What did your ........... father do in the war?

[dieseltaylor]

Kind of amazing really.

Medieval battle records go online

The new website reveals which medieval soldiers rode the furthest

The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers - including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt - have gone online.

The database of those who fought in the Hundred Years War reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted.

The full profiles of soldiers from 1369 to 1453 will allow researchers to piece together details of their lives.

Thomas, Lord Despencer is the youngest soldier on the database, whose career began when he was aged just 12 in 1385.

Elsewhere, the career of Thomas Gloucestre, who fought at Agincourt, can be traced over 43 years and includes campaigns in Prussia and Jerusalem.

'Remarkable survival'

The website is the product of a research project by Professor Anne Curry of the University of Southampton and Dr Adrian Bell of the University of Reading.

Dr Bell said: "The service records survive because the English exchequer had a very modern obsession with wanting to be sure that the government's money was being spent as intended.

"Therefore we have the remarkable survival of indentures for service detailing the forces to be raised, muster rolls showing this service and naming every soldier from duke to archer."

He said accounts from captains showing how funds were spent and entries detailing when the exchequer requested the payments can be found.

The free-to-use website, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, also shows which soldiers rode the furthest.

BBC

[Wakner]

Hope that I'm allowed to post the link for this : non-commercial, etc:

http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/soldier/database/

Cheers

Ads

[gunnergoz]

Pretty amazing site and records. An obsession with bureaucracy can have its utility at times!

[Sixxkiller]

Thats kinda crazy. The amount of work on this has to be respected!

[howardb]

Pretty amazing site and records. An obsession with bureaucracy can have its utility at times!

Our lives would've been much much worse if we didn't have bureaucracy. Every - and any - large organization is unmanageable without bureaucracy. Even matrix organized orgs has their share of bureaucracy.

Sorry for the derailment.

[Affentitten]

This sort of record keeping is what made Henry V such a great king. He wasn't just a good field commander, he was an expert administrator, fund raiser, financier and so on.

[dieseltaylor]

Good point. However it does raise the question how important is the info as I assume other Kings also had a system. But did it require a King who understood the information and could make decisions based on it.

In my wife's organisation [100000+], there are duff information systems and many managers who do not understand the limitations of the statistics gathered and just wing it. hey say in the time of the Raj the village headman would fill in returns with information that he thought the local Admistrator would like to hear.! : )

[Stalins Organ]

Why do we assume the medievals were incompetant or stupid?

the doomsday book was a lot earlier, Romans legions were as rigidly organised and paid ans anyone has been, while the Achaemenid empire maintained a system of tarrifs, messengers and a bueracracy to look after it, and there ar records of central record keeping going all the way back to sumer.

[Affentitten]

SO, I don’t consider Medievals incompetent, though many were pretty slipshod. Partially this reflects the relative lack of professionalism, literacy and bureaucracy compared to say the Romans, not to mention the fairly small size of the more localized medieval campaigns. The Romans thought nothing of sending thousands of well equipped men from one end of the content to another when they needed to. Medieval European kings often had trouble organizing half as many men to limp across the English channel for one summer. If the Romans had been running the Crusades….

Other kings may have had a system. But Henry V was much more rigid about it because he was keener on managing the expenses of his foreign wars, especially given the large sums he was ‘in hock’ to his wealthy nobility and parliament. His father had also neglected this sort of treasury management and not left Henry V much of a legacy. Previous monarchs often left this admin up to their retainers and/or were not so picky about creating a paper trail down to the level of individual soldiers. This of course created inaccuracy and the medieval equivalent of defence contracting fraud, with nobles claiming expenses for non-existent men-at-arms or needing to be supplied with weapons that they should have had etc.

One of the cool things about Henry V’s military admin was the use of ‘indentures’ for troops. The contract was written out twice on one sheet of parchment and signed. The sheet was then cut in two by the soldier in a zig zag pattern. He then kept one half of the contract and the state kept the other half, along with all his other records. (In the days prior to filing cabinets and ring binders, a simple felt bag was used for each man.) When the soldier finished the campaign and wanted to be paid he had to produce his half of the contract. This was then matched up to the ‘indents’ on the state’s copy as proof.

[dieseltaylor]

Neat. Derived from tally sticks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_sticks

[Michael Emrys]

Why do we assume the medievals were incompetant or stupid?

the doomsday book was a lot earlier, Romans legions were as rigidly organised and paid ans anyone has been, while the Achaemenid empire maintained a system of tarrifs, messengers and a bueracracy to look after it, and there ar records of central record keeping going all the way back to sumer.

And don't forget the Chinese, who have perhaps the longest running bureaucracy on the planet.

Michael

[Stalins Organ]

SO, I don’t consider Medievals incompetent, though many were pretty slipshod.

so much like today's population then.

[RSColonel_131st]

Could the word "stock" have been derived from that tally stick? Most interesting discussion here.

[dieseltaylor]

I don't think so as there is no obvious link via language.

My belief is it comes from herding animals were one herder or more may look after many peoples stock [livestock]. So essentially a number is involved. So the concept of division/shares was ingrained in the culture.

From Wiki again a little history but without much on the term itself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_stock_company

[Affentitten]

The indentures for Henry V's campaigns also inlcluded the vital rules for dividing up the spoils and ransoms. The king generally got 1/3 of each retinue leader's prizes and 1/3 of each leader's men's prizes. Except in the case where royalty was captured and these had to be handed over entirely to Henry.

And I should correct myself that not every man had an indenture. It was only the retinue leaders, but within their documentation would be the muster roles of the troops they had contracted to provide.

[Bulgaroktonos]

SO, I don’t consider Medievals incompetent, though many were pretty slipshod. Partially this reflects the relative lack of professionalism, literacy and bureaucracy compared to say the Romans, not to mention the fairly small size of the more localized medieval campaigns. The Romans thought nothing of sending thousands of well equipped men from one end of the content to another when they needed to. Medieval European kings often had trouble organizing half as many men to limp across the English channel for one summer. If the Romans had been running the Crusades.

I think you significantly underestimate medieval armies.

To start with, knights (at the very least, and usually their men, too) were very professional, and the characterisation of the impetuous and incompetent knight slaughtering bands of threadbare peasants is a result of 18th, 19th and 20th century prejudices and a misguided fixation on battles (which took up a very tiny portion of medieval warfare) and those of the Hundred Years War in particular. To start with, knights performed cohesive charges that Napoleonic cavalry could not match, despite the latter having the advantage of bureaucracy and formal ranks. The generals were also often well-read and studied tactics and strategy, most commonly Vegetius, but others too. El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, most famously read from military manuals to his men while he was in exile. Tournaments were, for their first two hundred years or so, training exercises rather than games, and very effective ones at that.

Medieval warfare also took a different route from the Roman, instead dealing with a much greater density of fortresses and castles which shifted the focus of warfare from the battlefield to the siege, skirmishes and ravaging. While the Romans were skilled in siegecraft, ravaging and skirmish were big weaknesses of theirs, as shown by Germanicus' costly and largely ineffectual attempts in Germania, and the medievals improved greatly on siegecraft, as shown by the development of castles and keeps, better armor, round towers, the crossbow, trebuchets and gunpowder, and counter-castles.

Medieval generals most often practiced the strategy advocated by Vegetius, one of battle avoidance, in which siege, supply, harrying, ambush, and all of those less glamorous aspects were the bread and butter (and meat and vegetables, too) of war within Europe. Battles were all-or-nothing gambles, and would remain that way until guns dominated the field. It's worth noting that Crusade is slightly different than European warfare, and has more complex cultural implications.

Consider the effectiveness of Bertrand du Guesclin's work against the English. Very few pitched battles were fought, yet the Breton managed to win back nearly all that France had lost, and subjugate Brittany to the French crown. Another example of typical medieval warfare can be found in the 1099 campaign of William Rufus, King of England, against Helias, Count of Maine. There are two especially important events in this campaign that demonstrate normal conduct. First was the siege of the citadel at Le Mans, which was defended by a small number of Norman knights and their men for weeks until it was relieved by the king without a battle. The second is the ravaging of Maine. After the siege was lifted, Helias's men confined themselves to their castles, rather than face William's much larger and stronger army. However, William was unsuccessful in taking any of Helias' other fortresses notably Mayet, after the Manceaux burned the land during their withdrawal from Le Mans. So with Helias' men shut up in castles, and little prospect of supplying his sizable army in a sustained siege, William ravaged what those parts of his enemy's territory which had escaped the scorched earth policy, and disbanded his army, probably with intention to return the following year. Of course, he was killed (either by accident or intentionally) in the New Forest soon thereafter.

The reasons medieval armies were usually smaller than the Roman were manifold. Perhaps most important was the actual lack of any empires anywhere near as big as Rome's, but there is much more to it than that. There was a strong dislike of centralisation among the Germanic peoples that entered Western Europe during the Migration period and lingered until the Early Modern period. Further, the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire and the inadequacy of the Roman Popes from the 7th c. until the late 10th c. (for example the so-called "Pornocracy") prevented any cohesion in the West. On top of that you get the comparatively even match between the various kingdoms and incursions from powerful invaders (Arabs, Magyars, Norse) made the dominance of any one culture or government extremely difficult. By the end of the 11th century, however, and perhaps earlier still, a lot of this was changing.

I suppose, however, that if "Christendom" or at least "Western Christendom" could be considered a singular entity, its armies in the period (which spans as much as 1000 years, depending on what you consider "medieval") would be massive indeed.

John Gillingham's article, "Richard I and the Science of War" is a superb work on the subject. Matthew Strickland's work "War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066-1217" is a more complete overview. For a view less centred on Anglo-Normans, consider Aldo A. Settia's excellent article, "Infantry and Cavalry in Lombardy (11th-12th Centuries)" and for a non-Western, but nevertheless similar conduct in war, John Haldon's "Byzantium at War (600-1453)" is a handy introduction, while Eric McGeer's "Byzantine Siege Warfare in Theory and Practice" is reasonable and more thorough study.

Sorry for the derail. The database is fascinating. I especially enjoy the ability to link men to retinues, and come to a rough assessment of how many men were independent stipendiaries, how many were part of a retinue, etc. There will be a few dissertations coming out of this database I'm sure.

[Field Marshal Blücher]

What Bulgaroktonos said!

Seriously, though, I've been kind of waiting for you to post in this thread.

[Bulgaroktonos]

What Bulgaroktonos said!

Seriously, though, I've been kind of waiting for you to post in this thread.

I don't get to talk about medieval warfare often on this site, so I'm making up for lost time!

[Affentitten]

So I say that medieval warfare was different because of its small size and more localised (ie. decentralised) context and you say......the same thing?

[Bulgaroktonos]

So I say that medieval warfare was different because of its small size and more localised (ie. decentralised) context and you say......the same thing?

You called medieval armies 'slipshod', unprofessional, illiterate, and gave a silly comparison between the transportative capabilities of the two nations. Also, getting smug and dismissive about the Crusaders is dumb.

[Michael Emrys]

Oooo, I bet that's gonna sting.

Michael