They'd have been known as Crossbow Control, Inc.
Clayton Cramer provides a fascinating look at bow and arrows and their usage (and control by the ruling class)
The Battle of Crecy (1346) and even more so, the Agincourt (1415), demonstrated the foolishness of this approach. Those peasant English archers were quite effective because if you were practiced with it, you could unleash an incredible storm of arrows with an effective range of hundreds of yards from the longbow. But to be practiced, you needed to let your archers have those longbows available to them. By comparison, the French, when they deigned to make any use of peasant infantrymen, were issuing them crossbows. In theory, the crossbow is a formidable weapon because it is so powerful. But the range wasn't so impressive, and the French nobility weren't generally thrilled about confronting uppity peasants if they were armed. Consequently, in much of this period, crossbows were issued by the government to peasants for war--but they weren't generally left in "unreliable" hands.
Emphasis mine.
Déjà vu, eh?