Innholdsfortegnelse for MW X11.1 i Medieval World Culture & Conflict Magazine

The navy of the English was made up of drafted men and their ships. As discussed in previous issues, the king could demand the men of his realm for military activity. This extended to the sea, a practice that may have gone back to the Anglo-Saxon period. By the late Middle Ages, this was an old and traditional right of the monarchy. The men on these ships could be sailors or soldiers, but it is highly probable that they both fought when at sea. These sailors and captains were drawn from port towns and communities, whereas soldiers could be drawn from anywhere. Ships would be requested by size. In late medieval England, there were three key types of vessels: the barge, the balinger, and the galley. It seems that barges…

The lack of precision in the generalizations about medieval warfare is very understandable: to list all the battles and all the sieges recorded in all the chronicles and other records of the Middle Ages would be a lifetime’s labour, and even then it would only give us a ratio of the recorded events, which would be biased in favour of battles, since they are more dramatic and larger in scale than most sieges, and so more likely to be written about, especially in the laconic texts of the early Middle Ages. But when it comes to the sieges (and battles) of the Hundred Years’ War, it is much more practical to follow the advice of Jacques le Goff that “one must count what can be counted in the source material”.…

Medieval warhorses were the size of modern-day ponies Medieval warhorses are often depicted as massive and powerful beasts, but in reality many were no more than pony-sized by modern standards, a new study shows. Horses during the period were often below 14.2 hands high (1.47 metres), but size was clearly not everything, as historical records indicate huge sums were spent on developing and maintaining networks for the breeding, training, and keeping of horses used in combat. A team of archaeologists and historians searching for the truth about warhorses has found they were not always bred for size, but for success in a wide range of different functions – including tournaments and long-distance raiding campaigns. The researchers analysed English horse bones dating between AD 300 and 1650, found at 171 separate…

Writing these pieces has been great fun and has led us down some interesting paths. We have always tried to find new and different ways to access the subject we were writing about. Indeed, we have always endeavoured to combine a number of different areas: research from original documents, artefact studies, and firsthand experience, together with visits to collections and churches, with the latter often being particularly inspiring. Our first piece, on the Viking axe, was sparked off by a visit to see the wonderful stone sculpture here in Yorkshire of the Middleton Viking warrior armed with an axe. One of our last pieces took as its starting point a carved stone tympanum in a church in Dorchester in the south of England. Our piece on the bollock dagger was…

These six are the most famous Welsh castles and some of the best-known castles of medieval Europe. They are unique in that they were new builds at the behest of King Edward I (r. 1272-1307) and show his design influence. These castles are situated in coastal locations in northern Wales and constructed around the principality of Gwynedd, an area associated with the native Welsh princes of Wales and the focal points of their revolts. Other castles were built in Wales by both native Welsh and Anglo-Norman lords, while king and lords alike updated many more. The six share a number of commonalities. First, they were deliberately constructed on or close to the sea, which allowed them ready supply route access. Maritime resources were a central component to the successful English…

The first Mongol invasion is well covered, with detailed contemporary overviews, supporting sources from across the Mongol Empire, and extensive archaeological explorations in Hungary. In comparison, the later invasions can only be partially reconstructed through scattered mentions from Mamluk chronicles, Hungarian charters, and brief statements from several (often much later) European letters and chronicles. Archaeologists have pointed to potential sites of Mongol sieges in Slovakia from 1285. In the absence of more detailed accounts, popular speculation has generally dismissed the later assaults as utter defeats, where lightly armoured Mongols were overrun by European heavy cavalry. Yet the surviving materials paint a different picture. Europe did not have to wait long for the return of Mongol troops. In 1259, the veteran commander Burundai was moved to the Golden Horde’s western border…

Pepin the Short is a bit of a historical footnote, sandwiched between his father Charles Martel (‘the Hammer’), who won the Battle of Poitiers in 732, and his son Charles, known today as Charlemagne. Yet Pepin overthrew the figurehead Merovingian dynasty in 751 and, with the Pope’s blessing, invested himself as the first Frankish king of the line now known as the Carolingians. Between 741 and 758, Pepin fought and won battles in Lombardy, Saxony, Bavaria, and Burgundy. Along the way, he had also taken a preliminary swat at Aquitaine. While we lack virtually any Aquitanian sources, it is clear that Aquitaine considered itself an independent kingdom by the early eighth century. It was once a province under Frankish rule in the sixth century, but this control faded under the…

Such documents can flesh out our understanding of who went to war, for how long, how they got there, how much they were paid, and how the forces were organized into retinues and entourages. Chroniclers revelled in recording deeds of arms by great men, whose names fill their writing, but they took little to no notice of the aristocrats’ social inferiors, or of organizational details. To understand the great benefit administrative records are to historians, and the degree to which they enhance our understanding of the past, let us look more closely at the surviving documents addressing the English 1346-1347 campaign of the Hundred Years’ War, which included both their victory at the Battle of Crécy and their successful siege of the city of Calais. The archives are full of…

William, a Latin clergyman, was born and raised in the Frankish principalities that had been established in the Holy Land following the success of the First Crusade, and he enjoyed a long and illustrious career as a prominent prelate: his various capacities included serving as the archdeacon of Nazareth, tutor to the young Baldwin IV at the request of King Amalric, chancellor during the regency of Count Raymond III of Tripoli, and finally bishop of the Latin see of Tyre. Completed very shortly before its author’s death in 1186, the Historia’s ambitious narrative scope (spanning from the reign of the seventh-century Roman emperor Heraclius until the author’s own day) has frequently deterred scholars from attempting to analyze the Historia as a coherent whole. As Peter Edbury and John Gordon have…