Militia (England)
Militia units were repeatedly raised in England from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards for internal security duties and to defend against external invasions.
One of the first militia units in England were the fyrd, which were raised from freemen to defend the estate of their local Shire's lord or accompany the housecarls on offensive expeditions.
The origins of military obligation in England pre-date the establishment of the English state in the 10th century, and can be traced to the 'common burdens' of the Anglo-Saxon period, among which was service in the fyrd, or army.
The Statute of Winchester in 1285 introduced two more non-feudal categories to impose a general military obligation on all able-bodied males, including non-free, between the ages of 15 and 60, and updated the prescribed weaponry in the light of developments in warfare at the time.
During the Hundred Years' War, the king raised armies for service in France by indenture, which contracted magnates, under their obligation as subjects rather than feudal tenants, to supply a certain number of men for a specific amount of time in return for a set fee.
Their poor state of readiness and obsolete nature of the weapons they used (mainly bills and longbows) prompted the creation of the more elite Trained Bands, who numbered 50,000 in 1588 (comprising about a third of the militia).
[8] A 1522 survey had revealed a significant lapse in the obligation to maintain arms and train in their use, and from 1535 commissioners of muster held tri-annual inspections.
Despite the concerns of Parliament about expense and the threat to the power it had only recently won from the Crown, it still proved necessary to maintain a small standing force in England, for the protection of the new king and to garrison coastal forts.
[17][a] In the midst of the English Civil War there was some debate as to whether the militia should be a supplement or an alternative to a standing army, and a series of ordinances were passed in attempts to replace the repealed 1558 act.
[21] However, it was the army, already made more palatable to Parliament by acts of civilian service in support of the common good, that defeated the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, the militia having proved too slow to mobilise.
[22] Following the rebellion, King James II was able to expand the army with 16 new regiments, paid for by money misappropriated from funds voted by Parliament for the militia.
It was the defence of these interests that would lead, by the time of the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, to the establishment of the army as an accepted state body and a military leader in Europe.
[24] The status of the army as a state institution under parliamentary control and subject to national law was normalised in 1689 by the Bill of Rights and the annually passed Mutiny Acts.
Although it continued to be called out, for example in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in the aftermath of the Battle of Beachy Head and in the face of the Jacobite risings, the militia entered a period of decline.
It was regarded as so ineffective that against the Jacobite rising of 1745 it would prove more expedient to raise an ad hoc force of volunteers than to rely on the militia.
[27] Successful English settlement of North America, where little support could be provided by regular forces, began to take place in 1607, in the face of Spain's determination to prevent England establishing a foothold in territory it claimed for itself.
In the nineteenth century, Fortress Bermuda would become Britain's Gibraltar of the West, heavily fortified by a Regular Army garrison to protect the Royal Navy's headquarters and dockyard in the Western Atlantic.
