KEN WISE, ‘OXFORDSHIRE’S PART IN THE ENGLISH MILITARY CAMPAIGN IN FRANCE OF 1415’

Ken Wise is an independent local history researcher with a particular interest in Oxfordshire. He says he thought “The availability of The Soldier in Later Medieval England database was an exciting development and offered a huge opportunity not least to local historians. The medieval period is not so often tackled in this area of interest (although The Victoria County History teams continue to make important progress). The extent to which an active military class can be identified in a locality may still be a fairly new ground for consideration and any links with specific campaigns useful for understanding the formation of relationships influential in that society at the time. Correspondingly those relationships may well have been the basis of military recruitment networks and so an examination of them as glimpsed through the arrangement of muster lists is interesting. There is also some return for the family historian if individual settlements can be shown to be likely to have produced men involved in national events and communities found to have developed in a landscape in part shaped by inhabitants’ responsibilities during time of war.”

Ken is interested in sharing this research findings with other local and military historians and producing some further articles on the subject.

A download of Ken’s study is available here.