Maybe War Of The Wing Men was not such an inappropriate title for The Man Who Counts? This cover illustration exactly reproduces a scene from p. 389 (For full reference, see here):
the backbone of a flying army is the archers;
each has a bow as long as himself;
he grips it in his foot talons;
he draws the bow with both hands;
he gets the next arrow from his belly quiver with his teeth and is instantly ready to nock it;
the archers lay down a curtain that none can cross;
in this respect, they resemble SM Stirling's Emberverse archers, described somewhere on the blog (see Details Of War here);
soon, they must return to the bearers for more arrows;
the rest of the army guards them.
War is Hell but we enjoy reading about it.
20 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I'm wonder struck by the idea of FLYING archers! That skill must have taken YEARS for Diomedeans to master. I'm awed by the ingenious ways Poul Anderson worked out for making this practical.
Sean
The biggest difference is that Diomedian flying archers can draw the bow with their entire body; they're holding it with their feet, and drawing it with their torso. This is the way humans used to draw crossbows and it's much more powerful than using the arms; but the Diomedians can do it quickly.
BTW, there are several English comments from the late medieval period stating that the way they draw -- they called it "drawing inside the bow" -- is different from the way foreigners did; not just using the arms and shoulders, but throwing the whole weight of the body into it.
The pictures, and recreations, show that the English used an initial stance that was nearly front-on, with the left foot only slightly leading, and the bow and arrow pointing down. Then they threw the bow-arm forward and turned and twisted as they drew, sinking back into a sort of slight squat with the backside thrown back and drawing right across the chest, with the arrow ending well behind the ear, past the angle of the jaw.
(You have to aim "instinctively" while doing this, as you can't look down the shaft.)
That's born out by the skeletal deformations in burials of people identified as English longbowmen from the period; they show fusing of vertebrae and extensive muscle scarring on various bones from the endless repetitive effort.
Reconstructions of bows from the "Mary Rose" show no draw-weights less than 80 lbs, and some up to nearly 200 lbs.
The ballistics of archery mean that if you shoot at maximum range (45-degree angle up) the arrow will hit at about 3/4 the speed, and hence kinetic energy, it had when it left the string. That means that the effectiveness drops off only slightly across the entire effective range, about 300 yards.
Massed archery is hideously effective at those distances if the bows have really heavy draw-weights and the arrows are the right type.
I bow to the men of the bow.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, many thanks! What I've thought was how COMPLICATED this means of archery combat seems to be. That endless repetitive effort you mentioned must have taken YEARS for this skill to be mastered.
I think the advantage given by early gunpowder arquebuses was that it did not need years for guns to be mastered. Arquebusiers could be far more easily and quickly replaced than these highly skilled and hence costly archers.
Sean
There's a bit in Conan Doyle's THE WHITE COMPANY, in turn taken from a 16th-century source, of a man telling how his father trained him to the bow.
It starts out when he's six, holding a bowstave out until his arm shakes and he can't hold it any longer, day after day. "If my arm drooped, he struck me; when I could hold the stave, he gave me a heavier stave." Then there's shaping the bow, stringing it, then shooting -- at targets, at random things his father shouts out as they're walking across the countryside, shooting standing, squatting, running...
Dear Mr. Stirling,
IOW, a long, lengthy, years long effort was needed for mastering long bows. Again, I'm reminded of how and why gunpowder weapons displaced the longbow.
Sean
Not only years of practice, but it had to be kept up continuously. One recent archaeological discovery is a massive "archer's park" near London; it was made to be walked through for "rounders", where you were suddenly exposed to targets and snap-shot at them.
The national obsession with archery, btw, had social consequences. Longbows were relatively cheap -- you could buy one for about the price of half a sheep, or for about 2 weeks wages for a bowman in an English army. They could also be made fairly quickly; given a seasoned stave, a bowyer could turn out two or three in a day's work.
The other major cost was the "opportunity cost" of learning and maintaining the skill; but medieval agriculture was highly seasonal in its labor demands, with a lot of underemployment over much of the year, so the cost was fairly low. Basically it meant giving up your loafing time.
Hence ordinary 'husbandmen' and their sons could own bows and master their use; in fact, they were legally required to do so. Making the countryside severely unhappy with you was rendered dangerous thereby; otherwise you'd never dare ride within 300 yards of a tree or a hedgerow. The English upper classes had to put up with this for national-security reasons.
One major reason the French could never match the English bowmen, despite some efforts in that direction, was simply that the French noblesse didn't want the lower orders to have anything that effective on hand.
Mr Stirling,
This gets more and more interesting and informative. I like the idea of nobility afraid of armed peasants.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But in the later stages of the Hundred Years War the French kings finally got the upper hand over the English archers by means of massed infantry and the artillery needed for battering down the fortresses held by the English. Charles VII and his marshals finally got the hang of mobilizing the far greater resources of France efficiently at English expense. Policies continued by Charles' son Louis XI.
Sean
When the English turned the tactics they'd learned in the 100 Years War on each other in the Wars of the Roses, the results (at battles like Taunton) were truly gruesome; probably that was the most destructive period of internal warfare England (though not Ireland) ever saw, even in the Civil Wars of the 17th century.
George Martin drew his inspiration for the "Game of Thrones" series from the Wars of the Roses. Tho' as I said to him once, that wasn't how a feudal system worked: that was how a feudal system -stopped- working and slagged down in mutual extermination. The English medieval aristocracy essentially liquidated itself in the Wars of the Roses, and besides that fatally compromised its own legitimacy in the eyes of its followers.
Hence the lack of resistance to the Tudors, the first two of whom were really nasty pieces of work, though able. Mary was nasty and not very able.
Elizabeth was like her father Henry VIII, but with the character faults -- the ungovernable temper, the self-indulgence, and the rashness -- removed, and the virtues kept.
The early death of Henry V was probably the deciding factor in the 100 Years War. Henry finally found a way to make the English ability to win battles yield strategic results, but he died relatively young and before he could complete the conquest. Mind you, this was probably best for England. As with the Stuarts taking the throne of England, the attraction of the larger and richer country would have had the French tail wagging the English dog in a generation or two.
Poul points that out in one of his Time Patrol novels, where there's an alternate history in which due to the Papal-Imperial struggle coming out the other way the English do beat the French; after a while, it's a French kingdom that includes England, with nothing but some loan-words to show for the period of English dominance -- ones like "lord".
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I still regard Elizabeth I coldly and with dislike. I'll just say she was the first English ruler to be truly OPPRESSIVE to Ireland. And that turned a loose union into a disaster to both nations. So, I don't think Elizabeth was that able. There are many other reasons why I dislike that terrible woman, but I'll stop.
As for the Hundred Years War, I agree that it was only Henry V who managed to get STRATEGIC results from his victories over the French. Yes, given another ten or 15 years he might well have succeeded in conquering France. That still might have occurred if his brother John, "regent" of France for Henry VI/"II" had managed to break thru into central and southern France (hence the siege of Orleans). I recall reading of how Charles VII contemplated flight to Italy if Orleans fell.
But, as a Catholic I believe God intervened in the Hundred Years War by raising up Joan of Arc to rally France in her hour of despair. Henri Daniel-Rops, in his HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, suggested God intervened because He did not want both England and France to be ruled by a king like Henry VIII, dragging both nations into schism and heresy, doing incalculable harm to the Catholic Church.
Yes, I know skeptics won't agree with Daniel-Rops, but his suggestion makes as much as sense as any other for explaining Joan of Arc.
Sean
All English monarchs from the 13th century on claimed the overlordship of Ireland and were as oppressive to the Irish as they could manage, what with their commitments in Scotland and France distracting them.
The reason that the English didn't spend quite so much time devastating Ireland then was that they were busy massacring and robbing Frenchmen and slaughtering Scots. (*)
By Elizabeth's time the English had given up their attempt to dominate France, so they could turn their full attention to uniting the British Isles. Scotland was going to come in because James was the determinedly unmarried Elizabeth's heir(**), so the Irish were the weak point.
The history of the previous two reigns, her father and her disastrous sister's, made the break with Rome a central part of English national identity -- the English had always been profoundly xenophobic anyway -- and she was fine with that. She understood what every intelligent English monarch after her also grasped; that you couldn't be a Catholic and rule in London.
But theologically she was also fine with Henry VIII's "Catholicism without the Pope", and fought hard to keep the Calvinist party in the Anglican church under control.
What mattered to her was political loyalty and England's struggle with Spain.
The Catholic Church supported Spain -- to be blunt, at this point the Popes were more or less Spanish puppets -- so Catholics in Britain had to make a choice between supporting the Papacy's political aims or supporting the Tudors.
Elizabeth was perfectly willing to leave politically loyal Catholics alone.
Anyone who -wasn't- loyal was going to find out what a Tudor in a cold merciless rage was like, and that wasn't going to be a pleasant experience for them; she'd turn her armies and her pursuivants loose on them with fire and sword and rack and thumbscrew and noose.
As for her overall ability, look at England's position when she came to the throne, and its position when she died.
From a grossly inferior base in terms of population and money, she fought Philip of Spain and the whole world-spanning Habsburg empire to a standstill with cold cunning and endless patience, and she probably also secured the independence of the Netherlands, turning it into a bottomless pit that swallowed Spanish men and money at minimal cost to England and using it as a training-ground for her soldiers.
When she came in, English captains thought sailing to Lisbon was daring; when she died, they'd circumnavigated the world and returned with their ships ballasted with silver ingots, plundered Spanish treasure fleets, and burned cities on the coast of Peru. And they were on the verge of colonizing America.
Spain's decline as a world power dates from this point; the struggle with the English wrecked and demoralized and bankrupted them, and Elizabeth's leadership was crucial to that. If 25% of the world's area is occupied by people speaking English today, she's as responsible as any one ruler can be.
(*) one of the greatest propaganda successes of all time is the way the English have convinced the world that they're a hobbit-like race of gentle Morris-dancing gardeners puttering about their rose-embowered cottages. This is, historically speaking, really jaw-dropping-ly, hilariously untrue. Historically the English are a pack of hungry wolves, the web-footed seagoing Mongols of Europe, the devastators and plunderers of continents.
(**) I think Elizabeth may have been, in our terms, gay, or at least a switch-hitter who felt no particular desire for a man or children of her own. This fitted in neatly with her policy aims, which required first toying with multiple suitors (none of whom had any real chance), and then making a point of her "Virgin Queen" image. She never, of course, had any intention of taking a husband, who'd have expected to tell her what to do.
Mr Stirling,
I am English when I am not just a human being. Your two descriptions of the English - hilarious!
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Many thanks for your very interesting short essay, never mind how I still disagree with you on some points. E.g., the conclusion I drew from reading works like Philip Hughes three volume THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND, Francis Clark's EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE AND THE REFORMATION, and Eamon Duffy's THE STRIPPING OF THE ALTARS remains that most of the English, if push came to shove, PREFERRED to remain Catholic in 1558. I still argue that it was only the police state terrorism of the Penal Laws in Elizabeth's reign which finally imposed some kind of Protestantism on most of the English.
So, if Elizabeth had decided to honor the promise she made to the dying Queen Mary and remain a Catholic, I don't think she would have been endangered doing so. And there would have been no need to enforce the brutalities of the Penal Laws. What would have happened would have been the reverse of what did happened: you could not be a Protestant and rule in London.
What I think Elizabeth wanted was a puppet church which would not talk back to her or resist as, say, St. Thomas a'Becket had done to Henry II. She might have been satisfied with turning the Church IN England into just another eastern Orthodox Church in schism from Rome, but the times and circumstances made that impossible. What became the Church OF England was inevitably going to become some of Protestant sect. Yes, I agree Elizabeth seems to have disliked the more extreme Calvinists, but they still almost inevitably made the Anglican Church a truly Protestant institution. She could not stop that from happening, from the sheer logic of the Second Act of Supremacy of 1559.
No argument, I agree with you about Elizabeth's merely secular abilities as a ruler and how she fought Spain to a draw, with all the consequences that meant, both in Europe and America. Yes, the English were certainly not gentle Hobbits but web-footed sea going Mongols!
Yes, given the mores of the times, any husband Elizabeth married would have been expected to become the actual ruler, something SHE certainly would not like! But I don't think she was some kind of lesbian--the impression I got was that she preferred younger men, such as the French prince Hercule Francois, younger brother of Henry III of France. She SEEMS to have been so infatuated with the Duke of Alencon that, to the despair of her Privy Councils, she entered into apparently serious negotiations to marry him.
Sean
"What I think Elizabeth wanted was a puppet church which would not talk back to her or resist as, say, St. Thomas a'Becket had done to Henry II."
-- absolutely true, and so did every single monarch in Europe, including Philip of Spain. In the context of the time, the only way Elizabeth could get that was to maintain the break with Rome and be head of a national church.
Philip could (and usually did) control the Papacy; Elizabeth couldn't possibly do that.
I don't think she really gave much of a damn about "religion" as such, as opposed to using it as a tool of policy. She was a believer because it wasn't really culturally/psychologically possible to be anything else at the time, but she was a tepid one without much personal emotional involvement in it.
The English in general weren't Calvinists, though a substantial and growing minority were, particularly in the east of the country and London and some other towns.
What they were was -xenophobes-. They generally hated and despised all foreigners, and the more different they were from the English, the more they disliked them; they were notorious for it. Even in a relatively cosmopolitan trading city like London, an obvious foreigner might well be mobbed and stoned if he went outside certain districts.
Many English people seriously believed that the French (or the Scots, or both) had tails and weren't really human at all but devils in disguise, and the Irish were nearly universally viewed as subhuman verminous savages -- an attitude that dated long, long before the Reformation. The belief that God was actually English was also widespread, and/or a conviction that the English were the Ten Lost Tribes (British Israelism has a long pedigree, dating back to the 15th century).
The only force stronger than their xenophobia was their greed.
So while the bulk of the English were quite satisfied with traditional devotional culture of folk-Catholicism despite it having become rather decayed, they (or at least most of the ones who realized that the Church was based in Rome) had always disliked intervention from Rome in English affairs, and deeply resented "Peter's pence". This was obvious as far back as the late medieval period, with the Lollards and was a basis for the equally old and widespread anti-clericalism, because the only widespread group in English society which -didn't- resent outside influence in religious affairs was clerical.
As for Elizabeth's preferences, she seems to have been personally interested in some men (especially when she was younger) and certainly enjoyed ritualized flirtation and flattery from courtiers all her life. And like her father she loved dancing and was extremely good at it. On the other hand...
Possibly it was a case of 'faute de mieux' once she'd decided that marriage was out of the question... but note that she never did marry, despite the fact that most of her councillors desperately wanted her to do so in time to produce an heir of her own body and nagged her to the point that she made a proclamation in Parliament that everyone should just shut up about it.
Her father certainly hadn't given her a really good example of marital bliss, seeing as he'd run through 6 wives and killed several of them on trumped-up charges. Including killing her own mother. She may simply have had a generalized visceral dislike and horror of marriage as an institution, and who could blame her?
The indications are indirect, given the habits and terminology of the time. You could call a man a "bugger" or a "sodomite" (everyone knew about James up in Scotland, for instance) but there really wasn't a vocabulary available to talk about the female equivalent unless it involved persistent cross-dressing or the like. This made it then (and for a long time thereafter) easy for women to fly 'under the radar'.
If you read contemporary commentary about Queen Christina of Sweden two generations later, you'll see that the writers are struggling to find words to describe something that's pellucidly obvious to a modern eye; but then, Christina -was- much more unambiguous.
It was perfectly normal for people of the same gender to share beds in Elizabeth's time, for instance, even among the well-to-do, so it wasn't necessarily indicative that Elizabeth generally had one of her maids of honor sleep with her. Maybe it was just sleeping, maybe not. She had definite favorites that way ; maybe that was because those particular ones didn't snore or have halitosis or were interesting conversationalists. Perhaps there was intense competition for the spot because there was always competition for the Queen's attention and regard. OTOH, maybe not
Some of her personal relationships and the way she reacted with intense distress and what looks remarkably like jealousy when specific (young) maids of honor left her service to marry are sorta indicative, I think... but again maybe not, because a close concern with the marriage arrangements of the upper nobility were also politically necessary and customary and she was sometimes very unhappy with men about court who married without her leave (which was hard to get). Or maybe not.
"The only force stronger than their xenophobia was their greed." Love it!
Dear Mr. Stirling,
There really isn't much I disagree with, in these comments of yours, except my belief, based on the works of Hughes and Duffy, that Catholicism was not that decayed a "folk religion" in the 1550's. So, it still needed thirty to forty years of the Penal Laws to force Anglicanism on the English.
No argument, I agree the English were notoriously xenophobic! Altho, of course, there were honorable exceptions and some English were able to treat foreigners like fellow human beings.
I agree, about Elizabeth's ambiguous views about marriage. Yes, I knew of how HARD Parliament and the Privy Council pressed Elizabeth to marry in the early years of her reign. I had not known about her sometimes "unclear" relations with her maids of honor.
Sean
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