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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...'"
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.
I'd say, on the balance, that it was(though it isn't self-evidently so).
From the perspective of the present, where highly centralized governments are a nontrivial threat to freedom and efficiency, decentralized systems sound like a good idea. And, it is true that centralization can, and frequently has, taken a downright nasty turn. However, the feudal model of decentralization looks very little like the modern one and, to be frank, it sucked.
Central government existed largely in theory(the king did have power, under the right circumstances; but it was severely tempered by the local power of the nobility and the church); but that didn't make the people any freer. In the country, many people were serfs(legally bound to the land and service to the local noble, though not salable as slaves are) or small renters. In the towns and cities, the guilds controlled much of the commerce and industry. Religion exerted considerable temporal power(and siphoned off a good deal of wealth). Because of the fragmentation of power and the quasi-independence of numerous little fiefdoms, codes of law were a hideous mess of customary cruft, civil and ecclesiastical, that often varied from place to place. Weights and measures were not standardized across many areas and running into taxes, tolls and whatnot at the edge of every petty strongman's domain was always a risk(does wonders for trade, that).
For all its(considerable) vices, the notion of the nation-state, first under monarchs of greater or lesser absoluteness, and gradually under more representative flavors of government, was vital in breaking down the heavily entrenched local nobility, and their webs of onorous customary obligation, and replacing it with the notion of equals under law, with standardized rights and obligations. This is not to say that that was the intent(indeed, it almost certainly wasn't, it was about the king attempting to consolidate his own power at the expense of other strongmen); but it turns out that the effect of the absolutist project was the creation of an institutional system of governance that could survive a transition from dynastic power to representative governance.
In a sense, it took a period of centralization to attenuate the power of local nobility and create a uniformity of infrastructure and law sufficient to allow the modern concept of decentralization(often an excellent idea) to exist. Feudal decentralization was pretty pathological.