Andrew Ayton's research has illuminated our understanding of royal military service by the fourteenth-century aristocracy and how the king drew on existing socio-economic networks to assemble his armies. But what did the Edwardian military community do when there were no royal armies to join? And how were private military activities organised and funded? During the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, numerous English magnates and knights, along with their followers, travelled to Prussia to join the Teutonic knights in their campaigns against the pagan (at least until 1386) Lithuanians. The historiography has concentrated on whether these Baltic expeditions can properly be termed crusades or whether they are better viewed as exercises in chivalric vanity. The Baltic excursions of the Western European aristocracy have been described as ‘chivalrous package tours’, a ‘safari’ and even ‘a parade of bored nobles seeking parties and pageantry … and finding excitement in the forests of Lithuania chasing human game’. This essay will not wade into the debate over the relative importance of religious or touristic motivations but will instead focus on how such expeditions were funded and assembled, including the existing and future military links between fellow crusaders.

As we shall see, the evidence concerning English participation in the Baltic crusades is patchy. What there is, including deponent testimony from the Court of Chivalry, suggests that involvement in military campaigns beyond the scope of national warfare was not uncommon and that these expeditionary parties drew upon existing networks. Andrew Ayton has recently stressed the importance of the ‘dynamics of recruitment’, which ‘moulded military service as a social and cultural phenomenon: they explain the incidence of military service – who served, when, where and with whom – and thus the accumulation of actual experience that fuelled fortunes and mentalities, individual and collective’. The investigation of military networks is currently undergoing a transformation as historians begin to use the computational power of relational databases to analyse huge amounts of nominal data. Most historians have concentrated on service in royal armies, for which the surviving evidence is most plentiful, but many of the soldiers who fought for the English kings also took part in expeditions to the Baltic.

The later fourteenth century is blessed with sources enabling historians to create portrayals of colourful careers in arms. The testimony of deponents before the Court of Chivalry gives the soldiers' own accounts of their activities, while the portrait of the knight in the Canterbury Tales delivers an image of (allegedly) perfect military accomplishments. To this, we can now add the online database produced during the ‘Soldier in Later Medieval England’ project, which provides evidence of both actual and intended service for the English crown. Combining these sources, we can reconstruct a number of detailed case studies of soldiers and where they chose to fight. We can also test the depositions in the Court of Chivalry against the royal records of military service, and consider if the witnesses were braggards, or, by contrast, were modestly understating their level of military service. Finally, can we find out which soldier was ‘best’: who had the longest record of service; who took part in the most varied campaigns; who was the youngest; who was the oldest; and, of course, as the title suggests, taking the line from the description of Chaucer's Knight, who rode the furthest? This essay is limited to a set of case studies, drawing mainly from cases heard before the Court of Chivalry and expanded with further information from the medieval soldier database. Although they cannot be said to form a truly representative sample of the medieval English soldiery, nevertheless, this self-selected sample does indeed allow us to paint a dynamic portrait of what an average, as well as an exceptional, career in arms could involve in the later fourteenth century.

There are few areas of medieval studies that have flourished so much in recent years as military history. This volume represents a further flowering. The seeds of its contents were sown at a conference held at the ICMA Centre, University of Reading, in July 2009. They germinated there thanks to the energetic discussion of all participants, have subsequently been nurtured and pruned by reviewers, and are now presented in full bloom as significant contributions to the study of the individual soldier in the fourteenth century.

From the outset, our intention had been to invite contributors carrying out grass roots research in archival, as opposed to chronicle, sources, so that the conference and any publications would be genuinely new and ground-breaking. This was a natural development of our own research project under the auspices of which the conference was held – ‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England’. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for three years from 2006, with Adrian Bell and Anne Curry as co-investigators, Andy King and David Simpkin as research assistants, and Adam Chapman as doctoral student. Our aim was to produce an on-line searchable database of all soldiers known to have served the English crown between 1369 and 1453. This information was collected from a vast array of muster and retinue rolls held in English and French archives, and from the letters of protection and attorney which some soldiers took out to protect their domestic interests during their military service.