For the rest the Wars of the Roses show unmistakable signs of the changes that were coming over the art of war.[40] A most important point is the ever increasing employment of artillery in the field and the greater value attached to it. Richard, Duke of York, is said to have had a great train of ordnance and so many as three thousand gunners with him at Dartmouth in 1452. Artillerymen were becoming far more common, and as a natural consequence bade fair to command a smaller price in the wage-market. From this time also it may be said that the duel of artillery tends to become the regular preliminary to a general action. Still more significant is the augmented prominence of the common foot-soldier, known from his peculiar weapon as the bill-man, who now begins to supplant the dismounted man-at-arms in the work of infantry, and as a natural consequence restores the latter to his proper station among the cavalry. New weapons again make their appearance in the hands of the foot-soldier. Both Edward and Warwick introduced hired bands of Burgundian hand-gun men, whereby the English became acquainted with the new arm that was to drive out the famous bow. Again, on the field of Stoke there were seen two thousand tall Germans armed with halberd and pike, under the command of one Martin Schwartz, who fought on the losing side, but stood in their ranks till they were cut down to a man.[41] Lastly, the old order of battle in three lines was becoming rapidly obsolete. At Bosworth both armies were drawn up in a single line, with the cavalry on the wings; and the cavalry itself was beginning at the same time to forsake the formation in column for that in line, or as it was called, en haye.
All these changes were symptoms of a great movement that was passing over all Europe. The art of war, like all the other arts, was undergoing a transformation so fundamental that it has received the name of a renascence. England, cut off by her expulsion out of France from her former contact with continental nations, exhausted by her civil wars, reduced to her true position as a naval power, and above all wedded to the peculiar system which had brought her such success, lagged behind other nations in the path of military reform. The century of the Tudors' reign is for the English army a century of learning, and to understand it aright we must first look abroad to the countries that were before her in the school, and glance at the innovations that were introduced by each of them in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not without such study can we trace to their source innumerable points, great and small, that are observable in our army of to-day, nor grasp to the full the greatness of the English soldiers who, long before the renascence of the art of war, had divined its leading principles, had established for their country noble military traditions, and above all had made it a national principle that the English must always beat the French.
Authorities.—Monstrelet as before is the most important authority for the wars in France. The Wars of the English in France (Rolls Series) are valuable in elucidation. For the rise of the Scots in France M. Francisque Michel's Les Ecossais en France, and Forbes Leith's Scots Men-at-Arms in France. For the Wars of the Roses the sources of information are proverbially meagre, but the material has been worked up with admirable skill by Mr. Oman in his Warwick, to which I am greatly indebted. For the reorganisation of the French Army Daniel's Ancien milice Française may be consulted.
[BOOK II]
[CHAPTER I]
1420.