"For the Sword Consumes Now These and Now Those": The Changing Concept of Warfare in the Hundred Years' War, 1337-1453 (original) (raw)
Medieval warfare. England and her continental neighbours, eleventh to the fourteenth centuries
Journal of Medieval History, 1998
One wonders how many people in the world beyond the groves of academe might consider the two words of my title virtually synonymous. In England at least, medieval history only impinges regularly upon the school curriculum at its youngest levels, where exciting and dramatic events are those most easily communicated and absorbed, and where heroes are often those whose renown derives from military success-or failure. The period continues to be offered up on television or film with much the same emphasis. If people aren't being 'done in' individually (so that their deaths can be investigated by a monk who was himself once a crusader, against a background of civil war), they are killing or dying collectively, fighting for or against Saracens, Scotsmen, dragons, kings of England or whatever. It is hard to think of a popular portrayal of the Middle Ages which does not include at least one brutal death. Perhaps it is the intimacy of the bloodshed which seems distinctive, underpinned by the feeling that to kill and to be killed in hand-to-hand combat is a more gruesome fate than to be shot by an anonymous bullet. But violence forms only one side of this distinctive image of the popular Middle Ages. It is complemented by the notion of chivalry, that is, by a strong sense of personal and collective honour which justifies and explains otherwise brutal actions, and by a whole panoply of decorative features, shining armour, banners, caparisoned horses. Yes it is violence, but doesn't it look nice, and isn't it exciting? It was striking that on a recent trip to northern France, our students and staff were visibly moved by a visit to a battlefield associated with the first day of the Somme ( ), yet did not feel such emotions at the sites of Cr6cy or Agincourt. No doubt several papers could be written on this last point alone, but I would argue that the dichotomous popular portrayal of medieval warfare has been a burden under which even professional historians have laboured long and hard. The sources at their disposal have not helped. Even the bloodiest scenes of medieval battles in illuminated texts appear to the modern eye as colourful and stylized: they do not bite home in the same way as the ANNE CURRY is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Reading. Her principal research interests are the fifteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War and women and warfare in the Middle Ages as a whole. She has published several articles on English military organisation and on Normandy under English rule. 82 Anne Curry face of a nineteenth-or twentieth-century soldier captured on celluloid. There was no real equivalent to today's war-journalist and little chronicling of medieval warfare was executed by those involved in the actual fighting. Warfare impinged on much imaginative writing in the Middle Ages, but heroic or religiously-motivated elements tended to predominate, and the emphasis may be said to have been on idealism rather than realism. Indeed, it is surprisingly difficult to study medieval warfare, and this may be why a one-dimensional picture has often been transmitted and received. As J.F. Verbruggen wrote at the beginning of his Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, 'Few historical problems have received such unfortunate treatment at the hands of historians as that of the art of war in the Middle Ages'. ~ Military men may claim a special insight into the subject based on their personal experience, but rarely has this made them effective historians. Overviews of the subject, attempting to deal with all or at least a substantial chunk of the Middle Ages, at best, have never been able to deal evenly with such a long period, and, at worst, have contributed to popular misconceptions, the classic example being the supposed dominance of the mounted knight and of cavalry warfare over the period as a whole. A major problem is that military history cannot be studied in a vacuum; it is a product of the age and the society which produces it. But few historians can claim to be equally at home in all periods, and the Middle Ages were never simply a homogenous lump. Moreover, the most successful studies arise out of research which uses as wide a range of sources as possible. It is not too precipitate, I think, to admit that this is the major conclusion reached in the light of reading the books embraced within this review. Many earlier writers such as Oman and Burne were disproportionately dependent on narrative sources. This raises particular difficulties when assessing numbers of troops, or when looking at topics in which chroniclers had only an indirect interest, topics which include many aspects of what we nowadays lump under the general heading of military organisation. Chroniclers were not terribly interested in or well-informed about how troops were paid or fed, for instance. Naval activity was less appealing to them and thus less understood. Most chroniclers focused on, or even wrote for, only one side of a conflict; some wrote for a purpose, often several years after the events they recorded. They were prone to dealing with great men rather than the masses, and, being 'events driven', they found short-term engagements easier to deal with than long-drawn-out campaigns. Only by understanding fully the context in which chroniclers were writing and, where possible, researching in governmental archives and exploiting all sources which impinge on the subject, can we come to firm conclusions on medieval warfare, and even then only on a small part of it. Historical research is, however, very much the sum of the individual parts which make up the whole. A glance at the bibliographies of recent works reveals how much research has been going on in the field of medieval warfare. 2 Even restricting ourselves, as in this current review, to works dealing only with England ~J.F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, second edition, revised and enlarged (Woodbridge, 1996), 1. 2A useful list is provided in the footnotes of K. DeVries, Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century. Discipline, Tactics and Technology (Woodbridge, 1996), 3-4. 'Verbruggen, ix.
The Context of War and Violence in Sixteenth-Century English Society
Journal of Early Modern History, 1999
The Elizabethan epoch has long been regarded as a period in which England, isolated from the rest of Europe, fell behind the Continental powers during an era of "military revolution." More recently, England's sixteenth-century military history has attracted a growing number of scholars, but their conclusions vary widely and seem impossible to integrate. Yet recent analyses have generally been too narrowly focussed on events in Elizabethan England. This article (based on a synthesis of secondary studies, including social and cultural as well as military histories, but supported by evidence from the most important printed primary sources), attempts to put the military history of Tudor England in the setting, firstly of both earlier and later developments in England itself; and secondly, of the wider, contemporaneous experience of warfare in Europe as a whole. An understanding of the context of warfare can provide a better basis for future research into an issue with significant wider implications for early modern historiography.
Image and reality in medieval weaponry and warfare Wales 1100 1450
The established image of the art of war in medieval Wales is based on the analysis of historical documents, the majority of which have been written by foreign hands, most notably those associated with the English court. This thesis has revisited the historical evidence, and together with the analysis of literature and virtually untouched archaeological material, in order to determine the accuracy of this image. The thesis is separated into three sections. The first examines the variety of evidence available to study the art of war in medieval Wales, and assesses its value to the proposed research. The second is formed by a discussion of the different types of military equipment that would have been used, including the bow and arrow, the spear, the sword and other miscellaneous weapons. There is also a discussion on the form of the shield. Finally this is brought together in the final section to discuss the reality of soldiering in medieval Wales. Medieval writers established an image of Welsh soldiering that is quite often backward and barbaric, and although some refer to Welsh skill in combat, they also emphasise the weaknesses of their approach and their unwillingness to partake in open battle, preferring night attacks and ambushes. However, it is clear from this assessment of the sources, that difference between the Welsh approach to war and that of their Norman and English counterparts was not significantly different. Occasionally native equipment was abandoned in favour of foreign forms, including a change from native round shields to kite and heater shields during the thirteenth century. In other circumstances it appears that elements of Welsh warfare were adopted by the English. However the differences between the weaponry used and tactics deployed.
There are a lot of research works on weaponry, armament and war in the Middle Ages, but they are all based on various written and archaeological sources (texts, epitaphs, sculptures, archaeological finds and surviving weaponry belonging to private and public collections), whereas medieval manuscript illuminations are only partially used. 1 The topic of war and warfare and the representation of armed violence in medieval manuscripts are discussed in the works of J. Backhouse 2 , N. Hurel 3 , J. Watts 4 , K. Watts 5 , etc. but there is not a complete and independent research work on illuminations as an information source on war and warfare in the Middle Ages. The main reason for that can be found not in the insufficient amount (or lack) of manuscripts, but primarily in the belief that, for a couple of reasons, they cannot be considered as reliable information sources. Nevertheless, the analysis of some Gothic manuscripts results in interesting conclusions, some of which confirm, but others refuse the established negative attitude. As some authors like P. Porter 6 and F. Haskell 7 point out, manuscript illuminations can be used as sources of information on medieval war, but in a critical way, by comparing them with information from other sources, and by drawing the final conclusions only after having researched a considerable number of manuscripts. 8 After examining some late medieval manuscript illuminations found in the depositories of the British Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Cambridge University Library, I arrived at the conclusion that some illuminations supply interesting
Ancient, medieval and modern: continuity and change in siege warfare
Many books bear the title " ancient and medieval warfare " (or some variant on that theme), but there are remarkably few that link " medieval and modern ". To historians of all specialisms, there is a gulf between the medieval and the modern, as if one world suddenly came to an end and a new one began with little connection to what happened previously. When I was at school, English history ceased to be medieval at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. After that, we had the Tudors and modern history had begun. We also learnt that the renaissance began in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks and the flight of Byzantine knowledge to the west. Of course, the interpretation of historical development and in particular the understanding of the key role of social and economic changes has improved a great deal since then, but in popular understanding the gap between medieval and modern remains stark. Now when world leaders want to denounce a barbaric regime like Islamic State, they describe its practices as medieval. Leaving to one side that such assessments are made by a self-proclaimed civilisation that witnessed the liberation of Auschwitz just 69 years ago and followed this up with genocide in Bosnia only 20 years ago, these sound bites play on popular ignorance of history. They also misrepresent the middle ages and the original Muslim caliphates, the practices of which involved a religious tolerance that should shame many so-called modern states. But they rest on a perception that the medieval world has no continuity with our own. The other point to stress about the transition from medieval to modern, and this was helped by the appearance in the teaching of history of an intervening " early modern " period, is that the dates at which it was meant to happen vary by up to two hundred years depending on your own country's history, and the very characteristics serving to define medieval and modern are indistinct and remarkably flexible. This is not to deny that there were very big changes in the economy, society, religious life, and the form and the role of the state across the several centuries that traditionally mark the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the modern. In different places, these changes occurred in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth or even eighteenth century. The starting point for this paper therefore is that there was change in the way war was carried on, but not a single decisive event or even set of events to compare with the changes in the way of conducting warfare that happened with the advent of the industrial age and the days of mass conscripted armies – none of which had happened during the period between the medieval centuries, however their limits are defined, and the seventeenth century sieges of Limerick. Interestingly, nowhere is the alleged distinction between medieval and modern more sharply made than on the subject of war. What the decisive
One of the fundamental tasks of medieval kings was to be a peacemaker, that is, to settle disputes and to prevent new ones from arising. The later medieval kings of France, whose councilors probably thought more about kingship than anyone else would ever care to, took this task very seriously. Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the kings of France presented themselves to the world and to their subjects as arbiters of discord and guardians of peace. They did this through their personal work and that of their administrators and institutions in settling conflicts, but they also proceeded prescriptively by promulgating prohibitions or limitations of non-royal warfare. These ordinances outlawing the so-called "private" wars of nobles and other magnates have been considered, most notably by Aryeh Graboïs, as the culmination of a centuries-long development in the maintenance of order, one that began with the Peace of God Movement around the millennium and evolved into a royally directed program in the reigns of Louis VI and Louis VII. 1 But if development and change have been observed in the ideas and practices intended to maintain peace from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, this group of ordinances has not received as nuanced a treatment. Traditionally, in an approach that dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these texts were considered a single body of legislation representing a coherent and consistent ideological program directed by the crown. 2 Yet, these ordinances were issued over the course of more than a century, during which time eight kings held the scepter of France. 3 Moreover, as Raymond Cazelles has argued, there is considerable evidence for disjuncture among these texts. Indeed, Cazelles went so far as to assert that the ordinances against non-royal warfare were not at all indicative of a consistent program but rather only ad hoc, unconnected measures meant to deal with temporary