The Cutting Room Floor is a new series where I will be sharing work that I did for my new book, The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King, that did not make it into the final text. My book was very near to its maximum word count, so some sections had to be pulled or cut down severely in order to make room for more important sections. This was one such section. While I find the use of the crossbow by the English garrison in Calais fascinating, it didn’t quite fit anywhere within the broader arguments or structure of the book and so in the end I decided to cut it. I am now presenting that original section below, with some minor edits to make it read more cleanly since it is now divorced from the original context of the chapter it was written for.
The Calais Garrison
In the immediate aftermath of his famous victory at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, King Edward III laid siege to the city of Calais in Northern France. The siege was long and lasted through the winter, but in the end the city could not hold out and there was no sign of a relief army coming from the French king. In the subsequent decades Calais would provide a valuable foothold for the English on the European continent as well as granting them greater control over the English Channel. By the late fifteenth century the Pale of Calais, which consisted of the city of Calais and several nearby fortresses, was the last area in France still held by the English monarchy after King Charles VII’s reconquests of Normandy and Gascony. Defending Calais was a high priority, even during the upheaval of the War of the Roses. The soldiers defending Calais represented as close to a standing army as England had in the Middle Ages, and the information contained in the detailed records left by the garrison and its treasurers provide insight into the extent of crossbow use by the English during the era of the longbow.[i]
As one might expect, archers played a significant role in the defence of Calais. The garrison included large numbers of both archers and crossbowmen but the former generally outnumbered the latter. For example, Edmund Beaufort received wages for 40 crossbowmen, 30 mounted archers, two-hundred men-at-arms, and two-hundred foot archers. This is just one sample of hundreds of retinues hired over two centuries, but it is representative of the overall trend that crossbowmen were a valued minority of the garrison.[ii]
William Ross Master of the King's Ordinance and Controller of the Ordnance for Edward IV's invasion of France in 1475, bought over a hundred crossbows between the years 1473 and 1483. He bought both wood and steel crossbows, showing the longevity of the simple wooden crossbow, which was still seen as militarily viable. The two kinds of crossbow even had comparable costs. In 1476 there were 121 steel crossbows and forty wooden crossbows in the wardrobe in Calais, along with 1,076 longbows. By 1481 the number of crossbows had increased to two hundred. In addition, there was a garrison of forty crossbowmen not assigned to any specific retinue and paid at the higher rate than the rest of the garrison. Further evidence of a valued minority of crossbowmen defending the city.[iii]
The large numbers of crossbowmen and archers went largely unchanged after the introduction of gunpowder weapons. The number of arquebuses in Calais increased steadily over the early sixteenth century, but no drop off is evident for crossbows or longbows until the middle of the sixteenth century. For example, in a 1539 inventory of the armouries of the Calais and Guines, one of the other castles in the Pale, there were 184 new handguns, 416 older guns, 3,360 longbows, and 53 crossbows.[iv]
Crossbowmen seem to have generally been paid more than foot archers, receiving at least 8d. a day to the foot archers’ 6d. Mounted archers were generally paid the same wage as a crossbowmen, reflecting the higher cost of maintaining their horse. These are just average pay figures, though, and in practice they could vary. For example, in 1451 Edmund Beaufort received wages for 40 crossbowmen, eighteen of whom were paid 10d. a day and the rest 8d. a day. Crossbowmen were also generally given all their equipment out of the Calais armoury while archers were sometimes given their weapons but could also be required to provide their own bows. This was likely due to the greater costs involved in equipping a medieval crossbowman. It is worth mentioning that during certain periods in the history of Calais treasurers and other accountants had a habit of using the military description of a certain soldier to instead mean their level of pay. As an example, a record might describe a retinue as ‘foot archers’, but they might be equipped with spears rather than bows. If both foot archers and spearmen received a daily wage of 6d. a day, from an accounting perspective this was no problem, and it simplified the number of individual record types to lump them together. It is possible, then, that there were more crossbowmen hiding in the records under the guise of other military roles and many so-called ‘archers’ may not have used bows, but even still it is likely that there were more longbows than crossbows in the Pale. It should also be stressed that this was not a universal practice, and only reflects the careers of certain treasurers and covering certain periods in the history of the Calais garrison – other record keepers were more meticulous.[v]
The Calais garrison was not entirely defensive. In the wake of the failed Burgundian siege of 1436 many members of the garrison joined the English relief army in raiding the neighbouring Low Countries, which were ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy at that time. After the conclusion of the Hundred Years war, once the relationship between Burgundy and England had healed some, many members of the garrison found service as mercenaries in the dukes’ many wars – several even participating in the disastrous Battle of Nancy in 1477 where the last Valois Duke of Burgundy was killed by the Swiss. On a smaller scale, there were frequent skirmishes between the soldiers in the Pale of Calais and its French neighbours. David Grummitt has noticed that the Pale was still receiving shipments of pavises even after the rest of France had been lost. This could indicate that the crossbowmen in the Pale were expected fight battles outside of the city’s walls. The English have a long history of using the pavise with longbowmen as well, though, and so it is possible they were intended for equipping a field army including traditional archers pending a future invasion.[vi]
A common stereotype is that the English completely abandoned the crossbow sometime during the thirteenth century and adopted the longbow as their exclusive missile weapon. The evidence from the Calais shows how easily this can be disproved. While the garrison included a majority of longbow, it also included a highly paid elite of crossbowmen – sometimes receiving a daily wage of nearly double that of a longbow archer. They key takeaway is that crossbows and longbows were not necessarily technologies in competition and within medieval warfare there was plenty of room for both of them, even in a kingdom as obsessed with bows as England.
If you liked this, maybe consider buying the book which includes a lot more like it! You can see where to purchase it depending on your location at: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/books.
Notes:
[i] Paul L. Holmer, 'The Military Crossbow in Yorkist England', Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries, 22 (1979). pp. 11-16.
[ii] David Grummitt, The Calais Garrison: War and Military Service 1436-1558, (Woodbridge, 2008). pp. 45-52; 120-1
[iii] David Grummitt, The Calais Garrison, pp. 120-1; Paul L. Holmer, 'The Military Crossbow in Yorkist England', 11-14
[iv] David Grummitt, The Calais Garrison, pp. 45-50; 120-3
[v] David Grummitt, The Calais Garrison, pp. 45-52; 120-1
[vi] David Grummitt, The Calais Garrison, pp. 120-1; Kelly DeVries, “The Introduction and Use of The Pavise in The Hundred Years War”, Arms and Armour, 4;2 (2007). Pp. 93-100.