This chapter investigates the experience of preparation for and participation in warfare. People often owned weapons appropriate to their social status, and kept them all over their houses. Modernization was slow, but guns, useful for hunting and home security, spread steadily. Archery practice was widespread and training with other weapons was developing by the 1560s. Exhortations to manly valour, reinforced by peer pressure and self-preservation, egged soldiers on to fight, but captains’ handbooks show the difficulties in turning raw recruits into effective troops, all the more so as the social level of those enlisted relentlessly declined. While standing forces were small, English mercenaries fought in continental wars. Mutiny and desertion, massacre and panic were recurrent phenomena, but death rates were very variable, and more died of disease than from enemy action.
Design and implementation of modular home security system with short messaging system