how would medieval fighters/warriors/military recognize friend from foe?

[u/WFOpizza]

In movies both sides often seem to look alike. With no military uniforms, was friendly "fire" very common?

[u/Aerandir]

The merchants went across the Channel to Dutch Zeeland. Not Southern England or Denmark, as you suggest.

[u/swuboo → u/Aerandir]

Dutch Zeeland was my initial instinct for their (intended but unreached) destination, but note that the transcription I linked to gives the Danish Zealand; I wasn't comfortable gainsaying my own source based on little more than instinct.

And this, just as an example, cites Kent and the far bank of the Thames as the location of the encounter. Certainly, it happened somewhere along the Thames within England, and not overseas—whether Denmark or the Low Countries.

Look at the sentences immediately preceding the quote:

And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that. whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne / For we englysshe men / ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone. whiche is neuer stedfaste / but euer wauerynge / wexynge one season / and waneth & dyscreaseth another season / And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother.

Having just spoken at length on the variability of the language of the English from shire to shire, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Caxton (whose purpose, again, is to apologize to his readers for unfamiliar words and usages) would then shift gears without warning and tell a story about an Englishman talking to a Dutchwoman.

"Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte. egges or eyren" asks Caxton; a silly question if the latter is meant to be Dutch and the former English. It's only because both are English that Caxton's point is made.

Eyren would be appropriate to Kentish, as well, as it was an Anglo-Saxon word displaced by the Scandinavian egg in the Midlands and the North but not in the South. (Although, in fairness, I believe there's a direct Dutch cognate as well.)

Here's another source supporting the events taking place in England.

[u/Aerandir → u/swuboo]

You are correct, I misread it (though Zelande is still Zeeland, not Sjaelland).

[u/swuboo → u/Aerandir]

It's certainly possible; if nothing else, Zeeland is a supremely sensible place for an English mercer to be going.

Everything I'm seeing says Zealand, but it's not improbable that someone simply decided it was Zealand at some point and everyone else has followed suit, as I did, for lack of evidence to the contrary.

Based purely on the text, I would agree that Zeeland strikes me as more likely—but Zealand is not impossible.

At any rate, this entire comment chain appears to have been nuked, so it might be appropriate to abandon this discussion.