the appearance of the bow in the English armies in the fourteenth century led to a real revolution in the art of war. For the first time, it was no longer the knights who decided the fate of battles, but simple peasants. For generations, royal edicts encouraged the planting of yew trees, the slow-growing trees from which the best bows were made, as well as regular archery training every Sunday afternoon in every town. and all the villages of England, for it was only through this constant training that the archer acquired the precision and strength necessary to draw his bow. Thus, while the French knights continued to look down on the foot soldiers, their valets-at-arms, the English trained archers who soon performed wonders on the battlefields.
It was at the Battle of Crécy, in 1346, the first decisive battle in this long struggle between the English and the French that we call the Hundred Years War, that amazed Europe discovered the devastating power of the bow, used by trained and disciplined soldiers. King Edward III of England had landed in Normandy with a small army of 2,400 knights, 12,000 archers and some infantry troops. After threatening Paris, he had to retreat to Picardy before the three times larger army of Philip VI of France. Squeezed close, he decided to face and settled on the hills of Crécy. It was the morning of August 26, and an important page in the history of warfare in the Middle Ages was about to be turned now, the knight clad in his heavy armor would no longer be invincible.
The French knights, who, mounted on their steeds, were ready to charge impetuously, sure of victory, ignored the order given them by their king to wait for the rest of the army, and they immediately ordered their Genoese mercenaries to fire a volley of bolts with their crossbows in order to weaken the English. The 5,000 Genoese, covered in sweat and tired from a 30 kilometer march, advanced. But before they were within range of the enemy, the 6,000 archers in front launched a hail of arrows that cut them to pieces. Within minutes most of the Genoese were dead or wounded and the survivors fled through the French lines.
Philip VI cared little for the fate of these unfortunate mercenaries. "Kill me those rascals who bar our way for no reason," he cried, and the French knights rushed forward to massacre the Genoese. But, in turn, they found themselves within range of the English archers, who rained down on them 50,000 arrows a minute. In successive waves, the knights rushed against the English lines and stopped before they reached them, in a chaos of cries and whinnies. The knights who were dismounted found themselves pretty much immobilized by their armour, and they were easy prey for the English foot soldiers who slipped in among them, armed with knives and maces.
At nightfall, the French army retreated; among the dead were John the Blind, King of Bohemia, and the powerful Count of Flanders. Philip VI himself had had his horse killed under him, and he had to flee to Amiens with an escort of only five barons, instead of the hundreds of knights who accompanied him that very morning. The next day was a foggy day, and new French troops still advancing, unaware of the outcome of the battle, were ambushed by English archers. In just one of these clashes, 1562 knights remained on the ground.
The defeat at Crécy had the effect of a thunderclap in France. Ten years later, it was followed by another defeat, at Poitiers, where the English archers again triumphed over the French knights. This last defeat forced the King of France to cede Calais and part of the Southwest to England by the Treaty of Brétigny (1360).
When the French and the English met again, at Agincourt, in 1415, the French had still not learned the lessons of their defeats. Hampered by their heavy armor, their knights got bogged down in a plowed field, easy targets for the English archers, who again triumphed.
A formidable weapon
If the bow has been known since very remote times, the man-at-arms bow which made the fortune of the English armies in France was a relatively recent invention.
The bow had long been used for hunting and for pleasure, but it took Edward I of England, at the end of the 13th century, having to fight the remarkable Welsh archers who had risen against him, so that 'we understand all the military possibilities.
The English therefore adopted the bow and made it a formidable weapon of war. By the middle of the fourteenth century, it was the favored weapon of the English people. Its use did not require any particular skill, but a lot of strength and constant training.
At the time of Crécy, the bow of the man-at-arms was about 2 meters long. To better ensure the shot, its wood was straight in the center, about fifty centimeters, where the archer placed his arrow. Yew was the most popular wood, but oak and maple were also used. For arrows, 1 meter long and fitted with steel tips, birch, ash or oak were used. These arrows could not pierce the armor of a knight, but they were certainly enough to kill the horses, which were less well protected, and thus to unseat the knight, who once on the ground, weighed down by his armor, was easy prey for him. enemy infantry.
If English archers did not come from the nobility, they were not necessarily poor. Equipped with a steel helmet, a leather jacket reinforced with metal, a coat that also served as a blanket and a pair of boots, the archer carried with him a supply of water and the one-day ration. He was armed with a sword which he stuck in the ground in front of him to break cavalry charges. Mounted on ponies which made them very mobile, the archers constituted elite corps and received three times the pay of ordinary infantry. They generally formed companies of a hundred men led by captains who watched over their training.
After the disasters of Crécy and Poitiers, one would have thought that the French would have followed the example of the English and adopted their murderous weapon. However, they continued to prefer heavy cavalry and crossbowmen. The crossbow, used since the 12th century, was more accurate at close range in the hands of an untrained soldier, but its rate was much lower than that of the bow - 2 bolts per minute, compared to 10-15 arrows for the bow - and its range was much shorter than the 270 yards of this . last, as the Genoese discovered to their cost at Crécy. Anyway, the French always considered the crossbow as an auxiliary weapon, preferring to devote all their time and money to their noble cavalry. It is probably for this reason that they hesitated to adopt the bow. Moreover, it might not have been very wise to put such a formidable weapon in the hands of the peasants, when France was agitated by numerous peasant revolts in the 14th and 15th centuries. Yet the superiority of the bow was evident, and in 1448 Charles VII finally organized an elite corps, the Frankish Archers, which helped tip the scales in France's favor at the end of the Hundred Years' War. . In England, archers continued to occupy an important place in English armies until the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century, but firearms gradually pushed them away from the field of battle. When they were still thought of using them in 1815, at the battle of Waterloo, the extraordinary technique of the archers had long been forgotten.
In Canterbury Cathedral, the recumbent statue of the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III, evokes the model of the noble knightly warrior. However, for the inhabitants of the south-west of France, who saw him leading his men during these innumerable "rides" which made the English so hate, the noble Black Prince was undoubtedly more a brigand than a knight. Everywhere the English were looting houses and burning the fields. And the unfortunate peasants doubtless wondered the reason for all these battles to which we have given the name of the Hundred Years' War. This name does not correspond to reality, because the Hundred Years War was in fact a long series of wars which lasted 116 years. They began in 1337, when Edward III of England announced that he was claiming the throne of France and declared a war which would last until 1360. Through his mother Isabelle of France, Edward was Duke of Guyenne and had to swear to this title faith and homage to the King of France, who felt threatened by the presence of such a powerful duke on French soil. Eventually Edward was granted southwestern France by the Treaty of Brétigny (1360). By 1380, most of these territories had been taken over by Charles V and du Guesclin.
Henri V, great-grandson of Edward III, who, like him, claimed the title of King of France, resumed the fight and crushed the French nobility at Agincourt in 1415. In 1420, by the Treaty of Troyes, Henri V seemed to triumph:he became regent of the kingdom of France and forced the dauphin, heir to the throne of France, to take refuge south of the Loire (the "king of Bourges"). Yet French victory was near, and, inspired by Joan of Arc, Charles VII, through a string of victories, drove the English out of France. When the war ended in 1453, the English were no longer masters except of the port of Calais. This last English bastion in France was to be taken over in 1558 by the Duke of Guise.