Military Innovation in the Hundred Years War

TerrorFirmer

Had to write an essay on this, any opinions? Edits? Suggestions? Which will be, incidentally, too late to affect this actual piece, but all the same I'm curious for myself.

The Hundred Years' War was a conflict between France and England for the French throne. Philip VI claimed the title of King of France under Salic law; Edward III claimed to be King of both France and England as the maternal grandson of Philip IV. The conflict, generally divided into several phases, lasted from 1337 to 1453 with sporadic brief periods of peace. The war itself can be divided into several distinct phases, and the term ‘Hundred Years War’ is merely an expression to collectively group these wars which were fought over the same principles. Despite some overwhelming initial English victories, the wars ultimately led to the expulsion of the House of Plantagenet and English influence from France. Wars are always a catalyst for military innovation and in this regard the Hundred Years War was no different; over the course of the conflict, various new weapons, military structures and tactics were applied to the battlefield and standing armies were reintroduced to Europe for the first time in hundreds of years.

At the outbreak of war, England’s population was a mere 4 million in contrast to the 17 million of France . Subsequently, England had a much smaller manpower pool on which to draw. Edwards’s military potential scarcely amounted to half of Philips and he simultaneously committed to a war against Scotland. Key to the evolution of warfare was the French dominance in numbers of knights – traditionally the core of a medieval army, their importance was eroded by the devastating weapons, counteractions and tactics adopted by the numerically inferior English forces. Certainly, at the wars outset, the French had every reason to remain confident of the ability of their knights. In 1328, Philip and his Knights had annihilated an army of Flemish pikemen at Cassel. In contrast, England had a poor military record for the preceding decade in its wars on the Scottish border. By 1340, Philip had almost 50,000 heavy cavalry on the borders of Guyenne and Flanders, vastly outnumbering any potential force the English could muster. Victory must have seemed a given.

The battle of Crecy in July 1346 was one of the first decisive land battles of the war and significantly, one in which French ineptitude in grasping the concept of changing times was clearly evident. Many modern historians consider the battle, utilizing new tactics and technologies, as the beginning of the end to chivalry. The English forces numbered approximately 11,000 while those of France, as high as 30,000 . The English longbow, the decisive weapon of the battle, was not a new weapon, but its effectiveness employed en masse was seriously underestimated by the French who believed that archers would be ineffective when faced with a cavalry charge. Instead, the French employed crossbowmen. The weapons yielded by crossbowmen were certainly lethal; crossbow bolts offered a far greater penetrative ability than arrows and required very little training to operate. They were, however, more suited for defence as their rate of fire and accuracy was poor in comparison to the longbow and they were highly susceptible to poor weather. English archers were able to fire up to a dozen shafts a minute from a distance of 200 yards, devastating to large groups of men. The English deployed large numbers of archers, often with a ratio of three or more archers per men-at-arms. At Agincourt, for example, the English army compromised 6,000 men, of which up to 5,000 were archers. When faced with heavy enemy attack, these archers assisted the men-at-arms, clad in light armour and armed with swords and axes. The impact of French crossbowmen was ultimately negligible and in stark contrast the Longbow was to prove the decisive factor in English victory. Before the war heavy cavalry were seen as the fundamental core of an army and the France followed this practice, hacking down their own crossbowmen when they attempted to retreat, scorning them as cowardly. They then advanced towards the English fixed defences. Faced with an uphill charge across a quagmire of a battlefield, the French knights were cut down in their hundreds by arrow storms, failing to breach the English lines after 15 attempts . The battle was not merely a defeat, but a catastrophe. The rigid French belief in chivalry and the importance of knights placed above all other considerations; ultimately, an outdated code of ethics, was to blame. Until Crecy, the English were ill thought of as soldiers, while the French were considered the best in Europe. Tactically and technologically the battle amounted to a military revolution, a triumph of fire-power over armour. In the years following the disaster, French Knights now came to primarily fight dismounted. After the battle, English soldiers checked the battlefield for injured knights and those that were too seriously wounded were dispatched with mercy givers – long, thin blades inserted into vulnerable sections of armour to pierce the heart or brain. This was against the chivalric code as peasants were killing knights, but the message was clear. England was adapting to the demands of total war and would not be bound by codes that hindered her performance. France would soon follow suit, but its hesitance was to cost the country dearly.

Up until the battle of Crecy, knight’s armour, normally based upon chain mail, was generally insufficient to protect against penetration by longbows. In 1346, an English man-at-arms was still primarily armoured in chain mail, with steel breastplates and steel arm plates. His French adversary was somewhat better equipped, with plate armour also on the shoulders and limbs. Throughout the course of the 14 and 15th centuries, protection of arms and hands, legs and feet steadily became more complete. Generally, men-at-arms had to supply their own armour and as a result, the quality of armour varied according to position in the hierarchy of the elite. Archers wore light armour; often a brigandine with kettle hat or open front bascinet and many peasant soldiers wore a similar attire of light mail and an iron cap. As a direct result of Crecy, the production of plate amour became common throughout the 14th century to offer the Knight greater protection. In the battle of Poitiers, French Knights wearing plate armour enjoyed a greater degree of invulnerability against the longbow then their predecessors had at Crecy, but the English switched to targeting the still vulnerable horse flanks and, like Crecy, annihilated the French cavalry. Weapons too developed in correlation to the shift in armour type. The flat sword with a cutting edge against mail became redundant against plate armour and was subsequently replaced by one with a tapered point designed to penetrate plate armour. The English too began to use the bodkin arrow, lethal narrow tipped heads that offered greater penetration, to counter the increased presence of plate armour on French knights. The development of armour was not a result of technological advancement but rather adaptation to a changing battlefield and as a direct result, weapons progressed to counter these new styles. The increasingly frequent defeat of men-at-arms by foot soldiers from the 14th century onwards was a striking feature of the period that has been described as an ‘infantry revolution’ and led to constant modification to contemporary armour before the knights eventually faded away into obscurity and with them, heavy metal armour.

The war too saw the concept of ‘total war’, encompassing not only armies at war but entire nations. There were repeated French attacks on southern English ports in 1338-40, with towns and cities like Harwich and Southampton being plundered and burnt and many others raided and damaged. Despite the English superiority at sea later on in the conflict, lightning French raids sweeping up the channel could not be prevented, with Win Chelsea burned in 1360; Rye and Hastings burned in 1377 and Plymouth and other southern ports plundered in 1404. In return, upon invading France, the English engaged in systematic destruction of the countryside in order to force the French to battle. Landing with an Anglo-Imperial army in 1339, Edward rode through the Cambresis, Vermandois and Thierache, burning and plundering in an attempt to force Philip IV to commit to battle. Although it proved fruitless, the theory was sound – laying waste to large areas of land in order to force the enemy to attempt and stop the destruction – and subsequently, in 1346, 1349, 1355, 1356 and 1359 the English launched major chevauchees into almost every corner of France. In July 1346, Edward landed in the contintin. Philip gathered a large army to oppose him, and Edward chose to march northward toward the Low Countries, pillaging as he went, rather than attempting to take and hold territory, ultimately leading to the battle of Crecy. Subsequently the French were hesitant to join battle, and relegated themselves to a policy of abstinence. In one of the two great Chevauchees of 1355, the Black Prince rode 600 miles from Bordeaux with a small army to the Mediterranean seaboard and back, destroying over 500 castles, towns, villages and hamlets, along with Limoux and the suburbs of Toulouse, Carcassonne and Narbonne, some of the largest cities of France. One of his secretaries wrote that ‘since this war began, there was never such loss or destruction as hath been in this raid’ and his Chief administrator asserted that ‘The land and rich towns laid waste by this raid had been paying the French king more money each year for waging war then half his entire kingdom’. By 1359-60, when a large English army rode from Calais to Reims to Burgundy and Paris, France was left ‘overwhelmed, and trampled under foot’, ‘on the verge of destruction’ and ‘tormented and war-ravaged’ from one end to the other. Devastation was an important method of forcing an enemy into battle regardless of the tactical situation. Only the need to stop the wanton destruction perpetrated by the English forced the French into the disastrous battle of Crecy. The devastation however, also served other important purposes that quality it under the heading of total war. As well as demoralizing the enemy and depriving him of essential economic resources, the chevauchees greatly enriched the English. Nothing of value was ignored and the English, upon their return to Bordeaux, were laden with booty. The affected areas took years to recover, even with generous exemptions. The destruction gave apt reasons for all classes of the social hierarchy to seek peace, regardless of the consequences. As explanation for why he has accepted the humiliating peace treaty of Bretigny in 1360, King Jean II attributed it to the ‘people slaughtered, churches pillaged, bodies destroyed, maids and virgins deflowered […] towns, manors and buildings burnet’. In later years, the effectiveness of these campaigns was greatly reduced, as the French gained a far greater tactical flair for ‘shadowing’ invading armies and extensively re-fortified their towns and cities. During the reign of Charles V, the French strategy was one of scorched earth and guerilla raids and a deliberate refusal to engage in full scale battle. This forced the direction of the war into one of gradual conquest through siege warfare.

At sea, despite the theaters secondary status, events of the war shaped the development and tactical use of warships. The French enjoyed superiority in naval resources and organization; at Clos des Galees, they had a royal shipyard to build, maintain and supply the king’s ships and gather crews. In contrast, the English had no such privilege and their navy was largely based upon privately owned ships, mercenaries and merchant vessels. In 1379, for example, the French royal shipyard was constructing seven barges while repairing fourteen, while the English Royal fleet had dwindled to a mere five ships. Castilian galleys, allied to the French made a great impression on contemporary ship design. They defeated an English fleet at La Rochelle in 1372 and their shallow draught in combination with the ability to be driven by both oars and shall enabled them to penetrate inshore and devastate the English coast. The balinger ships of the late 14th and 15th century are considered to be a response to the effectiveness of the Castilian galleys. Ultimately, however, the war at sea remained a secondary theater of war in which both sides lacked the means to impose the advantages of superiority at sea on the continental war. It is estimated that up to 90% of the French Fleet was destroyed as Sluys, yet this resounding victory in itself had little bearing on the land war, though it did safeguard England against French invasion. Naval fleets remained as defensive rather then offensive measures. With the innovations in gunpowder and cannons, the armament of military vessels changed. During the period of the hundred year’s war, however, they supplemented rather then revolutionized naval warfare. Battles usually consisted of parallel vessels attacking each other with archers before close quarters combat. Cannon and small arms, when introduced, were directed at enemy soldiers rather then ships and the objective remained the capture rather then sinking of enemy vessels.

The Hundred Year’s War saw the introduction of gunpowder and cannons as a decisive factor on the battlefield. Their initial use on the battlefield was negligible and more so for reasons of morale, but they nonetheless replaced arrows steadily, albeit very slowly. At Crecy, Edward employed the use of at least three cannon. While serving little use as weapons, they terrified the French horses and their noise and thick black smoke unsettled those who had never experienced them. Early cannon were immobile, had poor range and a slow rate of fire and were used primarily as harassing weapons, such as lobbing stones onto houses within a walled city. The cannon gave way to increasingly larger designs capable of demolishing fortified walls so that by 1420, the biggest cannon were capable of firing balls weighting up to 750kg. This was an evolutionary step in military tactics, as it now offered the attacker the hithero defenders advantage of being able to force the enemy to attack. Defence now had to be defence on the field. In the siege of Caen in 1417, Henry’s artillery fired hollow iron balls filled with tow – an early form of shell, which easily punched holes in the cities walls in several places and allowed for a successful assault. Up until the early 15th century the focus was on increasingly larger guns and as this trend peaked, a number of technological developments and new designs brought the cannon to the forefront of contemporary warfare. Barrel length was increased, allowing for greater muzzle velocity and subsequently, power and accuracy. Firing rates also improved dramatically owing to the discarding of wet loam seals to plug balls into barrels. In 1419 it had taken Henry V seven months to capture Cherbourg. In contrast, it only took 16 days in 1450 to reduce the fortifications of Bayeux to rubble, and in 1451, a mere 6 to destroy the walls of Blaye. Similarly, in 1450, Harfleur submitted after 17 days, having previously withstood siege for almost two months. While this ‘artillery revolution’ offered the English advantages, it to suited the French. The fundamental English advantage in well trained archers was largely negated by the increasingly common use of heavy artillery, whose range and devastation far outstripped any arrow storm. By the mid 15th century, the side best served with artillery could seize the initiative and this was to finally present the French with the means for an effective counter to the English tactics that had dominated the battlefield for decades. They pioneered the successful system of siege trenches, allowing artillery to be moved around and used upon enemy positions unhindered. At Rouen in 1449, when the Duke of Somerset in the citadel saw that ‘great trenches were made there round about the said palace, as well in the fields as in the town, and bombards and cannon were laid on all sides’, he lost heart and sued for peace. The most decisive use of artillery occurred at the battle of Castillon in 1453, where the English army under Lord Talbot attempted to assault a fortified French artillery park protecting the town and was annihilated.

Under Charles VII, the French army underwent radical overhauls that placed it on superior footing to its English counterpart. By the mid 15th century, English finances were in ruins. Henry VI’s annual revenue amounted to little over £30,000, in contrast to his spiralling debts that were up to ten times larger. Desertion and mutiny became common among the soldiers in France, decreasing their already low numbers. Rebellion, rural decline and multiple harvest failures aggravated this problem. France, in comparison, enjoyed a period of good financial order. Taxes were being collected successfully. This enabled Charles to recruit a standing army, armed and paid for by the state and consisting of initially up to 12,000 men compromised of men-at-arms, archers and foot soldiers. The nobility were forbidden to talliage their demesnes, to raise troops without royal license or to levy private war. This was, for the time, a revolution in warfare, as the troops were kept on in peace time and not disbanded in maritime. This provided the French with a core well paid, properly trained and full time army. The English system of contract recruitment also produced a well trained army vastly superior to the previously undisciplined levied armies of France, but by the mid 15th century, owing to English financial difficulty this balance had shifted decisively to the French. The English armies of the mid 15th century were a shadow of not only those that Edward III had initially sent to France in the 14th century, but of the occupant English armies of the turn of the century. At Harfluer in 1449, there were a mere 500 soldiers protecting a garrison that had been occupied by 10,000 in 1416.

Although not realised at the time by either belligerent, the French victory at Castillon marked the effective end of the Hundred Years War. The hundred Years war had seen evolutionary and revolutionary changes on the battlefield; the development of new weapons and the tactics to counter-act and adapt to them and the emergence of war as a struggle between nations rather then localities. The victory of the English archers at Crecy and the dominance of French artillery in re-conquering France culminating at Castillon proved that firepower was to triumph over numbers. The age of the Knight, armour and chivalry was over, even if it took contemporary Europe several more decades to come to terms with the sudden and dramatic shift exerted by the necessities of the prolonged and destructive Hundred Years War.

Fratton Fred

thanks for sharing that, very interesting.

I always thought the name 100 years war was misleading. As far as I am aware it ended somewhere in the mid nineteenth century:D

The development of the arrow head and its role in the end of the armored knight was very significant. That and the disaster at Agincourt were the beginning of the end for heavily armoured men I believe.

I like the bit about the longbow and it's role in English warfare, it was illegal up until fairly recently, for men between the ages of 14 and 40 not to practice the longbow everyday. It may be urban legend, but I like it. As I do the longbow giving rise to the famous V-Sign.

McArmalite

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Had to write an essay on this, any opinions? Edits? Suggestions? Which will be, incidentally, too late to affect this actual piece, but all the same I'm curious for myself.

Watched a history of Wales on C4 few years ago. Apparently they said that most of the archers at Agincourt were in fact Welsh. The long bow been the favored fighting and hunting weapon of Wales at the time.

TerrorFirmer

I know the longbow originated in Wales, but I think every district (not sure how localities were organized) in England had to contribute an archer to the national pool.... not sure in what numbers the Welsh made up the composition of archers during the general war!

And actually yeah, they only renounced their claim to the throne in 1802!

Fratton Fred

McArmalite wrote: »

Watched a history of Wales on C4 few years ago. Apparently they said that most of the archers at Agincourt were in fact Welsh. The long bow been the favored fighting and hunting weapon of Wales at the time.

I believe they were, although the longbow was used by The English, Welsh and Scots around that time.

Archeologists can tell a longbow man's skeleton because of the deformities it caused to the body. It took such an enormous amount of strength to use the archer ended up with overdeveloped muscles in their right arm which caused spurs on the bones.