It is evident that the success achieved by any army depends very much upon the quality of its leadership, a subject much discussed by writers of the day. There were two closely related matters which concerned men of the late Middle Ages. One was the recognition that leadership was of prime importance if discipline was to be maintained and armies kept together as teams rather than as collections of individuals. The other was to ask who were to be the leaders of armies, and by what criteria they might claim to lead.
On the first of these the influence of the ancient world was to be considerable. Ever since the twelfth century a particular form of didactic literature, an instruction manual written for princes giving them both moral and practical advice on how best to rule those under their care, had been developing. Reasonably enough, princes required to be taught how to make war, and since many of the authors of these works were clerics, they turned to what were the standard handbooks on war to find the information they needed. Broadly, such advice came in two forms. One was the collection of anecdotes, culled from Greek and Roman history, which made points of military importance: armies should avoid having their backs to a river when confronting the enemy in battle (Bertrand du Guesclin ignored this advice, with fatal results, at Nájera in April 1367); or, attempts should be made to manoeuvre armies so that the sun shone in the enemy’s eyes. These maxims, many of them reflecting nothing more than common sense, and taken from the recorded experience of the past, were to be found mainly in two works: the Facta et dicta memorabilia of Valerius Maximus, written in the first century AD, and the Stratagemata of Frontinus, composed in the same century by a man who had been for a short while Roman governor of Britain. Both works were to be translated from Latin into the vernacular languages in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; both were known in military circles; and both may have had some influence on the formation of changing attitudes to leadership.
More important, however, was the most read handbook on the military art, the De re militari of Vegetius, compiled in the late fourth century AD. It was to this work that most writers of manuals on the exercise of princely authority turned if they wanted to learn how war should be fought. Vegetius was important less for his technical advice than for the general philosophical message on the conduct of war which his work contained. For, like Frontinus, he set great store by leadership, the moral qualities required of those who aspired to it, and the experience of war which they required to achieve it. In brief, the good leader, the man who could inspire his army, not merely he who could avoid the obvious pitfalls of generalship which Frontinus had pointed out, might be born with certain inherent qualities, but these had to be developed in the only way that could lead to success, through practice and experience.
There was implied, in what Vegetius wrote, a most important message: leaders did not choose themselves, but had to be chosen. Put into the social context of the late Middle Ages this meant that the class which had traditionally provided the leadership of armies was having its position, founded largely on social factors, questioned if not undermined. For the drift of the argument was essentially that men did not assume leadership, but that it was granted to them according to criteria which took merit and experience, as well as birth and social standing, into consideration. We may see this idea reflected in a number of ways. When John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen, wrote his long verse account of the career of Robert Bruce, king of Scots, about 1380, he emphasised that his hero’s successes against the English stemmed from his military qualities, his understanding of his men, his appreciation of the tactics required for victory, in a word his ‘professionalism’ as a man in arms. Likewise, the lives of other soldier-heroes of the period, the Black Prince, du Guesclin, even that of Henry V, although written in the chivalric vein, stress that these men were successful largely because their inherent qualities of leadership had benefited from training and experience. Similarly we may note that the feeling which was so openly exhibited against the French nobility after the battle of Poitiers reflected something of a growing opinion that, in spite of tradition, the nobility had no absolute right to assume positions of responsibility within the army. If they exercised them, it should be because they had earned them.
The historian is entitled to regard the matter of leadership as an ‘issue’ in the minds of the men of this time. We cannot ignore the fact that long-held attitudes were in the process of change. War was too important to be left to those who, by tradition, had been charged with supervising it. This discussion – if we may call it that – was part of a wider, on-going debate of what constituted true nobility. Was it birth and lineage, or could a man acquire nobility, and if so, how? Was it something which could be conferred, by means of an act of dubbing, or by the issue of a patent? And, if so, did the assumption of nobility mean that a man must act nobly to merit his new position? Such problems received considerable attention at this time; it is clear that nothing was being taken for granted.
How far was reality influenced by such ideas? Certainly, the decline of the feudal force did not lead to the demise of the traditional leadership in war. In both England and France, at the beginning of the Hundred Years War, the command structures were broadly similar. At the head of each were the kings, advised by men of martial experience who might be their kin or, at least, members of the nobility who frequented the courts. Beneath them, in France, there existed an ordered and fairly hierarchical structure which saw to the day-to-day defence of the country, from those with wide territorial jurisdictions to those who might be sent to a particular area, town or castle to organise its defence in time of crisis. By and large, the more important a command (importance being judged by the size of territorial authority, or, more appropriately in time of peace, by the numbers of men involved) the more likely it was to be given to a man who had achieved it as a result of attendance at court. For it was at court, as the more astute realised, that positions of power and wealth were to be found.
In time of war the presence of a king on campaign was an asset to be exploited. Not only did it give prestige and add a sense of urgency to an undertaking, it also exerted the pressure of old feudal practice upon vassals to join their lord in person. Expeditions led by a king were regarded as being of greater importance and were invariably larger than those led by others, however exalted in rank a royal lieutenant might be. There are numerous examples of kings themselves leading in battle. Philip VI did so at Crécy in 1346; John II was captured at the battle of Poitiers in 1356; Charles VII personally led the assault on Pontoise in 1441; while on the English side Edward III and Henry V provide us with excellent examples of the martial qualities demonstrated by certain kings.
The command structure, then, began at court and centred around the king. This fact, and the importance of royal patronage in the granting of military authority, gave a considerable advantage to those whose birth gave them natural access to kings.8 In France the brothers of Charles V, Louis, duke of Anjou, John, duke of Berry, and Philip, duke of Burgundy, all gained military advantage for themselves, their clients and dependants from their close relationship with successive kings. In England, Edward III was to make the fullest use of the military capabilities of his sons, in particular of Edward, Black Prince, whose employment in the war stressed the importance to the family of their father’s claim to the French throne. Such a policy of employing royal sons or brothers continued under the Lancastrians, as all four of Henry IV’s sons fought in France, and three were to die in that country.
Beneath the very greatest in the land, others were ready to act in positions of command when circumstances, such as war on a number of fronts, demanded it. In France whose who held high command, sometimes as lieutenants du roi, were usually princes or men who had achieved the rank of banneret, those senior knights whose swallow-tailed pennons had been cut to the square banners of their new rank. In England, too, the members of the highest nobility, from dukes to earls, gave service and exercised commands throughout the war. Edward III always recognised the importance of noble support in his wars, and, both in his reign and in that of his grandson, Richard II who succeeded him in 1377, the nobility led from the front.
We should be careful, however, to emphasise that the nobility (or noblesse, as we would term it in a French context) also had its high, middling and lower ranks. The highest nobility were only very few in numbers, so that when we speak of their hold upon military commands we must, consciously or not, include those who had inherited relatively low noble rank or who had only risen that far through their own efforts. These men were, largely, in a class apart, for even the English knight could be a man of importance in the county society in which he mixed. As war developed and the need for multiple commands increased, it was to such men that the monarchies of both England and France turned. They proved to have a vital, if at times unspectacular, role to play in the organisation of war. If the great aristocracy was responsible for providing large contingents for the war (and, in England, at least, it was they who, after the king, provided the largest) the work of raising these soldiers was often done by men of local knowledge and influence who subcontracted with the royal captains to raise the troops required. For the raising of armies depended upon networks of connection, based upon bonds of vassalage, regional influence, family and office. In this matter the lower nobility had a crucial role to play.
It went further than that. Because of its sometimes precarious economic position, no rank would refuse to accept the king’s wage. Many turned to war as a serious, full-time occupation, while others, constituting a large proportion of the lower nobility, saw military service at some time or other. As a result of this, their professional commitment to arms grew: in France, in the second half of the fourteenth century, some esquires (men on the very fringe of noblesse) were promoted over the heads of knights, whose numbers in the French army declined anyhow after about 1380, a suggestion that professionalism was coming to be well regarded. And in the persons of men such as Bertrand du Guesclin, Sir Thomas Dagworth, Sir Robert Knolles and Sir Hugh Calveley, the lower ranks of the aristocracy asserted themselves even further. For these were the real ‘professionals’ who, at certain times in the war, took over either as commanders appointed by the crown or as leaders of groups of freelance soldiers who could ignore royal orders and get away with it. Such men depended upon success for support: for while du Guesclin might play upon his Breton origin to gather a force (or route) around him, the English could not do so with the same ease, and therefore came to rely upon their reputations to draw men to their service. These were the first men of less than fully aristocratic background to gain prominence through their merit.
By the fifteenth century the higher ranks of the nobility had taken over again. In France the factionalism from which the country suffered was largely inspired by the nobility, so that command of the army, as the tragedy experienced at Agincourt in 1415 demonstrated, was chiefly in the hands of noble leaders who gave the army a character as noble as it had had in the 1330s. If the same could be said of the English army (with this difference, that the nobility was totally committed to Henry V, who had complete control over it) matters were to change under the rule of the duke of Bedford, acting in the name of the young Henry VI. First, a rift grew between the royal council in England and those whose daily task it was to face the French in France. Secondly, as the war became less lucrative (with fewer expeditions into enemy territory) and the needs of defence came to dominate military activity, so the glamour of war which had undoubtedly existed both in the previous century and under Henry V, began to diminish. Members of the high aristocracy took turns to rule Normandy, with mixed success. The number of places which needed guarding and which required the presence of a person of authority meant that, in some cases, men of military talent and experience, but not necessarily of high birth, were given positions of considerable responsibility. The exigencies of war were such that those with long years of service to their name (and there were probably more of them in the fifteenth than in the fourteenth century) almost inevitably found themselves in positions of command. And because of a decline in the number of knights in the English army by 1450, it was upon those of lower social status that many of these commands devolved.
In the mid-1440s, Charles VII organised major reforms within the French army. The aim appears to have been two-fold: to reassert the authority of the crown to appoint to military commands and, by a ruthless dismissal of the majority of commanders who had come to assume such commands, to make the army once more an efficient weapon of state in royal hands. The exercise was remarkably successful. Most of those whom the king preserved in office were men of the middle nobility, men whose experience would enable them to take effective charge of those placed under them. The king was fortunate: he had plenty from whom to choose, and he could afford to take only the best into his service.
If, then, we recall that there were degrees of nobility and aristocracy, we can admit that the leadership of French and English armies during the Hundred Years War was very largely noble. Both in the giving of counsel and in the recruitment of forces and, later, on campaign and in battle, the nobility played a dominant role as the servants of their respective kings. This was the traditional pattern which one would expect to see continued, as indeed it was, into the sixteenth century. Yet, as was suggested earlier in this section, new ideas were being bandied about. In a climate of opinion which laid greater stress upon collective success than upon the fame or reputation of any one individual, could the desire for fame, which might impair the effectiveness of the army, survive? The answer lay not in trying to play down the search for glory in war, but in channelling these energies towards the service of the king who represented the public good and honour of a nation or people. After 1400, it has been noted, lawyers in the Parlement of Paris consistently tried to show the respectability of their soldier-clients by underlining their service to the king and the public good: ‘…a longuement servy le roy’;‘…tient frontier contre les enemis’;‘… il a esté grevé car lui estant en expedición pour la chose publique’ are phrases which, when used regularly, tell us something of the values of the society in which they are uttered, and of the soldier’s role in it.
The emphasis was now to be increasingly on service, given to and paid for by the state, which assumed the right to appoint its commanders (this was made easier by the fact that all accepted the state’s money for service in war) and to demand that it got the best available in return for its money. The leaders of its armies, appointed by commission (as Charles VII appointed his chief lieutenants in 1445) rather than by the ‘natural’ right of birth, were to become its officers for whom advancement would be a recognition of merit. The logical outcome of this slow change of direction was to come later, but not much later. By the sixteenth century, no longer assuming that it had a right to positions of leadership in the armies, the aristocracy began to attend military academies where it learned the art of making war. This is what the work of Vegetius and others was destined to achieve.9