ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine some of the political, cultural and institutional factors that affected the ownership, use and status of arms and armour in sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England. There can be little doubt that England was among the most militarised societies in early modern Europe. Complex institutional, political and social factors had combined since the later Middle Ages to produce a society in which the ownership of arms and armour and participation in military culture more generally was far more widespread than it was in much of contemporary Europe. Yet paradoxically the universal nature of English military culture has contributed to it leaving a deceptively faint trace both in the contemporary archival and material record and in the work of later historians. The lack of a standing army until the 1640s (some 200 years later than the emergence of such institutions in France, Spain and the Low Countries) and the reliance of the English crown upon the private networks of aristocrats, merchants and townsmen to recruit and supply armies for the king’s wars has meant that the records of military activity are diverse and spread throughout numerous archives. Moreover, the experience of civil war and regicide contributed to a steady demilitarisation of English society in the years after 1660. This gathered pace after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and led to the development of a mature fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century, which facilitated the growth of British interests overseas and saw Britain ultimately victorious in the ‘second Hundred Years War’ against its ancient enemy France. The period after 1688 also witnessed the transformation of the English into a ‘polite and commercial people’ and a growing separation between civilian and military society (Langford 1989, 27, 199).
