Gang combat

[Sean Manning]

Many modern authors will claim that what you see on those videos is impossible- close-ordered massing of men brought ot "battle" with no boundaries to force them together and neither drilled formation nor command structure.

If they are claiming that (I'm not saying you are wrong, but I can't recall any off hand and I'm away from my books) then I don't think they have been reading much about medieval warfare. Later medieval infantry had a well-documented problem of getting too tightly packed together in a tough spot, which made it hard to fight and could produce crowd forces inside a formation. One use for drill is to keep men the right distance apart. (Cases of men suffocating inside a medieval infantry formation under attack from multiple directions could be supporting evidence for your theory).