Lancashire Militia
The English militia was descended from the Anglo-Saxon Fyrd, the military force raised from the freemen of the shires under command of their Sheriff.
Edward I regularly summoned the men of the County palatine of Lancaster (Lancashire) to fight in his Welsh Wars and to the army that won the Battle of Falkirk in Scotland in 1298.
(John E. Morris, the historian of Edward's Welsh Wars writing in 1901, likened this process to calling out the Militia Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers).
Edward III called out the Lancashire levies in 1332 and again 1333, when they served at the Siege of Berwick and the Battle of Halidon Hill.
The Lancashire JPs ordered armouries to be set up at Lancaster, Preston, Chorley, Ormskirk, Whalley and Manchester to store the arms and armour for the trained bands.
The resulting skirmish at Manchester on 15 July when Strange and his men were driven out by Wharton's Parliamentarians, was among the first battles of the war.
Under the Commonwealth and Protectorate the militia received pay when called out, and operated alongside the New Model Army to control the country.
Some counties were slack in training and equipping their men: in 1674 most of the weapons of the Lancashire Militia were found to be defective, and many had to be replaced again in 1689.
The Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, William Stanley, 9th Earl of Derby, organised three regiments of foot and three Troops of horse.
This brigade volunteered for service in William's campaign in Ireland under the command of the Earl of Derby's brother, Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon James Stanley.
[26][40][41][42] A regiment of the Lancashire Militia was called out on the outbreak of the Jacobite Rising of 1715, and fought at the Battle of Preston on 12–13 November, where they suffered heavy losses (11 officers and 105 men) attacking the rebel barricades in Church Street.
[26][40][41][43][44] In the Jacobite Rising of 1745, while the Lancashire Militia concentrated to protect Liverpool, the company at Lancaster succeeded in removing the county weapons from the armoury before the rebels arrived.
This company then operated alongside a volunteer unit, the 'Liverpool Blues', in harrying the Young Pretender's force as it marched through Lancashire.
At the end of the year it moved to Kent spending its winter in barracks or billets and its summers in camps on the South Coast.
In 1795–96 it became part of a concentration round London to prevent disorder, then in the summer of 1796 the regiment crossed to Warley Camp in Essex.
The 1st Royal Lancashire Militia immediately volunteered, and served there in 1798–99, while the last embers of the rebellion were put down.
Lancashire had to find an additional 5160 militiamen in five regiments,[50][57] the RLM sending a party to Lancaster to begin training them.
[78] Towards the end of the Napoleonic War the militia had become one of the biggest sources of recruits to the regular army, and whole regiments were encouraged to volunteer for garrison service in Ireland on in Continental Europe.
Napoleon had abdicated in April and peace was declared on 30 May, but the regiments had still not been disembodied in February 1815 when he escaped from Elba and the war was resumed.
The three regiments of Royal Lancashire Militia, which happened to be stationed together at Dublin, were allowed to recruit back to full strength by ballot and 'by beat of drum'.
Just before the 1831 training King William IV bestowed on the three Lancashire Militia Regiments the additional title The Duke of Lancaster's Own.
[85][86] Lancashire was one of the counties selected to have a corps of militia artillery, and on 10 March 1853 the Lord Lieutenant was requested to raise it from scratch, rather than by conversion of an existing infantry regiment.
The Lancashire units called out were the 4th RLM, from September 1857 to April 1859, serving at Aldershot and Portsmouth, and the RLMA, embodied from October 1857 to June 1860, which was stationed to man coastal batteries.
[105][106][107] Although often referred to as brigades, the regimental districts were purely administrative organisations, but in a continuation of the Cardwell Reforms a mobilisation scheme began to appear in the Army List from December 1875.
[86][111][112] After the disasters of Black Week at the start of the Second Boer War in December 1899, most of the regular army was sent to South Africa, followed by many militia reservists as reinforcements.
Militia units were embodied to replace them for home defence and a number volunteered for active service or to garrison overseas stations.
In addition the 3rd Bn Loyals served in the garrison of Malta for a year before going to South Africa, and received the Mediterranean battle honour.
There were moves to reform the Auxiliary Forces (Militia, Yeomanry and Volunteers) to take their place in the six army corps proposed by St John Brodrick as Secretary of State for War.
The unit trained for two months each year on Salisbury Plain, and that degree of commitment made it difficult to obtain part-time junior officers.
In that year the King drew the lots for individual regiments and the resulting list remained in force with minor amendments until the end of the militia.
