Medieval warfare: knights, archers and the feudal army c1250–c1500
An Army Built on Land and Loyalty
Between c1250 and c1500 the English army was not a paid, full-time force. It was a feudal host — a temporary army summoned by the king from his lords, who in turn brought their tenants. Society and command were one and the same: the king led the great lords, the lords led the knights, and the knights led the foot soldiers from their estates. Knight service meant that a lord who held land from the king owed roughly 40 days of military service each year — on horseback, fully armed.
A medieval English army therefore had three layers. At the top sat the mounted knight, the most expensive and prestigious soldier on the field. Below him stood the foot infantry — spearmen and men-at-arms drawn from yeomen and tenants. And from the late thirteenth century, archers became the third pillar, as kings realised that ranged firepower could decide a battle before the cavalry charged.
A medieval English army was raised through feudal duty: the king summoned lords, who brought knights, who brought their tenants. The three main components were the mounted knight, the infantry and the archer.
The Mounted Knight — and Why He Started to Decline
A fully equipped knight cost as much as a small village. He needed mail armour (later plate), a war horse, lance, sword and a long apprenticeship. On the battlefield he charged shoulder-to-shoulder, hoping to break the enemy line by sheer weight and shock. Against unprepared infantry this was devastating. Against well-organised foot soldiers with the right weapons, it was suicidal.
At Falkirk in 1298, Scottish foot soldiers formed schiltrons — tight rings of pike-points like a hedgehog — and English knights could not break them. The ring was eventually destroyed not by horsemen but by English longbowmen who shot the schiltrons apart from a safe distance. The same pattern was repeated at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415): mounted French knights charged across muddy ground into a wall of arrows. The mounted knight remained socially dominant, but militarily he was already in retreat.
The Longbow Revolution
The longbow was around six feet tall and required a draw weight of 100–150 lb — far heavier than a modern hunting bow. A trained archer could shoot ten or twelve arrows a minute and reach 250 yards. Edward III made longbow practice compulsory by law, and Sunday archery became a legal obligation in every village. By Agincourt (1415), perhaps 80% of an English army was longbowmen.
The longbow was decisive because it was cheap, fast and used by men of low status. A peasant with two pence worth of yew and a quiver could kill a knight worth two hundred pounds. This challenged the social logic of the feudal host, where battlefield power was supposed to mirror landowning rank. Wars now turned on what large numbers of trained commoners could do.
Tudor and Victorian writers loved the story of plucky English archers single-handedly destroying French chivalry. Modern scholars (Anne Curry of Southampton, the Royal Armouries) point out that the longbow worked alongside funnel terrain, deep mud, French command failures and Henry V’s decision to fight on a narrow front between two woods. The longbow was crucial — but it was one factor among several. The strongest answers weigh weapons against terrain and leadership rather than crediting one cause alone.
Schiltrons, Pikes and Other Foot Formations
The schiltron was a Scottish answer to mounted knights, but it was not the only foot formation that mattered. The men-at-arms — the heavily armoured swordsmen of knightly rank — increasingly fought dismounted. At Agincourt the English knights got off their horses, drove sharpened stakes into the ground and stood with the archers. The horseback charge was becoming an option, not the default.
Gunpowder Arrives
From the early fourteenth century, English armies used gunpowder in primitive cannon. Edward III deployed small bombards at Crécy in 1346. By the fifteenth century, large siege guns were knocking down castle walls that had stood for centuries. At the siege of Constantinople (1453), Ottoman cannon ended the medieval city defence. In England, Henry VIII’s gun foundries laid the basis of artillery that would change war for good in the next century.
Cannon did not yet dominate the open battlefield — they were slow, heavy and unreliable in 1400. But they ended the supremacy of the high stone wall, which had defined siege warfare for a thousand years. Combined with the longbow, gunpowder squeezed the mounted knight from two sides: cheap missile troops broke up cavalry charges, and cannon broke the castle that had been the knight’s refuge.
Students writing about the Western Front sometimes call trench warfare an invention of the twentieth century. The basic ideas — ditches, earthworks, layered defensive lines — are far older. Castle ditches, the prepared ground at Agincourt, and later the field fortifications of the New Model Army all use the same logic. What changed in 1914 was the machine gun, the artillery shell and the railway, not the digging. Across this whole unit you should look for continuity in tactics even when weapons change.
By 1500 the longbow had broken the mounted knight on the battlefield, and gunpowder cannon had begun to break the castle walls he sheltered behind. Both weapons let trained commoners challenge a noble warrior class.