Author: Anne Belsey

Orders of the day, Volume 32, Issue 4, 2000

The revitalisation of European culture during the 16th and early 17th centuries was not least in impacting upon the nature of European warfare. Since the end of the (Western) Roman Empire in the 5th century until the Renaissance there had been no standing armies of any significance and little thought given to creating, organising or controlling an army. Certainly there had been much warfare throughout the periods that we now refer to as ‘the Dark Ages’ and ‘the Middle Ages’, indeed in some places warfare was endemic, but it was almost without exception casual in execution, an extension of the tournament. In his substantial work on the life, work and legacy of Gustavus Adolphus, subtitled A History of the Art of War from its Revival After the Middle Ages to the Spanish Succession War, Theodore Dodge dismisses this entire period, of more than one thousand years, as contributing nothing to the development of the art of war.

This period was dominated by a form of warfare based on individual combat. Training tended to be limited to weapons handling for wealthy knights to achieve individual prowess. Such organisation as existed was very simple, being essentially a wealthy or charismatic leader and his band of followers, be he Viking warlord or feudal baron. Yet even those at the pinnacle of the feudal system, such as kings, were expected not only to lead their armies in person but to set the example of physical prowess by fighting in the front rank with sword or lance. (This ethos still seems to be evident within some SK pike divisions!)

Within such warfare, discipline was an unknown concept; lords and knights would not be bound by it, nor would they trouble themselves to impose it on their followers. The only tactic for attacking the enemy was the headlong, barely disciplined charge and many forces could not manage that. Even the renowned English longbowman could only fight defensively - he hammered in his sharpened stake and hoped that the French chivalry (heavily-armed knights on horseback or foot) would make a frontal attack.

It took the development of the pike by the Swiss during their wars of liberation from the Holy Roman Empire during the 14th century for there to emerge for the first time in a thousand years a means by which the simple infantrymen could attack and defeat heavily-armoured chivalry. The pike was not an individual weapon; to be effective it had to be used in large, highly drilled and disciplined formations, but it was cheap enough for every peasant to use one.

In many respects the pike and the formations that used it were a throw-back to the phalanxes of ancient times. As the reputation of the Swiss pikemen grew throughout the 15th century, it not unnaturally led during the later Renaissance to the wider consideration of the tactics of the ancients.

Foremost amongst thinkers at this time was Niccolo Macchiavelli. Although he has become more widely known as a political theorist, he was interested in the creation, organisation and tactical control of armies as a political tool. His book The Art of War published in 1521 continued to be studied by military theoreticians, such as Frederick the Great, Napoleon and von Clausewitz, long after his death.

The formation that Macchiavelli presents as his ideal battalion, his fundamental tactical unit, may strike us as very strange; not only is it almost totally lacking in missile-firing troops, it is formed up in files of twenty, the front five being pikemen and the rear fifteen sword and buckler men. Some things are familiar however; the battalion is part of a regiment which is commanded by a colonel; the battalion is commanded by a lieutenant colonel, there is a captain for every 100 men and a corporal for every 10 men; but no other ranks are mentioned.

During any age, organisational structure and rank structure are very much part and parcel of the same thing. If we look at the organisational structure of the Civil War period - companies, regiments, brigades - we find that it is very similar to that of the modern day, just as the rank structure of the 17th century is broadly similar to that of the modern British army, despite the fact that during the last 350 years the nature of warfare has changed beyond all recognition.

By contrast, if we compare the Civil Wars with that last great war of the feudal age, the Wars of the Roses, although the technology of war was similar, e.g. armoured cavalry, simple firearms, pole-arms and crude artillery, the nature of the organisational and rank structures was totally different. During the Wars of the Roses, such things did not exist. Macchiavelli’s work gives us an insight into the developments that give rise to the troop formations of the Civil Wars. The names which came to be applied to such formations and of the various roles necessary to organise and control them give us further clues as to how they came to be.

There had long been military ‘companies’ just as there had been ‘companies’ of players or pilgrims. The term was a loose one and could be applied to any size of mercenary or feudal body of troops, and the leader of a company was styled ‘captain’, from the Latin for ‘head’ - capitis, in the casual way that it might be applied to the skipper of a ship.

In adopting the drill, discipline and size of formations needed to use such weaponry as the pike, small companies had to be grouped together under a common regime, using common drill methods, common drum calls, common rank structures and, eventually, common clothing. Under common regimes such bodies thus became ‘regiments’. On the march they formed long columns so their leader’s title was derived from the Italian for ‘column’ - colonna - colonel.

Formed up in their ranks and files, the ordinary soldiers needed individuals whose example they could exactly follow, a junior officer who fought in the ranks with identical weaponry. Commonly such individuals stood at the front or head of the body where they could be seen. Their job title was also derived from the Latin for ‘head’, via the French in the form caporal wither it seems to have become confused with the Latin for ‘body’ corporalis and came to us as ‘corporal’, an apt term for the ‘head man’ within a body of troops.

This then is essentially the rank structure that Macchiavelli describes, and in an ideal world it would be all that a regiment needs. The colonel as commander gives orders to the captains of his sub-units (companies, divisions or whatever) who give the orders to their men, essentially by telling the corporals whose example is then followed by the rest of the body. Unfortunately warfare is not apt to create ideal operating conditions for any organisation, so various other supporting ranks came to be developed.

Both captains and colonels found a need to have someone to stand in for them, or take over should they become casualties; someone who to hold their place, to be literally a tenant in their lieu, thus the ranks of ‘lieutenant’ and ‘lieutenant-colonel’ emerged. Although with Macchiavelli and the modern British army, as the battalion, rather than the regiment itself, was the tactical unit so the lieutenant-colonel was a tactical commander in his own right rather than merely a deputy. During the Civil Wars, lieutenant colonels often commanded regiments because their titular colonels were either not soldiers or were busy commanding the army.

Further down the scale there also grew a need for individuals who could not only train the rank-and-file in understanding the necessary drill and discipline but who could impose it on campaign and during a battle. These men were those professional soldiers of less than ‘gentle’ birth who had been household men-at-arms during the feudal system and whose title ‘sergeant’ was derived from the Old French for ‘servant’ - sergent. As men-at-arms of almost knightly status, these men had carried halberds and they continued to do so long after it ceased to be a significant battlefield weapon.

Within regiments the need to maintain uniformity across the different companies led to the emergence of an individual to oversee training and organisation, the sergeant-major, whose status was above that of captain and below that of lieutenant-colonel. During the Civil Wars this rank often lost the ‘sergeant’ part of its name, but the terms ‘major’ and ‘sergeant major’ meant the same and were used indiscriminately. The evolution of the senior NCO and warrant officer ranks of the modern army, what we now think of as ‘sergeant-majors’, post-dated the Civil War period. The rank ‘elder sergeant’ seems to be an SK invention.

Two other ranks of the Civil Wars were the most junior commissioned ranks: quartermaster and ensign. The former seems to have been purely an administrative position, whilst the latter’s responsibility for his company’s standard may not have permitted much in the way of a command and control function, save the important role of identifying the company’s (or regiment’s) core to its members.

Macchiavelli took the Roman legion as his model and his theoretical regiment consisted of 6,000 men divided into 10 battalions (each battalion thus equated to a cohort). The large square-shaped regimental formations that he proposed were not so dissimilar to the 3,000 strong tercios used by the Spanish during the 16th and early 17th centuries, which are perhaps better understood as regiments, given that each was a single tactical formation operating under a common regime.

The emergence of tactical formations which required a given number of drilled and disciplined men, together with the growing power of the nation state throughout Europe, effectively ended the feudal basis for warfare during the 16th century, but the changes that led up to the Civil War period still had some way to go.

The deep formations that the Swiss developed that Macchiavelli advocated and that the Spanish employed served well enough for infantry whilst missile weapons were few and ineffective, but by the 17th century it was increasingly evident that such deep formations were vulnerable to both hand-held firearms and artillery. They also reduced the number of one’s own soldiers who could return fire.

Prince Maurice of Nassau, commanding the Dutch in their rebellion against Spain, and Gustavus Adolphus in his various wars expanded the role of firearms, reducing the depth and expanding the frontages of formations. This both necessitated and allowed for greater sophistication in battlefield organisation.

The regiment came commonly to consist of approximately one thousand men being based on ten companies each of one hundred men, although in Britain and elsewhere regiments were occasionally much larger and very commonly much smaller, especially after a period on campaign. If one thousand men was too large a body for effective tactical control, it could be divided into two or three battalions or squadrons, each consisting of perhaps three or four companies from the same regiment. When regiments became too small to be tactically effective several could be combined to create one battalion, as practised by the Royalists towards the end of the war.

The brigade, by contrast, was a grouping of two or more regiments each of whom retained their own separate regimes, but were so arranged as to be able to offer mutual support. During the Civil Wars both the concept of the battalion and of the brigade seem to have been used only on a casual and almost ad hoc basis. Many regiments were soon so diminished in size as to effectively constitute only one battalion, and some Civil War armies had so few regiments that they effectively constituted only one brigade. For example, the Parliamentarian army was drawn into brigades at Edgehill but not at Naseby.

Like people engaged in any activity, the soldiers of the Civil Wars were influenced by practices and events that preceded them rather than those that came after them.

Looking at the Civil War from our own time it is easy to regard the armies of the Civil Wars, especially the red-coated New Model, as being part of a long tradition of British military history including Marlborough and Wellington and of thin red lines driving off attacking columns. Of course, none of this later history could influence the commanders of the Civil Wars, so we should be conscious not to allow it to influence us in our attempts to re-enact the period.

A study of the origins of the various formations of the Civil War period better enables us to understand what we are doing and to use the correct terms. Thus when we combine two or more SK regiments into a single tactical unit we are not brigading them, we are regimenting them, because in order to properly function they need to operate under a common regime - of drill, command structure, drum calls, etc.

By much the same token, the ranks carried by various Civil War officers were not merely arbitrary gradations of authority and status. Each rank denoted a quite different role within a regiment, reflecting that regiment’s organisation.

Of course, practice on campaign did not always coincide with theory, but theory acted as basis upon which practical improvisation could be developed. Similarly, in order to ensure that SK military performances, whether on the battlefield or in non-fighting displays, accurately portray Civil War practice, it behoves us to organise our SK formations in the manner of the period and have the correct rank structure to control them.

• The Armada Campaign. John Tincey, 1988
• The Art of War. Niccolo Macchiavelli, 1521
• The Concise Oxford Dictionary
• Edgehill. Peter Young, 1967
• The English Civil War, Philip Haythornthwaite, 1983
• Gustavus Adolphus. Theodore Ayrault Dodge, 1895
• Medieval Warfare. Terence Wise, 1976
• Naseby. Peter Young, 1985