Weapons, Tactics, and the Changing Face of War in the Hundred Years’ War
Few periods changed Western warfare as decisively as the long stretch from 1337 to 1453. In the reign of Edward III the dominant English weapon was the longbow, mounted knights still formed the backbone of French armies, and artillery was a curiosity mostly useful for frightening horses. By the reign of Charles VII, French field guns under Jean Bureau had won Castillon (1453) in a single afternoon, the mounted charge had all but disappeared from French tactics, and Charles had created the compagnies d’ordonnance, the first permanent royal army in Western Europe. This section follows the war’s three defining weapons and tactical systems through dedicated articles: the English longbow in the Hundred Years’ War, how gunpowder changed medieval warfare, and the place of knights and chivalry on the battlefield. Read together, they trace the slow displacement of the armoured mounted knight by the archer, the gunner, and the professional man-at-arms fighting on foot.
The English Tactical System and the Longbow
The English tactical system of the Edwardian War, refined at Halidon Hill (1333), Crécy (1346), and Poitiers (1356), was built around a roughly two-to-one ratio of men-at-arms to longbowmen, with the archers deployed in a shallow crescent or line on the wings or front, ideally on ground that funnelled the enemy charge. The longbow itself was a simple yew or yew-and-ash self-bow with a draw weight of 80 to 150 pounds, capable of firing twelve arrows a minute to a useful range of over 200 yards and, in skilled hands, of penetrating mail and lighter plate at close range. It was not a new weapon — Welsh and English archers had been used in the wars of Edward I — but its systematic use in massed formation was new, and the French chronicler Jean Froissart, who saw the Crécy campaign in the train of Enguerrand de Coucy, was sufficiently impressed to devote a third of his Chroniques to it. The military historian Clifford Rogers has argued that the longbow’s effectiveness at Crécy and Poitiers has been overstated by a later English tradition anxious to find a single explanation for the victories; Robert Hardy’s careful work on the longbow’s archaeology and use is the standard technical reference; and the modern French account by Philippe Contamine treats the weapon as one element, though a decisive one, in a larger English tactical superiority. The whole of this is examined in the English longbow in the Hundred Years’ War.
Gunpowder, Siege Artillery, and the Defence of the Realm
The Hundred Years’ War was the first major European conflict in which gunpowder weapons made a strategic difference. The first European cannon appeared in the 1320s, and the English used ribaudequins — small cannon mounted in carts — at Crécy in 1346, but the early weapons were clumsy, slow-firing, and dangerous to their own crews. What changed between 1380 and 1450 was the weight of metal available. By the time Charles VII was waging the final campaigns of the war, Bureau’s train of field guns at Castillon included the veuglaires and couleuvrines that could smash the wooden fortifications of a bastille in an afternoon, and the French crown had built, at the arsenal of Tours and elsewhere, a state gun-founding industry. Bernard Schnerb’s work on the French artillerie in the fifteenth century is the starting point for any serious account; it was he who showed that the gun-train at Castillon was the product of a planned industrial policy, not a one-off improvisation. The development of gunpowder, the slow shift from siege to field artillery, and the parallel introduction of hand-held firearms (the pothooks or gonnes à main of the 1440s) are examined in how gunpowder changed medieval warfare.
The Decline of the Mounted Knight
The third strand of the war’s military transformation is the social and tactical decline of the mounted knight. Maurice Keen, in the standard account of chivalric culture, treats the Hundred Years’ War as the period in which the chivalric ideal — at once a code of conduct and a military profession — was at once most fully articulated and most visibly failing. The French charges at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, in which great noble lineages were destroyed in single afternoons, are the obvious evidence; the much less commented-upon English inability to occupy what they had won in the years after Poitiers is the rest of the story. The Black Prince’s chevauchées of 1355–1357 devastated the French countryside but produced no political settlement, and the English garrisons of the 1370s, cut off by du Guesclin’s strategy of attrition, were starving outposts within a year of their founding. By the time of the Lancastrian War, the English army, too, was increasingly composed of archers and dismounted men-at-arms, with the longbow retained for its shock effect and the knight retained as a social ornament. The full social and military history of this transformation, and the role of chivalric ideology in obscuring it, is in medieval knights and chivalry on the battlefield.
Articles in this section
- The English longbow in the Hundred Years’ War
- How gunpowder changed medieval warfare
- Medieval knights and chivalry on the battlefield