CHANGING FACES IN THE STUDY OF MEDIEVAL WARFARE

This framework of understanding, interesting and important in itself, told us very little about the conduct of war. It was massively weighted in favour of the Hundred Years’ War, but even then it focused on specific battles and great events. There was an assumption that beyond these moments, there was little worth telling. This was especially true for English-language historians.

For a long time, military history was not part of the mainstream of medieval history, which was centred, especially in England and America, on constitutional, political, administrative, and intellectual institutions. Those who studied these areas were reluctant to concern themselves with the details of military events and found that they could simply refer to the standard works, which gave rise to a whole genre of writing in use to this day. This tendency was intensified because there were ample sources for England and France during the Hundred Years’ War, although there was a tendency to focus on a series of battles in the context of an apparently more organized and, in a sense, more familiar form of war fought between ‘states’ of a reassuringly familiar kind. As a result, much warfare that lacked such spectacular events was simply dismissed. In the words of A. H. Thompson: “European warfare in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shews a somewhat bewildering variety of practice behind which lies no constructive idea.”