MILITARY SERVICE 119
unknown began—a world of which they knew next to nothing by
personal experience, and little more by repute. Yet from time to
time echoes of this greater world came to the peasant in his
fields: news of conflicts between great neighbouring lords, whom
he might, perchance, have seen spurring through the village
street, or riding upon the uplands hawk on wrist. At times news
of the King's wars came to the village, brought by a passing
soldier en route for his home once more. War, however, for many
years after the Conquest, meant little or nothing to him: it was
true that in times of great stress he could be summoned to join
a mass levy, and then, armed with cudgel or knife, he formed
one of an ill-disciplined rabble, led by untrained and ill-prepared
leaders. It was such a body that was assembled to meet the
Scottish invaders, and which won the Battle of the Standard in
1138. Here, two wild undisciplined bodies of troops met and
fought out their quarrel more like wild beasts than soldiers.
Except for such very unusual emergencies, however, the peasant
knew little at first hand of war for some 150 years after the
Conquest.
The coming of the thirteenth century saw the beginning of a
change which was to have a marked influence on the peasant's
life. From time to time the King had issued Assizes of Arms,
which laid down the various categories of men liable for military
service in certain circumstances. The first of these, the Assize of
1181, contemplated only the arming of freemen,1 but in 1225, a
writ for the collection of a tax of a fifteenth mentions among those
to be exempted "quantum ad villanos armis ad quae jurati
sunt".2 From this it seems clear that villeins could be sworn to
arms, and this power is extended by a writ of 1242 enforcing the
Assize of Arms so that it includes not only citizens and burgesses,
but adds "libere tenentes, villanos et alios",3 from which it
1 Stubbs, Select Charters (8th ed.), 154. a Ibid. 356.
8 Lane. Lay Subsidies, I, 68, 69, and also a parallel writ for 1230. The date
given in Stubbs (p. 371) is 1252, but this is an error. (Lancashire and Cheshire
Rec. Soc.) The Rev. W. Hudson in his valuable and suggestive article on the
" Norwich Militia in the XlVth Century ", Norf. Arch, xrv, 263, interprets this
phrase to refer to such "villeins and others as held lands above a certain
value as sub-tenants (i.e. free tenants in villeinage)", but Pollock and Mait-
land, History English Law, i, 421 n. 4, accept the words at their face value to
mean "the villani if rich enough should be armed". And see Cal. Inqvis.
Misc. I, 558, "as they were sworn to arms, both freemen and villeins".