Each compagnie consisted of 100 lances fournies, which was built around a heavily armed and armored gendarme (heavy cavalryman), with assisting pages or squires, archers and men-at-arms, for a total of 600 men.

Eventually some were recruited by French mercenary captains who hired them out to the royal companies raised by order of the King, who it seems regarded the Écorcheurs as a major impediment to peaceful rule.

The mercenary companies were given a choice of either joining the Royal army as compagnies d'ordonnance on a permanent basis, or being hunted down and destroyed if they refused.

The origins of this name is often attributed to the order or "ordenance", act of arranging, by the King of France Charles VII in 1447 for a permanent standing army.

Furthermore, there existed throughout the kingdom countless garrisons of royal soldiers in towns, cities, castles and fortresses which were summoned to go to battle as in previous centuries; however their importance was not the same as that of the ordonnance men.

Adding to the murky historiography associated with this development, it seems pretty clear that there was not a single Grande Ordonnance, but rather two dozen or more, published simultaneously (or nearly so) across France.

The Grande Ordonnance, in whatever form it took, was a coherent, centralized effort to place the defense of the realm in the hands of a reliable force, whose senior officers were (as direct appointees of the crown) loyal to the French monarchy, and dependent on it for supplies, pay, and support.

The man-at-arms and squire were further assisted by a page, or valet de guerre, usually a teenage male, who was responsible for caring for their armour, equipment, and horses.

The squire was generally fully armoured, and usually charged alongside (or close by) the man-at-arms, and helped him handle the sixteen- to nineteen-foot lance when they fought dismounted (which initially happened fairly often).

In his famous Commentaires, the sixteenth-century soldier Blaise de Monluc noted that he had joined the army as an archer in the compagnies about 1521, but "since then everything had become degraded," and the old standards no longer applied.

The archers were more typically commoners at first, in part to integrate the considerable pool of experienced soldiers who were not gentry or aristocracy, into the framework of the new army.