In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down

Thu Nov 4 04:48:33 PST 2004

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB109953591903164550,00.html>

The Wall Street Journal

 November 4, 2004

 BOOKS

In a Sky Dark With Arrows,
 Death Rained Down

By NED CRABB
November 4, 2004; Page D10

The opening slaughter of what came to be known as the Hundred Years' War
took place on Aug. 26, 1346, near the village of Crecy in northern France.
There King Philip VI's French army bore down on a much smaller English
force commanded by Edward III. What happened in the ensuing few hours still
lives, in the French national consciousness, as one of the most painful
blots on the proud escutcheon of France.

As described in Hugh D.H. Soar's "The Crooked Stick" (Westholme Yardley,
241 pages, $24.95), a fascinating study of a forgotten weapon, King
Philip's shining knights, encased in magnificent armor and thundering
toward the enemy on huge war horses, were practically annihilated by an
enormous black cloud of thousands of arrows that rose from the English
lines and descended with murderous effect.

These were not the sort of sporting arrows skillfully shot toward gayly
colored targets by Victorian archery societies (charmingly described by Mr.
Soar in later chapters) but heavy "bodkin pointed battle shafts" that went
through the armor of man and horse. And the black cloud wasn't just one
surge, it kept coming and coming, arching high over the battlefield, as
each of the 6,000 archers released an average three or four arrows a minute.

For centuries the longbow dominated battle, affecting the fates of nations.

Royal blood soaked the ground, and with frightening suddenness King
Philip's now much reduced 27,000-man army was in desperate retreat from
Edward's 9,000 Englishmen. Sixty-nine years later, at Agincourt, similar
clouds of battle shafts released by the archers in Henry V's small, wet,
hungry and sick army devastated a French army so badly that scores of
ancient aristocratic lineages were ended in a few hours of battle.

The English longbowman had emerged from centuries of hunting in the dark
forests of his native land and into the glare of battle to end the
dominance of the mounted knight. The knight and his "destrier" horse, also
armored, were the medieval equivalent of an Abrams tank, owning the
battlefield for centuries and vulnerable only to other knights and
crossbowmen (who had to stop and rewind their weapons) at close range. And
now here was this peasant fellow in his hooded cloth shirt, leather jerkin
(close-fitting, sleeveless jacket), soft leather boots and crude helmet
bringing him down into the mud.

Whence came this man, with a great bow taller than himself? As Mr. Soar
fascinatingly elucidates, he and his weapon have a long history. Over
centuries, the English archer had developed an extra-long bow hewn from the
yew tree. Many types of wood possessed the essential power-making qualities
of tension and compression, but yew was by far the best. "Though
notoriously difficult to work with because of its often tortuous grain,"
Mr. Soar writes, "yew has an elasticity superior to all other timber." Yew
gave the warbow tremendous thrust, sending feathered (fletched) shafts 250
yards, compared with the shorter handbow's 50 or so and the crossbow's 100.
To this day, as Mr. Soar shows later when he describes longbow archery's
evolution into a garden-party pastime and Olympic sport, no superior wood
has been discovered.

Examining the longbow's heritage, Mr. Soar takes us to Paleolithic and
Neolithic prehistory for a vivid reconstruction of the ancient bowman
ancestors of the men who stood at Crecy in 1346. He begins with a typically
pithy statement: "Matters were not easy for our early ancestors. It was
their fate to be at once both predator and prey. At best, this was an
unattractive lifestyle and one fraught with inevitable uncertainty and
danger."

To improve the odds, early man devised the pointed stick with which to
skewer his food and his enemies. From the pointed stick came the spear with
its sharp stone point, and then the need to give it propulsion other than
by simply throwing it -- and thus, inevitably, the crooked stick with its
primitive string of plaited grass, sinew or hemp. Eventually the bow was
strengthened by the use of horn on the tips, where the string was either
tied or slipped into a groove at the shaft, and sinew and hemp gave way to
linen thread or silk, a far more elastic means of projecting arrows.

The longbow's supremacy lasted about two centuries, shifting the balance of
power mostly to England, whose kings issued royal decrees banning certain
"idle" games and demanding that all able-bodied young men in every village
and town diligently practice archery. The English were especially deft at
instituting battlefield discipline for archers, training them to move in
formation on command, usually by horn signals. The French never equaled
them in either training longbow archers or in disciplining them in
battlefield tactics. Some things never change.

It was not until the advent of gunpowder and artillery, with a much longer
range and much greater killing power, that the longbow lost its decisive
role. It remained a residual weapon in the Tudor era, especially for
aristocratic gentleman to demonstrate their athletic prowess at games and
tournaments. (King Henry VIII was particularly fond of the longbow, and
there are drawings of him shooting.) But on the battlefield, the bow could
not compete with the gun, which from the first exceeded the arrow's
velocity if not its precision. By the beginning of the 17th century,
however, cannons and muskets had found a deadly range and accuracy.

The battle of Pinkie Cleugh, in 1547, the last battle to be fought between
the Scottish and English royal armies, was also the "last occasion," notes
Mr. Soar, "when [the longbow] was used tactically en masse." The Scots
suffered defeat, with 15,000 men slain.

Mr. Crabb is the Journal's letters editor.

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