The wars of Edward III have been intensively studied from the point of view of military strategy, personnel and commissariat in recent years, against a trend that has treated the fourteenth century as an unfashionable period of history. The reign of Edward III has suffered from a reaction to the over-adulation of Edward as one of the heroic English kings, and from the twentieth-century liberal historian's dislike of nationalism and aristocracy. Edward III's court and its culture has both nationalism and nobility in spades; the same is true of the subjects of my article, the personnel who made his military achievements possible. Administrative historians and students of military theory studies have had their say on Edward's wars; it is perhaps the turn of the biographer again. Even in such an old-fashioned field and with such an old-fashioned subject different approaches are possible, and what I am attempting is a group biography, a genre which the Dictionary of National Biography has recently embraced. What follows is in effect a brief group biography of the original members of the Order of the Garter.

The Order of the Garter is familiar enough to us as one of the first secular orders of knighthood, but it is worth going over the ground again briefly before we examine its military function in Edward's wars and look at the military elements in the careers of the individual knights. If I had been giving this lecture at the first Kalamazoo conference forty years ago, I would probably have claimed that the Garter was perhaps a great innovation, the first of all such secular monarchical orders. But research in the last four decades means that we can now see that it belongs to a kind of broader chivalric movement. There are no known secular orders in 1300; by 1350 we can name at least half a dozen where records have survived. The honor of being the earliest such orders now belongs to the “fraternal society” of St George in Hungary (1326) and the “order” of the Sash in Castile (c.1330).