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Size of armies (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Pulp History


In: Wales
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After reading about the battle of Hastings it struck me that Harold's army was supposed to be the biggest amassed in British history at this point. This army was somewhere between 6000 to 10000 men, consisting of Houscarls and Fyrd.

Now, if this was Harold from England calling upon all 'English' people to defend their country against the Norman hopefuls, then why under 10,000 men from a population of what?? 2-3 million!!

OR did the army consist of a small ruling elite who could only gather 6 -10,000 men - or even fewer using some locals forced to fight who fled at the first opportunity??

What are people's thoughts on the sizes of armies in times past? How can a relatively small invading force not convince indigenous people to join up in droves to beat them off???
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Rocky



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Pulp History wrote:
What are people's thoughts on the sizes of armies in times past? How can a relatively small invading force not convince indigenous people to join up in droves to beat them off???

I'm not sure what you're asking here. Do you mean something like: "Suppose Iceland were occupied by France and then the Russians decided to invade Iceland. Why wouldn't the Icelanders join the Russians and take up arms against the French occupiers?"
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Pulp History


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That's an interesting question in itself, but what I was wondering was if invading forces in the past have been so small, in the region of a few thousand, then why can the native peoples, numbering millions, not beat them off? Was there a complete lack of ability to organise an army to defend?

That lack of ability could be argued for pre-Roman Britain, but could the same argument be used for pre-Norman conquest England? Surely the road networks, governmental systems and sense of unity were in place by this time?
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Rocky



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Pulp History wrote:
That's an interesting question in itself, but what I was wondering was if invading forces in the past have been so small, in the region of a few thousand, then why can the native peoples, numbering millions, not beat them off? Was there a complete lack of ability to organise an army to defend?

1) Maybe the churls and wenches didn't care about politics? Maybe they were to busy brewing mead and tending to the fields to notice who was holding court.

2) Maybe it can be compared to Africa and South America/ Mexico.

All the Europeans went to Africa and then they all left, except for in South Africa. But I don't know how big the armies were that fought the Europeans off.

In South American/Mexico all the Europeans came, but the natives didn't do such a good job of fighting them off.

3) Maybe the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the Norman invasion didn't happen.

Someone posted somewhere that there was a lack of archaeological evidence for the Anglo-Saxon invasion, but I couldn't find that particular post. I did find one that possibly references said post though:

Page 22 of Hill Forts:
Hatty wrote:
So far so good but why are other existing Roman towns also not called chester? After all some of today's towns stand on the same spot.

As Ishmael wrote on one of the threads, archaeologists have been hard pressed to come up with Anglo-Saxon remains. On the other hand, the English countryside is dotted with brown signs pointing towards a 'Saxon village' or 'Saxon town'; makes you wonder where the evidence actually is.


Page 38 of Matters Arising (The History of Britain Revealed):
Ishmael wrote:
Here is a quote from ["New chronology and new concept of the English history. British empire as a direct successor of byzantine-roman empire]:
William I the Conqueror and Hastings battle in 1066 A.D. The fourth crusade in 1204 A.D.

This is the exact conclusion to which I have come independently (though under Fomenko's influence). There was no Norman invasion. No 1066. This is Byzantine history transferred to the British Isles.

What I think is most interesting is that it is not necessary for either the Anglo-Saxon invasion or the Norman Invasion to have occurred for the English language to get to where it is today (according to THOBR).
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Rocky



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Alexander reorganized his forces at Tyre and started for Babylon with an army of 40,000 infantry and 7000 cavalry.

Isn't the path from Tyre to Babylon mostly desert? How long would it take to walk from Tyre to Babylon?

I find it implausible that 40,000 men and 7000 horses made this journey with the technology of the time.
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DPCrisp


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what I was wondering was if invading forces in the past have been so small, in the region of a few thousand, then why can the native peoples, numbering millions, not beat them off? Was there a complete lack of ability to organise an army to defend?

Organising an army 'in time' is surely a problem, but a much bigger one is training and equipping it.

Even if there is a well-defined sense of Englishness among the peasantry, do they feel strongly enough about who is in the big house to stand in front of a posse of trained, armed, armoured warriors, where everyone has a good chance of dying? Even if they did, does courage of conviction substitute for discipline?

That lack of ability could be argued for pre-Roman Britain, but could the same argument be used for pre-Norman conquest England? Surely the road networks, governmental systems and sense of unity were in place by this time?

So this is an argument that pre-Roman Britain is no less organised than post-Roman Britain.

This touches on the Roman Roads argument. The problem with getting a resistance force in place in time is that people are spread far and wide, but there are specific places they need to be to retain control: the capitals, castles, administrative centres, crossroads... that an invading force must secure in order to gain control. The geographical area occupied by an invasion force is tiny compared with the geographical area they command if they win (just as tiny moments in time determine the regime for years to come).

The Romans had to conquer the people, not the wide open spaces: their need to go to the towns and villages was equal to the people's need for specific places to go and direct ways to get there. Invading is a matter of following roads from town to town.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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I find it implausible that 40,000 men and 7000 horses made this journey with the technology of the time.

What technique/technology are you thinking of that would have made it easier?
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Rocky



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DPCrisp wrote:
I find it implausible that 40,000 men and 7000 horses made this journey with the technology of the time.

What technique/technology are you thinking of that would have made it easier?

I was thinking the modern car engine. You'd need something that could transport large amounts of food and water through the desert which doesn't tire easily.

I looked on a globe and the distance from Tyre to Babylon is greater than the distance from Calgary to Vancouver. It takes about 11 hours to drive from Calgary to Vancouver (on a highway).

That's a long distance for 40,000 guys + 7,000 horses to walk. So then I thought if you had cars and trucks to carry supplies you could probably do it. But then I realized you'd need a tanker truck to carry the gas to fuel the cars. But if you had a society with tanker truck technology, then you'd be past the point where you'd engage in the kind of warfare of Alexander's day.

That made me think that there has probably never been successful mass migration, for any reason, through any kind of inhospitable land. So if I read now in a history book and it says that some huge group of people left their settlement, and in a short period of time, moved a considerable distance, across the frozen tundra, or over a mountain range, or through the desert, it is not true.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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That's an excellent point. The same historians who pour scorn on historical accounts of 'armies that drank the rivers dry' and so forth are quite nonchalant about telling us that the whole of the, say, Alemanni upsticked and went a thousand miles to elsewhere.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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That made me think that there has probably never been successful mass migration, for any reason, through any kind of inhospitable land. So if I read now in a history book and it says that some huge group of people left their settlement, and in a short period of time, moved a considerable distance, across the frozen tundra, or over a mountain range, or through the desert, it is not true.

I don't believe in mass migration either, but we're talking about having somewhere to go and therefore having a way to get there (which is certainly true with cars: the wheel is not all it's cracked up to be).

Look at it the other way: unless the story is about the first to break through some barrier, then it can't have been a barrier. The Silk Road was an impossible journey... until it wasn't. After that, it wasn't.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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After reading about the battle of Hastings it struck me that Harold's army was supposed to be the biggest amassed in British history at this point. This army was somewhere between 6000 to 10000 men, consisting of Houscarls and Fyrd.

Sounds like a considerable army, almost suspiciously large; who supplied the figures I wonder, an anti-Norman A/S chronicler writing decades later?

The housecarls/retainers formed the main body of the lord's fighting force and owed him exclusive loyalty. It wasn't until the wars against the French, i.e. offensive not defensive fighting, that there was a professional army as such with a Parliament to accede to (or veto) raising taxes to fund the venture.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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I was thinking the modern car engine. You'd need something that could transport large amounts of food and water through the desert which doesn't tire easily.

The Mongols under Genghis Khan took a different view; they travelled light, a weapon, a yurt and a few cooking pots, and the size of the army was relatively small (at most 10,000 warriors?). There was surprisingly little hand-to-hand fighting, Mongolian fighters were almost pathologically averse to having the blood of their enemies on their person.

A village would be attacked thus ensuring that the villagers fled to the nearest fortified town, spreading panic, then another village suffered the same fate so that the town was packed with refugees from the region and the Mongols laid seige until it capitulated whereupon a choice between wholesale slaughter or giving, say, 10% of the produce was offered. A scribe or two would be given the job of administering the necessary paperwork and the townspeople were allowed to carry on as before in return for 'protection'.

The fear factor worked because Genghis 'invented' large cannon; the Chinese used gunpowder in fireworks but it was the Mongols who understood the potential use of gunpowder in a seige situation.
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Pulp History


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Also, on the topic of Guillame the Conq, a TV documentary that I saw made mention of the fact that William even tried to learn English when he took control of his new Kingdom, and showed a piece of written English as evidence of this - there was, however, no statement as to what the evidence for this is.

Is there some written evidence that William attempted to learn English? What English did William learn? Was it Anglo Saxon or peasant speak?
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Also, on the topic of Guillame the Conq, a TV documentary that I saw made mention of the fact that William even tried to learn English when he took control of his new Kingdom, and showed a piece of written English as evidence of this - there was, however, no statement as to what the evidence for this is.

Was the documentary out to show William in a good light? A monarch trying to please the people, needing perhaps to please the people, sounds plausible for a usurper aware he has to legitimise his claim; successive, legitimate, (Plantagenet) kings apparently didn't bother to learn English. Is it not likely that a proportion of the upper crust, churchmen particularly, would have known French (thinking of Charlemagne who picked an Anglo-Saxon speaking monk, Alcuin, as his tutor)?
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TelMiles


In: London
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I think there's something fishy about the Norman invasion. Something just doesn't add up. Imagine you're William and you decide to invade England. So you raise an army of just 8000 men! Only 8000? You'd better hope that Harold, despite being King of England can only raise a force of the same size and that you face him in a single winner-take-all battle AND that he brings all nobles of note to the battle, so that if he loses, England is yours, since there is no-one else left to fight. Hmmm.
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