Compagnies d'ordonnance

The compagnie d'ordonnance was a military unit, the late medieval forefather of the modern company and consisted of 100 Lances fournies, which was built around a centre of knights, with assisting pages or squires, archers and men-at-arms, for a total of 700 men.

In the 14th and early 15th century bands of mercenaries, whose contracts with their masters had expired, were the scourge of medieval France. In the late 1430s, with the Hundred Years war going through one of its quieter periods, unemployed mercenaries from the Anglo-Burgundian army were allowed to pillage. Eventually some were recruited by French mercenary captains who hired them out to the royal companies raised by order of the King, who it seems regarded the Écorcheurs as a major impediment to peaceful rule. These free companies were primarily composed of Gascons, Spaniards, Bretons, Flemish, and Germans. They extorted protection money from local peasants as well as exacting tolls from passing merchants and holding local important people for ransom.

In 1439 the French legislature, known as the Estates General (French: états généraux), passed laws that restricted military recruitment and training to the king alone. There was a new tax to be raised known as the taille that was to provide funding for a new Royal army. The mercenary companies were given a choice of either joining the Royal army as compagnies d'ordonnance on a permanent basis, or being hunted down and destroyed if they refused. France gained a total standing army of around 6,000 men, which was sent out to gradually eliminate the remaining mercenaries who insisted on operating on their own. The new standing army had a more disciplined and professional approach to warfare than its predecessors. The reforms of the 1440s eventually led to the French victory at Castillon in 1453 and the conclusion of the Hundred Years' War. The origins of this name is often attributed to the order or "ordenance", act of arranging, by the King of France Charles VII in 1447 for a permanent standing army. By 1450 the companies were divided into the field army, known as the grande ordonnance and the garrison force known as the petite ordonnance.

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