The sight of the Black Prince’s banner disappearing down into the valley on the right rear, rightly decided the French vanguard that their enemy had determined upon a retreat, and had actually begun it. The force in front of them, behind the hedge, large as it was, they rightly conceived to be the rearguard left to protect that retreat. They determined to attack at once; and the nature of the attack, which had carefully been planned beforehand under the advice of Douglas, the Scotchman who was fighting on King John’s side, and who had experience of the new Plantagenet tactics, must next be grasped.
The experience and the memory of Crécy ten years before had left with the Valois a clear though very general idea that the novel and overwhelming superiority of the English long-bow could not be met by the old-fashioned dense feudal cavalry charge. Any attempt to attack the front of a line sufficiently defended by long-bowmen in this fashion meant disaster, many horses would be shot long before their riders could come within lance thrust, the dense packed line of feudal knights, thousands in number, would be thrown into confusion by the maddened and fallen animals, the weight of the remainder as they pressed forward would only add to that confusion, and the first “battle,” delivering the regular traditional first-charge with which every old feudal battle had opened, would in a few minutes degenerate into a wild obstacle of welter and carnage stretched in front of the defensive line, and preventing anything behind them from coming up.
It was to avoid misfortune of this kind that the vanguard of which I have spoken was formed. Its orders were these:—The picked three hundred knights of that vanguard were to ride straight at the English archers, and almost certainly to sacrifice themselves in so doing. But as their numbers were few, their fall would not obstruct what was to follow. It was their business in this immolation of their bodies to make it possible for the mass of infantry, especially those armed with missile weapons, to come close in behind and tackle the English line. That infantry, aided by the mounted German mercenaries and meeting missile with missile by getting hand to hand with the English bowmen at last, would prevent those English bowmen from effective action against the next phase of the offensive. This next phase was to be the advance of the first “battle,” that of the Dauphin, the Duke of Normandy. His men-at-arms were to go forward dismounted, and to close with the whole English line while its most dangerous portion, the bowmen, were still hampered by the close pressure of the vanguard.
The plan thus ordered by the French king at the advice of his Scotch lieutenant was not so incompetent as the results have led some historians to judge. It suffered from four misconceptions; but of these one was not the fault of the French commander, while the other three could only have been avoided by a thorough knowledge of the new Plantagenet tactics, which had not yet been grasped in the entirety of their consequences even by those who had invented them.
The four misconceptions were:—
(1) The idea that the attack would only have to meet the force immediately in front of it, behind the hedge. This was a capital error, for, as we shall see, Warwick with his men escorting the waggons came back in time to take a decisive part in the first phase of the action. But it was not an error which anyone on the French side could have foreseen; Warwick’s men having disappeared down the slope of the hill towards the ford before the French vanguard caught its first sight of the enemy.
(2) The underrating of the obstacle afforded by the vineyard in front of the English line, and the consequent “bunching” of the attack on to the lane which traversed that vineyard. Probably the archers themselves did not know what an extraordinarily lucky accidental defence the vineyard provided for their special weapon. It was exactly suited to giving them the maximum effect of arrow-fire compatible with the maximum hindrance to an advancing enemy.
(3) The French king and his advisers had not yet grasped—nor did anyone in Europe for some time to come—the remarkable superiority of the long-bow over the cross-bow. Just so modern Europe, and particularly modern Prussia, with all its minute observation and record, failed for ten good years to understand that rate of delivery and not range is what turns the scale with modern artillery. The cross-bow shot an uglier missile, inflicted a nastier wound, was more feared by the man in danger of that wound than the long-bow was. In range the two weapons might be regarded as nearly equal, save for this deciding difference, that the trained long-bowman could always count upon his maximum range, whereas the cross-bow varied, as a machine always will, with conditions independent of the human will behind it. You could not extend its pull to suit a damp string, for instance, and if your ratchet caught, or your trigger jammed, the complicated thing held you up; but delivery from the long-bow was, from the hands of the strong and trained man, the simplest and most calculable of shots, variable to every condition of the moment. Its elasticity of aim was far superior, and, most important of all, its rate of fire was something like three to one of the arbalest.
(4) Douglas and the French king rightly decided that horses were so vulnerable to the long-bow as to prevent a mounted charge from having a chance of success, if it were undertaken in a great mass. They decided, upon that account, to dismount their men-at-arms, and to attack on foot. But what they did not allow for was the effect of the new armour upon foot tactics of that kind. It was one thing for a line holding the defensive, and not compelled to any forward movement, to dismount its armoured knights and bid them await an attack. It was quite another thing for such armoured knights to have to make a forward movement of half a mile or more on foot, and to engage with the sword or the shortened lance at the end of it. Armour was at that moment in transition. To the old suit of chain mail, itself quite ponderous enough to burden a man on foot, there had been added in that generation plate in various forms. Everyone had plate armour at least upon the elbows, knees, and shoulders, many had it upon all the front of the legs and all the front of the arms, some had adopted it as a complete covering; and to go on foot thus loaded over open fields for the matter of eight hundred yards was to be exhausted before contact came. But of this men could not judge so early in the development of the new tactics. They saw that if they were to attack the bowmen successfully they must do so on foot, and they had not appreciated how ill-suited the armoured man of the time was for an unmounted offensive, however well he might serve in a defensive “wall.”
These four misconceptions between them determined all that was to follow.