Tell me about medieval armies!

[Silveras]

For D&D-specific reading, you may want to look for "Raising the ... fyrd ?" in the Dragon Magazine archive CD rom. This article discusses the various options a local lord has for defending his/her lands.. standing armies, yeoman-class, a fyrd, levies, and so on. Although written in the 1st Edition period, there were no rules then, either, so it is probably 99% compatible with 3rd Edition.

A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe has a chapter on detailing Manors, and discusses the distribution of land in a feudal society. I think the book hits every one of the main points mentioned here. I would consider it "must" reading for anyone who wants to do a pseudo-historical campaign.

 

[s/LaSH]

Interestingly, the medieval military structure may be a historical anomaly. The Romans and Greeks had standing, trained armies, right? (I think the state of Sparta was nothing but army.) And yet it was in the medieval period that weapons requiring extensive training became popular - longbows, longswords, etc. Very strange.

 

[adwyn]

The type of army is dictated more by politics and economics than time period/technology. Just look at modern Somalia's feudalism and contrast it to the armies of Rome or Sparta.

The more powerful a leader is the more the army will represent a modern army in terms of consistent chains of command. A powerful ruler can have consistent regiments/cohorts/whatevers and assign them around the country as necessary. The important thing is they are his troops. If the troops belong to lesser leaders the organization will break down along the lines of politics. For weaker rulers, and especially in feudalism troops will be controlled by local lords. Units are most often small, though in battle they may be combined in an "Archers over there, nobles here, and you guys with the pointy sticks behind them" sort of way.

As to housing, economics is the most important thing. Troops in barracks are great but expensive. Some rulers can afford to do so always, other rulers will do so only when expecting war or perhaps only for a core of units. If the troops are safe from attack and don't need to be instantly ready they will more closely resemble what we would think of as the modern national guard.

Troops that are allowed to marry and have kids will want their own homes whenever possible. Roman soldiers were often allowed gardens to supplement their garrioson incomes. Just prior to the american revolution many british soldiers were expected to have a second job - especially in times of inflation wages barely covered expenses. And it often wasn't pay+ board. From the sixteenth century on costs of room, board, uniforms, and even weapons would be deducted from the soldiers pay. Add in graft and it could be unpleasant indeed for the common soldier. During peacetime most rulers would attempt to reduce the number of troops to the minimum. Extra troops might be chased out, allowed to take on extra jobs, simply leave or hired out en masse to friendly foreign powers.

All of this is rambling. First decide what kind of country you want. Now just be consistent with that. If you have a strong emperor with a centralized govt. go with a standing army. If you later decide it was to small, new troops can be recruited or return from foreign campaigns. If you want a dying king barely holding on to a realm on the verge of collapse go with a feudal kingdom with each village fortifed and every noble hording as many troops as he can.

Use the politics to explain what you want. Nations and their armies have changed rapidly over history, and there is no one model to use.

 

[Sarellion]

The knightly orders who fought in the holy landwere some kind of standing army in the era of the crusades. They had big castles for troopsas far as I know but most castles were designed by smaller lords with a small amount of troops.

The feudal lords were fighting each other most of the time. Small lords were the norm in the early middle ages, bigger ones in later times. The advent of a better transportation and information infrastructure enabled the grand lords to keep their vassals under control and to make them real dependant servants instead of more or less independant lords.

 

[mmadsen]

The Romans and Greeks had standing, trained armies, right? (I think the state of Sparta was nothing but army.)

The Roman legions are the example of a professional army. Renaissance armies tried to recreate the legions in many ways.

The Spartans you're thinking of, the highly disciplined heavy infantry, were the aristocratic elite of their society -- in some ways like the later medieval cavalry, but in their disciplined drilling and infantry tactics quite different.

And yet it was in the medieval period that weapons requiring extensive training became popular - longbows, longswords, etc. Very strange.

Ancient Greek armies drilled regularly to learn to fight as a team in a phalanx. Ancient Roman legions, again, are the example of a professional army, highly trained and highly motivated. Working as a unit requires plenty of training as a unit.

 

[Agemegos]

How did standing armies work from a soldier's point of view?

There were precious few standing armies. The exceptions are roughly:

(1) The Holy Fighting Orders, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Baltic;

(2) The households of nobles; and

(3) 'Free' mercenary companies.

How were armies divided? Did each ruler have his own soldiers or were they all from one pool, and assigned various stations and posts?

(1) The armies of the holy fighting orders were generally well-organised and well-disciplined. They consisted of a core of knights (aristocratic members) and sergeants (second-class members), plus archers, servants &c. who were salaried permanent emplyers, but had generally not taken vows. Each commandery had a permanent commander, a drapier (quartermaster) etc. Commanderies were grouped into territories with permanent 'preceptors' or 'priors', and those were grouped into 'langues' (national groups) with grand priors/grand preceptors in permanent charge. And ech order had a permanent Master with a staff, commissariat, treasury, regular revenues &c.

(2) Each knight or baron generally led his household himself, or perhaps deputised his eldest son. They were pretty much a mob. A great baron's military contingent would consist of his own household knights plus the households of his vassals, each household acting as a contingent. At war the army might be divided into three or four 'battles' (battalions) each including the contingents of the various barons, organised according to the prestige, alliances, and ages of the barons, and commanded by a 'captain' or 'general' appointed for the nonce, for political reasons, and often on the eve of battle. The king, his eldest son, or one of the great officers of the Royal houshold (the Constable of France, the Earl Marshal of England etc.) was in overall command. There is some evidence that in the best period Frankish and Norman knights were trained to co-ordinate with a small group of comrades called a 'lance', and some that the leader of a lance was denoted by the 'bannerette' on his lance. But on the whole command and control was a schemozzle. The infantry levies were separate, commanded by the 'sergeant-major general'. Individual local contingents of the infantry levy were probably led by prominent citizens elected from their districts.

(3) A mercenary company was led by its captain, who took orders from the person who hired him and gave orders to his troops. Sometimes the captain had an assistant/deputy called his 'lieutenant', and sometimes he would put his lieutenant in temporary charge of a detatched command.

Was there any initial training, similar in effect to modern boot camp?

Knights spent their youth in training, sometimes while fostered in the household of one of their fathers' overlords, allies, or friends.

Depending on time and place, members of the lower classes may have had compulsory weapons training and practise as part of the fyrd or wapentake. But there would not have been very much of it. Otherwise, no.

How did different soldiers come to fill diferent rolls? Archers, cavalry, etc.

Mostly this seems to have depended on their social class. The rich gots trained as knights, the not-quite so rich as mounted sergeants, the middle-class as foot sergeants, the poor as various forms of light infantry. But things were slightly different in places where livestock was cheap (eg. Spain.

Did soldiers typically live in a barracks, or did they live in homes near their posts like government housing?

When they weren't in camps, soldiers often lived in castles. The household of a landed knight would live in his castle, usually sleeping in the hall while the family slept in the chamber. A king or great baron might have a big enough castle that it had truly separate quarters for the garrison. The holy fighting orders had commanderies that ranged from a fortified manor house with a garrison of two or three up to great castles with a permanent garrison of two hundred knights, plus sergeants and turcopoles (light missile cavalry).

Was there any kind of organized training, or was it mostly up to each soldier to find a way to learn not to get stabbed?

Knights apparently had up to seven years of formal training as squires in the household of a baron.

In England at lest, commoners were obliged by law to own weapons appropriate to their wealth and to train with them every now and again: presumably the institutions that organised the training (parish wapentake, hundred moot and so forth) organised some training for youngsters.

How did one quit the army? Were there contracts for lengths of enlistment, or could you just up in leave (not in a time of war)?

A knight in service often died in service. Otherwise he might be lucky enough to be granted a manor or to marry an heiress.

A knight or sergeant in one of the Holy Fighting Orders was bound to the order for life, and leaving it under any circumstances was both a crime and an sin. But after specified tours of duty at the front he could expect to be put out to grass in a commanderies in a safe rear zone. This might be a big place where he got to live like a monk (under laxer or stricter discipline depending on time and place) or a little country manor where he got to live like a landed knight and mingle with the aristocracy (or at least gentry).

Mercenaries were generally free to quit at will, and companies often (butnot alway) broke up when their employment ended.

 

[DrZombie]

My two pence, in order to complicate matters even further :

Guilds : In medieval flanders, (nope, nothing to do with the simpsons) city guilds trained their members to be proficient in a certain weapon, the weavers would train as crossbowmen, the butchers would train with a pike, etc, in order to defend their town if it was under attack. They would take up "guard duty" as well. There still are "scuttersgilde" as of today, a remnant of the gunpowder training guilds, and they still hold competitions. It was the first army composed entirely out of non-knights ever to defeat a "traditional" army, in this case the french. OK, I admit, it was because the french knights charged their own troops because they thought their own peasants would win the battle, and they didn't know the flank that was left open was a swamp, but hey, we won...

Longbowmen : The english longbow can only be pulled today by olympic bowmen. They trained from an early age, and X-rays and CT-scans of the corpses from the graves at agincourt show that their shoulder-joint on their right(or left, can't remember) is massively developed, indicating years of stress. They'd get payed by the amount of arrows they could fire accurately in one minute.
There were 3000 archers at agincourt, firing 6 arrows a minute at the french... Thats 18000 arrows a minute. That might sting a little.

 

[frugal]

Also, in what could be described as the late medieval period (late 14th/early 15th century), when archery became important (think of what the English archers did at Agincourt - and yes I know the weather had a big part to play, but they were still rather effective despite dysentery) it was a duty of all male peasants to practice archery every Sunday, IIRC at their local church under the watchful eye of the priest. In fact, the law has never been repealed, so everyone in England who doesn't practice with his bow after Sunday service is a criminal.

The slaughter at Agincourt had more to do with the arogance and stupidity of the French knights, they did not believe that the flower of French chilvalry could be defeated by some english farmers with sticks

the French started the battle at the bottom of a muddy hill (by muddy I mean you could sink 2 feet into it). When the Genoesse crossbow men were cut down by the longer range of the longbow the french knights ran them down as they charged over them. Unfortunately for the french, knights on horse do not do well when marching slowly up a muddy hill with no infantry support. So they got slaughtered as well, then they turned and fled riding down the infantry who were desperately trying to catch up.

Agincourt would have been completely different if the french had taken the "defeated english peseants" seriously. But then that could be said about most battles.

 

[frugal]

England was a little different for a brief period of time (about a hundred years or so). The peasants and whatnot were encouraged to practice with a longbow. This worked out pretty well. Any idiot can use a crossbow (I've used one and hit a target) but long/shortbows take skill.

The english were required to train in the use of the longbow for the defence of the realm on Sundays and Feastdays. The penalty was the stocks, or a fine of tuppance.

The usual starting age for archery practice was 5 and the average age to first go to war was about 16. So you were practicing for 11 years...

You can get fairly good with a longbow in a short period of time, however one of the major reasons to spend so long training was to build up the muscles. The starting draw weight for a war bow was 120 lbs and it went up to about 180lbs (there have been bows found on the Mary Rose that were 205lbs but they were the kings elite). Being able to draw 180lbs 12 times a minute for 15 minutes takes a lot of training. The shoulder bone structure of a Medieval archer would be "deformed" by the forces upon it.

Once you've put in the three years or so of training though, you can do all kinds of funky archery that the English were infamous for.

What the english were famous for was putting thousands of archers together. If you have 6000 archers each shooting 12 shafts a minute that is 72000 shafts landing up on the enemy from up to 300 yards away.

At cracy there were 6,000 english archers and in 8 minutes they shot over half a million arrows

The effective accuracy of the individual arrow is not that great, half a million arrows against 10,000 men is a kill ratio of 1 in 100, but the psycological effect of having up to 18,000 arrows in the air at any one time is devestating. Each archer could have one leaving the bow, one landing and one at the top of the traectory at any one time. So there would be between 12,000 and 18,000 arrows in the air for a period of 8 minutes... They wer not called arrow storms for nothing.

However, there was one problem with this practice: it was a huge pain in the butt.

Only if you were the butt

Interesting note, in a lot of old villages there is a lane called Butt Lane or The Butts that runs beside or behind the church. This was so that the men could come out of church and go stright to the butts to practice.

Hmmm... This has turned into a bit of a lecture about how cool archers were One last fact: The Balista Bodkin is exactly the same shape as a modern armour piercing round. I have seen medieval bodkins put completely through a full suit of armour and the dummy that was wearing it; through kevlar body armour and through bulletproof glass...

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Military Organization During the War of the Roses

Right, first off I would like to say that this has been a pretty incredible thread in terms of the quality and variety of responses.

My take on military matters is pretty much entirely in terms of how it affects political stability so I'm generally less concerned about tactics and individual training as I am about who pays for it and how.

As a result, for instance, I would not qualify the Roman legions as a professional army in the sense by which we think of one. They came close to that, at times, but mostly the whole situation was very very confused. Thus the emperor.

So I'm really excited about this thread.

In terms of most of the original questions, everything was pretty well negotiated on an individual basis though there were market, cultural, political, and real guidelines. Many of which did not apply to the War of the Roses in the way that you might think. There were too many Knights in England so they were cheap and Longbowmen had done well in Europe so they got essentially the same pay contract with different duties.

In terms of the War of the Roses, and remember this is a period when things are and have been coming apart for some time, there are more or less two things at work:

Training:

School, or rather your whole life, taught you a method for being a soldier, caring for one, hiring one, or avoiding one. There are plenty of people to be hired of professional quality in England at this time.

Hiring:

You are a professional soldier. You are paid by institutions. This means you do your job. You could work for any number of authorities and you are not hired to be a soldier, you are hired and kept alive to perform a specific task. Say, protect Calais or put down Welsh Rebellions. You do not, as a general rule, therefore join armies. This takes time away from your real job. You do, however, often fight armies and may accompany them for a while as part of your job.

You are an entrepeneur. You are paid by people, governments, which are not institutions at this point, and markets, of various sorts and types. This means you join an army or retinue. You hire other people and are in turn hired until you are large enough to profit and survive from either joining or starting a war.

The second method is the only method by which armies were formed in the War of the Roses. War was a very free enterprise sort of a venture with plenty of willing contractors. The first method was the way the feudal system worked and it had its uses.

Because of the use of the second method there was almost no regularity and it was all negotiated and personality really shown through. There were a good number of honest to goodness heroes, villains, and noble lords and almost no generals and all too few meaningful titles or ranks.

There are a lot of VERY good reasons to do things this way, and bad reasons as well. But this was the way things were done.