Digital Muster Rolls Reveal Soldier Networks

A publicly accessible, standardized database of medieval soldiers (now ~290,000 records, 1350s–1453) allows researchers to trace careers, geographic mobility, unit composition, and kinship links at scale. That turns scattered pay lists and muster rolls into analyzable panels for testing hypotheses about military professionalism, recruitment markets, and early state capacity. — Large nominal historical datasets change how we understand institutional development, social mobility, and the roots of professional armed forces, with implications for historians, demographers, genealogists, and civic narratives about state formation.