Talk:Assize of Arms of 1181

message: I imagine this has just been pasted from somewhere, so should probably be checked out for copyright violations. I suppose the text of the Assize could be considered Crown Copyright. Kurando | ^_^ 09:36, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That sounds like a reasonable suspicion (I had the same), but I was unable to find any of this with Google, so I say "go with it" until someone claims a copyvio. - Eric 17:18, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Copyvio

message: Here is my first stab at improving this article. I have deleted reference to the Bill of Rights and the US constititution. If anyone objects to what I have written please let me know. If anyone proposes to make additions to include references to the Bill of Rights and the US constitution please let me know what that text should be and where it should be.  I own several books on English medieval history from 1066 through to the 17th and 18th century. None of them refers to the Assize of Arms. Blackwells commentaries (available on the net) make reference to this document, but only in the context of the formation of the military and the duty of the citizen to defend the king and the nation. I still see no connection to the rights of men. I have not found references for all the statements in the background section but any editor can challenge them. I do believe that they are broadly correct.--Hauskalainen (talk) 17:08, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed change to the header and a new background section 

message: This is an important event in English history the current article misses all the important points. I am going to dump some sources in case some one wants to help:
* pre1181  at questia
*text english]
* "The text of this assize was recorded by the twelfth-century chronicler Roger of Howden (fl. 1170-1201) in his Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi. The assize is usually thought to date from the autumn of 1181 and it was seemingly preceded by the issuance of a similar document in King Henry II’s continental lands earlier in the same year. The assize is concerned with the obligations and rights to bear arms, stipulating precisely the military equipment that each man should have according to his rank and wealth." also link to Latin text.
*{http://www.penultimateharn.com/history/armsassize.html} full text english
* Henry II made an Assize of Arms in 1181. It bound all freemen of England to swear on oath that they would possess and bear arms in the service of king and realm. The assize stipulated precisely the military equipment that each man should have according to his rank and wealth. The assize, frequently renewed, effectively revived the old Anglo‐Saxon fyrd duty.
*
*Full text
* Short and sweet
*Free at questia 
*In the year before the promotion of Thomas to the primacy, king and chancellor had dealt one direct blow at all feudal ideas. In the war of Toulouse the scutage was ﬁrst devised; a money payment was accepted instead of personal military service. The money was of course spent in hiring mercenaries; and it was largely by the help of mercenaries that Henry subdued his rebels in England. But later in his reign, by the Assize of Arms (1181), he regulated the old constitutional force of the country, and enjoined that every free Englishman should be ready to serve with the weapons belonging to his rank.
*An arrangement that only provided for an army composed of smaller armies, each drilled and each equipped according to the capacity or the mood of its manorial lord, could not for ever satisfy the growing needs of a nation that more and more was emerging from the isolation of its storm-swept shores, and was more and more making its being felt in the councils of kings and the destinies of mankind. It was essential that the men who for three parts of the year were well content to bide at home and know its joys, to dig the fields or guide the plough, to strew the golden corn and reap the gleaming harvest, but who at blaze of beacon or word of messenger riding in hot haste, must don the steel harness and seize the trusty weapon and haste against the Scot upon the border, or cross the waters and confront the chivalry of France — it was essential, I say, that such men should be welded into cohesion,and that some uniformity of equipment, some instruction in the art of common and concerted action, should be provided. It is doubtless to a perception of this truth that we owe the first statutes of Assize at Arms. They show that the armed forces of the land were to be, in future, not the mere retainers of powerful lords but the forces of the Crown, the defenders of the nation, the soldiers not of duke or baron, but the soldiers of their country and their king. Thus the Assize of Arms of 1181 provided that every military tenant, that is every tenant holding by service, then deemed the most honourable tenure, if not the only one that conferred honour, dignity and esteem, should be armed, not, as theretofore, just as completely, or as slenderly, as his caprice, his pride, or his parsimony inclined him, but should be furnished with a coat of mail, a shield, (on which, be sure, his coat of arms was picked with all points of heraldry), and a lance, and that the followers he led in his train, should be clad in habergeon,• an iron skull cap, and bear a lance. Itinerant judges of the Assize at Arms visited each manor and saw to it that each freeman had been mindful to equip himself in conformity with his rank and means ; a system of visitation which may serve to remind us that the volunteers in the first days of what is distinctively termed the Volunteer Movement, had ancestors, many centuries ago, who suffered the same grievances and no doubt made the same complaints as they. A similar enactment of Philip and Mary required every man, according to his position, to keep a sufficiency of arms ; the household armoury was to be equipped with the weapons then in use, and penalties were imposed upon those who absented themselves from the musters of the Sovereign or his Lieutenant. This mention of the Lord Lieutenant of the County, who once bore so prominent a part in connection with our modern Volunteers, points to the supersession in matters military of the Sheriff, who in former days had been responsible for the levy of the posse comitatus or levy of the County.
*23. The Assize of Arms. 1181. — In September 1174 there was a general peace. In 1181 Henry issued the Assize of Arms,organizing the old fyrd in a more serviceable way. Every English freeman was bound by it to find arms of a kind suitable to his property, that he might be ready to defend the realm against rebels or invaders. The Assize of Anns is the strongest possible evidence as to the real nature of Henry's government. He had long ago sent back to the Continent the mercenaries whom he had brought with him in the peril of 1174, and he now entrusted himself not to a paid standing army, but to the whole body of English freemen. He was, in truth, king of the English not merely because he ruled over them, but because they were ready to rally round him in arms against those barons whose ancestors had worked such evil in the days of Stephen. England was not to be given over either to baronial anarchy or to military despotism.
*The Assize of Arms, (:)—1181. Regulated the National fryd (or militia.) ; Fixed the way in which every Freeman, according to his means, was bound to arm himself for the defence of his country, when summoned by the king.
**(s) “ The Assize of Arms restored the National Militia to the place which it had lost at the Conquest. Every knight was forced to arm himself with coat of mail, and shield and lance ; every freeholder with lance and. hauberk, every burgess and poorer freeman with lance and iron helmet. This universal levy of the armed nation was wholly at the disposal of the king for the purposes of defence." “By his Assize of Arms Henry restored the Ancient Anglo-Saxon Militia System, and supplied the requisite counterbalance to the military power of the great feudatories, which, notwithstanding the temptation to avoid service by payment of scutage, they were still able and too willing to maintain. ”—-( Early Plantagenets. ) “ In all these measures (Assize of Arms, &c.) we may trace one main object, the strengthening of the Royal power, and one main means, or directing principle—the doing so by increasing the safety and security of the people. Whatever was done to help the people, served to reduce the power of the great feudal baronage, to disarm their forces, to abolish their jurisdictions, to diminish their chances of tyranny.”—(Early Ptamtagenets. )
:Points for the lede: Reviving the Fyrd, This is universally recognized as a duty and a check on the powers of the Barons
More to come J8079s (talk) 01:20, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re write 

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