"Scottish men at arms" Topic

Greetings and all and compliments of the season.

I am doing the reading but I am going to throw this question out there anyway, welcoming any informed answers (despite the lateness of the year…).

How practised would a Scottish man-at-arms circa 1330 have been in fighting with the lance on horseback, especially in mounted encounters?

I ask this this against the general impression that the Scots knights tended to ride to battle but dismounted to fight.
We have graphic accounts of King Robert's deftness with an axe
at Bannockburn and the lethal effect of Sir James Douglas' mounted coup de main on the English camp at Stanhope in 1327- but what of 'conventional' encounters between lance-armed cavalry?

Joyeux noel, ken.

Greetings and all and compliments of the season.

I am doing the reading but I am going to throw this question out there anyway, welcoming any informed answers (despite the lateness of the year…).

How practised would a Scottish man-at-arms circa 1330 have been in fighting with the lance on horseback, especially in mounted encounters?

I ask this this against the general impression that the Scots knights tended to ride to battle but dismounted to fight.
We have graphic accounts of King Robert's deftness with an axe
at Bannockburn and the lethal effect of Sir James Douglas' mounted coup de main on the English camp at Stanhope in 1327- but what of 'conventional' encounters between lance-armed cavalry?

Joyeux noel, ken.

Habere Cervisiam…..which is Latin for 'Haud ma broo…..'

The overwhelming majority of combat in the W of I consisted of clashes between men-at-arms; not an infantryman to be seen. Scottish MAA looked exactly like English or French or Low Countries MAA and fought like them too, so they might be dismounted if the situation required it. The number of large general engagements is really quite tiny…Stirling Bridge, Falkirk, Bannockburn, Myton, Halidon Hill, Neville's Cross. There's masses more engagements we ae aware of that are all-cavalry affairs. That was pretty much all the day-to-day military activity other than sieges.
There's a Ph. D thesis (ahem. kof kof…) on MAA service published as 'Knights of the Scottish Wars of Independence' (author did not get to choose the title) and the same guy also wrote 'The Second Scottish Wars of Independence' and 'Scottish Battlefields'. There are a great many books that you really should not read and almost all figures (not all) sold as 'medieval Scots' can also be used as Vampire Templar SS Maori Gurkha Undersea-Paratroop Zombie cowboys.
Strongly recommend you read Sir Thomas Grey's 'Scalacronica' (there's a recent translation/study by Andy King) which will give you a very good insight into the experience of a man who spent almost all his long military career fighting the Scots….except when he was a POW.

PS…the 'general impression we have that Scots knights tended to ride to battle but dismounted to fight' is a special facet of the past that medieval historians call 'wrong'. There is a much better word, but SWMBO tells me I'm not allowed to use it.

Would that be ‘bollox' by any chance?

Possibly… Very possibly…..

So…is there hard evidence to support the Scottish knights in panoply similar to that (lance, etc) of the French, etc? It is a little hard to believe? Was there enough economy to support that level of equipment/industry?

Yes; there's absolutely buckets of it and really nothing to the contrary. Why would it be hard to believe? 14th C Scottish MAA looked exactly like their English (or French or Low Countries) counterparts – same with the infantry. The Scottish economy was pretty robust, that's why Edward I wanted to annexe Scotland in the first place.
What 42Flanker describes as 'conventional' cavalry encounters were the normal day-to-day fare of the Wars of Independence. There's more record material relating to this than you can shake a stick at , but you might want to start with 'Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland'.

@Augustus

A lot of the Scottish nobility were of the same Norman descent as their English counterparts and some still held lands in England. Like all "elites" they would have made damn sure they got more than their fair share of the wealth of the country.

By 1300 the 'Norman' connection was pretty thin, but of course that is the nature of social/political elites.. A very tiny number of people held land in more than one country and mostly the property was fairly insignificant. Some of those would be magnates and some would be border families obtaining or giving land in marriage settlements. Before 1296 there was really very little trouble between England and Scotland by and really not much interaction beyond marriages of a handful of the tiny magnate class and border lords/gentry. The two kingdoms did very little trade with one another since they both exported the same products and only imported things they could not produce – most notably wine, spices and wine…….and also more wine.

Ooops….after 'elites' I meant to write….'to amass/extort a bigger share of the wealth'.

Was there enough economy to support that level of equipment/industry?

In the 14th century Europe, there were many regions that were more remote and economically challenged than Scotland, yet also in those areas the men-at-arms were able to kit out themselves in the full panoply of war.

x2 for Greifbringer; also…Scotland was neither remote nor economically challenged in 1296.

As regards setting up the industry, it does not take a massive economy to support a few weaponsmiths and armourers. Actually, a common blacksmith might be able to hammer metal components for simpler weapons, such as spears/lances, axes and arrows. Sword manufacturing could require more specialisation, though.

Armour manufacturing was also more specialised craft, though mail manufacturing was well-established art by the time, and the individual rings were not particularly complex to manufacture (could be handled by apprentices). Forming the rings together into a single, moderately comfortable suit would however require certain expertise and experience. And though the production of metal plates to protect limbs and torso was relatively modern concept in Europe in the beginning of 14th century, helmets had been formed from metal plates for centuries.

Also new influences could spread around Europe moderately quickly, thanks to trade and travelling individuals. Once the craft guilds had established themselves in towns, young artisan journeymen could find themselves travelling from town to town, learning new skills and spreading them, until they were allowed to set up themselves as a master of their own workshop (though in some cases a powerful magnate might hire them directly).

the 'general impression we have that Scots knights tended to ride to battle but dismounted to fight' is a special facet of the past that medieval historians call 'wrong'.

I can see I expressed myself badly.

Sifting, if I may, through your answer, I glean:

"The overwhelming majority of combat in the W of I consisted of clashes between men-at-arms; Scottish MAA… might be dismounted if the situation required it.

"The number of large general engagements is really quite tiny… Stirling Bridge, Falkirk, Bannockburn, Myton, Halidon Hill, Neville's Cross."

If I seemed to suggest that the majority of armed encounters in the Anglo-Scots wars were infantry engagements, that was my mistake. In my reference to riding to battle and dismounting to fight the key word was ‘battle,' by which I meant the general engagements that you list, which in most cases, few as they were, as I understand it, saw the greater proportion of the Scots armies fight on foot rather than being cavalry engagements.

My reference, which perhaps you missed, was to the lance in particular. While Scots knights/ men at arm were doubtless accomplished horsemen whose individual weapon skills might be developed to a high degree, I was speculating what opportunities there might have been for manoeuvering in formation, knee to knee with lances levelled and whether cavalry engagements ever extended much beyond relatively small scale encounters on the level of skirmishing, raiding or pursuit. Were there other weapons that were more favoured, King Robert's "guid axe" aside?

In Scalacronica, from a brief survey Grey's anecdotes show his father Thomas senior engaged in asymetrical clashes with adherents of the Bruce faction in and around Cupar, dispersing four hundred Scots with only twenty six of his own men at arms, "bearing many to the ground in his course by the shock of his horse and lance," and on another occasion, Grey describes his pater riding through a cordon of a hundred Scots where "he struck down some with his spear, others with the shock of his horse and passing through them all." Allegedly. Of course, he was English. Other encounters, at Norham for instance show Grey senior on two occasions driving off mounted Scots raiders with men of the garrison on foot armed with what are described as 'lances' in the Maxwell translation. Whatever they are, they are driven into the bellies of the Scots mounts and The ground is littered with felled horses. Not a mounted encounter of course, though Grey observes that if the English had been mounted, scarcely one of the attackers would have escaped.

The question of armour provision is interesting. Do we have evidence of a developed industry of armourers existing in Scotland in, say, the first quarter of C14th, or does that only become more relevant as the use of plate armour develops through the century? Meanwhile, ‘ammunition' mail and helmets might be turned out by local smiths but if knights of the upper echelons wanted an armour that was finer or more up to date, say, was there a sufficiently dynamic home industry to provide? I am curious as to what interplay there was between Scotland and the Continent, along the Low Countries axis, for example, communicating fashions and technical devlopments, and what do we make of Froissart's account of French knights bringing over armour to equip 1200 men "cap á pied"- Did our Jean have a particular agenda in relaying that story?

Absolutely – we were somewhat at cross-purposes and I think that's down to me. In general engagements Scottish MAA fought dismounted pretty much all the time. Even small cavalry actions were very much lance-based – man without lance is a man in trouble – that's why De Bohun was so confident……we all make mistakes.
Gray filius is at pains from time to time to shine himself (and pater) up….who would n't? People are not on oath when they write their memoirs. I've had to make the best of winnowing accounts of modern soldiers (WW2 and Korea mostly) and I doubt if things were much different 700 years past. OTH dispersing a large body of unformed foot with a few horsemen is pretty credible IMO – though you do have to wonder who was doing the counting don't you? Same with bursting through a cordon; pretty credible to me and I'm a long way short of being an equestrian. OTH, well-formed men on foot with 'lances' seeing off mounted men is extremely credible BUT, despite Grey Snr's claims, had the enemy been mounted who knows what would transpire? Roslin (a cavalry clash) sees a smaller Scottish force which had marched through the night from Biggar (more than 20Km) beat a larger, rested English force and more widely honours are pretty evenly divided for these sort of actions; there 's a 'Scottish Battlefields' book by some obscure old Scottish academic that lists quite a few…..)

13/14thC writers – let alone 19th C translators – were largely pretty loose with the terms spear and lance and I'm a bit inclined to think the weapons themselves were pretty much interchangeable at this time … but'a bit inclined' is the strength of it: I might read something tomorrow that would change my mind.
Armour -- there was home industry for sure, but there was certainly a fair bit of importing and – IMO – a high proportion of that would be top-end gear from the Low Countries … same as in England…..and there was also clearly some level of importing from England given attempts to ban the trade by Edward II, but that may just have been a temporary phenomenon; IIRC (and it's been quite maybe 20 years since I worked on this sort of thing) Edward's orders to refrain from exporting arms to Scotland are 1309-10 or thereabouts when Robert did not yet have possession of the significant towns and (thereby) artisans. OTH I think (operative word being 'think') that there was some trade in importing spears in considerable quantity – as there would be with muskets in later centuries. That said, at the very beginning of the W. of Ind. I suspect that there was very little armour-making due to there being very little demand, but when we get to the 1310s-20s and beyond there's really nothing much in record evidence about buying arms at all whether domestic or imported.

Froissart…..like LeBel or Bower best not to be taken too literally. IIRC some other source (Fordoun maybe?) writes of armour for 50. For sure there was probably never a time when Scotland could find 1200 MAA at all, let alone 1200 needing armour.
Communicating with the continent was normal; even before Edward I's actions England and Scotland did not really have very much to do with each other. Trade mas mostly to the Low Countries and France (and some to Spain) or to Norway and the Baltic. Marriages between magnate families – of which naturally there were very few since there were not all that many magnates – dwindled to virtually nothing by the early 1300s (Bobby T. Bruce's marriage to Eliz. de Burgh being something of an exception) and although it had been commonplace between border noble and gentry families (and sometimes burghal ones as well) that, too died out pretty fast.

13/14thC writers – let alone 19th C translators – were largely pretty loose with the terms spear and lance and I'm a bit inclined to think the weapons themselves were pretty much interchangeable at this time

Even more modern authors tend to be sometimes pretty free in their terminology when it comes to pointy stick, referring to them variously as javelins, spears, lances or pikes at their fancy, so it is often worth checking the actual details (e.g. lenght) available before making far-reaching conclusions. Wargamers tend to find these distinctions more important than most other readers.

As for 14th century lances, their main distinctive feature would have been a separate metal vamplate, that could be nailed to the shaft to provide the rider with a stouter hold on impact with a target. That said, not every lance had a vamplate, and it could probably be easily removed for dismounted use.

As far as I can recall I've not come across any reference to vamplates as early as the W of I but you may well be correct.

More pointy stick talk

I am looking at the Latin 'baculo'(from baculus), Within the Latin source this is clarifed as "called in French archegaie"

That latter term is clear enough. Deriving from the Arab-Berber azagaya- it is generally interpreted as a javelin-like weapon most commonly depicted in use by Christian light troops in the Iberian peninsula from the C14th, although in this instance it is being wielded by 'Saracens.'

'Baculo' has got me puzzled, however. Translated in dictionaries variously as 'staff' 'sceptre,' or 'bishop's crozier/shepherd's crook', its context seems to be firmly non-pointy and peacable, with a strong church connotation- although it does also turn up referring to cudgels used by rioting monks. All good fun.

My question is, does the word 'baculus/baculo' have a military context that I have missed? Or is it being used here simply in the sense, say, of 'shaft' with the pointy aspect taken as given, since it is depicted delivering a fatal wound to the individual whose body it has transfixed.

Your patience is appreciated.
Thank you for not smoking

Yes; pointiness taken as given. I think I've seen it used for crossbow bolts/quarrels/arrows as well, but it's 20 years since I worked on this stuff; I may well be mistaken.
As it happens I stopped smoking a couple of months back after 50+ years. I'm sure it's good for me……somehow.

Thank you (also for 29.12.22). Interestingly, it seems that previously 'archegaie' (etc etc) was interpreted by a handful of scholars as being a projectile shot from a crossbow/arbalest- a position now discredited as arbitrary and without any observable basis. Whether the author(s) of 'Chronographia Regum Francorum,' ca. 1400 might have been labouring under a similar misapprehension, I am not in a position to say.

I wonder which scholars dismissed it. There's a chap who is a great expert on jousting who gets to weigh in on battles pretty regularly…..the outcome is not good.

'Medieval folk etymologizing and modern misconstruals of Old French Archegaie'
by David Scott-Macnab
Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 123/1, 2013 at JSTOR

'Lexical borrowing and code-switching:
The case of archegay/hasegaye/harsegay
in the Middle Ages and later'
by David Scott-Macnab (2012)

PDF academia.educ & other platforms

Seems reasonably reasoned and thorough.

Cites Thom Richardson of the Royal Armouries, Leeds and various Professors

Fair enough – 'twas just a passing thought.

I'll see what else turns up.

Aha…the Micawber research method!

Always worked for me…
Reconnaissance by fire

Lovely!

Baculu[m] does of course get a mention on the Bayeux Tapestry when dear old Odo encourages the boys and is depicted with a rather crude cudgel…

DBS303 – I was not aware of that; a bit early for me.

"HIC.ODO EPS: BACULU. TENENS"

decouvrir-la-tapisserie-de-bayeux/explorer-la-tapisserie-de-bayeux-en-ligne

link