the foreign kings added to this a system of warlike organization grounded on the service due from its military tenants to the Crown, they were far from regarding this as superseding the national “fyrd.”  The Assize of Arms, the Statute of Winchester, show with what care the fyrd was held in a state of efficiency.  Its force indeed as an engine of war was fast rising between the age of Henry the Second and that of Edward the Third.  The social changes on which we have already dwelt, the facilities given to alienation and the subdivision of lands, the transition of the serf into a copyholder and of the copyholder by redemption of his services into a freeholder, the rise of a new class of “farmers” as the lords ceased to till their demesne by means of bailiffs and adopted the practice of leasing it at a rent or “farm” to one of the customary tenants, the general increase of wealth which was telling on the social position even of those who still remained in villenage, undid more and more the earlier process which had degraded the free ceorl of the English Conquest into the villein of the Norman Conquest, and covered the land with a population of yeomen, some freeholders, some with services that every day became less weighty and already left them virtually free.

[Sidenote:  The Bow]

Such men, proud of their right to justice and an equal law, called by attendance in the county court to a share in the judicial, the financial, and the political life of the realm, were of a temper to make soldiers of a different sort from the wretched serfs who followed the feudal lords of the Continent; and they were equipped with a weapon which as they wielded it was enough of itself to make a revolution in the art of war.  The bow, identified as it became with English warfare, was the weapon not of Englishmen but of their Norman conquerors.  It was the Norman arrow-flight that decided the day of Senlac.  But in the organization of the national army it had been assigned as the weapon of the poorer freeholders who were liable to serve at the king’s summons; and we see how closely it had become associated with them in the picture of Chaucer’s yeoman.  “In his hand he bore a mighty bow.”  Its might lay not only in the range of the heavy war-shaft, a range we are told of four hundred yards, but in its force.  The English archer, taught from very childhood “how to draw, how to lay his body to the bow,” his skill quickened by incessant practice and constant rivalry with his fellows, raised the bow into a terrible engine of war.  Thrown out along the front in a loose order that alone showed their vigour and self-dependence, the bowmen faced and riddled the splendid line of knighthood as it charged upon them.  The galled horses “reeled right rudely.”  Their riders found even the steel of Milan a poor defence against the grey-goose shaft.  Gradually the bow dictated the very tactics of an English battle.  If the mass of cavalry still plunged forward, the screen