The Soldier in Later Medieval England

Abstract

This book is the outcome of a project (sponsored by the AHRC) collecting the name of every soldier known to have served the English crown between the re-opening of the Hundred Years War in 1369 and the loss of Gascony in 1453, the traditional end-date of the Hundred Years War. We are able to make comparisons of different forms of war, such as the chevauchées of the late fourteenth-century, the Agincourt campaign, and the occupation of territory in France in the fifteenth century, thus identifying longer-term trends. Our period also straddles the divide of 1400, and which is of particular interest because of a change of dynasty in England. The book starts in 1369 because of the rich survival, from that point, of a particular kind of documentary record in which soldiers’ names are systematically recorded—the muster roll. The advantage of the use of muster rolls is that they enable the historian to look more closely at the lower ranks in the army, the men-at-arms and especially the archers, who, after all, contributed the largest proportion of troops to English royal service. We investigate various types of soldier, but also consider movement between ranks and issues across all groups, such as regional and national origins. The book focuses upon the individual soldier in line with the initial aims of our project and the success of the accompanying website and databases.

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