wars of the Roses

[barry carter]

It is more historically accurate to field mixed units of Bill and Bowmen rather than seperate units of each. Discuss!

[Erpingham]

What do you mean by a mixed unit?  One with archers and bills physically mixed together or a unit with separate sub groups of archers and bills?

[barry carter]

Therein lies one of the (many) problems - a paucity of hard information! There are inferences of inter-arms co-operation throughout the Middle  Ages but for England in the second half of the fifteenth century?

BC.

[Patrick Waterson]

Just to give us (I hope) a starting-point, archers really need to be in one of two basic configurations to deliver a convincing weight of arrow-power.

1) In a bunch by themselves, or

2) In the rear ranks of a 'mixed' formation.

I would favour 1) for Wars of the Roses archers for command reasons - Fauconberg at Towton seems to have utilised the Yorkist archers as a single contingent for shooting and had them move together on command.  Since from their positioning at extreme range they would perforce have been the foremost troops in the Yorkist army they are not back-rankers, which would exclude 2) as a possibility, at least for this battle.

If the Yorkists at Towton were using a standard deployment rather than an idiosyncratic one (this would seem to be the case as the Lancastrians also had their archers foremost) then this leads me to conjecture that the basic infantry deployment would have been a line of archers (several men deep) with a line of billmen behind them.

(Nice Towton Wikipedia article here: http://uk.ask.com/wiki/Battle_of_Towton)

This in turn leads to the supposition that once the archers had shot their shafts, or the enemy advanced close enough to be worrying, or both, the archers would filter back through the billmen (shades of Roman line relief!) who would prepare to take up the action.  This would safeguard the archers both from 'Patay syndrome' in which unprotected archers could be ridden down and from being caught in an unfavourable melee by enemy infantry.

Patrick

[Erpingham]

Thank you Patrick.  Personally, I'm not convinced by mixed bow/bill units in WoTR, although they are very fashionable in some rules.  There are, AFAIK, two pieces of evidence for mixing.  In 1486, an English force in Grenada formed up with men-at-arms in front, archers behind and they operated together.  They were, however, assaulting a fortification at the time.  In 1487, the royalists draw up "each bow with a bill at his back".  This has been interpreted as a mixed formation but may mean the archers stood in front of the billmen.  We can add a little burgundian evidence.  The 1465 engraving by Master WA shows a line of archers stood in front of a row of men with polearms.  Also the 1473 Ordnance has drill for archers shooting from behind a line of kneeling pikemen.  Only the latter clearly has two troop types mixed together.  The others, however, can be interpretted as units with separate sub-units of close-combat troops  and archers.  Set against this, there is the apparent English practice either side of the WoTR to use archers at the battle/ward level in a pitched battle, as in the Towton example quoted.

[barry carter]

I agree. Your reasoning makes absolute sense but the obvious problem is proving it. Contempory evidence from Charles the Bolds army shows archers co-operating with pikemen  and  we see the mid-Tudor army deployed so that the pikes support the shot (see the Society  for Renaissance Studies Occasional Papers No.5). There is no reason why a Wars of the Roses army would not operate in a similer fashion but..............

BC.

[Erpingham]

Not read the occassional paper but I would suggest that mid-Tudor organisation is following continental trends in creating regiments with pike and bill centres with "sleeves" of longbow and arquebus shot.  In the early Tudor period, they are still medieval, with large battles of close combat foot, with bows to the front and flanks, like they were in the HYW and, I would suggest, were in the WoTR

[barry carter]

I quite agree. However it does show developing trends and I suspect that no one awoke one early morning in fourteenwhenever, rubbed their bleary eyes and broke into a great grin because they realized that, at last, it was the Renaissance.

BC.

[Erpingham]

I quite agree. However it does show developing trends and I suspect that no one awoke one early morning in fourteenwhenever, rubbed their bleary eyes and broke into a great grin because they realized that, at last, it was the Renaissance.

BC.

True enough but there must come a point where we say (looking back) "this isn't medieval warfare anymore". Personally, I'm fairly happy with a hazy period from about 1470-1520 when this takes place.  Traditional historical markers for the end of the Middle Ages (like Columbus 1492) don't fit the history of warfare particularly well. Battles like Fornovo 1495, Hemmingstedt 1500, Knockdoe 1504, Flodden 1513 are pretty medieval IMO.

[barry carter]

True enough. Giovacchino da Coniano, sergeant major of the Italian troops fighting for the English in the mid sixteenth century tells us that English shot formed up behind the pikes and were trained to pass through the ranks of pikes to engage the enemy. When they fell back behind the pikes, the pikemen were trained to stoop so the shot could fire over them. This sounds similer to the training in the Burgundian army in the 1470s.

[Erpingham]

This would be the late 1540s.  We would need to find some string of continuity in those 70 years and somewhere in that string show the tactic being familiar to English troops. Otherwise the tactic could simply be a novelty experiment with how you mixed close-order foot and shot to best effect and the similarity to the Burgundian model (which, in fact, seems to be limited to the pikemen kneeling) is a co-incidence.

[barry carter]

Exactly. You pinpoint the problem - finding the contemporary evidence. I haven't come across anything so far. I was rather hopeing that someone else had!

BC.

[Patrick Waterson]

With all due respect to our sources, I rather suspect that if they had that kind of proof we would not be having this kind of conversation.    It seems to me that we are largely limited to a combination of extrapolation, inference and Occam's Razor to streamline what could have happened and see how the fragments of evidence we have match (or do not match) the idea we have in mind.

Given this, we can posit a pattern of separate lines of archers (in front) and billmen (behind) gradually leading to closer integration (e.g. the 1473 pike-and-archer formation - one wonders whether the Earl of Oxford would have used this at Stoke - and the Burgundian systems or attempts at same) and also away from integrated systems when using comparatively raw troops who worked better as two separate lines than as integrated mixed units.

Complicating the issue is the tendency for English armies to dwindle to vanishing point between wars and then turn up in a mix of retinue, array and occasional mercenary contingents all of which had different levels of proficiency which may have been reflected in simpler or more finely-tuned battlefield systems.

Having said all this brings us no nearer proof, but at least we should be able to narrow the field down to possibilities that match such evidence as we have.

Patrick

[Erpingham]

It is interesting if you read the occassional paper Barry refers to (tracked it down on the internet - thanks for the tip Barry), it is in the context that the English haven't got a system of drill like other nations for training their militia and, importantly, their militia captains.  So I think Patrick's comment about various capacities of different troop types is very pertinent.

I'm not convinced the English will have used Burgundian tactics at Stoke (or rather, this particular tactic).  Very few of the English in the Burgundian army of 1473 were foot archers in the ordnance companies who had to practice this tactic (they were mainly mounted archer units, IIRC), so not many men are likely to have been aware of it. 

Having been thinking about this abit, partly provoked by reading that occassional paper.  The mid-sixteenth century technique seems to have been to draw up a company in a certain way.  If you had multiple companies, you drew them up the same way.  So a single company put its skirmish screen out, and generally surrounded its pike and bills with its shot.  Put three companies together and they formed one body of pike and bills surrounded by shot.  If we look at English deployments in the HYW, they also exhibit scaleability.  Put the men-at-arms in the middle, wings of archers, sometimes a body of archers forward.  If you had enough men, you could have three battles arrayed like this.  I suspect WoTR deployment was the same - in a small action the archers and men-at-arms /bills fought in close concert (see the Granada incident above) but, when you scaled up, you concentrated your archers and bills separately.

[barry carter]

I think that, to date, we have all reached the same or very similer impressions of how the armies of The Wars of the Roses may have arranged themselves. By the way, it is worth reading "Decisive Battles of the English civil war" by Malcolm Wanklyn (Pen and Sword 2006) for it's approach as to how to treat sources. It makes life just so much more difficult!

BC.