Against the backdrop outlined above, participants of the crusade formulated responses urged on by a range of pressures and incentives. The structure of martial culture itself – with close contact between prominent men and strong (often temporary) demands made upon personal and local loyalties – predisposed certain groupings to military mobilisation and co-operation. Formed of large pockets of active interest, crusade idealism was primarily a function of knights' personal relationships (hierarchical or otherwise), and the gravitational pull of friendship, and service and reward. To this extent, imperatives of finance, logistics and military leadership – not unbridled zeal or personal ambition – brought expeditions to the field and sustained them over the course of a campaign. As well as being channels of idealism and social advancement, ties of affinity, formal contract, kinship, geography and friendship were the constituent parts of any fourteenth-century military retinue. How these factors coalesced in practice illustrates, then, on a more minute level, crusading's reception on the ground, in the localities and across individual social networks. This chapter seeks to outline the opportunities and interactions that could be harnessed to the crusade cause. Indeed, insofar as it involved the engaging of such key relationships, campaigning under the banner of the cross could be valued as much for its chance to enact men's military and social links as for its special moral and historical gleam. The following pages set out this ‘interior’ view, laying out a possible blueprint of what might be described as late-medieval crusading's sociology, picking apart the more closely packed patterns of recruitment and chivalric response.