The Archer's War: Exciting good read - adventure fiction about fighting and combat during medieval times in feudal England with archers, longbows, knights, ... (The Company of English Archers Book 4) (7 page)

       Martin Archer, the sergeant in command at Launceston, is not happy about losing most of his best men and all six of his horses, horse carts, and plows.  But he understands, at least I think he understands, why it is necessary. 

       If Cornell comes Martin will bar the gate and raise the drawbridge with enough supplies to last a year or more.  Martin and his men should be safe so long as he does not do something dumb such as making a sortie or being gulled into opening the gate or forgetting to block and keep a guard on the mine tunnel – things which I talk to Martin and his second about and absolutely forbid them from doing.

       I make quite a point of taking Martin and Guy from Ipswich, the archer who is Martin’s second now that Angelo Priestly is the boys’ tutor, to the secret mine tunnel and telling them how to defend it and use it.  Among other things, I tell them to move some of the village pigs into the little pilgrims’ shrine where the tunnel come out - and let the pig droppings pile up so that no one will go in and find the tunnel entrance. 

      
They can dig out the blockage I told them to put in the tunnel and push the pig shite in the shrine aside if they ever need to use the old mine tunnel to escape.

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       Intense days follow my return from Trematon and Launceston.  The men and wagons and plows I required of them are now at Restormel along with more and more supplies so it can withstand a long siege. No longer are the men practicing archery and walking together part of the day and spending the other part working on the two cogs we have under construction or whatever else they’re told.  Now it’s all training and weapons preparation with every man assigned a place in our battle formation.

       Our forces are constantly getting stronger.  Horses and men are coming in from all over the county and galleys and cogs with new recruits, including a number of archers with long bows and crossbows, have arrived from Cardiff and London - and the galleys that brought them have turned around and gone right back to get more. 

       There have also been a number of “walk-ins,” including a couple of men who are so starved they are almost dead by the time they arrive.  And, of course, the lure of food and coins has brought many of the local men, mostly serfs and farm laborers, into our camp to sign on as fetchers and carriers and to work in the smithy making pike blades and arrowheads.  Several of them, men who seem to have strong arms, make their marks to be apprentice archers.

       It’s all hands on deck as the excitement and anxiety about a being on the receiving end of a possible attack suddenly seems to grip everyone. 

       Thomas is still in London trying to hire mercenaries and recruit archers but Peter Sergeant and Evan are back and we seem to be making good progress: sacks of grain and other foodstuffs are pouring into Restormel’s siege reserves in response to the generous coins we are offering in payment.

      Others are useful as well - the shipwrights have turned their wood turning talents to the making of pike staffs; and the local women, such as they are, are helping with the fletching of arrows and the increased cooking required for our additional men. 

       In a nutshell, our capacity to wage war is rapidly increasing.  Even Helen is helping tie goose feathers on arrows under the watchful and all too admiring eye of old Issac, our head fletcher. 

      
I don’t trust that old man; he’d hump a frog if it stopped jumping.

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       Rain or shine every day starts right after dawn with two or three hours of battle practice for everyone including even the newest of our recruits and all the helpers and fetchers.  My personal fetcher and helper, Peter Sergeant, and I are usually there waiting for them when they begin to assemble.  Peter did well in London according to the parchment message I received from Thomas and he is now one of our master sergeants and my principal assistant. 

      
Roger the miner from Yorkshire replaced Peter in London as Thomas’s second; Peter says he thinks Roger is quite reliable.

       Our battle practice conforms to the way Henry, the master sergeant of our archers, trains our men to fight on our Cyprus training field.  It starts when a horn blows to call the men into their assigned positions around a chosen man carrying the flag of one of our three battle companies.

       Each of the three master sergeants commanding the companies is a steady English or Welsh archer trained by Henry in Cyprus and a veteran of either Trematon or Nicosia or both. Inevitably each shouts and rages as he works to get his men properly positioned. 

       When they finish, the men in each of the company’s eleven-man squads are stand in a file in a straight line from front to back. 

       Standing in the first three place in each file are the shield and arrow carrying pike men from among our steadiest non-archers.  The three pike men are followed in the line by four or five archers. The archers, in turn are followed by three or four fetchers and carriers with extra arrows slung over their shoulders and pulling hand carts piled high with the file’s supplies and equipment.

       Each file’s supplies and equipment includes stakes sharpened on both ends and even more bales of arrows, spades to dig holes to break horses’ legs, and sacks of caltrops for the horses and charging men to step on. 

      
Those caltrops are damn dangerous because charging horses and running men aren’t looking at the ground to see their sharp points sticking up – until they impale one of their hooves or feet where upon they almost inevitably scream and fall down.

       The first archer in each file line is the file’s sergeant and the last archer in the file is his chosen man. And each file stands shoulder to shoulder with the men in the files standing next to them. 

       Together the men standing in a file line form a company square with pike men three deep and shoulder to shoulder all along its front.  Most of the file sergeants, but not all, have been through Henry’s pike training on Cyprus and have experience using it in one or more of our battles. 

       Altogether we now have just over four hundred battle-ready archers with more dribbling in every day.  We also have about thirty crossbowmen in a special company and about twenty mounted archers with mostly longbows in another special company. 

      
I’ve sent out messengers to all the farms and manors throughout Cornwall that every horse except pregnant and nursing mares is to be brought to Restormel as soon as the harvest is in.  We’ve now got more than twenty archers who can sit a horse without falling off; it is useful horses we’re short. 

       Once our three battle companies are formed up and inspected each morning by Henry and all three of the company master sergeants. They watch and comment as the three companies move around and assume various battle positions according to the various commands shouted out by their master sergeants - such as would be given, for example, if the company is to advance or if an attack by mounted knights comes straight at the company or from the side or rear.

       When the companies change position the men walk in step to the beat of a rowing drum taken from one of our galleys.  The required walking together in step is one of the hardest things for the men to learn.  Henry in Cyprus came up with something that seems to work – each new recruit has a part of an old bow string tied around the big toe of his left foot. 

       So the sergeants walk the men to the beat of the drum shouting “string  .. string …string” so all the men’s left feet stomp down at the same time until the sergeants call “stop.”  It works.

       Our use of three pike men in each file instead of the two we used in the battles at Trematon and Nicosia is intended to make it even more difficult for knights on horseback to break through our pike lines to get to the archers.  The same for the sharpened stakes which are hammered into the ground wherever the sergeants want them and then quickly re-sharpened. 

       The sharpened stakes are something new that Henry wants us to use.  He thinks they’ll raise merry hell on the knights’ horses who manage to get through our storm of arrows.  That’s because the horses of charging knights typically wear blinders and are ridden by knights with their helms down.  Henry thinks the horses will impale themselves on the stakes just as they do on the pikes - because neither the horses nor their riders can see well enough to avoid them once the knights drop their helms and charge.

       If the horses of the semi-blind knights get past the stakes and caltrops and the leg breaking holes, they’ll run themselves on to the long Swiss pikes with their points aimed by the pike men with the butts of their pikes placed firmly in hastily dug shallow holes.

       It is from behind all that frontal protection of scattered caltrops and hastily dug holes to break horses’ legs and the stakes and pike men kneeling behind their shields that our archers will stand and shoot their armor piercing arrows straight into any charging or advancing horses and men. 

       The basic plan is for the pikes to be a surprise to the men who are charging them – to only come up at the last minute after the semi-blind Knights get past the piles of downed horses and men and through the arrow storm and leg holes and caltrops and the stakes.  Only then will our pike men, whose newfangled twenty foot bladed pikes are much longer than the lances of the charging knights, raise them so they can be seen and aim their steel points to impale the horses and men coming at them. 

      
Some say it’s the Swiss who invented the pikes, and God bless them for it, but it’s our own Henry and our smiths out in Cyprus who added the bladed hook that can be used to chop down men or hook them and pull them off their horses or feet.

       If we do it right by launching our arrows straight and holding our pikes steady none of the knights will get past our stakes and pike men; if we do it wrong the knights and their horsemen will get past our pike men and in among our archers - and most likely slaughter them.

       And, of course, it is always possible that the knights and their men will advance on foot through our arrow storm with their helms raised so they can see where they are going and not step on our caltrops or into the leg breaking holes we dig.  Each of our companies has something special for that to - its own heavy iron ploughs and plough horses with collars.
The horses are much better than the slower oxen that the farmers usually use because they walk faster.  We had to scour Cornwall to find them.

       The job of each company’s ploughmen is to quickly and deeply plow the ground in front of his company so its attackers will have to walk or ride in their heavy armor through both a deeply ploughed field and our arrow storm to get to our pike men. 

       If Henry is right, the enemy men who live long enough to get to our lines will be tired and off balance as a result of walking through the ploughed field - and be more easily shot down by our archers or speared or hooked or pushed to the ground by our long Swiss pikes with the new-fangled blade hooks our smiths added to them. 

      
I think Henry is right; I put on some captured armor and pretended to be a knight attacking on foot.  Walking through a plowed field in even partial armor is exhausting even with the visor up so you can see where you are going - I was easily overbalanced and pushed to the ground when I reached our pike men. I would have been a killed man for sure.

       Hopefully, of course, the attackers won’t even get to the pike men because of the steady stream of armor piercing arrows coming straight at them from our archers’ long bows.

       At least that’s the plan and it will no doubt work perfectly - until the first arrow flies and everything changes and becomes confused.

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       After two or three hours of company drill the men are dismissed for their first meal of the day.  From there they go to their individual assignments: archers to practice, fletchers to fletch and so on and so forth. That’s when I go back to the castle to eat and think.  And today I’ve been thinking about the future of our fetchers and carriers when the fighting starts and also about where the best battlegrounds might be for us to fight.

       From what I could see on the crusade, and more recently at Trematon and Nicosia, the lords and knights tend to fight individually because that’s the way they learned for their tournaments.  They charge in a great disorganized mass and begin fighting with whatever enemies they reach.  And they expect their men on foot and archers to run in behind them to join the battle and do the same.

       The inevitable result is that the battlefield dissolves into a great mass of individual and small group combats between handfuls of men.  Hopefully that’s what Cornell will do.

       But what if Cornell sends in his archers first to soften us up, particularly crossbowmen whose rate of fire is very much slower but whose metal quarrels have a range that is sometimes as great as or even greater than that of our longbows? 

       Our pike men can raise their shields and our archers can respond by shooting over and around the cover the shields provide.  But nothing can protect our fetchers and carriers who are behind our archers – they’ll have to temporarily pull back while the enemy bolts are coming in and then be brought back to support our pike men and archers when Cornell’s main assault begins.  We’ll have to start practicing that.