Provisioning War in the Twelfth Century

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries some western European monarchies began to produce documents which recorded their activities in a more sustained and detailed way than before. From this period it is thus possible to reconstruct the practical workings of government. One of the best-documented of medieval governments was that of England, and the map shows the kind of detailed information that can be drawn from twelfth-century English records. In this case the information is drawn from the Pipe Rolls. These were accounts of the sums rendered by the sheriffs and other royal officials to the exchequer, the central financial institution. When the king took goods from the localities directly, these were credited to the sheriff's account. Plotted on the map is the amount of foodstuffs and materials provided for Henry II's expedition to Ireland in 1171-2.

This expedition, which brought an English king to Ireland for the first time, had been made necessary by developments in Ireland over the previous two years. In 1169 Norman-Welsh adventurers had landed in Leinster, initially serving as auxiliaries in the never-ending warfare of the Irish kings. In 1171, however, their leader, Richard fitz Gilbert ('Strongbow') had taken over Leinster itself. Henry II had no desire to see a new, independent principality so close to his own territories, especially one ruled by a politically suspect member of his own aristocracy. His expedition of 1171-2 secured both Strongbow's submission and the recognition of his overlordship by the Irish kings. It was the beginning of a political connection which survives, in part, to this day.

The king maintained an army of about 10,000 men in Ireland for six months. This included a prolonged stay during the winter months in Dublin, where a timber palace was constructed.

An army of this size, especially if sedentary for any length of time, could not live off the land and hence a great quantity of provisions had to be collected in England and transported to Ireland. The map shows how a successful twelfth-century monarchy could mobilize large-scale resources for warfare. Thousands of quarters of grain and hundreds of hogs were sent from virtually every part of the kingdom. Beans and cheese (not plotted) were collected. Ships' gear, such as canvas, was procured and seamen were levied from a dozen counties. Axes, shovels and nails were also dispatched—60,000 nails and a thousand shovels came from the Forest of Dean, England's most important iron-working centre.

Bristol and Chester were the most important shipping points, but oats and other products of the northern counties were sent directly from Cumbrian ports. Naturally more food and material was raised in the counties nearer to Ireland, but the existence of water routes meant that even the eastern counties could contribute: grain was sent by river from Cambridge to Lynn, for example. The initial contact between Normans and Irish had been a matter of ambitious frontiersmen on a freelance expedition. From 1171 the English state was involved and hence the resources of a much larger area could be applied to support military or political involvement in Ireland. The food chain was extended; the acorns of Norfolk were being excreted in Dublin.

Other monarchs of this period also launched large-scale military expeditions. The kings of Germany, for example, repeatedly took armies of thousands southwards across the Alps. They left, however, no complex bureaucratic record of the provisioning of these troops. England is unique in the scope of its records rather than the scale of its undertakings. The existence of these

Records, however, enables us to anatomize some of these undertakings and produce a map illustrating a sophisticated twelfth-century state

At work in one of its most characteristic activities.

R. Bartlett