oman. "In his hand he
bore a mighty bow." Its might lay not only in the range of the heavy
war-shaft, a range we are told of four hundred yards, but in its force. The
English archer, taught from very childhood "how to draw, how to lay his
body to the bow," his skill quickened by incessant practice and constant
rivalry with his fellows, raised the bow into a terrible engine of war.
Thrown out along the front in a loose order that alone showed their vigour
and self-dependence, the bowmen faced and riddled the splendid line of
knighthood as it charged upon them. The galled horses "reeled right
rudely." Their riders found even the steel of Milan a poor defence against
the grey-goose shaft. Gradually the bow dictated the very tactics of an
English battle. If the mass of cavalry still plunged forward, the screen of
archers broke to right and left and the men-at-arms who lay in reserve
behind them made short work of the broken and disordered horsemen, while
the light troops from Wales and Ireland flinging themselves into the melly
with their long knives and darts brought steed after steed to the ground.
It was this new military engine that Edward the Third carried to the fields
of France. His armies were practically bodies of hired soldiery, for the
short period of feudal service was insufficient for foreign campaigns, and
yeoman and baron were alike drawn by a high rate of pay. An archer's daily
wages equalled some five shillings of our present money. Such payment when
coupled with the hope of plunder was enough to draw yeomen from thorpe and
farm; and though the royal treasury was drained as it had never been
drained before the English king saw himself after the day of Crecy the
master of a force without rival in the stress of war.

[Sidenote: Siege of Calais]

To England her success was the beginning of a career of military glory,
which fatal as it was destined to prove to the higher sentiments and
interests of the nation gave it a warlike energy such as it had never known
before. Victory followed victory. A few months after Crecy a Scotch army
marched over the border and faced on the seventeenth of October an English
force at Neville's Cross. But it was soon broken by the arrow-flight of the
English archers, and the Scotch king David Bruce was taken prisoner. The
withdrawal of the French from the Garonne enabled Henry of Derby to recover
Poitou. Edward meanwhile with a decision which marks his military capacity
marched f