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English Society in the Eleventh Century (1908)
English Society in the Eleventh Century - 1908 Author:Paul Vinogradoff Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FIRST ESSAY GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY SECTION I: MILITARY ORGANIZATION CHAPTER I MERCENARIES AND NATIONAL LEVIES Military i. Perhaps the most general featu... more »re of political organiza- systems. tiQn a feature common to all its varieties, however widely they might differ in other respects, is the necessity of a public force of some kind. Tribes and cities, savage hordes, feudal society and modern states, in as much as they are united against outsiders, and claim independent existence, have to provide, in one way or another, for an armed host. But, of course, this host may be arranged on very different lines: it may be the people in arms, or be recruited from a class of professional warriors, or consist of bands of trained mercenaries. In any case the system according to which the commonwealth carries on its armaments cannot but exercise a potent influence on the whole constitution of society—it may lead to social equality, or to the predominance of the armed few, to the endowment of soldiers with land, or to the sway of a plutocracy supported by hired armies. The central centuries of the Middle Ages in England present us with at least three main varieties of military organization, comprising further subdivisions. There was the hereditary aristocracy of feudalism based on land endowment; there were bodies of professional soldiers acting as mercenaries and household troops ; there were the national levies of fyrd and here gathered on the personal or on the territorial basis, t|ies? distinct systems overlapped a good deal, and may be said to have coexisted during the greater part of the period. But the epochs when each of them was predominant are easily distinguishable, and the contrast of the conceptions underlying them is so great that they may be considered separately from the...« less