If we may believe John Leyland, a tradition widely current throughout England in the 1530's attributed some of the costliest building of the later middle ages to warriors who had returned home laden with the spoils of France. Everywhere that the antiquary travelled, from Ampthill in Bedfordshire to Hampton Court near the Welsh border, from Streatlam in county Durham to Farleigh, Somerset, he was told of castles raised in stone and brick ‘ex spoliis nobilium bello Gallico captorurn’, sometimes of a whole mansion paid for from the proceeds of a single battle; and that not merely in the great days of Edward III and Henry V, but also when John of Bedford was ‘governor and regent’ of his dead brother's hard-pressed conquest. So Henry Vffl's subjects, not least those descended from the military captains of the Hundred Years War, were firmly convinced. Members of the Tudor nobility were willing, nay anxious, to swallow some very improbable stories about their family-origins and in a good many cases their faith in a particular forebear's achievement, indeed his very existence, may be open to question. But the fact remains that within a century of Bedford's death the spoils of France were generally regarded as at least a plausible explanation of a family's sudden wealth and of its capacity to embark upon a large-scale building project. There are signs that it had already won acceptance in the lifetime of Leyland's precursor, William Worcester, whose birth in the year of Agincourt and long residence in the household of Sir John Fastolf, the Regent's major-domo from 1422 to 1435, entitle him to speak with more authority.
The Dutch army and the military revolutions, 1588-1688