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hergrim · 5 years

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English Infantry Recruitment and Equipment c. 1070-1140

This was originally posted in reply to this question on /r/askhistorians. I've decides to start reposting some of my old answers here as a bit of an archive, and this will be the start.

Introduction

The last couple of decades of the 11th century and the start of the 12th century are rather interesting in terms of recruitment from the peasantry. While the Normans had conquered England and co-opted a significant part of the pre-existing Anglo-Saxon military system, there was still quite a strong tradition of military service among the peasantry until the reign of Henry I. In fact, in many ways it was the English infantry who enabled the early Anglo-Norman kings to maintain such a high level of centralised power in comparison to other kingdoms at the time.

However, as interesting as the subject is, I should stress here and now that we don't have enough information to be entirely certain on how everything was structured. Between various charters and chroniclers we can make out a reasonable amount about recruitment, and various artworks from the period provide some information about equipment, but there is still a lot we don't know and which will be speculative in nature.

Recruitment

The first thing you, as a peasant in England around 1100 AD, would think if a baron told you he was raising an army on behalf of the king would probably be something along the lines of "Christ's teeth, you traitorous French bastard, do you really think you're going to get away with this?". The reason for this is that barons in medieval England had no right to raise armies. While they owed their own service and the service of a number of knights for a set period (possibly originally 60 days, later modified to 40, although with a number of variants on this theme), the right to raise an army - and the peasantry more specifically - belonged to the king alone, and for William II Rufus and Henry I, the English peasantry formed the backbone of their armies against baronial revolt in England and ultimately allowed them to consolidate power and keep England as a relatively centralised state.

This doesn't mean that the barons couldn't raise infantry from their own holdings, since personal relationships and patronage were key to military service in the Middle Ages and there would doubtless have been some freemen who were tenants or owned land in one of their villages who would see some advantage in serving their lord, would be willing to serve for pay or might have felt obligated to serve because they had a position in the baron's household or village (the village bailiff, for example), but it is important to keep in mind that these weren't men they could legal call up for service.

Generally speaking, the process of recruitment appears to have been that the king would send out a summons to arms to the greater magnates (earls, the more powerful barons and powerful churchmen) and to the county sheriffs. The country sheriffs, acting as the king's agents, would then issue a summons to the lesser barons and knights, and also summon those peasants liable for military service. There are some variations to this process, especially on the Welsh Marches, where the earls had a large degree of military independence, but it would be fair to say that most armies were summoned by either sheriffs, who were the agents of Royal power, or the most important personages of the area, with whom the king either had a significant personal relationship, needed to provide them with respect or where they had been given a large degree of control over military matters in their sphere of influence.

The Royal control over the recruitment process, and the fact that free peasants technically owed their ultimate allegiance to the King rather than whichever baron or knight owned their manor, is probably partially responsible for the significant support of the English for William the Conqueror during the earl's rebellion of 1075, their support of William II Rufus during the 1088 aristocratic rebellion and Henry I during Robert Curthose's invasion of 1101 and the rebellion of the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1102. In all these cases, it was the English and lesser knights (milites gregarii) who provided almost all of the royal armies, with the barons and other aristocrats forming the bulk of the rebellious forces. Doubtless an antipathy towards the conquering classes and the possibility of local tyrannies springing up was also a major consideration for those English who served the kings, but the fact that they were legally only bound to serve the king must also have been on their minds.

The royal control was also necessary, since William the Conqueror had deliberately fragmented land holdings when he divided England up so that no baron had too much land close together, most likely to prevent them from dominating any one area. The rich abbey of Peterborough, for example, had its lands spread out over seven separate counties, which would have greatly slowed down the assembling of the army. However, with each county's sheriffs calling up the scattered knights and infantry, the army could be more swiftly assembled.

So who were the Englishmen who fought for the early Anglo-Norman kings? They were, undoubtedly, free men, and this puts something of a limit on who could fight. Much of England's peasantry were, technically, unfree and were bound to their land. Of the rural peasantry recorded in the Domesday Book, around 40% were classed as villani (serfs), who typically held 15 acres or more, with another 30% who were classed as cottagers, who typically held 5 acres or less. Servi (technically slaves, although in some areas they were more like serfs bound to a specific household rather than a specific manor) and miscellaneous categories account for around 15%. Only 15% of the rural population, therefore, was actually free and liable for military service.

However, "free" does not necessarily mean "landholder with comfortable acreage". Just as there were cottagers who held 15 acres, there were free men who held less than most cottagers. Generally speaking, the less densely populated an area was, the more land individuals held, although this was by no means universal - in Middlesex (a fertile area in southern England), for example, almost one third of the villani held between 1 virgate (30 acres) and 2 virgates (60 acres), at a time when 15 acres was enough to sustain a family. Further, at this point in English history the line between "serf" and "free" was still quite fluid, with some free men subject to obligations to their lords (although less onerous than the labour of the serfs), while serfs could attain essentially free status by paying a cash rent. As such it's probable, although by no means certain, that some serfs also served in military endeavors, especially those who were particularly wealthy or lived in border regions. It's also worth noting that, while the disparities in landholding are most apparent in free landholders, they still held 20% of the land despite only making up 15% of the population, so those who held more land than average held a lot of it.

This restricts the pool further. Only those who own enough more land than needed to support themselves in a bad year are going to have the surplus needed to purchase the necessary equipment for fighting. We're fortunate in that we have exceptionally detailed records for the abbey of Peterborough compiled between 1113 and 1135, which not only record the knight-service owed, but also sub-feudal infantry service owed by tenants. Approximately 76 sokemen owed military service to the abbey, and this was only a small portion of the total sokemen on abbey estates. Although we don't know how much land each sokeman owned, the lands belonging to the abbey would suggest a military obligation in Anglo-Saxon times of 70 men and, since the abbey had also over-enoffed knights in what was most likely a policy of ensuring there were reserves in case of injury, old age or minority on some of the knight's fees they owed, the case was likely similar here.

Unfortunately, Peterborough abbey is the only post-Conquest source to provide this level of detail on infantry soldiers, although there are several other charters and references in chronicles that, taken with this, suggest that the practice of keeping some peasants who specifically owed military service was widespread during the late 11th and early 12th centuries. This also tallies with modern views on late Anglo-Saxon military recruitment. Information is less available than with Peterborough Abbey, but Richard Abel's examination of the Anglo-Saxon concept of "bookland" - land which was legally owned by someone so long as they performed military service for the King - has thrown up evidence of two classes of warriors: those who held "bookland" directly from the king, and those who held land from another thegn or lord.

This latter class can be seen as analogous to the sub-feudal warriors of Peterborough abbey. They would have been granted, if not the full amount of land needed to gain the status of a thegn (five hides), then at least a substantial amount of land, in return for their service. The poem The Battle of Maldon, for instance, features a ceorl named Dunhere who appears to be counted among Earl Byrhtnoth's retainers and Ryan Lavelle's compilation of Anglo-Saxon wills in Alfred's Wars show several instances of gifts of land, horses or other military equipment to household men. And, although connected with cavalry service rather than infantry service, Sally Harvey has also shown that 2/3rds of early Anglo-Norman knights held 2 hides of land or less, which doubtless goes a long way to explaining why Anglo-Saxon language sources refer to Norman mounted warriors as cnights (servants) and may well be an adaptation of existing Anglo-Saxon practices.

What this all suggests is that the peasants who were liable for military service around 1100 AD most likely held land specifically in return for military service. It's probable that all free men could be obliged to defend their locality (within a half day's march) and were required to participate in upkeep of roads, bridges and fortifications. While I haven't discussed free men who held large amounts of land freely without owing any military service to a lord, since we don't have any information on them, it's probable that these men still had an obligation to the king and could be called on to serve, based on Anglo-Saxon practices.

Equipment and Training

And here we really enter the realm of speculation. We have almost no information on how peasants who would have served were armed, nor who was technically responsible for this. While Anglo-Saxon wills show an increase in mail shirts as part of the heriot towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, the symbolic nature of the heriot (think of it as military death tax) and the very limited number of them we have from thegns, as opposed to bishops and earls, make it difficult to extract much useful information from them. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are also hard to interpret, as they rarely depict even kings as wearing armour, whereas the Bayeux Tapestry makes no distinction in armour between Norman and Anglo-Saxon warriors.

However, the wills and heriots of late anglo-Saxon magnates do make some mention of horses or weapons being "loaned" to household servants, who most likely served with their lords on campaign. These might not necessarily have been fighting men - there's some evidence that late Anglo-Saxon armies were mounted for speed and so servants might well have been mounted to keep up with the army, and they might also have been armed for self-defence while on campaign. I do think, given that early Anglo-Norman knights were of fairly low status and in some cases were specifically provided with equipment by their lords, at least some of these household servants were equipped as part of the anglo-Saxon lord's fighting retinue, and Dunhere's appearance in The Battle of Maldon alongside thegnly members of the earl's retinue also points in this direction.

It's therefore possible that at least some of the peasants who owed military service would have been equipped by their lords. It's my opinion, though, that most of them would have been required to supply their own weapons and armour. This would have consisted of, at the very least, a shield, spear, helmet and long knife or a sword. The shield, helmet and spear are all present in anglo-Saxon artwork, while a long knife or sword as a sidearm is a requirement in a number of similar contexts, such as the Carolingian Empire and late 10th century Scandinavia. Some may have worn mail, but most likely only the richest or those specifically equipped by their lord.

It's not impossible that some kind of leather or textile body armour was available, but I've been unable to find a reference to either that can be dated with any certainty before 1130. The Gesta Herewardi, which is accepted to have been written between 1109 and 1131 mentions the use of felt tunics impregnated with pitch and "cooked leather" as armour, so if it dates more to 1109 than 1131 either option might have been available to you, but it's not easy to tell how popular such armour was. It's not really until the mid-12th century that we get any hint of either being popular, and textile armour doesn't show up in artwork until the 13th century, so it's more likely that the only armour you'd have would be your shield and helmet.

In terms of training, you probably don't have much, although we lack enough information to be sure. The Battle of Maldon has Earl Byrhtnoth showing the fyrd how to properly hold their shields, and Henry I showed his infantry the best way to fight against cavalry in 1101, so the general assumption is that training even for members of the fyrd was non-existent. Without more information I can't contradict this, although it's possible that those living in towns and making up the town militia trained to some extent; the London militia trained every Sunday in the mid-12th century, but we don't know if this was common practice or when the training was first introduced.

TL:DR

If you're a peasant in England around 1100 AD and you're going off to war, it's most likely that you're called up by the local sheriff because you own more land than most freemen in exchange of military service. You're unlikely to be protected by anything other than a helmet and shield, which you have had to purchase yourself, and the only training you're likely to get is a crash course by whoever is in charge shortly before the battle.

Bibliography

Alfred's Wars, by Ryan Lavelle

Military Obligation in Medieval England, by Michael Powicke

The Military Organisation of Norman England, by C. Warren Hollister

England Under Norman and Angevin Kings, by Robert Bartlett

Warfare Under the Anglo-Norman Kings, 1066-1135, by Stephen Morillo

"The Knights of Peterborough and the Anglo-Norman Fyrd", by C. Warren Hollister, The English Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 304 (Jul., 1962), pp. 417-436

"Bookland and Fyrd Service in Late Saxon england", by Richard Abels, in The Battle of Hastings, ed. Stephen Morillo, p57-78

Medieval England: Rural society and Economic Change 1086-1348, by Edward Miller and John Hatcher

"The Knight and the Knight's Fee", by Sally Harvey, Past & Present, Volume 49, Issue 1, November 1970, Pages 3–43

#medieval warfare #recruitment #england #equipment #11th century #12th century

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