Shared service in a given retinue mattered, and testimony demonstrates the long half-life of retinues which had ceased to exist many years before the Hastings witnesses, for instance, reflect membership of John of Gaunt’s retinue up to thirty years earlier. The rest of the book looks at factors determining the choice of witnesses by the various parties. On the way he suggests that the categorisation of military careers sometimes applied, setting “full time” professional soldiers against men who served more intermittently as part of their social status, may not reflect the complexities and sheer happenstance of individual life cycles. While very few witnesses even in Grey v Hastings (whose testimony focused on the activities of the defendant’s father in the 1370’s and 80’s) were of an age to take up arms in 1415 -Sir Thomas Erpington being a high profile exception- he traces family links forward to the fifteenth century wars. Working “downstream” from deponents’ appearance in the records, he seeks to show continuities of military service from the 1380’s through to Henry V’s relaunch of English claims in France. After summarising the cases (both Lovel v Morley and Grey v Hastings were at least partially proxy contests linked to wider inheritance issues) and their historiography, he considers the apparently well-worn issue of military service from a different angle. Philip Caudrey’s study seeks to approach the material from a somewhat different angle. Since then the depositions have been quarried by a series of historians, in particular as an entry point into reconstructing military careers in fourteenth century England though also by those interested in chivalric mentalities. Despite that, detailed analysis of the three cases for which substantial numbers of depositions survive (Scrope v Grosvenor, Lovel v Morley, both heard in the later 1380’s, and Grey v Hastings, taken some twenty years later) only began in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
$99.00/£60.00Īs far back as 1832 the indefatigable antiquarian Sir Harris Nicholas identified the potential historical importance of the testimonies given to the Court of Chivalry in disputes over the right to bear a specific coat of arms. Caudrey Military Society and the Court of Chivalry in the Age of the Hundred Years War (Boydell & Brewer, 2019) 227 pp.
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