The longbow had as yet been employed principally in defensive warfare and against an enemy inferior in cavalry to the English. But when Edward III led his invading force into France the conditions of war were entirely changed for the English. Now they were up against a country to be invariably superior in the numbers of their horsemen, so while the tactics of the archer were to remain defensive, they also had to be varied to meet the new threat. But the yeoman with his longbow was soon to find that the charging squadron presented an even better mark for his shaft than the stationary mass of infantry formed by the Scots schiltron. At the beginning of the Hundred Years War, in the early 1340s, the Continental world had not yet learned that it was almost hopeless for cavalry to try to force, in a frontal attack, a position defended by men-at-arms supported on their flank by archers. When the now well-tried technique was used in a battle near Morlaix in 1342, a few years before Crecy, it seems to have taken the French completely by surprise, as it did a short space of four years later on the fatal field of Crecy. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 117 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1971 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com