Clifford J. Rogers

The Medieval Legacy

The armies and navies inherited by the sixteenth century were conquering armies, though in the new era they soon became very different in role — less so in form. Conquering Naples in 1494, Charles VIII of France wielded forces forged in a dark time by his grandfather, and tempered and tried by the internal conquests of Normandy, Gascony, Brittany and Burgundy. When Gonzalo de Cordoba, ‘El Gran Capitan’, reached the peninsula to make the Spanish riposte, he and his army had also been shaped by the developments of the latter part of the Hundred Years War, and hardened in the decade of invasions launched to subdue the 250-year-old Emirate of Granada. On the other rim of the Mediterranean, Ottoman armies were grinding forward in the Balkans, seizing Serbia, the Morea, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Negroponte (Euboea) between 1459 and 1470, and even smashing their way into Otranto in southern Italy in 1480, only to ebb back on the death of the sultan a year later.

Giraldus Cambrensis, Edward I, and the conquest of Wales

In 1063, Harold Godwineson, heir to the English throne, launched a major invasion of Wales. His forces spread fire and slaughter through the rough Welsh terrain, killing so many men, Gerald of Wales tells us, that he “left not one that pisseth against a wall.” Such large-scale campaigns of devastation were typical of medieval warfare, and the result was also typical, at least for the early and high Middle Ages: the numerous Welsh “princes,” who independently governed their own mini-states, “submitted” to the English and acknowledged their over-lordship in a loose way. Harold and his men then went home with their booty (mostly cattle, no doubt), confident they had both weakened the Welsh and taught them a lesson, so that they would make little trouble for years to come. Harold did not, so far as our limited sources indicate, annex any territory, or depose and replace any Welsh ruler, or hold and garrison outposts within Wales. Having succeeded by the standards of the day, Harold found himself on the defensive in England three years later against two foreign attackers, first Norway’s Harald Hardrada, then William of Normandy. Against the Norwegians, who fought in the same style as the English, he won a decisive battle, but the Normans defeated him at Hastings. The result was the Norman Conquest of England, an extremely thorough occupation and domination vastly different from the loose subordination Harold had imposed on Wales. A French-speaking aristocracy of knights, barons, and counts supplanted the thegns and ealdormen who had been the principal landholders and political elite of the Anglo-Saxon realm. French replaced English as the language of the royal court and of law-courts, and as the second language (after Latin) for writing history or literary works. Although William retained some elements of the old system, broad aspects of Norman military and political organization arrived with the conquerors. For more than two centuries, the dominant form of Anglo-Norman armies was the armored cavalry rather than heavy infantry.

The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’

Traditional understandings of the development of the medieval English longbow and its role in the fourteenth-century ‘infantry revolution’ have recently been challenged by historians. This article responds to the revisionists, arguing based on archaeological, iconographic and textual evidence that the proper longbow was a weapon of extraordinary power, and was qualitatively different from – and more effective than – the shorter self-bows that were the norm in England (and western Europe generally) before the fourteenth century. It is further argued that acknowledging the importance of the weapon as a necessary element of any credible explanation of English military successes in the era of the Hundred Years War does not constitute ‘technological determinism’. ☆ My thanks to the Journal of Medieval Historys anonymous reader for helpful comments.

War and society in medieval and early modern Britain

The nine contributors to this book focus on three English civil wars: the civil war of King Stephens reign; the Wars of the Roses; and, the civil war of the seventeenth century. The wars are viewed within a wider European context, and characteristics of civil war are considered alongside developments in European warfare. This book deals with the general theme of the interaction of war and society rather than the details of individual campaigns and battles. It is concerned with the nature of war and the way it was conducted in the medieval and early modern periods, as well as the way it has been recorded and interpreted by contemporaries and later commentators.

The Military Role of the Magistrates in Holland during the Guelders War

Sources in the city and state archives of Holland show that at the beginning of the sixteenth century the magistrates of Holland were proficient in military matters of defense. During the Guelders war, which lasted until 1543, they hired and paid soldiers, arranged billets for them, confronted mutinies, controlled local military dispositions and costs, purchased and distributed weapons to their burghers, had munitions manufactured for them locally, supervised drills, mustered men, and, within their cities, organized resistance to the Guelders enemy. Two generations later, at the time of the Dutch Revolt, the same skills were needed again to help defeat Philip II.

The Field & the Forge

IT took me many hours to work my way through The Field and the Forge, but not because it is boring or badly written. On the contrary, it is consistently intriguing, informative, and thought-provoking, and the author’s prose style ranges from very good to outstanding. The reason it took so much time to read was because I had so frequently to pause and reflect on the challenging ideas presented, and their implications. Landers’s book ranges widely, spanning the whole chronology of the European Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern periods (through the French Revolution)—and integrating economic, demographic, macropolitical, technological, and military approaches. The general argument is that throughout that timeframe, European civilization was molded by the permanent and inherent characteristics of an “organic economy,” i.e., one in which most of society’s labor had to be devoted to agriculture, and most of the available energy came from muscle power or wood fires. These preindustrial economies were of necessity plagued by endemic poverty, which limited specialization of labor. The high costs of land transport ensured that the population and productive capacity would be widely distributed across the countryside. These considerations, in turn, put tight limitations on the resources that societies could devote to warfare. Military systems had to work within strict trade-offs between quantity and quality of soldiers, since the surpluses generated by organic

An Unknown News Bulletin from the Siege of Tournai in 1340

T he autumn of 1340, for the Plantagenet government of England, was a time of profound crisis.1 Kind Edward III owed £300 000 or more a sum roughly ten times the annual revenue which he had enjoyed at the start of his reign to various creditors, mostly continental merchants. The King had even been forced to leave Henry of Lancaster and other magnates from his court as hostages in Ghent, to reassure his creditors that the debts would eventually be paid. He himself had been obliged to sneak back to England with his wife and a few companions. English chroniclers complained of the grinding taxation which left the realm impoverished and turned the peoples love for their King into hate.2 Government ministers, who had recently been worrying about the possibility of a popular revolt, now concentrated on their own peril, for Edward had imprisoned most of them for suspected treason.3 John Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury and formerly Chancellor of England, fired off blasts of propaganda against the royal government from his cathedral, where he had taken refuge