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

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ival. By contrast, Henry, who shared Edward's belief in the English king's right to<br />

the French crown, saw all of the l<strong>and</strong>s his army marched through as his own <strong>and</strong> the<br />

people (so long as they did not oppose him) as his subjects <strong>and</strong> therefore under his<br />

protection. Many of the pleas for royal justice made after military campaigns are<br />

concerned with soldiers stealing <strong>and</strong> causing disturbances whilst getting to the muster<br />

point <strong>and</strong> waiting for the army to set off into enemy territory. To try to minimize these<br />

depredations the arrangements for raising troops often entailed the paying ol wages<br />

in advance or the provision of money for them to buy food <strong>and</strong> pay for lodgings on<br />

their way to the muster point.<br />

<strong>The</strong> way in which a medieval army could strip the resources of an area meant that<br />

it rarely stayed in one place for long. Denuding their immediate area, troops were<br />

forced to range ever further afield, <strong>and</strong> the foraging parties becoming increasingly<br />

vulnerable to attack from outlying garrisons or a relieving force. Being encamped in<br />

one location for any duration also posed other problems. Disease was an inevitable<br />

corollary of a long-st<strong>and</strong>ing encampment. So-called camp fever' - typhoid <strong>and</strong> cholera<br />

caused by infected water — could quickly decimate an army, whilst a shortage of<br />

supplies could lead to starvation <strong>and</strong> other diseases. Louis IX's army suflered both<br />

from dysentery <strong>and</strong> scurvy, with the king having his leggings cut away because of the<br />

former <strong>and</strong> men having their infected gums cut away because of the latter. When<br />

Henry V's army invested Harfleur in 1415 it quickly began to suffer from dysentery.<br />

<strong>The</strong> siege lines were drawn up on marshl<strong>and</strong> which meant that waste <strong>and</strong> dead bodies<br />

could not be properly buried <strong>and</strong> the drinking water became contaminated. More men<br />

died or were invalided home as a result of sickness than were killed in the siege itself.<br />

THE SIEGE<br />

It is something of a truism that sieges were far more common than pitched battles <strong>and</strong><br />

that it was the siege <strong>and</strong> not the battle that typified warfare in the middle ages.<br />

Operations centred on fortified locations were indeed a mainstay of medieval strategy,<br />

but that did not invariably mean that every such location had to be invested. In military<br />

terms fortifications were locations from which a garrison could project its military<br />

power into the surrounding area. During a campaign it was often sufficient to<br />

neutralize the garrison by penning it up until the army had passed by. Without the<br />

support of a field army there was only a limited amount that a garrison could do against<br />

a major enemy force. Spoiling raids might be launched against foragers or supply lines,<br />

but the former were usually sizeable enough to take care of themselves <strong>and</strong> rarely<br />

drifted too far from the protection of the main force, whilst medieval armies, as we

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