Aspects of War in the Late Middle Ages

by Christopher Allmand

Overview

This Variorum collection of articles is intended to illustrate that conflict in the late Middle Ages was not only about soldiers and fighting (about the makers and the making of war), important as these were. Just as it remains in our own day, war was a subject which attracted writers (commentators, moralists and social critics among them), some of whom glorified war, while others did not. For the historian the written word is important evidence of how war, and those taking part in it, might be regarded by the wider society. One question was supremely important: what was the standing among their contemporaries of those who fought society’s wars? How was war seen on the moral scale of the time? The last two sections deal with a particular war, the ‘occupation’ of northern France by the English between 1420 and 1450. The men who conquered the duchy, and then served to keep it under English control for those years, had to be rewarded with lands, titles, administrative and military responsibilities, even (for the clergy) ecclesiastical benefices. For these, war spelt ‘opportunity’, whose advantages they would be reluctant to surrender. The final irony lies in the fact that Frenchmen, returning to claim their ancestral rights once the English had been driven out, frequently found it difficult to unravel both the legal and the practical consequences of a war which had caused a considerable upheaval in Norman society over a period of a single generation. (CS 1106).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032227092
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/27/2024
Series:	Variorum Collected Studies
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Christopher Allmand is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History, University of Liverpool, UK. His previous publications include Henry V (1968), Lancastrian Normandy 1415-1450, The History of a Medieval Occupation (1983), The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c.1300-c.1450 (2001), War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France (2000), and The De Re Militari of Vegetius: The Reception, Transmission and Legacy of a Roman Text in the Middle Ages (2011).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: A Roman text on War. The Strategemata of Frontinus in the Middle Ages. / Chapter 2: The De Re Militari of Vegetius: How did the Middle Ages treat a Late Roman Text on War? / Chapter 3: The Fifteenth – Century English Prose Version of Vegetius’ De Re Militari. / Chapter 4: Did the De Re Militari of Vegetius influence the Military Ordinances of Charles the Bold? / Chapter 5: Changing Perceptions of the Soldier in Late Medieval France. / Chapter 6: Some Intellectual Influences on the Origins of the Royal Army in Medieval France. / Chapter 7: ‘Personal Honour or Common Good? The Witness of Le Jouvencel in the Fifteenth Century.’ / Chapter 8: The Problem of Desertion in France, England and Burgundy in the Late Middle Ages. / Chapter 9: Normandy in English Opinion at the End of the Hundred Years War. / Chapter 10: Diplomacy: The Anglo- French Negotiations, 1439. / Chapter 11: Local Reaction to the French Reconquest of Normandy (1449-50): The Example of Rouen. / Chapter 12: National Reconcilliation in France at the End of the Hundred Years War. / Chapter 13: Spies and Spying in the Fourteenth Century. / Chapter 14: War and the Non-Combatant during the Hundred Years War.