Me>> The French did use dismounted knights and they did have archery.
>I thought that the dismounted french knight was relatively rare before
>the stunning lesson of Crecy(though I seem to recall the English
>used the tactic against the Scots not long previously).
They were dismounting as early as 891 AD against the Vikings.
>I don't dispute
>that after that the French did start using knights on foot, but that they
>were still used without much regard for "tactics" or else Agincourt
>would not have been the success it was.
To argue from one or two battles that the French had no regard for tactics is like using Cannae to argue that the Romans were useless with respect to tactics. At Agincourt and Crecy, the French did abysmally. In other battles, such as Hastings, they did quite well.
>> In most medieval battles, the knights fought dismounted rather
>> than indulged in a cavalry charge. Furthermore infantry were
>> mostly trained men and not peasant levies.
>I would dispute your use of the claim "In most medieval battles".
Nevertheless this is the conclusion of my sources, based on recent scholarship (starting with Verbruggen in the 50's) which go out of their way to disprove the myths surrounding the medieval knight. In particular, attention has been paid to _all_ the battles fought and not those where one side manifestly screwed up.
>> In support of this, the most frequently copied, translated and
>> consulted secular prose work in the early medieval times was
>> Vegetius's 'Concerning Military Matters': This is almost entirely
>> about training infantry and contains very little about cavalry.
>I find this unconvincing. The Crecy battle example suggests that
>although there were indeed people who read tactical manuals,
>perhaps even Edward III, that they were by no means in the majority
>in the french fighting forces.
Even your description of Crecy showed that the battle began as a result of knights disobeying the King's orders and the infantry being thrown in battle ineffectively as a result. I do not believe that you can generalize that a gross lapse of discipline in one battle to say that the french did not know how to use their infantry correctly and then by implication that all western armies in glorantha will have ineffective infantry because they do not respect them. Normandy had the same knightly attitudes yet they used their infantry effectively at Hastings.
Powered by hypermail