Women, Armies and Warfare in Early Modern Europe

Women played important roles in the military economy of early modern Europe. Until the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, the swarms of camp followers traipsing in the wake of the ‘aggregate contract armies’ substantially outnumbered the soldiers: the concept of an inverse ratio between support and fighting troops is not a post-1945 phenomenon.

A cavalry brigade of 3,000 men would have been accompanied by a ‘camp community’ of at least 4,000 non-combatants – waggoners, sutlers (sellers of provisions), horse dealers, merchants, quacks, nurses, vivandières (supplying drink or food), washerwomen, wives, prostitutes, children, pedlars, servants, card-sharps, pimps, chancers – many of whom were female.

Armies had become semi-permanent mobile towns, travelling from campaign to campaign, often communicating in their own patois. After 1650, the numbers of camp followers in general and women in particular dropped spectacularly because the new standing armies began to provide some of the services, particularly reliable pay and improved logistics, that had justified the existence of the ‘camp community’. This, in turn, lowered the need for plundering and pillage, one of the major attractions to and justifications for those who followed camps.

Most ‘state commission armies’ reduced the number of ‘wives’ allowed on campaign to six or eight per company, who were expected to contribute as laundresses and nurses. There was a brief resurgence of patriotic female camp followers during the early French Revolutionary Wars but they jeopardised the martial efficiency of the ‘popular conscript army’ and after 1793 women were reduced to support functions, mostly performed from within the homeland.

A handful of women disguised their gender, with varying degrees of success, in order to serve in the ranks but throughout the three centuries under consideration, John A Lynn II (a historian formerly known as John A Lynn) has discovered only about 80 cases.

Even then it is hard to separate fact from fiction and the amazon probably existed more as myth than reality. In extremis, however, ‘ordinary’ women did participate in fighting, especially in sieges, as at Limerick in 1690. Lynn has brought together a range of secondary material and, although much is not new, it is here consolidated, explained and placed within the contexts of both military and gender history.

For those who wish to take the subject further, Lynn has provided an up-to-date synthesis complete with serviceable definitions. The principal problem is the seeming lack of direct, documentary evidence. The everyday is always unremarkable and the unavoidable use, for lack of other sources, of poetry, plays, doggerel, ballads, pictures, prints, woodcuts and legends creates but an impression. Yet there is a large body of rich documentation that does not appear to have been extensively investigated: legal and court martial records.