position, however useless for
offensive purposes. When we hear of A making a stand against B though B
was "three times as strong" as A, we must remember that this means only
that the counting combating units on B's side were three times A's. If A
was holding a defensive position against B, B would only attack with his
actual fighting units, whereas A could present a dense mass of humanity
much more than a third of B, certainly two-thirds of B, and sometimes the
equal of B, to resist him, though only one-third should be properly
armed. While, on the other hand, if B should fail in the attack and break,
the number of those cut down and captured in the pursuit by the victorious
A would be very much greater than the fighting units which B had brought
against A at the beginning of the combat. All the followers and domestics
of A's army would be involved in the catastrophe, and that is what
accounts for the enormous numbers of casualties which one gets after any
decisive overthrow of one party by the other, especially of a large force
against a small one. It is this feature which accounts for the almost
legendary figures following Crecy and Poitiers.

The gentry, who were the nucleus of the fighting, were armed in the middle
of the fourteenth century after a fashion transitional between the rings
of mail which had been customary for a century and the plate armour which
was usual for the last century before the general use of firearms,
ornamental during the century in which firearms established themselves,
and is still the popular though false conception of mediaeval accoutrement.
From immemorial time until the First Crusade and the generation of the
Battle of Hastings and the capture of Jerusalem, fighters had covered
their upper bodies with leather coats, and their heads with an iron
casque. From at least the Roman centuries throughout the Dark Ages, a
universal use of metal rings linked together over the leather protected
the armed man, and our word _mail_ is French for links, and nothing else.
In time, the network of links came to be used separate from the leather,
and so it was put on like a shirt of flexible iron all through the great
business which saved Europe during the ninth century against the Northmen
in Gaul and Britain, against the Moor in Spain. It was the armour of the
knights in Palestine, of the native armies which drove the Germans from
Italy, and of the Norman Conquest.

But with the end of the thirteenth