(^82) Chapter Three
Crécy (1346) he had taken the precaution of supplementing the
knightly array with crossbowmen hired in Genoa, hoping thereby to
counterbalance the mercenary longbowmen in the English army.
From the beginning, English armies in France were promised pay,
but seldom received it in the field. Instead, they lived off the country
by seizing food and forage for immediate consumption, hoping all the
while for some windfall—a hoard of silver or a great man’s ransom—
that would bring them at least temporary riches. Circulation of goods
through buying and selling had not developed to a sufficient level in
most of France for anything like the regulated fiscality of Italian
mercenary service to stabilize itself. Nevertheless, the transfers of
tangible wealth that resulted from the passage of plundering
armies—melting down church treasure, for example—must have
stimulated market exchange. The hordes of sutlers and camp followers
who attended English and French armies in the field regularly bought
and sold; and so of course did the soldiers when they failed to get
exactly what they wanted by stealing and plundering. As earlier in
Italy, an army in the field with its continual appetite for supplies acted
like a migratory city. In the short run the effect on the French
countryside was often disastrous; in the long run armies and their
plundering expanded the role of buying and selling in everyday life.^13
As a result, by the time the French monarchy began to recover from
the squalid demoralization induced by the initial English victories and
widespread disaffection among the nobility, an expanded tax base
allowed the king to collect enough hard cash to support an increas
ingly formidable armed force. This was the army which expelled the
of short-term feudal service among the French. Among the English, earlier wars of
conquest in Wales and Scotland had already triggered the development of a semiprofes
sional royal army of mercenaries. On recruitment into English expeditionary forces, see
Kenneth Fowler, ed., The Hundred Years War (London, 1971), pp. 78–85; H. J. Hewitt,
The Organization of War under Edward III, 1338–62 (Manchester, 1966), pp. 28–49.
- Cf. the masterful work by Phillipe Contamine, Guerre, état et société à la fin du
moyen âge: Etudes sur les armées des rois de France, 1337–1494 (Paris, 1972). On English
armies: Hewitt, Organization of War under Edward III, 1338–62; K. B. McFarlane,
“War, Economy and Social Change: England and the Hundred Years War,’’ Past and
Present 22 (1962): 3–17; Edward Miller, “War, Taxation and the English Economy in the
Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,” in J. M. Winter, ed., War and Eco
nomic Development (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 11–31; and the essays in Fowler, The Hundred
Years War (n. 12 above) are pertinent. For the economic consequences of plunder, cf.
Fritz Redlich, De Praeda Militare: Looting and Booty, 1500—1800 (Wiesbaden, 1956),
and especially his major work The German Military Enterpriser and His Work Force, 2
vols. (Wiesbaden, 1964), 1:118 and passim. Redlich’s data come from a later time, but
the fact that he was trained as an economist and brought an economist’s vocabulary to
bear on the phenomena of plunder and mercenary soldiering gives his work a unique
value.