7

ENGLISH FORCES IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Armies looked and sounded the part. When drawn up for battle, banners and pennons were displayed in magnificent pageantry. Battle cries invoked heavenly aid, while trumpets and kettledrums beat out a rhythm. Knights were splendidly arrayed. An inventory from 1378 shows that Robert Salle’s armour was enhanced with cloth of gold. He had a red breastplate and a quilted golden surcoat with silver buckles. There was a silver-gilt chaplet for his bacinet (war helmet), and a crest for his great helm. A man of impressive size, he must have looked magnificent.¹ Formations of archers with their bows of six foot or more in length, many in parti-coloured uniform, presented a different, and formidable, threat.

A large army was normally divided into three divisions. The basic building blocks of the army were the retinues, provided by magnate and knights, which varied greatly in size. The largest of all was that of the king’s household, consisting under Edward III of some 50 or more bannerets and knights, each of whom would have their own following. The retinues consisted of both men-at-arms and archers, most of whom possessed horses. The number of men-at-arms and archers in the retinues were roughly equal; other archers, recruited in the shires, were organized in units of twenties and hundreds. For campaigns in the Low Countries and northern France, armies were recruited in England. In Gascony, although English expeditionary forces were important, the majority of troops were local.

Command naturally went to those at the top of society, the dukes and earls. These men were brought up to have such a role; there is no question of armies being led by aristocratic amateurs. Henry of Grosmont, earl and later duke of Lancaster, had great ability as well as all the advantages of birth. Robert Ufford, earl of Suffolk, was praised by the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker, who described his role in command at Poitiers in 1356. He went up and down the lines, ‘encouraging and strengthening each man to do his best, cautioning the young not to advance too rashly, and telling the archers not to shoot in vain’.² There were some commanders who gained their position through experience and renown, not nobility. Walter Bentley was a case in point. A Yorkshire knight of no great standing, he showed his mettle leading his own routier band in Brittany, before being appointed by Edward III in 1350 to succeed Thomas Dagworth in the duchy. A memorandum he submitted to the king showed him to be a man who thought hard about the difficult situation he was in, with underpaid garrisons battening onto defenceless villages. Robert Knollys was a notable commander, of obscure origins in Cheshire, who probably began his career as an archer. His military abilities were such that he was the first man below the rank of earl to be given command of a major expedition.

There was no complex hierarchy of command, or trained professional officer corps. After the dukes and earls, the bannerets were the next highest rank. Normally of baronial standing, they bore rectangular banners. Theirs was a purely military status, which was not hereditary, unlike that of knight. Though a knightly title had strong military implications, it also indicated social standing, and was normally inherited. Below the knights were squires, a term which covered men of very differing status. Some might be aspirant knights, but many had no such ambitions. By the later fourteenth century some squires were of considerable standing, with their own coats of arms, but others were of no high position. They were often simply termed ‘men-at-arms’, with no indication of their rank. For convenience, the knights and men-at-arms are often referred to by historians as ‘cavalry’, though this is hardly accurate, for while they rode on campaign, they normally dismounted to fight.

Knights and other men-at-arms were well equipped. The chronicler Jean le Bel noted that on the campaign against the Scots in 1327 English armour was outdated, but that just over a decade later it was quite up to date. The evidence of memorial brasses shows that from the 1330s, plate armour was becoming far more common. Full protection was provided for arms and legs by rerebraces, vambraces, poleyns, greaves and sabatons, while for the torso there were ‘pairs of plates’, iron or steel plates riveted onto fabric, as well as mail shirts. By mid-century the visored bacinet was replacing the traditional ‘great helm’. Fashion led to tight jupons replacing cumbersome surcoats.

RECRUITMENT

Traditional feudal obligation, whereby landowners were obliged to provide set quotas of knights, was largely irrelevant by the time of the Hundred Years War. There was a feudal summons in 1327 for the campaign against the Scots, but by this period such a request yielded a very limited response. There was no precedent for using such a summons for expeditions to France or the Low Countries. However, concerns over recruitment in England during the first few years of the war with France led to an ambitious new scheme for compulsory service. In 1344 a graduated system was introduced, for everyone with an income of £5 a year or more. A £5 landholder was to provide one archer, a £25 one a man-at-arms. Commissioners were accordingly appointed to assess people’s wealth. In the following year, orders went out to recruit troops on this new basis. This was extremely unpopular. There were protests in parliament, and in 1346 the king conceded that he had acted out of necessity, and that this would not be a precedent. Finally, in 1352 he agreed that no one was to be obliged to perform military service, except by common consent in parliament. Compulsion was dead.

The alternative to compulsion was pay and persuasion. The normal rates of pay were 8s. a day for an earl, 4s. for a banneret, 2s. for a knight, and 1s. for a squire or man-at-arms. Because of concerns about recruitment for the Flanders campaign in 1338, higher wages, generally double the normal rate, were offered as an encouragement. This could only be afforded until the autumn of the following year. Later, high wages were occasionally offered, as in 1369 when John of Gaunt’s force was paid at one-and-a-half times the standard rate, and in 1370, when Knollys was promised a double rate for his men. In addition, from the mid-1340s a bonus, known as the regard, was payable, usually on a three-monthly basis. The normal rate was 100 marks (£66) for 30 men-at-arms, but this could be doubled or even trebled.

One source that the crown could rely on to provide service was the royal household, particularly when the king himself was leading an expedition. The knights and others of the household were in receipt of fees and robes on an annual basis, as well as pay when on campaign. They were an experienced body, who provided essential administrative as well as military service. There were probably at least 50 household bannerets and knights on the Crécy campaign, all with their own retinues. These varied greatly in size, from about 150 men down to as few as three or four. In all, the king’s household probably provided at least 1,700 men in 1346, forming the bulk of one of the three divisions of the army. There was a change in the 1350s, as a small body of a dozen or so emerged as ‘knights of the chamber’ rather than ‘knights of the household’. A wider affinity was then developed under Richard II, of ‘king’s knights’, men whose allegiance and service could be relied upon, but who were not expected to reside permanently at court. When Richard led an army to Ireland in 1394, out of a total of 89 bannerets and knights there were 39 king’s knights and nine chamber knights.

The most convenient method of recruiting more widely was to use contracts. Thus in 1346, Thomas Dagworth agreed to hold Brittany with 200 men-at-arms and 600 mounted archers in return for 2,500 marks, customary wages and a regard. Two years later the Earl of Warwick entered into an agreement for life. He was to receive an annual fee of 1,000 marks, and was to serve the king with 100 men-at-arms, who would be paid wages and a regard. In 1372 the Earl of Salisbury contracted to serve for a year, on land and sea, with 20 knights, 100 men-at-arms and 200 archers. He was to receive wages, and a double regard. Two years later, Richard Adderbury agreed to serve at sea with 40 men-at-arms and the same number of archers, for wages and a regard at one-and-a-half times the standard rate.³ English armies in Gascony depended to a very considerable extent on local recruitment; contracts were used there just as in England. In 1345 one of the Albret brothers, Bernard-Etz, provided 185 men-at-arms and 940 foot-soldiers, a huge force. However, for the king’s own large expeditions to France, as in 1346 and 1359, contracts were not used, as the armies were directly administered by the officials of the royal household.

To fulfil their contracts with the crown, nobles would turn first to their permanent retainers, who received fees, robes and other benefits in return for service in war and peace. Thus the Earl of Warwick made an agreement in 1339 for Robert Herle to serve him for life. One of the earl’s most important administrators, in wartime Herle would have a following of four men-at-arms. He duly fought with Warwick at Crécy, though later he had an independent career as captain of Brittany, captain of Calais, Admiral of the North and West, and Warden of the Cinque Ports. Other men would be hired for a specific campaign. In 1372 the Earl of Salisbury made a contract with Roger Maltravers, who was to serve for a year with two archers, and for overseas expeditions would have in addition three servants. He would provide his own horses and be properly equipped. He could keep two-thirds of any booty taken, with one third going to the earl.⁴

In the years up to 1360 the structure of retinues was reasonably stable. Men tended to serve with the same lord on successive campaigns. Out of 20 knights serving with the Earl of Warwick in 1346, 17 had been with him before on at least one occasion, and 12 had been on at least two earlier campaigns. The huge following that Lancaster took to Gascony in 1345 has been analysed in detail by Nicholas Gribit. This was more a small army than a retinue, and for many this was the only occasion they served with the earl. However, over a third of the knights had fought in his company previously, and about 80 per cent of the bannerets and knights who had been with him in 1344 were in his retinue in the following year. Many had family connections with Lancaster which went back to the time of the earl’s uncle, Thomas of Lancaster, who had been executed in 1322. There was a solid core to the retinues, with men linked not only by their military experience but also by bonds of land tenure and kinship. The proportion of knights to other men-at-arms did not change much in these years. In 1338 almost a quarter of the Earl of Suffolk’s retinue were knights, while the figure for Salisbury’s contingent was 19 per cent. In Brittany in 1343, 22 per cent of Lancaster’s retinue were knights. For the 1359 expedition, almost a quarter of the Black Prince’s cavalry were knights.

The resumption of war in 1369 brought change. The crown contracted for much larger retinues, such as the 900 of Hereford’s following in 1369, or the 700 two years later. There was, broadly, far less continuity in retinues, and presumably a consequent reduction in the sense of camaraderie. Just 19 per cent of those who served with the Earl of Arundel in 1388 had been with him in the previous year. With very large retinues, there was an increased reliance on subcontractors, who might themselves subcontract further. In 1374 the Earl of March, who had a contract with the crown, made an agreement with John Strother, who was to provide 30 men-at-arms and 30 archers for a year. Though Strother came from Northumberland, the men he recruited, again by contract, were mostly from East Anglia. He stood to make a profit, for the £40 a year he promised his men-at-arms was less than he was due to receive from March in wages for them.

There was a marked fall in the proportion of knights in the years following the renewal of the war. For Gaunt’s chevauchée of 1373 the figure was 13 per cent, with leaders of retinues finding it impossible to recruit all the knights they had contracted to supply. In 1388 knights in Arundel’s force were roughly 7 per cent of all the men-at-arms. This reflected wider changes in society, as men were increasingly reluctant to take up the burdens of knighthood. Whether this, in turn, was the result of a lack of enthusiasm for an increasingly unsuccessful war is questionable. It seems more likely that it was the burdens of knighthood in civil society that were unwelcome.

Military experience among the knights and men-at-arms was extensive, for soldiering was not exclusively for young men. A number of men gave evidence in the 1390s in a celebrated dispute over the coat of arms used by both the Scrope and Grosvenor families, detailing their military careers. Andrew Luttrell’s service in war stretched from 1337 to 1388, over 50 years. Guy Brian’s first campaign was against the Scots in 1327, and his last with John of Gaunt in 1369. William Lucy recalled the Battle of Sluys, the siege of Tournai, the battles of Crécy and Poitiers and the 1359–60 campaign. He also had experience of crusading in Prussia. John Rither, squire, had memories of the 1339 campaign. He had fought at Morlaix and at Crécy, and was on the 1359 expedition. His last battle was Nájera in 1367, his last expedition Gaunt’s chevauchée in 1373. His fighting career therefore lasted at least 34 years. Normally, however, a military career might be expected to last up to 20 years, and in some cases far less than that. The grizzled veterans on campaign, however, will surely have preserved knowledge of terrain and tactics, and given valuable advice to their younger companions.

HORSES

A poet described knights on campaign, mounted ‘on our swift war-horses, our shields at our necks and our spears lowered’.⁵ Though English soldiers had learned in the Scottish wars that success in battle was best achieved on foot, horses were still crucial for knights and men-at-arms. Men fought on horseback in skirmishes, and rode in the rout that followed battle. Further, they were a vital element in chivalric identity. Noble deeds were best performed on horseback. On one occasion Knollys ‘spurred on his horse in a very headstrong manner’ and charged a group of Bretons, only to be knocked off his horse, so that he had to be rescued by his men.⁶ In Spain, in 1367, William Felton ‘spurred his courser down from the hill, his lance lowered. When he reached the Spaniards, he drove his spear so fiercely at a Castilian that the blow pierced his armour, so that his lance went right through his body, killing him.’⁷

Very large numbers of horses were needed. In 1340 the convention was that earls should have six each, bannerets five, knights four, and men-at-arms three. For the 1359–60 campaign the Black Prince took 1,369 horses to France. In all, 395 were lost on campaign, but these losses were more than compensated for by acquisitions, so that the Prince brought home 2,114 horses. Records show that almost 9,300 horses were brought back to England in 1360. In 1370 Knollys, with about 4,000 men, took 8,464 horses to France for his ill-fated chevauchée. The best horses, the destriers, needed a great deal of care, with a groom for each animal. They were given large quantities of oats, supplemented by hay and cut grass; these pampered animals were not accustomed to grazing. The requirements of an army for horse fodder and water were immense. The needs of the horses might be greater than those of the men; in 1360 the Black Prince had to take a different route through Burgundy than his father, ‘for lack of fodder for the horses’.⁸ Horses need to drink at least eight gallons a day; it proved disastrous when, on the Prince’s 1345 expedition, they were given wine as no water was to be found.

Horses were a major investment, and until the 1360s it was normal practice for men to be compensated for the value of horses lost on campaign. Andrew Ayton studied the lists of horses that were drawn up by royal clerks, noting that the values in 1338–9 were almost double those of 1359–60. The proportion of high-value beasts fell dramatically as the war progressed: in 1338–9, 29 per cent were worth over £20, whereas in 1359–60 only 2 per cent fell into that category. In 1361 John Chandos claimed for the loss of 100 coursers, at a mere ten marks each. There are a number of explanations for this shift. The high valuations of 1338–9 may have been artificial, intended to encourage recruitment, just as the double wages of the time were. The practice of fighting on foot may have discouraged men from taking the best quality destriers on campaign. A top quality horse still cost a great deal in the 1360s; one bought for the king at Liège in 1362 cost over £100. In 1362 the Black Prince paid an impressive £232 for two destriers acquired in Flanders. There was a major change from the 1370s, for compensation for lost horses was no longer paid. Instead, the potential rewards men might receive from campaigning were raised. Rather than the king claiming half of the profits of war (from ransoms and booty), the proportion was lowered to a third.⁹

ARCHERS

There were normally more archers in Edward III’s armies than any other type of soldier. In 1339 there were roughly equal numbers of knights and men-at-arms, mounted archers and archers on foot. Twenty years later the large royal army consisted of about 4,750 knights and men-at-arms, 5,500 mounted archers and 1,100 footmen. In 1369 John of Gaunt agreed to serve with 500 men-at-arms and 1,000 mounted archers.

A crucial development under Edward III was the use of mounted archers. These men fought on foot, but rode with the cavalry, so enabling faster movement of troops. They were first used in Edward III’s Scottish campaigns; in 1334 there were 838 men-at-arms and 771 mounted archers in the retinues brought by great men. In the Low Countries in 1338 Henry of Lancaster had a retinue of 16 knights, 52 men-at-arms and 50 mounted archers.¹⁰ Curiously, a plan for forces in 1341 included no mounted archers, but in 1342 there were approaching 2,000 such men in the English forces in Brittany.

There were two main ways in which archers were recruited. They might form part of a retinue, and be recruited by the retinue captains. By the time of the Battle of Crécy, about a third of the archers were incorporated in retinues alongside the knights and men-at-arms. Alongside this, archers were also recruited in the shires by specially appointed commissioners of array. This system was open to abuses of all sorts. In 1345 in Norfolk, ‘the constables and under-constables levied large sums of money for the wages and clothing of the archers and the conductor of the same’, but either failed to recruit any men, or refused to give them what they were due. Arrayers might themselves be assaulted, as when one official complained in 1346 that ‘some malefactors by force prevented him from making the array’.¹¹ By 1359, only about 2,100 infantry, 1,000 of them from Wales, were recruited by commissions of array. The bulk of the archers were recruited by lords for their retinues. Recruitment was not always popular. When one William Fletcher was chosen to serve, his lord, the Abbot of Buckland in Devon, used force to prevent him being taken, saying that the king should never have William, nor any other of his men.¹²

Most explanations of the English success at Crécy and elsewhere give pride of place to archers. It was in the victory over the Scots at Halidon Hill in 1333 that the English archers had first shown Edward III their value. They could shoot at a fast rate, up to ten or twelve arrows a minute, at a range of up to 200 yards, crippling an advancing enemy. A single archer could probably loose two or three arrows as a horseman charged towards him. It used to be thought that there was a revolutionary transition from the ‘short bow’ to the longbow, but while the evidence does not support a dramatic change, it is likely that the bows used by Edward III’s archers were longer and more formidable than those of earlier periods.

Partly inspired by the discovery of a large number of bows in the wreck of the Mary Rose, there has been a great deal of discussion and experimentation to try to determine how effective the longbow was. Kelly DeVries has argued that arrows were ineffective as killing weapons. With a high trajectory, they would have struck at an angle, ricocheting off armour rather than penetrating. This argument flies in the face of the evidence of the chroniclers, as Clifford Rogers has pointed out. Descriptions of battle after battle attest the impact of English arrows.¹³ However, not all injuries inflicted by arrows were fatal. Philip VI was wounded in the face at Crécy, as was David II of Scotland at Neville’s Cross, and as Henry V would be at Shrewsbury. All three were presumably not protected by lowered visors. Horses presented a larger target than men, and were particularly vulnerable to plunging arrows, which maddened them. Archers could bring a charge to a halt, with uncontrollable horses rearing in pain.

More important than any technological development of the longbow was the fact that it was under Edward III that the government took action for the first time to ensure an adequate supply of bows and arrows. In the past it had been up to individuals to provide their own equipment; the single sheaf of 24 arrows an archer was likely to bring with him would not last long in battle. In 1338 the king ordered his armourer to supply 1,000 arrows, 4,000 bowstrings and 4,000 sheaves of arrows. Overall, in the years 1338–44, his forces were supplied with 3,705 bows and 5,424 sheaves of arrows. Much larger quantities were acquired later. The accounts for 1344–51, years which include the Crécy campaign and the siege of Calais, show that the armoury at the Tower provided 25,465 bows and over a million arrows.¹⁴ The Black Prince had problems in 1356, when he sent one of his officials to England to obtain 1,000 bows, 200 sheaves of arrows and 400 gross of bowstrings, for ‘no arrows can be obtained from England, because the king has caused to be arrested and taken for his use all the arrows that can be found anywhere there’. Despite the Prince’s efforts, at Poitiers the archers ‘ran out of arrows and picked up stones, and fought with swords and lances, and anything they could find’.¹⁵

Though the records normally describe the infantry as archers, they had other weapons. In 1338 at Antwerp 644 spears were bought for the Welsh.¹⁶ Bows were of no use in the mêlée, and for close combat the archers would use billhooks, short lances, swords, daggers, knives and anything else suitable. Though the chronicles do not describe their use by English troops, there were considerable numbers of pavises, large rectangular shields, in the Tower armoury, which would have been valuable in siege warfare or on ships. Gascon foot-soldiers were armed with pikes and other weapons for hand-to-hand combat, as well as crossbows.

In the field the archers were organized as they had been since Edward I’s reign, or even earlier. They were placed in twenties and hundreds, commanded by vintenars and constables. In the case of the Welsh, documents show that there were in addition chaplains, interpreters, doctors and criers (to shout out orders), but curiously there is no such evidence for the English. Many of the archers wore uniforms. The Earl of Arundel’s Welsh troops wore red and white, while the Black Prince’s men were in green and white. Mid-fourteenth century arrays at Norwich show that the centenars, officers in charge of a hundred men, were well equipped, each with mail shirt, bascinet, breastplate, gauntlets, sword, dagger and spear. The vintenars, in charge of twenty men each, were also well provided with arms and armour. Archers each had a bow, arrows, sword and knife, and were clearly superior to other men who had no more than a staff and a knife.¹⁷

It was essential that enough men had the right skills for archery, but the evidence of some musters suggests that this might well not have been the case; the record of an array of 1346 in the Suffolk district of Blything listed some 50 men, of whom only two possessed bows.¹⁸ It was certainly a matter of concern. A well-known proclamation in 1363 suggested that ‘the art is almost wholly disused’, and required all the able-bodied to practise shooting, rather than engaging in ‘vain games of no value’ such as football.¹⁹ To be a good archer undoubtedly required much training. It is not known how this was organized, or whether it took place in villages or when armies were mustered. There is no evidence for anything like the tedious drill exercises that have occupied so much of the time of army recruits in more recent periods.

Although records provide the names of many archers, historians have not succeeded in working out many biographies of them for the fourteenth century. Robert Fishlake provides a rare example: he served in Brittany in 1378, and on at least six expeditions in the following eleven years. Some served for longer. In 1384 Richard Pupplington, ‘one of the oldest archers of the crown’, was promised 6d. a day for life, a reward for over 40 years’ service.²⁰ No doubt these two were among many who campaigned on a regular basis, but there is no way of determining how many of the archers were regulars who made war their profession.

Nor is it possible to do much more than hypothesize as to where archers fitted in the social hierarchy. The difficulty of tracing them back to their origins is vividly demonstrated by the fact that very few can be identified in the records of the 1379 poll tax. Only one man out of a Northumberland retinue with 40 archers is listed in the tax record for the county. A mounted archer, with his wage of 6d. a day, was unlikely to have been recruited from among the poorest villagers. It was only men of some standing who could afford a horse and at least some equipment. The arrays at Norwich show that a few archers even had servants. The professions of the archers listed included tailor, mercer, goldsmith, bowyer and fletcher. These were surely middle-ranking men. Most of the archers in English armies will have been drawn from the countryside, not the towns, but this evidence is nevertheless suggestive.

OTHERS

Armies needed support. Armourers, engineers, masons, smiths, farriers, waggoners and wheelwrights all had vital roles. Clerks were needed to record musters and to calculate wages. Others engaged in war included spies, such as the queen’s servant sent to Paris in 1338 ‘to spy out secretly the doings of Philip of Valois, for forty days’, at 18d. a day.²¹ There is little evidence to show how many non-combatants accompanied armies, but servants and grooms were required to see to the needs of the knights and men-at-arms. Most contracts made no mention of these, for they were not paid by the crown, but it is clear from some private indentures that their numbers were very considerable. It was perhaps exceptional that in 1353 John Sully agreed to serve the Black Prince with one squire and no fewer than eight or nine grooms, but even a squire might have a small entourage of two or three. On a conservative estimate there would have been at least as many grooms and servants in an army as there were cavalry.

Armies contained a good share of criminals. Evil-doers were encouraged to fight by the expectation that they might receive pardons. In the summer and autumn of 1346, Edward III pardoned 1,308 men for a range of offences, on condition that they remained in the army. The great majority of pardons went to ordinary soldiers, but included the earls of Warwick and Suffolk and a few knights. In many cases men received pardons for serious crimes. In 1360 a knight, Robert Darcy, received one for an impressive list of offences, which extended from murders, operating a protection racket and assaulting a royal justice, to the less significant matter of forcing a prior to accept a woman as a nun.

THE NAVY

Naval resources were central to English campaigning. Yet the crown itself possessed few ships, and efforts to build up and maintain a royal navy were very limited. In 1338 there were 13 royal ships, based at the Tower of London. In 1369, 27 were at sea. By 1378, however, there were just five left. Most of the royal vessels were no different from merchant ships in build, with single mast and sail, though they would have featured ‘castles’, built up platforms on bow and stern, and in some cases fighting platforms at the masthead. The largest, of 240 tons or more, carried big crews: in 1338 the Cog Thomas had a constable, a clerk, a carpenter, 116 sailors and 16 ship’s boys. Many were of the kind known as cogs, flat-bottomed and high-sided, while others were simply referred to as ‘ships’, while there were also some hulks (vessels with the hull constructed in reverse clinker) and other types. There were also some oared galleys; in 1336, Edward had La Philippe built at King’s Lynn at a cost of £666, but there was no attempt to create galley fleets such as the French possessed. In the 1370s, however, some specially built oared vessels, termed barges and balingers, were commissioned. The London barge Paul had 80 oars; balingers were smaller. Relatively slender, these were valuable for escort duties and quick crossings to France. The great majority of ships in royal service were merchant vessels, whose recruitment and numbers are discussed in Chapter 9. Some of these were quite as formidable as any royal ship; in 1356 the Seint Marie had a crew of 140 men.

There was little distinction between the type of men appointed to command at sea and those who led on land. When the Earl of Arundel was made admiral in 1345, this was because ‘no one save he can punish or lead them unless he is a great man’.²² As a lord summoned to parliament, Robert Morley had sufficient status; he served with distinction as admiral of the northern fleet on several occasions. In the early 1350s the Duke of Lancaster and the earls of Northampton and Warwick were all appointed as admirals. Guy Brian, soldier, administrator and diplomat, rose in the king’s household to baronial standing. He served often as admiral of the western fleet. Reginald Cobham also held that position. A knight of the Garter from 1353, Cobham had a distinguished military and diplomatic career. Admirals of this type and calibre were not sailors by training, but no doubt could call on the expertise of their captains. Occasionally, men of lesser status were appointed as admirals. Robert Ledrede was a royal sergeant-at-arms who commanded a fleet sent to Gascony in 1357 to bring wine to England. His writ of appointment suggests that his main duty was seen as the maintenance of discipline ‘according to the law of the sea’.²³

At sea, it was normal to employ equal numbers of archers and men-at-arms. A contract in 1372 with William Nevill, admiral of the north, specified service with 60 men-at-arms and the same number of archers, and in the next year Esmon Rose, esquire, captain of the Barge of London, agreed to serve with 20 men-at-arms and 20 archers for four months.²⁴ The number of soldiers employed on naval expeditions might be considerable. In a disastrous voyage in the winter of 1377–8, Buckingham commanded 4,000 soldiers at sea, in addition to almost the same number of sailors. In 1388 Arundel had almost 3,500 soldiers in a fleet of 53 ships and nine barges, manned by about 2,900 sailors.

***

A common explanation for the successes of English forces in the glory days of Edward III’s reign is that they were the product of a military revolution, which provided the archers with a decisive weapon in the form of the longbow. That was just part of the story. It was important that most of the archers were mounted, for this meant they were not left behind on a march. English armies had coherence, demonstrated by the way in which retinues were not composed solely of knights and men-at-arms, but included archers in their numbers. The fact that the English were fighting in France no doubt made for some difficulties, but it also gave them advantages. Desertion had been a problem when campaigning nearer home, in Wales or Scotland, but in France it was much less easy to abandon the army. There were many other reasons for English successes. Morale was important, if hard to analyse. The chronicler Geoffrey le Baker gave an account, in implausibly literary Latin, of the Black Prince’s speeches before the Battle of Poitiers. He emphasized, surely rightly, ‘honour, love of homeland, and the magnificent spoils of France’.²⁵