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Medieval UK Battle Records Released Online
eldavojohn writes "Do you have ancestors who served in the British military under Henry V or fought in the Hundred Years War? Look them up online now that 250,000 medieval battle records are online and available for searching. According to the project details (PDF): 'The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to Flanders, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a much wider geographical spectrum than before 1369. In addition, garrisons were maintained within England (such as that held at the Tower of London), the Channel Islands, Wales and the marches, as well as at Calais and in Gascony. In the fourteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War, the English also held some garrisons in areas of northern France, and in the fifteenth century phase, there was a systematic garrison-based occupation of Normandy and surrounding regions...'"
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Maybe we can find him there.
"I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence." - Gen. Ripper
Terrorists could exploit this knowledge to close the trebuchet gap.
If you were wondering who won, it was the British.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Seems that even absolute monarchies had problems with bureaucrats. Makes you wonder if the species will ever evolve past them.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Lots of records with no family /surname. "What's your name soldier?" "John" "Right, stick him down scribe, John the archer".
Don't hold your hopes out if you were dreaming to find your ancestor on some particular march out to France or Scotland. Not unless your ancestors happen to be the Dukes of Northumberland or the like...
Wow can't imagine someone actually invested the time to put this together. As cool/interesting as this is... it really doesn't serve a purpose. or does it ?
For the first time in my life (Probably the last), I wish I was British. This is so damn cool...
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Nerds love ancient historical stuff -- who the hell else is in the Society for Creative Anachronism, the Sealed Knot, various battle re-enactment societies, etc. etc.? Nerds! And what could be more nerdy than a mountain of statistics about the same?
Oh, and anybody who can't think of a use for this data has no idea what historical research is. You crowdsource this stuff and all kinds of interesting things will pop up. The better we understand our past, the better we understand ourselves.
As for the observations about monarchs needing bureaucrats -- EVERYbody needs bureaucrats, unless you'd prefer the government to be run by astrology and guesswork. If you're a soldier and you want to get paid the correct amount, on time, you need a bureaucrat to look after it. Plus, Britain during a lot of this period was essentially a police state, and police states need more bureaucrats than most. The Stasi in East Germany were Exhibit A, closely followed by the Nazis. The latter's record-keeping got a fair number of them hanged.
I piss off bigots.
...check out John Keegan's Face of Battle. It covers the battle of Agincourt and several other major battles - Waterloo and the Somme. This book really gives you a feel for the human element in these battles.
As an additional stamp of approval, it's also on both the Army and USMC reading lists.
The Army reading list
that a family member had served in the military back in the day.
Signed,
John Arrowbait
Reports like this, where fairly old records are referenced, always make me wonder about the accounting that we keep regarding current events. To what degree will our own stories be available to future generations? We have an ever-growing dependency on a computerized-only storage monoculture, and frankly all this may just be a good $CATASTROPHE$ away from being made into doorstops.
I'm not suggesting we transfer the contents of Slashdot to cave paintings, or transcribe $CELEBRITY_DU_JOUR$'s Tweets to stone tablets, but does anyone know of projects underway to preserve the highlights of modern history in some sort of permanent medium? Is anyone taking down the top x significant stories in a year and sticking them in a jar in a cave somewhere?
---
L
...Sphinx for lightning-fast searches (and stemming, and relevancy, and much more) and Open Calais for text analysis. Combine this data set with those two tools and you could have a pretty nifty site.
The Army reading list
>The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to ... Scotland
Sorry, but my ancestors were on the other side. Damn English. Well, they were good at raising cattle to steal.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"I am Arthur, king of the Britons."
... "I am your king!" - "I didn't vote for you." - "You don't vote for kings." - "How did you become king then?"
"King of the who?" - "The Britons." - "Who are the Britons?" - "We all are. We're all Britons. And I am your king." - "Didn't know we had a king. I thought we're an autonomous collective."
"The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying, by divine providence, that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king." - "Listen, strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses. Not from farcical aquatic ceremony."
Let's see...
2009-1369 = 640 years
Using a (conservative) 25 years/generation...
640/25 ~= 25.6. Call it 26.
2^26 = 67,108,864
According to medieval demographics and human population, the number of people alive in "Europe" around then peaked at 70-100m *before* the famines and plagues of the 14th century. Europe would not regain that population peak again for 200 years.
If you are caucasian then, given these figures, unless you are descended from a multi-generational set of *extremely* inbred kin, the probability that at least one of your ancestors was in that battle is quite high. The Most Recent Common Ancestor of all peoples. never mind all Europeans, is more recent than you think.
Da Blog
I should add these population numbers:
1350, England: 2,500,000
1345, France: 20,200,000
Da Blog
And here I thought we were going to get to hear some 15th century hip-hop!
Breakfast served all day!
All of my ancestors are dead.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Hey, cuz, who you callin an inbred?
Just because I have a few attention issues... oooh, shiny!
Anyhow, where was I? Say, yer mouth sure is purty!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I guess it's only a start, but speaking as someone who works on database searching from a website the search method they use really sucks. You practically have to know what you're looking for in order to find it, and once you do there's precious little information apart from a couple of names and a campaign. there's no hyperlinking (er, this _is_ the web in 2009 yaknow) and there's no way to just browse the data (see commanders in a campaign for instance) to pick up interesting facts or trends. In short, useless. Most people will look up a couple of names then forget about it completely.
I hope I'm wrong.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
So that's where my great great great great great grandfather's bleeding left eye rolled to.
Table-ized A.I.
Scotland was not a part of England at the time.
Medieval UK battles records released online.
Even so i never heard of recording mafia called Medieval it would be kinda fitting.
28502 matches for John.
147 matches for George.
Something tells me John was a popular name.
I thought St. George was the patron saint.
I assumed they were Medieval UK was a music label myself and assumed they had put their battle records online.
Well, "A United Kingdom" rather than "The United Kingdom" was formed then when the Scots ran out of cash when the Darien scheme went tits up, but the current "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" was only established in the 1920s.
In the late 1600s there was a lot of talking up of the similarities of the inhabitants of the islands of Britain, and the "Kingdom of Great Britain" was what resulted from the union. It didn't stop various disaffected Scots wandering south in the 1700s.
Is here. Share and enjoy.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The Beebs posted a link somewhere in this story, I just can't see it, right? Right? Tell me they're not that dumb. The whole point is that the records are released ONLINE.
Duke of Monmouth 705 vs Earl of Derby 1,201 (away win)
Lord Gloucester 11,703 vs The French 602 (home win)
The Scots 0 vs The Highland Scots 0 (match abandoned due to fog)
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
Indeed, slashdot seems to be incapable of telling the difference between the UK and England. It leads to confusion until I read the article.
Haha, you complain about the British "Getting their asses handed to them" in 1944 when warfare was still in its infancy, and include the gem that if it wasn't for the US we would be . Yet, the great USA invaded Iraq (Twice) and gets their asses handed to them both times. Yet claims victory for both. Then there's Vietnam. No you're right. The US is a true master of warfare and we should be happy to have your troops behind us (Most likely shooting us in the back). Seriously, without us in WW2 there wouldn't have been a WW2 and the Nazi's would have taken the whole of europe. No one was doing shit until our little island nation decided enough was enough. You ignorance astounds me.
Next you'll be telling me King Arthur didn't battle Judah Ben Hur in medieaval Winsconsin in order to gain control of the magical Rosetta Stone, carved by God on Mount Everest with his ten commandments to be given to Alexander the Great, pharoah of Nevada!
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Yet they still managed to build the biggest empire in history, marched the Canadians right into the US capital, won the battle of Britain without the need for US support, defeated a nation 10,000 miles away when outnumbered 10 to 1 (Falklands) and are still required to help the US in pretty much every modern conflict because US forces are not skilled enough to go it alone.
This is as opposed to say, the US and France, who haven't ever been able to act unilaterally in military conflicts, from US war of independence where they had to work together all the way through to Vietnam where one of their few unilateral attempts ended up in severe and miserable defeat to the gulf wars where foreign help was needed and even then the US parts of the campaigns were abysmal failures with thousands of US soldiers killed.
It seems a bit silly to talk down British military history whilst using the US and France as counter-examples when out of Britain, France, the US (and even Spain and Germany), Britain is the only nation of them all to have managed to act both unilaterally and achieve near consistent success in the wars it's been involved in as opposed to the almost constant defeat for US and French forces - sometimes even when they've had massive foreign support.
Hell, even on D-Day the US needed British sailors to get them to shore and when they did get to shore, the only purely US beachhead (Omaha) was the biggest disaster out the lot with 4,500 US soldiers dead vs. only 1,200 Germans. Compare this to Gold, Juno and Sword which were equally strongly defended by the Germans and were where the purely British or British and Canadian forces landed and they only suffered around 400 - 500 at each beach whilst killing thousands of Germans and destroying much armour too. So much for the British operations being a shambles then when on the 3 British managed beacheads the deathtoll was less then a 3rd of the US casualties on a single beachhead with more German forces destroyed too.
No, the reality is if the British do one thing right it's military campaigns, their history of being a nation of war winners is testament to this. The US and France with their failures from the war of 1812 to Vietnam, to even the US campaign in Iraq for the US and France's consistent and repeated failure against the British empire, their Napoleonic defeats by the British, their twice losing their country in the 20th century to the Germans is testament to the abject failures these nations consistently are in military campaigns. At least use a nation like Russia that's had much military success through the years, in fact, even Germany, Italy and particularly Spain and Portugal despite their defeats have also had more success over the years. This is why half of the Americas speak Spanish/Portuguese and the other half speak English and pretty much none speak French.
If your ancestors were rievers they probably stole cattle from both sides. Rievers and the borderers generally had a strong reputation of not worrying too much about philosophical high ideals like nationality when an opportunity for a little extra wealth presented itself.
Many cases of rievers joining the Scottish army as they marched south to join with a bit of English plundering and happily picking off wounded and unwary Scots soldiers or joining in English counter-raids on the return journey (and vice versa).
Not so many cases of rievers standing in a field next to a herd of unattended cows and asking "should we check if these are English cows or Scots cows before we decide whether to rustle them away?" ;-)
However, I have to ask - if the male line died out, how do you come to have your surname? Cadet branch?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Well, if it wasn't for your little island nation, and that larger nation to the south both wanting to exact revenge on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles after WWI, there wouldn't have been a WWII in the first place. So there!
If only President Wilson had been in better health and was able to get his plans for the treaty through the heads of European leaders...
The problem, as I see it, is that there are often attempts at humor that are not actually funny. And often those attempts dominate an important discussion.
This is typical of the National Archives. They take a document which belongs to Britain and for which the copyright has long since expired, and allow a third party to compile data from it suitable for insertion into a database. Great stuff... except they also allow that third party to retain copyright of the data as it exists in the database, thus forcing anybody else who might want to use the source material to go through the whole process again or pay up.
The 'researchers' only allow you to conduct searches via their query engine. They don't make the source material available as a download. The same is true of the Old Bailey records which went on line a while back and other sources.
They have to cover their costs, I hear you say. But these are research projects and the National Archives don't even bother to negotiate a limit on the rights of the researchers. They could for instance require the researchers to make the data source available after a set period.
The Doomsday Book is a thousand years old. You would have thought that it would be available on line free of charge by now. It isn't. The National Archives allowed a third party to perform a new translation (that way they get copyright on their brand spanking new work) and put that on the net but only via a query engine. No source material available.
The people running the National Archives should be sacked for incompetence.
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') AGAINST ('' IN BOOLEAN MODE)' at line 1
they might want to fix that...
Nationalism is a very sad sad thing, getting all chest thumpy over your people or our people or their people killing thousands is pathetic.
A quick bit of math shows that if we assume a new generation is born approximately every 25 years, and if you're not too badly inbred, then you should have about (2 parents)^(400 years ago/25 years)=2^16=65536 ancestors. It's an order of magnitude estimate (doubles or halves if you add or remove a generation) but it shows that if your ancestors are primarily European and especially if they are primarily British, then you have a pretty good chance of having an ancestor somewhere in that database.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
This is why half of the Americas speak Spanish/Portuguese and the other half speak English and pretty much none speak French.
I'm from the French part of Louisiana, you insensitive clod!
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Shhh! You do know we let them think that, because every time they start feeling a bit insecure, they get into it with some under-funded dictatorship or island nation or something, don't you? I am right next door (north-wise) and keep having to remind myself to keep my trap shut about the whole 1812 thing. I figure there's a good bet that if they ever remember that bit of history, they'll want a rematch, and that will interrupt hockey season.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
Anything in there about a Knight that goes "nee"?
Before you go badmouthing the US again over D Day, there are two things you might want to take into account. (Or not, if you prefer being an ignorant bigot.) First, Gold, Sword and Juno beaches were nice and level, with ample access to the land behind it, while Omaha was backed by cliffs with only limited, narrow exits, well defended by the Germans. Second, Omaha Beach was the one place in Normandy that you could be sure would be picked for a landing, if there were one in Normandy at all. Thus, it was not only one of the hardest beaches to exit, it was also, by far, the best defended. The important thing about Omaha Beach isn't that there were so many US casualties, but that under the above circumstances, there were so few. It could easily have been worse; if Rommel had been in tactical control and allowed to use the troops as he saw fit, he might actually have driven the landing back into the sea at Omaha, unlike every place else.
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Oh holy crap. The original spelling of my family name has TONNES of references. COOL!!
how is babby formed?