Medieval Warfare: Cavalry, Castles and Crossbows
War as the King’s Business
Edward I fought wars for much of his thirty-five-year reign — against Wales, against Scotland and against France. Medieval warfare was expensive, slow and shaped by the technology of the day. England did not have a standing army. Instead the king summoned a levied army for each campaign, made up of knights, men-at-arms, archers, crossbowmen and foot-soldiers, paid by the Crown only for the days they served. Understanding how these forces fought helps explain why the Welsh wars succeeded but the Scottish wars dragged on without a final victory.
Edward’s armies combined four main groups: heavy cavalry of knights and men-at-arms, mass infantry of foot-soldiers, longbow archers (mainly from south Wales and Cheshire) and crossbowmen. No one group could win alone — the test of a commander was making them work together.
Cavalry: Knights and Men-at-Arms
The most prestigious part of any army was the heavy cavalry. A knight rode a powerful warhorse, wore mail or partial plate armour and carried a lance, sword and shield. Below the knights came the men-at-arms — professional soldiers, similarly equipped, who fought for wages rather than feudal duty. A charge of massed cavalry could shatter an enemy line that lacked discipline. At Falkirk in 1298 it was the cavalry pursuit, after the Welsh archers had broken Wallace’s schiltrons, that decided the battle.
Cavalry had limits. Horses were expensive: a quality warhorse could cost the equivalent of several years’ wages for a foot-soldier. Knights needed grooms, squires and a string of remounts. They were also vulnerable to disciplined infantry on bad ground — as the English would discover at Stirling Bridge in 1297, where the Scots caught the cavalry on a narrow crossing and destroyed it before it could form up.
Infantry, Longbows and Crossbows
The bulk of an Edwardian army was infantry: foot-soldiers raised by commissions of array from the shires and Welsh marches. Their main weapons were spears, short swords and axes. More valuable still were the missile troops. The English longbow, made of yew and roughly six feet long, could be drawn to the ear and could send a heavy arrow through mail at 200 yards. A trained archer could shoot ten or more arrows a minute. Most English longbowmen of Edward’s reign came from south Wales and Cheshire — areas with a deep-rooted bowman tradition.
The crossbow was a horizontal, mechanically-drawn weapon. It was more powerful than the longbow at short range and required less training, but it was slower to reload — perhaps two bolts a minute compared with ten longbow arrows. Edward employed Genoese and Gascon crossbowmen for siegework, where they could shelter behind a wooden shield called a pavise while reloading.
At Falkirk in July 1298 William Wallace formed his Scottish spearmen into four schiltrons — tight defensive circles bristling with twelve-foot spears. The English heavy cavalry could not break them. Edward then ordered his Welsh and English longbow archers forward. Volley after volley fell on the static Scottish formations until the schiltrons disintegrated. Only at this point did the cavalry charge home. Falkirk is often cited as the moment when massed longbow archery became central to English battle tactics — a doctrine that would dominate the Hundred Years War a generation later.
Armour: From Mail to Plate
In the late thirteenth century armour was changing. The standard knightly defence was a long mail hauberk — thousands of riveted iron rings — worn over a padded gambeson. By Edward’s reign this was beginning to be reinforced with plate: rectangular iron plates riveted inside a leather coat (the ‘coat of plates’), then separate metal plates strapped over the shins, knees and elbows. A foot-soldier could rarely afford much more than a padded jack and a simple iron helmet. The growing weight of plate would, over the next century, change cavalry tactics across Europe.
Siege Warfare
Most medieval campaigns were sieges, not battles. A castle could deny an enemy a region until it was taken. Edward’s armies used four main siege techniques. Mining meant tunnelling under a wall, propping the tunnel with timber, then burning the props so the wall collapsed. Sapping picked away at the masonry under cover of wooden screens. Scaling used ladders and movable wooden towers to attack the walls directly. Bombardment used stone-throwing engines: the trebuchet, powered by a heavy counterweight, and the smaller mangonel, powered by twisted rope.
Edward took these tools to a new scale. At Stirling Castle in 1304 he had a giant trebuchet called ‘Warwolf’ built on the spot; the garrison surrendered before it was even fired, but Edward insisted on a demonstration anyway. A siege ended only when defenders ran out of food, surrendered to spare their lives, or had a breach forced. The longer the siege, the higher the cost in money, men and time — reasons why Edward built ring after ring of stone castles in Wales rather than fight repeated field campaigns.
Edwardian siege warfare used four main techniques: mining (tunnelling and burning), sapping (cutting away masonry), scaling (ladders and towers) and bombardment (trebuchets and mangonels). Most campaigns were sieges, not battles, and the cost of a long siege explains why Edward’s castle programme aimed to make Welsh resistance impossible.