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I have a soft spot for Hennequin of Bruges, who a young Francesco di Marco Datini set up in a shop in Avignon in the 1360s to make, alter, and repolish the mail he was buying and selling. Making mail was not one of the best trades- it was labour-intensive, and the materials were not especially rare or expensive, so it was hard to make much money at it- but it was still worthwhile to bring a man from Flanders all the way to the south of France. What adventures did he have along the way? Why did he leave Bruges? What did he use as a working language when the locals spoke Provençal and his boss / business partner spoke Tuscan? What did he do when Datini made so much money that he decided to return home to Prato? Or when that army of mercenaries showed up to squeeze money out of the pope?
I think the biggest difference between the social character of western European armies say in 1300 and 1600 was the kind of resources you needed to start out as a soldier. When captains were equipping and training whole companies, some pretty desperate types could start out that way. When you had to provide your own bow and arrows or sword, haubergeon, and iron cap and show you could use them, you needed a certain amount of resources. But specialists in warfare in the 14th century are pretty sure that the men who did most of the fighting and burning were not very respectable: too violent, just on the edge of falling down the social ladder, unpopular in their communities, or just not married and propertied yet and looking for a way to earn some money fast. There is a big difference between a gentleman-farmer’s son from the Rhineland heading to Calais in 1370 and a cotter from Scotland selling his goods to buy an arquebus in 1620, but within their estates they were marginal.
People in the 14th century were bitching that the soldiers of their day were a bunch of jumped-up thugs, so I’m not surprised that they were complaining in the 16th and 17th century. They might have got more desperate over time but that is the kind of big statement that I’d have to bone up on 16th and 17th century history to be sure of.
There is a famous parable from the 14th century where a friar meets a wandering horseman. “God give you peace!” says the friar. “God take away your alms!” says the horseman. After some sputtering, the horseman explains that without war he does not eat, just like without alms the friar does not eat (and it had been the same back to the 11th or 12th century). When you need men to burn cottages and hold merchants’ feet over a fire until they pay ransom and sack towns and monasteries, or to camp for months in dysentry-infested mud while people shoot at them with guns and crossbows, the men you get are usually not nice and usually not secure.
Forces like town militias or the English musters of the clergy had a different social character, but they did not do most of the war-making. Those towns had work they needed to get back to, and they didn’t have an interest in dying for some prince, and those mass musters got too many badly-equipped, unskilled people (and they had work they needed to be doing too). So my impression is that in the 14th century, you can get those militias or musters out for a campaign or so in their neighbourhood, but as soon as things sputter down to doing horrible things to the peasantry and trying to take towns and castles, or fighting far away, you get this particular mix of nobles and all these kinds of people on the margins of society.
The 16th and 17th centuries are not one of my periods, but I think there were trends for the poor and criminals to become more prominent in armies. But a lot of those poor saw themselves as gentle too! As gentle status was becoming a hereditary, formalized-in-law thing, it became even harder for landlords who had a bad 20 years to sink down to working for a living and sell off the warhorses and the armour.
No, it is the men-at-arms and the infantry. Those poor knights put on a great joust for Edward of England! Datini’s agent was going to buy up harnesses and longswords and good arbalests. And people who fought Turkomen and said “this is easy!” were usually dead by sunset. They were not rich in durable goods, but they were very clever and determined.
By the late middle ages, the middling gentry were often not very military. If they had enough land for an easy life, why risk that? It was their excess sons and the nobility who filled up armies. These men-at-arms with barely enough kit and some kind of warhorse who rob and wander from paymaster to paymaster are all over the military writers and chroniclers and social commentators of the 14th century. Very little is known about John Hawkwood’s parents or who knighted him, and there is a story he started out as an archer …
This is getting a bit big for a thread, so I just want to give some examples of medieval armies with a big contingent of what medieval people considered poor men. I already talked about Turkomen: most of those guys were just shepherds, so they usually had a bow and arrows, and maybe a club or a big knife, and their horses.
Edward I famously recruited big armies for his wars in Scotland (by medieval Latin standards, like a couple tens of thousands). They tended to fade away taking his crossbows with them because he was not so good at feeding and clothing and paying them. The early English armies in France also have a lot of poor Welsh knife-men (and later they are recruited by offering pardons to felons, so probably not all the most comfortable people). Scottish armies often impressed the English as poor because they didn’t bring the kind of luxuries that English armies often did, William Patten’s description of Pinkie Cleugh in 1548 has some good ones. He also has a good example of the servants grabbing weapons, because that was a big jump in status (just like getting some kind of a warhorse and declaring yourself a horse warrior was a big jump in status for a footsoldier).
A lot of soldiers in the 14th century did not own their kit, they borrowed it, or took out loans to buy it. In one of his letters Francesco di Marco Datini takes it for granted that when a company disperses most of the soldiers will be selling their kit cheap to pay their debts and tells his local agent to go and see what he can pick up. There is an incident early in the HYW where a bunch of knights from Haunault and places like that come to Edward III, ask for a job, and when he says he can’t pay them they beg for at least a little money so they can afford to travel home (he also demurs and the local dealers in used goods get rich). William the Marshall started out like that, he did great in a tournament but his horse was killed and he was so excited that he had forgotten to take anyone else’s. That would have been the end of his career if he hadn’t talked someone into lending him one for another tournament. A lot of the horsey fighty class were right on the margin between being gentle and having to work for a living.
Then there’s Adolph King of the Romans’ invasion of Austria with a “great multitude” or “copious multitude” in 1298 https://www.dmgh.de/mgh_ss_17/index.htm#page/264/mode/1up Our chronicler calls out two types as especially fearsome: the armed men who had an iron hat and a gambeson and a shirt of mail, and the possessers of destriers. But that means that there were a large number without that much kit!
So yes, armies in the second half of the middle ages did tend to be based around a well-equipped, highly skilled core and didn’t tend to be as big as the armies of big ancient kingdoms. But they tended to acquire a cloud of poorer, less respectable people.
Most large western European armies between the 14th and the 17th century contain a big contingent of poor people, because they were easy to recruit (and because if you were a male servant, getting a weapon and calling yourself a soldier was a step up in status). The French told stories about English archers, the English told stories about Scots and Welsh, crusaders told stories about Turkomen. So no special pleading why one example to illustrate a trend does not count! In a forum post I can’t provide a lot of examples with footnotes.
There is a website with the data from Peter Spufford’s “Handbook of Medieval Exchange”
The L/s/d currencies in the Archivo Datini di Prato seem to be worth about 1/10 as much as English money (so an Italian soldo is about an English penny in the late 14th century). IIRC, a florin was about 3 shillings English in the late 14th century, and Datini usually reckoned 23 soldi of Provence or 32 soldi imperiali made a florin. The big thing was that other money was being randomly debased, but gold florins and silver English money more or less kept their value (and if you use one and only one L/s/d system, there is no confusion). But then the Tudors come in, and Cortez and Pizarro, and things become pretty hopeless to track for a couple of hundred years.
Also, the only thing about English silver or florins is that the precious metal content stayed pretty stable and English-speaking economic historians have a feeling of the kind of life different incomes in English pounds or florins brought and what portion of the population had that income. So its just a convenient money of account which lets someone whose specialty is say 13th century Florence or 15th century England have a feel for what the money means (and the florin was a pretty common money of account).
And the way big conscript armies tended to melt away or turn robber is one reason why so many princes wanted to cut deals with towns and cities to get the use of their militia, but that’s another story and you could talk about it all day.
Ruth Matilda Anderson, Hispanic Costume, page 65: Before Pavia the imperial commander asked his men to wear shirts over their other clothing for recognition and lend spare shirts to the Germans. Those without a spare shirt would wear sheets and tent awnings (tiendas) or two sheets of paper made into short cloaks or sambenitillos.
I have read stories about soldiers whose clothes are falling apart over and over in western Europe from the 14th century into the 17th century … kings were keener to hire and deploy soldiers than keep them supplied with food and clothing. That is one reason why so many soldiers turned to robbery and extortion, and why the Swiss were so firm that if the money stopped they were walking.
Converting sums into florins or English pounds would make it easier for other English-speakers to understand the sums you are talking about.
I think Christopher Dyer reckoned about 240 working days in a year for carpenters, thatchers, and other day labourers in late medieval England after allowing for sickness and holy days and family duties and rest (which is handy, because then an income in pennies per day is pounds per year!) But there were a significant population earning a pound English or so a year, just like there was a significant population with no change of clothing and one or two changes of underwear. At Pavia in 1525, the imperialists tried to make a night attack and decide that everyone would wear a shirt over their other kit so they could recognize each other, at which point one of the captains shifted uncomfortably and reminded the lords that some of the lads did not have a spare shirt and they made arrangements to use paper and tent canvas.
But yes, that narrative of continual progress, or something in the 18th or 19th century happening which is the cause of everything good and nothing bad, has a lot of problems.
Also, I agree that we have to be careful about calling medieval / early modern people ‘poor’ because their economies produced different things than ours. I like talking about societies which have a lot of ‘durable stuff’ per person and societies with less. There are reasons why late medieval peasants and artisans often took time off rather than work to get more of the simple goods they could buy, or why settlers in 17th and 18th century North America or the 20th century Pacific Islands often talked to the locals, looked at their life and the lives of the locals, and vanished one morning to join an indigenous community. Sometimes people would rather govern themselves, or have a good climate and time to hang around, than be in a place with lots of movable goods.
I get frustrated with the economists who invent numbers for world GDP before 1900 and declare that in the Olden Days everyone had a very low income. Their numbers are made up, and they don’t ask how much people today would pay for some of the things those ‘poor’ people took for granted.
Yes, I think part of it is me being focused in 14th century Italy, and you on the 15th and 16th centuries north of the Alps.
Without going on a deep dive into 15th and 16th century HRE urban history, I think the most useful thing I can say is … the people who live outside the boundaries of the town are people too. So are all the unmarried servants. The Burgers didn’t always acknowledge them as part of the community, but they were an essential part of the system which made the town work (just like the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia can’t survive without South Asian servants and workers and European and settler soldiers and technicians). Those clothes and dishes still needed to be washed, that firewood needed to be gathered and split, that trash and sewage needed to be cleared away. Only counting propertyowning Burger and their wives and children is like only counting the Spartiates when you talk about ancient Sparta.
There were quite a few guilds which relied on shops with many apprentices and journeymen. By definition, shop owners could only be a minority of craft workers in those guilds. IIRC you see this in the armour industry, guilds which focus on quantity allow bigger shops, towns which focus on individual clients allow smaller ones. This was why the Arti Maggiori of Florence stamped down so hard when the popolo minuto created real guilds with brawny arms, it threatened their ability to get rich running carding and weaving and shearing and dying shops and lending money to the poor.
Different kinds of landholding in late medieval and early modern Europe, and which are “private property” in the sense of US or Canadian law, is another big topic. There were a lot of prosperous farmers who leased etc. their land.
Yes, logos would be a whole other topic! You wear a bourgeois hood in red and blue or a badge of a ragged staff to mark your membership in a community which watches each other’s backs. You wear a badge of San Rocco or an amulet set with genuine imitation amethysts to protect against terrible dangers like plague or drunkenness. You don’t wear BROADCLOTH OF BRUGES: IF YOU WANT THE BEST, ASK FLEMISH WEAVERS on your surcote because if its real Flemish broadcloth people will know.
Hans, I think people would be interested in some demographic estimates for one of the freer towns in the 15th century. My understanding is that you need several apprentices and journeymen and day labourers and carters for every master or yeoman … but if someone got into a good guild, they definitely had prospects of a comfortable life by the time they were 50 (or some travel and adventure if they decided to look for work somewhere less advanced or settle in a free city some lord with more land than money was founding).
Just to make things complicated … Villani complains that in his visit to Tuscany, Kaiser Karl IV dressed in brown without any ornaments so he looked like a hermit (Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince p. 70).
According to the Journal de Jehan Aubrion, on 12 July 1479 Louis XI was going to mass:
Et avoit le ro vestus un gippon de rougue sattin, des chaulces de blan bocquassin, des grans houzel de magre bazenne, et une robe de tannelz jusques une palme ou environ desoure le genoux; et avoit ung bonnet rouset, et ung chappel de brun tanel.
And the king had dressed in a doublet of red satin, hose of white boccasino (a cotton or part-cotton fabric), big gaiters of a poor sheepskin, a robe of tan cloth up to a palm or thereabouts above the knees; and he had a russet bonnet, and a (felt) hat of brown tan cloth.
During the bad times on the Anglo-Scottish border from Edward I to Elizabeth I, we also hear about lords who spend all their money on strong houses and keeping as many armed retainers in porridge as they can.
But many medieval people got quite vocal about people under-dressing or over-dressing for their station.
Pelgraine Press is one of their publishers. A nice thing is that they break the podcast into 15-minute chunks, so if there are topics you aren’t interested in or where their perspective makes you grind your teeth (Robin D. Laws is really really evangelical that “roleplaying games are like Hollywood movies, screenwriting books teach you the secrets of good scenario design” which is nuts to me because a director controls everything you see and hear and a game-master nor so much) you can skip those without too much back and forth.
I’m neurodivergent so a lot of pop psychology makes me scream “that is not how any of those things work”!
Ooh, big question! I think late medieval people would have loved dyes from industrial chemistry (real black! cheap colourfast crimson and vermillion!) And they did wear some cotton, especially in the Mediterranean and in doublets / jacks. But I think they would have been shocked at people wearing cottong where its going to get rained on (wet cotton sucks heat out of you!), at the way polyester and nylon blends catch fire so easily and cling as they burn, and that everything is so insubstantial and won’t last a month of serious work. Also that you can’t look at someone and immediately see their nationality and their station. If Henry VIII could wear 11 1/2 ounces of gold just in the points of his better arming doublet in 1510/11, POTUS should be wearing at least a kilo of gold right? And then there are the the brocades and the furs and the broadcloth dyed in grain … And why are all the fancy people wearing black and brown and beige like a bunch of monks or Burgundians? Their hose don’t show off their legs properly either.
I’ll never forget wearing the first gown to the mid-shin of three broad yards of cloth and realizing that a winter coat can be warm and breathable not trap you in a sheath of sweat and leave your legs freezing.
