The provision of an equipped archer to attend the king in his wars, is the frequent sergeantry for lands at this time; and the particulars attached to the service occasionally partake of that whimsicality found in other tenures of the period. It is curious also to trace the changes which these charters undergo in a small lapse of years, as they come under the inspection of the jurors appointed to enforce their engagements. Thus, the service for the manor of Faintree, in Shropshire, in 1211, is "a foot-soldier, with a bow and arrows, for the king's army in Wales." In 1274 the soldier is bound to stay with the host only "till he has shot away his arrows." In 1284 the archer has "to attend the king in his Welsh wars, with a bow, three arrows, and a 'terpolus[271].'" This terpolus, or tribulus, was probably an "archer's stake," not the mere small iron _caltrop_, of which the provision of one only by each archer would be of little use in impeding a charge of cavalry. The duty of the bowman who had only to stay in the field till he had shot away three arrows was sufficiently easy; but on other occasions the archer did not escape so lightly. The manor of Chetton, co. Salop, supplies in 1283 an archer for the king's host in Wales, who is to take with him a flitch of bacon, and to remain with the army till he has eaten it all up[272]. [Illustration: No. 49.] The Cross-bowman was an essential component of the host during all this period. He was in the van of battle. "Balistarii semper præibant," says Matthew Paris[273]; and there is scarcely a conflict mentioned by this chronicler in which the arbalester does not play a conspicuous part. In the battle near Damietta, in 1237, "more than a hundred knights of the Temple fell, and three hundred cross-bowmen (_arcubalistarii_), not including some other seculars, and a large number of foot-soldiers[274]." The Emperor Frederic in 1239, giving an account of his Italian campaign to the king of England, writes: "After we had by our knights and cross-bowmen reduced all the province of Liguria[275]," &c. In 1242 the Count de la Marche, refusing to do homage to Amphulse, the brother of the French king, "swelling with anger and with loud threats, accompanied by his wife Isabella and surrounded by a body of soldiers, broke through the midst of the Poictevin cross-bowmen, and having set fire to the house in which he had dwelt, suddenly mounted a horse and took to flight[276]." St. Louis, marching to meet the English in Poitou, had an army in which there were "about four thousand knights splendidly armed to the teeth, besides numbers of others, who came from all directions, flocking to the army, like rivers flowing into the sea; and the number of retainers and cross-bowmen was said to be about twenty thousand[277]." The opposing forces of the English king consisted of "sixteen hundred knights, twenty thousand foot-soldiers, and seven hundred arbalesters."