longbowmen in close combat

[aphillathehun]

Kit bashing Perry plastics is addicting.  I'd like to depict some WotR longbowmen as they are ready to join melee - swords drawn.  It's a bit of a challenge.  One question I have for that though is, what does a longbowmen do with his bow once he starts to come to blows with someone in close combat?  Does it get slung over the back (I can't imagine this is desirable) or is it stacked somehow, or just tossed to the ground in back?  Does one ever use it as a makeshift shield (I really can't imagine how this is desirable)?

[Cubs]

I would imagine it was dropped, ready to be picked up later. In a larger battle, presumably the men would ditch their bows in a pile together, like soldiers dropping their packs before combat. The bow wasn't overly expensive or precious, so if it was a choice between defending oneself to survive or keeping hold of the bow, I'd be choosing the former!

Of course, if they had plenty of time, they could unstring and put the bow back in its bag, maybe then sling it across the back. If there was an arrow wagon or barrow, the bows may have been piled on that.

[Charlie_]

That's an excellent question!

I have been doing the same thing with my Perry WOTR project. I've made quite a few longbowmen with swords and bucklers, of which I've painted three so far - I will show you some pics tomorrow!

There aren't many appropriate sword arms for this as the kits come, but there are some great ones on their Hundred Years War kits (the English archer frame and the French infantry frame). Hand-swapping gives loads more options. There's also suitable swords on the Mercenaries command frame and the light cavalry set, which can be cut and put on more appropriate bow arms from the WOTR set.

I have often pondered what they did with their bows. Dropping them in a big pile together does make sense I guess.

[Arlequín]

Even companies of bowmen had non-combatants, so you would imagine the same boys and guys who fetched and carried arrows, water/ale, and polished the commander's helmet, would be available to police the position for the unit's bows and unused arrows. I doubt that in the heat of battle much time at all was spent un-bending and wrapping up bows before it came to hand strokes, especially as the last 50-100 yards or so was the distance the longbow became a killer rather than an immense annoyance.

Slinging your bow across your back would be an impediment in close combat, as well as potentially being something your opponent could grab and pull to your discomfort.

No I can't see anything but bows being dropped and swords/mauls/axes being taken up with mere yards to spare before the melee began and then the non-coms trying to gather up the bows and tend the wounded, while the battle went on around them. 

[OSHIROmodels]

I would imagine it would be a rather desperate situation that would call for the bowmen to become involved in melee 

It's a good excuse for some converting though 

cheers

James

[Charlie_]

I would imagine it would be a rather desperate situation that would call for the bowmen to become involved in melee 

Surely that's not the case? Considering the high ratio of bowmen to men-at-arms in English armies in the 15th century, it would be surprising if no archers ever got involved in melee? Especially considering the good equipment longbowmen were required to have in the latter half of the century... longswords, bucklers, brigandines, sallets, etc.

Anyway, here are my conversions.

[aphillathehun]

Thanks everyone.  I'm doing stands for ACoS so multiple archers on a stand.  It would be nice to have some bows I could leave laying on the ground then.  I guess that is what greenstuff is for....

I like your conversions Charlie_ and will do some of my own soonish.

[Norm]

For my money, archers should not be given qualities that encourage them to go into melee .... other troops were there to do that and they were armed and armoured for that task.

Archers were highly valued and well paid to do what they had done since boyhood .... draw a bow.

As a battle broke down into groups of melee, I believe that archers would gather into small 'knots' and still use their bows at available targets, with accurate fire, rather than the sort of general bombardment that an opening mass arrow storm resulted in.

There are accounts of archers taking down individuals and using their long daggers to attack eye slits in helmets and armpits to look for vulnerable parts of their disable enemy.

[Captain Blood]

Great conversions Charlie.

I always understood that the longbowmen only went into hand to hand once the main battle was over. They would go in and finish off stragglers and fallen enemies, but weren't equipped to go toe-to-toe in the armoured slugfest between nobility and / or professional hand-to-hand combat specialists. I'd guess that in dire straits they'd fight hand to hand, but as ever, no-one knows anything for sure. Given that longbowmen were highly prized as missile troops, allegedly trained from boyhood for that role, surely, if you were a captain, you'd need to be in a tight corner to chuck them into serious hand to hand work and risk losing them? So I'd say, yes, occasionally they'd fight hand to hand if the circumstances favoured them or absolutely demanded it. But on the whole, I think they'd do their job, then let their better trained and armed comrades, lords and masters, go in and do theirs.

[Patrice]

I'm not sure about the WOTR, but I understood that during the HYW the English longbowmen stopped shooting and joined the melee with their hand weapons when the French men-at-arms came to contact with the English men-at-arms (perhaps because English armies were outnumbered at the beginning of these battles).

I don't have Froissard at hand just now, but Ian Heath (Armies of the Middle Ages, vol 1) pages 46-47.

[Arlequín]

I imagine Agincourt might be remembered for very different reasons had the 1,000 or so men at arms in the English line been merely cheered on by the 6,000 or so archers there. The most compelling reason for them to fight enemy men at arms, as opposed to restricting themselves to their equals, was to capture prisoners for ransom. Money only rolled uphill back then, so if the archers didn't capture anyone, they didn't get 'prize money' just for being on the team.

In the 15th Century at least, the majority troop type in any army were not the men at arms. In both the French and Burgundian Armies in the second half of the century, the ratio of men at arms to other troops was between 1:8 and 1:10 - the same as the English Armies. After the men at arms, the archers were the next-best armoured and equipped troops.

In what records we have of views of arms, men at arms aside, it is the archers who have the armour when anyone does, while those below them often don't even have a weapon, let alone any form of protection. The Bridport Roll has archers also possessing the majority of the pole weapons presented in that view of arms. Mancini's 1483 description of big lads all with bow, sword and buckler, don't sound like shrinking violets when it came to a fight. Burgundian archers had hand and a half swords, which I doubt were for show either.  

For me an analogy to suggesting that archers did not fight and only shot, would be saying Wellington's infantry didn't either and it was only the cavalry that took part in melees. Fortunately there is a lot of documentation to say otherwise in their case.

C'mon chaps, lets get past this stereotype of archers just being peasants with bows.    

[Captain Blood]

But is that not, in part at least, Jim - as I'm sure you yourself have pointed out before - because by this period, 'archers' had become a generic term equating to 'soldiers', rather than longbowmen specifically?
In which case 'archers' being listed as well armoured and equipped with polearms etc, makes sense. It's basically talking about infantrymen.
Or can we say that these men are also definitely longbowmen?
(I ask this, you understand, in the full knowledge that we can say nothing 'definitely' about the late medieval period  )

I didn't say longbowmen were 'peasants', but well trained specialists - even if these specialists made up a significant proportion of any given army of the period. As in most armies, my theory (from a position of blind ignorance) would be that specialist troops are best used to do the job they're trained for.

Rather than the Wellington analogy, perhaps consider any WW2 or modern army... You have gunners, engineers, tank crew, signallers, drivers, medics, etc etc, as well as infantry. The infantry are there to fight. But of course they can all pick up a rifle and bayonet and fight if they need to. That doesn't mean they always will though. They only will if the situation demands it. Maybe this was the case with C15th longbowmen. Or maybe, as you suggest, they were multi-skilled soldiers equally able to shoot well and fight well, switching between roles as required. Or maybe that capability only applied to a proportion of them - the professional soldiers, but not to all.

[Arlequín]

I was being a touch facetious with the Wellington remark, but where evidence is slim, you still have to go with it and you can't whip up an idea in your head and then ask people to prove it wrong; which is essentially what has been done with the whole bills and bows debate.

Certainly nothing is definite, but what evidence we do have all points one way. I do believe, as you say, that medieval soldiers defy classification though and just like today there were multiple roles and they were what they needed to be when they needed to be it. There is even evidence that some few archers became men at arms for a year or two and then were back to being archers after that, we don't know the circumstances of why that was though. 

Certainly it might *sometimes* be the case that 'archer' equalled 'soldier' and I was once pretty sure that was usually the case, as 'billmen' didn't show up anywhere at all. Then I came across some indentures from 1492, which moved away from the usual 'man at arms - archer' format from earlier and neatly divided forces into men at arms, custrells (as their 'seconds'), demi-lances, mounted archers, archers and billmen/halberdiers, and which apart from forces raised in some very poor areas, featured barely any billmen at all. Another (Gilbert Talbot's iirc) stated that if sufficient archers could not be found then billmen could make the numbers up.

It has also been pointed out elsewhere that the archer = soldier idea, or essentially that scribes making rolls were too lazy to write both archers and bills (or whatever) when they were paid the same, doesn't explain why the same thing wasn't done in regard to groups of craftsmen on the same rolls, who were also paid the same, but who are each listed separately by trade. That we also have evidence that archers and other infantry were not paid the same (6d vs 4d), why would they list them together?

The conclusion is that archers actually did just mean archers and not anyone who wasn't a man at arms. This tends to be backed up by indentures which are usually very explicit in terms of who and what was to be provided, like the one in here.

The oft-quoted 'Strickland Indenture' that gives us the 'wargames standard' of equal numbers of both bows and bills in WotR armies, turns out not to be dated to the whatever year of Henry VI's reign, but to that same year of Henry VIII's... a mere hundred years or so beyond, all thanks to a transcription error between VI and VIII . The only clue was that the wording matched that of the later Tudor Era and not the 15th Century.     

In indentures before 1492, you won't find the term 'billmen' anywhere. Not because they were hidden, but because they were not worth employing. Archers were considered a bargain in comparison to men at arms, which is why the ratio of them increases over the century. If archers couldn't fight you would need a lower ratio so as to have fighters still. Even orders to one of the Courtneys, as a commissioner of array stipulated that he was to ensure that each 'archer' could draw his bow and had two sheaves of arrows, not a word about bills, glaives, or anything else.

When we do get to the Wars of the Roses and troops can be raised for free and serve for nothing, then we start to get hints that everyone wasn't an archer. Richard III was pressing smiths to make thousands of 'Welsh Bills'; which of course implies that many of his levies had no weapons of their own. Troops are also being sometimes referred to as 'horsemen' and 'footmen' too, which covers pretty much anyone and everyone. The difference here is that being freed from paying all but your retinues, you can raise pretty much everyone, but most have nothing to fight with.

I wasn't specifically saying you said archers were peasants Richard, but that is the general perception and pretty much appears almost every time the topic comes up. Up here in Cheshire many of the gentry families traditionally served as mounted archers rather than men at arms. Cheshire gentry formed Richard II's archer guard and Sir William Stanley's contingent in 1492 was completely formed from mounted archers, he was the only man at arms. You can be pretty certain that they were well-protected and armed mounted archers though.

Archers were indeed well-trained specialists and like more modern soldiers, the accent may have been on their ability to shoot above all, but 'bayonet drill' wasn't neglected either.

[Charlie_]

I imagine Agincourt might be remembered for very different reasons had the 1,000 or so men at arms in the English line been merely cheered on by the 6,000 or so archers there.

^^^ This!!!!

I was hoping you'd chime in Arlequin, as I really like your ideas on this subject (I've enjoyed reading the articles on your blog recently!).

C'mon chaps, lets get past this stereotype of archers just being peasants with bows.  

Yes!

[Charlie_]

Also, here's a Graham Turner painting I really like of archers getting into close quarters with swords and bucklers.



It's from Osprey's The Fall Of English France 1449-1453.