As we have already noted, people of the late Middle Ages appear to have accepted, with a certain sense of fatalism, the destructive energies released by war. We have also seen that the period witnessed an increasing awareness of what such destruction meant to those who experienced it: moral shock and material loss. Was this desirable, either in terms of the physical violence which war appeared to breed (‘there is no good war without fire’), or of the economic loss (sometimes long-lasting) which it caused, or (a point increasingly accepted) of the military effectiveness which commanders sought to achieve? The evidence seems to suggest not.
It has become fashionable to see war in terms of armies ravaging the enemy’s countryside, in order to deprive him of material and economic resources, rather than as a series of ‘set-piece’ confrontations or battles. The enemy, Vegetius had taught, should be brought to his knees with as little risk, effort and expense as possible. This required that war be fought in a relatively disciplined and ordered manner. We must take note of how these changes took place.
The late Middle Ages witnessed a development in the formalisation of war’s activities. Some writers have seen this as satisfying the well-known medieval love of symbolic action: the giving of his right glove to Sir Denis de Morbecque symbolised John II’s act of surrender at the battle of Poitiers, while the very formal surrender of the keys by its leading citizens represented the capture of Harfleur by Henry V in September 1415. Likewise the raising of unfurled banners signalled the opening of hostilities, just as the firing of a cannon came to mark the start of a siege. The sociologist may choose to interpret such acts in terms of play or game, and that element cannot be totally ruled out. Yet of far greater significance is the fact that such acts were not only symbolic but were also regarded as creating particular legal situations which could have effects upon decisions taken in the courts of law. Disputes as to the legal status of a soldier claimed by another as his prisoner could hang on the circumstances in which the man was captured or the manner in which he was taken. Whose prisoner he was might depend to whom he had formally surrendered, and how. A knight might take another prisoner and assume that he was now his ‘master’ (with all that this could mean in legal terms); but if the ‘giving of faith’ to the captor by the captured were not done properly and formally, then the ‘capture’ might be regarded as invalid and open to challenge in a court of law.11
The historical significance of this form of evidence (which may appear to be mere quibbling over a matter of military custom) is precisely that it shows us that recourse to the law was encouraged as a means of bringing fairly widely-held conventions to bear upon the conduct of war, and that these were being applied judicially in courts such as the Parlement of Paris or the military or admiralty courts in both England and France.12 In such courts a number of different traditions, some more formally legal than others, were brought to bear. One was local custom, built up over decades and even centuries, upon which many decisions in suits over merchandise taken in war time were based. Another, more difficult to define with precision, was the tradition of the chivalric code, which gave guidance and, sometimes, laid down principles for the conduct of the knightly class in war. But probably most important of all was the strong influence of the ‘written law’, and in particular of the specifically military law of Rome which, much modified by more recently promulgated canon law, sometimes formed the basis of judgements handed down in, for instance, the Parlement. Here the influence of the fourteenth-century Italian school of jurists, one of whose tasks was to make the law of Rome, and the later law of Justinian, relevant and applicable in their own, very different, century, was considerable. In Italian tradition law was one means of achieving the common good. Law must be practical, otherwise its influence and effectiveness would be diminished. Significantly it was to the Italian universities that Charles V of France turned in 1368–9 for advice as to whether he had a cause for resuming the war against the English in Aquitaine. Equally significant, it was to the same widely accepted precepts of Roman law that those who sought to find solutions to legal problems arising out of war between different peoples also turned. The law was ‘international’ in all but name.
Appeal to the old-established law, albeit an up-dated one, was a way of bringing a measure of order to war’s activities. Another was the introduction of new or restated regulations concerning the conduct of both armies and individual combatants in time of war. It was the final quarter of the fourteenth century which witnessed increasingly outspoken criticism of the way contemporary war was being fought; the works of Honoré Bouvet and Philippe de Mézières are among our prime witnesses to this. The call to defend the civilian, his person, and his property, a reaction against the generally accepted ways of making war, was beginning to be heard. It is no coincidence that the best-known attempt to control the excesses of English armies, the ordinances drawn up by Richard II at Durham in 1385, should date from this time. In these regulations, a number of important matters are dealt with. The military jurisdiction of the constable and the marshal of the host is clearly established, and punishments for specific offences are set out; the need for soldiers to act only with authority of superior (‘chevytaignes’) is emphasised; order within the army is to be maintained; the rights of civilians are to be observed; and specific regulations regarding the capture and ransoming of prisoners are set out. A generation later, in Henry V’s day, another, rather longer, set of ordinances was to be issued, ‘the whiche… thinketh the Kyng to be nedefull to be cried in the oste’ from a copy to be given to all commanders, ‘so that thay may have playn knowlege and enfourme their men of thiez foresaide ordinauncez & articlez’.13 It was not sufficient for the ordinances to be made; their contents had to be publicised so that all serving or present in the king’s army should know what they might or might not do. There could be no doubt regarding the king’s firm intention to exercise discipline within his army.
The practical ability to translate that determination into reality was increased by the development of the military indenture, one of whose major contributions was that it established a hierarchy of authority and command, and made all those within the system liable to the taking of orders and the acceptance of discipline. In theory, if not always in practice, authority in both English and French armies came to be exercised in the name of the king, or of one or more nominated to act in his name. Further down, captains who did not have lieutenants assigned to them often appointed such men themselves, the relationship being formalised through the drawing up of indentures. In this way the chain of command came into existence, and could be seen to exist. When it was a question of applying that command, this could be done in different ways. Captains exercised a measure of disciplinary authority which they could use to counter or eliminate specifically unauthorised activities, and in this they had the assistance of the marshals and of the court of the constable of the host. Standards of competence and equipment could be maintained by musters, and then by regular reviews, when soldiers under a particular commander were regularly assembled (often once a month in time of war) to be counted, inspected and passed as suitable for service (‘armez entiers’), the inspection being usually carried out at the command of the highest authority by two independent persons, one of whom was sometimes a civilian.14 It was only after such an inspection that the crown’s financial agents were instructed to make payment to the captain, and then only for those men who were present and had ‘passed muster’.
The application of such a structured system had great advantages, as was clearly appreciated when a form of it was introduced into the French army in 1351 as part of a package of reforms. The quality of troops, and not merely their quantity, could thus be maintained. In this way the men themselves, if fulfilling what was required of them, would experience no financial loss through penalties; nor would their leaders suffer reproach for providing soldiers who did not come up to standard, as was sometimes the case. The inspection system had the advantage that it held no fear for those who fulfilled their obligations, while it could expose those who did not and who, thereby, not only diminished the efficiency of the force in which they served, but also laid themselves open to ‘correction by the purse’.
The withholding of wages, the basic source of wealth to most soldiers, for the breaking or non-fulfillment of an indenture was perhaps the most effective way of applying and maintaining military standards within an army. Important, too, were the attitudes of the crown’s military officers and of the courts to military misdemeanours. For a soldier not to be adequately prepared for war (lacking proper weapons, for instance) was bad enough; for him to be absent without leave (‘noman departe fro[m] the stale [army] withoute leve & licence of his lord or maister’, as Henry V’s ordinance put it)15 was coming to be seen as not merely the infringement of a private contract to which he was party, but as something much more important and significant, little short of treason itself. This change of emphasis was coming about in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. In 1433, when Robert Stafford was involved in a suit before the Parlement of Paris, accused of having negligently failed, through absence, to prevent the capture by the French of La-Ferté-Bernard, of which he was captain, he sought (successfully, as it turned out) to defend his ‘honneur’ and to have the sentence of confiscation of property passed against him overturned. At the same time, and in the same court, Thomas Overton and Sir John Fastolf were locked in legal combat over a complex financial case which was concerned, on the one hand, with a matter of personal honour, on the other, and more significantly, with how money, collected in the form of taxes, should be spent.16 How far, the question was being asked in these years, was the obligation of the king (and, by implication, that of soldiers in his pay) to defend the public welfare the all-important consideration governing military conduct? A soldier, having agreed by indenture to serve the king or his representative in return for the promise of pay, was now coming to be seen as accepting pay from public funds, so that the obligation to serve the public welfare (expressed in terms such as ‘la chose publique’ or ‘la deffense du pais’) imposed itself with greater moral weight upon his shoulders. In 1439 the English Parliament moved with the times when it passed legislation making desertion, even when no war was being fought, the breaking not simply of a private contract between soldier and captain but, more important, the breaking of a formal undertaking in which both soldier and captain were the servants of a greater, public good. In such circumstances, and with such ideas in the air, it is scarcely surprising that every effort possible should have been made to achieve and maintain proper authority over every soldier in an army. With Parliament asking questions about the spending of funds publicly voted, it became morally incumbent, as well as militarily desirable, for commanders to impose discipline from the top. Very slowly the idea of public accountability for money spent (or ill spent) was coming into being.17