The Archers of Medieval England and Wales

The Archers of Medieval England and Wales
Igéretemhez híven ime a Gödény Kupán elmaradt előadás anyaga:
The Archers of Medieval England and Wales
For about 200 years between 1330 and 1530 the Archers of England and Wales ranked among the best fighting men in Europe. The question is, how did this come about?

by Richard Wadge

Three factors came together in the early fourteenth century:
Legal
The Norman French kings of England recognised the value the Anglo Saxon tradition of the Fyrd to raise an army from all classes their subjects. So they passed a series Statutes, culminating in the Statute of Winchester in 1285 which required English men to keep arms in their homes, be able to use them, and to bring to ‘Views of Arms’ to demonstrate that they were prepared to do their duty. The statute included all men by requiring that “all others that may (meaning all those who did not have sufficient property to have to use more expensive weapons) shall have bows and arrows”
Tradition
There was a tradition of heavy bow archery in among the Welsh and probably in the North of England as a legacy of the Vikings. Also archery with substantial bows seem to have been practiced in some parts of the country, such as the Weald of Kent since In 1266 “300 of the best archers from the Weald” were arrayed for coastal defence duties, and in the royal forests such as Macclesfield in Cheshire which in 1277 provided Edward I with a bodyguard of 100 archers.
Military Practice
In the early fourteenth century military leaders in England realised that England would never be able to raise sufficient heavy armoured knights to become a powerful European army, and so developed what is often called the English tactical system: dismounted knights and men at arms form the core of the battle line with larger numbers of heavy bow archers forming a skirmish line in front of them, between the ‘battles’ making up the line and on the wings.
1. How were Medieval English Armies Raised?
By the 14th century there were three possible ways the King of England could raise an army:
He could issue Commissions of Array, which was a form of conscription
He could agree Indentures with the great nobles, military captains of all ranks or even individual soldiers. The indenture was a contract which laid down how many men the indenture holder would bring to muster, what weapons they would have and how long they would serve for.
He could summon those who had personal ties directly with the king such as the great nobles and men who held land or offices from the king to come to muster with any companies of soldiers they could raise. This method was very rarely used in this period, and, because it did not need approval by Parliament was viewed as a despotic practice particularly in Richard II’s reign.
a, Commissions of Array
Commissions of Array seem to have developed in Edward I’s reign. The Commissioners of Array were usually local knights appointed in each county when the King needed to raise an army. Their job was to select the most suitable men aged between 16 and 60 for military service to fill a quota specified in their summons. Despite being supervised to some degree by the King’s officials there were no standard procedures laid down for selecting men and no standards of fitness and skill specified.
The commissioners were instructed to:
Choose, test and array a certain number of men
Clothe them
Equip them
(In some instances) mount them
Pay them (to a limited extent)
Send them under a leader to a given place OR hold them in readiness awaiting further instructions.
In the counties the selection process would be managed by allocating a share of the county’s quota to be raised from each hundred. It seems that within the hundreds, the village communities managed the selection. They would do this from volunteers, from an element of family compulsion, perhaps a family would send a younger son, and from hiring men willing to serve. The hirelings might be outsiders, but could easily be members of the local group of landless labourers taking the duty on as a wage earning activity. How ever they were picked, they would be sent to the county muster for the Commissioners to assess. In cities and towns a similar approach would be taken. When London was expected to raise 80 archers in 1345, this was shared out among the 24 city wards, with the ward alderman selecting and equipping the men from his ward.
The involvement of local officials in this very devolved system might have made it more likely that the King would get the troops he needed. In fact arrays only provided the numbers the king asked for on very rare occasions, commonly providing about 70% of what was expected.
Problems with the Array System
However the array system was open to manipulation and corruption from the start. The Arrayers themselves were often corrupt, and local communities would deliberately send unfit men or not equip their men so that they had to be equipped at the Sheriffs’ expense. In 1315 John Botetourt complained that that the men that the Arrayers had recruited for him were “feeble chaps, not properly dressed, and lacking bows and arrows.” This poor performance by the Arrayers may have been influenced by knowledge of the disaster at Bannockburn the year before and popular indifference to Edward II’s military plans.
The Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London were in trouble with Edward III in 1337 for being slow in arraying archers and sending men of poor physique to serve, so that he had to instruct them to select 200 “from among the strongest and healthiest men in the City.”
The Arrayers could also misuse their powers to extort money. In 1341 Edward III when trying to raise forces for both Scottish and Breton expeditions, had to reprimand the arrayers of Kent in the following terms “… yet the electors and arrayers, not considering the danger to the realm, have acted carelessly sending few and feeble archers, and the arrayers and the late sheriff have extorted money for their own use divers sums from the men of the county in the name of wages…”.Copies of this were also sent to the Sheriffs of twenty one other counties, either as a warning or as an early example of ‘name and shame’.
The Black Death made the Arrayers task more difficult by reducing the pool of suitable men by nearly half. This and the increasing development of indentured retinues lead to problems like those of Commissioners of Rutland in the 1350s who claimed that they were unable to fulfil the king’s orders since all the able bodied men had been recruited by local magnates.
The array system continued to be used throughout the sixteenth century to raise troops to guard against or repel invasions of England
b, Indentures
Indentures came to be the main method of raising armies in this period. Normally these were contracts made between the Crown and a military leader, such as a peer, knight or gentleman, wherein it was agreed that the leader would provide a given number of soldiers of specified types as his retinue. Individuals also indented directly with king for just their own service, although this was less usual, and probably unpopular with the royal officials since they had to do the same amount of work for an individual as they would for a captain bringing forty men. The indentures also specified the muster point and date, the maximum period of service (the king could declare the campaign over at an earlier point), the wage rates and the conditions of service, such as the rules for dividing up booty or ransoming prisoners. The retinue was mustered and inspected at an agreed date and place; the men were counted and checked to ensure that they were equipped to the standard specified in the indenture. At this point any variations between the terms of the indenture and the men actually mustered were noted.
The use of indentures became significant in the 1330s, initially being used to raise the cavalry and mounted archers who might be seen as the elite forces in relation to the arrayed men. The indenture system gave the crown much more control over the timetable of the campaign, for instance most indentures for the Agincourt campaign were sealed on 29th April 1415, when the retinue leaders would receive the first quarter’s pay for their retinue. The indenture system used to build up an army was a pyramid structure. The King, or leader of the whole expedition, agrees indentures with a considerable number of others for them to provide specified numbers and types of soldier. Some of the indenture holders would bring large contingents, often built up through a system of sub indentures, while others would bring a few men, or even just themselves. In the Agincourt campaign for example, 320 men indented to serve, some as joint leaders, while others, including 34 archers indented for their own service alone. Anne Curry in her book ‘The Battle of Agincourt; sources and interpretations’ writes that an unusually large number of men (including archers) indented directly with the crown in 1415.
indentures were also used in the fifteenth century to raise forces to campaign against the Welsh and Scots. An example of this use of indentured forces happened in 1402 when Sir John de Poole and Sir William Stanley made a joint indenture to serve Henry Percy, Hotspur, with 24 lances and 48 archers. This appears to have been a temporary arrangement rather than part of tradition of service with the Percys.
From 1330s to the end of the 1350s the great majority of archers in indentured retinues were mounted archers receiving 6d per day, twice the foot archers’ rate. This was because the indentured archers were expected to come to the muster point fully equipped, their arms and horses would either be personal property, or belong to the magnate in whose retinue they served The higher pay rate reflected the greater outlay necessary to pass muster as a mounted archer, a hackney alone would have cost about 20/-. As a result most of the mounted archers in this early period would be yeomen, landholders making up perhaps the top quarter of the peasantry. However once the wage rate for all archers was set at 6d per day in the late fourteenth century the social origin of the archers became more varied.
Throughout the period the retinues were built up through sub indentures. Sometimes the sub retinues came together mainly from the main retinue leader’s estates, neighbours and clients, while other sub retinues seemed to be scratch groups of professional soldiers. An example of the first kind was Sir James Audley’s raised in 1345 at least half of retinue of 80 men came from gentry families and tenantry close to his own lands. An example of a scratch retinue brought together for a particular campaign is the one that Sir John Strother led in 1374 as part of the Earl of March’s expedition. Strother indented to provide 30 men at arms and 30 archers, but it seems that he did not have these men as a standing company. He set about employing them after he had sealed his indenture, and received the first instalment of the pay. Looking at the sub indentures that have survived, each for a man at arms accompanied by an unnamed archer, he seems to have relied on the reservoir of unemployed fighting men that collected around London to do this. The problem with this was that he had no real idea of the reliability of the men he was employing, so he did two things to protect himself from default. Firstly, to ensure that the men were properly mounted and equipped, he put a clause in the sub indenture saying that “ both being well enough arrayed that Sir John would not suffer any loss or reproach at his muster…” Secondly, some of the sub indentures at least included an obligation by a pledge or guarantor, who would be liable to pay between twice and four times as much as Strother had paid the man at arms in the first instalment of his pay if the man at arms did not appear at the muster. Two of these guarantors at least were citizens of London. What is noticeable from these indentures is that the archers were still nameless, despite their military importance. This might be because they were not directly employed by Strother, but were employed by the individual man at arms to provide part of the service that he was indenting for, effectively adding another layer to the employment structure of the retinue.
This also seems to have been the case in the sub indentures issued by Sir Hugh Hastings in 1380. We know that Sir Hugh campaigned regularly in the 1370s and 80s, but for only one of his campaign, that with Thomas Earl of Buckingham to Brittany do have information about the make up of his retinue. He issued 24 sub indentures, and relied heavily on the men at arms taking up these indentures to recruit the archers he required. His reliance was not misplaced since he had four more archers at muster than he had indented for.
Problems with the Indenture system
The practice of the leaders of indentured retinues of issuing their men with either a livery badge or a uniform came to be symbolic of the basic problem with indentured troops in the later fifteenth century. There always was an inherent danger in the indentured retinue system, namely that the individual fighting men might be more loyal to their employer, especially if the employer was a powerful landed nobleman, than to the crown. This was a problem in France when the Kings made peace, and companies of soldiers, having been made unemployed as a result either fought for themselves or became mercenaries. In England it became a problem as the Hundred Year’s War ended in defeat allowing the indentured men the opportunity to concentrate on their lord’s quarrels rather than their king’s. This is despite indentures containing clauses such as”…to do him service during the same time in peace and war before all other persons, except our sovereign lord king Edward IV…”. An idea of the scale of this threat can be gained from an example from 1485 when Sir William Stanley met Henry Tudor before the battle of Bosworth, he had 3000 retainers with him in red coats wearing hart’s head badges
Uniform and levels of equipment
The king expected that the troops were properly equipped when they attended muster, whether they had been raised by array or indenture.
Archers were expected to have the following equipment which would either be provided for them if they were arrayed or be their own (or their employer’s) if indentured
c, A Standing Army
From Henry V’s time to the end of the Hundred Year’s war in 1453 the English armies, particularly in Northern France were often hired in annual indentures, normally renewed year after year. These forces were effectively the first English standing army largely recruited from a well established community of professional soldiers of all types. They were still structured in retinues employed through their captain. However this did not mean that the individual retinues became permanent forces of fixed size. Their presence depended on the willingness of the leader to continue to take up the indenture, some like John Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury agreeing indentures over a 25 year period, albeit not in every year. The size of the retinue depended on the terms of the indenture. While most of the captains would have a number of men at arms and archers they worked with regularly, they may have had to employ others, possibly from a pool of experienced men in England and Normandy, less well known to them personally on occasions when the indenture specified a large number of men. The muster records for this period list thousands of men who took part in the English armies for greater or lesser periods. The majority are listed by name, although there are a number who are listed by nicknames, concealing their true identity. These men may be criminals or deserters from other companies hiding themselves, or they may show attempts by captains to hide a shortfall in numbers and so ensure that they get paid as much as possible. An early example of this is found in a muster roll for the Earl of Salisbury’s retinue for 1424.
In the years 1418 -22 Henry V made substantial successful efforts to conquer northern France. This began a change in the nature of military service in the English armies, with an increasing proportion of men being committed to garrison service. Between 1418 and 1420 between a quarter and a third of Henry’s men seem to have been part of garrisons. After Henry V’s reign large expeditionary forces into northern France from England became a thing of the past, and the English leaders such as the Duke of Bedford or Earl of Shrewsbury had to rely on the garrisons, a few small field armies based in the major garrisons and relatively small forces of reinforcement from England to hold the increasingly effective French forces at bay. From the early 1420s onwards, a pool of ex soldiers developed in Normandy, who could be recruited as necessary to reinforce the standing forces. Another development at this time was the increased use of the ‘great indenture’, wherein a military leader, commonly one of the magnates such as Thomas Montague, Earl of Salisbury, contracted with the crown to raise the whole force that was required in a given year. This made matters simpler for the royal administration since they only had to deal with one man for the force’s pay, rather than a group of indenture holders. It was the holder of the ‘great indenture’ that had the problems of ensuring the soldiers got their due pay, and that he had the necessary records to claim his money from the crown. Holders of ‘great indentures were often allowed to substitute fighting men of one sort for another, most commonly archers for the increasingly hard to find men at arms. However, when substitution occurred, it was common for two or three times as many archers to be employed, than the number of men at arms who were being replaced, the Earl of Salisbury’s army of 1428 being a case in point.This is a clear demonstration of a widespread enthusiasm among English and Welsh men to serve as archers in France.