De Re Militari | Book Reviews
David Simpkin
The English Aristocracy at War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn
Warfare in History 26. Woodbridge/Rochester NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2008. xv + 228 pp. $95/£50. ISBN 9781843833888.
Michael Prestwich demonstrated some years ago that the armies mobilised by Edward I in pursuit of his political ambitions in Wales, Scotland and France were amongst the largest ever put the field by any medieval English monarch. The complex and composite nature of their recruitment (made up as they were of men in royal pay, others serving voluntarily at their own expense and yet others fulfilling feudal obligations) has however tended to discourage the kind of micro-level study of individual military careers which historians like Adrian Bell have undertaken for the contract armies of the later Fourteenth Century. David Simpkin has now trawled the very diverse administrative records generated by the Edwardian campaigns and examined other relevant material such as the heraldic rolls created as a kind of visual war memorial to those who participated in particular actions in order to fill this gap. This must have been a massive exercise and in many cases a frustrating one, akin to assembling a jigsaw puzzle with at least half the pieces missing. The results are nevertheless revealing and generally persuasive.
Simpkin demonstrates the very high level of mobilisation of the English landed elites (his coverage in fact goes far wider than the “aristocracy” of his title, stretching down to those who served as mounted sergeants), particularly in the period 1296-1307. This does not come as a great surprise. He does however additionally find evidence that a substantial percentage of these elites- at all levels from senior commanders through knightly retinue leaders to sergeants- served repeatedly in those years, becoming in effect military professionals. Furthermore, he is able to identify patterns of service which strongly suggest that the membership of individual retinues tended to be stable from one campaign to the next (a point sometimes questioned by earlier scholars) and that there were cohesive sub-units based on links of family and locality which campaigned together regularly and which would take service together in another retinue if their “normal” leader chose to miss a given campaign. While the sources do not allow any overview of those who served at their own expense (or in the retinues of those who did so), Simpkin is able to offer some conclusions on those who served under feudal obligations (whether their own or on behalf of others like ecclesiastical landholders). He argues that feudal service was not the anachronism it is often depicted as being; the men who turned up to offer feudal service were no less “professional” than the other members of an Edwardian host- indeed they might be the same men temporarily operating under different terms and conditions. While his argument here is plausible, his evidence is much more tenuous and the difficulty he has in determining whether a given individual was providing feudal service at a particular moment in a campaign perhaps reflects the perplexities of contemporary royal administrators.
Simpkin convincingly demonstrates that the mounted components of Edward I’s armies were markedly more professional and cohesive at unit and sub-unit level than has been fully recognised in the past. Obviously there are limits to his view. We have no way of knowing if the “professionalization” he describes could be found even further down the social hierarchy among the infantry mobilised in even larger numbers for the royal campaigns since the sources available to him are silent about these units. His claim that this Edwardian era professionalization laid the foundations for the very differently structured armies of Edward III’s reign is rather harder to substantiate than he implies in the absence of evidence on those who did not even have the sorriest nag to register on the horse rolls. Clearly there are substantial similarities between the military structures and career patterns he has uncovered and those to be found later in the smaller, fully contractual, archer-dominated, armies of the Hundred Years War and it is intuitively plausible that there might be a linkage between the two. It is however rather a long jump from the Bannockburn campaign to the armies of the 1330's and 1340's. The “anchor” point for much of Simpkin’s analysis of military careers is the Falkirk campaign of 1298. It would be interesting to undertake a similar study with Bannockburn as the “anchor” campaign to see if the same patterns can be found in the years from 1314 to, say, the 1327 Weardale Campaign- a period of almost unrelieved defeat and disaster for English arms.
Simkin’s work bears witness to what one might describe as the forcible re-militarisation of English social elites at the demand of a monarch whom one could with equal justice see as a chivalric and inspiring figure and an overbearing bully (as well as a control freak, as his attempts to micro-manage campaigns by letter demonstrate). Simkin notes that Edward I’s attempt to enforce mass mobilisation on this group was beginning to run into serious problems even before his death. A weaker successor was likely to face serious problems, and so it proved (there are intriguing parallels to be drawn with the situation at the death of Henry V). Simkin has little to say about the broader social, economic or cultural impact of this militarisation process on the English realm. He notes some interesting patterns in heraldry whereby new-minted knights assumed arms with close similarities to those of their retinue commanders. His examination of the impact of military service on local office holding is somewhat inconclusive because most men who undertook substantial local administrative duties did so at a relatively advanced age. His data on military careers, however, suggest that, for every man who discovered a military vocation in the mountains of Snowdonia or the lowlands of Lothian and Angus, another served on one or at most two campaigns. Did such differences have any consequences for the fractious politics of Edward II’s reign? In addition to its valuable reassessment of military careers and structures in the reign of Edward I, Simkin’s work opens up some intriguing perspectives for future research.