Book Review: Henry of Lancaster’s Expedition to Aquitaine,1345-46: Military Service and Professionalism in the Hundred Years’ War Nicholas A. Gribit

Henry of Lancaster’s contribution to the wars waged by Edward III in the mid-fourteenth century, most notably his spectacularly successful expedition to Aquitaine in 1345-1346, has long been recognized by historians, just as it was celebrated by his contemporaries. Through the popular, chronicle-based work of Alfred Burne and the ground-breaking scholarship of Kenneth Fowler in the 1950s and 1960s, via Jonathan Sumption’s sweeping narrative in the late 1980s, to Clifford J. Rogers’s more recent portrayal of the victory at Bergerac as a prime example of an English way of war rooted in rapid movement and the quest for battle, Henry of Lancaster’s expedition to Aquitaine has an established place in Hundred Years War historiography. However, what Nicholas A. Gribit’s weighty monograph demonstrates is just how much more can be done with the richly documented campaigns of the fourteenth century. In the second part of his book, Gribit offers a lively narrative of Lancaster’s field operations in Aquitaine. He navigates a carefully reasoned, independent course through the textual ambiguities of the chronicles. Notably, by critical engagement with the ‘St. Omer chronicle’, a text rediscovered some years ago by Clifford Rogers, he succeeds in casting new light on these familiar campaigns. While he makes a good case for Lancaster’s ‘exceptional’ generalship, quite as interesting is his argument that these victories are likely to have had a powerful confidence-boosting impact at a pivotal moment in the war. For, as he shows, news of Lancaster’s triumphs would have reached England not only by means of messenger-borne dispatches to the king but also through the recollections of returning soldiers, a number of whom arrived in good time to serve with Edward III in Normandy and Crécy or at Neville’s Cross.

While Gribit is at his most relaxed and engaging in the chapters on Lancaster’s field operations, it is in the first and third parts of the book that genuinely new ground is broken. In the first, the organization and financial administration of Lancaster’s army are brought under the spotlight, while in the third we turn to his personal retinue, and specifically to how the men were recruited and how their backgrounds and experience contributed to the collective identity of what was both a social organism and fighting unit. Here and there, a degree of strain is evident in the argument: points are laboured or, when engaging with pertinent historiography, a discordant note is struck. Some readers may also find Gribit’s penchant for highlighting the perceived errors of those who have preceded him a little wearisome, although at least there is a smile or two to be had when occasionally the criticism backfires. Nevertheless, through the careful assembly, assessment, and analysis of a wealth of new material from archival and printed records, the book offers much food for thought on the organization of war and military recruitment at this time. And it in no way diminishes Gribit’s achievement to point out that a reader is also left with a clear sense of what remains to be done and where an adventurous researcher might proceed next.

Following an agenda first mapped out in H. J. Hewitt’s classic work on the organization of war under Edward III, Chapters 3 and 4 of Gribit’s book examine the practicalities of assembling, managing, paying, and transporting a ‘hybrid’ army of contracted retinues of mounted troops and arrayed contingents of English and Welsh foot, consisting in all of about 2,000 combatants. A thorough search of the enrolled Exchequer accounts relating to Lancaster’s expedition has proved particularly fruitful, yielding, for example, a more complete picture of where the warhorses of Lancaster’s army were appraised and how many were lost during the expedition. But the summarized, enrolled copies of accounts presented at the Exchequer can lay traps for the unwary. Relying on a Pipe Roll entry, Gribit argues that Lancaster’s transportation fleet consisted of 252 ships, noting that no fewer than three distinguished historians ‘mistakenly claim’ that there were 152. Such weight of advocacy ought really to have set alarm bells ringing; the fact that only 201 masters and constables were owed pay and that 152 ships are listed on a roll attached to the original particulars of account surely settle the matter. Gribit’s instructive exploration of how payments were made to captains, in cash or by assignment of revenues, in England or Aquitaine, before, during, and after the campaign, leads to the persuasive conclusion that the efficiency and flexibility of royal financial administration made an important contribution to the operational success of contract armies on multiple fronts. It is unfortunate, therefore, that he misinterprets the terms that Lancaster secured for the payment known as ‘regard’. Calculated according to the number of men-at-arms serving under a captain’s banner, regard became a standard component of the package of remuneration from 1345. For his own retinue, Lancaster received three times the rate that was to become the norm for later campaigns (the other retinue captains in his army secured less generous terms). With the first half year’s worth of pay and regard delivered up front, he had much more disposable cash to prepare for the campaign than would have been provided by an advance on his men’s wages alone. And for the whole expedition, in addition to over £14,500 in wages for his retinue, he was ultimately owed nearly £10,800 in regard by virtue of fielding 250 men-at-arms: the newly established ‘captain’s bonus’ had therefore contributed more than 40 per cent of pay-related remuneration. Lancaster was also relieved of the customary obligation to deliver half of his war gains to the crown, which was a concession that – given the ransoms and booty secured at Bergerac and Auberoche – would prove immensely profitable. It can be seen, therefore, that the crown’s financial planning and flexibility extended to providing captains with both the incentive and the wherewithal to take on the responsibilities of independent command. When, in order to get his fleet to sail, we find Lancaster willing and able to disburse nearly £650 in mariners’ wages from his own resources, we are witnessing a war machine in which strategic ambition has been matched by the sinews of war.

The last three chapters of the book focus on Henry of Lancaster’s personal retinue, for which a roll of names has survived. Three long-misplaced membranes of this retinue roll, listing the esquires and archers, were only recently rediscovered, and Gribit is the first historian to make use of the complete document. The roll is not without interpretative problems. It supplies the names of far more combatants than would be expected, given the retinue’s projected contract strength, yet it omits others who are known to have served. And as a simple list of names, grouped by rank, it offers no indication of the internal company structure of the retinue. Consequently, it can provide only indirect guidance to those interested in social connections or the process of retinue formation. Nevertheless, Lancaster’s is the most fully documented of the large retinues to have served the English crown during the first phase of the Anglo-French war, and this long roll of names does offer great potential for biographical reconstruction and prosopography. The fruits of this work are laid out in Appendix B, where Lancaster’s men are listed alphabetically, with accompanying biographical notes for those who have been identified. Evidently, a great deal of careful documentary research and nominal record linkage has been done, but equally clear are the consequences of finding the lower portion of the roll so late in the research process. Archers, always difficult to pin down from their names alone, are apt to remain the shadows, but more disabling for Gribit’s project is the fact that about 70 per cent of the esquires have not been identified beyond what their surnames may suggest about family connections or geographical origins. As a consequence, the prosopographical analysis of Lancaster’s retinue rests predominantly on evidence concerning a little over a hundred knights banneret and bachelor, and this has implications for the conclusions that can reasonably be drawn.

Comparison of the retinue roll with other records, notably bills requesting the issue of letters of protection, yields insights into the formation and internal structure of Lancaster’s comitiva. Similarly insightful is Gribit’s investigation of the ‘geographical dimension of the retinue’: the location of soldiers’ landholdings and places of residence in relation to Lancaster’s spheres of influence. (The analysis here draws usefully on the records generated by the mid-1340s military assessment, but overlooks the more precise material in the returns of the feudal aid triggered by the knighting of the Prince of Wales in 1346.) That, through his bannerets’ companies, Lancaster was able to extend his recruiting reach is a familiar enough story; more intriguing is that he appears to have inherited the recruitment network of his deceased father-in-law, Henry Beaumont. Turning to the military careers of Lancaster’s men: by carefully reconstructing how frequently, where, and with whom they served, Gribit highlights the depth of experience and cohesion within the retinue, which in turn may cast light on its operational effectiveness. Erroneous nominal record linkages are an unavoidable accompaniment to such work. Most, no doubt, pass unnoticed, but decidedly conspicuous is that concerning the Sir John Lymbury on Lancaster’s roll. He is accorded the distinction of being ‘perhaps the oldest serving knight’ in the retinue, but he cannot have been the man whose military career has been traced back to 1301, because he had died several years prior to 1345. If that is an understandable slip, less easy to sympathize with is the author’s preoccupation with ‘professionalism’, which distorts the whole discussion of military careers. Rather than carefully defining and conceptualizing what being a careerist soldier in the mid-fourteenth century actually meant, we are offered the apparently arbitrarily arrived at criterion that serving on at least four campaigns suggests that a man was in some sense a professional soldier. At a time when men of gentle birth or aspiration customarily combined landownership and local administrative service with campaigning, such a criterion would mean assigning the ‘professional’ label to a great many of them, regardless of the fact that, for most, neither livelihood nor social standing depended on soldiering. And while there were ‘socio-professionals’, like Sir Nicholas Goushill, serving in Aquitaine in 1345, Gribit’s predominant focus on knights, with most of the esquires and archers excluded, means that we are unable to gauge how dependent Lancaster was on recruiting ‘marginal’ or sub-genteel careerists: men for whom social conditioning played little or no part in their choice of soldiering.

Gribit’s book prompts reflection on how – and why – we apply prosopographical methods to the study of late medieval military history. His approach to Lancaster’s military following, involving the reconstruction of the individual and collective identities of a group of men assembled for a single campaign, tracing their pasts and futures, brings a sharpness of focus to the investigation while anchoring it to specific events. Prosopography is here employed to inform the narrative. Less clear from this approach is how Lancaster’s military following developed over time. For that, we would need to know who served under his banner throughout his life, something that Kenneth Fowler provided for readers of his extraordinary 1961 PhD thesis, ¹ and through engagement with those data, prosopography could be employed to trace the evolution of a social organism over the course of three decades. We also need to think about the purpose that case studies serve and how best to frame them. As with the Lancastrian affinity under John of Gaunt’s lordship, Henry of Lancaster’s retinue should leave the researcher wondering whether the reconstructed patterns of service and social connection were representative of the wider military community at that time. Gribit makes some useful comparisons with existing scholarship, but an obvious next step would be to compare Lancaster’s retinue with the four others in the army, which altogether contributed half of the retinue-based personnel, a contracted total of 500 men-at-arms and archers. And, given the diverse backgrounds and levels of experience that Ralph Stafford, Walter Mauny, Laurence Hastings, earl of Pembroke, and James Audley (who did not serve in person) brought to the task of recruitment, we might expect to find instructive variation in the mechanics of retinue formation against which Lancaster’s experience could be compared. An obvious conclusion to draw from research of this kind is that it is the personal – rather than institutionalized – basis of recruitment to medieval armies that makes applying the prosopographical approach particularly rewarding. And for the same reason, another collective entity essential to Lancaster’s expedition that would benefit from a similar approach is the transport fleet of requisitioned vessels that took his army to Aquitaine. We are fortunate in having a roll recording the ship’s name, home port, master’s name, and crew numbers for each of the 152 vessels in the fleet. As with the men in Lancaster’s army, these identifiable ships and their masters had past and future lives that can be reconstructed and home communities that were affected by their involvement in the king’s war. Maritime logistics and, indeed, the operations of war fleets remain pregnant with prosopographical research possibilities. We should not criticize Nicholas Gribit for failing to follow this line of enquiry in his book, for it was surely beyond his remit. What can be said, however, is that it is high time the traditional and surely untenable gulf that exists between the land-based and maritime spheres of the Hundred Years War is filled in. Methodologies that may be applied equally profitably to both could perhaps provide a means of achieving this.