How Often Would You Actually Go to War?
Whether a medieval Englishman went to war often depended less on training and more on simple bad timing — plenty of genuinely unprepared people ended up on a battlefield purely because they happened to be in the wrong retinue at the wrong moment.
During the Barons’ War of the 1260s, Simon de Montfort brought London’s so-called “Trained Bands” into his army at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, despite the name being wildly optimistic — the Bands were mostly apprentices and labourers with minimal actual combat training. Facing a cavalry charge from the future Edward I, they promptly fled toward home. Ironically, this accidental rout helped win the battle for Montfort anyway, since Edward and his own inexperienced young knights broke formation to chase the fleeing Londoners, leaving his father, King Henry III, dangerously exposed to Montfort’s remaining forces — Henry lost the battle and, for a time, control of the country. Edward, having clearly learned his lesson about battlefield discipline, went on to defeat and kill Montfort at Evesham the following year.
Warfare wasn’t purely a matter of individual bravery, either — it served a deliberate political function. One later English king, in a fictionalised but historically grounded reflection on the ongoing wars with France, made essentially this argument: a foreign war kept the nobility united and occupied against a common enemy, and the alternative, with a class trained for little beyond fighting and nothing external to fight, was far bloodier civil strife at home. Given that several of the very worst periods of internal English violence — the Barons’ Wars, the unrest of the 1320s, the later Wars of the Roses — did indeed erupt during lulls between major foreign campaigns, it’s a defensible, if cynical, piece of medieval statecraft.
Visit westerbone.com for more insights into medieval historical fiction.