Osprey - General Military - Knight - The Warrior and ... - Brego-weard

ival. By contrast, Henry, who shared Edward's belief in the English king's right to
the French crown, saw all of the lands his army marched through as his own and the
people (so long as they did not oppose him) as his subjects and therefore under his
protection. Many of the pleas for royal justice made after military campaigns are
concerned with soldiers stealing and causing disturbances whilst getting to the muster
point and waiting for the army to set off into enemy territory. To try to minimize these
depredations the arrangements for raising troops often entailed the paying ol wages
in advance or the provision of money for them to buy food and pay for lodgings on
their way to the muster point.
The way in which a medieval army could strip the resources of an area meant that
it rarely stayed in one place for long. Denuding their immediate area, troops were
forced to range ever further afield, and the foraging parties becoming increasingly
vulnerable to attack from outlying garrisons or a relieving force. Being encamped in
one location for any duration also posed other problems. Disease was an inevitable
corollary of a long-standing encampment. So-called camp fever' - typhoid and cholera
caused by infected water — could quickly decimate an army, whilst a shortage of
supplies could lead to starvation and other diseases. Louis IX's army suflered both
from dysentery and scurvy, with the king having his leggings cut away because of the
former and men having their infected gums cut away because of the latter. When
Henry V's army invested Harfleur in 1415 it quickly began to suffer from dysentery.
The siege lines were drawn up on marshland which meant that waste and dead bodies
could not be properly buried and the drinking water became contaminated. More men
died or were invalided home as a result of sickness than were killed in the siege itself.
THE SIEGE
It is something of a truism that sieges were far more common than pitched battles and
that it was the siege and not the battle that typified warfare in the middle ages.
Operations centred on fortified locations were indeed a mainstay of medieval strategy,
but that did not invariably mean that every such location had to be invested. In military
terms fortifications were locations from which a garrison could project its military
power into the surrounding area. During a campaign it was often sufficient to
neutralize the garrison by penning it up until the army had passed by. Without the
support of a field army there was only a limited amount that a garrison could do against
a major enemy force. Spoiling raids might be launched against foragers or supply lines,
but the former were usually sizeable enough to take care of themselves and rarely
drifted too far from the protection of the main force, whilst medieval armies, as we