Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

By the time that Edward I was living out his own personal romantic fantasy, however, the role of the knight was beginning to change. For one, their role on the battlefield had to adapt to innovations in tactics and developments in armor. In the British Isles, one of the most catastrophic days in the history of knightly combat occurred on June 24, 1314, the second day of the battle of Bannockburn, at which hundreds of English knights under the command of Edward I’s hapless son Edward II (r. 1307–27) were skewered by pike-wielding Scottish infantry marshaled by the heroic king Robert the Bruce. In the century that followed, English knights began to radically change their fighting methods, abandoning their traditional reliance on the couched-lance charge and often riding into battle but fighting on foot as what military historians call “dismounted men-at-arms.” They were protected by ever-heavier armor, which was evolving from chain-link mail to “plate”-style armor, in which interlocking sheets of hammered steel provided better protection from sword, lance, and ax blows. No longer was the missile barrage of the old “Frankish” cavalry charge the chief weapon in the medieval general’s armory. Besides knights fighting on foot, English kings deployed longbowmen (often recruited from Wales), while their continental counterparts used crossbowmen—the Genoese were renowned for producing the most skilled. Furthermore, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the way armies were rai...