The British army in the late eighteenth century was a small organization of officers and men more or less isolated from the civilian society which gave it grudging support. Like most armies then and now it possessed institutional characteristics some of which contrasted sharply with those of the civilian life around it. It was an authoritarian organization which demanded exact obedience. It was a rigidly stratified social system with a hierarchy of command established and maintained by formal rules and regulations, infractions of which were subject to severe punishment. It was a self contained society, which provided for all the physical and most of the psychological needs of its members. It was a society with deeply rooted traditions or ways of doing things which prized conformity and discouraged initiative.