I've recently come across these two battles, which apparently rank alongside Pavia, Mohacs, Frankhausen, Muhlberg and Spurs in their importance in books by G.R. Elton and Lotherington. Has anyone got any tactical information and synopses on these battles?
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The thing to remember about English battles against continental forces in the early modern period is that what constituted a great victory to the English was frankly much smaller than what the empire or france would have considered it. For example, it cost Henry VII about 60'000 pounds just to keep a few troops in Northern France in the 1484 campaign (following the marriage of Charles VIII of France to Anne of Brittany, meaning that the English and Germans had to defend her in the treaty of Rouen signed earlier). However, Spurs (also called Guinegate, 1513) does seem to me an impressive affair and I don't really understand what Elton is going on about when he talks about that - Maximilian provided a great deal of the forces, (however, Wolsey was responsable for the strategy that defeated the French) granted, but take into account that a vast amount of the French forces actually fled. Obviously, we have to keep these things in retrospect, but it seems to have been a fairly important battle. However, on the wider scale, we must not forget that the English fleet (Under Edward Howard) was decisively defeated by the French in the same year at Brest. Therefore, as an overall campaign, granted, it may not have been that effective. However, if we are to consider that Wolsey's 1518 treaty of London allied all of the European forces together against the Turk, we could see it as evidence that actually, France was exhausted - consider other examples; all of these large suspiciously friendly treaties in the early modern period only really occured when one or more sides was completely tired by war (Chateu-Cambresis 1559, Peaces of Passau and Augsburg 1552, 1555 etc) all show this. Therefore this can be used to indicate that perhaps France was affected by Spurs. But meh.
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