To the memorable Scottish victory Mr. Oman, as we might expect, devotes special attention (pp. 570–579). He attributes “the most lamentable defeat which an English army ever suffered” to two fatal errors, of which one “was the crowding such a vast army on to a front of no more than two thousand yards” (p. 579). His argument, in detail, is this:
Two thousand yards of frontage only affords comfortable space for 1,500 horsemen or 3,000 foot-soldiers abreast. This was well enough for the main line of the Scottish host, formed in three battles of perhaps 25,000 men in all, i.e. eight or nine deep in continuous line. But, allowing for the greater space required for the cavalry, the English were far too many for such a front, with the ten thousand horse and 50,000 or 60,000 foot which they may have mustered.
The result of this fact was that from the very beginning of the battle the English were crowded and crushed together and wholly unable to manœuvre (p. 575).
In his first work (1885) Mr. Oman had adopted “100,000 men” as the number of Edward’s host; in 1895 it had become “an army that is rated at nearly 100,000 men by the chronicler.”[589] In 1898 we learn that “the estimate of a hundred thousand men, which the Scottish chroniclers give, is no doubt exaggerated, but that the force was very large is shown by the genuine details which have come down to us” (p. 573). These “genuine details” prove to be the figures in the ‘Foedera,’ on which Mr. Bain relied. Mr. Oman arrives at his figures thus:
Edward II. had brought a vast host with him.... There have been preserved of the orders which Edward sent out for the raising of this army only those addressed to the sheriffs of twelve English counties, seven Marcher barons, and the Justices of North and South Wales. Yet these account for twenty-one thousand five hundred men, though they do not include the figures of any of the more populous shires, such as Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, or Middlesex. The whole must have amounted to more than 50,000 men (p. 573).
To the numbers of Edward’s host he attaches so great an importance that he gives the details, from Rymer, in a note. I make the total, myself, to be 21,540.[590] It is Mr. Oman’s extraordinary delusion that the other English counties were similarly called on for troops, but that the orders have not been “preserved.” On the strength of this illusion alone he adds some 30,000 men to the English host! A glance at Rymer’s list, as given in his own pages, is sufficient to dispel that illusion. As Mr. Bain correctly implies, the counties called on for troops form a compact group, of which Warwick was the southernmost. Moreover, even within that group, the southern counties were evidently called on for much less than the northernmost, Warwick and Leicester only sending 500 men, while Northumberland and Durham were called on to supply 4,000, as was also Yorkshire. We have only to turn to the ‘Rotuli Scotiæ’[591] for 1314 to learn that the writs originally issued (i.e. in March) for the Bannockburn campaign summoned no more than 6,500 men, and these from the counties “beyond Trent” alone.[592] As the peril increased subsequent writs called for a further 6,000 men from these counties, and extended the net so as to obtain 3,000 from Lincolnshire, 500 from Warwickshire and Leicestershire, and 500 from Lancashire (previously omitted); this, with 4,940 men from Wales and its marches, made up the total.
When Edward III. arrayed his host, twenty-five years later, for the French war, he only asked for 500 foot from Northumberland (as against 2,500), and 1,000 from Yorkshire, but from Warwickshire with Leicestershire he exacted 480. These figures speak for themselves. Any one of ordinary intelligence can see that the forces on these two occasions were raised on entirely different principles, Northumberland being called on for five times as many men in 1314 as in 1339, while Warwickshire and Leicester supplied almost as many in the latter as in the former year. And yet Mr. Oman actually makes the comparison himself (p. 593), and prints the numbers in detail for both occasions without any comprehension that this was so. Indeed, he bases on his misapprehension a theory that as, at the later date (1339), the quotas were never more than a third of those demanded for Bannockburn (1314), a comparatively picked force was secured.
We note that the Commissions of Array in the latter year were directed to levy only from about one-third to one-fifth of the numbers which the sheriffs had been told to provide in the former year. They were, of course, individually better in proportion to the greater care which could be taken in selecting them.[593]
We have seen that, on the contrary, in Warwickshire and Leicestershire, the number summoned was almost the same, and that the above theory is, therefore, another delusion. In 1339 the proportion varied from 20 per cent. to 96 per cent. of the numbers summoned in 1314, and did so, as we have seen, on a geographical system. Mr. Oman bases his above assertion on a note in which four lines contain four direct mistakes. It asserts that Yorkshire sent “six thousand,” Lincolnshire “four thousand,” Warwick “five hundred,” and Leicester “five hundred,” in 1314, when the right numbers, as given by himself on page 573 of the same volume, were: Yorkshire four thousand, Lincolnshire three thousand, and Warwick and Leicester together five hundred. The result of this astounding inaccuracy is that he fails to understand the system of these levies in the least.
It is, no doubt, surprising that, after years of study, a writer should produce a work intended to constitute a standard authority on mediæval warfare, in which he has not even grasped so elementary a fact as the raising of English armies, in the 14th century, on geographical principles, and should consequently invent an imaginary host of nearly 30,000 men. Precisely as in 1314, the bulk of the foot for the Scottish expedition were raised from the Northern counties, so in 1345, for the contemplated French expedition, it was from the counties south of the Trent that the infantry (archers) was raised.[594] But it is even more surprising that he should substitute for this system a theory, based on the misquotation of his own figures alone, that, in 1339, we meet with a new system of summoning a comparatively small quota of picked men. It is but a further instance of his grievous lack of accuracy that on page 599 he renders the “homines armati”[595] summoned from the towns as “seventeen hundred archers,” although he prints from Rymer, a few pages earlier, the numbers of the foot summoned in 1339, of whom half are distinguished as archers and half as “armati.”