BRITAIN.

beautiful and charming, but they are easily surpassed by the elegance of our more cultivated talent and the learned allurements of manners. The youth, however, is seen to be most decorous with a liberal countenance, cultivation, and masculine cleanliness; nor are some lacking, as in a long peace and far from the duties of warfare, who are accustomed to be a little more delicate and fussy, to arrange the hair with a comb, to clean the garment with a brush, and to show too much of a study for elegance in adornment and gait. Nor do they bear fierce countenances and stubborn minds, even if they were born of Saxon blood, since for a long time now they have brought back the excellently tempered gifts of body and soul from neighboring nations. But among the ignorant commoners, and especially those who never travel, pride and contempt for outsiders flourish; for they think that man to be very unhappy and half-human who was born elsewhere than in Britain, and furthermore, that man to be by far the most unhappy who happened to leave his spirit and bones in a foreign land outside the island. British kings, by ancient custom, feed no foot soldiers or horsemen at all in peace except for the praetorians; for when war is declared, they call them out from the provinces. Once the levies have been held and they have gathered at the standards, they pay a three-month stipend for those enlisted in wings and cohorts, and finally the military laws are published, with such severity of the edict that it is a capital offense to have played with dice and painted cards, for one who brings goods for sale into the camp to have violated [the camp], to have brought in a harlot, and to have drawn a sword in a quarrel. So it is not entirely a wonder if we have declined from that ancient honor of the art of war, since in this such foul and pestilential impunity of crimes, our wicked and equally unskilled leaders have completely lost every method of discipline, so that we watch that honor, which was once very illustrious in our ancestors, transferred with glory among foreign nations while liberty is lost along the way. Among the English, the only hope and chief glory, gained by frequent outcomes of victories, is in arrows. They fire them, thicker than the smallest finger, two cubits long, and tipped with barbed iron, from huge wooden bows with such force and skill that they easily penetrate a scaly breastplate or armor at the first shots, and often pierce through iron equestrian armor, heated and [left] in the much sun. It is their custom from Roman discipline to carry a stake, and as soon as the enemy is in sight, to fortify themselves in a circle at a measured distance; for they fix round stakes, sharpened at both ends with an iron point, into the ground with wonderful speed and turn them, slightly tilted in a hostile line, toward the enemy. In the middle, however, is an iron ring by which they are often bound by a continuous rope. Circumvallated in this way, they press the stake at the bottom with their left foot and, with legs spread and arms loosened, they discharge the arrows, while they are covered by an internal wooden shield of the left arm so that the force of the rebounding string is not crushed by the wrinkles of the gauntlet. By this kind of fortification we have mentioned, they excellently withstood the charge of the Gallic cavalry, than which nothing was once more sharp and vehement, while some, having rashly brought themselves forward, impaled themselves on the sharpened stakes, and others were mowed down in the rear line by a hail of arrows. By this one method of battle, John, King of Gaul, was defeated and captured in a huge battle near Poitiers, and Philip was routed near Samarobriva after receiving a great slaughter. It appeared in that battle that the Ligurian archers, who used iron-bowed scorpions—a type of weapon and spirit by which they could seem equal to the enemy—were not to be compared to the English in neither force nor speed. The remaining English foot soldiers fight in the German manner with a long spear and heavy axe, but with longer swords; when they have drawn these, they hold forward the small iron shield seized from the belt with the left hand. The horsemen, according to the custom of the Gauls and Belgians, are armored and adorned with beech-wood, crests, and painted horse coverings. Among all, the Welsh horsemen hold the duties of light armor more skillfully,