Medieval Military Combat

Battle Tactics and Fighting Techniques of the Wars of the Roses

Tom Lewis

• Editore: Casemate
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781612008882
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Military & Maritime History

A concise and entertaining explanation of how other accounts, and popular culture such as films, have misrepresented medieval warfare. We don't know how medieval soldiers fought. Did they just walk forward in their armor smashing each other with their maces and poleaxes for hours on end, as depicted on film and in programs such as Game of Thrones? They could not have done so. It is impossible to fight in such a manner for more than several minutes as exhaustion becomes a preventative factor. Indeed, we know more of how the Roman and Greek armies fought than we do of the 1300 to 1550 period. So how did medieval soldiers in the War of the Roses, and in the infantry sections of battles such as Agincourt and Towton, carry out their grim work? Medieval Military Combat shows, for the first time, the techniques of such battles. It also breaks new ground in establishing medieval battle numbers as highly exaggerated, and that we need to look again at the accounts of actions such as the famous Battle of Towton, which this work uses as a basic for its overall study.

CHAPTER 1

The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses were one of the most destructive internal conflicts in Britain’s history. They basically revolved around who should have command of the kingdom: the House of York or the House of Lancaster. Fought over the years 1455–85, the Wars of the Roses – although only named so years afterwards – were in reality a series of rebellions followed by battles, some indecisive but others instrumental in deciding which faction would rule. Revenge killings often then took place. A period of uneasy peace usually followed, until a dispute attracted sides once more, and then argument would again boil over into armed conflict.

The Wars arose out of argument as to which descendants of King Edward III, of the House of Plantagenet, should rule the kingdom. The Plantagenets had ruled since 1154, with their most famous monarch being Richard I – ‘the Lionheart’ – but hundreds of years later their Henry VI was a weak ruler had who married Margaret of Anjou, a scheming French princess. The Queen and her Court friends were known as Lancastrians, from Henry of Lancaster’s surname. The nobles who opposed the Queen’s group were led by Richard, Duke of York – Henry’s cousin – also descended from Edward III. They were known as Yorkists.

The various tensions and arguments had arisen from a number of causes, amongst them succession to the throne, the illnesses of Henry – which often seemed like madness – and competition for power. The first battle of St Albans, fought in May 1455 22 miles (35km) north of London, was one of the first major clash between the factions. Richard, Duke of York, and his allies the earls of Salisbury and Warwick from the Neville family, defeated an army commanded by the Duke of Somerset, Edmund Beaufort, who died on the field. King Henry VI was captured, and a subsequent parliament appointed Richard of York as Lord Protector.

Successive battles broke out through the following decades. These fights were often quite small affairs, with armies generally numbering in the low thousands. The struggle tended to be ignored by the general population of the country, who had no real interest in which faction ruled the land. Peasants, however, were often conscripted under the levy system of the time, whereby they were compelled to serve under their local lord. Nevertheless, the local men often did have quite a loyalty to their lord, for he was the source of law and order in their area. Following battles, such levied forces were usually released to return home.

There was no standing English army at the time. The leading figures on both sides commanded local forces with the assistance of the garrisons of their own castles or lands. The cavalry soldiers – who when dismounted become heavy infantry – were made up of men-at-arms: professional soldiers who had trained for combat. To this was added the mass of the troops: levied forces from the local peasantry. To identity their forces on the field, most of these soldiers generally wore a prominent sleeve badge or some such device. Richard Neville, for example, the 16th Earl of Warwick – nicknamed ‘the Kingmaker’ – used the device of a bear and a ragged staff, while Richard III utilised a white boar.

The Wars of the Roses contain some of the most instructive clashes of the medieval period for those interested in studying how the art of battle was developed. They have three unique characteristics.

First, they were deliberate planned battles. Both sides decided to thrash out their differences. In this way they are very different from a battle resulting from, for example, an English chevauchée through France; that is, a raiding progression. The battle of Crecy (1346) is a typical example of the latter. There, the English force was brought to bay by pursuing French cavalry, and almost forced to stand and fight.

Second, both sides contained soldiers who could afford the latest equipment, such as the best armour. These, therefore, were the ultimate warriors of the age, almost archetypal. The battles of the Wars of the Roses were the medieval equivalent of the German King Tiger tank battling it out with the US Army’s M26 Pershing during World War II.

Third, the two sides fighting each other in the Wars of the Roses were extremely highly motivated. It was literally a case of win or die. Executions, particularly of the defeated leaders or any captured personnel who were defined as ‘rebels’, was the norm. The leader brought to the battle his followers, whose lives were bound up with his good fortune. The soldiers on the two sides would consequently fight to their best.

So here were the best and fittest of the day battling it out. These were professional, well-trained men. There is evidence that medieval commanders were practiced in, and had an interest in, the art of war, and this included the use of missile weapons. One particularly prevalent planning manual, for example, was Vegetius’s Epitome of Military Science.1 Vegetius was the first Christian Roman to write on military affairs, and his work became, and remained for centuries, the military bible of Europe,2 an analysis deriving from the late Roman Empire period. The Epitome of Military Science was reprinted and studied widely across the technically accomplished parts of the world – that is, those areas that had printing methodologies and the practice of literacy. Vegetius was so popular, one researcher has found, that over 300 copies have been located; King Edward I owned a copy, and folding, pocket-sized versions were made for use on the battlefield.3

Armed might is known to have been an established part of English society. Violent crime was always present, and all over the country there were men living ‘outside the law’. Robbery on the highways was common, and travellers were routinely armed with a sword. Ian Mortimer describes solo travellers as a ‘walking liability … the principal reason why you might think twice about travelling by road is the danger of attack’.4 Murder rates were extremely high compared to today. In the mid-1400s they were the highest ever recorded, at 73 deaths per 100,000 of the population annually; in 2010, by comparison, they stood at five deaths per year.5

Military might ruled England for hundreds of years, and many men lived by the sword. The invasion of 1066 brought with it the establishment of ‘the march’, or countrywide lines of Norman castles, and a system of subjugation of the populace by local garrisons with strongholds impervious to assault by anything but specialised sieges. The Marcher Lords – knights of the manor – and all of the trappings of feudal society were governed by soldiers who took armed violence as a very necessary way of life, to be studied; its techniques practiced and often used.

It is logical enough to say that medieval battles were not simply two groups of opposed thinkers turning up to a battlefield site and setting about each other. The junior and senior commanders of the Wars of the Roses fully understood the strategic, tactical and logistical demands of their military situation. There are plenty of accounts of the time which show that battles took place, that soldiers in quantity turned up to fight them and that, logically, they had enough supplies to allow them to travel to the battlefield. What is unknown is how those battles were tactically sustained; how accurate were the numbers of those present, and of those who died; and how battles ended – for, as will be shown, there is room for considerable doubt there too.

Some of what is under discussion here must be surmised; for example, that the sergeants who organised the soldiers in the ranks knew how to control their men on the march – otherwise the soldiers would have arrived both piecemeal and hungry. The sergeants must have also known how to control their men in battle – otherwise battles would have been characterised by mass desertion. What we don’t know precisely is how those medieval soldiers were controlled, but modern scholarship is working towards a new understanding. They were not, it is emphasised, the professional soldiers of the Roman legions, but nevertheless they had to fight in a reasonably organised way.

Once a conflict was joined, with both sides either thinking they had a good chance of success or being in a situation where they had to fight to survive, there were routines to be followed. Vegetius instructs in the use of missile weapons, particularly in the case of provoking the enemy to fight:

The light troops, archers and slingers, provoked the opposition, going in front of the line. If they managed to put the enemy to flight, they pursued. If they came under pressure from the other side’s resolve or numbers, they returned to their own men and took up position behind them.6

Men generally took their own weapons to battle. They were divided, in very general terms which will be broken down into detail later, into three groups: - billmen’ – a generic term describing those who took along a bladed hook weapon on a pole; bowmen, for most men were capable with the longbow; and men-at-arms – plate armour-clad poleaxe - or mace-carrying professional soldiers. This work focuses on the role of the latter of the three groups: the heavy infantry, the most capable forces in the battles of the Wars of the Roses. The combat elements of the force were always followed by a tail formed of the logistics elements: cooks, carters, armourers, farriers and more, plus an element of ‘camp followers’ – family partners, prostitutes, beggars and so on.

This book focuses primarily on the battle between the two sides at Towton, the biggest action of the Wars of the Roses, chiefly because in terms of combat it is one of the most typical examples of late medieval infantry fighting. When campaigning in Europe (England regarded Normandy as its own property), the English primarily employed the longbow, wh...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Medieval Mystery
• 1 The Wars of the Roses
• 2 The Genesis of Infantry Combat
• 3 The Black Hole of Knowledge Regarding Medieval Combat
• 4 Misunderstanding Medieval Tactics, Armour and Weapons Through Modern Books and Movies
• 5 Armour in the Medieval Period
• 6 The Longbow’s Place in Medieval Battle
• 7 The Fight of the Poleaxe Soldier
• 8 How were Medieval Battles Actually Fought?
• 9 Towton as an Example of Medieval Battle
• 10 The Myth of Fatalities in Medieval Battle
• Conclusion: A New Theory of Medieval Battle
• Appendix 1: Accounts of the Battle of Towton
• Appendix 2: Percussive Weapons of the Leeds Armouries Database
• Appendix 3: Re-enactor Analysis
• Endnotes
• Bibliography