forward
dismounted, and to close with the whole English line while its most
dangerous portion, the bowmen, were still hampered by the close pressure
of the vanguard.

The plan thus ordered by the French king at the advice of his Scotch
lieutenant was not so incompetent as the results have led some historians
to judge. It suffered from four misconceptions; but of these one was not
the fault of the French commander, while the other three could only have
been avoided by a thorough knowledge of the new Plantagenet tactics, which
had not yet been grasped in the entirety of their consequences even by
those who had invented them.

The four misconceptions were:--

(1) The idea that the attack would only have to meet the force immediately
in front of it, behind the hedge. This was a capital error, for, as we
shall see, Warwick with his men escorting the waggons came back in time to
take a decisive part in the first phase of the action. But it was not an
error which anyone on the French side could have foreseen; Warwick's men
having disappeared down the slope of the hill towards the ford before the
French vanguard caught its first sight of the enemy.

(2) The underrating of the obstacle afforded by the vineyard in front of
the English line, and the consequent "bunching" of the attack on to the
lane which traversed that vineyard. Probably the archers themselves did
not know what an extraordinarily lucky accidental defence the vineyard
provided for their special weapon. It was exactly suited to giving them
the maximum effect of arrow-fire compatible with the maximum hindrance to
an advancing enemy.

(3) The French king and his advisers had not yet grasped--nor did anyone
in Europe for some time to come--the remarkable superiority of the
long-bow over the cross-bow. Just so modern Europe, and particularly
modern Prussia, with all its minute observation and record, failed for ten
good years to understand that rate of delivery and not range is what turns
the scale with modern artillery. The cross-bow shot an uglier missile,
inflicted a nastier wound, was more feared by the man in danger of that
wound than the long-bow was. In range the two weapons might be regarded as
nearly equal, save for this deciding difference, that the trained
long-bowman could always count upon his maximum range, whereas the
cross-bow varied, as a machine always will, with conditions independent of
the human will behind it. You could not extend its pull to