War with France was bound to have a great impact on the south of England as a whole, not least when armies gathered in the ports and their environs awaiting ships to set sail for France. Between 1415 and 1453 approximately forty-five armies, ranging in size from one hundred to over 12,000 men, embarked from the ports of southern England to cross to France for land campaigns. Over these thirty-eight years somewhere in excess of 100,000 men units (expressed in this way as some men served on more than one expedition) journeyed to the points of assembly on the south coast and were mustered, transported across the Channel and directed to war fronts in France. This number can be boosted if we include men embarking for naval campaigns or crossing to France on other occasions to join or rejoin garrisons in the Calais march, Normandy and elsewhere in northern France and Gascony, to carry messages, to escort materials and officials and, of course, to return home to England after completing their service. The total is increased by acknowledgment that the numbers crossing in paid royal service were not the only people embarking: there were servants, victuallers, craftsmen and countless hangers on – countless in the sense that the documentary evidence does not allow us to detect and number them.

In one sense there was nothing new about this. The southern ports had witnessed departing armies ever since the Anglo-Norman connection had been forged. Edward III's army had crossed from Portsmouth to Barfleur in 1346, and Edward, as Henry V nearly seventy years later, resided in Portchester castle while the troops assembled. A number of other expeditions departed from the south coast in the fourteenth century, but, in a very important sense, the fifteenth-century experience of the ports was unique. Armies crossed to France in almost every year between 1415 and 1453. The only exceptions were 1446, 1447 and 1451. Sometimes more than one army crossed in a year. This essay concentrates first on the choice of ports for the launching of expeditions and subsequently on the impact of the presence of armies in the south-coast ports and their environs.