Camp Followers and Other Noncombatants

…[Nobles] brought with them to war a variety of noncombatants, including heralds, musicians, clerks, chaplains, cooks, body servants, smiths, carpenters, miners, barber-surgeons, physicians, and so on. In addition to these members of royal and magnate households, armies would usually have with them very substantial numbers of unattached camp followers—prostitutes, butchers, women selling provisions, shield merchants (shields being prone to demolition in combat), cobblers, and washerwomen, among other groups. Guillaume Guiart gives a nice picture of them in a French army camp of 1304 [C.E.], crying their cheeses and breads, dispensing wine from casks, baking tarts and pasties, and getting into trouble of various sorts. The number of noncombatants marching with the baggage was always large and could in fact be greater than the total number of fighters, though the army of the Free Companies in 1368, with 20,000 pillagers and women for 4,000 combatants, was doubtless an extreme case. Because all these people added as much as fighters to the logistical burdens of the army, and because some of them tended to cause disorder in the host, commanders often tried to keep them to a minimum, and it is interesting to note what that minimum was considered to be. The Crusaders against the Hussites ordained that no one below the rank of knight should have more than one servant and that no women should be permitted in the army. Charles the Bold ordered that no soldier in his ordinance companies should keep a woman privately in his quarters; instead, there were to be a maximum of 30 women “in common” for each company of 700 men. Richard I, for one difficult march, ordered all women to be left behind the army, except for 300 elderly women, considered necessary for washing clothes and heads and removing lice from the soldiers, at which task they were as skilled as monkeys.

Along with carts, wagons, and camp followers, the army would typically also be accompanied by large quantities of food on the hoof. For the start of his Murcia campaign, for example, James the Conqueror provided himself with 1,000 mule loads of wheat, 2,000 of barley, 3,000 cows, and 20,000 sheep. This would, of course, require large numbers of drovers and muleteers. The sources offer little clue as to how exactly these vast herds and flocks were managed, but they can hardly have been allowed to separate the rear guard from the main body; that would have been begging for defeat in detail. Most likely, the livestock, and often also the noncombatants who were not attached to the households of particular soldiers or contingents, were left to trail behind the army proper. This would have left them very vulnerable to attack by enemy cavalry, but they were probably usually given some protection by small escorts of men-at-arms detached from the army, and of course, despite being so-called noncombatants, wagoners, sutlers, and muleteers were normally armed and would fight to defend themselves, with some advantages provided by their wagons themselves.

— Soldiers’ Lives Through History, pp. 75-76