Force composition in the Wars of the Roses

[coopman827]

     Yes, some hand gunners were in Edward's force at Barnet, according to Gore and Ball's "Wars of the Roses Scenarios", which I just received 2 days ago. 
     This scenario book also shows that there were a fair no. of Welsh, Irish and Borderers troops present at some of the battles.  Can anyone recommend some 28mm figures that would be suitable for representing these troops?  I'm beginning to think that I should probably get a copy of Ian Heath's "Armies of the Middle Ages, Vol. 1".         

[MerlintheMad]

Doesn't that volume only go up to c. the HYW? WotR is very late medieval.

Yes, I think that the gunners at St Albans are the ones I was remembering.

Borderers could be mounted like coustilliers and with a light crossbow. They are SO cool looking. I have a single ten figure unit of mounted crossbow, but they don't look as cool as Borderers. Maybe it's mostly the posture of the miniatures, riding casually forward, instead of shooting back "Parthian style", like the illo in that old book on the battle of Flodden (not an Osprey, and I wish that I had a copy now). Mine are 28mm, Essex I think, not sure....

[coopman827]

Vol. 1 of the "Armies of the Middle Ages" covers the HYW and the WOTR.   

[Arlequín]

I would caution against relying on a book that's over thirty years old, history isn't what it used to be and things have moved on a bit since then. You may as well read Oman's Art of War in the Middle Ages.
 

Finds at Bosworth indicate that not only was there a fair bit of artillery on the field, but also a fair few handgunners (or possibly early arquebuses even). The Pastons hired a couple to defend Caister against the Duke of Norfolk in the 1460s, so there were individual gunners knocking around besides 'companies'. I'd be willing to bet a shilling that Burgundian/Flemish handgunners were a routine portion of Yorkist armies from 1471 onwards, possibly even from 1461 given that Philip the Good did not want a pro-French Lancastrian faction running England.

Crossbows were surprisingly common and statutes allow 'foresters' et al, to attend muster with them instead of bows (being caught in the green wood with a bow would cost you your hand or a few lashes if you were lucky). There were enough of them (and handguns) being used instead of bows, for Henry VIII to prohibit them amongst the 'lower orders' as alternate options for bows in 1511, while at the same time issuing another statute reinforcing the existing one for bows, with the usual bans for football and stuff like that (as had Edward IV during his reign).

Margaret of Anjou, Warwick when he was a Lancastrian and Henry Tudor, were all in receipt of French money and given leave to recruit in France (as opposed to the general 'myth' that the French actually sent troops), Henry Tudor even managed to bag some recently redundant, Swiss-trained men of the bandes françaises and one of their captains (Philibert de Chandee) in 1485, along with his pick of lesser criminals from the gaols of Brittany and Normandy. Likewise Pierre de Breze, while out of favour (and therefore out of work) with the King of France, kept himself busy by taking up employment with the Lancastrians in the North after Towton, at the head of 2,000 mercenaries recruited in France.

The same deal applied to Edward and Richard in 'Burgundy' (i.e. Flanders), as opposed to actual 'Burgundian Troops' being supplied. This is how Juan Salazar (a Spaniard) ends up fighting at Bosworth, I doubt he was the only 'exotic' soldier there... then there is Martin Schwarz and his Swiss and Germans (although to the English they were all German).

What all these guys were armed with is open to debate. Schwarz's guys were previously in the service of Maximilian and almost certainly were pikes with a smattering of gunners and crossbows, likewise the former bandes française guys. Breton 'javelinmen' seems a no-brainer, until it's pointed out that a 'javelin' in the 15th Century was any spear shorter than a lance (also elsewhere called a 'lancegay' or 'assegai' sometimes) and English speakers referred to a lance as a spear. What we would call a javelin was called a 'dart'.  

You could hazard a guess and say that most mercenaries were a mix of crossbows, halberds/voulges, with the proportions dictated by where they originated from and probably be not too far off the mark. North of the River Seine and in the Low Countries the crossbow was a middle-class pastime, with the bow, glaive/voulge and 'piques' (long spear in France, real pikes in Flanders) as the lower class traditional weapons. South of the Seine it's pretty much crossbows all round for the masses, especially in Gascony for some reason. Normandy of course had a tradition of archery from their time as part of England.

What strikes me with all this is the value placed on supposedly inferior troop types. We (i.e. the English) have this idea that English archers were 'the' late medieval superweapon, yet they felt the need to recruit foreign mercenaries to supplement their indigenous forces. De Chandee, leading what were supposedly the dregs and scum of Brittany and Normandy, got an Earldom for his role at Bosworth, Schwarz and De Breze were both experienced leaders, with reputations as fighters, De Breze occasionally even had the King's ear... strange huh?

[Captain Blood]

Gents, we have strayed a fair way from the original sticky topic and into discussions of tactics, armour class and all sorts of other things not strictly concerned with the ratio of bills:bows:other things in a WOTR force, which was the oft-debated topic of the original sticky - and a subject which most people interested in gaming the WOTR probably want to know about. To a certain level.

I've therefore demerged the latter part of your discussion after this point into a separate topic where you can continue debating the finer points to your hearts' content.

[janner]

To follow on from the discussion on Stoke Field,

Sure, I understand that the Pale would have resembled an English Shire, but what's your take on the timing for the bill as dominant long arm for English foot?

Based on Thomas Ruthall's letter after Flodden, it's clearly well established by 1513 - amongst troops from Northern England at least, but probably across England given Ruthrall's military knowledge. So I'd argue that we have a relatively safe book end there, but how far would you shift it to the left?

[Arlequín]

Well that's the million dollar question for the era.  

To be honest I'm uncertain. 'Billmen' - by which I also include guisarmes, spears, pointy sticks and anything else, were available in quantity from the word go... the bulk of the population earned under £2, so according to the Assize of Arms and Statute of Winchester most people would fall into this category. Availability of course does not imply that they were called on.

The earliest mention I have found in a professional force is for Henry VII's French expedition of 1492, where out of 1108 foot, 124 are listed as billmen or halberdiers (in two retinues), the rest are archers. 40 of those come from a single retinue (Sir Walter Herbert) where they form exactly half of the foot. 20 halberdiers form virtually a third (20) of Viscount Welle's footmen. The only other significant number of them are in Sir Reynold Brey's where he has 24, as compared to 231 archers. 13 retinues out of the 26 have no billmen at all, the rest between 4 and 13, 4-6 being the most common.

The retinues are very different in size and composition, but other than the ones I mentioned it is the smaller ones which contain bills, like the Earl of Surrey's which has 13 bills to 66 archers.

Sir Gilbert Talbot's commission for the same expedition is given as being as '80 men' with as many men at arms and demi-lances as possible, the rest to be archers or bills. Then the rates of pay for his men are also given, which are different to another source in that Men at Arms were given there as being paid 18d (presumably to pay for the custrell and page) and archers whether foot or mounted were getting 6d.

This was an army of volunteers and essentially it was announced that an army was being raised and that anyone interested in applying should should go and sign up. While this gave them the pick of who they took on, I can only imagine that they could also only choose from who turned up too.  

Herbert's recruitment area was around Brecon, an area both poor and lacking in archers in any case (an earlier Herbert was the one who also lacked archers at the Battle of Edgecote in 1469 - Central and Northern Wales did not have a tradition of massed archery, or so I'm led to believe).

What is also very interesting (to me at least) is that it is the first listing of men at arms as being accompanied by a 'custrell' and page - and every one of them are, that I've come across and 'demi-lances' are also mentioned... alongside mounted archers and in some cases exceeding them in numbers.

I've put the table in Word on dropbox here. Sadly I didn't note the source at the time and I need to find it again... it poses more questions than it answers.

1) I presume that both bills and demi-lances did not suddenly appear in 1492, so why do we not find them before?

2) Is the split into men at arms, demi-lances and mounted archers for the mounted element indicative of an acceptance of the reality, i.e. that all 'men at arms or mtd archers' were not equal in terms of armour and equipment and there was a middle ground which previously fell arbitrarily into either camp in earlier documents?

Older retinues are just divided on paper between men at arms, mtd archers and archers (sometimes just men at arms and archers), but now we have men at arms, with an exactly equal number of 'custrells', then demi-lances and mounted archers (in no fixed ratio), then archers and billmen (with archers still the majority foot)... seven years after Bosworth and five after Stoke Field.

I haven't looked further forward than this, so I'll take it on advisement what the ratios were for later forces...

[janner]

Yes, that all fits with what I have seen, i.e. bills appearing occasionally as weapons earlier, but billmen as an identifiable group not seen until virtually the dawn of the 16th Century. Hence I can't help but do a double take when the term is used to describe troops earlier in the Middle Ages.

In my book, prior to that we have foot, who unless described otherwise (e.g. archers), could be expected to be armed with some form of longarm (spear, guisarme etc) sometimes backed-up by a hand weapon, such as an sword or axe. If their harness was of sufficient quality (or their employer could provide it), they could find employ as a man-at-arms. For certain expeditions, of course, the commander might be able to be choosy and limit his foot to archers and men-at-arms 

On Edgecoat, as you are no doubt aware, North Wales was known for its spearmen. Interesting, custrell was also used to describe a type of sword in an account for the Calendar of Patent Rolls - 10 August 1451 (based on the double edged French coustille probably):

Pardon to Thomas Osbatteley of Norhampton, co. Northampton, 'taillour,' of the king's suit for all felonies, trespasses and offences and any consequent outlawries by reason of the presentment on Monday after St. John before the Latin Gate, 29 Henry VI, at Norhampton, before Thomas Braunfeld, Henry Baldeswell, Simon Philipp the elder and William Par, coroners in the town, on view of the body of William Hedge of Norhampton, 'wever', that on Sunday before the said Monday, about the eighth hour after twelve William Hedge and Thomas Osbatteley sat within the dwelling of John Broun of Norhampton, ' baker', in the company of others, drinking and singing by turns, and there came William Cook of Norhampton, 'wever', and made assault on Thomas touching his singing, whereupon abusive words passing between them, the said William Cook and Thomas Osbatteley, alias Botteley, assaulted each the other, and William with a ' pykfork ' worth 2d. struck Thomas on the head, whereupon Thomas drew a sword called a 'custrell' worth I2d. and would have struck William Cook, but William Hedge intervened and was struck by William Cook with the ' pykfork ' under the right ear and by Thomas with the 'custrell' in the belly (in ventrem inter viscera) on the left side under the navel, making a wound 9 inches deep, and William Hedge lay sick till the fourth hour at dawn of Monday and then expired.

[Arlequín]

Nicely dug out there... It makes a change from the usual run of disputed inheritances causing affrays.  

Sure, the custrills, costrills, whatever, were the English version of French and Burgundian coutillier or coustilier, named after the weapon and in later centuries would lend its name, but not its form to the cutlass. The demi-lances almost certainly were the better of the archers who we find occasionally serving as men at arms earlier and the poorer-equipped of the men at arms, regraded and paid somewhat less than a 'proper man at arms' in full harness... for my money anyway.

Billmen I suspect made earlier appearances. I'm happy you won't find them in the Hundred Years War, unless you consider the 'men at arms on foot' found in garrisons to count, although for 8d a day I'd expect them to have everything a man at arms was supposed to have (whatever that was) but the horse.

In the Wars of the Roses however, there are frequent summonses for 'tall men' and as 'as many as you can goodly make' and similar phrases, which imply to me that other than when 'defensibly arrayed' etc is requested, they weren't too fussy what you brought as long as you brought something. So in that context I imagine billmen got their premature moment in the sun.

I'm a believer in gradual change and continuity and I suspect that billmen turned up in such ad-hoc bodies of men first, but by the end of the WotR they were probably a minute part of the more professional bodies of formal retinues too (as seems to be the case in 1492). Alternatively they may, as you say, be quite well-accoutred enough to supplement the men at arms when they were foot, or maybe they formed a sort of 'colour-guard' of sorts for the archer's commanders and standards. Batches of bows ordered at various times (Coventry's being one) usually include a small number of bills, presumably either for 'watch and ward' in camp, or for such a duty in battle.

I certainly don't expect to see whole units of bills from those numbers I supplied though, and even in Herbert's 50/50 retinue, I imagine it was a case of a 'bowe and a byll at his back' and entirely the result of there being a lack of archers in such areas as he and his forebears recruited from, or in the case of the other contingents, a lack of archer volunteers.

Edward IV's push to ban football etc in favour of archery in 1477 might indicate an increasing shortage of archers, but I suspect any lack was due more to increased demand for them overall than a decline in numbers; France and Burgundy were both increasing the ratio of common soldiers to men at arms in the same period and Edward's own army of 1475 fielded the largest numbers of archers ever in an English army. If there truly was a drop in archer numbers I doubt he would allow Charles the Bold a free hand in recruiting from within his army. So we've moved from more than enough archers for the crown's needs, to demand outstripping supply, rather than less people actually available.  

Either way, with the exception of a few able and well-equipped individuals, who for whatever reason did not learn to shoot a longbow or just couldn't, I believe the bills were a stand-in for archers rather than a conscious desire to have 'heavy infantry', which judging from Tudor musters, only around 10% would cut it in that role, the rest only having the bill itself and maybe a sallet.  

[MerlintheMad]

Were "billmen", i.e. infantry without bows, mustered with the MAA or the archers, or both? Judging by the small ratio of infantry to archers, it seems likely to me that anyone with a bill could go either way. They (certainly) were not arrayed by themselves into discrete companies/units. I could see a case for a single company/unit of infantry stationed as a specific guard or reserve, which would mean that they were arrayed separately. But there isn't any tradition for such use.

In my army list I go for longbowmen OR billmen. The option is up to the player. But unarmored longbowmen are a REQUIRED UNIT, which means that before fielding anything else you must have a unit of unarmored longbowmen. After that, the proportion of billmen to longbowmen is up to you. I know that this is very "free style" compared to the apparent norm of the period. But the army list can be used to field anywhere from a thousand men up to Towton. So the flexibility is actually the result of simplicity, perhaps over-simplicity. It is, what it is....

[janner]

Less well protected chaps with long arms may well have been a cheap and cheerful way to improve the defensive capabilities of archers.

Given human nature, after a slow start, I wonder if it just became the new 'must have' item of shiny equipment, the iBill if you will 

[Arlequín]

But there isn't any tradition for such use.

Traditions only hold until someone creates a new tradition. 

Given that the Men at Arms and the Demi-lances were pretty much at the head of a new tradition of English cavalry, the obvious answer to me is that the bills were with the bows, but you could argue that they were the new dismounted men at arms; the proportions of bows to bills are not far off 1475's men at arms to bows after all.

Although the overwhelming majority of bills available were the lowest members of society and equipped as you'd expect, clearly with only 100+ in the force they need not have looked further than the guys who did possess protection and experience.

It's like a sports team, millions of people play a sport, but you wouldn't take a cross section of them to make up a team, you select only the best... unless you're an England manager.
 

I wonder if it just became the new 'must have' item of shiny equipment, the iBill if you will 

  Well let's face it, after killing Charles the Bold and Richard III pole-arms couldn't have better press.

"Arrows bouncing off that pesky Gothic plate? You need iBill. iBill - guaranteed to render your foes' facial features unrecognisable".

[Arlequín]

I've been reading up on the Calais Garrison and while I didn't find what I was looking for, I did find remarks about weapon stocks around 1476-81.

They had 1076 longbows, 120 steel crossbows, 40 wooden ones, 15 'hake guns' (old hook guns), 25 iron handguns and 243 brass ones. In terms of hand weapons they had 67 spears (by which I take to mean lances perhaps), 144 'Moorish pikes' (which I presume are the continental type  18-24 foot ones), 360 pike shafts, 941 spear heads, 84 'white bills' (steel?), 119 black bills (iron?), 60 'gylt axes' (decorated pole-axes for ceremonial use?) and 172 'ungylt axes' (normal pole-axes?).

As the garrison was usually reinforced by 'crews' from England when trouble was on the horizon, I expect the stocks were to replace deficient items they bought with them. Calais had around 40 crossbowmen of its own, so I expect they didn't need three spare weapons each. The total garrison for Calais and the castles of Hammes, Rysbank and Guines was about 700 men, some 2/3-3/4 of whom were archers at any given time.

-Source: Grummitt, D. (2008) The Calais Garrison: War and Military Service in England, 1436-1558. Boydell & Brewer.

I have no comment, but other than the longbow stocks, I am surprised at the weapon mix to say the least.     

[janner]

I vaguely recall Moorish or Morris pikes being used to describe those carried by Scots Schiltrons. I'll see what I can dig up.

[le bon roi rene]

With the ratio of MAAs _and_ bill armed infantry to archers so small in WotR retinues it is almost inconceivable to me that all possible missile fire wasn't focused on the hth infantry. Its seems like the sheer volume of missile fire would have vaporized the hand to hand troops, yet we know that didn't happen. What is the missing piece of the puzzle? My guess is that the ratio is not quite as high as those for continental expeditions and the earlier HYW.

Cheers,
Fred