Synopsis

In this study of the army’s peacetime and wartime training regimen in the period between the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns and the reforms associated with the Duke of York, J.A. Houlding looks primarily at the various circumstances that contributed to such a lack of preparedness that one officer considered the troops ‘in imminent danger of being cut to pieces in our first encounter’. In discussion of the poor training of the eighteenth-century army the usual suspects are the purchased commissions system and lack of drill regulations. Houlding challenges that argument, analysing a mass of War Office documents including Marching Orders, Inspection Returns and drill books, to present a detailed account of the timetable of peacetime service and the preoccupations of the army with civil matters which, he concludes, left it short of the time and opportunity for training.
 

ISBN 0-19-822647-0