The King's Company
The King's Company is the permanent, standing force of longbowmen maintained by the The High King.
It is used to garrison royal castles throughout the The High Kingdom and also as the nucleus of a reserve army that is based in Nejard. In times of war, this then forms the nucleus of the Royal Army.
Composition
Manpower
The King's Company is formed of two pools of manpower.
The first is the garrison troops, who number in total around 2,000.
The second is the reserve army, who number around 5,000.
Equipment
The King's Company are issued with equipment from the royal armouries, and are therefore excellently equipped, often with weapons and armour that date back centuries. Their appearance is therefore somewhat archaic.
Each soldier wears a breastplate, greaves, and plate vambraces, and is equipped with a longbow and longsword.
Weaponry
The primary weapon of the King's Company is their fearsome elven longbow. Each solder is issued with 2 bows, 5 bowstrings, 2 quivers and 200 arrows. Additional arrows are held in the armoury and carried in the supply train when on campaign.
Each soldier is also issued with a finely crafted elven longsword, and the King's Company are renowned hand to hand fighters as well as archers.
Structure
The smallest sub-unit of the Company is the Brotherhood, which numbers 20 soldiers. This is led by a ?.
For some of the smaller castles, a single Brotherhood may be the entire garrison.
Two to five Brotherhoods are grouped together to form a Pennant, so named after the flag which each is grouped under. In the field army, at full strength, each Pennant contains 5 Brotherhoods, but this will normally change during a campaign as losses mount, or Brotherhoods are detached to serve as garrisons or escorts. Each medium sized garrison will be a Pennant, but the number of Brotherhoods in it will depend on the size of the castle.
A Pennant is therefore nominally 100 soldiers.
Five Pennants are then combined to form a Banner of 500 soldiers.
Five Banners are combined to form a Wing of 2,500 soldiers. There are two Wings to the field army part of the King's Company (the Left Wing and the Right Wing), and the garrison troops form a third wing for logistical purposes. On the few occasions where the entire King's Company has been used in a single battle, including the garrison troops, the Third Wing was used as a separate reserve formation.
Tactics
In a pitched battle, the King's Company will form the centre of the battle line, drawn up with the two Wings side-by-side, 5 deep. Each Brotherhood will therefore have a frontage of 4 soldiers, each Pennant 20 soldiers, each Banner 100 soldiers, each Wing 500 soldiers and the whole Company will be 1,000 soldiers wide. With a standard frontage of six feet allowed for each soldier to shoot unimpeded, this will therefore stretch for 6,000 feet, or 2 km.
If time has permitted, the Company will deploy behind lines of stakes, caltrops and ditches to delay the enemy and keep them in the firing zone for as long as possible. This tactic precludes the use of knights behind to charge through however, so is not always used (or sometimes only stakes are used as they are less dangerous to cavalry charging through in the direction the stakes are pointing).
Training
Soldiers of the King's Company are permanently under arms and train constantly. They are skilled both in their longbows (and long training has also given them the physical prowess to draw such powerful weapons) and in the longsword, because they are expected to be as proficient in close quarter combat as in shooting.
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