Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (35 page)

The same day, a further letter was sent from Richard to every sheriff, ordering that upon receiving their instructions from the commissioners of array, they were to remain within their shire town or at least ensure that their deputy was present, ‘where ye or he shall be surely found for the performing and fulfilling of such things as on our behalf as by our said Commissioners ye shall be commanded to do. Not failing hereof in any ways, as ye will answer unto us at your uttermost peril.’ Only one text of an individual ‘commission’ survives, which Richard had sent to the county of Gloucester in 1484, though the instructions must have been the same for each county and would have likely remained unchanged when reissued:

Commissions of array were the principal means by which kings were able to recruit forces for the defence of the realm. They had their origin
in the obligations owed by men both living in shires and boroughs to give armed support to the king, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times. The arrangement was formalised during the thirteenth century, when the Statute of Winchester in 1285 set down the types of arms that men who owned goods or chattels of differing values were required to own in readiness in case they were called for service. The Statute described how:

Once all able-bodied men had assembled, grouped under their shires or boroughs, they were first sworn to allegiance. Leading members of the gentry, preferably knights with military experience, were appointed to raise individual companies for each shire, and to ensure that recruits were properly equipped, clothed, mounted and received pay. In 1327, in the face of rising costs as a result of increasingly sophisticated armour, a statute clarified that levies would only be expected to meet the costs of their arms as set down by the Winchester statute, while in 1343 it was agreed that men could be exempted from service if they paid a fine. In 1402 these statutes were once again confirmed, making clear that individuals would not have to meet their own costs and would receive wages for their service.

Once commissions had been sent out, all sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs,
constables and officers were expected to assist the commissioners with their recruitment, issuing proclamations that every man between fif-teen and sixty was ‘to be ready in their said harness’. Constables of hundreds searched for all inhabitants ‘of ability and harnessed to serve’ in order to draw up a muster roll – a list of names and what weapons each man was able to bring with them.

Few of these documents have survived; however, a muster roll held at Bridport in Dorset in September 1457 reveals that 180 men with ‘harness’ presented themselves for inspection before the town’s two bailiffs and constables. Around a hundred presented themselves with some form of arms; two-thirds of those had just a bow and sheaf of arrows, while seventy possessed further armour or weapons, including poleaxes, glaives, spears, axes, custills (two-edged daggers), bills, staves, a hanger (a short sword) and a gun. Some had incomplete pieces of armour that included harbergeons (jackets of mail or scale armour), pairs or gauntlets and brigandines (metal plate armour on material), leg harnesses and a kettle hat. Only ten owned the complete equipment expected for a man-at-arms: a sallet, a jack, sword, buckler and dagger, while another twelve lacked a buckler and dagger. One man was exceptionally equipped with two sallets, two jacks, three bows with sheaves, two poleaxes, two glaives and two daggers, but those whom the bailiffs considered of sufficient wealth to provide for additional equipment or arms (more shields, bucklers and sallets were required, while some men were required to double the number of arrows carried) were ordered to produce new equipment within two weeks, under pain of fine.

The Bridport muster roll indicates that the weapon of choice for most men was the bow and arrow. Another list of eighty men, complied for Sir William Stonor by constables of Ewelme in Oxfordshire, noted the preferred weapon of choice for their men, drawing up lists of archers, sometimes noted as ‘good’ archers, or whether they fought with a bill or staff(and whether they were ‘able’ at using it or not). Precise information was therefore available not only regarding the quality of weaponry that an area might present, but the quality of men that were to use it. The dependence on archery is understandable. As Sir John Fortescue argued in
The Governance of England
, completed in the 1470s, the might of England ‘standith most upon archers, which be no rich men’. ‘In my opinion archers are the most necessary thing in the
world for an army’, wrote Commynes, ‘though they should be counted in thousands, for in small numbers they are almost useless’. The archer’s rate of fire, which could reach ten or twelve arrows a minute compared to a crossbowman’s two, led to the saying ‘thicker than arrows in an English battle’. At archery, the English remained internationally renowned. They were ‘the world’s best’, according to Commynes, while the Italian cleric Dominic Mancini, visiting England in 1482–3, was genuinely impressed by the sight of English archers mustered by Richard. ‘Their bows and arrows are thicker and longer than those used by other nations just as their arms are stronger than other peoples’, for they seem to have hands and arms of iron’, he wrote. ‘As a result their bows have as long a range as our crossbows. Almost every man has a helmet and each carries an iron shield and a sword which is as long as our sword, but heavy and thick as well.’

In announcing an immediate commission of array and muster of men throughout the kingdom, Richard was relying upon a centuries-old mechanism by which a king might prepare his kingdom for war. Throughout the civil wars, commissions of array had been used by both sides as a means of raising an army at short notice; frequently, men would be ‘well and defensibly arrayed’, to be prepared for service upon an hour’s warning. It was all very well in theory, but how effective could the arrays be? In reality, arrays often suffered from being perilously slow: in 1469 Edward IV had to cancel a campaign against northern rebels, ‘finding that the common people came to him more slowly than he had anticipated’. Then there was the problem that communities were only prepared, or could only afford, to pay for soldiers’ wages for a few weeks’ service. Richard understood from his own experience in the wars against Scotland that gathering a force together was not easily done with speed: when in March 1481 York agreed to send 120 soldiers to serve in Scotland, they had still not left the city by September.

Richard might be able to mobilise men through the commissions of array, but there was no guarantee how effective this assembled force might be. In spite of the civil wars, England had not been at war in France for nearly three decades. An entire generation of men had gone without the experience of fighting on a protracted scale or the knowledge of siege warfare; in consequence they were desperately short of military experience. It was a problem that alarmed those who
believed that the English now lacked the capabilities of their Continental neighbours. When the printer William Caxton dedicated his translation of Raymond Lull’s
Order of Chivalry
to Richard in 1484, he took the opportunity to lament ‘where is the custom and usage of noble chivalry that was used in those days?’ Instead of practising military exercises, knights now instead ‘go to the baths and play at dice’. How many knights, Caxton asked, would know how to ride a horse in armour? He asserted that if ‘a due search’ were performed, ‘there should be many found that lack. The more pity is.’ Twice or three times each year, Caxton suggested, there should be a tournament of knights to encourage each knight to take up their training, with a ‘diamond or jewel’ as a prize, to ‘cause gentlemen to resort to the ancient customs of chivalry to great fame and renown’. Caxton hoped that every knight would read Lull’s book in order to ‘come to the noble order of chivalry’ and ended by urging Richard, his ‘redoubted, natural and most dread sovereign lord’, to ‘command this book to be had and read unto other young lords, knights and gentlemen within this realm, that the noble order of chivalry be hereafter better used and honoured than it hath been in late days passed. And herein he shall do a noble and virtuous deed. And I shall pray almighty God for his long life and prosperous welfare, and that he may have victory of all his enemies.’

Caxton’s fears were no exaggeration: in May 1485 Richard had been forced to write to the bailiff and constables at Ware, complaining that he had discovered that the inhabitants of the town had shunned their archery practice, ‘necessarily requiste to be exercised for the defence of this our realm’, preferring instead to ‘to use carding, dicing, bowling, playing at the tennis, coyting and picking and other unlawful and inhibited disports’ – as well as poaching the king’s game. The activities of the town could hardly have left Richard with much confidence that he would have at his disposal a fearsome army ready to combat his enemy.

As the king’s letters reached the appointed commissioners of array across the country, men gathered their weapons and made their way to the muster points, in preparation for a battle still on an unknown horizon. Not knowing when they would be required to leave their homes and families and depart within the hour for a punishing march to an unknown field, some decided to make other preparations. The
commissioner for Buckinghamshire, John Iwardby, made his will on 22 June, the same day as the instructions sent out by Richard for his troops to be ready at an hour’s notice. Iwardby knew that when the final call came, he might never return alive. With his own mortality in mind, he requested that he be buried in
loco sacro ubi complacebit
– ‘in a sacred place where it shall please God’.

On 24 July Richard sent letters to his chancellor John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, demanding ‘for certain reasons’ that he hand over the Great Seal to the keeper of the rolls Thomas Barowe, so that it could be taken immediately to Nottingham. There could be no clearer sign that Richard expected that an invasion was imminent. If he hoped to raise an army against Henry, he would need to have this ultimate instrument of royal authority in his possession; the impression of the king’s Great Seal, on one side displaying the king seated upon his throne wearing the regalia of state, on the reverse, a knight in armour, charging with his sword borne aloft, was not merely a symbol of the king’s royal authority, it possessed real authority of its own. Without it, Richard knew his commissions of array or signet letters drawing men to his side would have little force. A Norfolk gentleman, Sir Edmund Bedingfield, would later have difficultly persuading his neighbours to obey a commission of array he had been tasked to execute, since it had not been sealed ‘under wax, wherein hath been great argument’; ‘it was thought I ought not to obey no copy of the commission’ unless it was appended with the Great Seal.