 Detachments of around 1,000 men could be sent off to separate duty, but in practice the Legions were initially little more than an ill-disciplined rabble and a failure as a battlefield force, and as such were soon relegated to garrison duty until they matured in the seventeenth century.In practice, pike and shot formations that the French used on the sixteenth-century battlefield were often of an "ad hoc" nature, the large blocks of Swiss mercenary, "Landsknecht", or, to a lesser extent, French pikemen being supported at times by bands of mercenary adventurer shot, largely Gascons and Italians.