Definition
A commission of array was a royal writ issued in medieval and early modern England directing officers—commissioners of array—to muster, inspect, and organize the able-bodied male inhabitants of a given county for military service. Under the commission, named commissioners were empowered to review the fitness of men, array them into fighting order, and ensure the county's military readiness at the Crown's direction. The commission derived its authority directly from the sovereign and operated as the primary mechanism for raising local forces before standing armies and professional military administration displaced it.
The commission of array was superseded by commissions of lieutenancy, which vested substantially the same powers in lords lieutenant appointed for each county. Once that framework became established, the commission of array fell into disuse and is today a purely historical instrument.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the category of obsolete English Crown instruments that appear frequently in medieval and early modern legal and administrative records but have no living counterpart in modern Anglo-American law. Researchers encountering "commission of array" in primary sources—chronicle accounts, plea rolls, parliamentary records, or county administrative documents—should treat it as a military mobilization instrument, not as a civil commission or a judicial commission.
The key research trap is anachronistic conflation: the word "commission" carries heavy modern freight (administrative agency, judicial appointment, fee arrangement), none of which applies here. A commission of array is closer in function to a conscription or muster order than to anything bearing the name "commission" today.
Chronological placement matters. Commissions of array appear with particular density during periods of military crisis in medieval England—wars with Scotland and France, episodes of baronial conflict—when the Crown needed rapid mobilization of county forces outside the feudal levy system. Their frequency in the record declines after the Tudor period as lord lieutenancy became the dominant framework for county military administration. Researchers working in records post-1600 who encounter references to commissions of array are likely reading historical citation or revival rhetoric rather than active legal instrument.
The term also surfaces in constitutional history in a different, charged context: the Civil War period of the seventeenth century, when Charles I issued commissions of array in 1642 as a counter-move to Parliament's militia ordinance. This revival—legally contested at the time—generated significant pamphlet literature and parliamentary debate about the Crown's prerogative powers versus parliamentary authority over local forces. Researchers working in that period must distinguish the medieval administrative instrument from its politically explosive seventeenth-century invocation.
No direct connection to modern American law exists. The term should not appear in any modern U.S. legal context except as historical reference.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in close agreement, with both relying on the same underlying source: Stephen's Commentaries on the Laws of England (2nd volume, 7th edition, at pages 582–585 depending on the edition). Both entries make the same essential points: the commission directed officers into every county to muster and militarily organize inhabitants, and it was superseded by commissions of lieutenancy embodying the same substantive powers.
The entries are accurate as far as they go but are compressed to the point of omitting context that a researcher may need. Neither dictionary addresses the seventeenth-century revival of the commission of array during the English Civil War, which is the moment when the instrument received its most sustained legal scrutiny and generated the most accessible primary source material. Neither addresses the medieval statutory underpinnings—statutes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries governing the obligation to bear arms and the mechanics of array—that gave the commission its formal legal footing. Researchers relying solely on these dictionary entries will have enough to identify the term but not enough to analyze its legal history or its constitutional significance in the 1640s.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses commissions of array or medieval English military administration. The matched encyclopedia entries (payroll commissions, the NRC, the FEC) are not relevant. Omitted.