Daniel P.

Franke, Dissertation Introduction

Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution:

Robert Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, and the Wars of England
1298 – 1369

Introduction

History is the narration of deeds, through which what was done in the past may be

discerned.

--Isidor of Seville, Etymologiae I.41.1

On August 26, 1346, the French and English armies clashed near the village of Crécy-en-

Ponthieu, in northern France. The result was an English victory that astounded their

contemporaries for several reasons. First, it was an unexpected result: the French army was

considered to be the best fighting force in Christendom up to that point, full of bravery and valor,

led by men who understood both the tactics and strategy of warfare, battle-tested and confident

in divine support of their righteous cause. Second, it was a far more complete victory than

medieval audiences would have expected, given not only the disparity of the two armies but also

the acknowledged competency of the French commanders. Third, the manner in which Edward

had gained his victory caused people to marvel. The decisive element of the French discomfiture,

mentioned in most chronicles, was the hail of arrows from English archers, who first shot down

Philip VI’s Genoese crossbowmen (sent forward without their pavises, their protective shields),

1
“Historia est narratio rei gestae, per quam ea, quae in praeterito facta sunt, dinoscuntur.” For the old Latin edition,
see the online edition at LacusCurtius, which is the 1911 Oxford edition,
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Isidore/1*.html. Accessed 25 February, 2014. For a recent
translation of the etymologies, see The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J.
Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 1

and then shot down man and horse as the French cavalry closed with the English men-at-arms.2

The slaughter of the Scots at Duplin Moor (1332) and Halidon Hill (1333) had impacted public

consciousness far less than this similar spectacle unfolding on the continent with the French

army as its object. English archers, already a fairly cocky lot, became even more so, as the

English camp hummed with ribald rumors and stories of Philip VI’s cowardly and un-kingly

behavior, while the English bows were “famous and feared the world over,” as the anonymous

poet at the Calais siege camp put it.3

In the last twenty-five years, it has become fashionable to explain the English victory at

Crécy as being the result of a military revolution. These explanations fall into two major

categories. According to one interpretation, advanced by Clifford Rogers and modern warfare

analysts who have followed him, Edward III won because he had embraced the “infantry

revolution” first started by the Scots and the Flemish at the turn of the century, and thereby

catalyzing a Revolution in Military Affairs. They had demonstrated, at Sterling in 1297 and

Courtrai in 1302 respectively, that foot soldiers, properly led and deployed, could survive

armored cavalry attacks and actually destroy the enemy horsemen.4 Edward had an additional

advantage in that his foot troops carried a bow longer and far more powerful than those

2
The most important study on Crécy is The Battle of Crécy, 1346, ed. Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009); see in particular Michael Prestwich, “The Battle of Crécy,” 139-157, and Andrew
Ayton, “Crécy and the Chroniclers,” 287-350.
3
A. G. Rigg, “Propaganda of the Hundred Years War: Poems on the Battles of Crecy and Durham (1346): A Critical
Edition,” Traditio 54 (1999), 169-211; 187, line 295, “Est mundo toti notus tuus archus et omen.” An older version
of the Crécy text is in Wright, Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, vol. 1 (London, 1859), 26-40.
4
Though it has been corrected and superseded in parts, the most readable account of early fourteenth-century
warfare remains Kelly DeVries’ Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century: Discipline, Tactics, and
Technology (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996). It is especially valuable for its analysis of the battles of Courtrai in 1302
and Boroughbridge in 1322. For the first major interpretation of Edward III’s victory as a “military revolution,” see
Clifford J. Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years’ War,” in The Journal of Military History, 57:2
(April, 1993), 241-278, in particular pg. 247, n. 23, “Note that the reason the English were once inferior to the Scots
is that the latter perceived the potential of the Infantry Revolution before their southern neighbors, just as the
English appreciated it before the French.”

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 2

commonly in use during his grandfather’s reign.5 When combined with other infantry, in

Edward’s case cavalry (men-at-arms) fighting on foot, the result was greater command and

control and greater lethality. This type of army therefore had the ability to triumph over larger,

but far less disciplined, enemy formations.6 By itself, this analysis is really a series of

observations about tactics. What raises it to the level of a paradigm is the consequence claimed

for these tactical developments: tactics drove political change as the importance of infantry

helped the Commons to gradually become a true partner in English government. Tactics drove

social structures, as the methods by which the English crown recruited armies imposed their own

logic on power, patronage, and the patterns of military recruitment. Tactics, in some sense, even

drove the strategy of the realm, as the possibilities inherent in the archer/dismounted men-at-

arms system gave impetus to the organizing, supplying, transporting, and sustaining of armies to

help the king maintain his cause in France. Of all these things, the battle of Crécy was at once the

result and the catalyst.7

Another interpretation focuses more on the institutional changes to the English military

establishment that resulted in a better organized, better led, more resilient fighting force. This

process was a deliberate strategy on the part of Edward III, resulting from his analysis of Scottish

5
See Clifford J. Rogers’ excellent article, “The Development of the Longbow in Late Medieval England and
‘Technological Determinism,’” in The Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011), 321-341.
6
At Dupplin Moor in 1332, the largely English force of about two thousand defeated a Scottish army often said to
be ten times that number. At Halidon Hill a year later, Edward III’s army was probably outnumbered by two to one.
See Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp, 34-41 (Dupplin Moor), and 69-71 (Halidon Hill).
7
The works of Clifford J. Rogers are the formidable corpus expressing and refining this particular thesis. For the
most concise summary of the impacts of Edward III’s military affairs, see War Cruel and Sharp, English Strategy
Under Edward III, 1327-1360 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), especially Chapter 1 “Introduction,” 1-9. See also “The
Efficacy of the Longbow: A Reply to Kelly DeVries,” in War in History 5:2 (1998), 233-242; “Edward III and the
Dialectics of Strategy, 1327-1360: The Alexander Prize Essay,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th
series, vol. 4 (1994), 83-102; “The Development of the Longbow in Late Medieval England and ‘Technological
Determinism,’” in The Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011), 321-341; “ ‘As if a new sun had arisen’: England’s
Fourteenth-Century RMA,” in The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050, eds. M. Knox and W. Murray
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The most important of his writings have been collected in Essays
on Medieval Military History: Strategy, Military Revolutions and the Hundred Years War (Farnhma, Surrey:
Ashgate/Variorum, 2010).

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 3

fighting methods and then applied to the English “military community” in order to produce the

same results in English tactics. This analysis is not explicitly mentioned in either chronicles or

surviving state correspondence, but becomes readily apparent once the administrative patterns of

military mobilization are pieced together. For example, the documents for the evaluation of

warhorses and reimbursement for lost horses are a valuable source for this organizational

transformation.8 The emergence of armies raised entirely by private contract with the monarch is

another, and the indenture of service gives us valuable clues to the recruitment process by which

Edward produced his armies, exclusively so after 1346.9 Ultimately, these institutional

procedures created semi-professional armies, whose service patterns become especially

pronounced in the later fourteenth century. In this interpretation, the English army of Crécy is

extremely important because it holds the middle space (literally) between the feudal army of

Bannockburn in 1314 and the contract armies of 1387-8, which were the subject of a recent in-

depth analysis.10 One of the most useful ways to revise the Medieval Military Revolution thesis,

then, is to re-evaluate the army of the Crécy-Calais campaign.

8
See Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, Chapter 3 “The Horse Inventories: Documents and Administrative Processes.”
9
This interpretation is contained in the works of Andrew Ayton, like Rogers’ also a formidable body of work. See
Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III (Woodbridge: Boydell,
1994); “Sir Thomas Ughtred and the Edwardian Military Revolution,” in The Age of Edward III, ed. J. S. Bothwell
(York: York Medieval Press, 200), 107-132; “The English Army at Crécy,” in The Battle of Crécy, 1346, ed.
Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 159-251; “Edward III and the English Aristocracy
at the Beginning of the Hundred Years War,” in Armies, Chivalry and Warfare in Medieval Britain and France, ed.
Matthew Strickland (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1998); “Armies and Military Communities in Fourteenth-Century
England,” in Soldiers, Nobles, and Gentlemen: Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen, ed. Peter Coss and Christopher
Tyerman (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 215-239; and “Military Service and the Dynamics of Recruitment in
Fourteenth-Century England,” in The Soldier Experience in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry,
Adam Chapman, Andy King, and David Simpkin (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 9-59.
10
See the “Introduction” to Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War 1278-1476, ed. Michael Jones and
Simon Walker, Camden Miscellany 5th ser., no. XXXII (London: Royal Historical Society, 1994). Also James
Sherbourne, “Indentured Retinues and English Expeditions to France, 1369-80,” in the English Historical Review 79
(1964), 718-46, reprinted in War, Politics and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England (London: Hambledon Press,
1994). For professionalization through consistent military service, see The Soldier in Later Medieval England
project pages, at http://www.medievalsoldier.org/index.php (Accessed February 9, 2014). For the 1387-8
campaigns: Adrian R. Bell, War and the Soldier in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 4

 The current project is the first step in that re-evaluation, using as a case study the career

of the Earl of Suffolk, his retinue, and the Suffolk archer levies sent to Calais immediately after

the battle.

Robert Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, as Case Study

Why focus on the Earl of Suffolk and the military retinue specifically? First, Robert

Ufford’s active military career spanned most of the fourteenth century, and encompassed the

military changes identified by Rogers, Ayton, and others as significant in that time. Ufford’s

own situation as a rather poor country baron raised to the highest levels of the nobility is itself an

interesting story, and one that has not been told in any great detail; this rise in status makes him

an excellent case study to test the social theories of the military revolution. Ufford’s career is

also a useful way to connect the military affairs of Edward III’s reign with those of his father

Edward II—a very important but seldom-recognized continuity that will alter the way we view

the military developments of the 1330s. I conclude my analysis with a brief consideration of

Crécy and Calais, as to go further brings us too close to the Black Death effectively to analyze

military affairs in the space available—though my analysis of Ufford’s career suggests several

trends in his service and retinue until his death in 1369.

Second, we happen to have a significant amount of data on the men who served with

Ufford in 1346. The vehicle by which Edward III’s wars were carried out on campaign was the

retinue, that collection of men serving under the banner of a lord, whether knight, baron, earl,

duke, prince, or king. In the fourteenth century, the retinue became the exclusive organizational

unit of English armies, as the large blocks of county levies were gradually replaced with

companies recruited by various lords and captains. Since the “raw material”, so to speak, of a

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 5

retinue lay in the lord’s own social and feudal circle, retinues were far more than simply tactical

military units; they were the microcosm of county and regional politics and society. The retinue

was fundamental to how the army (and the navy, though records there are scarcer) was recruited,

how it served, when and why it served on campaign, how popular opinion on the war was shaped

and perceived at home, and how the relationship between war and society was experienced.11

The retinue, in turn, was situated in what Andrew Ayton has referred to as the “military

community”—a narrow and fairly well-defined group of nobles, barons, and gentry who formed

the backbone of Plantagenet armies. These were the men who recruited and led the troops on

campaign, and who had much to gain both from faithful service to the crown and from the social

connections made through warfare. Thus the military community, the fighting leadership of the

counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, is the core of any inquiry into the effects of war, for the

behavior of these men in war affected their communities, and they often were the “internal

structure” of the English administration. Of course, war impacted more than simply the military

elite: to this group must be added those involved in the logistical and naval aspects of warfare, as

they worked closely with the military community as such; indeed, as Ayton has recently written,

future studies need to be cognizant of multiple and expanded military communities.12 After all,

the bulk of the military population did not serve on campaign during the fourteenth century, or

else served in such a way (e.g., naval transport) as to notice little substantive difference between

wartime and peacetime. Yet while these other population groups were important in shaping the

collective English military experience, it was the more narrowly construed military community

that was involved in the constitutional crises of Edward’s reign, and it was the military

community that embodied Edward III’s expectations of his army and his administration. Thus, it

11
See Ayton, “Armies and Military Communities,” 233-236.
12
Ayton, “Armies and Military Communities,” 216.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 6

makes sense first to understand their experiences before expanding the inquiry to the farmers, the

sailors, the merchants, and the townsfolk.13

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in the case of Suffolk, we happen to possess seven

different documents that, when overlaid chronologically and geographically, allow us to see

more clearly the process of mobilization and militarization of England for the Crécy campaign.

The documents are as follows:

1. The Feudal Aid of 1346, outlining the tenurial, land-holding structures in Suffolk.

2. The French Rolls, TNA C76/19-25, which allow us to reconstruct a large proportion of

Ufford’s retinue. These can be supplemented by various rolls of arms and documents

produced in Chancery and the Exchequer, which allow us to bring such figures as Sir

John Bret and Nicholas Bonde to some semblance of life.

3. The national array schedule of 1345, TNA C47/2/39/13, which outlines the overall

targets for gentry participation in the upcoming campaign. This can be supplemented in a

general way with summary orders of battle such as BL Additional 38823.

4. The magnates military contributions schedule of 1345, TNA C47/2/58/1, which

outlines the expected manpower contributions from the magnates.

5. The Suffolk Assessment of Arms of 1345, which, while faded and damaged in some

areas, gives a close breakdown of the sub-gentry arms-bearers in those hundreds outside

the Liberty of St. Edmund (the western half of Suffolk County, controlled the Abbott of

Bury St. Edmund).

13
A start to this type of inquiry is my article “War, Crisis, and East Anglia: Towards a Reassessment,” in The
Hundred Years War (Part III): Further Considerations, ed. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden:
Brill, 2013), 187-215.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 7

 6. The returns of array for Suffolk in 1345-6, again in hundreds outside of the Abbot’s

jurisdiction, breaking down the number of sub-gentry troops assessed and the expected

targets of recruitment.

7. The East Anglian archer reinforcements for the siege of Calais, autumn of 1346, TNA

E101/575/15, to which Suffolk contributed eighty archers.

Using these core documents, this study examines the “medieval military revolution” thesis from

several different non-military perspectives: medieval culture (concepts of causation, history, and

warfare); biography (the earl as military leader and recruiter); social history (the composition of

his retinue at Crécy); and demography (the social composition and armament of the archers).

Each topic is supported by a different set of documents. The battle is covered in chronicles and

various telling references in English administrative records. The composition and identity of the

retinue is reconstructed from the Patent Rolls and the manuscripts of the French Rolls, as well as

other documents contained in Wrottesley’s collection of documents on the campaign.14 The

social composition and armament of the archers is reconstructed from muster rolls, assizes of

arms, and returns of array. The demographics of mobilization—who was recruited or drafted

from which part of the county—are revealed by drawing on various archival records of land

assessments and transactions, particularly the Feudal Aid of 1346, the Nomina Villarum, the

Inquisitions Post Mortem, the Close Rolls, and the Patent Rolls. When overlaid, one on the other,

the result is rather like a series of transparencies that together complete a drawing. In each

chapter, the “military revolution” theory is found to be an inaccurate and ultimately unhelpful

term for understanding the English army of 1346, largely because the theory does not take proper

account of English society. The result of the battle may not be in dispute, but how it happened,

14
George Wrottesley, Crecy and Calais: from the Original Records in the Public Records Office (London: Harrison
and Sons, 1898; reprinted by the British Library, “General Historical Collections”); this is an indispensable resource
for the English army in the Crécy Campaign, although it contains a few errors of identification.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 8

and what it meant for England in particular and medieval warfare in general, is disputed.15 The

point of view taken here is that social, cultural, and political history must precede military

history, if we are properly to understand the impact of warfare on society. The entire point of the

“military revolution” theory, after all, is that military action had social and political

consequences; to see if that was so, we need to follow early modern historians and reconstruct

the social, cultural, and political world that produced Edward III and his captains, among them

Robert Ufford, earl of Suffolk.

Defining “Military Revolution” and “Revolution in Military Affairs”

Before proceeding, the above claims require a more detailed inquiry: what are “military

revolutions” and “revolutions in military affairs” (RMAs), and how have they influenced the

study of medieval warfare? Debates over these terms are very much matters of definitional

positioning; the greatest difficulty in discussing them is that there is no single definition of either

term.16 In 1994, Andrew Krepinevich argued that military revolutions comprise four elements:

“technological change, systems development, operational innovation, and organizational

adaptation.”17 Clifford Rogers, in his perceptive article “‘Military Revolutions’ and ‘Revolutions

15
Most recently, Richard Barber has offered a radical reinterpretation of the battle narrative, in which Edward’s
army deployed in a wagon-laager, with archers thrown out in skirmish order to the flanks, largely hidden from view
by wheat fields and hedges. See Richard Barber, Edward III and the Triumph of England (London: Allen Lane,
2013), Appendix 1 “The English Battle Formation at Crécy: A Hypothetical Reconstruction.” This volume is the
subject of a forthcoming essay review in the Journal of Military History by the author, as well as the focus of a
primary sourcebook by Kelly DeVries and Michael Livingston, currently under development.
16
Andrew Latham identifies this difficulty in “Warfare Transformed: A Braudelian Perspective on the ‘Revolution
in Military Affairs,’” in the European Journal of International Relations 8:2 (2002), 231-266. Latham’s is perhaps
the most important historiographical concept piece on RMAs, military change, and history. A “ubiquitous feature”
of all RMA scholarship is “the tendency to view the history of organized political violence as being little more than
a linear series of temporal ‘epochs’, each of which as a unique nature or character and each of which is initiated by
an RMA” (234). This analysis is refined and expanded in his 2012 Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics: War and World
Order in the Age of the Crusades (New York: Routledge, 2012).
17
Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions,” in The National Interest,
no. 37 (Fall, 1994), 30-42; 30.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 9

in Military Affairs’: A Historian’s Perspective”,18 offered some working definitions of concepts

that reflected, and still reflect, common usage, especially within the Department of Defense. A

Revolution in Military Affairs is “simply a revolutionary change in how war is fought,” and

might not have larger consequences for society at large—in that case, such changes stop short of

being actual “Military Revolutions” on par with, say, the Scientific or Industrial Revolutions. A

true Military Revolution should reverse or radically alter some aspect of warfare as it had been—

shifting the balance between the superiority of offense and defense, for example. Its impact can

be gauged in part by how easily it is copied by other militaries. If an RMA is to be considered an

actual “Military Revolution,” “it must make changes that endure beyond the monopoly period,”

i.e. after the changes have been widely adopted. An RMA of true significance will likely alter

“the balance of military power within a participating society”—the most commonly cited

medieval example is the Infantry Revolution. In addition, it will affect the balances of power

among states of differing sizes, thereby changing belligerents’ calculations of each other’s

military strength. Each of these points has numerous historical examples at its disposal, and has

been grouped in chronological fashion: the Cavalry Revolution, the Infantry Revolution, the

Artillery Revolution, the Fortress Revolution, the Organization Revolution, and so on.19

18
Originally published in Toward a Revolution in Military Affairs? Defense and Security at the Dawn of the Twenty-
First Century, ed. T. Gongora and H. Von Riekhoff (Westport: Greenwood, 2000), 21-36; reprinted in Essays on
Medieval Military History: Strategy, Military Revolutions and the Hundred Years War (Ashgate Variorum, 2010).
19
The basic outline of these paradigms was laid out by Clifford Rogers in “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred
Years War,” in The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe,
ed. Clifford Rogers (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 55-93. He has since adjusted the schematic, especially for
pedagogical purposes, to include the “Artillery Fortress Revolution” and administrative, systemic changes
associated with the late sixteenth and mid—seventeenth centuries (Author’s notes, West Point Summer Seminar in
Military History, 2010). Each of these revolutions has its own historiography and controversy, which can only be
briefly addressed here. The “Cavalry Revolution” was, without using that precise term, most famously postulated by
Lynn White in Medieval Technology and Social Change, and almost immediately challenged by Bernard Bachrach
in “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup, and Feudalism,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance
History 7 (1970). Debates over the supposed “supremacy” of medieval cavalry have continued since then, with
Matthew Bennett’s article “The Myth of the Supremacy of Knightly Cavalry” perhaps receiving the most
prominence, in Papers of the 1996 Harlaxton Conference, ed. M. Strickland (Paul Watkins, 1998), 304-16. The
“Infantry Revolution” has been proposed by several scholars, many of them focusing on the battle of Coutrai in

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 10

 Earlier “military revolution” arguments were more concerned with showing that it was

human agency that created the modern nation state in response to the challenges of waging war

successfully. The touchstone for all revolution theories is Michael Roberts’ famous 1955 lecture

“The Military Revolution, 1560-1660,” in which he identified early modern technological

developments as crucial in transforming war, and then, as kingdoms scrambled to take advantage

of them, transforming governments and whole societies as well. Gustavus Adolphus was the

greatest visionary exponent of this military revolution, developing and applying devastating

methods for using the firepower of his artillery and musketeers. The story is by now a well-

known one. Its significance, as Clifford Rogers has explained, was that it broadened the

importance of military history by showing “how the resulting changes in warfare can alter entire

societies.”20 Less frequently noted is that in 1953 Geoffrey Elton had published The Tudor

Revolution in Government, which changed the terms of the debate on late medieval and early

modern English government.21 The 1950s, then, saw two important ideas about war and

government introduced to the scholarly world, which, although not necessarily in dialogue with

each other, dramatically influenced the way historians thought about government and warfare in

the late medieval and early modern periods.

Geoffrey Parker challenged and refined Roberts’ “military revolution” concept twenty

years later, subsequently expanding his article into a full-length study, and suddenly military

1302 and Bannockburn in 1314, which saw Flemish and Scottish footmen, respectively, defeat larger cavalry forces
without any or significant support from their own cavalry; see J. F. Verbruggen on Courtrai; J. E. Morris on
Bannockburn [and a couple other new studies…]; Kelly DeVries’ rather maligned study Infantry Warfare in the
Early Fourteenth Century: Discipline, Tactics, and Technology does an excellent job of surveying infantry-
dominant engagements across Europe as a whole, and in marshaling the historiography at the date of publication
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996).
20
Clifford J. Rogers, “The Military Revolution in History,” in The Military Revolution Debate, ed. Clifford J.
Rogers (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995), 2. For Roberts’ address, see “The Military Revolution, 1560-
1660,” in Essays in Swedish History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), pp. 195-225.
21
Geoffrey R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 11

historians began to see a dynamic model of “revolution” unfold, one that was flexible enough to

sustain considerable tinkering and debate.22 In the early 1990s, partly as a result of the Office of

Net Assessment’s propagation of the Soviet theories of an imminent technological revolution,

scholars across the profession began writing about military revolutions, and particularly about

“revolutions in military affairs.” Some medievalists, in particular Clifford J. Rogers, were quick

to point out the medieval origins of early modern revolutionary developments,23 since medieval

England certainly did experience a military revolution, according to the definition of the term.

This is partly the result, as Michael Prestwich has wryly observed, of medievalists’ proclivity for

insisting that “it happened earlier.” Sometimes the results are unintentionally humorous, as the

supposedly revolutionary shift from feudal service to paid service “appears to have taken place in

virtually every period of the middle ages.”24 Some scholars have resisted extending or applying

Roberts’ and Parker’s early modern revolutionary paradigms to medieval warfare. An

“antirevolutionary” counter-narrative is immediately apparent in such works as Strickland and

Hardy’s The Great Warbow, which presents a (generally) convincing case for the universal

importance of combined arms throughout the medieval and early modern periods—the success of

various weapons and combinations being dependent on symbiotic relationships among armor,

metallurgy, and changing troop quality.25 Yet, whether one adopts the stridently pro-

22
Geoffrey Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution,’ 1560-1660—a Myth?”, in The Journal of Modern History, vol. 48,
no. 2 (June, 1976), pp. 195-214, and The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-
1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
23
The most concise overview of this narrative is Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, “Thinking about
Revolutions in Warfare,” in The Dynamics of Military Revolution 1300-2050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 1-14. See also Stephen Pete Rosen, “The Impact of the Office of Net Assessment on the American
Military in the Matter of the Revolution in Military Affairs,” in Journal of Strategic Studies 33:4 (2010), 469-482.
24
Michael Prestwich, “Was There A Military Revolution?”, in Recognitions: Essays Presented to Edmund Fryde,
ed. Colin Richmond and Isobel Harvey (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1996), pp. 19-20.
25
Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy, The Great Warbow: from Hastings to the Mary Rose (London: Sutton,
2005). Earlier rejections of the “military revolution” thesis in toto were J. R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance
Europe, 1450-1620 (Leicester, 1985); M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618-1789
(Leicester, 1988); Frank Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1495-1715 (London, 1992); John Childs,
Warfare in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2001).

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 12

revolutionary stance of Ayton, Rogers, Simpkin, and others, or the anti-revolutionary stance of

DeVries, Black, and Morillo, or the moderate stance of Prestwich, there is no denying that the

fourteenth century saw serious changes in English war-making.26

Of these different theories, the so-called “Infantry Revolution” has captured the attention

of most scholars of medieval England because it combines tactical, technological, cultural, and

social change simultaneously. It is also the one medieval “revolution” that most scholars,

regardless of period, can agree upon. Rogers has long advocated the importance of the longbow

and the employment of archers to English military success—though insufficient causes in

themselves to achieve victory.27 Andrew Ayton, on the other hand, has focused particularly on

what Krepinevich would call “organizational adaptation,” emphasizing changing patterns in

recruitment, unit formation and organization, and the consequent reshaping of civil society, as

the most important—and most easily quantifiable—aspects of the Infantry Revolution. While he

has restated his argument several times over the years, his original way of expressing these

changes remains a touch-stone for future scholars on the subject: “contrasting the character and

26
For an overview of the debate through the mid-1990s, see Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate,
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), and MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, eds., The Dynamics of Military
Revolution, 1300-2050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Andrew Ayton, “Sir Thomas
Ughtred and the Edwardian Military Revolution,” in The Age of Edward III, ed J. S. Bothwell (York: York Medieval
Press, 2001), 107-132; Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward
III (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994); Clifford J. Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years’ War,” The
Journal of Military History, vol. 57, no. 2 (April, 1993), 241-278; Rogers, “The Efficacy of the Medieval Longbow:
A Reply to Kelly DeVries,” War in History 5, no. 2 (1998), 233-42; David Simpkin, The English Aristocracy at
War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008);
Kelly DeVries, "Catapults Are Not Atomic Bombs: Towards a Redefinition of 'Effectiveness' in Premodern
Military Technology," War in History 4 (1997), 454-70; DeVries, "The Military Revolution Revisited," Technology
and Culture 31 (1990), 500-07, written with Bert S. Hall; Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change
and European Society 1550-1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, originally published 1991); for his most
recent view, Beyond the Military Revolution: War in the Seventeenth Century World (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011); David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998);
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Revolution and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Stephen Morillo and Michael F. Pavkovic’s analysis of
how “military revolution” has impacted military history and general history, in What Is Military History?, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 73-81. See also Peter Purton, who has observed that the narrative of English,
French, and Scottish warfare showed little change in siege craft or tactics from the thirteenth century; see Purton, A
History of the Late Medieval Siege 1200-1500 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), chapter 3, esp. 114-142.
27
Rogers, “England’s Fourteenth-Century RMA,” pp. 18-22.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 13

structure of the royal army which was routed by the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314…with the

army that marched defiantly through France [in 1359].”28 In 1314, the army consisted mainly of

foot soldiers, with a smaller contingent of mounted troops, at a ratio of about 6:1; “they were

recruited separately and fought separately.” In the 1359 Reims Campaign, the English army was

evenly divided between men-at-arms and (mostly) mounted archers, most of whom had been

recruited together, and fought in the company of the same captain. These captains, whether of

magnate, baronial, bannerette, or knightly rank,29 served the king by way of indenture and

carefully drawn-up contract, which specified the terms of service, the numbers and types of

troops they were to deploy, pay rates, division of loot and handling of prisoners, and so on.

Conscription of archers and foot soldiers to serve overseas essentially ceased after the surrender

of Calais in 1347, and thus the indenture system “was probably decisive in ensuring that the

structural reforms endured.”30 The effects of these changes can be seen especially in the “much-

diminished role for the warhorse” in English campaigns, and “[t]he impact of this change on the

collective psyche of the aristocracy—and, indeed, on the military establishment—should not be

underestimated.”31

From Rogers’ and Ayton’s writings, then, we can usefully define the English Medieval

Military Revolution as theoretically comprising several features:

1. Development: the development of the mounted archer as an all-around fighting man,

capable of fast movement, quick deployment, ranged and even close combat when

28
Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, pp. 9-10.
29
It may be helpful to think of magnates (in somewhat simplistic modern terms) as corps commanders, barons and
some bannerettes as division commanders, bannerettes as brigade commanders, and knights as battalion
commanders. Taking into account the scale of troop contingents, relative responsibilities, permanence or
impermanence of command structures, and what is known of their actual deployment on campaign and in battle,
these modern conceptualizations work surprisingly well.
30
Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, p. 14.
31
Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, pp. 21, 22.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 14

 necessary, cheaper to pay, and better disciplined than the feudal infantry levies that

preceded him.

2. Technological Change: the increasingly wide-spread use of the longbow by Edward

III’s armies.

3. Operational Innovation: the deployment of archers and men-at-arms in integrated,

dismounted formations on the tactical defensive, but the strategic offensive.

4. Organizational Adaptation: The shift from a feudally-summoned army of separate

horse and foot contingents to an army recruited for pay, serving in mixed contingents of

mounted archers and men-at-arms.

Many scholars can in some measure agree upon these four points—point 1, the mounted archer,

has been a staple of military history since the turn of the twentieth century, and point 3 is self-

evident in the historical narrative.32 There is less agreement in interpreting the causes and

consequences of these military changes, particularly for points 2 and 4, Technological Change

and Organizational Adaptation. In his most recent article on the topic, Ayton points out the social

consequences of the shift to the “super” mixed retinues of men-at-arms and archers in the later

fourteenth century, when captains had to bring much larger numbers of troops to the army. The

retinue commander now had to effectively recruit double the number of men that his father or

grandfather had, necessitating not only more social contact with those below his station in order

to find archers and men at arms, but also more reliance on men whom he did not know well. It

also meant captains in the later fourteenth century recruited and fielded retinues far beyond

“what was sustainable by their wealth, social authority and connections.”33 Thus military service

32
John E. Morris, The Welsh Wars of Edward I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), and his “Mounted Infantry in
Medieval Warfare,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd series, no. 8 (1914), 77-102.
33
Ayton, “Military Service and the Dynamics of Recruitment in Fourteenth-Century England,” in The Soldier
Experience in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Adrian R. Bell and Anne Curry (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 32.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 15

increasingly “was determined not by any pre-existing ties that they might have to a captain but

by a careerist mentality and the contractual terms that had been agreed upon.”34

Yet on closer inspection these arguments, while well-founded, do not get us any closer

to understanding the emergence of the mixed retinue as the English government’s organizational

response to war. Nor do they help us to understand how extensive a pre-1350 earl’s network

could be, without it leading to socially unstable retinues. Perhaps most importantly, Ayton’s

description (again, accurate as far as it goes) does not explain why the mixed retinue became

dominant only after the Black Death had done its horrifying work of shrinking the manpower

pool and destabilizing the social structure that produced the army of Crécy. If Crécy is the

touchstone for understanding Edward III’s military endeavors, then a seismic shift occurring

only after the Plague surely should make us re-think the causes of organizational change.

Further, recent studies have suggested that both later and earlier fourteenth-century narratives of

organizational change are far more complicated than seemed the case in the mid-1990s. To

mention three: David Bachrach has argued that there was a considerable amount of

professionalism in the centenars (company commanders) and vintenars (platoon commanders)

who led the county levies in Edward I’s reign, and David Simpkin has recently shown in

exquisite detail that in both military and social terms there was little difference between the ways

in which feudal and paid retinues functioned. Meanwhile, Adrian Bell has shown how important

personal connections and shared political sympathies were for the Appellant campaigns of 1386

and 1387.35

34
Ibid., 33.
35
David Bachrach, “Edward I’s Centurions: Professional Soldiers in an Era of Militia Armies,” in The Soldier
Experience in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Adrian R. Bell and Anne Curry (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 109-128;
David Simpkin, Chapter 5 “Feudal Service and the Pre-Contract Army” in his study The English Aristocracy At
War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008); Adrian Bell,
War and the Soldier in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 16

 To move from causes to consequences, it is also by no means clear that the “psyche” of

the military elite was affected by the crown’s increasing reliance on men of small to moderate

means for its cavalry and mounted infantry forces. As I show in Chapter 3, until after the Black

Death we would be hard-pressed to find (whether in administrative, land tenure, or financial

records) much evidence of social displacement, hardening of elite social attitudes, or political

assertiveness on the part of a newly-empowered lower class. Lordship in the 1330s and 1340s

remained essentially unchanged, as did the relationships between the recruiters and the recruited:

they were essentially “feudal” in some way or another. Further, interpretations of such social

and cultural consequences rely upon a rather ill-defined notion of what exactly constituted the

chivalric mentalité of the military elite; and as Chapter 1 shows, not only was this mentalité more

widespread than is often thought, it grew, rather than diminished, over the course of Edward III’s

wars. The oft-cited chivalric complaint at Crécy that the foot soldiers were killing without regard

for possible ransoms did not signal a new “way of war”; it was a particular complaint sparked by

the circumstances of a particular battle.36

Ultimately, the above analysis drives home that military revolution theories make broad

claims about societies and cultures—that is their main claim to our attention, after all. If changes

in military affairs had no larger social or cultural significance, they would not be worth our time.

36
Edward’s German allies protested the potential loss of income during the battle, but were curtly dismissed by the
king. See Michael Prestwich, “The Battle of Crécy,” in Ayton and Preston, The Battle of Crécy, 1346, 151. Common
arguments advanced about the decline of chivalry and cavalry in the face of foot soldiers and gunpowder often take
incidents like this out of context, and then apply them to medieval society as a whole. Further, Rémy Ambühl’s
recent study on prisoners in the Hundred Years War suggests that “no quarter” was more common in the early
fourteenth-century than is supposed. See Prisoners of War in the Hundred Years War: Ransom Culture in the Late
Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 102. There are parallels to McCall’s thesis regarding
the decline of Roman Republic cavalry: “We should not overestimate the changes in elite values. The evolution in
elite values and identity was very gradual and largely seamless…Nevertheless, the elite Romans of the first century
faced a set of challenges and problems that their fourth century predecessors did not face to the same degree—not
least of all how to distinguish themselves as elite in a society with great monetary wealth and an expanded citizen
body. Cavalry service was not an effective means for coping with these problems and it lapsed. This important
change in the military sphere was closely connected to social, political, and economic changes.” See Jeremiah B.
McCall, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic (London: Routledge, 2002), 139.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 17

The problem lies in the fact that in making these claims, military revolution theorists have not

made much effort to study the histories of the societies and cultures supposedly affected, and

those who have objected to the claims of the “revolutionaries” have let the matter lie, without

attempting to help us understand how war did impact pre-modern societies. As a result,

unworkable theories of military change have been tacked on to social or cultural

historiographies, while social/cultural historiographies do not address the actual planning,

conduct, and experience of military affairs. These theories leave us with no way either to read

medieval warfare, or to understand why it mattered so much to medieval people. And it did

matter, as the present study hopes to demonstrate.

The Current Project: Scope and Method

This project begins to move beyond the “medieval military revolution” as a sufficient or

necessary paradigm for analyzing medieval warfare, preferring instead the concepts of “military

adaptation” and “challenge and response” advocated by Jeremy Black and Frederick Kagan,

respectively.37 Employing these concepts in medieval warfare entails using social and cultural

history to establish parameters for studying warfare, with the expectation that doing so will result

in dialogue among different historiographies. In other words, social historiography should inform

constitutional historiography, which should inform cultural historiography, which should inform

military historiography, etc. Some of these—social and cultural, for example—are habitually in

dialog with each other. Others, such as social and military, are not, surprisingly enough.

Applying this method can result, as it does in this study, in reconfiguring the actual significance

of military affairs to English society: the larger social and recruitment “revolutions” were in fact

driven by non-military factors. Moreover, while I save the Plague itself for a later study, any

37
See Jeremy Black, Beyond the Military Revolution: War in the Seventeenth-Century World (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 1-5, and Frederick Kagan, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy
(New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 360-361.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 18

“military revolution” theory must ultimately take the Black Death into account. Inasmuch as the

battle of Crécy was revolutionary, it was so due to tactics and leadership, which are best

considered separately from the social, political, and cultural consequences attributable to victory

in battle. This is not to relegate the study of the actual violence of war and battle to a side-show

of history. Paradoxically, battlefield victory actually had a tremendous impact on the society that

fought the engagement, precisely because battle was an experience so far outside of everyday

life. Indeed medieval people tended to perceive battles that way, as the poetry of Laurence Minot

(addressed in chapter 1) makes plain. Crécy became the focus of national, regional, and social

myths and identities precisely because its outcome “was greater than the sum of its parts,”38 and

because the narrative of the battle could be used in so many ways by different audiences.

These issues form the basis of the four chapters that follow, as they break down in greater

detail whether the Earl of Suffolk and his retinue were participating in a military revolution, or

instead were reacting to social, economic, and cultural pressures to which war provided both risk

and opportunity. Chapter 1 establishes the social and cultural context of Robert Ufford’s career

by examining the different discourses concerning war and its utility under discussion in England

in the fourteenth century. The chief questions asked here are “Did medieval audiences regard

warfare as being potentially ‘revolutionary,’ could they have recognized a military revolution

when they saw one, and how would this influence their practice of war?” Answering this query

creates both an historiographic and a methodological space for re-evaluating the “military

revolution” thesis as a whole. What emerges from the chapter is that Edward III’s clerical

advisers were mostly concerned with two different, seemingly contradictory things: (containing)

human free will and the “matter of England,” that is the identity of the English nation and its

38
I must give credit for this formulation to my brilliant students in HI370, Ancient and Medieval Warfare, Spring
2014.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 19

delineation in art, literature, and legislation. They were the products of a fractured intellectual

world, where vigorous debates were taking place between those who valued human agency and

those who saw a discussion of human free will, even as a “secondary” cause, to threaten divine

control over human affairs. At the same time, the king, his nobles, and their knights were

enthusiastic participants in chivalry and celebrations of King Arthur; these stories valued human

agency, and the potential for worthiness in arms to overcome the boundaries of Fate and Fortune

for the honor of one’s own name, and honor in the military community. Finally, the ubiquity of

Fortune’s Wheel in both Arthurian literature, as well as in medieval society in general, is

reflected in the way chroniclers wrote about the battle of Crécy. English contemporary

chroniclers attributed little agency to “Fortune” in the outcome of the battle, while continental

and later chroniclers, living in an age when England had lost Edward’s conquests, tended to

remember the war in terms of Fortune’s Wheel.

Having established the Earl of Suffolk’s cultural referents for warfare, Chapter 2 then

analyzes his career, taking as its main question “Does the earldom of Suffolk impact Robert

Ufford’s military leadership or ability to recruit men-at-arms for Edward’s wars?” The chapter

introduces the theme of the intimate connection between Ufford’s military retinue and his land

holdings. In contrast to most scholarship on the English military retinue, my analysis shows that

the great majority of Ufford’s men served with him because he was in some sense their “feudal”

overlord, were extended family members, or had an earlier connection to the Ufford family. The

significance of this finding is considerable, as it not only makes the “dynamics of recruitment”

more stable, tied directly to land and hierarchical relationships, but it also suggests that Edward

III did not, in the 1330s and 1340s, think in sociological terms of “recruitment networks,” but

rather in traditional terms of “feudal” networks. The chapter finishes by discussing the extent to

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 20

which reputation and prestige played a role in Ufford’s career and recruitment, and how his

career functions as an example of social military history.

Chapter 3 is in many ways the core chapter of the dissertation, and analyzes careers and

military service of identifiable men from Suffolk’s retinue at the battle of Crécy. The guiding

question is “What does an analysis of Suffolk’s retinue tell us concerning military recruitment

and military service in the first half of the fourteenth century?” For this inquiry Gorski’s brief

study of Suffolk’s retinue in The Fourteenth-Century Sheriff is very valuable, though as we will

see not complete or free from error. In addition to the Chancery diplomatic/military rolls and the

Issue Rolls mentioned above, which provide details on individual military service, we rely

primarily on the surviving payroll records in the Exchequer, which, even when they do not give

lists of individual names, will provide overall figures for regional military contributions. In

many instances the task is a prosopographical one, matching names in muster rolls to service in

other campaigns, and recreating, as far as possible, individual careers in arms. In some cases this

is possible; in others we have little information on the knight, man-at-arms, or archer in question.

It will emerge that Suffolk’s retinue was stable, small, feudal in its reasons for serving with him,

and provincial in its outlook. These findings in turn have important consequences for identifying

the level of militarization existing in East Anglia before the outbreak of the French war in 1337,

the impact of the Scottish wars of the 1330s, and the impact of the French war in transforming

military service patterns.

Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the way that the Crécy campaign impacted the lower

levels of Suffolk society, by asking how Suffolk supplied archers for the 1346 campaign, and

who these archers were. In this we are assisted by the rare survival of those royal documents

mustering various towns and hundreds (subdivisions of the county) for weapons and militia

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 21

organization. It is possible, from these documents, to get a sense of the number of archers

existent in Suffolk in 1345-6, as well as whose lands and localities were being used for military

service—whether the villages of the earl and his subordinates were “safe” from military service,

or whether the earl’s villagers did in fact bear a heavier burden of military service. This chapter

is important for two reasons: first, it opens a window for us to see how lower medieval English

society experienced war and participated in war, and second, it shows the extent to which

English society was dominated by the military elites, so that the English war effort did not in fact

result in political change.

The Conclusion draws these themes together and raises a number of new issues for the

study of the Crécy campaign, as well as for English society in general. Our understanding of

English warfare during Edward III’s reign is in need of revision, as is our assessment of what

exactly were the “effects of war” on the late medieval state’s military and administration. In

particular, the conclusion stresses the need to replace the “military revolution” approach with a

method that stresses adaptation, and the need to ask hard questions of future research on the topic

of England and the Hundred Years War.

Franke, Beyond the Medieval Military Revolution, Introduction 22