wunder beta🐴 Oman's medieval art of war
An All Souls fellow wins the 1884 Lothian Prize by hanging a thousand years on one thread: heavy cavalry rises at Adrianople and falls at Marignano. You learn what Oman can still show you, and where his century shows.
What you’ll learn
- The prize essayIdentify this book as Oman's 1885 Lothian Prize Essay and state his cavalry thread in his own words.Oxford, 1885. Not Sun Tzu. A new All Souls fellow argues that medieval war is the rise, supremacy, and decline of heavy cavalry from 378 to 1515.
- Adrianople as a modelSeparate Ammianus's disaster from Oman's forty thousand and from the claim that cavalry then ruled a thousand years.378 is his hinge. Keep the late cavalry charge. Soften the census. Read Vegetius as a manual that mixes old names with ideals.
- Answers to the horseState Oman's critique of feudal cavalry and contrast the Swiss pike system with the English long-bow system.Charges waste power; castles eat campaigns. Swiss columns and English archery are two answers. Marignano is where he stops the horseman.
- How to read him nowKeep Oman's questions about hosts, sources, and adaptation; leave the cavalry millennium; take one public map tonight.The last chapter already widens to wagons and Janissaries. The 1898/1924 History enlarges the sketch. Tonight, mark where a label outruns the source.
Questions this course answers
What thread does Oman say links medieval military history into a whole?
The Introduction states the thread in those words, and sets Adrianople and Marignano as the first and last triumphs of the medieval horseman.
Match the source to the warning Oman wants you to hear
Oman is useful when you keep his own cautions: manuals invent, chronicles omit, and his conclusion already widens past the knight.
Put Oman's arc in the order his chapters argue it
Chapters I and IV establish the rise and the waste. V and VI give the two infantry answers. VII and the introduction's end-date close the argument.
Oman says the English long-bow was borrowed, as far as he can tell, from which people rather than from the Normans?
Chapter VI opens by calling the origin Welsh rather than Norman, then immediately lists the difficulties: Bayeux shows a short bow, the 1181 Assize omits the bow, and early-thirteenth-century vogue looks northern.
In your own words, why should Adrianople be read as Oman's model rather than as proof that cavalry ruled the next thousand years?
Treat 378 as the hinge he chose. Keep the foraging charge. Do not promote his census or his millennium into a fact.
Why does Oman say a Swiss victory does not require a genius in command?
Chapter V compares the Swiss to early Republican Rome: excellence of system matters more than excellence of generals. The elected captains set in motion an engine already built.
Grounded in trusted sources
- C. W. C. Oman, B.A., Fellow of All Souls College, The Art of War in the Middle Ages A.D. 378–1515, Oxford: B. H. Blackwell / London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1885 (Lothian Prize Essay, 1884; printed by Horace Hart). Introduction: definition of the art; feudalism's military side; 'the rise, supremacy, and decline of heavy cavalry as the chief power in war'; Adrianople the first and Marignano the last triumph of the medieval horseman. Ch. I: Adrianople as cavalry over infantry; Valens, officers, and forty thousand; Vegetius uses old names for new things and gives ideal forms; legion of 6,000 vs late-fourth-century 1,500; discarded armour reread as a turn to missiles. Ch. II: early-medieval sources as fragments. Ch. IV: unscientific feudal war, headlong charges, supremacy of fortified places, 1066–1346. Ch. V: Swiss pike of eighteen feet plus a foot of steel; system over generals; wedge and hedgehog; decline via Landsknechts, Spanish swords, Bicocca, artillery, Marignano. Ch. VI: long-bow Welsh rather than Norman, with Bayeux / 1181 / 1252 caveats; bow as a system. Ch. VII: Zisca's waggon-fortress; Janissaries and timariot cavalry. Project Gutenberg ebook 44308, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44308 and https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44308/44308-h/44308-h.htm
- Internet Archive scan of the same 1885 Blackwell edition, catalogued as The art of war in the Middle Ages, A.D. 378-1515, by Charles William Chadwick Oman. Confirms publisher, date, maps, and pagination against the Gutenberg transcription. https://archive.org/details/artofwarinmiddle00omanuoft
- G. N. Clark, 'Sir Charles Oman, 1860–1946', Proceedings of the British Academy 32 (1946), 299–306. Born 12 January 1860 at Mozufferpore to Charles Philip Oman and Anne Chadwick; Winchester; New College Firsts in 1882 and 1883; All Souls, November 1883; Lothian Prize, 1884; librarian of the Codrington, 1891; Chichele Professor, 1905; Conservative Burgess for the University, 1919–1935; KBE 1920. Use for the life, not for battle narrative. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/5095/32p299.pdf
- Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae XXXI.12–13, Loeb Classical Library translation (John C. Rolfe, 1939) via LacusCurtius / Bill Thayer, and the older Bohn rendering at tertullian.org. Valens slain, body not found; scarcely one-third of the army escaped; comparison with Cannae; Gothic cavalry of Alatheus and Saphrax return and break the Roman horse, then fall on packed infantry. No figure of forty thousand. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Ammian/31*.html and https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ammianus_31_book31.htm
- Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War: the Middle Ages from the Fourth to the Fourteenth Century, London: Methuen, 1898; second edition, revised and enlarged, 2 vols., Methuen, 1924 (I: A.D. 378–1278; II: A.D. 1278–1485). The prize essay is the seed of this later History, not a summary of it. Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/historyofartofwa00omanuoft
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