10-22-2006, 05:53 AM
Quote:... 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.
In response:
"The largest armies raised in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were no more than a few tens of thousand men strong. The largest English royal army of the Middle Ages was probably the host raised by Edward I for the Falkirk campaign of 1298 - perhaps 3,000 heavy cavalry and over 25,700 infantry;45 but once the unwieldy and poorly disciplined infantry armies of the Anglo‑Scottish wars had been abandoned, very few English field armies exceeded 10,000 men. Most of the classic chevauchees of the fourteenth century were conducted by armies of half this size.46 J.R. Strayer has doubted whether Philip IV of France `ever had more than 30,000 men concentrated in one theater of war',47 whilst surviving pay accounts suggest that, in September 1340 in northern and south-western France combined, Philip VI fielded 28,000 men-at-arms and 16,700 foot soldiers. The very differently composed permanent French army of the late fifteenth century numbered 20,000 to 25,000 fighting men!48 The permanent peacetime armies of Milan and Venice in the fifteenth century fluctuated in size from about 10,000 men to over 20,000, though it was not impossible to mobilize larger numbers.49 In 1486 King Matyas Corvinus of Hungary's standing army, mustered at Vienna, numbered 28,000 men, over two-thirds of whom were cavalry.50 "
from http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/a ... ayton1.htm
Many armies were under 10,000 men, but some were not; and the numbers at Agincourt were substantially less than the numbers at Crecy, before the Black Death.
We actually know quite a bit about some medieval warriors, as can be seen from an article beginning:
"At Ipswich on 17 June 1340, a week before the battle of Sluys, an English knight, William Tallemache, attached his seal to an indenture recording his receipt of an Essex manor in return for life service in peace and war with William de Bohun, earl of Northampton.[2] Tallemache was a seasoned warrior, a veteran of the War of St Sardos, Scotland and Edward III's first expedition to Flanders.[3] He had already served, as an esquire, in Northampton's comitiva on several occasions, but in the spring of 1339 after months of inactivity in Flanders he seems to have become restless.[4] In May we find him transferring to the service of Sir John Molyns under whose banner he fought and received the accolade of knighthood during the brief autumn campaign in the Cambrésis.[5] Perhaps it was this dalliance with the ambitious and unscrupulous Molyns that spurred Northampton into offering Tallemache a secure place in his affinity.[6] Whatever the earl's reasons, within days of the indenture being drawn-up and sealed, Northampton and his new retainer were in the thick of it at Sluys, risking, as one of that earl's letters put it, `vie et membre' in the king's war.[7] "
http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/a ... ayton2.htm
Felix Wang
