What follows is the culmination of several years of research which has led me through the doors of numerous archives and libraries in England and ‘across the way’ in France. The search through voluminous original documents and records, and the consultation of published primary sources, has been a lengthy process; such a task cannot be completed without enduring some level of tedium, but feelings of this sort are easily eclipsed by the excitement of discovering new pieces of evidence which, however significant, can throw further light on the subject of medieval English armies and the lives of the individuals who constituted them.

From the outset of this research it was my intention to write a clear and ‘rounded’ account of an English military expedition (1345–46) that would appeal to students, academic researchers and the general reader alike. In this fashion I have endeavoured to further our understanding of medieval warfare, but if this present work only succeeds in sparking the interest of a curious mind, or aids the research of somebody else, then I shall be replete.

There are a handful of individuals and institutions to whom I am greatly indebted for their generous help and support in bringing this current work to fruition. Firstly, I wish to acknowledge the grant made by the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research, which helped make this publication possible. An award from the Extraordinary Research Fund, made by the University of Leeds School of History, enabled me to undertake archival research in France, and I was warmly welcomed by the community of scholars at Université de Bordeaux III (now Université Bordeaux Montaigne) who permitted my use of the research institute, Ausonius – UMR 5607, during my brief sojourn in the regional capital. The Ranulf Higden Society has also provided a stimulating environment in which I have had numerous queries regarding the translation of complex medieval documents answered.

David Simpkin, David Green and Philip Caudrey have been particularly generous in sharing their research findings. They have offered specialist advice on the careers of those men who fought in the reigns of Edward I and Edward II, who belonged to the affinity of Edward, the Black Prince, and who originated from Norfolk, respectively.

An investigation of the extent to which Henry of Lancaster's war retinue was a cohesive force, and an assessment of the stability of its composition, are prerequisites to understanding why it was such a formidable fighting contingent in 1345. The strength and cohesion of the retinue were fundamental to establishing efficient networks of command and communication, discipline and tactical capability, all of which were vital to its ‘operational effectiveness’ and no doubt contributed to the overall success of the expedition in the duchy. A feeling of camaraderie based on previous experience of fighting alongside one another, of serving under the same captain or campaigning in the same theatre of war, would have helped forge a collective identity among the troop and enhanced their effectiveness and efficiency as a team of combatants. An insight into the esprit de corpswhich had developed among Lancaster's retinue can be gained by analysing the men's histories of service: including how often they had taken up arms together on earlier occasions and the proportion who had previously served under Lancaster's command. Moreover, evidence of continuity of military service with Lancaster on campaigns undertaken either side of the expedition to Aquitaine can be used to establish the stability of his military personnel in the mid 1340s. The level of stability of the composition of Lancaster's retinue can also be compared with that of retinues led by other captains around that time, as well as those led by noblemen at the end of the thirteenth and later in the fourteenth centuries, in order to determine whether the size of his comitiva, and the means by which it had been assembled, affected the overall stability of his troop in 1345.

In addition to a shared campaigning experience prior to 1345, the cohesion and unity of Lancaster's retinue derived from a wide range of personal connections which existed, on the one hand, between the retinue leader and his men (at-arms or archers) and, on the other, between the men themselves based, among other things, on family and friends, comradeship, lordship, tenure and a shared locality.

The study of an English army raised during an important period of transformation in the organisation of war would not be complete without an investigation of the development of professional soldiering. The careers of the most renowned professional soldiers such as the Cheshire knights Robert Knolles and Hugh Calveley have been well documented in both contemporary and modern literature, and there can be little doubt of their single-minded commitment to a martial lifestyle. The task of establishing traits of professionalism amongst less well-known soldiers, however, is more difficult. It is the aim in this final chapter to investigate the extent to which professional soldiering is evident in the retinue of Henry of Lancaster in 1345–46. How many of Lancaster's men should be considered as professionals in warfare, and how many different retinue captains had they previously served under before joining Lancaster's comitiva? The answers to these questions may give an insight into men's attitudes towards warfare and their aspirations to different types of careers in arms during the first half of the fourteenth century. It is important to remember that professional soldiers were not a homogeneous group, as the paths and progression of a military career could vary greatly from one man to the next, and a focus, therefore, on the underlying patterns of service of individuals can often help elucidate the various motivations and campaigning habits of military careerists.

If we broaden the analysis to include military service performed after 1345 then we can also capture the careers of men who were inexperienced and relatively new to the business of warfare at the time of Lancaster's first expedition to Aquitaine. By reconstructing the entire careers of the earl's men, as far as the sources permit, and focusing on those individuals who served on the largest number of campaigns, we can also assess the different types of military professionals that emerged in the fourteenth century. The loyal warrior who might be considered a ‘one household soldier’, for example, who served exclusively with the same retinue leader during his lifetime, was clearly of a different cut of cloth from the roaming careerist or freelance soldier who served in the companies of multiple captains.

Recruitment

The two principal methods of recruitment used by the Crown to raise armies during the first phase of the Hundred Years' War were the indenture system and the commission of array. Indentures, or contracts of service, were first used under Edward I, and then more frequently under Edward III during the Anglo-Scottish wars, until they became the predominant method of recruitment when an army was not led by the king in person and more specifically, when the royal Wardrobe was not present. It was the use of short-term contracts between the king and his captains that allowed Edward III to pursue his highly successful strategy of fighting France on multiple fronts in the 1340s and 1350s. The indenture system essentially filled the vacuum created by the absence of the king and his Wardrobe clerks, who would ordinarily administer the army's finance, and became the most effective means of raising an expeditionary force, or several, if required, which were led overseas by the king's lieutenants.

The use of indentures resulted from the wider developments in military organisation during the first half of the fourteenth century, whereby the feudal elements of the English armies of Edward I and Edward II, based on the provision of compulsory and unpaid military service, were replaced by wholly paid armies. At the turn of the thirteenth century a royal host typically included a combination of feudal, voluntary unpaid and paid components, but by the time of Edward III's wars in Scotland all armies were paid. The system of contracts was used to raise ‘mixed’ retinues by indenture, which from the 1330s onwards consisted of approximately equal numbers of men-at-arms and mounted archers. These retinues could vary in size from a couple of soldiers to a more substantial force of several hundred men depending upon the rank and status of the captain under whose command they served. It was the retinue captain who was responsible for recruiting and leading his men in war.

The commission of array, by contrast, was the traditional means by which infantry divisions were raised from the local communities of England and Wales.

When Lancaster's fleet sailed up the Gironde estuary and disembarked at Bordeaux on 9 August 1345 the duchy of Aquitaine was only a pale shadow of what it had once been. The territories under English control were limited to the southern coastal towns of Bayonne and Bordeaux, Saint-Sever and the maritime strip of land which joined them. There were no towns deeper inland which had remained loyal to Edward III, as French forces had advanced as close as Libourne, to the east/north-east of Bordeaux, and to Langon in the south. The principal aim of the expedition was simply to recapture the key fortifications that had fallen to the French, and to regain control of areas that had been gradually encroached upon since Philippe VI had declared the duchy confiscate in May 1337. The grant of extensive administrative, judicial and military powers to the king's lieutenant suggests, as Jonathan Sumption points out, that ‘his military objectives were left entirely to his own discretion’. It is unlikely that Lancaster had any preconceived plans of attack before landing in Aquitaine, and the openness of his objectives is reflected by the lack of precision in his indenture with the king, which simply states that ‘if there is war … to do the best he can’ (si guerre soit, et a faire le bien q'il poet).

The first acts of warfare in the duchy had begun in the regions surrounding Bordeaux two months prior to the arrival of Lancaster. Local Gascon lords allied to the English conducted raids in Agenais, Périgord and Saintonge, which resulted in the capture of Montravel and several other formidable castles along the Dordogne river. It was in the second half of June, however, that the official offensive began when the English seneschal, Ralph, Lord Stafford laid siege to Blaye.6 This garrison town lies roughly 40 kilometres north of Bordeaux and seems to have been an obvious choice of attack given its proximity to the provincial capital and its strategic position on the north bank of the Gironde. Stafford then doubled back and marched up the Garonne valley and laid siege to Langon, having left part of the Gascon forces behind at Blaye.

On Sunday 13 March 1345 the king entered into an indenture, or formal contract of service, with Henry of Lancaster, whereby Henry agreed to go to Aquitaine as the king's lieutenant and command an army of 2000 men who were to assemble at Southampton on 14 May, ready to embark for the duchy. The bulk of the cost of the expedition was to be financed by the accumulated clerical and lay subsidies, forms of extraordinary direct taxation granted to the king by parliament two years earlier. The indenture stipulated that the army was to comprise 500 men-at-arms, 500 Welsh infantry and 1000 archers (half mounted, half on foot). It also set out, amongst other things, the extensive military and judicial powers that Lancaster was to have as the king's lieutenant, and stated that he was to serve in the duchy for an initial period of six months. The terms embodied in the indenture of service are discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, but, first, an important prerequisite to an in-depth study of Lancaster's army is an examination of the typical soldiers who were required to serve under the earl's command. Although the various troop types which constituted English armies in the fourteenth century have been discussed extensively in previous studies, there remains some ambiguity surrounding the terminology used both by contemporary clerks and present-day scholars to describe men of different rank and status. A brief definition of each type of soldier that served with Lancaster is therefore needed. It is necessary to determine how they were equipped, to analyse the various terms used by clerks to describe such men and where they fitted in the overall structure of the army, and how they related to medieval society in general.

The conventional view that medieval armies were made up of ‘cavalry’ and ‘infantry’ contingents does not fit with the English armies of the fourteenth century. As Michael Prestwich points out, it would be problematic to define a soldier by whether he fought on horseback or on foot, not least because the developments in army organisation in Edward III's reign had transformed the military role, and sometimes the status, of the medieval soldier.

If ‘the size and splendour of a magnate's retinue signalised his importance in the [medieval] world’, then Henry of Lancaster must have been considered one of the most important men of his time. The comitiva(retinue) which Lancaster assembled for war in 1345 was not only the largest of the retinue contingents which set out to Aquitaine in that year, but the largest ever to be mobilised for any military expedition up to that date. It was a harbinger of the ‘super-retinues’ which characterised the structural composition of the English armies of the second half of the fourteenth century and more importantly, from a historian's point of view, it remains the most fully documented of the retinue contingents in Lancaster's army.

The subject of the military retinue has received much scholarly attention over recent decades, but an in-depth study of a single English retinue which campaigned in France up to the Treaty of Brétigny (1360) has rarely been undertaken. As a result of the recent rediscovery of the missing portion of Lancaster's 1345 retinue roll, the men who served under his banner in Aquitaine now can be seen to represent the largest military retinue of the first half of the fourteenth century for which there is full nominal evidence of the entire troop, that is to say, the identities of all of the men are known to us. This provides a unique opportunity to investigate the formation and structure of a war retinue of exceptional size based firmly on prosopographical evidence of the individuals who took up the sword (or indeed the bow) with Lancaster. Such an approach can modify Kenneth Fowler's earlier assessment of the earl's comitiva, and further our understanding of the means by which a magnate could raise a retinue of unprecedented magnitude in the mid 1340s.

To understand Lancaster's war retinue in 1345 we must endeavour to answer the basic but fundamental question: how was Lancaster able to assemble a military contingent which itself was the size of a small army? By what means did he go about the task of recruiting such a sizable troop?

The financial system of the English government of the fourteenth century is a well-researched subject which has interested historians for more than a century. Consequently, there is an abundance of historiography based on the royal medieval administrative system. T. F. Tout's impressive Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England marked the beginning of a plethora of important scholarly studies which have developed our understanding of the role of the state and of the king within the overall financial system, the evolution of the different departments of government and the working of the administration in practice. It is no surprise, however, that comparatively little attention has been given to studying the financial administration of a single army or military expedition based firmly on the pay records, considering that the relevant documents are often widely dispersed among the administrative records and, in many respects, it remains a specialist subject of study. An attempt to trace the expenditure of the Crown and military captains through the administrative records and to construct a schedule of payments which are itemised in the extant accounts has, up to now, yet to be undertaken.

This approach to the sources will enable us to understand some basic issues of financing an army. For example, how did the king's wages effectively reach the pockets of soldiers who served on expeditions overseas, and can we identify the individuals (both prominent and obscure) who were involved in the process? How did the ‘money chain’, so to speak, work in the mid 1340s – from which departments was funding issued, and what different methods of payment were used by the Crown? The details of payments to captains can also be used to analyse the efficiency of the royal administrative system over the course of the expedition, and assess whether it was affected by the growing war effort following Edward III's great expedition to Normandy in 1346. A close scrutiny of the sources will help elucidate the various administrative procedures of accounting for service in Aquitaine, and provide valuable insight into how the financial system worked in wartime.

The Siege of Aiguillon

At the beginning of 1346, the French army in Aquitaine and the surrounding regions was in disarray following the English acquisition of territory, and by March its possessions were restricted to a few major strongholds. In response to Lancaster's military success and territorial gains the French raised an army of an unprecedented size for the southern theatre of war. The army that Philippe VI provided for his son, Jean, duke of Normandy, was the result of a period of intense military recruitment financed by papal loans and taxation of the communities in the south. Soldiers were recruited from various regions in France and crossbowmen were hired from Aragon and Genoa. It is difficult to determine the size or composition of the entire French army; from among the vast range of numbers given by the chroniclers, it seems reasonable to estimate that the army numbered somewhere between the 10,000 given by Robert Avesbury and the 30,000 recorded in the Récits d'un bourgeois de Valenciennes. This huge force was led by no fewer than twenty-one counts and another thirty-one noblemen.

The main army under Normandy's command comprised an array of northern lords, including Pierre, duke of Bourbon, Eudes IV, duke of Burgundy, and Gautier of Brienne, duke of Athens, as well as Jean, count of Boulogne, Bouchard, count of Vendôme and Charles, count of Joigny. They were augmented by the military officers of the royal household: Raoul II, constable of France and count of Eu, and both marshals and the master of the Royal Archers. A second army assembled at Toulouse at the instance of Jean de Marigny, bishop of Beauvais, which included nobility drawn from the southern seneschalcies, such as Jean, count of Armagnac, Pierre- Ramond, count of Comminges, and Gaston Fébus, count of Foix. The French force which mustered in the south brought with it a train of siege equipment, including five cannons; considering the weight and size of such equipment it made logistical sense for it to be brought by the southern army which was located closer to the intended theatre of war than its northern counterpart.

This catalogue provides key information on individuals who served, or who intended to serve, in Lancaster's retinue on the Aquitaine expedition of 1345–46. The entries are not complete biographies, but provide a summary of qualitative evidence of each person. Entries are arranged in alphabetical order by surname and are given in the following format:

Note that evidence of county of origin is tentative when based solely on a locative surname which has several toponyms. For example, it is feasible that the archer Thomas de Ashley may have originated from either Cheshire or Northamptonshire, as there are places named Ashley located in both counties. Forenames are given in their modern indigenous form, except where ambiguity remains. Locative surnames are given in their modern form if the place-name can be identified with certainty (e.g. Blakschaue is rendered as Blackshaw, Yorkshire), as are descriptive (e.g. Broun as Brown) or occupational names (e.g. Cok as Cook), except where a more common form of the surname exists in the sources. Sir Thomas Cok, for example, is rendered as Cok rather than Cook.

For the purpose of brevity entries have been kept short and generally do not include information which can be found in the main text of this work, or in well-known secondary literature. Evidence of military service is not referenced in detail, nor are the administrative commissions undertaken by men at county level which has been largely sourced from the online Calendar of Patent Rolls. Similarly, the evidence of landholdings is often duplicated with the evidence of service in Lancaster's retinue (line two), and therefore is usually only referenced once.