s, who first, by an accident about to be described,
discovered, and who by their genius for command developed, a revolution in
missile weapons, marched at the head of columns which were, not only for
their spirit and their tradition and command, but for all their important
fighting units, mounted.

Tradition and the memory of a society are all-important in these things.
From the beginning of the Dark Ages until well on into the Middle Ages,
say, from the end of the fifth century to the beginning of the
fourteenth, a battle was essentially a mounted charge; and the noble class
which for generation after generation had learnt and gloried in the trade
of those charges was the class which organised and enjoyed the peril of
warfare.

The armoured man was always an expensive unit. His full equipment was the
year's rent of a farm, and what we should to-day call a large country
estate never produced half a dozen of him, and sometimes no more than one.
He needed at least one servant. That was a mere physical necessity of his
equipment. Often he had not one, but two or three or even four. He and his
assistants formed the normal cell, so to speak, of a fourteenth-century
force. And on the march you would have seen the thousands of these
"men-at-arms" (the term is a translation of the French "gensdarmes," which
means armed people) surrounded or followed by a cloud of their followers.

Now their followers were more numerous than they, and yet far more
vulnerable, and they form a very difficult problem in the estimation of a
fourteenth-century force.

When I say, as I have said with regard both to Crecy and to
Poitiers--though it is truer of Crecy than of Poitiers--that the number
of combatants whom contemporaries recognised as such was far less than the
total numbers of a force, I was pointing out that, by our method of
reckoning numbers, it would be foolish to count Edward III.'s army in 1346
as only 24,000, or the Black Prince's ten years later as only 7000. The
actual number of males upon the march who had to be fed and could be seen
standing upon the field was far larger. But, on the other hand, the value
for fighting purposes of what I may call the domestics was very varied.
Some of those who served the wealthiest of the men-at-arms were themselves
gentry. They were youths who would later be fully armed themselves. They
rode. They had a sword; they could not be denied combat. Even their
inferiors were of value in a defensive