ABSTRACT
It was Machiavelli who noted that once a man became a soldier ‘he changes not only his clothing but he adopts attitudes, manners, ways of speaking and becoming himself quite at odds with the civilian life’.1 This quotation is taken from John Hale’s classic account of Renaissance warfare. In those days, despite the prevalence of violence at every level of society, soldiers and civilians were worlds apart – as distinct, in fact, as the clergy was from laity. Hale records that contemporary writers criticised members of the Imperial Army in 1528 for letting their beards sprout and their hair grow long – through this inversion of the clerical tonsure they were signalling their entry into a separate way of life and, like the clergy, their form of dress focused attention on their difference from other men. From the late fifteenth century, anti-soldier attitudes swirled easily along the grooves cut by centuries of anti-clericalism.2
