Quote Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy View Post
Is it not cheaper though than a crowd of costly men at arms?? thats prob the real advantage.

I remember my brother once made the point that Rome must have had an enourmous advantage economically having standard weapons. One could make the case that the English just hit on plan with more bang for it's buck quite literally, cheaper yeomen who can concentrate fire on an enemy a fair bit away.
The Roman army did not use standard weapons and armor nor did they have the machines to make it standardized in a modern sense.

English kings hired foreign knights for domestic campaigns and even tried, unsuccessfully, to increase the numbers of men-at-arms from the local lords. They also tried to build up a force of heavy infantry with little success. If we look at late 13th to early 14th century we see several campaigns using enormous amounts of infantry, something that was never repeated later on as it seems the poor quality and low mobility was not worth the hassle. It is after that we see a stronger focus on archers as the main infantry, and even a lot of mounted archers even though they cost more.

English kings does not seem to have had many options left but to focus on archers to increase the strength of their armies. That does not mean they were bad, only that cost is just one of several reasons as to what troops were used.