A Christian captive in the Holy Land announced that liberation was at hand, on spying a cog from his prison window. Winston Churchill characterized the importance of the longbow in these words: The long-bow , handled by the welltrained archer class, brought into the field a yeoman type of soldier with whom there was nothing on the Continent to compare. Churchi ll goes on to note the dev astating effect of the English arrow storm as the French first encountered it in the naval battle of Sluys in 1340. Here Engli sh archers mowed down the crews of the bigger French ships before the English closed for the boarding of armed men th at determined the course of medieval sea battles. And Churchi ll describes how the subsequent landing of the English invading army at France faced stiff resistance from Genoese crossbowmen and men-at-arms ashore: " But the English archers, shooting from the ships at long range, cleared the shores and covered the invading troops. " This unprecedented achievement of the archers has been largely overlooked by naval historians; Churchill, who knew something of amphibious warfare in two World Wars, appreciated thi s revolutionary ac hievement for what it was. The longbow at its most formidable, in the hands of a yeoman trained since childhood at the archery butts, had a killing range of 250 yards-two and a half footbal I field s-and at closer ranges it could go right through a charging horseman. Handling one of the longbows recovered from the Tudor warship Mary Rose , sunk in 1545, Norma Stanford, a determined archer, having asked permission and braced herself to the task, found she could hardly bend it-nor could I. It took a special breed of nonnoble worker to draw that bow. Armed with this weapon, small Engli sh armies, always outnumbered and often put in impossible positions by arrogant but determined leaders, won victory after victory in the fighting after Sluys, from Crecy six years later, in 1346, to Agincourt in 1415. lt was left to Joan of Arc, taking command of the French armies in 1429, to enlist the nascent national spirit of France and drive the English out forever-and she was no noble but a servant girl who learned to ride horseback tending to the horses of travelers at a local inn . So ended the Hundred Years War, which soaked up the energies of Britain in the futile dreams of kings who aspired to rule both England and France. And as 10
that conflict dissolved in the rising tide of French national awareness, the English nobility embarked on another violent strugg le, a long contest known as the War of the Roses, fought between the rival York and Lancaster factions for control of the English throne. This was to end only in 1485 when the Tudor Henry VII took the throne. By that time medieval society with its glories and horrors was fading on the European scene.
Cathedrals, Castles ... The medieval establishment in Europe was one that insisted on order and subordination, in a prolonged and strong reaction to the chaos and confusions which had destroyed the advanced soc ieties of the Roman Empire by 500AD. By about the year 1000, despite millenial prophecies of the destruction of all earthly kingdoms, the new medieval order had been established. Glorious cathedrals began to soar toward heaven , structures which stop and stagger people today who come to them for the first time: arched, fretted and spired testaments in which the stone, increasingly penetrated and suffused with light as the Gothic style evolved throughout the West, positively sings the wonders of the Creation. The great human truth s and asp irations expressed in these exaltations of high purpose shaped in cold stone speak to us across the centuries. To miss the message of the great cathedrals and turn a deaf ear to their music is to miss the singular glory of the Middle Ages, and more, to miss something important and inspiring in the story of humank ind . To know this, visit the great cathedrals, and see what they tell you directly, rather than rely on the word of the materialists of our day who too often simply don 't see the shaping influence of things that reach and move the human psyche directly. The message of the stone castles that appear across Europe contemporaneously with the cathedrals is an easy one to read: They define " us" agai nst"them" with their massive walls, moats and drawbridges, a message of determined isolation and provincialism. In another sense, they stand like rocks put down upon the carpet of the countryside, with the lives of its people woven into its fabric like a figured designrocks carefully placed to keep that carpet down against whatever winds of change may blow. In still another, the castles and the villages that huddle for shelter, typi-
cally, under their frowning walls stand for a kind of Germanic gemut lichkeit, or homey , snug cheerfu lness in a vanished age when money was not the measure of all things and the ideal of service to the community was everywhere honored and in uneven but distinct ways carried out. This practically universal society, with its local variations (sometimes quite significant variations, as we have seen in England) had in its early stages developed the integrity and energy at first to fend off and then completely repel the Viking raids that fell so ca lami to usly on Europe from the north, and at the same time contain the threatening advance of Islam in the south. Islam, born in the Arabian peninsula in the 700s, had a century later conquered the kingdoms of the Middle East and swept through Spain into France, overturning the Germanic states that had been set up by Vandals and Visigoths. The new Islamic caliphates introduced what to our eyes today is unmistakably a more advanced, tolerant and ed ucated soc iety than the society of medieval Europe . This was true, at least up until the time of the European Renaissance beginning in the later 1300s, a revival of art and learning of the ancient world of Greece and Rome-a revival ow ing much, as it turned out, to the scho larship of great Islamic centers of learning from Cordoba to Baghdad. But this remarkable contribution was hidden in the future as the two great systems smashed up against each other in the Mediterranean world. To win the encounter the Christian West mustered the great military effort known as the Crusades. Beginning in 1096 and petering out in the 1200s, these armed expeditions allowed the restless knight errantry of England and Europe to gallop off to free Palestine, where Christ had walked the roads and pursued his mission unto death and immortality, from the hated grasp of the infidel.
... and Castled Ships These ventures brought Northern European shipping into the Mediterranean, and , with the beachhead Crusader kingdoms established in Palestine, encouraged trade with the Middle East, based largely on the spices of the Indies and si lks and ceramics from China, brought in by Arab merchants trading by sea with the Orient, as they had for centuries. These Northern ships were univerSEA HISTORY 76, WINTER 1995-96