Medieval Madness (A show idea challenge)

*And four months later...*

Cannon Fodder refers to units and men considered expendable, and is therefore not specifically referencing front line troops as a whole. Usually it seems to relate to troops or units that would be fairly easy to replace, and which are/were used to either wear down an enemy through weight of numbers or get their attention so they miss something you are doing elsewhere - For example getting a forts defenders to concentrate on the men attacking the main gate rather than on the small team of sappers that are about to bring the back wall down.

High quality troops, even if they are standing on the front lines, tend not to be used this way. So you don't usually see cavalry (which were expensive and tended to be filled with the nobility) treated as expendable nor the higher quality and experienced/respected infantry units such as the various Scottish Regiments circa 1800.
Where such units were ordered to attack a superior force it was either a calculated gamble, an emergency or a question of someone somewhere having seriously messed up.

Anyway.

I ran across a reference to the naval battle of Sluys (1340) at the start of the hundred years war, which was one of the last naval battles to be settled entirely by boardings. It was noted in that that the English Archers, who were using long bows, started firing at a range of some 60 yards. This was almost certainly an estimated range - and at sea range is difficult to judge at the best of times by eye. But even accounting for some element of misjudgement it seems that archers were not usually expected to conduct direct fire beyond around 100 yards or so - I somehow doubt that indirect fire would be used against ships, since not only would a large number of shots go straight into the sea but the masts, rigging and sails would provide additional protection.

I found this interesting because of the earlier discussion about the effectiveness of armour against the long bow. As I recall part of the discussion revolved around if troops at Agincourt would have been killed from archery when advancing on the English lines. Or if the primary use at that point would have been to have further tired the French out by forcing them to advance with helmets down and shields up - which probably would not have helped anyone who lost their footing.
If this 60(ish) yard figure is correct then this might be the sort of range at which long bows started becoming really effective against armour, and is certainly a range at which any decent (ie employed) English archer could reasonably expect to be capable of aiming at an individual target.

Agincourt, the Brits had Longbows, the phrench did not.

We had the superior technology.
We also had a bit of history... they knew we was coming.
They were scared of the Brits at that point..


English and Welsh not the Brits, Scotland wasn`t involved, the Auld Alliance was pretty quiet then.

Who? The French?

The French leaders, or at least those present at Agincourt, would have been at least as experienced and skilled as their English opponents. In fact you could make a reasonable argument that individually they were probably more skilled (and certainly more experienced) than the English, due to having spent a lot of their time trying to kill each other.

The problem for the French wasn't poor leadership as such, rather that they had no clear single leader to direct their efforts. Fighting or planning a battle by committee never works out well.

There was no 'alliance' between Scotland and England until 1717, and even before that Scotland was not only a totally separate country. But who's national pass time was to march south for the summer and set fire to as much of Northern England as they could manage*. If anything Scotland was closer to France than to England, although one suspects that was more because the French thought this was a great way to annoy the English than because they actually liked the Scots**.

(*The English national pass time involved going south and beating up the French, or occasionally the Spanish for a change in pace. Of course this was expensive, and like any expensive holiday not something you could do every year, so occasionally going north and beating up the Scots*** had to do. It was in any case good practice, as if you could survive a battle with the Scots the French wouldn't scare you.)

(**All the references I can find to French opinion on the Scots are as far from positive as possible without anyone having been killed. They seem to have regarded the Scots as being one step removed from cavemen, although I'm not clear if that step was forwards or backwards.)

(***Or being beaten up by Scots depending on which side of the boarder you happen to live on,or how close you happen to be to a Scotsman...Or maybe it was a case of marching North and being half-frozen and being beaten up...Or just a matter of making the mistake of eating the local food. Who knows.... )

No, their leadership was divided not inept. They spent far to much time talking about what they should be doing rather than just doing something.

In the case of the archers being moved, had the French been under a single leaders command he would have been able to order the cavalry to charge - which would most likely have wiped out the English Archers and left the rest of the English Army to get crushed by the huge French Army. As it was because they were run by committee they spent so long arguing about if they should charge they never did.

Sorry I should have explained better, the Auld Alliance is a term often used by Scots to refer to a perceived alliance between Scotland and France. How much the French understand this relationship is debatable, they more looked at Scotland sometimes being useful in harassing the north of England.

Has Scotland had any troops at Aguncourt they may well have fought on the French side.

....And that is why they were not there....
The leader of the English army, Henry V, by the time they got to Agincourt, was HUGELY experienced in warfare.
And so were his men....
This was not just one battle, it was the end of a campaign, that hadnt gone to plan exactly, but had gained his men HUGE amounts of experience.
Battle hardened?... these men were hardly at their best form, but still as hard as Steel at that point.

He (Henry) was heading for Calais, had had quite a few skirmishes on the way, and had battle hardened soldiers.
He was faced by the Phrench, under various pomposity levels of leadership, who were so certain of themselves in victory, they didnt get together to plan anything properly, they just assumed, wrongly, it would be a "walk-over".... their 'soldiers' were a lot of farm-boys hastily trained who were riled up by promises of easy victory and that the English would be so out numbered it would probably be hard to find a target to fight....
They actually believed it was all just a show.

The Scots knew this, and stayed away. .....On Purpose.

The English had a battle plan... Plan A, Plan B, all the way to plan Zed, and had actually started planning the huge party in England afterwards, they had good communications, and determination.....
This WOULD be the last battle, because winning here was the final... almost the Cup Final if you will.
They were trying to get Home.... as stated, their target was Calais, they were tired, weary, many were ill, they were trying to get home to recuperate, regroup, and get well again.
But the phrench arrogance though that they were weakened and easy targets.
And the Brits knew the phrench were disorganised.
They actually planned on the phrench being disorganised.
They planned on targeting one of the phrench lords, knowing that if they scared him enough, he would run away and take most of his part of the army with him....(That bit eventually worked, sort of, the boys and men ran whist the knights were slaughtered?...)

What happened is the Brits plans worked, and communication, and the ability to adapt, the Brits seized every chance to gain an advantage.
Henry V was victorious.
The ground was heavy with Mud, which was good for the Brits, as the heavy armour of the phrench knights meant that once of the horse, they got stuck in the mud (Reports of them suffocating in that mud?..) and this kept the phrench at distance, for a while, which is why the English longbow was in favour on the day, the phrench could not charge properly, and the Brits were fighting for their life... they were trying to get Home, to escape, they had no other option, so fought for themselves, for each other, for honour, and the Archers when forced to turn to close combat, had the skills to grab whatever weapon came to hand, and fight as infantry.

The phrench attacked in waves... which gave the Brits chance to deal with each wave as it came and be ready for the next.

Their goal was Calais, and Home... this was their last chance to get home....
One thing the Brits are known for is determination.
We had it in bucket loads that day.

It didnt all go as one huge victory...
The phrench went for a sneak attack to destroy the baggage train, Henry responded in trying to bargain prisoners of the nobility in return for his captured men, no deal, Henry ordered the slaughter of those left injured on the field.

The English lost about 500 men from about 6,000, but the phrench lost thousands......

There are various sites on the web that tell the tale, all in a slightly different way, but the main truth is Henry was trying to get home, with an already weakened army, and this was the last straw....

There is a story about the Swiss. They proudly told (I think it was a Prussian) leader than they could muster a quarter million highly trained riflemen. The Prussian asked what they would do if he sent in half a million men. The rely? 'Shoot twice and go home'.



The Scots stayed away because sending an army to France would have
A: Weakened their defences, probably fatally. A Scots army would have needed to traverse the North Sea to get home, while the English just needed to cross the Channel. Although land transportation was slow, bad weather in the North Sea and unsuitable winds could have trapped a Scottish Army in Northern France for months.

B: Would have been expensive, there were very few real warships at this time (Henry had around five, and those where principally used as merchant ships anyway) and no dedicated transports. In order to get a fleet together to move troops overseas you had to commender them from merchants under the Feudal system - which meant that after two(?) months all costs had to be paid by the crown. For England this wasn't a major issue, as the trip across the channel took a week at most. So even when you consider time to load the troops on board and waiting for a suitable wind they had time to spare.
The Scots however had a much longer voyage, so chances are good that the crown would have ended up having to foot the bill for the ships and probably army - which would have bankrupted the country or at least the King.

C: I'm doubtful in any case that the Scots would have possessed anything like the number or size of ships needed to transport an army. England was in a much better strategic position than Scotland, certainly as far as trade routes are concerned*, which meant that they had a significantly larger merchant fleet and one that possessed bigger ships than the Scotts. Reading between the lines it seems that English ports considered the call up of ships to be mildly inconvenient, but not crippling to trade. I suspect that the Scottish Ports however would have had to send so many ships the result would have brought overseas trade to a near standstill.

(*Trade to Scotland required passing through the Irish Sea or North Sea - both of which not only required sailing past England but through waters renown for bad weather and ship wreaking shorelines. The alternative was to sail up and down the west coast of Ireland and through the North Atlantic - who's weather was quite capable of sinking ships two hundred years later or leading them onto shorelines known for ripping ships apart and inhabitants who did much the same to any survivors.)

In this light if Scotland wanted to aid the French the best way to do so was to do nothing. By keeping their forces where they were they avoided any risks while forcing Henry to keep a significant part of his overall force back home to prevent any chance of a Scottish invasion.

Interestingly this principle of a 'force in being' - meaning that you can tie up a significant part of an opponents military force simply by keeping a force of your own in a position where it can do significant damage if ignored - was often used against England and later Britain for centuries. The German navies surface fleet was built up specifically to do just this in both world wars.