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MILITARY ORGANIZATION Roger of Howden Tells Us That Henry II Lost A

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MILITARY ORGANIZATION Roger of Howden Tells Us That Henry II Lost A CHAPTER THREE MILITARY ORGANIZATION Roger of Howden tells us that Henry II lost a good number of barons, nobles, and men during his 1165 Welsh campaign, and in one succinct phrase he sketches the rough composition of a High Medieval army.1 The baronage is distinctly separated from its lessers in terms of importance (greater) and usually also their number (lower). The ‘nobles’ consisted of an array of men: those holding honours or great fees; the lesser or middling nobility later of the banneret; landed and un-landed knights (men owing service through so-called money- fiefs); and perhaps also the king’s household knights or familia.2 The distinctions between knighthood and the baronage were often indis- tinguishable. Castellan lords also existed as perfect expressions of knighthood, so the different terms do not always indicate a difference in class.3 The king and his barons led particular tactical units in the army that rallied around their respective banners, and the nobles were the cavalry. The familia appears to have been omnipresent: Henry’s court was mobile and traveled with the king, and he had the use of his household knights at any given time. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis estimated this household contingent to be 200–300 men during the reign of Henry I, and by the later twelfth century the familia regis had become a standing professional force in its own right. Henry II’s familia supplied him with sheriffs, governors, coun- cilors, judges, and diplomats as well as warriors and included by and by members of comital families.4 In 1159, for example, Henry’s familia 1 Chronica, I: 240. 2 An honour could mean nothing more than an estate and was not limited just to barons and earls; see F. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166 (Oxford, 1961), 57–9. Lesser families could be quite influential and powerful; see R. Dace, “Lesser Barons and Greater Knights: the Middling Group within the English Nobility c.1086–c.1265,” HSJ 10 (2001): 57–79. In any case, by the end of the twelfth century the honour had lost most of its prestige. 3 D. Barthélemy, “Castles, Barons, and Vavassors in the Vendômois and Neighboring Regions in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Cultures of power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. T. N. Bisson (Philadelphia, 1995), 58–61. 4 J. O. Prestwich, “The Military Household of the Norman Kings,” EHR 96 (1981): 11–12. Henry the Younger’s familia may have numbered over 200 knights; Prestwich, The English Experience, 13–14. 104 chapter three included the chamberlain Henry Fitzgerald, the knights Richard de Camville and Robert de Dunstanville, Justiciar Richard de Lucy, Chancellor Thomas Becket, and the constable Henry of Essex.5 Knights, owing to their elite status acquired through a formal cere- mony, are distinguished from mounted warriors, although both could wield similar weapons. John Gillingham has provided the tidiest definition: a ‘knight’ is a well-armed soldier who possessed horse, hauberk, sword, and helmet; ‘knight service’ is service performed by well-armed soldiers of this type and owed to a lord in return for land held from that lord.6 However, there are knights and then there are knights: William the Conqueror differentiated between middling noble knights (milites mediae nobiles) and common knights (milites rustici), and later there appears terminology for hired mercenary knights (milites stipendiarii).7 The number of knights in a battle was usually smaller than the number of cavalry itself. The ‘men’ were an amal- gamation of English troops drawn from the great or select fyrd (dis- cussed below), troops sent by allies, or mercenaries who had no formal lord and who received wages as a return for a period of ser- vice to the paying general. They were foot soldiers, skirmishers, archers, and missile troops (sometimes mounted) and could be com- posed of local forces or mercenaries.8 The Question of Obligation Of the major components of a typical Anglo-Norman army the knights have traditionally been viewed as the most important, borne from J. H. Round’s old view that William the Conqueror instituted a feudal system de novo after Hastings. Depending upon the size of his fiefs, a vassal owed knight service fees or servicium debitum in 5 J. Martindale, “‘An Unfinished Business’: Angevin Politics and the Siege of Toulouse, 1159,” ANS 23 (2000): 129–30. 6 R. Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, 1995), 27; J. Gillingham, “The Introduction of Knight Service into England,” ANS 4 (1981): 53. 7 S. Harvey, “The Knight and Knight’s Fee in England,” Past and Present 49 (1970): 28–9. 8 Under consideration here is primarily the organization of Anglo-Norman armies, not French, although they had much in common. For a good survey of the latter, see Histoire militaire de la France 1: des origins a 1715, eds. A. Corvisier and P. Contamine (Paris, 1992), especially Contamine’s studies of the Capetian armies in chapters 3 and 4, pp. 43–106..
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