The English Aristocracy at War

As the general editor comments, this book is the product of a school of research which is developing our understanding of English military history, in its broadest sense, primarily through the study of later medieval administrative sources. Its method is that which Andrew Ayton has called ‘military service prosopography’, and Dr Simpkin has made a fine contribution to this endeavour. The book has five interrelated chapters. The first, on mobilisation, largely concerns the reign of Edward I. The relative scarcity of experienced warriors in the armies of his early years meant that Edward was ‘forced to act with promethean ingenuity’ in creating ‘a military community out of a realm of estate dwellers’. As far as knighthood is concerned, Simpkin clearly considers that Edward I did more than merely halt the decline in the number of knights, as previous historians have thought, and certainly shows Denholm-Young to have been wrong in his estimate of the number of actual fighting knights at a paltry 500. Simpkin, moreover, shows beyond doubt that the numbers who went to war at some stage in their lives increased dramatically in this period and that Edward I succeeded in expanding the reservoir of mounted warriors for his wars

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