The Age of Edward III (review)

The Age of Edward III is a collection of eleven articles drawn from the papers delivered in 1999 at a conference on Edward III of England (1327-77) organized at the Centre for Medieval Studies, York University, by James Bothwell and Mark Ormrod. This collection benefits from a useful joint introduction by Chris Given-Wilson and Michael Prestwich that provides both a summary and critique of each of the articles in the volume.

As is often the case in collections of this type, a superior volume is one that is more than simply the sum of its parts. This collection meets that condition. All of the studies take as their theme one or another aspect of King Edward III's government and support the general scholarly consensus that he ruled both intensively and well. In addition, each of these studies makes clear that warfare, the preparation for war, and war's aftermath were the central focus of his reign. Several of the studies, particularly those by Caroline Shenton, David S. Green, W. M. Ormrod, Craig Taylor, Clifford J. Rogers, and Michael Bennett, introduce new sources or radically new readings of long-known texts to sharpen our image of Edward's policies. The two studies by Richard Partington and A. K. McHardy bring the reader into the sophisticated world of Edward's administration regarding the employment of the king's sergeants-at-arms to provide "off the shelf" government and the dissemination of royal propaganda through the church, respectively. Partington's study in particular provides an excellent discussion of the office of the king's sergeants-at-arms and their duties and would benefit from being expanded into a monograph-length study.

The one article that is most clearly focused on military matters and therefore of the greatest potential interest to military historians, unfortunately, is the most disappointing. Andrew Ayton adds a new dimension to the so-called "Edwardian Military Revolution" by arguing that mounted contingents provided by major landholders and foot soldiers provided by shire militias were abandoned in favor of "wholly mounted, 'mixed' retinues composed of men-at-arms and archers" (p. 110) with a concomitant dramatic change in the social profile of archers from villeins to gentry (p. 113). However, Ayton ignores the continuing role of shire militia forces throughout Edward III's reign and the long prehistory of contract companies that dates back to the reign of William the Conqueror (died 1087). With regard to the social aspect of this thesis, Ayton offers no quantitative evidence that there were more members of the gentry in the armies of the Edward III than even under Henry II (died 1189), either in absolute numbers or relative to the other troops employed by the English government. In fact, by his own admission, many of the gentry served in Edward III's wars of conquest "by proxy, or by fine," (p. 113), that is, through substitutes, which undermines the notion of the creation of a new "military mentality" (p. 113) among the gentry. Finally, Ayton's thesis of military revolution fails to take note of the continuing dominant role of sieges in warfare during the fourteenth century with the continuing need for siege engines as well as large numbers of foot-soldiers. As a number of the other studies in this volume make clear, Edward III's government borrowed heavily from its predecessors and the notion of revolution or even distinctively new practice must be carefully documented rather than simply asserted.

This volume will be exceptionally valuable to medieval scholars as well as to specialists in administrative and military history. The collection of articles as a group also demonstrates that the study of military history is central rather than peripheral to our understanding of virtually all aspects of medieval institutional life.