The Monmouthshire Warrior in the Middle Ages

 The medieval fighters of Gwent/Monmouthshire
  We know a certain amount from various sources but one seminal writer on the topic is Giraldus Cambrensis who toured Wales with Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1188. He kept a kind of diary (I have no doubt that today he would have been an enthusiastic and diligent blogger) and, as one of his motives was to drum up support for the Third Crusade, his notings of military matters are crucial to our understanding.
  He commented that the men of Gwent "have much more experience of warfare, are more famous for their martial exploits and, in particular, are more skilled with the bow and arrow than those who come from other parts of Wales." He quotes events from the capture of Abergavenny castle where the arrows penetrated the oak doorway of the tower, almost as thick as a man's palm, and where the infamous William de Braose told a riveting (pun intended) tale. In this account a Welsh bowman shot an arrow through a rider's thigh despite protection by cuishes, then though his leather tunic, part of the saddle and deeply into the horse, killing it. Another fighter, similarly pierced, wheeled his mount round and was impaled on the other side, pinning him twice to the animal.
   Giraldus sums this up: "It is difficult to see what more you could do, even if you had a ballista". Quite so, Gerald of Wales. These bows were carved out of dwarf elm trees, not very large but sturdy, and left unpolished: in his view they were particularly useful at close quarters. In general, the archers were usually, as John Keegan states, "from remote and rustic areas ... with time on their hands." They were often not considered worth a ransom.

The longbow
   It is generally accepted that the English longbow was borrowed from Wales and evolved to become a formidable weapon, by the 13th century coming to measure around 6ft. It had a complex construction of different woods and required great strength and skill to manipulate. A shorter bow drawn back as far as the nearside of the chest had some force but the taller one taken further back as far as the ear was a winner - this change dates from the first decades of the 14th century. The yard-long arrows took 3 times as long to make as the bow, needed goose feathers from the same wing of the bird for even flight and were tipped with metal bodkins. This explains why they were frequently retrieved from the dead on the battle field.
  It was Edward I who was mainly responsible for recognising the potential of the longbow, ironically largely because of his encounters with it in the hands of his enemy, The rise of the English infantry to be a real power in Europe depended on the longbow drawn to the ear and he developed such trust in it that he had an archers-only corps of 800 men in 1277 from Gwent and Crickhowell who gained, as mercenaries, an unusual 3d per day. The arrows could penetrate chain mail and chroniclers report victims looking like hedgehogs with bristling spikes - bowmen were more often combined with other forms of infantry or even cavalry. A rain of arrows caused a "funk" sending a soldier into a kind of distraught madness even if he were not hit.

It could take 10 years to train an archer and they developed enlarged pulling arms and shoulders as has been seen on skeletons. Edward III issued a declaration in 1363 that "every man in the ... country, if he be able-bodied, shall, upon holidays, make use, in his games, of bows and arrows ... and so learn and practise archery." He recognised that this would give him a pool of skilled men for recruitment in war. By contrast, the French rulers discouraged such training for fear that the plebs would use their proficiency to rise up in revolt against them. They perhaps regretted this after their defeats in the great battles of the Hundred Years' War. It should be noted that archers were also used on ships and stood on the "castles" to fire.

England/Wales v France
  Crécy was perhaps the battle of the non-Hundred Years' War (I was baffled by the arithmetic when I was at school) most affected by the longbowmen. 2000 of them were taken from South Wales to a resounding victory over the French who were blinded by the sun: at least 10000 of the enemy died, many of them noblemen. We will skip over Poitiers where the bowmen committed atrocities and move on to Agincourt where the arrow-scarred Henry V (injured by a Welsh shot at the Battle of Shrewsbury and captured in his portrait in profile to hide this) won another round of the contest. Again French losses vastly outnumbered the English. In a conversation with Fluellen after the battle, the Welshman refers to Henry's great-uncle "Edward the Plack, Prince of Wales" fighting a "most prave pattle here in France" in which the Welshman did good service ... wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps" as the King does on "Saint Tavy's day" because he is, as he acknowledges, Welsh himself.
 On a sourer note, we can infer that some regarded as treachery, Welsh service to the English cause.

Henry V was born in Monmouth Castle and, if you are interested in the ballista, there is also a post on this blog about such Medieval weapons. I am indebted to Reginald Bosanquet for the detail about goose feathers which, at first, seemed rather like the tale I once believed that it was best to buy a left leg of Welsh lamb because they built up flesh on that side by circling the mountains clockwise.