1
The military careerist in fourteenth-century England
Andrew Ayton*
Department of History, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom
(Received 1 August 2016; Accepted 31 August 2016)
This article seeks to explain how it was that the careerist soldier became so prominent and
ubiquitous a feature of the English military scene during the second half of the fourteenth century. Beginning with a characterisation of the military careerist in his various guises, the discussion proceeds with an investigation of how the pool of militarily-employed manpower and the wider recruitment context changed during the fourteenth century owing to the impact of exogenous agencies of change on the dynamics of recruitment. The importance of expanded employment opportunities across Europe and the socio-economic consequences of the Black Death are noted, but particular attention is given to how the English crown’s management of war strategy and operations, and its influence on army structures and recruitment mechanisms, created a fertile soil within which military careerism could flourish.
The roles played by ‘supersized’ mixed retinues and by opportunities for service in garrisons
(especially at Calais) and at sea are considered in turn. The article concludes with an assessment of how the rise of the careerist affected the character of England’s military community and the social cohesion of its armies.
Keywords: careerism; military service; soldiers; armies; garrisons; navies; recruitment;
Calais; Edward III of England; Richard II of England
For over three decades from the late 1410s until 1450 the English crown maintained a large garrison establishment on a permanent footing in Normandy and the pays de conquête. This, 2
it has recently been argued, was the defining period for the late medieval English professional
soldier,1 and it is an argument that has much to commend it, for long-term service within a
single institutional context does indeed represent a major step towards ‘professionalism’ in the modern sense. Moreover, the large number of men-at-arms, archers and others employed on these terms – 3000 to 4000 from the beginning, reaching a peak of about 6000 in 1436, with inevitable shrinkage towards the end2 – is indicative of how far the professional
practitioner had become emblematic of England’s military community during the second
quarter of the fifteenth century.3 The crown’s heavy reliance on standing forces at this
particular time, to maintain a ‘scale of garrisoning never hitherto experienced by the English’
in pursuit of a policy of conquest and occupation,4 can be compared with contemporary
developments elsewhere in Europe. For Venice and Milan, it was rivalry and regular conflict
that prompted the shift towards greater permanence: stability and loyalty were achieved by
extending the duration of military contracts from a few months to several years.5 For the
Hungarian crown, it was defence against the Ottoman threat that necessitated the
maintenance of a chain of garrisoned fortresses along the southern frontier of the kingdom
from the Adriatic to Transylvania.6 For the Portuguese, capturing Ceuta on the Moroccan
coast in August 1415, a symbol of reconquista resumed, committed the crown to sustaining a
garrison of 2700 men in what was essentially a base for raids on land and at sea.7 Setting
*E-mail: [email protected] Postal address: Department of History, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, United Kingdom 1 The following abbreviation is used in this paper: TNA: Kew, The National Archives. A.R. Bell, A. Curry, A. King and D. Simpkin, The Soldier in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 266–70. 2 A. Curry, ‘English Armies in the Fifteenth Century’, in Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, eds. A. Curry and M. Hughes (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), 39–68 (51). 3 ‘Professional’ in the adjectival sense: ‘having the qualities of’. D.J.B. Trim, ‘Introduction’, in The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism, ed. D.J.B. Trim (Boston: Brill, 2003), 1–38 (25). 4 Bell and others, Soldier, 266. 5 M. Mallett, ‘Condottieri and Captains in Renaissance Italy’, in Chivalric Ethos, ed. Trim, 67–88. 6 P. Engel, The Realm of St Stephen. A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–1526, ed. A. Ayton (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 237–8. 7 M. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (London: Routledge, 2005), 21. 3
England’s shift towards institutionalised military professionalism alongside the experience of other polities serves primarily to highlight the variety of forms that standing forces took at this early stage in their development – the variety being the result of differences in the circumstances of demand and supply: of particularities in the nature of military and political objectives and in the potential of, and limits imposed by, resources and institutions.
Necessarily quite as varied as a consequence were the ‘local’ identity and experience of military professionals: their terms of service, their operational roles and the social and institutional structures within which they served. If military professionalism, as both a key feature of standing forces and an individual career choice, was an evolving and non-uniform phenomenon in the early to mid fifteenth century, what of its antecedents in the fourteenth?
Immediately evident when we survey the second half of the fourteenth century are the prominence and ubiquity of English fighting men whose careers may appear to justify the epithet ‘professional’. Sir John Hawkwood, the much sought-after mercenary leader in Italy, or Sir Robert Knolles, the freebooter and royal captain in the French wars, spring to mind, as does Chaucer’s fictional Knight, whose dedication to the martial life took him just about everywhere except Italy and France. Like all his pilgrims, Chaucer’s veteran man-at-arms was both larger than life and a familiar figure of his time.8 Indeed, it is the ubiquity of proto- professionals in the mid to late fourteenth century that demands attention and explanation: men like John Dancaster, leader of the band of adventurers from the Calais garrison who captured the castle of Guînes from the French in 1352;9 or Richard Musard, the soldier of fortune who became the companion and trusted lieutenant of Count Amadeus of Savoy for
8 S.H. Rigby, ‘The Knight’, in Historians on Chaucer: the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales, eds. S.H. Rigby and A.J. Minnis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 42‒62. 9 E.M. Thompson, ed., Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynebroke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1889), 116–19; Calendar of Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Edward III, vol. 9, 1350–54 (London: H.M.S.O., 1907), 238, 242–4; TNA, E 101/170/16, ff. 19r–v. 4 over 20 years until, with the count, he died of the plague while on campaign in 1383;10 or the extraordinary Nicholas Sabraham, whose campaigning life, which took him from Brittany to the Black Sea, was if anything even more varied and packed with incident than that which
Chaucer bestowed upon his Knight.11
As these examples illustrate, what is strikingly different about the world of the dedicated English soldier during the later fourteenth century, as compared with the reigns of
Henry V and Henry VI, is the diversity, in terms of location and character, of accessible wars, and also their intermittent nature. Consequently, there was no single, predominant institutional context within which long-term service could flourish. Since what might be regarded as the pre-requisite conditions for military professionalism existed only in certain localities, notably Calais, the dedicated soldiers of the fourteenth century are perhaps more appropriately described as ‘careerists’, a term that conveys something of the individualism that was a key feature of their martial lives.12 Viewed from one perspective, what follows is an exploration of the implications of that individualism. Accordingly, we shall examine how the interaction of personal background and opportunity, of supply and demand at individual level, contributed to the distinctive patterns of experience of fourteenth-century careerists.
Nevertheless, our underlying purpose is to investigate how it was that the military careerist became so prominent and ubiquitous a part of the English military scene during the mid to late fourteenth century, and what consequences this had for the military community as a whole. To this end, it is necessary to begin with a working characterisation of our subject.
10 E.L. Cox, The Green Count of Savoy. Amadeus VI and Transalpine Savoy in the Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 183, 207, 228, 252–3, 262, 280, 298, 338. 11 N.H. Nicolas, ed., The Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy. 2 vols (London: Johnson & Co, 1832) 1: 124–5; A. Ayton, ‘From Brittany to the Black Sea: Nicholas Sabraham and English Military Experience in the Fourteenth Century’, in The Courts of Chivalry and Admiralty in Late Medieval Europe, eds. A. Musson and N. Ramsay (Woodbridge: Boydell, forthcoming, 2017). 12 An alternative term, ‘freelance’, is not used because it implies socially unembedded, mercenary service, which, as we shall see, is not necessarily synonymous with military careerism. 5
The military careerist
How is the careerist to be identified amidst the amorphous crowd of men who took up arms at
some point in their lives? He is, perhaps, most obviously identifiable from what he actually
did: by the intensity and single-mindedness of his focus on war, by the frequency and
regularity – even continuity – of his service. One problem with this approach to identifying
careerism – with counting campaigns and assessing length of service ‒ is that we are often let
down by our sources. As relatively well-documented as fourteenth-century English royal
armies and garrisons undoubtedly are, there are many lacunae in the sequence of nominal
records; and freelance service is still more patchily documented. How, in these
circumstances, are we to interpret the gaps, perhaps lengthy, that are likely to appear in a
man’s career in arms? Moreover, establishing a reliable career profile through nominal record
linkage is not made any easier by the diffuse, apparently unfocused character of many of our
dedicated soldiers’ lives with the sword or bow. For every John Dancaster, who scarcely
strayed from the Calais March, there is a globetrotter like Nicholas Sabraham – or, to ascend
the command hierarchy, a captain like Sir Ralph Ferrers, who served for over 40 years from
the mid 1330s, taking in Scotland, Ireland, France, including several tours of duty at Calais,
and some serious naval service in the 1370s.13
Career reconstruction is generally less difficult with those, like Ferrers, from the upper levels of the pyramid of gentility. But it is that very socio-economic group that presents another interpretative problem for an approach to identifying the careerist that is based simply on his actions. For a warrior like Ferrers should be considered a ‘socio- professional’:14 a man whose regular soldiering and leadership roles were closely related to
his social standing, to his membership (albeit as a younger son) of a noble family and the
13 Nicolas, ed., Scrope and Grosvenor, 1: 155–6; 2: 261–6. 14 Bell and others, Soldier, 20. 6
martial mentality that went with those origins. The problem with socio-professionals is that,
for all the frequency of their campaigning, only a proportion of them can properly be
considered military careerists. Take, for example, Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford (d.
1373), whose short adult life was by any standards energetically martial – in Prussia, the
Mediterranean, France and at sea; but he was, of course, so much more than a soldier. He did
not depend on soldiering to maintain his lifestyle. His landed wealth and socio-political
weight facilitated his military leadership role; indeed, that role was expected of him. Hereford
was an employer of military careerists, an enabler, but not one himself.
Establishing who served where, when and with whom is an essential starting point in our search for the careerist, but understanding military careerism requires appreciation of two
further issues, the first being why men served, their motivation and personal circumstances.
The second concerns the relationship between the consequences of that inclination to take up arms and the opportunities that existed for doing so, between the supply of manpower and the demand for it. Let us begin with why men served. Remuneration should be considered a key issue, but always interwoven with what would have been for everyone a mix of considerations. A career soldier enlisted because, given his skills and often his background, soldiering was the most attractive means of making a living, and perhaps the only practical or socially acceptable one. Indeed, whether fortune smiled or scowled, careerists could easily become locked into the life of the sword, the winners and losers nicely illustrated by Sir
Roger Beauchamp’s will in 1379, which included a bequest of £20 to his son Philip, who had last been heard of in Lombardy, ‘bound in a sum of money’ to the mercenary captain Sir John
Thornbury.15
15 F.A. Page-Turner, ed., ‘The Bedfordshire Wills and Administrations Proved at Lambeth Palace, and in the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon’, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society Publications 2 (1914): 3–59 (8). 7
The remunerative aspect of soldiering that was necessarily a characteristic of the careerist mentality preoccupied men of diverse social origins. On the one hand, there was a subset of the socio-professionals who had been born and bred to the life of arms but depended on payment to maintain their status. It is something of a commonplace that the freelance companies that flourished across Europe at this time were swelled by the impoverished petty nobility, and this certainly applied to England as much as it did to France, Germany and
Hungary. Among these genteel military careerists were heirs awaiting inheritances, and for some this proved to be a long wait. That Sir Nicholas Goushill served regularly with the sword for over 35 years was surely related to the extraordinary longevity of his parents.16
More numerous were those lacking significant inheritance prospects: younger sons, like Sir
Ralph Ferrers, striving to maintain their status, and those at the very broad base of the
pyramid of gentility, the parish gentry, who shared the values of the nobility but not their
resources. Some of these men, perhaps younger sons of families on the margins of gentility,
might start out as mounted archers.17 Many, even the most experienced and successful among them, eschewed knighthood: the genteel military careerist was typically an esquire.18
Turning to the remainder of the pool of military careerists, the sub-genteel men-at-
arms and archers, it is tempting to regard them as the authentic military professionals, for
with such men we can set aside the issue of cultural conditioning that affected the gentry –
the predisposition to take up the sword – and focus squarely on remuneration. Patchy sources
combined with attendant difficulties of nominal record linkage mean that the personal
circumstances of these men are usually less easily discernible than those of socio-
professionals. Take, for example, John Dancaster, the hero of Guînes. It was probably the
16 A. Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), 236, nn. 190 and 191. 17 Bell and others, Soldier, 162–4. 18 For example, A. Ayton, ‘William de Thweyt, Esquire: Deputy Constable of Corfe Castle in the 1340s’, Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries 32 (1989): 731–8. 8
king’s award of an annuity of 50 marks, following Dancaster’s exploit, that allowed him to
serve in the Calais garrison as an esquire,19 and that service is documented year on year; but
that he had begun as an archer is known only from the testimony of chroniclers.20 Although
Sir Robert Salle’s rise from conscripted bondman to captain of Marck in the Calais March demonstrates what it was possible to achieve at this time,21 his career was probably
exceptional, and not simply because knighthood was a distinction that few sub-genteel
careerists attained. More fundamentally, it is clear that getting started, as a mounted archer let
alone a man-at-arms, was most easily achieved from the fairly prosperous ‘middling sort’
platform that a yeoman or burgess family would provide. But from the point of view of a man
like Sir Walter Bentley, who in 1352, as king’s lieutenant in Brittany, had reported on the
difficulty of exercising authority over the self-financing garrisons in the duchy, such men, not
being knights or esquires, and concerned only with personal gain, were ‘gens de petite value’,
who could only be controlled if you paid them regularly.22
The ‘identity’ of the military careerist was shaped not only by his socio-economic
circumstances, but also by the service opportunities that he encountered: by the demand for
manpower. Indeed, it was the interplay of background and opportunity that determined the contours of soldiers’ lives in arms and thus the diversity of careerist experience that was so notable a feature of the later fourteenth century. Patterns of service are to be discerned amidst the diversity, most obviously the well-trodden paths between certain theatres of war. Also distinguishable, and of particular interest to us, are what Stephen Morillo has termed socially embedded and unembedded service. Morillo’s typology of military service, and the
19 Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1350–54, 220; TNA, E 101/170/16, f. 12v. 20 Baker’s testimony is corroborated by Robert of Avesbury: E.M. Thompson, ed., Adae Murimuth, Continuatio chronicarum and Robertus de Avesbury, De gestis mirabilibus regis Edwardi tertii. Rolls Series 93 (London: H.M.S.O., 1889), 414. 21 K. Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, vol. 1: The Great Companies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 11–12. 22 Kervyn de Lettenhove, ed., Oeuvres de Froissart. Chroniques. 25 vols. (Brussels: Victor Devaux et Cie, 1867–77), 18: 339–43. 9
distribution field that he created from it, measures (as well as the role of political and
economic factors) how far a soldier’s service was embedded in the social fabric of the polity
employing him.23 Many military careerists began their careers, and spent a significant part of
them, in a socially embedded context, in the service of the crown and nobility of England.
This was the inevitable consequence of how recruitment networks operated, mapping the social networks within military communities onto the structure of armies. Accordingly, martial lordship underpinned a great deal of the service performed in the retinues of great men, even though only a small proportion of it was based on continuous financial support in the form of retaining fees.24 The elusive Nicholas Sabraham appears to have served first with
William Bohun, earl of Northampton, and then his son, Humphrey, earl of Hereford.25 Here we see Hereford as the employer and enabler of military careerists. And the emergence of
‘mixed’ retinues in the mid fourteenth century, in which archers served alongside men-at-
arms, meant that these socially embedded opportunities were extended to the whole spectrum
of potential careerists. Indeed, it may have been as an archer that Sabraham first entered
Northampton’s service. While socially embedded service provided the launch platform for many a soldier, it is important to recognise too that, together with the necessity of remuneration, a willingness to engage with, and perhaps a predilection for, socially unembedded soldiering was another feature of military careerism.26 The most obvious
examples would be self-interested mercenaries, like Hawkwood, ever seeking the best
available terms of service, indifferent to the political context; or the freebooters sustaining
23 S. Morillo, ‘Mercenaries, Mamluks and Militia: Towards a Cross-Cultural Typology of Military Service’, in Mercenaries and Paid Men: the Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. J. France (Boston: Brill, 2008), 243–60. 24 A notable example is Edward, prince of Wales’s military lordship, exercised in Cheshire during the 1350s and 1360s: P. Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 1277–1403. Chetham Society, 3rd series, 34 (Manchester: Manchester University Press for the Chetham Society, 1987), Chapters 3 and 4. 25 Ayton, ‘From Brittany to the Black Sea’. 26 As with crusading, much freelance soldiering was pursued during lulls in the king’s wars, but a predilection for mercenary service may be assumed with those Englishmen who stayed on in Italy after the resumption of the Anglo-French war in 1369. 10
themselves by predation and exploitation of towns and countryside. But the idea of socially
unembedded service can also be applied to the recruiting context closer to home. For all that
military lordship might set a man on the careerist path, it was unlikely to be sufficient. To
sustain the martial life it may well be necessary to serve under captains with whom there
were no prior, personal ties – a recruiting context that became much more common during the
later fourteenth century.
While Morillo’s model usefully highlights the detachment of much careerist service
from the social fabric of the employing polity, we should not imagine these men to have been
wholly isolated individualists lacking personal loyalties. Companies of a handful of men-at-
arms and archers, perhaps one of each and a servant,27 were the basic building blocks of
armies and garrisons: what modern sociologists of war have called ‘primary groups’. For the
most part, therefore, a careerist’s experiences were group-based, shared with comrades. And
long-term service in a garrison or one of the self-governing martial societies, the Great
Companies, would create new loyalties. As David Grummitt argued in connection with
fifteenth-century Calais, there was a sense of community, indeed fellowship, with comrades in arms, ‘reinforced by ties of kinship and marriage’ and an institutional memory concerning the garrison’s past deeds.28 Moreover, one of the shared, distinctive features of service at
Calais and in the White Company in Italy was the fact that Englishmen would mingle with
soldiers from different polities.29 Indeed this serves as a reminder that established military
careerists operated within an extensive, continent-wide network of practitioners, which
facilitated the transfer of men and expertise between employers located in different corners of
27 See, for example, J.R. Alban, ‘An East Anglian Knight’s Indenture for Military Service at Sea, 1388’, Norfolk Archaeology 47 (2014): 1–12 (9). 28 D. Grummitt, The Calais Garrison. War and Military Service in England, 1436–1558 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), 97–9. 29 Calais: Bell and others, Soldier, 247–8. 11
Europe. For some, like Nicholas Sabraham, there was perhaps a sense of belonging to a trans-
continental military community.
The dynamics of recruitment and agencies of change
Our search for the identity of the military careerist has by necessity involved an appreciation
of formative influences and developmental experience at individual level. And from one
perspective the evolution of careerism at this time can indeed be viewed as the sum of these
individual influences and the collective experience that was the result of them. But if we are to determine how it was that careerists became so prominent a feature of the military scene of
England and the English during the later fourteenth century, we need to broaden the scope of
our enquiry and investigate how the pool of active manpower and the recruitment context
changed. To do that we need, first, to focus on the dynamics of recruitment, which at any
given moment were the result of the interplay of the collective reach of captains tasked with
recruitment, the supply of manpower and the scale and nature of demand (or service
opportunities);30 and, second, to assess the impact that various agencies of change had on the
dynamics of recruitment during the later fourteenth century, and how this affected the
composition and character of the military community. Although these potential agencies of
change evidently interacted, prompting and responding to each other, some are clearly
distinguishable. Those that were exogenous to the recruiting system could have significant
destabilising effects on the dynamics of recruitment: indeed, these were very much the
driving forces behind the rise to prominence of the military careerist in the later fourteenth
century. Undoubtedly important in this respect were changes in the military environment
across Europe: specifically, the increased and diverse range of accessible employment
30 For what follows, see A. Ayton, ‘Military Service and the Dynamics of Recruitment in Fourteenth-Century England’, in The Soldier Experience in the Fourteenth Century, eds. A.R. Bell and others (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 9–59. 12
opportunities, from Portugal to the Black Sea, which boosted the demand for external
manpower and to which English freelances were only too ready to respond. Quite as
important were the socio-economic consequences of successive plague visitations. The
loosening of social bonds, combined with awakened expectations among the survivors,
coincided with, and responded to, new recruitment opportunities, whether in the public or
private enterprise spheres of warfare. In addition to these exogenous agencies of change,
which clearly influenced the dynamics of recruitment throughout Europe, there were others,
directly connected with the English war effort, that had effects specific to recruitment and the
military community in England. Indeed, as we shall see, it was through its management of
war strategy and operations, and its influence on army structures and recruitment
mechanisms, that royal policy, in a variety of interconnected ways, created a particularly
fertile soil for military careerism to flourish.
From the late thirteenth century, the intensity and focus of the English king’s wars prepared the ground for the later, abundant growth of careerism. A by-product of the process
whereby the Scottish wars of the three Edwards had, through regular, heavy recruiting
demands, militarised the English gentry was the creation of a pool of potential careerists, drawn largely from the ranks of younger sons and the lesser, or parish, gentry. Among the
opportunities, often socially unembedded, that were available were those involving service in
garrisons, as proffered men-at-arms discharging the feudal obligations of ecclesiastical
tenants-in-chief,31 or as leaders of companies of arrayed foot soldiers.32 Doubtless, there were
careerist common soldiers who were hired by communities to perform the service they owed.
Doubtless, too, such men took advantage of the more flexible openings for archers provided by retinue-based service from the mid 1330s. Indeed, the period of about a decade and a half,
31 M. Prestwich, ‘Cavalry Service in Early Fourteenth-Century England’, in War and Government in the Middle Ages, eds. J. Gillingham and J.C. Holt (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1984), 147–58 (149). 32 D. Bachrach, ‘Edward I’s Centurions: Professional Soldiers in an Era of Militia Armies’, in Soldier Experience, eds. Bell and others, 109–28. 13
from the Battle of Dupplin Moor (1332) to the siege of Calais (1346–7), should be seen as a
crucial foundational period for military careerism in England. For these years witnessed a
near continuous sequence of major campaigns in Scotland and then France,33 supplemented
by opportunities for garrison duty, whether in the pay of the crown or in a freelance capacity.
Just how numerous such ‘men who waged war for their own profit’ had become by the early
1350s was made clear by Sir Walter Bentley’s report, noted earlier. As Thomas Gray related
in his Scalacronica, it was possible during the later 1350s for ‘astonishing numbers’ of
‘unknown youths’ to pursue military careerism in France.34 When, with enforcement of the
Treaty of Brétigny, these opportunities were constrained during the 1360s, English careerist
soldiers were able to find employment elsewhere: in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, in a
variety of ‘crusading’ ventures, in royal expeditions to Ireland. Here, then, the buoyancy of
demand was met by plentiful supply. These are, admittedly, familiar enough elements of a
story that is peopled by the rise of such larger-than-life careerists as Hawkwood and Knolles.
But there were other developments at this time, in military organisation and in war strategy
and management, that contributed significantly to the fertile soil in which careerism could
flourish.
Army structural change: the emergence of supersized mixed retinues
33 For the armies raised, see R. Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), Appendices II–VIII; N.B. Lewis, ‘The Recruitment and Organisation of a Contract Army, May to November 1337’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 37 (1964): 1–19; A. King, ‘A Good Chance for the Scots? The Recruitment of English Armies for Scotland and the Marches, 1337–1347’, in England and Scotland at War, c.1296–c.1513, eds. A. King and D. Simpkin (Boston: Brill, 2012), 119–56; A. Ayton, ‘Edward III and the English Aristocracy at the Beginning of the Hundred Years War’, in Armies, Chivalry and Warfare in Medieval Britain and France, ed. M. Strickland (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1998), 173–206; K. Fowler, The King’s Lieutenant. Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster, 1310–1361 (London: Elek, 1969), 222–4; A. Ayton, ‘The English Army at Crécy’, in The Battle of Crécy, 1346, eds. A. Ayton and P. Preston (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 159–251. 34 ‘espessement a meruail ... ieunes mesconuz’: Sir Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, 1272–1363, ed. A. King. Surtees Society, 209 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 152–3, 156–7. 14
In the sphere of military organisation, and specifically the way armies were recruited and
structured, the most consequential development of the century was the emergence, during the
1330s, of the ‘mixed’, or combined arms, retinue, generally consisting of men-at-arms and mounted archers.35 It is easier to highlight the phenomenon than to explain it, though it is possible to offer an interpretation of the circumstances from which it emerged. From his
earliest appearances in the records, in 1334, the mounted archer is to be found serving
alongside men-at-arms in mixed retinues. This distinctive association of fighting man and recruitment context can be interpreted as a response to the dispiriting campaigns of the 1320s, but another possibility is that it was prompted by the experience of Edward Balliol’s private- enterprise venture in Scotland in 1332: an expedition demanding mobility, but also, because lacking access to commissions of array, a different approach to raising archers.36 The obvious
solution was for captains contributing retinues to Balliol’s expedition to recruit men-at-arms
and bowmen in the same way, whether in pre-formed mixed companies or as individuals. In the absence of a surviving pay roll, we can but speculate whether mixed retinues were already
a feature of the English royal army that triumphed at Halidon Hill the following year, but we
can be sure that they were by the winter of 1334–5.37 It will soon have been recognised that the mixed retinue was the only realistic context within which mounted archers could be
recruited in the long term. They were more expensive to equip and maintain than the foot
soldiers who had traditionally been raised by commissions of array, and the shires throughout
the realm could hardly be expected to bear these costs regularly. Instead the responsibility,
and no doubt part of the cost, of recruiting mounted archers was very largely transferred to
35 Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 37–49; Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, 12–18, M. Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages. The English Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 125, 134–5. 36 Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, Chapter 6. 37 Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, 245–7. 15 noblemen and knights who were already accustomed to mustering retinues of men-at-arms.38
This was crown-directed policy, which brought organisational and operational advantages, but its implementation was necessarily to a degree consensual. By taking on the responsibility of supplying archers, captains, individually and collectively, increased their stake in the king’s wars. While their commitment had grown, there may too have been recognition that their time-honoured martial role was simply adapting to changes in military organisation: an adaptation that also gave them access to a share of the profits acquired by archers in their service.
The mixed retinues raised by noblemen and knights were at first – during the 1330s and 1340s – of a size commensurate with the captain’s wealth and status. This was his
‘natural’ capacity for recruitment: what was asked of him might be arrived at through negotiation or, in the case of targets imposed from above, was at least informed by a rough- and-ready understanding of his capacity.39 To find the men-at-arms required of them, captains at this time would draw on recruitment networks that may have been established over generations, such laying down of traditions of shared service being a feature of the militarisation of the gentry under the three Edwards.40 Heavy reliance on established recruitment networks resulted in a marked degree of retinue-level stability of manpower from campaign to campaign.41 For the recruits this was socially embedded service. It is unlikely
38 Ayton, ‘English Army at Crécy’, 176. The cost to the captain depended primarily on whether the mounted archer provided his own equipment and horse (221); G. Baker, ‘Investigating the Socio-Economic Origins of English Archers in the Second Half of the Fourteenth Century’, Journal of Medieval Military History 12 (2014): 173–216, especially 200–12. 39 Governmental planning documents reporting the manpower to be supplied by captains generally record decisions rather than how they were arrived at: see, for example, M. Prestwich, ‘English Armies in the Early Stages of the Hundred Years War: a Scheme in 1341’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 56 (1983): 102–13. For evidence of negotiation, as well as imposition from above, see Lewis, ‘Recruitment and Organisation of a Contract Army’, and King, ‘Good Chance for the Scots?’, 137, 148–53. 40 A. Ayton, ‘Sir Thomas Ughtred and the Edwardian Military Revolution’, in The Age of Edward III, ed. J. Bothwell (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 107–32 (111–14); A. Ayton, ‘Armies and Military Communities in Fourteenth-Century England’, in Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen: Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen, eds. P. Coss and C. Tyerman (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 215–39 (221–6). 41 Ayton, ‘English Army at Crécy’, 204–15; Ayton, ‘Armies and Military Communities’, 233–5; Ayton, ‘Military Service’, 11–23. For retinue-level stability under Edward I and Edward II, see D. Simpkin, The English Aristocracy at War from the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn (Woodbridge: 16
that these characteristics of the typical retinue were much affected by the need to recruit mounted archers as well. That captains would naturally look first to the manpower of their estates is nicely illustrated by the (at least) six archers who, in 1346, were recruited by the earl of Huntingdon from his manor at Worfield in Shropshire.42 Moreover, given that a
proportion of bowmen for whom a captain received pay would actually be attached to knights
or men-at-arms serving under him, it can be seen that adding archers to a retinue would not
necessarily dilute its territorially-related cohesion or the relative stability of its personnel.43
With an increasing dependence on mixed retinues during the 1340s and 1350s, as
commissions of array were used less often for continental expeditions,44 it is tempting to
suggest that English armies as a whole were becoming more socially embedded. But if that was the case, it was not to last. From the mid-fourteenth century we find some of the leading captains serving with larger mixed retinues: a process of manpower consolidation that is particularly noticeable with the royal army raised in 1359, when over 3000 men, about a third of the total manpower, served in three retinues.45 Such supersized contingents became a
characteristic feature of English armies during the 1369–89 phase of the Anglo-French war.
While initially, in 1369 and 1372, some retinues were of conventional size relative to their
captain’s status, the trend is clear. The army raised for the Brittany campaign of 1375, in all
4000 men, was made up of only four retinues. In 1380, the contingent that Thomas, earl of
Buckingham, had contracted to supply contributed nearly half of the army’s strength of 5200
men, with the bulk of the remainder fielded in five retinues, each of about 400 men or more.46
Boydell, 2008), 119–41; A. Spencer, ‘The Comital Military Retinue in the Reign of Edward I’, Historical Research 83 (2008): 46–59. 42 Ayton, ‘Armies and Military Communities’, 225–6 (TNA, SC 1/39/190). For further examples, see Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 75–6 (James Audley, 1345) and A.R. Bell, War and the Soldier in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 117–25 (earl of Arundel, 1387–8). 43 On mixed companies within retinues, Ayton, ‘Armies and Military Communities’, 232–3. 44 Ayton, ‘Armies and Military Communities’, 218–19. 45 Retinues led by Edward, prince of Wales, the duke of Lancaster and the earl of March. Ayton, ‘Military Service’, 31–2, and the works cited there. 46 J.W. Sherborne, ‘Indentured Retinues and English Expeditions to France, 1369–1380’, in idem, War, Politics and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. A. Tuck (London: Hambledon, 1994), 1–28 . 17
The only retinue of comparable size at Crécy in 1346 had been led by the prince of Wales.47
What had changed in the interim is easily understood. Supersized retinues were a product of the process of organisational streamlining that accompanied the emergence of full-blown contract armies: a response, firstly, to the setting aside of recruitment by commission of array, which was having an effect on retinue size as early as the campaigns of 1345–7 and
1359–60; and, secondly, to the withdrawal of the royal household division, as the ageing king made his bow, which – as we see with Buckingham’s retinue in 1380 – was in part compensated for by the personal military leadership of his sons.
Not even the mightiest of noble captains could sustain a supersized mixed retinue from his accustomed recruiting networks. Raising it was only achievable by drawing on men with whom he had no prior close acquaintance or connection. By way of illustration, let us consider the earl of Hereford, a front-rank captain until his untimely death in 1373. The huge retinues with which he campaigned in 1369 and 1372 – consisting of 900 men and nearly 700 respectively48 – were far larger than anything that he or his father had led to war in the past,
the transient nature of the 1369 retinue being suggested by the fact that only a third of the 34
identifiable knights were to serve with Hereford again.49 For the naval expedition of 1371
Hereford brought a retinue of more manageable size: 77 men-at-arms and 120 archers.50 That here we are seeing a core group of men upon whose service the earl could rely is shown by the remarkable degree of continuity from that year to the next. Comparison of the complete retinue rolls reveals that, overall, 92 per cent of these men returned in 1372, including an astonishing 98 per cent of the archers.51 However, the returnees constituted only 27 per cent
47 Ayton, ‘English Army at Crécy’, 245–51. 48 Sherborne, ‘Indentured Retinues’, 3; TNA, E 101/31/27, m. 2. 49 Protections for 1369: C 76/52, mm. 6–9, 10–13, 15–23. 50 He had contracted to serve with 60 men-at-arms and 100 archers. E 101/31/15 (retinue roll); E 101/31/27, m. 1. For Hereford’s permanent retainers, see G.A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth- Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 80 and n. 4. 51 TNA, E 101/32/20 (retinue roll, 1372). 18
of Hereford’s much expanded retinue in 1372. Nearly three-quarters of the manpower had to
be found elsewhere. Indeed, many had to be found at short notice. On 25 February the earl
contracted to supply 200 men-at-arms, but this had grown to 300 (and the indenture amended
accordingly) by 4 May, when the third instalment of regard was received.52
How in these circumstances did captains like Hereford manage to recruit so many
additional military followers? The duke of Lancaster expanded his permanent retinue at this
time and the apparent surge in indentured retaining after 1369 may well suggest that other
magnates followed suit.53 What is clear is that captains would also need to call upon noble and knightly sub-contractors from the wider military community: middle-ranking leaders who would contribute contingents that, in their turn, were larger than they or their forbears were accustomed to supply. This is what Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381), did in preparation for the campaign to Brittany in 1375, and what the duke of Lancaster had to do
on a grander scale throughout this phase of the war.54 Also evident is that men from the
expanding pool of socially disengaged careerists were both keen for enlistment and
accessible, presenting themselves at recruiting centres like London or the ports of
embarkation.55 Surviving sub-contracts from the 1370s and 1380s show how the large retinues of the period were partly constructed from small companies, a significant proportion
of which were contributed by such adventurers as Jankyn Nowell, who contracted to serve
with a company of four men-at-arms and five archers in Sir Hugh Hastings’ retinue in 1380.56
52 Archer numbers also increased. E 101/68/4/ 92; E 101/31/27, m. 2. 53 S. Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 14. Twenty-six non-Lancastrian indentures from the period 1369–89: M. Jones and S. Walker, eds, ‘Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War, 1278–1476’, Camden Miscellany XXXII. Camden 5th series, 3 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1994), nos. 53–78. Cf. Holmes, Estates, Chapter 3. 54 R.R. Davies, Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages, ed. B. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 130; S. Walker, ‘Profit and Loss in the Hundred Years War: the Subcontracts of Sir John Strother’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58 (1985): 100–6; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 49–50. 55 Bell and others, Soldier, 226–30. 56 A. Goodman, ‘The Military Subcontracts of Sir Hugh Hastings, 1380’, English Historical Review 95 (1980): 114–20 (116–17). For Nowell’s career, see Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, 20–1. See also Bell and others, Soldier, 130–1. 19
Sub-knightly careerists, like Nowell, were needed if captains were to reach their recruiting
targets, but there were consequences, perhaps the most obvious being a proportional drop in the involvement of knights. In the armies of 1375 and 1380 noted above, no more than 5 per
cent and 7 per cent of serving men-at-arms were knights.57 The proportion of knights was higher in armies led by the king in person (about 15 per cent), but even that represents a
significant fall from the 25 per cent that had been usual during the era of socially embedded
service at the start of the Anglo-French war.58 The careerists’ little companies would no
doubt have brought knots of expertise and camaraderie to what must often have been an
amorphous body of men with little collective identity. But such decentralisation of loyalty
was surely a mixed blessing for the integrity of the retinue as a unit. Indeed, viewing the
nobleman’s retinue as a whole, increased reliance on careerists can only have resulted in
manpower that was less settled from campaign to campaign, and less socially embedded, than
would have been the norm earlier in the century.
What particularly accentuated the role of the careerist and his impact on the collective
identity of armies was the emergence of sub-noble captains, many of whom, we may be sure,
had begun their careers as Bentley’s ‘gens de petite value’. Having made their names and
fortunes in the troubled regions of France during the 1340s, 1350s and 1360s, they could, by
the 1370s, plausibly offer themselves as leaders of retinues of a size that in the past would
have been the preserve of the comital community. For example, in April 1373, Roger
Newent, esquire, contracted to supply a retinue of 160 men, a contingent that joined the earl
of Salisbury’s naval expedition tasked with the relief of Brest.59 The annotated muster roll
reveals how different Newent’s retinue was from the contingents fielded by the leading
57 Sherborne, ‘Indentured Retinues’, 12–15, 27–8. The corresponding figure for Arundel’s naval expeditions of 1387 and 1388 was 9%: Bell, War and the Soldier, 56, 64–5. 58 Bell and others, Soldier, 56; Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, 228–9. 59 One hundred men-at-arms and 60 archers. TNA, E 101/32/36, mm. 1 (account), 2 (indenture). 20
captains of the 1340s.60 It is telling that only one of Newent’s 93 men-at-arms was a knight,
that none of the leaders of distinguishable companies was even styled ‘esquire’, and that one
of the companies was composed entirely of men of Low Countries origin. If in Newent’s
retinue we see the new world of careerist soldiers in microcosm, the most striking instance of
governmental reliance on captains of this stamp was the army that Sir Robert Knolles jointly
led in 1370, to which he contributed a personal retinue of 300 men-at-arms and 300 archers.61
The next largest contingent was raised by the shadowy Sir John Minsterworth (200 men-at-
arms and 300 archers), a man of obscure origins who can have had no long-established social
networks to draw upon. The new crop of captains also figured prominently in the army that
the bishop of Norwich contracted take to Flanders in 1383. In order to find 5000 men, the
bishop, who lacked any form of personal military following, had no option but to turn to a
group of careerist leaders, including Sir Hugh Calveley and Sir William Elmham.62 The key
role played by such men in these unconventional armies is certainly noteworthy, but it should
not distract attention from the essential contribution that careerist captains made to the supersized retinues of the old nobility. Minsterworth had helped Hereford raise his large retinue in 1369, and was to do the same for the earl of Cambridge in 1372.63 Similarly, Sir
Matthew Gournay, another of those younger sons who made their fortunes with the sword,
contracted to provide 250 men-at-arms and 250 archers to Cambridge’s expedition to
Portugal in 1381.64 Most armies might be led, as before, by the great men of the realm, but
they relied heavily on military careerists at all levels of the recruiting hierarchy.
60 E 101/32/36, mm. 4–5. 61 E 101/30/25; Sherborne, ‘Indentured Retinues’, 6–7. On this army, see G.P. Baker, ‘The English Way of War, 1360–1399’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Hull, 2011), 149–78. 62 J. Magee, ‘Sir Henry Elmham and the Recruitment for Henry Despenser’s Crusade of 1383’, Medieval Prosopography 20 (1999): 181–90. 63 TNA, C 76/52, mm. 8, 10; C 76/55, m. 40. 64 C 47/2/49/2. 21
Military careerism might have been encouraged by the recruiting vacuum created by a general growth in retinue size, but money was needed too. Increasing the recruiting responsibilities for army captains and, as a consequence, their sub-contractors, as well as forcing them to look beyond their accustomed social networks, must have put great pressure on their financial resources. Advantageous adjustments to the terms of service were needed if captains, in contractual negotiation with the crown, were to be persuaded to raise and maintain larger retinues, and this is indeed what happened in the early 1370s.65 Benefits that would be received long after a campaign had ended, like warhorse compensation, were replaced by an increased emphasis on guaranteed payments that could be delivered in advance (such as the doubling of ‘regard’), the apparent intention being to make it easier for captains to meet the expenses incurred in finding, hiring, perhaps equipping and to a degree maintaining larger numbers of men, including many from the open market. The crown’s seriousness of purpose concerning advance payments can be gauged from the terms of indentures of war and the evidence of cash actually changing hands, as recorded in audited accounts. Hereford’s indenture for the 1372 campaign, dated 25 February, stressed the importance of payments made ‘hastivement en main’ and ‘avant la main’, and the first instalment of regard was duly received on 9 March. Over £3300 had been delivered to the earl before his retinue had mustered, and when the naval expedition was aborted in October he had already received almost all of the money owed in wages and regard.66 Hereford’s experience was widely shared.67 The advances received by Roger Newent prior to the departure of Salisbury’s naval force in July 1373 were more than sufficient to cover his retinue’s wage bill for this short campaign.68 Substantial advance payments for contracted
65 Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, 120–37. 66 TNA, E 101/68/4/ 92; E 101/31/27, m. 2. 67 e.g. the earl of March in 1374–5 (Davies, Lords and Lordship, 129); the duke of Lancaster in 1369 and 1372 (Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 60); Ralph Ferrers in 1377–8 (TNA, E 101/36/26). 68 TNA, E 101/32/36, m. 1. 22
service were not new;69 but prior to the 1360s this was the exception rather than the rule:
advances were smaller and payment in arrears commonplace. When the Anglo-French war
resumed in 1369, service according to the terms of written military contracts, with favourable
payment arrangements, became the default. The old nobility were enabled to continue their
time-honoured role in a more demanding recruiting environment, while a suitable incentive
was provided for careerists, whether captains contracting directly with the crown or sub- contractors benefiting from the trickle-down of upfront payments. The contract system had contributed to the rise of the careerist and it provided the means of sustaining him.
Garrison service
If the emergence of supersized retinues, frequently employed in the long-range chevauchées that were typical of the renewed war in France, provided one sphere where military careerists could thrive, there were other aspects of the French war that had the same effect, though in markedly different ways. The example of Lancastrian France would suggest that the most appropriate place to look for military professionals during the previous century would be garrisons, and in this respect too the English war effort after 1369 provided fertile soil for careerism to flourish. Large-scale garrisoning commitments had been a prominent feature of the Anglo-Scottish wars since Edward I’s reign. There were, for example, as many as 1300 combatants in the six Scottish garrisons maintained by the crown in 1335–6, and others were in private hands.70 These commitments continued on a somewhat smaller scale during the
later fourteenth century,71 but by then the capture of Calais in 1347 and the permanent garrisoning of the locality as a strategic and commercial centre had, in terms of the
69 e.g. the army that the earl of Derby led to Aquitaine in 1345, for which he provided an usually large retinue (250 men-at-arms and 250 mounted archers): Fowler, King’s Lieutenant, 222–4, 230–2. 70 D.J. Cornell, ‘Northern Castles and Garrisons in the Later Middle Ages’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Durham, 2006), 11. 71 Berwick, Roxburgh and Lochmaban (until 1384), plus Carlisle. 23
manpower, money and logistics required, opened a new chapter of military-organisational ambition for the English crown. Over 1000 combatants, plus technicians and workmen, were permanently based in the area throughout the 1350s,72 and there was a return to such numbers
after the resumption of war in 1369. Indeed, the Calais March, a block of territory roughly 30
km by 15 km in extent, was probably the most intensively garrisoned locality in western
Europe, its identity and defensive strength deriving from the relationship between the port- town hub and its network of satellite strong points, set within an advantageously waterlogged landscape. Of the soldiers on the payroll in 1371–2 (nominally 1132), nearly 500 were based in Calais itself, over 300 in Ardres, 80 in Guînes and from 14 to 50 in nine other fortified places in the March;73 and for the English crown this was merely the greatest concentration of
garrison troops in France. In the same year there were 250 men at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte
in Normandy.74 Taking account of the garrisons at Brest and, from 1378, Cherbourg,
combined with existing commitments in Gascony and the Channel Islands, it can be suggested that, all told, at least 2000 men were simultaneously employed in England’s
‘barbican’ fortresses.75 It is small wonder – and worth emphasising – that maintaining these
garrisons, including Calais, consumed well over a third of war expenditure during the half- decade from 1376 to 1381: over £150,000.76
The personnel of the Edwardian and Ricardian garrisons at Calais and elsewhere in
France and their patterns of service have yet to be researched in detail, though the sources for
72 S.J. Burley, ‘The Victualling of Calais, 1347–65’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 31 (1958), 49–57 (51). 73 E. Perroy, ed., Compte de William Gunthorp, trésorier de Calais, 1371–1372. Mémoires de la Commission Départementale des Monuments Historiques du Pas-de-Calais, 10, fasc. 1 (Arras: Commission départementale des monuments historiques du Pas-de-Calais, 1959), 6–7, 11, 20–5. 74 TNA, E 101/31/18. St Sauveur was lost to the French in 1375. 75 M. Jones, Ducal Brittany, 1364–1399 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 152–3; J. Sumption, The Hundred Years War, vol. 3: Divided Houses (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 310, 330; Bell and others, Soldier, 100. 76 J.W. Sherborne, ‘The Cost of English Warfare with France in the Later Fourteenth Century’, in idem, War, Politics and Culture, 55–70 (67–9). 24
doing this are available, including some clusters of muster records.77 For the moment, David
Cornell’s investigation of the soldiers serving in English-held castles in fourteenth-century
Scotland offers some guidance. He showed that a proportion of serving men-at-arms pursued
garrison service, often within a single fortress, as a long-term occupational choice; and that
the steady turnover of manpower around this core group was partly the result of the comings
and goings of captains.78 That we should also expect to find other, less specialist careerists
mingling with the ‘garrison community’ is suggested by the experience of the widely
travelled Nicholas Sabraham, who fitted tours of duty at Lochmaban and Roxburgh into his
long career with the sword.79 Patterns of service were probably similar in the Calais March, though they will also have been affected by organisational changes there that mirrored the structural development of field armies at this time. While the hybrid Calaisis garrisons of the
1350s were composed of mixed retinues, royal household personnel, companies of hobelars
(lightly armed horsemen) or archers and a mass of small contingents and unattached
individuals, the more streamlined military establishment of the 1370s consisted, in the main,
of contracted retinues, which were now very large if the contractors were responsible for one of the main garrisons.80 A preliminary investigation, focusing on those with command
responsibilities, suggests that the Calais garrison, like those in Scotland, provided
opportunities for a variety of careerist ‘types’. On the one hand, so central was Calais to
England’s strategic interests, most of the seasoned captains whose careers we have noticed in
passing performed at least one spell of duty there.81 The ubiquitous socio-professional Sir
Ralph Ferrers, having been responsible for Guînes in the mid 1350s, was captain of Calais at
77 Cf., for the fifteenth century, Grummitt, Calais Garrison, 76. 78 Cornell, ‘Northern Castles and Garrisons’, Chapter 5: ‘Garrison Service’. 79 Nicolas, ed., Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy, 1: 124–5; TNA, C 71/50, m. 4. 80 As in 1371–2 when Sir Nicholas Tamworth, captain of the town and castle of Calais, led a retinue of nearly 500 men (Perroy, ed., Compte de William Gunthorp, 11, 21–2), whereas the personal retinue of his counterpart in early 1356, Sir John Beauchamp, provided merely the core (100 men) of what was an organisationally more fragmented military establishment (TNA, E 101/173/7, f. 5r). 81 For example: Sir Robert Salle (TNA, E 101/180/4, f. 6v), Sir Hugh Calveley (Lambeth Palace Library, MS 284, f. 3v) and Sir Matthew Gournay (TNA, E 101/40/26). 25
the time of the Reims campaign and keeper of Ardres when war resumed in 1369.82 On the
other hand, there is plentiful evidence of settled, long-term service at Calais among some of
the retinue and company leaders. Take, for example, Sir Godfrey Roos, who rose from
leading a small company of five men during the mid 1350s to commanding Audruicq castle,
with 50 in the 1370s;83 or Thomas Aberford, one of John Dancaster’s comrades at the capture of Guînes in 1352, who was leader of a company of hobelars throughout the 1350s.84 If such
men can be considered military professionals in the sense that has been applied to Lancastrian
Normandy, it is a term that should also be extended to long-serving technicians who were responsible for operating engines and manufacturing weaponry: men like John Cornewaill, springaldar, who served in the Guînes garrison during the 1350s.85
Maritime expeditions: military service at sea
Another notable feature of the English war effort after 1369, very much related to the
barbican strategy, was an increased emphasis on maritime operations, and specifically those
involving heavily armed fleets stuffed with fighting men. Eleven major naval expeditions
were mounted during the 20 years of intensive warfare from 1369 to 1389. The largest – in
1372, 1377 and 1378 – carried as many soldiers as served in the more celebrated chevauchées
of the period, and so it is not surprising that, during this phase of the war, almost as many
men-at-arms and archers were deployed at sea as for field operations in France.86 And we
should not forget that mariners, a pugnacious breed of men, would readily engage in a sea
fight, those on the king’s ships during the 1370s being supplied with mail coats and bascinets,
82 Guînes: TNA, E 101/173/7, f. 16v. Calais: E 101/174/7, f. 3r. Ardres: E 101/178/14. 83 E 101/173/7, f. 6r; E 101/174/7, f. 3v; E 101/179/12, f. 5r; E 101/180/4, f. 7v; Perroy, ed., Compte de William Gunthorp, 23–4. 84 Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1350–54, 244; TNA, E 101/170/16, f. 14r; E 101/171/1, f. 8r; E 101/171/3, f. 6v; E 101/173/7, f. 9r; E 101/174/7, f. 6r. 85 E 101/171/1, f. 13r; E 101/171/3, f. 22r; E 101/27/6, m. 16; E 101/174/7, f. 10v. 86 J.W. Sherborne, ‘The English Navy: Shipping and Manpower, 1369–89’, in idem, War, Politics and Culture, 29–39 (35–9). 26
bows and a plentiful supply of arrows.87 Though perhaps surprising, it seems clear that, in
terms of the deployment of fighting men, the war at sea was the predominant sphere of the
Anglo-French conflict at this time. For an indication of the numbers involved, the naval force
that the earl of Hereford led to a largely forgotten victory in the Bay of Bourgneuf during the
summer of 1371, consisting of 42 vessels, manned by over 1700 mariners and 1400 soldiers,
may be regarded as a typical operation of middling size.88 Also typical was the distinction
between those soldiers whom we might consider ‘marines’, intended as stiffening for the
ships’ crews (243 armed men and 279 archers) and those serving in retinues (420 men-at-
arms, each with a valet or servant, and 460 archers). And the retinue of Guy, Lord Brian, on
this occasion, 240 men-at-arms and 240 archers, also illustrates how, as on land, retinue-
based manpower involved in these naval operations was often deployed in supersized units,
which could not possibly have been raised from the tried and tested recruitment networks of
their leaders.89 A few months later, Sir Ralph Ferrers, as admiral of the northern fleet, faced a
similar recruiting challenge. The contingent of 500 men that he contracted to lead was five
times larger than anything that he had been (or would ever be) required to raise, and there
could be no clearer indication of how dependent he would be on the pool of careerist soldiers
than the contractual requirement that only seven of 199 men-at-arms should be knights. In the event, he managed to find six.90
Although naval operations involved challenges that were in many ways different from those encountered during a chevauchée on land, the increased commitment to maritime expeditions after 1369 meant that many soldiers gained experience of fighting at sea, perhaps
87 TNA, E 101/30/13. 88 Ships and armed crews: TNA, E 101/31/23; E 101/31/10 and 14; E 101/31/12, m. 1, and E 364/5, rot. 31d (a); E 101/30/13, m. 5, and E 101/30/15, m. 3. Retinues: E 101/31/11 (Brian); E 101/31/12 (Neville); E 101/31/15 and E 101/31/27 (Hereford). 89 For the low level of repeat service in the retinues raised by Brian for naval expeditions in 1370, 1371, 1372 and 1378, see Ayton, ‘Military Service’, 24. 90 TNA, E 101/31/28. Cf. 1377–8, when he contracted to provide 100 men: E 101/36/26. 27
as a consequence of loyalty to a particular captain,91 or because, for flexible careerists like
John Nowell, this was just another employment opportunity.92 Yet, from the crown’s point of
view, it also clearly made sense to enlist men who had their sea legs and could turn their
hands to handling the ship if necessary. When an admiral needed manpower for a naval
expedition, he would first search the coastal zone, even if – as we see with Guy Brian’s
actions as admiral of the western fleet in 1371 – this brought him into conflict with
prohibitions on recruitment within the maritime land.93 Marines and seamen would be drawn
from the same pool of manpower, as can be seen with the 500 men-at-arms, armed men,
archers and mariners raised in the spring of 1371 by the admiral of the northern fleet, John,
Lord Neville of Raby.94 How far retinue-based men-at-arms and archers were also recruited from coastal communities is as yet unclear, but it would be surprising if, for example, Guy
Brian did not seek manpower in maritime Devon, including Dartmouth, and Dorset, where many of his landholdings were located.95 What is clear, given the intensity and variety of
maritime operations at this time, as well as the demands of home defence, is the depth of
involvement of England’s coastal and estuarine communities in the king’s war. And of
particular interest in this respect is the accumulating evidence of men serving,
interchangeably, as soldiers (men-at-arms, armed men, archers) or seamen. For example, of
the 29 armed men serving on the Maudeleyn of Ipswich for a defensive patrolling voyage in
1374, six had been recorded as Ipswich-based mariners in a survey made in 1372.96 That a
91 e.g. William Biset: Bell and others, Soldier, 119. 92 Both Nowell and William Biset were at sea with Ralph Ferrers in 1371–2. TNA, E 101/31/28, mm. 1, 3. 93 Brian: Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office. Edward III, vol. 15: 1370–74 (London: H.M.S.O., 1914), 88; Calendar of the Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office. Edward III, vol. 13: 1369–74 (London: H.M.S.O., 1911), 229; TNA, E 101/31/11, m. 7. J.R. Alban, ‘English Coastal Defence: Some Fourteenth-Century Modifications with the System’, in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England, ed. R.A. Griffiths (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1981), 57–78 (69–70). 94 Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1370–74, 24; TNA, E 101/31/13; E 101/31/17. 95 Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and Other Analogous Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office, vol. 16, 7‒15 Richard II (London: H.M.S.O., 1974), 380–2 (nos. 959–62). R.G.F. Stanes, ‘Sir Guy de Brian, K.G.’, Devonshire Association: Transactions 92 (1960): 248–78. 96 Crew list: TNA, E 101/32/29, m. 2. Ipswich return for mariner survey: C 47/2/46/12. 28
proportion of shipboard fighting men, the ‘marines’, were actually seafarers for much of their
lives, earning a living wholly or in large part at sea, has interesting implications. The first is that, as marines, they were operating as a distinctive kind of proto-professional, which serves further to emphasise how, especially outside a settled institutional context, our definition of military careerist needs to be quite inclusive. Secondly, it helps to explain how it was that, during a period of population decline, the pool of deployable manpower, the military community, appears to have expanded.
Conclusion
If we are to understand the rise to prominence of the English military careerist during the later fourteenth century we clearly cannot ignore the expanded employment opportunities in
European theatres of war for men of his skills and proclivities and of the multi-facetted socio- economic consequences of the Black Death, which served to release the energies of such men. But we need also to focus on the management of the English king’s wars, which in at
least three respects encouraged the transformation and supplementation of the traditional pool
of manpower available for recruitment. Larger, sometimes supersized, mixed-arms retinues
were now characteristic of all forms of military service, and those in field armies provided an
ideal context for careerists seeking short to medium-term spells of duty. The standing
garrisons in the barbicans around the French coast, most notably at Calais, and also in the
Scottish March, offered the prospect of longer-term, indeed semi-permanent, employment.
The naval expeditions that were so characteristic a feature of the late Edwardian and
Ricardian war effort drew in part on a distinctive group of men from the coastal zone who could serve as shipboard soldiers or seamen. Determining with any degree of precision what effects these developments had on the size, composition and character of the pool of active combatants in England – the military community ‒ represents a considerable challenge. We 29
are in the early stages of a research effort that will need to be driven by critically informed data handling combined with a sure theoretical grasp. At present, it is easier to characterise the diversity of careerist identity than it is to provide a quantitatively informed picture. But a quantitative perspective, though at this stage necessarily provisional and tentative, should not be avoided, as this is the only sure guide and foundation for deeper enquiry.
Two points are suggested by our present state of knowledge. The first is that the
military community had not shrunk significantly in the wake of the Black Death and may
well have grown in size.97 This may seem counter-intuitive, given general population shrinkage and the much reduced incidence of occasional service by men raised by
commission of array. But it is surely the implication of those increases to both demand and
supply that were brought about by the impact of various agencies of change on the dynamics
of recruitment. How else do we explain the royal army that campaigned in Scotland in 1385,
which consisted of 4500 men-at-arms and over 9000 mounted archers?98 Never before had
such numbers of these types of fighting men been assembled simultaneously for a campaign.
The two armies of comparable overall size during the preceding half century, those raised in
1335 and 1346, were packed with foot soldiers.99 And to these 1385 totals should be added
the crown’s garrisoning commitments at that time (2000 men in France, plus Berwick and
Roxburgh) and an unknown number of English soldiers working on their own account across
Europe.100 That the army of 1385 was exceptionally large as a consequence of royal
leadership and was in the field for only a few weeks does not affect its value as an indicator
of the minimum size of the pool of potentially available manpower. A perhaps more telling
indication is provided by the very small overlap between the manpower employed on the earl
97 Ayton, ‘Military Service’, 36–9. 98 N.B. Lewis, ‘The Last Medieval Summons of the English Feudal Levy, 13 June 1385’, English Historical Review 73 (1958): 1–26 (5–6). 99 Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, 198–200, 248–55; Ayton, ‘English Army at Crécy’, 181–9. 100 For details of the hundreds of English soldiers employed in Italy at this time, see G.B. Parks, The English Traveller to Italy. The Middle Ages (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1954), 383–95, 419–22. 30 of Arundel’s two very fully documented naval expeditions of 1387 and 1388. Of over 5600 identifiable men who served in these armies, fewer than 500 (8 per cent) enlisted on both occasions.101 Fewer than 7 per cent of 2300 sub-knightly men-at-arms served both times.
Here, it is not the total number of individuals that is significant, but the low level of repeat service from one naval expedition to the next, which is suggestive of a very large pool of potential recruits: a pool that had been supplemented by a host of careerists, opportunists and
‘soldier-mariners’ from the coastal zone.
The second quantitative point about the military community that can be proposed is that, during the period up to 1389 (at least), the nobility and gentry remained quite as committed to performing an active military role as they had been earlier in the century, a good deal of this service being delivered, as before, through traditional recruiting networks.102 However, as is suggested by the shrinking numbers of serving knights, which is noticeable in all operational spheres, the gentry was now contributing a smaller proportion of the men-at-arms employed in armies on land and at sea, and in garrisons. In part, this was the result of population shrinkage, in part because the pool of men-at-arms had expanded and had become more socially diverse. If we are to hazard a characterisation of this diverse group of men-at-arms, to distinguish simply between the gentlemen warrior, whose service was rooted in traditional values and social structures, and the socially disengaged proto-professional would be misleading. Matters were much more complicated, and it is not just that there were a good many military careerists of gentle blood. Social groups were in flux at this time, and the military and social advancement of men of sub-genteel origin contributed to this. The emergence of the mounted archer and mixed-arms retinues during the 1330s and 1340s had been important to such advancement, for this not only released the military potential of what
101 Ayton, ‘Military Service’, 37, drawing on Bell, War and the Soldier, 56, 64–5, 98; 133, n. 109; 221. 102 Ayton, ‘Military Service’, 41–59; Bell and others, Soldier, 73–84. 31
we might term the ‘middling sort’, it also bridged the chasm between gentleman and
husbandman, and provided a service platform from which men might aspire to go higher, by
investing their gains in horse and harness. This is surely the experience of Knolles and
Hawkwood, and probably John Dancaster too.103 Fashioning a tidy characterisation of the
dedicated soldier at this time is made still more difficult by the diversity arising from the
nature of particular career paths and perhaps most notably from the new found prominence of
the soldier-sailors of the coastal zone. Moreover, at any given moment, alongside established
careerists, whether men-at-arms or archers, there would be new men working their
apprenticeships in arms and, in all probability, a good many opportunists and criminals: men
whose occasional service needs also to be taken into account when assessing the overall size
of the military community.
Just how important, quantitatively speaking, the riff-raff and fraudsters were is
difficult to say. The chroniclers delight in drawing attention to them, as can be seen with their
accounts of armies raised in 1370, 1383, 1384–5 and 1387.104 Although these authors may
have been exaggerating, this was not a wholly imagined phenomenon. There are other
indications that the military community had become a more volatile, less reliable workforce –
and not simply because of opportunists, but rather because of a more general shift in
‘culture’. On the one hand, there were serious mutinies, such as that perpetrated by Sir John
Minsterworth in 1370, which caused the break-up of Sir Robert Knolles’s army,105 and that
which affected the earl of Cambridge’s expeditionary force in Portugal in 1382.106 There
103 Ayton, ‘Military Service’, 41; Bell and others, Soldier, 69, 114, 162–4. 104 V.H. Galbraith, ed., The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333–1381 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927), 63; L.C. Hector and B.F. Harvey, eds., The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 45; J. Taylor, W.R. Childs and L. Watkiss, eds., The St Albans Chronicle. The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, vol. 1, 1376–1394 (Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press, 2003), 809–11. Cf. Bell and others, Soldier, 206–7. 105 Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, 292–7. 106 P.E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 331; M. Keen, ‘Richard II’s Ordinances of War of 1385’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England. Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, eds. R.F. Archer and S. Walker (London: Hambledon, 1995), 33–48 (40‒1). 32
were many less dramatic cases of cases of desertion. As Simon Walker observed, even John
of Gaunt, ‘often chronically short of money’ as a campaign came to a close, ‘was unable to halt the gradual disintegration of his army through desertion’.107 This was not a new
phenomenon, of course; but in the later decades of the fourteenth century it was not so much
the disappearance of arrayed, perhaps unwilling and inexperienced foot soldiers that was the
problem, as we see earlier in the century, but the unreliability of volunteers in contracted
retinues. That some men who offered to serve, perhaps taking an advance on wages, had no
intention of embarking for France is shown by the much increased incidence of fraudulently
obtained letters of protection, as measured by the large number of revocations that appear on
the Patent Rolls after the resumption of war in 1369.108 To find the bishop of Norwich in
1383 indignantly demanding the revocation of protections may occasion little surprise, given
the circumstances in which his army was raised,109 but this was in truth a problem that
affected all armies to some extent. In 1370, two dozen of the men who had engaged to serve
in Sir Walter Hewitt’s very large retinue in Aquitaine, but failed to sail with him, had their
protections revoked.110
The pool of manpower that was the late fourteenth-century military community was a diverse, volatile world, constantly in flux, its diversity and volatility being as much a reflection of the mentalities and aspirations of combatants as their socio-economic origins.
This was the world in which the military careerist moved during the later fourteenth century:
a world in which the balance had shifted from predominant dependence on established
recruiting networks to a greater reliance on captains and rank and file manpower who were
107 Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 52–3. 108 Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, 158–9; Russell, English Intervention in Spain and Portugal, 371–2; Bell and others, Soldier, 5–7, 83. 109 TNA, C 81/1735/33–6. Enrolled protection revocations: Magee, ‘Sir Henry Elmham’, 190, n. 51. 110 Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office. Edward III, vol. 14: 1367–70 (London: H.M.S.O., 1913), 457–8; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1370–74, 27. Hewitt’s retinue: 200 men-at-arms and 300 archers (Sherborne, ‘Indentured Retinues’, 16). 33
largely disengaged from the recruitment structures, assumptions and constraints that were at
the heart of the traditional military system. It is small wonder that, on the eve of the major
royal expedition to Scotland in 1385, the English high command considered it prudent to
codify, and probably elaborate, the existing army disciplinary regime in the form of a
schedule of ordinances.111 Indeed, the army ordinances of 1385 have all the appearance of an
attempt to shore up a system that was having difficulty containing the destabilising influences
that were operating within it. Here we have the darker side of the standard, upbeat narrative
of army organisational reform: the story of the replacement of cumbersome and poorly integrated ‘hybrid’ armies by structurally uniform ones; the creation of a flexible ‘army style’
that could be employed, whether or not the king was present, for operations of all kinds, on
land and at sea, as well as for maintaining long-term garrisons. On the face of it, the armies of
the later fourteenth century were more streamlined and efficient; and, ceteris paribus, they ought to have been more effective. But the rise of the careerist soldier had been accompanied by dilution of the social embeddedness that had brought stability and strength to Edwardian armies. The army structural reforms which, together with other agencies of change, had made the recruitment of the careerist soldier possible, indeed essential, had also made it less easy to accommodate him in a fashion that exploited his skills while curbing his individualism.
Acknowledgements
At several points my research for this article has benefitted from access to the AHRC-funded
‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England’ online database (www.medievalsoldier.org). I should also like to acknowledge the kindness of the late Professor Linton S. Thorn, who made his research materials on English Calais available to me, and the collaboration of Dr
111 Keen, ‘Richard II’s Ordinances of War’; A. Curry, ‘Disciplinary Ordinances for English and Franco-Scottish Armies in 1385: an International Code?’, Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011): 269–94. 34
Craig Lambert in developing the materials and ideas presented in the section on maritime recruitment.
Andrew Ayton is a specialist in late medieval military and social history. He has written extensively on England’s military communities and the organisation and conduct of the king’s wars in Scotland and France during the fourteenth century. He is currently Honorary
Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Hull (having been a member of that department for 30 years until his retirement in 2015) and Honorary Senior
Research Fellow at Keele University.