Hi my name is Kevin Hicks welcome to my YouTube channel The History Squad. Now today's video is
actually in response to a question from one of my patreon members about how was ransom
and plunder shared in an English medieval army, so you know, how much, how was all this plunder
shared in the Middle Ages and even interestingly, uh how did they hold on to it? Because it wasn't
always that easy. So let's have a look. So ransom and plunder. Plunder, straightforward,
you rob the house, you steal the goods, that's your plunder. It could be a bed, it could be a
fur coat, it could be a tablecloth, it could be a bag of gold right? Now that's got to be anteed up,
but I'll talk about that in a minute. But what I want to talk about is ransom. So,
there you are in the heat of the battle and in front of you and your little gang of bowmen is a
French Knight. You've got him surrounded. He sees he can't move, he opens his visor you're about to
stab him and he shouts out ‘je me rend’ ‘je me rend’, apparently that's French chivalric talk
for ‘I surrender’. He then takes off his right gauntlet, hands it to you and says this lovely
word ‘parole’. So there you go, that's his word of honour, he's not going to run away but you've now
got to hold on to that prisoner, so you and your band of merry little men, bind his wrists maybe
but guard him because if you don't, somebody might slit your throat for a prisoner that is basically
worth his weight in gold. To you it's like, for a bowman in modern terms, winning the lottery.
So when it comes to ransoms and plunder for that matter there are rules and regulations.
If you for instance capture the enemy King, or his son the prince, or a captain of the royal blood,
or one of their lieutenants or constables of high rank, you're not allowed to keep
him you've got to hand him over to the king or one of the king's representatives immediately.
But that means doesn't mean you're just giving him away, you will get a reward
right. Now anybody below that, now is your chance because you can make money out of this,
you can sell him and make a profit and his belongings. If he's got a great big horse,
you're not going to give it away are you, you're going to sell it. So ransom and plunder, whether
you've ransomed a prisoner or whether you've got a wagon full of plunder there are rules how it is
divided. I call it the rule of thirds. You as your common bowman, lucky bugger, you have just won the
lottery because you get to keep two-thirds of the proceeds. You must hand over one third to your
captain, and from his third he pays one-third to his captain, who then in turn from his third pays
one third to the king. And this is kind of how it works, I've got this 1443-1444 from the clerk to
the Garrison of Tomberlain from the sale of a prisoner his horse and his sword. I love this.
There was a total of 28 pounds 17 and six pence that's old money. I know all about old money.
Um, 9 pounds 12 and 6 was to his captain, but from his 9 pound 12 shillings and six pence
he paid 3 pounds 4 shillings and tuppence to the garrison commander who from his 3 pound 4
shillings and tuppence, paid 1 pound 1 shilling and five pence to the king. You still walk away
with your two-thirds, that is fantastic, but all you've got to do now is you've got to hold
on to it and it's, it's interesting isn't it if you're just a man at arms or a a bowman
and you've made this money that's great, your prisoner's gone you've got your bag of gold
great but the king or your boss or your boss's boss, he's stuck with the prisoner.
Now if you can be quick about it you can get a his ransom paid, if it's reasonable,
pretty quick, but the guy who's got him further down the line he's got to squeeze that ransom
out of that French nobleman right? Now if he's a lesser knight it could be a quick thing yeah,
it's a low ransom get it paid, but if he's very very uh wealthy then you've got problems because
that knight could be stuck in your castle back in England for quite a while. Some of the most famous
ransoms from the medieval time uh was, one of them was King David, captured, the Scottish King, King
David who was captured at Nevilles Cross together with the three arrows that were stuck in him.
His ransom was set at 100,000 merk, which is, it's an almost forgotten Scottish silver coin.
But you have John the Good, King John captured, the French King captured at the Battle of Poitiers
there, uh three million gold crowns was his ransom, this is literally a king's ransom
isn't it? But we've got a record here of a bowman an ordinary bowman at Agincourt, he
together with a couple of buddies, I believe they were men at arms, he was an archer they captured
um what is described as Le Sire de Corps, it's a French nobleman. He handed him over and his
reward was 99 pounds, that's what he walked away with that's 44 times his wages for the campaign.
That's wow, he's won the lottery. The trick is though he's got to hold on to it because when the
Agincourt army arrived at Calais, disease, fear of disease, but I've also read that they were
frightened they were going to run out of food so they wouldn't let a lot of the lesser soldiers and
their prisoners in, so they had to sell up some of their wares and sacrifice some of their ransom,
so you've got to be very canny in holding on to your ransom, to your plunder, to your profit.
An interesting angle that I've been reading about is, is why men served and fought in the
king's armies in the medieval times from England and Wales. Well for the nobleman,
the knight it was described as his raison d’etre, his reason to live, he was born to serve to fight
and profit was secondary, but when you come down to the basic bowman, Kev the Bowman,
he wants adventure. He doesn't want to live his entire life in the same old village with the
same old people, he's a skilled bowman. He has a little bit of prestige so he can elevate himself,
become a member of a liveried household yeah? Or he's got the divided colors of his master,
he earns a good wage but also when he goes abroad to fight there is that extra incentive,
Ransom and plunder. Now one of the tricks is to get your ransom money, your plunder back home. We
don't quite know how they did it, but we do know they did it because one of Froissart’s Chronicles,
first of all he mentions how these common bowmen are diddling their captains out of a
bit of silver and this is what he says ‘the men on campaign they told about the corn that they took,
the houses they ransacked, the horses, cattle and all the other things, but they never mentioned
the silver or gold’ they kept it to themselves, do you blame them? But then he wrote in 1348,
‘In England’, so we're home now, ‘Few women that didn't possess something from Caen and other
places the army had been, tablecloths, linen, clothes, jewelery, furs.’ It would appear that
the bowmen particularly got plenty of things home to adorn their tables and their wives.
Well I hope you enjoyed our little video there, full of bits of information. If you did, like,
share and subscribe you know the drill, but don't forget to turn on your all notification
button so you know what's coming down the line next. But before I go a quick
shout out to some of my patreon members. Without my patreon members I wouldn't be
able to do these models that's for sure Christopher Varner, Bishop Odo's nephew,
I like that and Trish McFerran hey guys thank you very much indeed. Bye for now.