ABSTRACT

In this chapter we address what might be regarded as the $64,000 question: how big was an early medieval army? This is an issue that has attracted much attention historiographically, and so deserves a chapter of its own. Although we must prefix any answer, as commonly throughout this book, with the specification that it depends on context – where, when and above all what sort of war – the only truly honest answer to this crucial question is that we do not know. That has, nevertheless, not prevented a great deal of scholarly – and some not-soscholarly – debate on the matter. The earliest classic statement is represented by the work of Hans Delbrück, who concluded from careful study that early medieval armies must typically have been quite small.1 The argument that early medieval armies were to be numbered in the low thousands was espoused by Verbruggen, and followed by F.-L. Ganshof.2 In 1968 Karl-Ferdinand Werner3 argued against this position, using Ottonian sources to contend that the potential military manpower available to tenth-century German rulers could be as high as 20,000 armoured cavalry, and that their armies in the field actually, on occasion and with help from allies, reached this order of magnitude. He claimed that the number of warriors potentially available to Charlemagne at the height of his success must have been even greater. At the same time, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz argued that the kings of the Asturias must also have fielded large armies.4 This he claimed because of the need to raise every available man in defence of the Christian fatherland against the ‘Islamic flood’, and especially to counter the armies of the emirs and later caliphs of Cordoba, which Moslem sources number in tens of thousands. One such source lists contingents of levied Moslem Spanish cavalry alone adding up to no fewer than 21,613 in a campaign of 865.5

Much of the discussion since then has been concerned with the size of Viking armies, and arose from scepticism in the 1960s about early medieval descriptions of the scale of the Viking threat and from reconsideration of the extent of Viking settlement. This in turn led to discussion of the size of the armies which the Vikings’ Anglo-Saxon enemies could have mustered. Peter Sawyer famously argued that even a Viking ‘Great Army’ should instead be numbered in the low hundreds.6 Representing the orthodoxy in Anglo-Saxon

studies, Sir Frank Stenton, on the other hand, envisaged early medieval AngloSaxon and Viking armies as numbering thousands, with Viking hosts perhaps around 5,000 men.7 Given that Stenton regarded Harold II’s army at Hastings, which he estimated at about 7,000 men, as representing substantially fewer than an Old English king could have mustered to face an invasion, he clearly envisaged pre-Conquest English forces as potentially numbering over 10,000, perhaps as many as 20,000 men.8 However, at about the same time as Sawyer critiqued the accepted views of the size of Viking armies, Eric John countered the then popular notion of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Nation in Arms’ with an argument in favour of military service performed by aristocrats only, thus also postulating small armies.9 Sawyer’s perhaps deliberately extreme position provoked a healthy debate, but his thesis was convincingly refuted by N.P. Brooks, who showed that Viking armies could indeed, on occasion at least, number hundreds of ships and thousands of men, though probably not tens of thousands.10 In more recent years, Bernard S. Bachrach has argued that early medieval armies could be very large indeed, perhaps even reaching 100,000 men in the field at one time, if not in the same army.11 Although Bachrach proclaimed his opinion to represent the orthodoxy on the subject in the late 1990s,12 this is far from the case. Where early medieval historians express a view on the matter, the consensus appears to be in much the same area as Verbruggen and Brooks left it, with armies in the low thousands.13 Clearly, however, there is much room for debate.