Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[Aryaman2]

Medieval armies were larger before the Black Death than afterwards; the largest medieval English army that was mustered was early in the Hundred Year's War, and had some 32,000 men. .

Felix
When I started my research I also noticed that armies of early medieval times tended to be larger, and so I thought of the Black Death, however I am now convinced that the difference is one of sources, for the early period we have almost exclusively literary sources, as for Ancient times. I have never come accross an army of 32.000 documented in musters or pay rolls. An example of a well documented pre-Black Death army, the army Edward I raised for the invasion of Scotland in 1300, at its peak (because another thing we learn on documentary sources when they extensive is that armies tended to flutuate in numbers on a given campaign very much) it had 9.220 infantry and 584 cavalry. A month later, with not a single important action fought, it had 5110 Infantry and 728 cavalry (Lib Quot p275)
A famous example was Agincourt, we had documentary sources for the English army that put its strength at a maximum 9.000, but for the French army we had only literary sources with estimations from 25.000 to 300.000, allowing all sort of wild theories about how lethal was the long vow, a sort of mediaeval machine gun. Recently, Anne Curry made a research on French documentary sources and she found out that the maximum strength of the French army was 12.000.