Of all England's fourteenth-century kings, Edward II was the most dependent upon his Welsh subjects. As the first English prince of Wales he had been lord of the shires of both North and West Wales. Aside from being born in the midst of the building site that was Caernarfon Castle, he had maintained a number of Welshmen in his household as prince. Nevertheless it is likely that the connection with the uchelwyr, the class of the native elite that had deserted Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, was acquired on campaign. The loyalty displayed towards Edward II by this group right until the end of his reign is remarkable and the importance of this support has been underappreciated by many historians. Edward II's military machine was very much the same as that developed by Edward I but was extended above and beyond sustainable levels, and the number of Welshmen employed by Edward II in his campaigns to Scotland was larger even than those deployed by his father in the 1290s. The machine was found wanting most tellingly at Bannockburn in 1314 and again in 1322, but Edward did little to change the nature of his armies and few of his campaigns enjoyed conspicuous success. Enormous levies of Welshmen, generally led by their fellow countrymen, were essential to Edward's ability to wage war and also for the ability of his barons to oppose him. Most of Edward's opponents held substantial Marcher lordships so it was natural that, in their struggles with their king, Edward's barons deployed their Welsh tenants to buttress their causes. In the dispute over the ordinances intended to limit Edward's power in 1312, in the war fought against Hugh Despenser the younger in 1321 and in support of Thomas of Lancaster during the winter of 1321–22, the power of the lords of the March was measured in the numbers of men their estates could supply.

This chapter will consider the role of Welsh military resources in the political narrative of Edward II's early reign before turning its attention to the continuation of the wars against the Scots as far as Bannockburn. Next, it will discuss the political fallout from this cataclysmic defeat as it related to Wales: the revolt in Glamorgan led by Llywelyn Bren in 1316 through to the campaigns that led to the defeat of the king's enemies at Boroughbridge in 1322.

The reign of Edward III was, in military terms, a period of transition. At the beginning of his reign, the military systems inherited from Edward I were largely unchanged and their failures, obvious by the time of Bannockburn in 1314, had not been addressed. In 1327 the armies recruited in the young king's name for service in Scotland were dominated by foot soldiers levied on counties and liberties by commissions of array. The men-at-arms accompanying them were drawn primarily from the royal household and the households of the king's barons. By the time the first phase of the French war was concluded by the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, English armies had started to assume a different character. The foot soldier had almost wholly given way to the mounted archer serving in mixed retinues with mounted men-at-arms. Although mounted, and thus able to travel swiftly on horseback, both men-at-arms and mounted archers generally fought on foot. The means by which they were recruited also changed: commissions of array gradually gave way to recruitment by military indenture, and paid service was the norm. Effectively, this privatised military recruitment: captains were responsible for gathering both men-at-arms and archers, usually in approximately equal numbers, for fixed periods in a clearly defined contractual arrangement. This change was gradual; although indentures had been known in the reign of Edward I, they were then only for garrison service, but the effects on the military participation of men from the shires and March of Wales were marked. The ill-equipped foot soldier was obsolescent by the 1340s and, whether they were levied from Welsh shires, Marcher lordships or English counties, their decline was a result of their inflexibility. Although foot soldiers were recruited after 1360, they were generally employed, as we shall see, in specialist roles.

Wales was subject to other changes. The generation which had witnessed Edward I's conquest, that had bolstered Edward II's authority, and that had led armies far greater than those ever assembled by any Welsh prince, came to the end of their careers and their lives. By the 1340s there was an identifiable change in attitude among the Welsh elite toward fighting in English wars. The leaders of Welsh society had always defined their position by military leadership. By the second third of the fourteenth century this tied Welshmen, militarily, to their lords.

Welsh historians have tended to view the second half of the fourteenth century in the context of two attempts at Welsh self-determination. These were the claims of the last descendant of the princes of Gwynedd, Owain Lawgoch (d. 1378), to be prince of Wales and then later, the rebellion led by Owain Glyndŵr in pursuit of the same title during the first decade of the fifteenth century. The one was concentrated in France and attracted a sympathetic response in Wales and from Welshmen seeking service against the English in France. The other was a revolt fomented among men who had made their careers as soldiers and administrators of the English Crown. War determined the pattern of relationships between Welsh and English because, between 1360 and 1400, there was scarcely a year that did not witness some military engagement or defensive activity. That said, foreign expeditions led by the king in person were relatively unusual. There were none, for example, between 1359 and 1385. There was a further gap then to 1394 and no more before Richard II's fateful campaign to Ireland in 1399. The Irish campaigns marked a return of war to the lands of Wales in that they offered a departure point. Richard II was the first English king to visit Ireland since John campaigned there in 1210.

This chapter begins in the years after the Anglo-French peace settlement in 1360. English soldiers continued to have a presence in France and the first fruits of the ideas of national self-determination that bloomed under Owain Glyndŵr were harvested under the leadership of the last descendant, in the male line, of the princes of Gwynedd. The leadership of Owain Lawgoch (Owain of the Red Hand) meant that Welshmen served on both sides after the failure of the Brétigny settlement. The records available to us also reveal that Welshmen played their part in conflict at sea and in Iberia, Scotland and Ireland.

In this period, the military aspect of Marcher lordship expressed itself as forcefully as before, but, in common with the scale of armies after 1359, the scale of Welsh involvement was much reduced. The general experience of those living in the principality of Wales and the March was a peaceful one, although significant tensions lay beneath the surface. Peace and stability, combined with proactive management, meant that Marcher revenues greatly increased in the second half of the fourteenth century.

The period discussed in this book was one of significant change in the nature of military service in both England and Wales. The conquest of Wales by Edward I completed a process of expansion by the English Crown into Wales which had lasted centuries. It also marked the beginning of the end of another process, the transition from armies with a feudal component that held land in return for military service to armies recruited by various methods in return for pay. The settlement imposed upon Edward's newly conquered territories in Gwynedd – the statutes of Rhuddlan of 1284 – imposed legal and administrative conditions upon the Welsh. In common with similar provisions in England, they also imposed conditions upon men to serve in arms against the king's enemies. This chapter and that which follows will consider the theoretical implications of this settlement: military obligation in law and custom, and then their practical application in the practices and processes of recruitment, payment and deployment.

The nature of military obligation, as it existed in the English realm in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, was in flux. English kings had long found the apparently simple demands of the feudal summons a severe constraint on their ability to wage war. For this reason they had employed mercenaries and sought ways around its restrictions since at least the early twelfth century. Welshmen, paid for their service were often part of the solution. Edward I's Welsh wars changed the state of military obligation in England. The duty of all free men in England to possess the arms and military equipment appropriate to their status and wealth had been set out by Henry II in the Assize of Arms in 1181. In their laws, the Welsh princes invoked similar obligations, although these were not generally tied to land until Llywelyn ab Iorwerth made attempts to establish a military elite based on tenure of land in the thirteenth century. In November 1282 all free men with at least twenty liberates of land who were not serving in the Welsh war were summoned to appear at Northampton early in the next year, together with shire and borough representatives. Edward's objective was doubtless to secure financial grants in return for the service they were not doing. If so, he was unsuccessful and the obligation of military service inherent in the summons was not recognised.