Agincourt Read online

  Copyright © 2005 by Juliet Barker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company,

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  First eBook Edition: June 2006

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05589-5

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  Contents

  Preface

  A Note to the Text

  Part I: The Road to Agincourt

  Chapter One: Just Rights and Inheritances

  Chapter Two: A King’s Apprenticeship

  Chapter Three: A Most Christian King

  Chapter Four: The Diplomatic Effort

  Chapter Five: Scots and Plots

  Chapter Six: “He Who Desires Peace, Let him Prepare for War”

  Chapter Seven: Of Money and Men

  Chapter Eight: The Army Gathers

  Part II: The Agincourt Campaign

  Chapter Nine: “Fair Stood the Wind for France”

  Chapter Ten: Harfleur

  Chapter Eleven: “Our Town Of Harfleur”

  Chapter Twelve: The March To Calais

  Chapter Thirteen: Crossing The Somme

  Chapter Fourteen: The Eve Of Battle

  Chapter Fifteen: “Felas, Lets Go!”

  Part III: The Aftermath of Battle

  Chapter Sixteen: The Roll of the Dead

  Chapter Seventeen: The Return of the King

  Chapter Eighteen: The Rewards of Victory

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  ALSO BY JULIET BARKER

  The Brontës: Selected Poems

  The Tournament in England, 1100-1400

  Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (with Richard Barber)

  The Brontë Yearbook

  The Brontës

  The Brontës: A Life in Letters

  Charlotte Brontë: Juvenilia, 1829-35

  Wordsworth: A Life

  Wordsworth: A Life in Letters

  For Maurice Hugh Keen

  EMERITUS FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

  PREFACE

  As first light dawned on the morning of 25 October 1415, two armies faced each other across a plateau in an obscure corner of north-eastern France. The contrast between them could not have been greater. On one side stood the bedraggled remnants of an English army that had invaded Normandy ten weeks earlier and, in a major blow to French pride, captured the strategically important town and port of Harfleur. The siege had taken its toll, however, and of the twelve thousand fighting men who had embarked on the expedition, only half that number were now assembled on the field of Agincourt. Of these, only nine hundred were men-at-arms, the human tanks of their day, clad from head to toe in plate armour and universally regarded as the elite of the military world. The rest were English and Welsh archers, who wore only the minimum of defensive armour and carried the longbow, a weapon virtually unique to their island. Many of them were suffering from the dysentery that had also incapacitated their comrades: all were exhausted and half-starved after a gruelling eighteen-day march through almost two hundred and fifty miles of hostile terrain, during which they had been constantly harassed, attacked and deflected from their course by the enemy. Even the weather had been against them, biting winds and constant heavy rain adding to their misery as they trudged from Harfleur towards the safety of English-held Calais.

  Facing them—and blocking their route to Calais—was a French army that outnumbered them by at least four to one and possibly as much as six to one. Galvanised by the desire to revenge the loss of Harfleur, the chivalry of France had turned up in their thousands from every part of northern France and some from even further afield. So many men-at-arms had answered the call that it was decided to dispense with the services of some of the less well-equipped city militiamen and crossbowmen, and reinforcements continued to arrive even after the battle had begun. With a few notable exceptions, every princeling with a trace of royal blood in his veins was present, together with all the greatest military officers of France. Well rested, well fed, well armed, fighting on their own territory on a site that they had chosen themselves, this army could be forgiven for thinking that the result of the battle was a foregone conclusion.

  Yet some four hours later, in defiance of all logic and the received military wisdom of the time, the English were victorious and the fields of Agincourt were covered with what one observer graphically described as “the masses, the mounds, and the heaps of the slain.”1 Perhaps most astonishing of all was the fact that virtually all the dead were French: “almost the whole nobility among the soldiery of France” had been killed,2 including the dukes of Alençon, Bar and Brabant, eight counts, a viscount and an archbishop, together with the constable, admiral, master of the crossbowmen and prévôt of marshals of the French army. Several hundred more, among them the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, the counts of Richemont, Eu and Vendôme, and the celebrated chivalric hero Marshal Boucicaut, were prisoners in English hands. The English, by contrast, had lost only two noblemen, Edward, duke of York, and Michael, earl of Suffolk, a handful of men-at-arms and perhaps a hundred archers. The English victory was so unexpected and so overwhelming in its scale that contemporaries could only ascribe it to God.

  For Henry V, however, the battle of Agincourt was not just a divine affirmation of the justice of his cause. It was also the culmination of a carefully planned campaign, preceded by years of meticulous preparation. To see the battle in this context is to understand not only the determination and single-mindedness of the principal human architect of the victory but also the reason why, against all the odds, he was victorious. For these reasons, therefore, this book is not merely a study of the military campaign to which this battle was the dramatic denouement. Agincourt also aims to set the scene in which such a conflict was possible and to explain why, given the character of Henry V, it was almost inevitable. The book falls into three parts. The first deals with the inexorable countdown to war as Henry stamped his authority on his own kingdom, exploited the internal divisions caused by the French civil wars to his own advantage and engaged in diplomacy to ensure that France’s traditional allies did not come to her aid when he attacked. The second part of the book follows the campaign itself, from the moment Henry gave the signal that launched the invasion, through the siege and fall of Harfleur, the increasingly desperate march to Calais, the battle and, finally, the formal concession of defeat by the French heralds. The third part examines the impact of the battle on the victors, on the families of those who lost their lives and on the prisoners, some of whom were to endure years in foreign captivity. It also looks briefly at the wider historical consequences of Agincourt and at the literature that this spectacular victory inspired.

  It is no coincidence that many authors have been prompted to write about Agincourt in times of war. When national morale is low and victory seems uncertain or far off, it is useful to be reminded that resourcefulness and determination can sometimes be more important than sheer weight of numbers. On the other hand, writing in such circumstances makes it easy to fall into the propaganda trap, and much of the historical and literary response to Agincourt has been one-sided, politically motivated or simply jingoistic, portraying the battle as a victory of stout-hearted, no-nonsense English commoners over lily-livered, unmanly, foppish French aristocrats. Writing in the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasio
ns of Afghanistan and Iraq by the Americans, the British and their allies, it is impossible not to be struck by the echoes from six centuries ago. But while human nature does not change, the circumstances in which we live and fight our wars do, and it would be wrong to draw too close analogies between the past and the present.

  In writing this book, I hope to have done something towards creating a more balanced view of the battle and the events leading up to it. Inevitably, the fact that English administrative, financial and family records have been preserved in far greater numbers than similar ones in France (where most were destroyed during the French Revolution) means that greater emphasis is placed on the English experience, though this is not necessarily inappropriate, given that Henry V was the aggressor. The fascination of the English material is its detail: we learn of the young earl marshal’s purchase of new armour and equipment (including a pavilion to stable his horses and a new seat for his latrine) for his first military campaign; of the vast household, including everyone from heralds and minstrels to scullery servants and torchbearers, which accompanied the king himself; of the unprecedented expenditure in hiring armourers, fletchers and, most significantly, foreign gunners to operate Henry’s huge train of cannon and artillery.

  What we can piece together from the French sources makes it clear that, contrary to popular belief, there was a brave and concerted effort on the part of many of those living in northern France to resist the English invasion. The extraordinary story of the unsung hero Raoul, sire de Gaucourt, is a case in point.* If he is remembered at all, even in his own country, it is only as the friend and companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. Yet a host of scattered references reveal that this former crusader not only succeeded in getting a relief force into Harfleur under the nose of Henry V but also conducted a long and gallant defense of the town which foiled the king’s plans for the next stage of his invasion. His subsequent treatment by Henry V and his own sense of knightly duty, which obliged him to surrender himself into English custody because he had given his word to do so, make him a figure of compelling interest. The cult of chivalry has often been misunderstood, misinterpreted and derided as hopelessly romantic by historians, but Raoul de Gaucourt was a living example of the way that it informed and determined the conduct of medieval men-at-arms. And he was not alone. The great tragedy of Agincourt for the French was not just that so many of them were killed, but that so many of them had altruistically put aside bitter personal and political differences to unite in defence of their country and lost their lives as a result.

  Military historians, rightly, have an exhaustive interest in battle formations, positions and tactics but sometimes seem to forget that the chess pieces on the board are human beings, each with their own distinctive character and history, even if the future is not always theirs. All too often medieval men-at-arms are depicted as little more than brutal thugs, unthinking killing machines, motivated solely by lust for blood and plunder. Yet on the field of Agincourt we find many highly intelligent, literate and sensitive men: Edward, duke of York, and Thomas Morstede wrote the standard fifteenth-century treatises in English on hunting and surgery respectively; Charles, duke of Orléans, was a gifted writer of courtly love lyrics; Jean le Févre de St Remy and Jehan Waurin became the chivalric historians and chroniclers of their age; Ghillebert de Lannoy a celebrated traveller, diplomat and moralist.

  At an altogether different level, we can occasionally catch a poignant insight into the impact of war on less notable people: an esquire desperately trying to raise money on the eve of the expedition by pawning his possessions; two Welshmen performing a pilgrimage “in fulfilment of vows made on the battlefield”; the unfortunate Frenchman left without heirs because his four sons were all killed at Agincourt; the mother of seven children who, six months after the battle, had no income and did not know whether she was a wife or a widow because her husband’s body could not be found; the anonymous English chaplain, author of the most vivid, detailed and personal account of the campaign, who sat trembling with fear in the baggage train as the battle raged around him.

  It is the personal stories of individuals such as these which make Agincourt live again for me.

  A NOTE TO THE TEXT

  In order to make the quotations from contemporary sources more easily understood, I have translated those in medieval French and Latin into English and modernized archaic English passages. For authenticity’s sake, however, I have kept the pre-decimal references to pounds, shillings and pence. In the fifteenth century, one pound sterling (£1) was divided not just into twenty shillings (20s), or two hundred and forty pence (240d), but also into six parts: one sixth (3s 4d) was known as a crown, a third (6s 8d) as a noble and two thirds (13s 4d) as a mark. To give the reader a rough idea of the current values of these sums, I have used figures supplied by the Office for National Statistics, which equate £1 in 1415 with £414 ($666.54) in 1999.

  PART I

  THE ROAD TO AGINCOURT

  CHAPTER ONE

  JUST RIGHTS AND INHERITANCES

  The last letter that Henry V sent to Charles VI of France before he launched the Agincourt campaign was an ultimatum, its opening lines, which in most medieval correspondence were an opportunity for flowery compliments, characteristically abrupt and to the point. “To the most serene prince Charles, our cousin and adversary of France, Henry by the grace of God king of England and France. To give to each that which is his own is a work of inspiration and of wise counsel.” Henry had done everything in his power to procure peace between the two realms, he declared, but he did not lack the courage to fight to the death for justice. His just rights and inheritances had been seized from him by violence and withheld for too long: it was his duty to recover them. Since he could not obtain justice by peaceable means, he would have to resort to force of arms. “By the bowels of Jesus Christ,” he pleaded, “Friend, render what you owe.”1

  Henry V was undoubtedly an opportunist, in the sense that he was remarkably clever at identifying the chance to turn something to his own advantage. Was he also an opportunist in the more negative sense of the word, a man prepared to put expediency before principle? Had he really been deprived of his “just rights and inheritances”? If so, what were they and was it necessary for him to go to war to win them back? To answer those questions, we have to go back almost exactly 350 years before the Agincourt campaign, to another, even more momentous invasion.

  In 1066, at the battle of Hastings in southeast England, the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons and crowned their own duke, William the Conqueror, as king of England. Though the kingdom continued to be governed separately and independently from Normandy, socially, culturally and, to a much lesser extent, politically, England effectively became part of the continent for the next one and a half centuries. William and his Anglo-Norman aristocracy held lands and office on both sides of the Channel and were equally at home in either place. French became the dominant language in England, though Latin remained the choice of official documents and the Church, and Anglo-Saxon lingered on in vernacular speech, particularly among the illiterate. Cathedrals and castles were built as the visible symbols of a newly powerful and dynamic system of lordship in Church and state.

  The new technique of fighting which had won the battle of Hastings for the Normans was also adopted in England; instead of standing or riding and hurling the lance overarm, these new warriors, the knights, charged on horseback with the lance tucked beneath the arm, so that the weight of both horse and rider was behind the blow and the weapon was reusable. Though it required discipline and training, giving rise to the birth of tournaments and the cult of chivalry, a charge by massed ranks of knights with their lances couched in this way was irresistible. Anna Comnena, the Byzantine princess who witnessed its devastating effect during the First Crusade, claimed that it could “make a hole in the wall of Babylon.”2

  Intimately connected with these military developments was the arrival—via William the Conqueror—of the feudal system of land tenure, which
provided the knights to do the fighting by creating a chain of dependent lordships with the king at its head. Immediately beneath him in the hierarchy were his tenants-in-chief, each of whom had to perform a personal act of homage, acknowledging that he was the king’s vassal, or liege man, and that he owed him certain services. The most important of these was the obligation to provide a certain number of knights for the royal army whenever called upon to do so. In order to fulfil this duty, the tenants-in-chief granted parcels of their own land to dependent knights upon the same conditions, so that a further relationship of lord and vassal was created. Though it quickly became the accepted practice that the eldest son of a tenant succeeded his father, this was not an automatic right and it had to be paid for by a fine. If the heir was under twenty-one, the lands returned to the lord for the period of his minority, but a vassal of any age could be deprived of his lands permanently if he committed an act contrary to his lord’s interests. The feudal system underpinned the entire structure of Anglo-Norman society, just as it did in France, and if abused it could cause serious tension.

  The cracks took some time to show. Pressure began to build in the twelfth century. The marriage in 1152 of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine created a huge Angevin empire, which covered almost half of modern France as well as England and Wales. It encompassed Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Poitou—virtually all of western France apart from Brittany. Such an extensive, wealthy and powerful lordship was a threat, politically and militarily, to the authority and prestige of an increasingly ambitious French monarchy, which launched a series of invasions and conquests. Over time, virtually all of the Angevin inheritance was lost, including Normandy itself in 1204. All that then remained in English hands was the duchy of Aquitaine, a narrow strip of sparsely populated, wine-producing land on the western seaboard of France. Otherwise known as Gascony, or Guienne, it had no exceptional value, except for the strategic importance of its principal ports of Bordeaux and Bayonne, but it was a constant source of friction between the French and English monarchies.3