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Saxon Huscarl Anglo-Saxon England relied on the fryd to raise men for armies and navies alike. The Normans replaced this system with enfeoffed feudal military obligations, although the idea of fryd-style “national” service and collective obligation survived beneath the Norman surface to influence later attitudes and ease the transition to pay-for-service and large infantry formations. […]

James Butler (1610-88), the Earl of Ormonde, was among the most prominent royalist leaders who survived to enjoy the Restoration of the Stuarts to the throne. An Anglo-Irish nobleman of Catholic ancestry but Protestant persuasion, he had joined the hard-fisted administration of the Duke of Strafford in 1633, and was deeply involved in the confiscation […]

The constitutional confrontation of King Charles I with Parliament became more serious in early 1641 when the king ordered the arrest of the House’s leaders, then it became outright war in August 1642. Many of the shires were dominated by Puritans, hence sympathetic to Parliament, and when the Scots abandoned the alliance with the king, […]

Charles Edward Stuart as an old man. In forcing the British government to recognise that they could no longer hold on to the North American colonies, the American Patriots achieved what the Jacobites had failed to do – inflict a decisive defeat on the authority of the British Crown. With the support of the French […]