Compagnie d'ordonnance

The compagnie d'ordonnance was the first standing army of late medieval and early modern France. The system was the forefather of the modern company. Each compagnie consisted of 100 lances fournies, which was built around a heavily armed and armored gendarme (heavy cavalryman), with assisting pages or squires, archers and men-at-arms, for a total of 600 men. By 1445, France had 15 compagnies, for an army of 9,000 men, of which 6,000 were combatants and 3,000 non-combatants. Over the course of the 15th century, the compagnies d'ordonnance expanded to a peak strength of 58 compagnies of 4,000 lances and 24,000 men in 1483. It was later supplemented by the bandes d'artillerie, the franc-archers militia after 1448 and standing infantry regiments (bandes d'infanterie) from 1480 onward. The compagnies d'ordonnance were replaced by the gendarmerie system in the 17th century. 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 armies 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.