It is now some forty years since I first became aware of the name Vegetius, and of how often I was meeting it in a variety of medieval texts, in particular in those concerned with war. It is getting on for thirty-five years that I first spoke about him and other ‘veteres scriptores de re militari’ at a meeting at the University of Nottingham. For years, thereafter, I copied down information on odd bits of paper which came to hand. Elsewhere, unbeknown to me, historians of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages were working more scientifically on aspects of his work, the classicists being interested in his sources and contemporary context and relevance, the medievalists rather more in showing the influence of his text upon the practice of war during the long Middle Ages. The past generation has seen a marked growth of interest in Vegetius, witnessed to by new editions and, not least, by translations of his work. Furthermore, the medieval translations of his text have provided not only historians, but philologists and those interested in the development of European vernacular languages, with evidence useful to more than a single discipline. In 1998, Philippe Richardot published the first historical study of Vegetius’ text, which helped me in a number of ways as I approached the subject from sometimes rather different directions.

From the start, it seemed important to appreciate how Vegetius’ medieval readers had responded to the texts which they read. The limitations of microfilms, however carefully made, soon became obvious to one wanting to read and study such responses, mostly written in the margins of manuscripts. In the end, I handled more than 200 manuscripts of the Latin text and almost 100 of those of vernacular translations. It is pleasant to record that the staff in libraries where it is policy to offer the researcher a film of a manuscript being studied understood the problem, and were willing to modify their practices to help me.