Current scholarship on medieval warfare focuses almost entirely on the soldier as an active combatant. Comparatively little work has been done to broaden that identity and investigate a soldier’s life back home, away from the battlefield. 

My PhD is going to investigate how soldiers in England (and possibly France) were demobilised and returned to civilian life during the 1400s. This was a politically turbulent century which saw the end of an international conflict, followed by the swift rise of a civil one. It is possible that many veterans of the Hundred Years War then returned to combat during the Wars of the Roses. I want to uncover more about the experience of being reassimilated back into peacetime, and whether this late medieval society was able to adequately cater for so many physically wounded, mentally scarred, and highly trained soldiers. I hope to assess crime, political favour, disability, identity, and reward.