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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...'"
Terrorists could exploit this knowledge to close the trebuchet gap.
""The reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is because God doesn't trust the British in the dark.""
yeah it is pretty cool but it's not worth carrying an umbrella all the time.
...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
Slashdot: News for Nerds, and also XPeter
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Actually, bureaucrats were a creation of the monarchy and essential to their attempts at absolutism.
Before bureaucracy, the king's only way of making something happen beyond his own landholdings was to apply pressure down a chain of one or more (generally recalcitrant) nobles who theoretically owed him ties of obedience and/or kinship; but, in practice, enjoyed considerable autonomy. Bureaucrats, by contrast, were simply commons with technical skills(yes, reading, writing, and bookkeeping count, even when you don't do them with computers) and depended directly on the monarchy for their positions.
Everybody loves to hate them, and sometimes they deserve it; but bureaucracy is one of the defining characteristics of the move from feudalism to the nation-state.
"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