Military Technology and Garrison Organization: Some Observations on Anglo-Saxon Military Thinking in Light of the Burghal Hidage

Abstract

Military Technology and Garrison Organization: Some Observations on Anglo-Saxon Military Thinking in Light of the Burghal Hidage BERNARD S. BACHRACH AND RUTHERFORD ARIS Reliable numbers concerning military units in the Middle Ages and especially in pre-Crusade Europe are very rare.1 One such rare piece ofevidence that provides highly reliable quantitativedata is the Burghal Hidage, a document that was drawn up in Anglo-Saxon England during the reign of Edward the Elder, but before 914, ostensibly in order to Dr. Bachrach, professor of history at the University of Minnesota since 1975, earned his Ph.D. at the University of California (1966) and was elected a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1986. He specializes in medieval history and is the author of numerous books and articles, including Merovingian Military Organization (1972), A History of the Alans in the West (1973), and Early MedievalJewish Policy (1977); a political biography of the Angevin count Fulk Nerra (987- 1040) will appear in the near future. Dr. Aris, Regents’ Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, has his Ph.D. (in mathematics and chemical engineering) and D.Sc. from the University of London. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Medieval Academy of America and of the National Academy of Engineering. As well as teaching and publishing on chemical engineering, he teaches Latin paleography and is the author of An Index ofScripts in E. A. Lowe’s “Codices Latmi Antiquiores” (1982). He is currently working on an introduction to paleography, entitled Explicatio Formarum Litterarum, to be published in 1990. 'See, e.g., the important old general studies: Hans Delbrück, History of the Art of War within the Framework of Political History, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Walter J. Renfroe, Jr. (Westport, Conn., 1982); Charles Oman, A Histoiy of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (London, 1924); and Ferdinand Lot, L’Art militaire el les armées au Moyen Âge, en Europe et dans le Proche-Orient, 2 vols. (Paris, 1946). Even the excellent studies by J. F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages from the Eighth Century to 1340, trans. Sumner Willard and S. C. M. Southern (Amsterdam, 1977); and Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael Jones (Oxford, 1984), seriously neglect the problem of numbers with regard to pre-Crusade Europe. The question has been taken up in Bernard S. Bachrach, “Angevin Campaign Forces in the Reign of Fulk Nerra, Count of the Angevins (987-1040),” Francia, vol. 16 (1988). For a recent reassessment of the size of William the Conqueror’s army in 1066, see Bachrach, “Some Observations on the Military Administration of the Norman Con­ quest,” Anglo-Norman Studies 8 ( 1986): 1 —25.© 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3101-0004$01.00 1 2 Bernard S. Bachrach and Rutherford Aris outline the administrative measures taken to garrison the burg system of defenses created by Alfred the Great (d. 899). This document sur­ vives in a number of manuscripts, of which the best, though not the earliest, is a 16th-century copy ofan 11th-century (pre-Conquest) Win­ chester parchment. Thirty-three burgs, or fortifications, are listed along with the number of hides—that is, income from a stipulated landed resource—required to support the garrison troops needed to defend the perimeter wall of each stronghold. As the Anglo-Saxons measured the troop deployment, “If every hide is represented by one man, then every pole of wall can be manned by four men. Then for twenty poles ofwall eighty hides are required.. . .”2 Each man thus was expected to defend a quarter-pole of wall or, as we would have it, 4- feet. 8 Although the Burghal Hidage itself is not an inconsequential document, the administrative work that undergirds it, which scholars have effectively deciphered only during the past quarter-century, is very impressive. The administration, both in detail and scale, hints at the type of governmental sophistication that in the future would produce the Domesday Book.3 Briefly described, the perimeter de...