"Many people with an interest in war in the Middle Ages succumb to the temptation to confuse the reality of how it was with a romantic ideal of the spectacle of knights in battle. Of course, it was sometimes possible that wars were quickly decided by such dramatic combat, but if they dragged on, which they normally did, battles and even sieges became rare exceptions. Instead the fighting devolved into raids, ambushes, devastation and looting. Such tactics allowed fighting to continue by providing funding for troops, while simultaneously depleting the enemy's financial resources. No wonder then that these armies quickly mutated into little more than bands of robbers. Chivalry – at least in the modern understanding – was mainly conspicuous by its absence. These "knights" were often too busy collecting ransom money to go out and loot, torture prisoners or extort the last piece of bread from starving peasants.
Like shining beacons the spectacular English victories of Crecy (1346) and Maupertuis (1356) lit up the first phase of the Hundred Years' War. But what happened in between? While there was no pause in the fighting, one gets the impression that events became obscured in the darkness between the blaze of these two battles. Looking for more specific information, you may stumble upon – in a very remote corner – the war in Brittany. There, after the death of the old Duke in 1341, fighting broke out between two noble factions over the succession in the duchy. One group had formed around Charles of Blois, the husband of the niece of the Duke. Because Charles of Blois was approved by the French king, it was only natural that the English supported his competitor, John of Montfort, the step-brother of the old Duke.
The war finally ended in 1364 after more than twenty years, with the death of Charles of Blois in the Battle of Auray. Since the English concentrated their forces mostly in the north in Flanders or in the south in Gascony, Brittany was almost always a neglected sideshow and wasn't allowed to become too much of a financial drain. The troops were therefore largely left to themselves. Very often groups composed of only a few dozen warriors seized castles or another fortified places, most commonly during night raids. They then extorted protection money, the so called "Patis", in the controlled area and undertook raids into the enemy's lands. Both sides constantly employed a good number of foreign mercenaries (German, Flemish, Savoyard, Genoese), but over time the involved British and Bretons also developed an increasingly mercenary mentality…"
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Amicalement
Armand
begins his series on how to paint a 15mm DBA army well, in a reasonable time frame.
