Still the lesson of Flodden to the English was mainly that bows and bills were still irresistible; and to a conservative people none could have been more welcome. Henry, who was an enthusiastic archer, had already renewed a statute of his father's prohibiting the use of the cross-bow without a licence, and he now withdrew all licences and extended the prohibition to hand-guns.[101] The long-bow, on the other hand, received all the encouragement that enactments and sentiment could afford it. Henry dressed himself and his body-guard in green, which was the archer's peculiar colour; and the Venetian ambassador Giustiniani writing in 1519 described, with but slight exaggeration, the English military forces as consisting of one hundred and fifty thousand men, whose peculiar though not exclusive weapon was the long-bow. Men-at-arms were extinct, light cavalry insignificant in number. Giustiniani, however, did not add that the archers were now more efficiently equipped than at any previous period, being provided with two stakes instead of one, and further protected by a breastplate.[102] Nor did he notice a new weapon, the Moorish or Morris pike, which had lately come into use among the English, and had brought them a little closer to the famous infantry of the Continent. [Sidenote: 1520.] It is, however, almost with a smile that we see Henry with undiminished satisfaction flaunting his archers in the face of Francis at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Francis on his side produced his Swiss, and gave the English an opportunity of studying the first infantry in Europe. Fleuranges was at their head, and as his eye wandered from the scarlet and gold of the body-guard to the white and green of the other English troops, he probably felt justified in his opinion that they could not meet his own men in the open field. Henry, however, was unchangeable,[103] and the only sign of novelty that we see at this famous pageant is a horn-shaped flag borne in the retinue of Cardinal Wolsey, the _cornette_, which was in due time to give its name to the standard-bearers of the English cavalry.[104] [Sidenote: 1522.] [Sidenote: 1523.] [Sidenote: 1525.]