The Archer's War: Exciting good read - adventure fiction about fighting and combat during medieval times in feudal England with archers, longbows, knights, ... (The Company of English Archers Book 4)

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Book: The Archer's War: Exciting good read - adventure fiction about fighting and combat during medieval times in feudal England with archers, longbows, knights, ... (The Company of English Archers Book 4) by Martin Archer Read Free Book Online
Authors: Martin Archer
Tags: Historical fiction
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arrow storm and leg holes and caltrops and the stakes.  Only then will our pike men, whose newfangled twenty foot bladed pikes are much longer than the lances of the charging knights, raise them so they can be seen and aim their steel points to impale the horses and men coming at them. 
           Some say it’s the Swiss who invented the pikes, and God bless them for it, but it’s our own Henry and our smiths out in Cyprus who added the bladed hook that can be used to chop down men or hook them and pull them off their horses or feet.
           If we do it right by launching our arrows straight and holding our pikes steady none of the knights will get past our stakes and pike men; if we do it wrong the knights and their horsemen will get past our pike men and in among our archers - and most likely slaughter them.
           And, of course, it is always possible that the knights and their men will advance on foot through our arrow storm with their helms raised so they can see where they are going and not step on our caltrops or into the leg breaking holes we dig.  Each of our companies has something special for that to - its own heavy iron ploughs and plough horses with collars. The horses are much better than the slower oxen that the farmers usually use because they walk faster.  We had to scour Cornwall to find them.
           The job of each company’s ploughmen is to quickly and deeply plow the ground in front of his company so its attackers will have to walk or ride in their heavy armor through both a deeply ploughed field and our arrow storm to get to our pike men. 
           If Henry is right, the enemy men who live long enough to get to our lines will be tired and off balance as a result of walking through the ploughed field - and be more easily shot down by our archers or speared or hooked or pushed to the ground by our long Swiss pikes with the new-fangled blade hooks our smiths added to them. 
           I think Henry is right; I put on some captured armor and pretended to be a knight attacking on foot.  Walking through a plowed field in even partial armor is exhausting even with the visor up so you can see where you are going - I was easily overbalanced and pushed to the ground when I reached our pike men. I would have been a killed man for sure.
           Hopefully, of course, the attackers won’t even get to the pike men because of the steady stream of armor piercing arrows coming straight at them from our archers’ long bows.
           At least that’s the plan and it will no doubt work perfectly - until the first arrow flies and everything changes and becomes confused.
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           After two or three hours of company drill the men are dismissed for their first meal of the day.  From there they go to their individual assignments: archers to practice, fletchers to fletch and so on and so forth. That’s when I go back to the castle to eat and think.  And today I’ve been thinking about the future of our fetchers and carriers when the fighting starts and also about where the best battlegrounds might be for us to fight.
           From what I could see on the crusade, and more recently at Trematon and Nicosia, the lords and knights tend to fight individually because that’s the way they learned for their tournaments.  They charge in a great disorganized mass and begin fighting with whatever enemies they reach.  And they expect their men on foot and archers to run in behind them to join the battle and do the same.
           The inevitable result is that the battlefield dissolves into a great mass of individual and small group combats between handfuls of men.  Hopefully that’s what Cornell will do.
           But what if Cornell sends in his archers first to soften us up, particularly crossbowmen whose rate of fire is very much slower but whose metal quarrels have a range that is sometimes as great as or even greater than that of our

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