What were the most important developments in
warfare between 1300 and 1450?
War has always been, and remains, one of the greatest
catalysts for change and development known to man. By its very
nature, each side strives for advances in technology and strategy
in order to gain the upper hand over the other. The best recent
historical example is that of World War II, where the peak of
technology on both sides was enshrined in their simple aluminium
and fabric fighter aircraft, but by the end of the war, jet aircraft,
long range rockets and the atomic bomb had all appeared into being.
The period 1300 to 1450 is no different. At the beginning of this period,
the heavy chivalric cavalry still reigned supreme over the battlefields
of Europe, their charges crushing all resistance. However, by the time
the English were finally expelled form France in 1453, the cavalry charge
had been resoundingly blunted by a combination of longbow and tactics,
and the great walled cities, towns and bastions once so impervious to all
things, crumbled in days before the onslaught of heavy cannon. In
just one hundred and fifty years, the entire face of European warfare
had been changed by a series of military 'revolutions'. The 'infantry'
revolution of the first half of the fourteenth century saw the armies
of the period expand in size, with radically different composition to
before, whilst the 'artillery' revolution of the early fifteenth century
made siege warfare last (at least until developments after 1450) a matter
of days, rather than months. It also saw the emergence of the worlds first
professional standing armies.
The turning point in Medieval military tactics can be easily
traced to the events of July 1302, when the French king sent a large force
of 2,500 men-at-arms and 8,000 infantry to break the siege of Courtrai
castle, which was being attacked by rebelling Flemings. For the vastly
inferior Fleming force, the traditional thing to do in this situation would
be to retreat to the nearest protected stronghold in their possession, but
at Courtrai they did not flee, but retreated to a very defensible position
in marshy ground, where streams and ditches protected their flanks. The
infantry also created a lethal hedge of spears designed to stop and break
up the French horses. The French heavy cavalry, the finest fighting force
on the continent, advanced towards the Flemings, hindered by the terrain,
and impaled itself on the rebel line. Over one thousand men-at-arms died in
the course of the ensuing battle. Never before had anything like this been
experienced by the great feudal hosts of Europe, and it marked the beginning
of the end of the cavalry's domination over the medieval battlefield.
Increasingly from this point on, medieval armies fought on foot, for
example the English at Dupplin Moor (1332) and Halidon Hill (1333) against
the Scots, and, after Crecy in 1346, the French to fought a lot on foot from
Poitiers (1356) onwards.As Clifford Rogers so rightly points out in
his article 'the Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War' , this
revolution in the tactics of battles had far reaching consequences in
the composition and recruitment of armies, military participants, and also
on social, cultural and class attitudes towards fighting.
The most important change of this 'revolution' was clearly in
the make-up of forces during the Hundred Years War, and how they were
persuaded to fight. Whereas in the years leading up to 1300, the bulk of
a kings troops would be those fulfilling their feudal obligations of service,
English armies especially began to turn to paid troops, raised by a system of
contracts and sub-contracts known as indentures. In this way large armies could
be raised, at a price, for very little effort on the part of the king.
The infantry revolution saw the number of common soldiers fighting, usually
either as pikemen or archers. Their advantage lay in their cost. A mounted archer
for example, would only need a cheap horse to carry him around, as it would not
be used in battle, unlike the great destriers of the knightly classes. Also,
infantry made do with much simpler and less expensive armour, and expected much
less luxury whilst on campaign. An English mounted archer cost just half of that
of a man-at-arms, whilst a Welsh spearman cost the equivalent of just one sixth
of an esquires pay. Another benefit of the growth in importance of the foot
soldier was that a king could recruit form the bulk of his population, and not
just the elite top 3-4%. Armies therefore became much larger than before, and
the percentage of men-at-arms naturally declined in the face of growing numbers
of peasant-folk.
A by product of this was that battlefields became a much more bloody
and less chivalrous place in the fourteenth century. Noble combatants in the
high middle ages expected to be taken for ransom rather than be killed in
fighting , but common troops were of insignificant value and therefore not
worth taking as prisoners, even if their inferior armour kept them alive for
long enough to surrender. This led to bitter to-the-death struggles in many
of the battles of the Hundred years War, such as the battles of Formigny and
Castillon between archers, unwilling to be slaughtered if captured, and the enemy.
As the war continued into the fifteenth century, another development in
the composition of troops involved in the fighting was the decrease in the dubbed
knights taking part. Andrew Ayton argues that this decline is merely a mirror
of the decline of the number of knights in society as a whole, due to the
increasing administrative and financial burden that the title imposed on the
bearer. He argues that the number of dubbed knights fell form perhaps 1,500
in 1300 to well under 1,000 in 1400. By the 1370's and '80's, typically, fewer
than 10% of an army's men-at-arms would be knights, as compared with around
20% or more for armies of comparable size earlier in the French war. Whether
or no this is the case, the withdrawal of the dubbed classes from the conflict meant
greater opportunities were available to the gentry and yeoman classes, as well as
the professional soldiers who now took over their traditional places as captains of companies and castles.
The second 'revolution' to take place in the period 1300 to 1450 was in the
field of artillery and gunpowder. As with most military evolution, it was inspired
as a direct answer to the changed tactics, strategy and warfare in general that had
come previously, in this case, the 'infantry revolution'. The defensive warfare
inspired by the infantry revolution, by which armies forced their opponents onto
the offensive by either laying siege of a vital town or stronghold, or by conducting
the destructive chevauchee raids, had produced many astounding victories in Europe.
By the English alone, the list includes Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, as well as
many others. As Jean de Bueil wrote in the late fifteenth century, "a formation on
foot should never march forward, but should always hold steady and await its enemies
….a force which marches before another force is defeated, unless God grants it grace."
Naturally, to medieval commanders faced with such a problem, especially the French
military leaders, something must be done to reverse the situation, and force the
opponent onto the offensive. Artillery provided the answer.
Cannon were not a new phenomenon in the 1400's, for they had been in use
for nearly a century, but were of small design, and useless against fortifications.
A gradual development in the size of cannon, a lengthening of the barrel for greater
range and accuracy, and the more widespread use of the powerful 'corned' gunpowder
meant that the cannon in use in the 1420's were infinitely more able to deal with
the problems presented to them than any of their predecessors. Take for example
the reconquest of Normandy in the 1450's by the French king, Charles VII. Henry V had
taken seven months to capture Cherbourg and six more to take Rouen in 1418-19, whilst
in 1450 by contrast, only sixteen days were needed to leave the walls of Bayeux 'pierced
and brought down'. Clearly then, the art of the siege in medieval warfare had been made
obsolete (for the moment, in any case). In 1449 at Rouen, the duke of Somerset took one
look at the array of large siege weapons surrounding him on all sides, and sensibly
surrendered his command on terms to the French. Many other towns and castles swiftly
followed suit, and artillery was the prime and deciding factor in the fantastically
quick recovery of Normandy by the French in 1449-50.
Artillery use in a siege is one thing, but how did it affect battles in the
field? The use of artillery is identical in the field as in elsewhere. It is primarily
used to draw the opponent onto the offensive, by compelling them to either attack, or
suffer interminable bombardment, and thus secure for themselves the advantages of the
tactical defensive. The best example of this is the battle of Formigny, in March 1450.
An English force under Sir Thomas Kyriel encountered a slightly smaller French force near
Formigny, and drew up into the standard English battle formation, with archers on the
flanks and infantry in the centre. The French attacked and suffered badly for about two
hours from the archers, until they brought forward two cannon on the flank and badly
harried the English line. So much so, indeed, that the archers left their protected
position to capture the guns, which they did, but were then caught in the open by the
arrival of another French force. In disarray and taken on two flanks, the English army
was crushed, and suffered over 5,000 dead, wounded or captured, including Kyriel. Such
was the influence of artillery in the battle.
The development of artillery also gave rise to perhaps the biggest and most
important long-term development of the whole period, namely that of the first standing
armies. Artillery was changing the face of the set piece battle, raising it to a level
of unprecedented importance. The commander who defeated his opponent in the field could,
with the aid of a good artillery train, subdue or reconquer vast areas of territory before
the enemy had time to reorganise and regroup. The old systems of raising troops via a
feudal summons, or raising indentured armies, were now far too slow in reacting to the
strategic situation, and what was needed was a fully professional, standing army,
available at a moments notice. The real pioneers of the standing army were the Valois
kings of France. Indeed, they actually happened on the compagnies d'ordonnance by accident.
Charles VII intended them as temporary measures to clear his countryside of the worst of the
roaming freebooter bands of mercenaries and unemployed soldiers. The ordonnance of 1445 was
not expected to remain in service for long, or, indeed, the taxes levied to support the soldiers
pay. The ordonnance of 1445 established 15 compagnies d'ordonnance for Langue d'oil, to which a
further 5 for Languedoc were added in 1446. The core unit of a compagnie was a 'lance', which
consisted of six mounted men, namely a man-at-arms, a 'coutillier' (armed with a sword and a knife),
a page, two archers, and a valet. The companies captain was a paid officer of the Crown, and was
ultimately responsible for keeping up the numbers of his men, and their discipline. A further
ordonnance of 1448 made the provision for the reinforcement of these mounted troops by infantry
called the 'francs archers', recruited on the basis of one fully equipped archer for every fifty
hearths.
This early system of a fully paid, disciplined and standing army was incredibly
expensive, and therefore only available to the wealthiest states in Christendom, hence
its adoption by the kings of France and the dukes of Burgundy. It did however, provide
the necessary advantage that the kings of France had been searching for for the past
fifty years. The final pushes into Normandy (1449) and Gascony (1453) were both spearheaded
by these professional men of the compagnies d'ordonnance, backed up by large and well equipped
artillery trains. For the financially hard pressed and politically divided English, this
combination of the major developments in warfare proved irresistible.
In conclusion then, the period 13300-1450 sees three major developments in medieval
warfare, each contributing inevitably to the next. To a very great extent, 1453 saw the ending
of the chivalric age of warfare. The battlefields of Europe were now the domain of the professional
soldier, for whom war was a living, and not just a knightly way of life. Chivalry had become
anachronistic, summed up in the demise of John Talbot at Castillon (1453); an exemplar of
the chivalric ideal he died whilst urging his troops ever onwards to death at the hands of
scathing artillery fire.
It must be noted however, that even these periods of intense and rapid development
were not perhaps as conclusive as they appear at first sight. In the early 1300's the
cavalry of Europe still had a number of victories, notably the French against Fleming
forces in the months following the battle of Courtrai, and the artillery used at Castillon
was siege artillery, hastily pressed into use, and not specifically intended to be used against
Talbot and his men. Indeed, advances in military structural engineering after the 1450's saw
the balance swing right back to the defender in a siege. Unfortunately, the developments came
far too late to save Lancastrian Normandy and other English possessions from returning to the
hands of the French permanently.
The military developments of the period also set up what was ultimately the foundation
for all modern warfare. What state in existence now does not possess at least a semblance of a
professional standing army, or a large number of powerful artillery pieces? For nearly five and
a half centuries, these fundamental principles of warfare, established on the bloody battlefield
of medieval France, have held firm, and look to remain so, even with the development of the
ultimate step in warfare, the atomic weapon. Clearly then, the period 1300 to 1450 was
immensely important in the history of not only medieval, but all warfare.
Bibliography
Curry A The Hundred Years War , London, 1993
Keen, M (ed) Medieval Warfare, Oxford, 1999
Fowler K (ed) The Hundred Years War, London, 1971
Ormrod M Political life in medieval England, 1300-1450, London, 1995
Wise T Medieval Warfare, London, 1976
Neillands R The Hundred Years War, London, 2000
