Sir John Hawkwood and English Longbowmen, Hundred Years War (MED0011)

English men-at-arms and longbowmen behind the stakes

Four English knights — Sir Gilbert Umfraville, Sir John Hawkwood, Sir Thomas de Ferrers and Sir Thomas de Holand — with longbowmen shooting from behind a line of sharpened stakes. It is the tactical system that made English armies dangerous in France for a century, and it is all in one frame: dismounted armoured men holding the line, archers on the flank, and the hedge of stakes that made cavalry useless.

Why the stakes are the centre of the picture

An archer caught in the open by armoured horsemen is a dead man. The answer was a line of sharpened poles, cut on the march and planted at an angle towards the enemy: nothing a horse will run onto. Once the stakes were in, the archers could shoot standing, and the whole French problem became how to reach men who could not be charged.

The longbow was a social fact before it was a weapon

A war bow needed a lifetime of practice — the draw weights involved deformed the skeletons of the men who used them, which is how archaeologists identify archers in mass graves. That kind of skill cannot be raised in a season. It existed because English law required practice at the butts, and because the yeoman class that supplied the archers had the standing to be trusted with weapons. No continental kingdom reproduced it, which is why the longbow stayed English.

Knights who fought on foot

The men-at-arms here are in full plate but standing in the line, not mounted. Dismounting the nobility was the second half of the system: it stiffened the position the archers were shooting from, and it removed the temptation to charge. Plate of this period was proof against most arrows at range — the archers were not there to kill the knights, but to break up the attack before it arrived.

Sir John Hawkwood, the one who left

John Hawkwood is the name in this group that outgrew the Hundred Years War. After the peace of Brétigny in 1360 he took his men to Italy and spent thirty years selling war to Pisa, Milan, the Papacy and finally Florence, which buried him in its cathedral and had Paolo Uccello paint his equestrian monument there in 1436. In Italy he is Giovanni Acuto, and he is remembered far better than at home.

Heraldry as identification

The surcoats and shields are not decoration. In a press of identically armoured men the coat of arms was the only way to tell who was who — whom to protect, and whom to take alive for ransom. Each of the four knights here is identified by his arms alone, which is also how Giuseppe Rava reconstructs them: from rolls of arms, not from portraits that do not exist.