Many will be familiar with the De re militari of Vegetius, probably written very late in the fourth century, which served as a kind of military ‘bible’ or authority for men in the Middle Ages. The survival today of more than 200 medieval manuscripts of the complete or nearly complete text, not to mention collections of excerpts which met the demands of preachers and compilers of encyclopaedic works (such as Vincent of Beauvais), suggests how widespread the appreciation of Vegetius' ideas was in the Middle Ages.

There came a time, in the second half of the thirteenth century, when the need to extend the readership to men beyond those with a knowledge of Latin was increasingly felt. The first translation, existing today in a single manuscript, was rendered into Anglo-Norman about 1271, probably for the future Edward I. The next half century produced three translations into French, two in prose and one in verse, and one into Italian, while from Iberia would come two Catalan and one Castilian translation in the fourteenth century. Such information emphasises the fact that when the first English translation was completed late in 1408, German was the only major European language without its translation, which would eventually be made in 1438.

The person who commissioned the first English translation, Thomas, Lord Berkeley, a member of a family known for its literary patronage, was himself a man with experience of war in France, Castile and Wales.