Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T08:51:54.338Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Cum Socio Eiusdem: Military Recruitment in the Armies of Edward I Among the Sub-Gentry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2022

Clifford J. Rogers
Affiliation:
United States Military Academy
Get access

Summary

Following the pathbreaking work of Andrew Ayton, scholars have developed sophisticated methods for analyzing the relationships among members of the knightly class and gentry to demonstrate the existence of “military communities” that joined together to form the English armies of the Hundred Years’ War. More recently, scholars have used these same techniques to identify similar military communities among the knights and gentry during the reigns of Edward I and Edward II. The main sources for establishing these ties of family, tenancy, friendship, and previous military service have been the so-called “horse lists”, which were essentially insurance records for the mounts of men in the army, and letters of protection, guaranteeing freedom from prosecution and debt collection while the combatant was in royal service. Knights and members of the gentry appear quite frequently in these types of documents. However, 90% or more of the men in the English armies during the reign of Edward I, belonging to the economic and social strata below the gentry, rarely appear in either letters of protection or horse lists. As a result, these men have not received any attention from the perspective of analyzing English military communities in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Through a systematic analysis of broad classes of largely unpublished documents from Edward I's military campaigns in Scotland between 1296–1307, particularly payroll and victualling documents as well as garrison rolls, this essay begins to address the scholarly lacunae with respect to sub-gentry soldiers and finds that they also formed military communities in the same ways as their social and economic superiors.

Prosopographical studies of the fighting men serving in the English armies during the Hundred Years’ War, largely drawing on the models developed by Andrew Ayton, have focused extensively on the question of recruitment networks among the knightly class and gentry. More recently, this social-prosopographical approach has been adopted with respect to the reign of Edward I (1272–1307) in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, most notably by David Simpkin and Andrew Spencer. As has been true of the treatment of military recruitment from the reign of Edward III (1327–77) to that of Henry V (1413–22), the prosopographical examination of the armies of Edward I tends to draw extensively on horse inventories and to a more limited extent, royal letters of protection.

Type
Chapter
Information
Journal of Medieval Military History
Volume XX
, pp. 109 - 124
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×