Medieval UK Battle Records Released Online 178
eldavojohn writes "Do you have ancestors who served in the British military under Henry V or fought in the Hundred Years War? Look them up online now that 250,000 medieval battle records are online and available for searching. According to the project details (PDF): 'The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to Flanders, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a much wider geographical spectrum than before 1369. In addition, garrisons were maintained within England (such as that held at the Tower of London), the Channel Islands, Wales and the marches, as well as at Calais and in Gascony. In the fourteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War, the English also held some garrisons in areas of northern France, and in the fifteenth century phase, there was a systematic garrison-based occupation of Normandy and surrounding regions...'"
Battle Results: Warning: spoiler!!!! (Score:3, Informative)
If you were wondering who won, it was the British.
Lots of blokes called John (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of records with no family /surname. "What's your name soldier?" "John" "Right, stick him down scribe, John the archer".
Don't hold your hopes out if you were dreaming to find your ancestor on some particular march out to France or Scotland. Not unless your ancestors happen to be the Dukes of Northumberland or the like...
For a great study on Agincourt... (Score:5, Informative)
...check out John Keegan's Face of Battle [amazon.com]. It covers the battle of Agincourt and several other major battles - Waterloo and the Somme. This book really gives you a feel for the human element in these battles.
As an additional stamp of approval, it's also on both the Army and USMC reading lists [militarypr...glists.com].
Re:Beancounters in the day... (Score:5, Informative)
Before bureaucracy, the king's only way of making something happen beyond his own landholdings was to apply pressure down a chain of one or more (generally recalcitrant) nobles who theoretically owed him ties of obedience and/or kinship; but, in practice, enjoyed considerable autonomy. Bureaucrats, by contrast, were simply commons with technical skills(yes, reading, writing, and bookkeeping count, even when you don't do them with computers) and depended directly on the monarchy for their positions.
Everybody loves to hate them, and sometimes they deserve it; but bureaucracy is one of the defining characteristics of the move from feudalism to the nation-state.
Re:!newsfornerds is way wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
SCA is not ancient or historical. It's an excuse for Internet Tough Guy to put on black leather, take a few tokes, and finally make it with that weird chick at the pet store.
Re:Stupid and short sighted (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot readers put a lot of mental effort into being funny. Often Slashdot story comments are dominated by humor.
Another subject: The story to which Slashdot could have linked: Was your ancestor a social climbing soldier in the Hundred Years War? [rdg.ac.uk]. That story leads to a story that contains a link to the database. I didn't want to post that link because it might be Slashdotted.
Re:Lots of blokes called John (Score:4, Informative)
I actually looked up the first name of John as it would return something with near 100% success rate and a lot of Johns have surnames and looking at the nature of these names(names not directly refering to objects, professions or places), I'd say a good bunch are not invented on the spot.
Re:Ponderings on record keeping... (Score:2, Informative)
I imagine that there are at least dozens of libraries that archive major newspapers to microfilm (err, microform, I guess) and store it in artificial, man made caves.
Apparently, some of the archives go back a ways:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaperarchive [wikipedia.org]
And some are enormous:
http://www.loc.gov/about/facts.html [loc.gov]
England and France (Score:5, Informative)
I should add these population numbers:
1350, England: 2,500,000 [wikipedia.org]
1345, France: 20,200,000 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Battle Results: Warning: spoiler!!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Battle Results: Warning: spoiler!!!! (Score:4, Informative)
It was the other way around. The Normans invaded in 1066 and annexed England. After that, things got complicated.
Re:Battle Results: Warning: spoiler!!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Not all that complicated. When Norman Willie died, he gave his eldest Normandy, since that was the valuable part of his lands, and left England for a younger son.
Because, after all, England wasn't really worth giving to your primary heir...;)
Re:Braveheart (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Lots of blokes called John (Score:3, Informative)
I found my namesake was an archer in 1441.
He was probably an asshole, too.
The great UK Venn Diagram (Score:5, Informative)
Is here. Share and enjoy. [qntm.org]
Re:John vs. George (Score:3, Informative)
Re:90% success (Score:1, Informative)
Yet they still managed to build the biggest empire in history, marched the Canadians right into the US capital, won the battle of Britain without the need for US support, defeated a nation 10,000 miles away when outnumbered 10 to 1 (Falklands) and are still required to help the US in pretty much every modern conflict because US forces are not skilled enough to go it alone.
This is as opposed to say, the US and France, who haven't ever been able to act unilaterally in military conflicts, from US war of independence where they had to work together all the way through to Vietnam where one of their few unilateral attempts ended up in severe and miserable defeat to the gulf wars where foreign help was needed and even then the US parts of the campaigns were abysmal failures with thousands of US soldiers killed.
It seems a bit silly to talk down British military history whilst using the US and France as counter-examples when out of Britain, France, the US (and even Spain and Germany), Britain is the only nation of them all to have managed to act both unilaterally and achieve near consistent success in the wars it's been involved in as opposed to the almost constant defeat for US and French forces - sometimes even when they've had massive foreign support.
Hell, even on D-Day the US needed British sailors to get them to shore and when they did get to shore, the only purely US beachhead (Omaha) was the biggest disaster out the lot with 4,500 US soldiers dead vs. only 1,200 Germans. Compare this to Gold, Juno and Sword which were equally strongly defended by the Germans and were where the purely British or British and Canadian forces landed and they only suffered around 400 - 500 at each beach whilst killing thousands of Germans and destroying much armour too. So much for the British operations being a shambles then when on the 3 British managed beacheads the deathtoll was less then a 3rd of the US casualties on a single beachhead with more German forces destroyed too.
No, the reality is if the British do one thing right it's military campaigns, their history of being a nation of war winners is testament to this. The US and France with their failures from the war of 1812 to Vietnam, to even the US campaign in Iraq for the US and France's consistent and repeated failure against the British empire, their Napoleonic defeats by the British, their twice losing their country in the 20th century to the Germans is testament to the abject failures these nations consistently are in military campaigns. At least use a nation like Russia that's had much military success through the years, in fact, even Germany, Italy and particularly Spain and Portugal despite their defeats have also had more success over the years. This is why half of the Americas speak Spanish/Portuguese and the other half speak English and pretty much none speak French.