3 - Raising an Army: Recruitment and Composition

Summary

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.