This meant that a man, in exchange for land to farm or an annual stipend, agreed to fight for and wear the livery (uniform and badge) of his lord. After 1453, when the French won the 100 Years War and finally drove the English out,England was filled with thousands of unemployed soldiers.

These men were quickly snapped up into the private armies of great lords, who were consolidating their own power in the power vacuum created by the regency of the child King Henry VI. The archer here, in the red and blue coat, is wearing the livery and boar badge of Richard, the Duke of Gloucester (the future King Richard III). The other archer wears the livery of the Knights of Saint John.

In 1455 hostilities broke out between the House of York, which claimed the throne, and the House of Lancaster, whose titular head was King Henry VI. Henry suffered from some sort of mental illness and, unlike his warlike father Henry V, he was not stong enough to make people forget his family's shakey claim.

When war came, the men supplied by livery and maintenance were not sufficent to fill out the armies, so the lords of England, on both sides, opened their purses and hired professional mercenaries. Many of these mercenaries were Englishmen, who had gained a fierce reputation in the wars in France, and were in great demand in Burgundy, Spain and Italy. Many other mercenaries were foreigners, such as Frenchmen, Germans, Italians and Flemings.

The use of mercenaries by the English is not surprising, since the old "feudal" system of raising armies (a system that had never really worked on a large scale) had been pretty much abandoned in Europe, and nearly everyone relied upon professional soldiers, such as Swiss pikemen and halbardiers, French cavalrymen, Genoese crossbowmen, and English longbowmen to fight their wars.

The backbone of the English armies was the longbowman. His weapon, which pulled from 75 to 150 pounds, was not a new invention, nor was it unique to the English or Welsh. It had changed little since the last Ice Age.

The English, however, were the only Europeans in the Middle Ages to nurture a huge class of expert archers among their peasantry, which meant that they could field thousands of archers when fighting the French, the Scots or each other. There are many legends about the deadly effect of the longbow, such as supernatural accuracy or unstoppable penetration. While, in some execeptional cases, longbows could perform some rather impressive feats, most of their effectiveness was as an "area weapon".

They would fill the sky with arrows that fell like hail on their enemies. If the enemy was well armored, the arrows would have little effect, but if he was poorly armored like the Scots, or he was on horseback like the French chivalry, the longbow was devastating. When English longbowmen were on the field in large numbers, and they were protected from sudden charges by a line of sharpened stakes, cavalrymen had no choice but to hang back or dismount to fight on foot.

While an arrow would not usually kill a horse, an arrow hanging from its flesh would drive it mad, and make it dangerous to its rider and its neighbors. The longbow's greatest effect on medieval warfare was to turn most of Europe's well born cavalry into well born, and well armored infantry.

When Englishman fought Englishman, the longbows tended to cancel each other out, and the battles were usually decided by close range stab & smash fests between well-armored infantry forces, made up of "pole-arm-men" like the fellow in the yellow hose shown previously, and dismounted chivalry like the fellow to the left. The battles were brutal, desparate and bloody, and were often as much tests of stamina as tactics.

The steady infusion of foreign mercenaries which war brought into the land meant that some new weapons would make their way onto the English scene.

These men, in the colors of the Duke of Burgundy, are using the new-fangled "hand-gonne". This was a weapon that underwent rapid evolution in the 15th Century. It started out as nothing more than a miniature version of the cannon, put on a stick, and touched off by a smoldering match held in the hand; but by last part of the century it had a wooden stock, a trigger and a "serpintine" to hold the match, which meant that it had become possible to aim.

By the end of the following century, the hand gonne had become the musket, and driven the longbow from the battlefield.

Fighting men were not the only people found in the armies of the Middle Ages. Soldiers often had no home and certainly no barracks to live in, so any family they might have would have to follow them anywhere their profession might take them. Camp followers lived as hard a life as their men, and did most of the domestic tasks around a camp, such as cooking and washing.

Furthermore, they were as vulnerable as their men to diseases like plague or dysentery, that killed many times more than the sword. Their children were particularly at risk, and in a time of terrible infant mortality in the general population, the additional hardships of the army life made sure that few of a soldier's children would see adulthood.

Not all of the life of a soldier and his woman was hardship however. When the fighting was done, wages had been paid, and especially when a rich town had been looted or ransoms had been collected for prisoners of war; soldiers and their families would have a chance to relax and live well; eating and drinking until their money ran out. Then it would be time to seek out another employer and another war.

The Red Company marches off into the winter mist