Download PDF | Adam Chapman - Welsh Soldiers in the Later Middle Ages, 1282-1422 (Warfare in History)-The Boydell Press (2015).
284 Pages
Acknowledgements
The research that initially informed this book was the result of an AHRC doctoral award, part of a much larger project, ‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England, 1369–1453’. To be part of such a valuable contribution to medieval military history was extremely rewarding; so it is to my supervisor Anne Curry, and the rest of the project team, Adrian Bell, David Simpkin and Andy King, that I owe a significant debt. Without them, their feedback, friendly interest and helpful criticism, this book would not have reached publication. Their efforts were supplemented by the enthusiasm of those behind another AHRC project based at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth. Without Ann Parry Owen, whose excitable email in Welsh began a journey into the cultural context in which ‘my’ soldiers lived, this would have been a rather different book.
Her interest and that of Dylan Foster Evans, Barry Lewis, Jenny Day and Eurig Salisbury helped my research evolve and shaped something of its current and future direction. Others who were with the process from the start also deserve special thanks. Leonie Hicks and Rachel Evans have probably listened to my witterings on this subject over enormous quantities of tea for longer than anyone else and with far greater patience than was warranted. Others who shared parts of this process included the various denizens of room 2241, most notably Jaime Ashworth, whose alternative title, ‘Dying for a Leek’, requires no further comment here. Mike Lally, Ally Moore, Mark Rose, Jennie Thorne, together with Hannah Ewence, Jan Lanicek and Stephen Robinson, all contributed valuable moral and intellectual support when it was needed. To all those who have lent their support in answering questions and generally providing prods in the right direction, especially Simon Payling, Ben Bankhurst, Gordon McKelvie and Linsey Hunter, thank you. At Southampton I was fortunate enough to benefit from the kindness of archaeologists Gareth and Nicole Beale, Sandy Budden, Christina Karlsson, Chris Lewis, Kris Strutt, Pina Franco, Dave Underhill, Sarah Inskip, Pete Girdwood, Lief Ishaksen, Ellie Williams, and others from yet more diverse disciplines, particularly Beth Carroll, Adam Dunn and Mary Orr, Eleanor Quince and Mary Stubbington.
I have been lucky enough to have received support and advice from Professor Ralph Griffiths, Deborah Youngs, Dan Power of Swansea University, Louise Barker and Richard Suggett of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and Jeremy Ashbee of English Heritage, all of whom have been encouraging at key moments. Sara Elin Roberts deserves special praise for her thorough and direct approach to copy-editing, late-in-the-day reference checking and guidance in matters of medieval Welsh law. I am also grateful to those I was fortunate enough to work with at the University of Southampton, the University of Kent and Manchester Metropolitan University, and my current colleagues at the Institute of Historical Research. Special gratitude must be reserved for the staff of the Victoria County History, Elizabeth Williamson, Matt Bristow, Jessica Davies, Alan Thacker and Rebecca Read. As with all historians, I am in the debt of the staff of the National Archives, the British Library and the National Library of Wales and all the various institutional libraries, notably those of the University of Southampton and Cardiff University whose assistance was so invaluable.
This process has been speeded by the good offices of Caroline Palmer of Boydell and Brewer and the mobile office space afforded by South West Trains, and leavened by my reintroduction to the cricket field. All those who have played for the Cavaliers Cricket Club will be aware that this has resulted in no compromise to their standards. Finally, I should like to thank my family, who have looked on without obvious bemusement for all this time, and Louise and those who introduced me to the study of medieval history at the University of East Anglia: Rob Liddiard, Stephen Church, Christopher Harper-Bill and Tom Williamson. Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of the grandfather I knew, Marcus Chapman, and the one I did not, Norman Womack, both veterans of the RAF in the Second World War.
Introduction
This book seeks to explore the role of the Welsh in England’s armies and in England’s wars between Edward I’s conquest of Wales and Henry V’s conquest of Normandy. It concerns the structure and composition of armies, the group dynamics within them, and the social networks and hierarchies which underpinned them. What sort of Welshmen became soldiers? How was Welsh society organised for war? What impact did wider political considerations have upon Welsh service in England’s armies? War in English service inevitably had a colonial flavour in the years after the conquest of Gwynedd, and war played its part in the process of resettlement. The employment of Welshmen in England’s wars in Scotland, Flanders and later, the wars pursuing the English claim to the throne of France, now called the Hundred Years War, played a key part in shaping later medieval Wales. It has often been stated, and is still widely believed, that the Welsh archer in his ‘knitted Monmouth cap’ was a key part of every English victory in the Hundred Years War.1 A possible origin may lie in Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599).
In the play, the garrulous captain Fluellen reminds the king not of the number or importance of Welshmen in his army, but of those in the army of his great-uncle, Edward the Black Prince, at Crécy. It is also an article of faith in some quarters that the longbow was a curiously Welsh weapon whose secret was imparted to the English through Edward I’s wars of conquest. This is an assertion that it is difficult for the evidence to sustain, but is nonetheless one of the key elements of Welsh popular history. What follows is a study in two parts. Part I offers a chronological account of the involvement of Welshmen in English armies between the conquest of Gwynedd in 1282–83 and the end of the reign of Henry V in 1422. In doing so, it considers the continuation of Edward I’s attempts to master the British Isles, addressing the wars in Scotland that dominated English military affairs from the 1290s to the 1340s. Edward I’s reign also contained wars against France, the first after the conquest of Wales being in Gascony, the second, in the winter of 1297–98, in Flanders.
It was here that Welshmen were first exploited as subjects of the English realm, but it was in the reign of Edward II, the first English prince of Wales, that Welshmen assumed political as well as military importance. Edward I created the military machine that Edward II and Edward III developed. Paid, Welsh infantry were a substantial part of this machine. The Welsh elite who abandoned Llywelyn ap Gruffudd were bound to Edward I and more so to his son. Many of the most tumultuous periods of Edward II’s reign were shaped by events in Wales and Welshmen fought on all sides; Chapter 2 emphasises this. This book’s treatment of Edward III’s reign is divided. The first part encompasses the period between 1327 and 1360. This reflects a political divide, from the deposition of Edward II, the establishment of Edward III’s personal regime in 1330 and his formal assumption of the title of king of France in 1340 and ends with the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360. This also reflects a historiographical divide in terms of the military experience of the English realm.
During this period, the nature of the wars fought by English kings changed and with it, the nature of English armies. From levies of men drawn from English and Welsh communities with the king’s own military household at its head recruited by mechanisms honed in Edward I’s day, by 1369, England’s armies were almost universally recruited by indentured contracts with individual captains. Chapters 4 and 5 abandon strict regnal divisions. The first considers Welsh attitudes to the wars between England, France and their proxies in Iberia and of the English in Ireland in the second half of the fourteenth century. As the work of ‘The Soldier in Late Medieval England’ project has shown, this period was essential to the development of the profession of soldiering in England.2
This is also an important period for Welsh historiography. After a spell of relative stability and the repositioning of the Welsh elite as servants to the English Crown, there is a marked sense of the re-establishment of a Welsh ‘national’ identity. In military terms this has two key manifestations. The first was the threat presented by support for Owain ap Tomas ap Rhodri, otherwise Owain Lawgoch, descendant of one of the brothers of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the self-proclaimed and French-supported prince of Wales. The support he gathered from Welshmen in both France and Wales led to his assassination by an English agent in 1378 and foreshadowed the revolt of Owain Glyndŵr.3 This revolt and its aftermath form the focus of the remaining chapter of this part of the study (Chapter 5).
This chapter examines the role of Welshmen opposing the rebellion and the place of reconciliation in the careers of repentant rebels. It goes on to show how Henry V absorbed the remilitarised Welsh population into his wars in France. Part II of this book examines what might be termed the military society and communities of Wales. Chapter 6 examines the mechanism of obligation that compelled Welshmen to join England’s armies. In the absence of traditional feudal structures, Welsh law was adapted for this purpose and military tenures of other sorts instituted in both royal shires and Marcher lordships. Chapter 7 explores the way in which Welsh soldiers were recruited, arrayed and paid. It investigates how the mechanisms of royal and Marcher government were used to gather soldiers from Wales and the way in which they performed, or were meant to perform, in battle. The final chapter of Part II considers the ‘distinctiveness’ of the Welsh soldier. To what extent were Welsh soldiers different from their English counterparts? How would their contemporaries have recognised these differences and how were the differences between Welsh and English societies manifested in war?
Wales and the Welsh between 1282 and 1422
Military historians are occasionally guilty of neglecting the context from which armies and individual soldiers emerge. Wales was not one country and was not treated as a single polity until the Acts of Union of the 1536 and lacked even an idea of a clear set of geographical boundaries until the years of the Glyndŵr rebellion in the first decade of the fifteenth century. The constituent parts of what was considered ‘Wales’ in the later Middle Ages were many and varied. For the English, pre-Conquest Wales was divided into ‘pura-Wallia’, the independent areas of Wales still ruled by native princes, and the ‘Marchia Wallie’, the Marchland which had been conquered by Anglo-Norman lords; and after the Edwardian Conquest this contrast was largely perpetuated in the distinction drawn between the Principality (the five counties of Anglesey, Merioneth, Caernarvon, Carmarthen and Cardigan) and the March (the rest of Wales, with the exception of Flintshire).4 The shires of Wales formed the principality of Wales, with Flintshire part of the earldom of Chester.
The label ‘principality’ was inherited from the princes of Gwynedd who, in the thirteenth century, had styled themselves ‘prince of Wales’. Hence the label applied even when there was no prince of Wales, as was the case for significant periods (1307–43, 1376–99 and 1413–22). The March consisted of forty or so independent lordships, with rights and privileges taken by right of conquest from Welsh princes or granted by English kings and jealously guarded by their lords. There was a tendency over time, however, for the lands in the March of Wales to be collected in the hands of the dominant English magnates, a trend exaggerated by the Lancastrian usurpation in 1399 which brought the estates of the duchy of Lancaster into the royal demesne. For the purposes of this book, Wales shall be taken to refer to the totality of the shires and March, but not the ‘marcher’ counties of England on the borders of Wales. This reflects a contemporary formulation, coined by Lewys Glyn Cothi, a Welsh poet active in the middle years of the fifteenth century, who, in an elegy to Thomas ap Rhydderch, a gentleman of Carmarthenshire, termed the different parts of Wales ‘siroedd a’r mars’, literally, the shires and March.5
The Welsh as a people, however, by virtue of their language and history, were rightly regarded as different and remain so. It is possibly for this reason that the period between the fall of Pura Wallia in 1283 and the victory of a Welshman of sorts at Bosworth in 1485 has, with a brief and notable interlude in the early years of the fifteenth century, been relatively neglected until the latter part of the twentieth century. Powell’s Historie of Cambria, now called Wales (1584) was only expanded to include material after 1282, with material derived from the papers of the antiquarian Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, by William Wynne of Garthewin in Denbighshire, published in 1697.
Both were regularly reprinted well into the nineteenth century. The period after the Edwardian conquest remained neglected however. J.E. Lloyd’s pioneering two-volume study of medieval Wales, published in 1911, ended altogether in 1282.6 As Rees Davies noted, ‘It is perhaps inevitable that the history of what is “pure” should occupy pride of place in the studies of Welsh historians.’7 This study is not concerned with that pursuit, but with the settlement made by Edward I, the way in which military matters were affected by it and the ways in which Welsh society responded to it. Within a society that had a distinct ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity which was retained after the conquest, wars fought on behalf of a different country inevitably assumed a colonial character.
Sources
Much of the work on medieval English armies has drawn upon the first example of systematic study of royal administrative and financial documents, J.E. Morris’s The Welsh Wars of Edward I. 8 The work Morris published was not without its faults: there were a number of documents, both printed and in manuscript, of which Morris was unaware, while at the time he was compiling his work the Welsh context of the wars described was relatively little studied. Work on the nature of England’s armies between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries has been extensive. Michael Prestwich’s analysis of Edward I’s personal administration, the king’s Wardrobe, in the organisation of Edward I’s military machine – essentially that used until the middle years of his grandson’s reign – built upon the foundations laid by Morris and has, in turn, set a pattern for much later work on the subject.9 Prestwich’s work consolidated the case for a great change in the nature of English armies during the reign of Edward I but, more recently, he has argued that developments were not sustained and that armies in the reigns of Edward II and Edward III were hampered by ‘a striking failure to innovate’.10
This assessment echoes Clifford Rogers’s arguments concerning an ‘infantry revolution’ in the practice of war in fourteenth-century Europe. Rogers, citing much chronicle evidence, notes a marked change in English tactics between Bannockburn in 1314, when cavalry were bested by Scottish foot soldiers, and Haildon Hill (1333) and Crécy (1346), when men-at-arms and archers were combined and fought on foot. This, he suggested in a highly influential article, was the basis of English success and the trigger for major change.11 The fundamental question, perhaps, is whether the kind of army available to a commander was a result of or led by the strategy employed. The reign of Edward III saw a number of changes occur together. The key changes in military organisation were relatively simple though their impact has been disputed. Whence these developments emerged and what they meant are at the heart of the debate. For Rogers, Edward III’s change in fortunes in France in the years after 1346 resulted from the skilful use of the longbow and defensive tactics involving the use of dismounted men-at-arms and archers.
The ‘adoption’, development, and use of the longbow is key to this argument and Rogers suggests that later gunpowder artillery had a similarly important effect.12 This technological determinism is countered, to an extent, by the administrative innovations relating to war in the same period. Until the Reims campaign of 1359–60, foot soldiers raised by commissions of array played a significant part in wars beyond England’s shores. Andrew Ayton’s work on military organisation in the first half of Edward III’s reign has greatly expanded the understanding of the formalisation of the ‘mixed retinue’ of menat-arms and archers led by members of the aristocracy which first supplemented arrayed county levies and later replaced them.13 H.J. Hewitt also provided an invaluable overview of developments in this important period though some of his conclusions have been modified in light of later research.14
After the resumption of the war with France in 1369, armies were generally smaller and wholly mounted and were recruited by indentured contract. Military indentures in themselves were not a new development but after 1369 the Crown entered into contracts with its magnates and, increasingly, with individual captains to supply a specified number of men-at-arms and archers for set periods for defined rates of pay. In effect, the process of military recruitment was privatised and, through the documents presented to the Exchequer for audit, a greatly increased range of documents, notably payrolls and muster rolls, are available for analysis by the historian.
These documents, together with particulars of account presented by captains and the issue rolls and warrants for issue from the Exchequer, survive in abundance, an abundance that has, until recently, been a barrier to systematic study.15 The changes in the composition and documentary record of the resulting armies were first addressed in the work of A.E. Prince and later by James Sherborne, whose efforts traced developments in the composition and organisation of English armies from the 1340s to c. 1380.16 Individual expeditions have also attracted attention and have added to the wider picture: Ayton’s work on the Crécy campaign, Hewitt’s volume on the Black Prince’s expedition of 1355–56 and Anne Curry’s work on Agincourt have all made contributions to military history which are greater than narrative accounts of battles or discussion of tactical practice and strategic ambitions.
Sources for Wales
Searching for Welshmen among the military records of the English Crown was where this study began and where other scholars, indeed, had been before. Studies specifically seeking references to Welshmen fighting in English service in the later Middle Ages have been relatively limited, however. There have been a number of biographical studies, notably J.G. Edwards’s work on Sir Gruffudd Llwyd, and Tony Carr’s biographies of Sir Gregory Sais and Owain of Wales, together with his seminal article ‘Welshmen in the Hundred Years War’, are the most comprehensive and commonly cited works on the subject.18 Carr’s overview was unusual in its use of the large body of Welsh-language literature to illustrate his subject, in addition to the records of English government. In this, he drew upon the work of Theodor Chotzen who attempted to place the work of the fourteenth-century poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym, in its historical context and Howell T. Evans, whose Wales and the Wars of the Roses made the case for the use of poetry to explore the complicated web of allegiances in fifteenth-century Wales.19
The nature of this poetry, composed for a courtly setting and likely set to music, is one reason that it has been greeted with suspicion. Most of the Welsh poetry of the later Middle Ages is praise-poetry, and it was composed for the property-owning section of Welsh society, the so-called uchelwyr (literally ‘high men’).20 The social pressures of Welsh society were put into words by a class of professional poets, who travelled from house to house, praising the uchelwyr for upholding the values of the aristocratic status and, occasionally, attacking them when they did not. Indeed, at least by the fifteenth century, it seems to have been all but a social requirement for uchelwyr to welcome poets into their houses. It is their beholdenness to the praise of poets, rather than any difference in values, which distinguishes the Welsh uchelwyr from the equivalent social groups in England. At the latest estimate, some fifty-nine poets who worked during the fourteenth century have left us samples of their work.21 As to the fifteenth century, no estimate has yet been made, but there will probably be around a hundred poets, ranging from those with only one or two surviving poems to Guto’r Glyn, with more than 120, and Lewys Glyn Cothi, with around 238.
The task of editing this material has been going on for over a century. A milestone was reached in 1952 with the publication of Thomas Parry’s Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym. 22 This work set the pattern, and over the years a number of high-quality editions have appeared, the most significant being Dafydd Johnston’s Gwaith Iolo Goch and Gwaith Lewys Glyn Cothi. 23 In the 1990s the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, having completed a seven-volume edition of the poetry of the Welsh princes (c. 1100–c. 1282), turned to a systematic programme of editing later medieval poetry. The resulting series Beirdd yr Uchelwyr, or ‘Poets of the Nobility’, at the time of writing, contains some forty-one volumes, over eighty poets and some 50,000 lines of verse from the period between about 1300 and about 1550.
This material has been deployed in a limited fashion in this book but it remains a valuable resource which deserves greater attention from historians.24 If the military history of England in the later Middle Ages has come to be dominated by documents originating in central government, the role of war in local administrations has often been overlooked. This book draws heavily upon administrative documents from the principality of Wales, and the earldom of Chester particularly the accounts of their chamberlains which survive in a more or less complete series for the fourteenth century. While those examining the royal castles have made extensive and effective use of such documents, the picture of routine military activity can be greatly expanded by use of these documents. Examination of these records of local government has done much to broaden the base of this study and to establish how mechanisms of military organisation meshed with the day-to-day administration of the lands of Wales. The careers of officials, in the southern shires of the principality, at least, are known through the extremely detailed prosopographical work of Ralph Griffiths and this resource has done much to illuminate how military service was integrated into the wider public careers of many soldier recorded in the records of the Exchequer.25
Use has also been made of the surviving documentary evidence for Marcher government. In many cases, the detail these documents provide is similar, but with the addition of detail relating to landholding and its military components, and their debts to Welsh practice is made clearer through the succession of estate surveys made at various points in the fourteenth century. All these sources and others go a long way towards integrating the affairs of Wales into more general sources, such as the calendars of patent and close rolls. The intention of this book is to establish the importance of the Welsh soldier in the period between the Edwardian conquest of Gwynedd and the death Henry V, in the aftermath of the most sustained Welsh revolt against English rule, the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr. In doing so it addresses the importance of war to the development of Welsh society in the same period and it is hoped that it provides a wider appreciation of the Welsh soldier as a member of England’s armies and in the military landscape of the English realm.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق