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and especially Genoese. They were moved about, sometime separately, but more often in companies, and were used for the most part in garrison duty.2 They were of varying rank or social status; for example, in a band of eighty-four which is mentioned in the Liberate Roll of 1200, twenty-six travelled with three horses apiece, fiftyone with two, and seven with one horse.3 The king was apparently responsible for the weapons: they are occasionally referred to as his, and he refunded money which was expended upon them; moreover, the various kinds of crossbow were, if we may argue from French practice a few years later, kept in the armouries of the royal castles.5

A well-known passage in the Philippid describes the part played by the arbalisters in the operations of a siege, and emphasises the value which Philip Augustus placed upon their services. Some of those in Philip's service, and in that of his rivals, are known by name, and we possess a few details about the lands with which they were endowed, but that is all. The only man who stands out with any prominence from the shadowy background is Richard's follower, Master Ivo, who was probably an engineer. Ivo was evidently very skilful and much trusted. He had apparently been on terms of sufficient intimacy with his great master to feel the change from Richard to John as a personal loss; and his interest in and

1. Rot. Norm., 47, 59; Round, op. cit., 16.

2. Rot. Norm, 77.

3. Rot. de Lib., 6; cf. Rot. Norm., 47; Rot. Scacc., ii, 314, gifts to balistarii for the purchase of horses.

4. Rot. Scacc., ii, 314. -wages 2s. 6d. a day. expenditure "in nervis et

"Ricardo Walensi qui faciebat balistas Regis" Rot. de Lib., 100, order for repayment of cordis et clavibus balistarum nostrarum."

5. Cart. Norm., nos. 214, 215.

6. Philipp, lib. vi, vv. 263 seqq., 661 seqq. (Delaborde, ii, 186, 202).

The latter passage begins:

"Hic Blondellus erat, Perigas, aliique viri quos

Regi reddiderat ars balistaria caros,

Ditatos ab eo villis, et rebus et ere."

fidelity to John were certainly weakened by the middle of 1203. His quarrel with the king was so violent that he fled for sanctuary to the cathedral at Rouen, and John seems to have had some difficulty in patching up an understanding. The archbishop restored Ivo to the royal service, and Ivo gave his sons as hostages in pledge of his fidelity; but on the other hand he was to remain under the protection of the Church and was free to go where he wished, with wife, sons and chattels, so soon as peace or a truce of two or three years was made between the king and Philip Augustus. John bound himself under ecclesiastical penalties to accept this arrangement, and only stipulated that Master Ivo should not take service with his enemies.1

I have described the balistarii as the elect of the military profession. At the other extreme were the outcast Brabançons and Cottereaux. Midway stood the Welsh mercenaries. We have already seen a Welshman at work upon the royal crossbows, and it is possible that there were Welshmen among the crossbowmen, but, as is well known from the writings of Gerald of Wales, the favourite weapon of his fellow countrymen was the longbow. It is impossible to say whether the bands of Welsh mercenaries who enlisted under our Angevin kings were all archers, for the presence of archers in the Norman wars is but casually mentioned by the chroniclers, and the rolls only refer to a company of archers under William of Vernon. The history, however, of the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland would suggest that the Welsh would

3

1. This interesting charter, dated Rouen, July 29th, 1203, is enrolled in Rot. Pat., 31b.

2. Cf. Guill. le Maréchal, 1. 7416 (ed. Meyer, i, 267).

3. Rot. de Lib., 78, where the archer is distinguished from the arbalister. Some times, however, the archer is clearly a crossbowman, e.g., the Genoese in Rot. Norm., 47: Rigord mentions "equites sagittarii" (i, 162).

use the bow in Normandy. Indirect evidence points to the same conclusion. They were especially useful in ambush. In 1174 Henry II sent them to cut off the provisions of the French as they were brought through the woods to the army which was besieging Rouen; and in Richard's reign the Welsh had a reputation for the success with which they harassed the French in the forests.3 They were not enlisted separately; but the government made arrangements with some Anglo-Norman tenant of the Welsh march, or with a native Welshman who collected a band and was responsible for the distribution of the wages. Some of these companies were large. In 1204 John refers to one which contained two hundred Welshmen. 5 In 1195 at least five shiploads of Welsh cavalry and foot crossed to Normandy under various leaders."

We now come to the mercenaries proper, who were carefully distinguished from the various branches of the

1. The Song of Dermot and the Earl, p. 52; Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, i, 148.

2. Robert of Torigni (ed. Delisle), ii, 52. "Venieus itaque Rothomagum misit marchisos suos Walenses trans Secanam, ut victualia, quae veniebant ad exercitum Francorum, in nemoribus diriperent."

3. The French chronicle in Historiens de France, xxiv, part ii, p. 738. Delaborde points out that William the Breton's description of the Welsh is based on Gerald of Wales (Phil., lib. v, 11. 276-299, ed. Delaborde, ii, 136).

4. Rot. Sacc., i, 236. "Willelmo de Marisco et Walensibus suis" £296. William was a West country man (cf. Rot. Pat., 52, where he is collecting workmen and sailors). A William de Marisco shared a knight's fee in Hereford "de Wallia" in 1166 (Red Book, i, 281). Cf. Robert of Torigni's phrase "marchisi."

5. Rot. de Lib., 88. The sheriff of Gloucester is to give William of Briouze ten marks "ad opus Leisani Walensis filii Morgan qui veniet in servicium nostrum cum cc Walensibus."

6. Rot. Scacc., i, 185, "in passagio Walensium apud Ostreham in tribus navibus, viij li. x so."; ibid., 275, "in passagio Philippi de Estapedona et Walteri de Escudemore et Helye de Chigehan et sociorum eorum Walensium equitum et peditum in ij navibus [to Barfleur] viij li.”

artillery and from the Welsh. The English hated John's foreign balistarii, but never confounded them with the stipendiarii.2 The French expressed their disgust of the Welsh, but never confounded them with the Brabançons. Indeed in 1194, while the royal forces were waiting for a favourable wind at Portsmouth, the Welsh and Brabançons came to blows, and the king had to hurry back from his hunting to restore peace.3 The struggle for existence which encouraged the surplus population of Wales to seek military employment had not destroyed family and tribal ties; the Brabançons and Cottereaux, on the contrary, were pariahs, outcasts from society and under the ban of the Church. Their gipsy-like organisation, their antisocial and anti-Christian devastations shocked the conscience of western Europe. They were worse than the most illicit of corporations, or the most heretical of sects.

A closer scrutiny of the mercenary forces in the service of Richard and John enables us, however, to make some qualifications. It shows that the clear line of division drawn by the anathema of the Church in 1179 and by current opinion between the mercenaries and other paid soldiers was easily blurred in actual life. The routiers

1. See H. Géraud, "Les Routiers au douzième siècle," and "Mercadier. Les Routiers au treizième siècle," in Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes, 1841, iii, 125-147; 417-447; Boutaric's paper in the same, 1860, xxii, 7-12, republished in his Institutions militaires de la France avant les armées permanentes (1863); Luchaire, La Société française sous PhilippeAuguste, pp. 10-20; Cartellieri, iii, 110; Delisle on Cadoc in his preface to the inquests of Saint Louis, Recueil des historiens de France, xxiv, part i, pp. 130*-133*.

2. Magna Carta, c. 51, "et statim post reformacionem amovebimus de regno omnes alienigenas milites, balistarios, servientes, stipendiarios, qui venerunt cum equis et armis ad nocumentum regni."

3. Howden, iii, 251.

4. Cf. the anonymous chronicler of Laon's description of Ebbe of Charenton's ruse in 1185 (Chronicon Universale, ed. Cartellieri, p. 40), "set propter pactum quod cum eis pepigit, uxores immo pellicentes eorum cum pueris et alia familia et rebus aliis eis extra castrum remisit."

W

(rutharii or ruptarii), to give them their generic name, comprised elements which were drawn from many countries, from Aragon, Gascony, Bigorre, as well as from the populous Rhineland,' and it is hard to distinguish between bands which may have been recruited on the spot and the professional vagabonds who offered their services to the highest bidder. Yet the former would obviously be regarded as more respectable. Again, men of ability who were found trustworthy enough for high administrative office, such as Martin Algais, a mercenary who became seneschal of Gascony, can hardly be dismissed as social outcasts. The origin of many of John's favourite servants was so obscure that the transition from Martin Algais to the great Hubert de Burgh himself is not very difficult. We might begin this transition with the mercenaries in John's service who were always his subjects and whose military gifts had emancipated them from the caste system of feudalism: such were Fawkes of Breauté, and that upstart kindred of Touraine, Girard of Athée and his cousins of Cigogné and Chanceaux.2 Next we should come to high officials like Guérin of Glapion and William Crassus (le Gros), both seneschals in Normandy under John, both apparently of humble origin, and both men whose reputation was unsavoury in the land of their exactions forty years later. There is little difference in character between such men as William Crassus and the leading routiers, and probably little difference in origin, and when King Richard began, for military reasons, to entrust Norman bailiwicks to his mercenaries, the differ

1. The chronicler of Laon, p. 37, gives a brief list: "importuna lues Ruthariorum, Arragonensium, Basculorum, Brabanciorum et aliorum conducticiorum." Wages to Bigordenses, in Rot. Scacc., i, 237.

2. Maitland, Pleas of the Crown for the county of Gloucester (1884), pp. xiii-xv.

3. For Guérin of Glapion, see above, p. 256. The misdeeds of William Crassus are described in the Querimonia Normannorum, nos. 382-462 passim, about eighteen cases.

4. e.g., William le Queu in the Vexin; above, p. 296.

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