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

Abstract

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 Medieval Jewish Policy (1977); a political biography of the 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 of Scripts in E. A. Lowe's Codices Latini 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 Delbriick, 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 History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (London, 1924); and Ferdinand Lot, L'Art militaire et les arme'es au Moyen Age, 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 Conquest, Anglo-Norman Studies 8 (1986):1-25.