OLD DUFFER'S
BOOK CORNER

Infantry Warfare In The
Early 14th Century

Infantry Warfare In The Early 14th Century (Kelly DeVries for Boydell)

Snappy title hein? Yes, its Medieval Month here at Birch Bottom (Ancestral Home of the Duffers). Kelly (eldest child of the House Harkonnen Mentat as many of you will know) is not exactly an exciting writer, he has decided that repetition of detail from one battle after another is the best policy and then he confronts us with his theory at the end. This can mean that one drops into confusion with much of the early stuff as the band plays "The World Turned Upside Down".

It also means that you look at each battle on its own merits and its own events. Furthermore it also allows DeVries the chance to discuss the different views of the relevant chronicles. One gets sixteen battles: Courtrai, Arques, Mons-en-Pévèle, Loudon Hill, Kephissos, Bannockburn, Boroughbridge, Cassel, Dupplin Moor, Halidon Hill, Laupen, Morlaix, Staveren, Vottem, Crecy and Neville's Cross (plus the ambushes of Morgarten, Auberoche, and La-Roche-Derrien). In nearly all of those battles the winning side was on foot (infantry for this purpose even if mounted infantry elsewhere) yet this is, so the Clever Dicks tell us, The Age of Chivalry.

But the real common thread is not that the winner is on foot, but that the winner is the side that obliges the other to attack. The winner usually inhabits the field before the loser gets there, he often prepares the field with traps and canalising measures, he always maintains the better order.

The loser is usually the side that loses its composure first and advances to the attack (at Cassel Philip VI - later defeated at Crecy and therefore a Stupid Aristo- induced the Flemish foot to charge him and won the battle, but of course Al Nofi would tell you that this is impossible). The loss of composure often occurs amongst the chivalry affronted by these ghastly proles in serried ranks assembled. Often but not always. To DeVries the English longbow is not the "fifteen rounds rapid" killing machine but a form of canalising fire from which men flinch or delay and its real use is not in killing men but in disordering the attacks (by killing horses for example).

Is the message therefore Attacking Bad, Defending Good? It probably is, although to tidy things up DeVries should have looked at a win for the Attackers such as Falkirk where much of what he proposes is shown not to be of global application. It was possible to buck the trend. (Consider the Swiss contribution to warfare - an attacking infantry or such violence and speed that they could defeat combined-arms forces).

It all returns to the fact that simulating battles is often simulating the last act of a three act play, it is what happens before the battle that is important in determining who is left with no option but to attack. Rather as in Roman warfare many a campaign was decided by the careful outflanking of camps and cutting them off from supplies so that the losers withdrew rather than fight a losing battle. Indeed read with a different mind-set I am reminded of Napoleonic warfare, cavalry can only win if they get lucky, catch a flank, or catch the infantry moving. Not quite the panzers of the Middle Ages.

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© Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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