If a unit needed to rally and regroup did they just signal a retreat and the it’s every man for himself or was there a tactic involved?
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Most medieval battles ended catastrophically for the losing side. Massive massacre and only units that weren’t at the actual frontline had a chance to escape in a coordinated way.
More coordination existed before for example in ancient rome, and also later when the medieval knight frontal assault slowly got replaced by well organized infantry. Firearms especially allowed some “covered retreat” without immediately being overrun by chasing riders
Regardless of your time period, true (not feigned) retreats come in two basic flavors: tactical withdrawals, and routs.
In a tactical withdrawal, order and discipline are maintained. If you’re in the phalanx era, your shield-wall starts moving back instead of forward. In the mounted knight context, you’d start backing your horses up while continuing to face the enemy. In a modern retreat, you’d have some soldiers cover the retreat from one position while the main corps falls back, then the corps would cover the retreat of those who’d covered them in their retreat.
In a rout, regardless of time period, discipline is lost. Soldiers discard their weapons and defense and run: every man for himself.
In the pre-modern period, the vast majority of casualties happened during a rout, as fleeing soldiers were cut down from behind.
This depends on a lot of things. The medieval period is 1500 years long period that saw lots of technological and structural changes. And there were lots of different armies that trained differently and were structured differently. What you describe is what is known as a route. And from what we can tell this was almost a certain loss of the battle and more then likely a loss of the army. One problem was that without any structure cavalry and skirmishers could easily pick off the warriors one by one. The other issue is that it was hard to coordinate a regrouping as communications were difficult and a lot of the warriors easily lost motivation to be in the army after losing a battle. So a routing unit could most likely be counted as lost.
The generals of course knew this. And they also knew how to prevent this. The Romans had well organized armies and hired mercenaries from all over Europe that were taught in fighting structurally. So these ideas were well known throughout the world and were constantly being developed further as the technology and the structure of the armies changed. How exactly a retreat would be drilled and organized differed from army to army. You would usually have some sort of rotation system while in combat. But the best is to disengage from combat and slowly march backwards. Armies would drill this regularly so it became second nature for them to follow the instructions and perform the drill.
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