French advanced and were received by the English with a mighty shout. The French cavalry on the wings charged, broke through the archers, and sweeping round the English rear fell upon the baggage. They were greeted by the guard with a shower of arrows, but contrived none the less to carry off some quantity of spoil, with which they galloped away, feeling sure that the day was won.[32] But meanwhile the two battalions of dismounted men-at-arms, those on the French side being exclusively Scots, had closed and were fighting desperately. For a moment the English were beaten back by superior numbers; but Salisbury, John Talbot, and other tried leaders were with them, and they soon recovered themselves. The archers on the wings rallied to their aid, while those of the baggage-guard, freed from all further alarm of cavalry, hurried up with loud shouts in support. The Scots wavered, and the English pressing forward with one supreme effort broke through their ranks, split up the battalion, and threw the whole into helpless confusion. And then began a terrible carnage, for the Scots had told Bedford that they would neither give nor receive quarter, and they certainly received none. Five thousand men, mostly Scots, were killed on the French side, John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, the Earl of Douglas and James his son being among the slain, and two hundred more were taken prisoners. Of the English some sixteen hundred only went down.

To France Verneuil was a disaster little less crushing than Agincourt, and indeed it seemed as though she had passed irrevocably under English dominion. All was however spoiled by Bedford's brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who, having made a match with a rich heiress, Jacqueline of Holland, carried away English troops to take possession of her dower-lands, and, worst of all, gave the deepest offence to Burgundy. At home Humphrey was equally troublesome, so much so that in 1425 Bedford was compelled to return to England to set matters right. It was not until three years later that he took the field again, well reinforced with men and with a powerful train of artillery. So far we have rarely found artillery employed except for sieges, but henceforth we see gunners regularly employed at the high wage of a man-at-arms, one shilling a day, and "hand-cannons" and "little cannons with stone shot of two pounds weight," playing ever a more prominent part in the field.

Against his better judgment Bedford now resolved to carry the war across the Loire, and detached the Earl of Salisbury with ten thousand men to the siege of Orleans. The operations opened unfortunately with the death of Salisbury, who was mortally wounded by a cannon-shot while examining the enemy's works; but the investment was carried on with spirit by the Earl of Suffolk, and a little action at the opening of 1429 showed that the English superiority still held good. This, the battle of Roveray, better known as the action of the Herrings, has a peculiar interest, though the occasion was simple enough. Lent was approaching; and as, among the many complications of mediÆval warfare, the observance of the fast was by no means forgiven to fighting men,[33] it was necessary to send provisions of "Lenten stuff," principally herrings, to the besieging force round Orleans. The convoy being large was provided with an escort of sixteen hundred men under command of Sir John Falstolfe. The French and Scots decided to attack it on the march, but unfortunately could not agree as to their plan; the Scots insisting that it was best to dismount, the French preferring to remain in the saddle. Meanwhile Falstolfe with great dexterity drew his waggons into a leaguer, leaving but two narrow entrances defended by archers. It was the trap of Poitiers once more. The French and Scots after long discussion agreed to differ, and attacked each in their own fashion. The English archers shot with admirable precision; the Scots lost very heavily, the French after a short experience of the arrows rode out of range, and Falstolfe led his herrings triumphantly into Orleans, having killed close on six hundred of the enemy with trifling loss to himself. This was the last signal employment of the tactics of Poitiers, the last brilliant success of the English in the Hundred Years' War, the first glimpse of a lesson learnt by England from the military genius of a foreign power. For the tactics of the waggon were those of John Zizka, the greatest soldier of Europe in the fifteenth century.

From this point the story is one of almost unbroken failure for the English in France. They were now about to pass through the experience which later befell the Spaniards in the Low Countries, and the French themselves in the Peninsula. The turning-point is of course the appearance in the field of Joan of Arc, a phenomenon so extraordinary that it has become the exclusive property of the votaries of poetry and sentiment, and is, perhaps rightly, not to be rescued from their hands. It is certain that her military talents were of the slightest; but, on the other hand, she possessed the magic of leadership and the amazing power of restoring the moral strength of her countrymen, which had been impaired as never before by an endless succession of defeats. The English not unnaturally attributed this power to witchcraft: for by what other agency could a peasant girl have checked the ever-victorious army? and the punishment of witchcraft being the fire they burnt her to death. Any other nation would have done the same in their place then, and there are still a few folks both in France and the United Kingdom who would do so now. But the fire in the market-place of Rouen availed the English little. "The French," as Monstrelet says, believed that "God was against the English"; and the English began to believe it themselves.

For the woman's quick instinct and the pure insight of a saintly soul had guided the maid aright. The moral quality of the English force was corrupted, and needed only to meet some loftier spirit to fall into decay. The chivalrous character of the war was gone. Hostile commanders no longer laid each other friendly wagers on the success of their next operations. The army too was ceasing to be national; the English element was growing smaller and smaller in number, and fast sinking to the level of the lawless adventurers who furnished the majority in the ranks. Long contempt of the enemy had bred insolence and carelessness, and the old discipline was almost gone. The sight of a deer or a hare sufficed to set a whole division hallooing, sometimes, as at Patay, with disastrous results. On that day the French scouts, who were feeling for the enemy, roused a stag, which ran towards the English array, and was greeted with such a storm of yells as told the French all that they wanted to know. The English force blundered on, without advanced parties of any kind, till it suddenly found itself on the verge of an engagement. Then the leaders wrangled as to the question of fighting in enclosed or open country, and, having finally in overweening confidence selected the open, were surprised and routed before the archers could plant their stakes in the ground. Worst of all, an officer in high command, Sir John Falstolfe, seeing that defeat was certain, disobeyed the order to dismount and galloped away. He was disgraced by Bedford, but was afterwards for some reason reinstated, though had Harry been king he would assuredly have lost his head.[34]

Among the French the revival of the military spirit soon showed itself in a remarkable development of new ideas. They had long copied, though with a bad grace, the English practice of dismounting men-at-arms and furnishing archers with a palisade of stakes, but in 1434 at Gerberoy they used the three arms, cavalry, infantry, and artillery, in combination, with signal success. Artillery was still so far a novelty in the field that only three years before a whole army collected by the Duke of Bar had flung itself howling to the ground at the first discharge; but the English archers, though they knew better than to behave thus, were sadly dismayed when the round stone shot came bounding within their trusted palisade. It was just after this, too, that two fatal blows were struck at the English by the shifting of Burgundy to the French side, and by the death of their ablest leader, John, Duke of Bedford.

Still the war, wantonly and foolishly continued by an inefficient Government, dragged on and on, and, though not unbroken by occasional brilliant exploits, turned steadily against the English. The behaviour of the soldiers was sullied more and more by shameful barbarity; and gradually but surely their hold on Normandy and Guienne slipped from them. Truce was made at last in 1444, and Charles the Seventh seized the opportunity to execute a series of long-meditated reforms in the French army. He established a national militia of fifteen companies of men-at-arms and archers, each six hundred strong, organised garrisons of trained men for the towns, took the greatest pains for the equipment, discipline, and regular payment of the troops, and formed the finest park of artillery thitherto seen. In a word, he laid the foundation of the French standing army, with the Scottish archers and Scottish men-at-arms at its head, two famous corps that remained in their old place on the army-list until the French Revolution. Thus French military organisation, spurred by a century of misfortune, made one gigantic bound ahead of English, and may be said to have kept the lead ever since.

In England there had been no such improvement. A feeble effort had been made to check by statute fraudulent enlistment and the still graver abuse of embezzlement of the soldiers' pay by the captains, but this was of little help when the enforcement of the Act[35] was entrusted to so corrupt and avaricious a commander as the Duke of Somerset. Throughout the truce the soldiers on the English side behaved abominably; but, since they were robbed of their wages by their officers, it is hardly surprising that they should have repaid themselves by the plunder of the country. When finally the truce was broken, and the French invaded Normandy, the English dominion fell before them like a house of cards. Town after town, their garrisons depleted to fill Somerset's pocket, surrendered to superior force, and the English as they marched forth had the mortification to see the Normans gleefully doff the red cross of St. George for the white cross of France. An attempt to save the province was foiled by the rout of the English reinforcements at Fourmigny, and Normandy was lost. Anjou and Maine had been already made over to the father of Henry the Sixth's Queen, and Guienne and Gascony, which had been English since the reign of Henry the Second, alone remained. Next year they too went the way of Normandy and were lost.

Gascony, however, notwithstanding her hot southern blood, was in no such anxiety as Normandy to be quit of the English, and sent messages to England that, if an army were sent to help her, she would revolt against the French to rejoin her old mistress. England lent a willing ear, and John Talbot, the veteran Earl of Shrewsbury, was sent out to this, his last campaign. The decisive battle was fought under the walls of Chatillon. The French were strongly entrenched, with three hundred pieces of artillery in position, a striking testimony to their military progress. The English fought with the weapon which for a century had won them their victories, and for the last as for the first battle of the Hundred Years' War, every man alighted from his horse. John Talbot alone, in virtue of his fourscore years, remained mounted on his hackney; and with the indomitable old man at their head the English hurled themselves upon the entrenchment. It was a mad, desperate, hopeless venture, but they stormed forward with such impetuosity that they went near to carry the position. For a full hour they persisted, until at last, riddled through and through by the fire of the artillery, they fell back. Then the French sallied forth and turned the defeat into a rout. Old John Talbot's pony was shot under him, and being pinned to the ground under the dead animal he was killed where he lay. Young John Talbot, Lord Lisle, refused to leave his father, and fell by his side. The army was dispersed over Aquitaine, and the ancestral domains of seven generations of English kings passed from them for ever. By the irony of fate a Scottish soldier[36] was appointed to hold for the crown of France the French provinces that had clung with such attachment to England. Of all the great possessions of the English in France Calais now alone was left, to break in due time the heart of an English Queen.

At home the discontent over the national disgrace was profound. The people of course cast about to find a scapegoat, and after one or two changes finally fixed upon the blameless and unfortunate Henry the Sixth. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly the disease from which England had suffered ever since the death of King Henry the Fifth, but for this the nation itself was principally responsible. It had chosen for its rulers the House of Lancaster because Henry of Bolingbroke had agreed to accept constitutional checks on the royal power before the country was ripe for self-government. It had thrown off the yoke of discipline which alone could enable it to tug the heavy load of English weal and English honour, and it paid the inevitable penalty. Numbers of republics have made the same mistake during the present century and have suffered or are suffering the same punishment. There is no surer sign of an undisciplined nation than civil war.

In the England of the fifteenth century the disease had been deeply aggravated by the interminable campaigns in France. All classes at home, from the highest to the lowest, were equally selfish and apathetic in respect of the national good: internal order was at an end, and riots and outrages which amounted to private war continued unceasingly and remained unrepressed. The system of indentures between king and subject for the supply of troops had been extended from subject to retainer and, as has been well said, the clause "for the King's service" could easily be dropped out of the contract.[37] The red cross of St. George never appears in the English battlefields; red rose and white were indeed the emblems of contending factions, but we hear far more of the badges of great families, the ragged staff, the cresset and the like, and of the liveries, which, though forbidden by statute to any but the king, were conspicuous all through the Civil War. The loss of France furnished but too much material to the hands of violence and strife. England was full of unemployed soldiers, who had been trained in the undisciplined school of French faction to treachery and plunder and all that is lowest and most inhuman in war. Hundreds of men who had held comfortable posts in French garrisons, and had turned them to purposes of brigandage, were cast adrift upon England, barbarised, brutalised, demoralised, to recoup themselves in their own country. After the peace of BrÉtigny the disbanded soldiery had made France their chamber and swept down thence upon Italy; the like men[38] were now to be let loose upon England, and France was to be well avenged of her old enemy. Worst of all, the leaders of factions, in the madness of their animosity, were not ashamed to import foreign troops and set them at each other's throats.

I shall not dwell upon this miserable and disastrous period, marking as it does the wreck of our ancient military greatness. Such few military points as present themselves in the scanty chronicles of this time must be noted, and no more. Of the principal figures one only is to be remarked. Warwick the "King-maker" must be passed over as rather a statesman than a soldier; Margaret of Anjou—the pestilent, indomitable woman—must be remembered only for her importation of mercenaries; Edward the Fourth, full of the military genius of the Plantagenets, alone is deserving of lengthier mention. There was not an action at which he was present wherein he did not make that presence felt. It was he who at Northampton turned his treacherous admission to the left of the Lancastrian position to instant and decisive account. It was he who in the following year, still only a boy of twenty, crushed Owen Tudor at Mortimer's Cross; it was he who held supreme command at that more terrible Marston Moor of the fifteenth century, the battle of Towton.

This action has a peculiar interest as an example of English tactics and tenacity turned upon themselves. The Lancastrians, sixty thousand strong, were formed up on a plateau eight miles to the north of Ferrybridge, facing south-their right resting on a brook, called the Cock, their left on the Great North Road. It was a strong position, but too much cramped for their numbers, having a front of less than a mile in extent. They were probably drawn up according to the old fashion in three lines of great depth. The Yorkists numbered but five-and-thirty thousand, but they were expecting an additional thirteen thousand under the Duke of Norfolk, which, advancing from Ferrybridge, would come up on their own right and against the left flank of the enemy. Edward appears to have remedied his numerical inferiority after the pattern of his great ancestor at CreÇy by forming his army in echelon of three lines, refusing his right. The foremost or left line of the echelon was commanded by Lord Falconbridge, the second by Warwick, and the third by Edward in person. The Yorkists advancing northward to the attack had just caught sight of the enemy on a height beyond a slight dip in the ground called Towton Dale, when there came on a blinding snowstorm, which so effectually veiled both armies that it was only by their shouts that they could know each other's position. Falconbridge with great readiness seized the moment to push forward his archers to the edge of the plateau, whence he bade them shoot flight-arrows, specially adapted to fly over a long range, into the Lancastrian columns. This done he quickly withdrew his men. The Lancastrians thereupon poured in a tremendous shower of fighting arrows, all of which fell short of their supposed mark, and maintained it till their sheaves were well-nigh exhausted. Then Falconbridge again advanced and began to shoot in earnest; his men had not only their own stock of shafts but also those discharged by the enemy. The rain of missiles was too much for the Lancastrians: they broke from their position on the height and poured down across the dip to drive the Yorkists from the slope above it. Then the action became general and the whole line was soon hotly engaged.

What followed for the next few hours in the driving snow no one has told us, or, it is probable, could ever have told us. All that is certain is that the Lancastrians, though occasionally they could force the Yorkists back for a space, could never gain any permanent advantage, a fact that points to extremely judicious handling of the refused division by Edward. From five in the morning until noon the combat raged with unabated fury, and the pile of the dead rose so high that the living could hardly come to close quarters. At length at noon the Duke of Norfolk's column, timely as BlÜcher's, appeared in the Great North Road on the left flank of the Lancastrians, and began to roll them back from their position and from the line of their retreat. Slowly and sullenly the Lancastrians gave way; there was probably little attempt to alter their disposition to meet the attack in their flank; but for three long hours more they fought, disputing every inch of ground, till at last they were forced back from it upon the swollen waters of the Cock. Then the rout and the slaughter became general; thousands were drowned in the brook; and the pursuit, wherein we again see the hand of Edward, was carried to the very gates of York. Thirty-five thousand Lancastrians and eight thousand Yorkists perished in the fight, an appalling slaughter for so miserable a cause. But this was a contest not merely of faction against faction, but of North against South; and the North never spoke disrespectfully of the South again. This perhaps was the principal result of what must be reckoned the most terrible battle ever fought by the English.

The decisive battle of Barnet furnishes a still more brilliant instance of Edward's skill, and of his quickness to seize the vital point in a campaign. All turned upon his forcing his enemies to action before they could gather their full strength about them. Edward marched his men up to Warwick's position actually after dusk had fallen, a rare accomplishment in those days, and drew up his men as best he could in the dark. When day broke with dense fog he discovered that his army far out-flanked Warwick's left, and was as far out-flanked by Warwick's on his own left. The result seems to have been that the two armies edged continually round each other until their respective positions were reversed,[39] for some of Warwick's cavalry, coming back from the pursuit of Edward's left, found itself on its return not, as it supposed, in rear of Edward's army, but of its own. The cry of treason, always common in the Wars of the Roses, was quickly raised, and in the general confusion the battle was lost to Warwick. None the less the victory was due to Edward's promptness; and indeed the rapidity alike of his decisions and of his marches stamp him as a soldier of no ordinary talent, and as in many respects far in advance of his time.

For the rest the Wars of the Roses show unmistakable signs of the changes that were coming over the art of war.[40] A most important point is the ever increasing employment of artillery in the field and the greater value attached to it. Richard, Duke of York, is said to have had a great train of ordnance and so many as three thousand gunners with him at Dartmouth in 1452. Artillerymen were becoming far more common, and as a natural consequence bade fair to command a smaller price in the wage-market. From this time also it may be said that the duel of artillery tends to become the regular preliminary to a general action. Still more significant is the augmented prominence of the common foot-soldier, known from his peculiar weapon as the bill-man, who now begins to supplant the dismounted man-at-arms in the work of infantry, and as a natural consequence restores the latter to his proper station among the cavalry. New weapons again make their appearance in the hands of the foot-soldier. Both Edward and Warwick introduced hired bands of Burgundian hand-gun men, whereby the English became acquainted with the new arm that was to drive out the famous bow. Again, on the field of Stoke there were seen two thousand tall Germans armed with halberd and pike, under the command of one Martin Schwartz, who fought on the losing side, but stood in their ranks till they were cut down to a man.[41] Lastly, the old order of battle in three lines was becoming rapidly obsolete. At Bosworth both armies were drawn up in a single line, with the cavalry on the wings; and the cavalry itself was beginning at the same time to forsake the formation in column for that in line, or as it was called, en haye.

All these changes were symptoms of a great movement that was passing over all Europe. The art of war, like all the other arts, was undergoing a transformation so fundamental that it has received the name of a renascence. England, cut off by her expulsion out of France from her former contact with continental nations, exhausted by her civil wars, reduced to her true position as a naval power, and above all wedded to the peculiar system which had brought her such success, lagged behind other nations in the path of military reform. The century of the Tudors' reign is for the English army a century of learning, and to understand it aright we must first look abroad to the countries that were before her in the school, and glance at the innovations that were introduced by each of them in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not without such study can we trace to their source innumerable points, great and small, that are observable in our army of to-day, nor grasp to the full the greatness of the English soldiers who, long before the renascence of the art of war, had divined its leading principles, had established for their country noble military traditions, and above all had made it a national principle that the English must always beat the French.