Probably a dumb question since I only know if history from outside facts and people talking about discussing fictions books, but I can't get how so much was lost after the fall of the Roman Empire.
When you hear of the Roman camps and warfare, everything seem so much more controlled, regimented and structured than what you hear of the later middle ages warfare and combat. I understand that some things definitely changes since there wasn't a uniformed government among all the factions/countries of the Europe at the time, but it seems like so much was thrown out or lost in the intervening ages during the fall of the Roman Empire.
Is there just some general loss of knowledge from languages diversifying or was they're actual attempts to distances themselves from Roman history? I'm just curious as to how the change from such a structured society didn't have any huge remnants in later ages?
When you hear of the Roman camps and warfare, everything seem so much more controlled, regimented and structured than what you hear of the later middle ages warfare and combat.
I'm not sure where you got that impression, but it is certainly not true in a lot of cases. Medieval armies were not a ragtag rabble, nor did they fight like it. There's a previous answer here with an answer from myself and a bunch of further links about the organisation of medieval armies.
It's important to recognise that medieval tactics were not due to logistical inability or some 'lost knowledge'. In fact, they knew the Roman army pretty well thanks to Caesar's commentaries, which were well known to a lot of medieval noblemen. The smaller scale of medieval warfare is often taken to be a sign of regression, but really it is a demonstration of changing military doctrine. Most medieval leaders rejected Caesar's strategies, and instead followed the military theory of Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, a late Roman writer who completed his De Re Militari around 400 AD. He believed that warfare was changing; that the age of the pitched battle was on its way out in favour of more drawn out campaigns of attrition and raiding, and he was generally right. His advice on pitched battles was very clear: do not fight them unless you have overwhelming numerical superiority, and medieval commanders took this to heart. In the Middle Ages it was common for knights with long and illustrious careers to fight only two or three battles in their entire life, and the vast majority of medieval warfare was fought on the scale of skirmishes of a few hundred men rather than decisive battles comprising thousands of men on each side, or through sieges where large numbers of men were committed not to battle, but to standing around while a town or castle got starved into surrender. The nature of medieval warfare does not really show a regression, but a recognition that tactics from 1000 years ago were not really suitable any more.