Thirteen years later this boy ascended the throne of England as King Edward the Third, and almost immediately marched with a great host against the Scots. The campaign came to an end without any decisive engagement, but on the one occasion when an action seemed imminent, the English men-at-arms dismounted and put off their spurs after the old English fashion. Peace was made, but only to be broken by the Scots, and then Edward took his revenge for Bannockburn at Halidon Hill. The English men-at-arms alighted from their horses, and were formed into four battalions, each of them flanked by wings of archers, the identical formation adopted two centuries later for the pikemen and musketeers. The Scots, whose numbers were far superior, were also formed on foot in four battalions, but without the strength of archers. "And then," says the old historian,[14] "the English minstrels blew aloud their trumpets and sounded their pipes and other instruments of martial music, and marched furiously to meet the Scots." The archers shot so thick and fast that the enemy, unable to endure it, broke their ranks, and then the English men-at-arms leaped on to their horses for the pursuit. The Scotch strove gallantly to rally in small bodies, but they were borne down or swept away; they are said to have lost ten thousand slain out of sixty thousand that entered the battle.
The mounting of the men-at-arms for the pursuit gave the finishing touch to the English tactical methods, and the nation was now ready for war on a grander scale. Moreover, there was playing round the knees of good Queen Philippa a little boy of three years old who was destined to be the victor of Poitiers. It is therefore time, while the quarrel which led to the Hundred Years' War is maturing, to observe the point to which two centuries and a half of progress had brought English military organisation.
AUTHORITIES.--By far the best, so far as I know the only, account of the rise of English tactics and of English military power is to be found in _Die Entwickelung des Kriegswesens in der Ritterzeit_, by Major-General Köhler, vol. ii. pp. 356 sq., and vol. v. pp. 97 sq., a work to which my obligations must be most gratefully acknowledged. The authorities are faithfully and abundantly quoted. Freeman's _Norman Conquest_, Mr. J. H. Round's _Feudal England_, Hewitt's _Ancient Armour_, Oman's _Art of War in the Middle Ages_, Grose's _Military Antiquities_, and Rymer's _Fœdera_ are authorities which will occur to every one, as also the Constitutional Histories of Hallam, Stubbs, and Gneist.