But there is also a marked distinction between the conduct of the battles of the houses of York and Lancaster, and those of the Stuarts and the Parliament of England in the next civil war. Up to Bosworth, armies raised at a convenient feudal centre advanced, when “mobilised,” against another army collected in a similar way at another place convenient for the faction to which it belonged. They met as soon as they were ready. They selected no “position for defence,” a primary tactical law for a weaker force, which by so doing enlisted on its side the elements afforded by such a selection. This was chiefly due to the fact that the bulk of each army was still cavalry, but the other “arms” were increasing in number and value, though still not fully appreciated by the mounted men.
The two battles of St. Albans and the fight at Barnet fully show this. In both of the former the combatants met en plein face. The one was making for London, the other stopped him. In the second battle the Lancastrians tried to check the opponent, and failed in preventing his advance, both armies in which mounted troops predominated. There was nothing but a mutual offensive, the system that was at the basis of feudal tactics, and which crystallised in the personal battle between knight and knight in the lists. Strategy in its best sense was not, neither were tactics, for tactics mean the development of a means of equalising the deficiency of one side in numbers, arms, or morale.
So long as a battle depended on personal prowess, the personal fighting power, or even the personal domestic influence of a leader, so long were battles often a mere matter of chance. When Warwick fell, Barnet was lost. The next civil war changed this: neither the death of Falkland nor that of Carnarvon at Newbury affected the fight seriously in one single degree. Finally, as a rule throughout all these days armies moved in order to subsist, and supply trains were rare. Thus true strategy was barely in existence yet, but shock tactics in battle were just beginning to give way to the fire tactics of bow and musket.
As regards supplies in the Wars of the Roses, it must be remembered that, as in later times, notoriously in the Peninsula, when the armies had at times to collect the enemy’s shot and bullets, the weapons of either side were interchangeable.
Doubtless at certain places—castles or fortresses—the actual munitions were stored. To these the armies must have either periodically gone to refit, or what answered to convoys, conveying absolutely necessary warlike stores, must have been formed for the specific purpose of replenishing the locally exhausted stores. All that was really required for the purposes of such wars must have been carried on the persons of the combatants, as seems generally to have been the case, or even on pack animals or country carts. The state of the roads and both their poverty and paucity must have rendered regular organised supply trains impracticable. Similarly as regards food supplies little could have been carried. Like the French about 1811 and 1812, necessity must have rendered the soldiers hardy and self-dependent, though of course at the cost of the civil population. Thus it is said of the French troops in 1811 that they “were trained to reap the standing corn, and grind it by portable mills into flour; if green, they mowed it down with equal dexterity for their horses; if reaped (and hidden away by the inhabitants), they forced it from the peasants’ place of concealment, by placing the bayonet to their throats.” And Wellington himself writes, that “the French armies in Spain have never had any secure communications beyond the ground which they occupy; and provided the enemy opposed to them is not too strong for them, they are indifferent in respect to the quarter from which their operations are directed, or upon which side they carry them on.”
And, later, the French “live by the authorised and regular plunder of the country if any should remain; they suffer labour, hardships, and privations every day; they go on without pay, provisions, money, or anything, but they lose in consequence half their army in every campaign.” This accounts for the enormous losses of the rank and file in the early days of the nineteenth century, while the losses in the fifteenth century, with little or no medical or surgical knowledge for the aid of sick and wounded, can only be surmised.
History, military history especially, always repeats itself in pointing out the necessary results of such unsystematically organised systems.
Half Armour (Circa 1640).