When the Cannons Fall Silent: Demobilisation and Re-assimilation in Mid-Fifteenth Century England

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What happens when the guns fall silent and the soldiers return home? How can battle-hardened and battle-scarred individuals be reintegrated into peaceful society? These questions have faced societies throughout history. This study offers the first in-depth exploration of this phenomenon in a late medieval English context. This has both social and cultural significance, and provides an important historicaldimension to issues and challenges which the modern world continues to face.In the past thirty years, scholarship on late medieval warfare has blossomed, but the scope of this work has tended to focus on a limited number of well-trodden paths: recruitment into armies, military technologies, battlefield strategies, martial ethos and the background of commanders (most recently, Bell et al., 2013; Gribit, 2016; Madden, 2018). Almost no scholarship exists on what happened when warsended and potentially thousands of soldiers returned to their communities. An assumption underlying existing scholarship is that medieval soldiers can only be defined, and their careers traced, by scrutiny of their military function: this thesis challenges that preconception by considering the lives and careers of fighting men when they stopped fighting.The focus of this project is the mid-fifteenth century, specifically the years 1440-1471. The period witnessed the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France (1337-1453) and the most intensive military activity of the Wars of the Roses. An important element in the study will therefore be a comparison of demobilisation in the context of a 'national' war, on the one hand, and a 'civil war', on the other. 'Soldier' is defined in the broadest terms possible and applies across the social scale from the humble archer to captains and commanders.Key research questions are:-How carefully managed by the crown was the process of demobilisation in the mid-fifteenth century?-How effectively did veterans assimilate in their local communities?-In what ways did military service impact on the careers and lives of ex-soldiers?-How were war wounds and disabilities viewed?The building block for the study is the Medieval Soldier Database, which contains the service records of all known men who served in English armies in the Hundred Years War, numbering over 100,000. Further muster records will be used to identify the combatants of the Wars of the Roses. Prosopographical analysis of selected individuals, drawing on the published and unpublished records of central government (including The National Archives series E101, C1, KB27 and KB9), will illuminate the career paths of the veterans. Analysis will consider cases of office-holding, favour and reward, marriage and kinship ties, involvement in crime, and the perception of seriously injured individuals. Historians have long noted the militarised nature of late medieval society, but few scholars have demonstrated this truism. This study will be the first in-depth investigation into the intersection of the military and non-military aspects of individual lives. It shines light on the social and economic impact of demobilisation, and it considers whether, through their experiences, soldiers represented a breed apart, or were easily assimilated back into 'civilian' life.