From the early fourteenth century the battlefield dominance of the mounted knight was increasingly challenged by the rising power of the foot soldier. The Flemish spearmen at Courtrai in 1302, and the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314, showed that steady foot could defeat mounted knights. However, it was the English use of massed longbowmen combined with dismounted men-at-arms that would come to dominate western European battlefields for the rest of the 14th century and well into the 15th. During the Hundred Years War, from 1337 to 1453, the French knights suffered a string…