In Defense of Peasant Levies

Havoc over at Lonely Star made a post last month titled “No More Peasant Armies”, in which they argue two chief things:

1. Think a lot about how people are fighting and why. This point I agree with a ton, adding more to your conflicts is a great way to make them more engaging to your players. 

2. A lot of statements about how your average farmer didn't see a lot of combat because raising a peasant levy is stupid. This point I disagree with immensely. 

What they're arguing against essentially is the idea that medieval combatants were primarily conscripted peasants in the vein of World War I, with a vast array of chaff ready to be mowed down en masse while the knights won the day. In doing so, however, I think their hyperbole has missed the forest for the trees, and unintentionally indulged in that same caricature of peasants as victims of history, even as Havoc argues for the face of battle to be more complex than the pop culture image.

The first thing that crops up, both near the beginning and near the end, is the concept of these conscripts having no reason not to turn tail or revolt at the first sign of trouble. Except, of course, they had a strong reason not to do so: their buddies. James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades is a seminal work on what exactly gets people through being shot at, analyzing records from the American Civil War, and it found two interesting points: the cause will get you to the battle, but its your comrades, and not wanting to let them down, that keep you in the fight. If your brother-in-law is next to you, you aren't going to look like a coward in front of them. While there may be less formal drill or training than the early modern period, that culture is gonna be ingrained into the people of that society, and functions as a cause all of its own. “This is the way we always do things” is a powerful motivation for many. “We're protecting our homes” is another.

The second point (really two points) is one of logistics. Havoc presents the idea that weapons cost money, and no one will buy weapons for a given peasant, and besides they need to be tending the fields anyway. I bring this up because one of the examples they present (the battle of Hastings) disproves both of those points. A major component of the English army in that battle was the fyrd, a temporary levy drawn from the populace where a few households would all chip in and equip one guy, because pre-industrial economies functioned on a basis of mutual aid among the peasantry. (As an aside, we also see this in the Roman Republic, but that's outside the time scale of this post). Also, the fyrd could only be drawn up for two months at a time, explicitly because they had to go back and tend their farms! This is, fundamentally, the farming class being present in combat. Are they normally left out of literary accounts? Yes, but we don't have to take the word of elites for it.

Via the Bayeux museum, some dudes who appear to only have shields and spears

Finally, a footnote on armies feeding themselves. Footnote 5 claims that kings preferred to stock up on supplies they bought in friendly territory and carry that into enemy territory, and…no? Anything that eats food is going to eat more food than it can carry, that's just math. The logistics of medieval kingdoms were primitive, often relying on forcing families to accommodate soldiers for a time. Even early modern armies with somewhat more advanced logistics tethers struggled with it, to the point that the United States banned the practice as part of the Constitution. 

All that said, I think Havoc absolutely has the right of it in terms of giving your armies color. Those people are from somewhere, they have families they belong to, a reason to fight and a social order that they have opinions on. “How do we feed this army?” can make for a solid adventure hook, whether a scouting mission or a smash-and-grab, and can be an opportunity to show the human cost of the conflict.

For those players who are martially inclined, ask yourself why your character chose to take up the sword (loyalty, obligation, necessity, profit), and what gets them through being stabbed by goblins. Because the idea of ordinary people as faceless conscripts and victims is outdated at best; people have agency, and sometimes exercising that agency means that you raise your spear, hold your ground, and fight.