The armies of late medieval Europe were among the most distinctive institutional, social and cultural phenomena of the age, and yet they are also among the least well understood. Those raised by the fourteenth-century kings of England stand out as prime examples of how these vehicles for collective martial activity so characteristic of their time and so important in themselves, politically as well as militarily, have become disconnected from the mainstream of historical understanding. There are, no doubt, many reasons why modern historians have struggled to get to grips with these armies, but it may well be their very distinctiveness – or, more precisely, the social and institutional characteristics that contributed to that distinctiveness – that has been the essential problem. For the conceptual and material worlds of the fourteenth-century English royal host are now quite remote from us. Raised when required for a single campaign and disbanded at the end of it, an army at this time relied heavily on men who were intermittent rather than professional combatants; and until at least the mid-fourteenth century it would be assembled (from the crown's point of view) by exploiting a variety of methods of recruitment, voluntary and obligatory. With those methods, together with the accompanying remuneration package, apt to change from campaign to campaign, and with the surviving documentation correspondingly variable and, in any case, uneven in quantity and quality, it is small wonder that the historian seeking to reconstruct these armies, and understand how they functioned, is faced by a veritable Gordian knot of interpretative complexity. And given their ‘hybrid’ form and short life-span, it is small wonder too that, to a modern observer, they may seem decidedly amorphous and ephemeral, lacking structural robustness or any form of overall organisational principle.

How different all this seems from the modern, barracks-based standing armies with which we are familiar: armies that for several centuries in the western world have had permanent institutional structures (including unit and command hierarchies) into which recruits, officers and rank and file alike, have been absorbed, their individuality subordinated to the collective and enduring identities of, on one level, the regiment and, on another, the armed forces of the state.