Our latest issue -
XI.6: Sieges of the Hundred Years' War - marks the end of two columns for this magazine. I wanted to spend a few words to give my appreciation for these writers.
The Weapon
Soon after becoming the editor of
MW, I reached out to Kay Smith and Ruth Rhynas Brown about the idea of writing a column. Kay and Ruth. a wonderful couple, have been spent their careers learning about the history of weapons, including working for museums and writing many books and papers. They have accumulated a vast knowledge about the intracies of medieval weaponry, and I knew they could create articles that offered details like no one else could.
You can find thirty articles by them, covering almost every important weapon used in the Middle Ages. They have found quite a lot of interesting details about these weapons, sometimes found in churches. At other times, they wrote about how they personally tested some of these weapons, learning firsthand about their capabilities.
Please, check out their website,
Basiliscoe, where you can learn about the other work they do, and buy some of the books they have wrote.
The Soldier
Randall Moffett became our columnist in issue VIII.3 - in this case he was hired after we did a search for someone who could write about medieval soldiers. Randall is a much younger scholar, having PhD at the University of Southampton in 2009, but his work on the organization of armies was impressive. We gave him a challenging task, as he had to write about a wide variety of different soldiers and armies, but he delivered some great pieces. You can read about Norwegian freemen, Byzantine soldiers from the eighth century, Scottish knights, the professional men who served under Charles the Bold, and Turkish cavalrymen, among many other groups. With it you get to know the arms and armour they used, and a little bit about the tactics and organization.
Randall Moffett is teaching at Southeastern Community College. You can
follow him on Academia.edu.
To Kay, Ruth and Randall, my many thanks for spending the last few years writing for our magazine. I learned a lot from you, and I think our readers did too.
