A quick one today. Fitting for the battle - English vs French 100 years war, with the French invading Normandy in the Winter
My English got a perfect defensible position, with woods anchoring both flanks and a stone wall in front of them. Perfect.
However, playing it safe didn't seem like much fun, so I deployed half of my English troops and all the Normans behind the wall and sent Thomas of Essex with the other half of the longbow and knights on a flank march.
The French dismounted and advanced cautiously, while their light troops moved around the flanks. The French field artillery started with a quick kill of the English guns.
On the flanks things started well for the English, with large numbers of French knights dying on the way in, but far from a catastrophic number. Meanwhile Thomas and his army was no where to be seen. King Henry would have to hold on to the fortified position for much longer than hoped.
The French knights attacked the English defenses... and walked straight through them, easily pushing the longbow and Normans back, crossing the wall and cutting into the English defenders.
The English lines began to fray extremely quickly, with Henry and his bodyguard having to even charge into the melee to plug a gap. Thomas needed to arrive quickly.
But he didn't. The French knights quickly overwhelmed their English counterparts who moved in to aid the beleaguered longbowmen, killing 2/3rds of the deployed English nobility in a couple of bounds, breaking the morale of the nearby longbowmen which, in turn caused the Normans to similarly surrender the field.
Thomas arrived too late, turned around and fled.
Overall that was an utter disaster. The inability for my flank march to arrive in time coupled with the uselessness of the boundary wall meant that in only an hour and bit the English were routed. Still the longbow corps is still in tact, so this is far from the end of the hundred years war...
https://www.facebook.com/groups/824840264342234/posts/2548947921931451
Many thanks for the game report. Thomas was clearly not a really useful engine 
No comments:
Post a Comment