Would there have been any women and children fighting in medieval battles?
It does depend on your definition of “children.” Early medieval Bavarian law, for instance, did consider males to come of age at twelve which would make them eligible for military service. Duke Tassilo of Bavaria joined in Frankish military expeditions when he was fifteen. At various stages of medieval history, you could expect to have young boys as pages and servants accompanying an army but they wouldn’t fight. Shakespeare makes much of the French massacring English page boys in the baggage train at the Battle of Agincourt (he doesn’t mention that Henry V had cut the throats of prisoners the English had taken, also considered an atrocity in medieval warfare). Women were certainly not supposed to fight. Joan of Arc marched with the French army, dressed in armor like a soldier, but I do not believe she ever actually hit anyone with a weapon. There would have been a lot of women around medieval armies — campfollowers, servants, prostitutes, sometimes the soldier’s wives. A lot of non-c
Joan of Arc definitely engaged in combat during the Medieval Period, but this was the exception for women rather than the rule. Women and children sometimes helped out as defenders in sieges, carrying rocks and other materials to soldiers defending walls to de dropped on/thrown at the enemy. However, in open battle I know of no instance of children being used as soldiers – they weren’t strong enough to wield weapons effectively, and certainly wouldn’t have been strong enough to bend or draw a bow so as to use it as an effective weapon.
Not too sure about children fighting… Women did take part in the siege of Acre, and in fact participated in all the crusades to the latin east, but they may not have actually fought in terms of wielding weapons. Two of the sources which describe the siege of Acre, the Itinerarium Peregrinorum – a chronicle of the third crusade (written in latin) and Ambroise’s Estoire de la guerre sainte (written in old french), describe women carrying stones to fill the ditch that the defenders had dug to protect the city, so that the crusaders could set up siege engines. Chronicles of other crusades describe women helping the soldiers by bringing water to them and dragging the wounded away from the battle. But they are rarely said to have actually fought. However, chroniclers may have been reluctant to portray their women fighting because at this time it would have been seen as a specifically masculine sphere. It would have reflected badly on the men to have the women fighting with them.
Women and children may have been killed in the aftermath of a medieval battle but not as combatants during the actual battle. The English Long Bow of the period was typically between a 60 and 90lb pull and about 6 feet long. Not many untrained adults could even bend one let alone a child. Bill-men, Pikemen and Spear-men all required training, strength and stamina. Men-at-Arms were trained from a very early age to fight in Armour, swordsmanship and the usage of a variety of edged weapons but would be at least in their mid teens before fighting in battle. The same applies to the sons of the Barons and Earls. They were usually trained in the Household of another great Lord in the duties of Knighthood over a long period. Women such as Joan of Arc in the Hundreds Year War and Margaret of Anjou during the Wars of The Roses often led Armies but the actual physical fighting would have been done by the professional soldiers. Women and children from the baggage train would have helped loot the d
