Then, very gradually, came a change in the opposite direction. The knights and their retainers had been practically the only fighting men who counted, and were accustomed to ride down with ease and contempt any footmen who ventured to stand against them. Bows and arrows and axes and knives seemed of little avail against the spearman with his almost impenetrable armour and his thundering steed. As Colonel Maude puts it, “the knight in full armour had borne about the same relation to the infantry as an ironclad nowadays bears to a fleet of Chinese junks.” But little by little it began to be recognised, first it is said in the Crusades, when the knights had to take or defend fortresses and otherwise fight on foot, that there were operations in war for which the heavily armoured horseman was not well fitted. Bodies of footmen began to be raised again for such purposes, and even to be brought into the open field as archers or cross-bowmen for use in broken ground. They often suffered horribly, but now and then they gained some successes, and as time went on they developed greater skill and confidence. Eventually, at Crécy and Poictiers and Agincourt, the English archers, with their cloth-yard shafts and their bristling defence of pointed stakes, won astonishing victories over the Chivalry of France, and proved to Europe that the horseman was no longer invincible on the battlefield. The lesson had very nearly been taught by the English three hundred years earlier, on the field of Hastings; but the time had not then come. Lured from their stockades, the footmen had been cut to pieces, and the French Cavalry had conquered England. At Crécy the English footmen turned the tables. And elsewhere, about the same period, the Swiss Infantry won almost equal honour. The Cavalry of Europe nevertheless fought hard for their old pre-eminence, and it was long before they could be brought to see that they would never again be the undisputed masters in battle. But it was a lesson they had to learn. As time went on they found their charges repelled by serried squares of pikemen, from which came showers of arrows and cross-bolts; and later the invention of firearms weighted the scale still further against them. The only offensive weapons of the horsemen were the weight of their horses and the lance or sword; and if the horses failed to break the rows of eighteen-foot pikes, the _arme blanche_ could do nothing. At last, after many attempts by the Cavalry to meet these new conditions, by using firearms themselves and other devices, it came to be generally recognised that against confident and steady infantry armed with the pike, deliberate frontal assault by horsemen was practically hopeless, and that for the future Cavalry must depend to some extent upon surprise and stratagem to give them victory. The defence had in some measure triumphed over the attack, and the essentially offensive arm had lost its pride of place.