The corrody is harshly judged by many medieval historians; it is condemned because it introduced into the cloister a distracting and often boistrous presence from the secular world. With sharp hindsight, they argue that the corrodies were poor financial policy and often saddled a convent with an unwelcome boarder who lived off its resources long after his original investment had been consumed. But the corrody was most often used, at least in the fourteenth century by bishops and archbishops, to reward a faithful servant or to provide care and maintenance for those who were unable to sustain themselves. In this article, the corrody and its recipients are examined in an effort to redress the balance and demonstrate its praiseworthy character as an institution of medieval charity.

But first things first. What is a corrody? Following the etymological derivation of the word made by A. Hamilton Thompson, corredium, corradium, corrodium and other variations are derived from conredum and conredium, which have “the primary connotation of equipage, and among others, it was especially applied to the provision made by a feudal vassal for the entertainment of his lord when he made his round. The corrody was the provender or prebend which was the lord's due …. [The[ corrody became first and foremost a grant of money or victuals, or of other means of livelihood, made by a monastery or other religious or charitable corporation to dependents upon its bounty.” According to one authority, the first usage of the word in this sense in England was in a deed of 1197.

One of the most bitter pamphlet wars of the later seventeenth century was fought between the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who by 1689 had perhaps fifty-thousand followers, and the Muggletonians, a tiny sect which probably had fewer than one-thousand members. Despite the difference in the number of their adherents, the Quakers believed that the dispute with the Muggletonians was so significant that George Fox, William Penn, Edward Burrough, Isaac Penington, and other Quaker leaders attacked the Muggletonians in print. The Muggletonian prophets, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, believed that the Quakers were the greatest enemies of true religion, and they produced a steady stream of anti-Quaker tracts. Some of the accusations on both sides, such as being Antichrist or being worse than the Pope, were common in sectarian arguments, but the conflict reached a sustained height of invective which was rare even in such a contentious age. In Fox's opinion, Muggleton was a “heathen” whose “foul breath … comes from the foul spirit of thy father.” Another Quaker, Thomas Loe, addressed Muggleton as “thou son of perdition and child of the Devil … seed of the serpent and old sorcerer … ignorant sot.” Quaker attacks on the Muggletonians culminated in Penn's assertion that “from the most primitive times there has not appeared … a more complete monster … than John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, brethren and associates in the blackest work that ever fallen men or angels could probably have set themselves upon.”

One of the most vexatious questions of twentieth century military history concerns the manifest ascendancy of British theoretical development of mechanized warfare during the inter-war period. Why this should be so in a society which was by no means the most motorized in the contemporary world and which was already displaying a distinct penchant for technological stagnation poses a perplexing riddle. Facile attributions of such hegemony to either the inherent genius of the two progenitors of mechanized warfare, J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart, or a shallow acceptance of these theories as an obvious ramification of British experience in the First World War would seem to neglect other profound intellectual and military influences. Such a renowned historian as John Keegan has even written that it is “unrewarding” to speculate on the reasons for British preeminence in military thought during the inter-war years. The search for such explanations, however, constitutes the historian's task.

Although definitive resolutions to the conundrums posed by the emergence of intellectual trends can never be achieved, this essay will contend that Britain's leadership in the development of doctrines of mechanized warfare can be partially attributed to her heritage of mobile warfare along the frontiers of empire. The neglect of this imperial dimension is one of the factors which has thus far obscured our understanding of the genesis of innovative thought among British military intellectuals during the interwar years. Furthermore, the tendency to interpret Britain's military role almost solely in reference to the looming armored clashes on the European continent during World War Two has seduced some military historians into ignoring the long-term historical antecedents of an emphasis on celerity of movement bred by the imperial tradition of dynamic attack.