VII
‘Starkly the left arm hold with the bow
Draw with the right, and smite and overthrow’
A fifteenth-century translation
of Vegetius’s De Re Militari
‘Agincourt is … a school outing to the Old Vic, Shakespeare is fun, son-et-lumière, blank verse, Laurence Olivier in battle armour; it is an episode to quicken the interest of any schoolboy ever bored by a history lesson, a set-piece demonstration of English moral superiority and a cherished ingredient of a fading national myth. It is also a story of slaughter-yard behaviour and of outright atrocity.’
John Keegan, The Face of Battle
On 6 October Henry V marched out from Harfleur. Calais was 160 miles away and he expected to reach it in eight days’ time. He had approximately 900 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers, grouped in three ‘battles’ with skirmishers on the wings. The king and the Duke of Gloucester led the main army, Sir John Cornwall the advance guard, and the Duke of York and the Earl of Oxford the rearguard. Henry was plainly anxious to make all speed possible, travelling without artillery or baggage wagons, his troops bringing only what they could carry on pack-horses – mostly the men-at-arms ‘harness’ and provisions for the eight days. He intended to march north to the River Somme, then south-east along its bank until he reached the ford of Blanche-Taque and then go straight on to Calais. To ensure a safe crossing he had sent orders for a force from Calais to seize the ford. (It had been used by his great-grandfather Edward II in 1346 on his way to Crécy.) No doubt he hoped for a minor engagement en route from which he could extract some semblance of a victorious trial by battle.
As was customary, the English slew and looted as they went, their passage announced by columns of black smoke from burning farmhouses. The abbey of Fécamp also went up in flames, women who had taken refuge in its church being dragged out and raped. Most of the archers were mounted so that the English were able to average nearly twenty miles a day, though such a pace must have been gruelling for those on foot with quivers holding fifty arrows. When fired on by the garrison at the castle of Arques as they were about to cross the River Béthune, Henry threatened to burn the town, extracting supplies of bread and wine for not doing so – it was the same story at Eu when crossing the Bresle. The army looked forward to an easy road over the Somme, which the king expected to reach by midday on 13 October.
Only six miles from the river a prisoner captured by English scouts reported that the tidal ford at Blanche-Taque was blocked by sharp stakes, and that Marshal Boucicault was waiting on the other side with 6,000 troops. (The force from Calais had been intercepted and driven off.) Henry personally interrogated the prisoner, telling him he would lose his head if he did not tell the truth but the man stuck to his story. In the meantime the tide came in and made the ford impassable. The king marched on eastward along the southern bank of the Somme to look for another ford. An eye-witness, the author of the Gesta, records the dejection of the army:
Expecting to have no alternative but to go into parts of France higher up and at the head of the river (which was said to be over sixty miles away) … at that time we thought of nothing else but this: that, after the eight days assigned for the march had expired and our provisions had run out, the enemy, craftily hastening on ahead, would impose on us, hungry as we should be, a really dire need of food and at the head of the river if God did not provide otherwise, would with their great and countless host and the engines of war and devices available to them, overwhelm us, so very few we were and made faint by great weariness and weak from lack of food.1
Every ford appeared to be held by the French, who kept pace with the English from the other bank. There was a real danger of discipline breaking down. At Boves they drank so much wine, extorted from the castellan by the usual threats, that Henry forbade them to drink any more – when an indulgent commander told the king that they were simply filling their bottles, Henry snapped, ‘Their bottles indeed! They’re making big bottles of their bellies and getting very drunk.’ By now they had eaten their rations apart from a little dried meat, which they supplemented with nuts and what vegetables they could dig up in the fields.
The king took advantage of a loop in the river to make a short cut and outdistance the enemy who had to go the long way round. He still managed to enforce discipline, hanging in full view of the army a man caught sacrilegiously stealing a cheap copper gilt pyx from a church. (During later campaigns he would not be so particular.) Then on 19 October two unguarded fords were found at Voyennes and Béthencourt near Nesle. They could only be reached through the marshes over causeways which had been destroyed by the French; 200 archers, bows on backs, struggled through a quagmire at Béthencourt to wade waist deep across the river and establish a bridgehead on the far bank; a similar operation at Voyennes was also successful. Henry was not disposed to be merciful to the local peasants who had hung red clothes and blankets out of their windows, as a symbol of the Oriflamme (the sacred battle banner of the kings of France) and of defiance; he ordered every house whose occupants were unhelpful to be burnt to the ground. The causeways were repaired with window-frames, doors, roof-timbers and staircases from their hamlets as well as with hurdles, tree-trunks and straw. As soon as the causeway at Béthune could support a horse, Sir Gilbert Umfraville and Sir John Cornwall crossed at the head of 500 men-at-arms, just in time to drive off an attack on the archers’ bridgehead. By an hour after nightfall the entire English army was over the Somme and in much better spirits. They did not yet know that the main body of the French was only six miles away at Péronne.
Estimates of the number of French troops vary considerably but they almost certainly outnumbered the English by four to one and may have been as many as 30,000, of whom 15,000 were men-at-arms. Their leaders, Marshal Boucicault and the Constable d’Albret – Constable of France – were cautious veterans who wanted to leave Henry alone and let him go back to England while they concentrated on recovering Harfleur. They were overruled by more pugnacious, less experienced spirits. Among the latter were not only the Armagnac Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon but Burgundian magnates like the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Nevers, who were the brothers of Duke John. Although he himself still vacillated, his son, the future Duke Philip, regretted for the rest of his life that he had not fought in the campaign. Even Burgundians could not stomach an English invasion. However, Charles VI, momentarily sane, and the Dauphin Louis stayed away; they did not wish to be taken prisoner, as Charles’s grandfather, John II, had been at Poitiers.
On 20 October, a Sunday, three French heralds arrived at Henry’s camp. They remained on their knees, keeping silence until given permission to speak. ‘Right puissant prince, great and noble is thy kingly power,’ began their spokesman. ‘Our lords have heard how you intend with your army to conquer the towns, castles and cities of the realm of France and to depopulate French cities. And because of this, and for the sake of their country and their oaths, many of our lords are assembled to defend their rights; and they inform you by us that before you come to Calais they will meet with you to fight with you and be revenged of your conduct.’ Henry replied calmly, ‘Be all things according to the will of God.’ Yet there was a hint of uneasiness in his answer to the heralds’ enquiry as to what road he would take. ‘Straight to Calais, and if our enemies try to disturb us in our journey, it will not be without the utmost peril. We do not intend to seek them out, but neither shall we go in fear of them either more slowly or more quickly than we wish to do. We advise them again not to interrupt our journey, nor to seek what would be in consequence a great shedding of Christian blood.’2 Then he sent the heralds back to their masters, each with a hundred gold crowns. He realized that he had been outmanoeuvred and expected to be attacked the next day. He ordered his men to take up positions, anticipating an onslaught from the direction of Péronne where the enemy had their camp. But it became clear that the French were not going to attack, so he gave orders for everyone to get a good night’s rest before continuing the march.
They awoke to a morning of drenching rain, beneath which they set out. For some days there were no serious incidents though ominous signs were not lacking, such as the road being churned up as if by the feet of ‘an unimaginable host’. The rain was unrelenting, driven into their eyes by the wind; they had to sleep in it. Many of them were weakened by dysentery and kept their breeches down. They were all famished. Morale sank very low indeed.
On 24 October a terrified scout reported to the Duke of York that he had sighted the enemy through the drizzle. The English had just forded the ‘river of swords’, the little River Ternoise. The chaplain tells us that ‘as we reached the crest of the hill on the other side, we saw emerging from further up the valley, about half a mile away from us, hateful swarms of Frenchmen’. They were marching in three great ‘battles’ or columns, ‘like a countless swarm of locusts’,3 towards the English to intercept them. For the French commanders had decided to make Henry stand and fight, and there was no hope of escape. He had been out-generalled. The English trudged on through the mud and the wet to the hamlet of Maisoncelles, where they bivouacked, preparing to spend yet another night under torrential rain. Even the king was shaken, releasing his prisoners and sending some of them into the French camp with a message that, in return for a safe passage to. Calais, he was ready to surrender Harfleur and pay for any damage he had done. The offer was rejected. A Somerset knight, Sir Walter Hungerford, told Henry that they could do with 10,000 more archers, at which the king rounded on him, retorting that he was a fool since the troops they had ‘are God’s people’. He added, again with a hint of uneasiness, that no misfortune could befall a man with faith in God so sublime as his own.
A set-piece confrontation was the last thing he wanted. He had only seen one before, at Shrewsbury, where he had very nearly been on the defeated side and had almost lost his life. He shared Vegetius’s opinion: ‘a battle is commonly decided in two or three hours, after which no further hopes are left for the worsted army … a conjuncture full of uncertainty and fatal to kingdoms.’ In any case he was more of a gunner, a sapper or a staff officer, than an infantry commander, and this was going to be an infantry battle. It was clearly with the utmost misgivings that he prepared for a general engagement.
According to English sources the French passed the night dicing for the English lords they expected to capture and for the rich ransoms they would demand. Later it was said that they were so confident that they had brought a painted cart with them in which to bring Henry back to Paris as a prisoner. They had plenty of wine and provisions and the sound of their feasting could be heard in the English camp. The Picard squire, Monstrelet, (born in 1390 and a contemporary) tells us, however, that the French passed a depressing night during which not even their horses neighed. He also says that, ‘The English played their trumpets and other musical instruments, so that the whole neighbourhood resounded with their music while they made their peace with God.’4 For, as all sources agree, the English were understandably terrified, confessing their sins to each other if the queues for priests were too long. The king ordered them to keep silent during the night, under pain of forfeiture of horse and armour for a gentleman, and of the right ear for a yeoman and anyone of inferior rank. (The reality behind Shakespeare’s ‘touch of Harry in the night’.) Armourers were kept very busy servicing weapons, as were the fletchers and bowyers. All were exhausted after their gruelling eighteen-day trek, all were sodden and starving, and all must have dreaded the next morning. Henry had got his trial by battle with a vengeance.
The chaplain, a fearful eyewitness, records how ‘in the early dawn the French arrayed themselves in battle-lines, columns and platoons and took up position in that field called the field of Agincourt, across which lay our road towards Calais, and the number of them was really terrifying’. It was a vast open field sown with young corn, two miles long and a mile wide but narrowing in the middle to about a thousand yards, where a small wood hid the village of Agincourt to the west and another small wood hid that of Tramecourt to the east. The King had spent the night in the village of Maisoncelles to the south, the French in and around that of Ruisseauville to the north. The site, off the road from Hesdin to Arras, remains miraculously unchanged, preserved by the re-planting of trees in the same clumps for generation after generation. On that particular day, because the corn was newly sown and because the rain had been falling for several days, the field had turned into a sea of mud which was bound to be churned up by large bodies of men and horses.
Most of the French were men-at-arms in full plate armour. There were three lines of them, each six deep, the first two lines dismounted and carrying sawn-off lances. A third line remained mounted, as did two detachments of 500 men-at-arms who were on the wings. They had some cannon and even some catapults together with a few crossbowmen and archers but there was no room to deploy them. The French plan – if plan it can be called – was for the horsemen on the wings to dispose of the English archers, while their men on foot got to grips with the English men-at-arms and overwhelmed them. They hoped that the English would facilitate this simple operation by attacking. Even the Constable d’Albret and Marshal Boucicault took their places in the front rank of the first line. The French therefore left themselves without any proper command structure, let alone any room to manoeuvre.
There was another eye-witness besides Henry’s chaplain who has left an account. This was ‘Messire Jehan, bastard de Waurin, sieur du Forestal’, a Picard nobleman born in 1394 who fought on the French side and whose father and younger brother were killed in the ensuing combat. Waurin recalls what it was like for the French nobles to prepare for battle:
And the said Frenchmen were so heavy laden with armour that they could not support the weight nor easily go forward; firstly they were armed in long steel coats of plate down to the knee or even lower and very heavy, with armour on their legs below, and underneath that white harness [felt], while most of them had on basinets with chain-mail; the which weight of armour, what with the softness of the trampled ground … made it hard for them to move or go forward, so that it was only with great difficulty that they might raise their weapons, since even before all these mischiefs many had been much weakened by hunger and lack of sleep. Indeed it was a marvel how it was possible to set in place the banners under which they fell in. And the said Frenchmen had each one shortened his lance that it might do more execution when it came to fighting and dealing blows. They had archers and crossbowmen enough but would not let them shoot, since so narrow was the field that there was room only for men-at-arms.5
The English also took up their positions at dawn. They were by now down to 800 men-at-arms at most and probably slightly under 5,000 archers. The former, dismounted and carrying sawn-off lances like the French, were grouped four deep in three ‘battles’, each one flanked by a projecting wedge of archers four or five deep; on both wings there was a horn-shaped formation of archers curving gently forward so that they could shoot in towards the centre. By the king’s orders every archer stuck an eleven foot long stake, sharpened at both ends, into the ground in front of himself as protection against enemy cavalry. There were not enough troops for a reserve, so great was the disparity in numbers, the baggage train behind being guarded by ten men-at-arms and thirty archers. However, the English front did at least cover the entire centre while the flanks were protected by the woods.
Descriptions of Agincourt omit to comment on the relatively advanced age of the men whom the twenty-six-year-old monarch chose as his key commanders for this critical confrontation. The right was under his cousin, Edward, Duke of York, who at forty-two was the senior member of the royal family; fat and extremely cunning, once a favourite of Richard II, he was a natural survivor and by medieval standards in advanced middle age. The left wing was under Lord Camoys, married to Hotspur’s widow, who had seen service against the French as long ago as the 1370s. A still more reassuring figure was ‘old Sir Thomas Erpingham’, Knight of the Garter, who had charge of the archers. Born in 1357 he had been a household man of both John of Gaunt and Bolingbroke, accompanying the latter into exile in 1397 and on his march from Ravenspur to seize the crown. He had become Steward of the Royal Household in 1404 and was someone whom the king had known for most of his life. Henry, as overall commander, took the centre himself. It is significant that he did not entrust one of the main commands to his brother Humphrey – he was plainly anxious to have the coolest and most reliable heads available.
The author of the Gesta was among the other chaplains, the sick and the supernumaries who stayed near the baggage. He says that he and his fellow English priests were so frightened that he believed the French to be thirty times larger than the English army, and that he and his companions prayed throughout ‘in fear and trembling’. Nonetheless, he kept his head sufficiently to watch the battle and gives the best eye-witness account of it.6
Henry heard three Masses and took Communion before donning a burnished armour, over which he wore a velvet and satin surcoat, embroidered in gold with the leopards and lilies; on his helmet was a coronet, ‘marvellous rich’, studded with rubies, sapphires and many pearls. Then, riding a small grey pony – a page leading a great war-horse behind him – he rode up and down the line in front of his troops. His eve-of-battle speech struck a familiar note – he ‘was come into France to recover his lawful inheritance and that he had good and just cause to claim it’. He warned the archers that the French had sworn to cut three fingers off the right hand of every English bowman captured. ‘Sirs and fellows,’ he promised his army, ‘as I am true king and knight, for me this day shall never England ransom pay.’ When he had finished they shouted back, ‘Sir, we pray God give you a good life and the victory over your enemies!’
In the justified belief that it would be best for the English to open the battle, the French remained motionless, some 700 yards away. After waiting for four hours Henry decided that his cold, wet, hungry and weary men had stood there quite long enough and resolved to make the French attack. He ordered Erpingham to take the archers forward just within range of the enemy. When Sir Thomas signalled that he had done so, by throwing his wand of office into the air, the king gave the command, ‘Banners advance! In the name of Jesus, Mary and St George!’ His men therefore, as was their custom, first knelt and kissed the earth on which they made the sign of the cross, placing a morsel of soil in their mouths in token of desire for communion. Then, trumpets and tabors sounding (‘which greatly encouraged the heart of every man’), they marched forward as steadily as the soggy ground permitted, shouting in unison at intervals, ‘St George!’ The little army was now within 300 yards of the vast host of the enemy, many of its men bedraggled and lacking equipment, especially the archers who went barefoot because of the mud. The latter replanted their stakes, a horse’s breast high and angled so as to impale, and began to shoot. Volley after volley hissed up into the air for a hundred feet before descending noisily onto the Frenchmen who kept their heads down beneath the arrow storm – even if few arrows penetrated their expensive plate armour the clatter must have been unnerving.
Now the first line of the enemy, 8,000 strong, began to advance, roaring hollowly from inside their close helmets their traditional war cry of ‘Montjoie! Saint Denis!’ At the same time 500 mounted French men-at-arms, led by the Sieurs Guillaume de Saveuse and Clignet de Brébant, charged the English on each flank. The archers repulsed them with ease. Three horses were impaled on the stakes and their riders killed, among them Saveuse. What drove the enemy horse off, however, was arrow fire under which their poor mounts became unmanageable, screaming and bolting back through those advancing on foot. They knocked many over, throwing the line into confusion. They also galloped over their gunners and catapult men, besides trampling down the sparse contingent of French archers and crossbowmen. Their example was contagious – after only one discharge the entire enemy artillery withdrew rather than face English arrows.
The first line of the dismounted French men-at-arms trudged grimly on, often sinking knee-deep into the mud on account of their weight, an exhausting business for a heavily-armoured man. Their ranks included the greatest names of France, royal as well as noble, for among them were the Dukes of Bourbon and Orleans. The English archers shot point-blank at their flanks – armour-piercing range. To avoid the murderous hail the French flinched away towards the centre, bunching up, so that the line turned into a dense scrum. Nevertheless they came doggedly on, though trying to keep away from the wedges of archers between the English battles who were also shooting at them. At last three tightly packed columns of French infantry crashed into the English men-at-arms, with such an impact that the latter were flung two or three yards back.
But the French were packed so close together that they could not raise their arms to use their weapons, while those in front were pushed over by those behind. Once down it was almost impossible for them to regain their feet. The fallen were soon pressed further down by more and more men falling on top of them in ever growing heaps; many drowned in mud or were suffocated by the bodies above. (John Hardyng, a former squire of Hotspur’s who was present, says specifically that ‘more were dead through press than our men might have killed’.) As soon as their arrows were exhausted, the English archers seized ‘swords, hatchets, mallets, axes, falcon-beaks and other weapons’ – even stakes according to the Gesta – and rushed at their enemies. Lightly clad, they jumped on top of the prostrate men-at-arms, frequently three deep, to get at their companions. Yet more Frenchmen were pushed off their feet and lost their balance as the second line came up behind.
The English men-at-arms were saved from being similarly pushed over because there were so few of them. An exception was the fat Duke of York, who was trampled under foot and suffocated. They were able to use their own weapons, at close quarters and to maximum effect. Tito Livio, who had met many who had been in the battle, says that Henry fought ‘like a maned lion seeking his prey’. Some Frenchmen fought back ferociously and Tito’s patron, the Duke of Gloucester, ‘sore wounded in the hams with a sword’, fell half-dead, with his feet towards the enemy. The king stood over him, fighting off assailants until his brother could be picked up and carried to the rear.7
The Duke of Alençon, a prince of the Blood, who had led the second French line, was one of those in the mêlée round Gloucester. He had left the scrum for a moment, mounting a horse to go back and rally the growing number of deserters. Failing, he returned and, together with a handful of French men-at-arms, attacked Gloucester’s party. One source says he hacked a fleuret from Henry’s helmet. At last, beaten to his knees, Alençon surrendered to the king and removed his helmet, whereupon a berserk English knight cut him down with an axe.
The French were everywhere lying in heaps, sometimes higher than a man on his feet. Many were alive, prevented by their armour from rising. The English finished some off as they lay like stranded turtles, thrusting a dagger through their visors, but the majority – perhaps as many as 3,000 – were pulled out and sent to the rear as prisoners for ransom.
Suddenly a shout went up that the third, mounted, French line was about to attack. The Duke of Brabant, a younger brother of the Duke of Burgundy, and another prince of the Blood, had arrived late. Being without a surcoat he borrowed a tabard from his herald and then tried to persuade the French reserve to go into action. In the event he charged almost alone and was eventually unhorsed; because of his tabard he was unrecognized and had his throat cut. It is possible that this happened at a slightly earlier stage in the battle. What is certain is that after the rout of the second line two brave French noblemen, the Counts of Marle and Fauquembergues, swore to kill Henry or perish and prepared to launch a final despairing charge with a mere 600 men.
The king was already uneasy enough about the prisoners at the rear. Just before the start of the battle local peasants had raided his baggage but had been driven off. It was possible they might try to raid it again. When it looked as though he might expect a serious attack from the third line and that it was possible the captured men-at-arms might break free and join their comrades, he ordered their liquidation. His men were horrified, not from compassion but at the prospect of losing such valuable ransoms. Henry promised to hang anyone who refused to obey. He detailed 200 archers to slaughter the prisoners; in the words of a Tudor chronicler, they were ‘sticked with daggers, brained with pole-axes, slain with mauls’, and finished off by being ‘paunched in fell and cruel wise’.8 We know from a survivor, Gilbert de Lannoy, that one batch were burnt to death in the hut where they were confined. Those spared were worth great sums, such as princes of the Blood like the Duke of Orleans. The king stopped the slaughter when he realized that he was not threatened by a serious attack from the French third line and was throwing money away.
This massacre of prisoners in 1415 is Henry V’s one generally acknowledged peccadillo. Almost every one of his English biographers and historians tries to absolve him of guilt, referring to the lack of condemnation by contemporary English chroniclers, or to ‘the standards of the time’. In reality, by fifteenth-century standards, to massacre captive, unarmed noblemen who, according to the universally recognized international laws of chivalry, had every reason to expect to be ransomed if they surrendered formally, was a peculiarly nasty crime – especially by someone who constantly claimed to be a ‘true knight’. The chronicler Waurin notes with horror that it was done ‘in cold blood’ (‘de froit sang’).
The charge by Marle and Fauquembergues had been routed without difficulty, since by then the English not only outnumbered them but were protected by ramparts of French corpses. Both Marle and Fauquembergues lost their lives. The remainder of the French third line, its nerve broken, rode off the field. In under four hours the English king and his tiny army had routed a force many times larger. For a loss of 500 men at most they had slain nearly 10,000 of their opponents, if one includes the prisoners they had put to death. Besides York, the English notables killed numbered only one peer, the young Earl of Suffolk (whose father had perished of fever at Harfleur), and a handful of knights – among them that redoubtable Welsh veteran Davy Gam with his two son-in-laws, Walter Lloyd and Roger Vaughan. The French had lost the Dukes of Alençon, Bar and Brabant, the Count of Nevers (another brother of the Duke of Burgundy) with eight other counts, ninety-two barons, 1,500 knights and countless gentlemen. Among the prisoners who had survived the massacre were the Dukes of Bourbon and Orleans, the Counts of Eu, Richemont and Vendôme, with 1,500 gentlemen. The rest of the day was spent searching for overlooked prisoners and cutting the throats of the disabled or worthless. The bodies of the English dead were taken to a big barn at Maisoncelles which was piled high with faggots and then set alight to burn throughout the night as a funeral pyre. That evening Henry’s most distinguished captives served him at supper on bended knee. God had spoken, giving his verdict on the trial by battle – now he knew that he was in truth King of England, and of France too. He named his victory ‘Agincourt’ after the nearby castle.
It began to rain again. Next morning, wearier than ever, the English army resumed their march to Calais through the downpour. The troops were weighed down with expensive armours looted from the dead and from their prisoners. Still seriously short of rations, they now had to feed the prisoners as well. When the army reached Calais on 29 October its welcome left much to be desired. Many men were refused entry, while those admitted had to sell their armours and their prisoners to pay for the extortionate prices they were charged for provisions.
The king lodged at his castle of Guisnes outside Calais, where he imprisoned his own extremely valuable captives. Understandably, he was in an excellent mood, telling the Duke of Orleans that his victory was scarcely to be wondered at ‘for never were there greater disorders, sensuality and vices than now prevail in France, which it is horrible to hear described’. It would be many years before some of these prisoners came home; Marshal Boucicault would die in captivity at Methley in Yorkshire in 1421 while Orleans was not released from the Tower of London until 1440. Even so, they were luckier than many humbler fellow captives later sold as servants in England by the Calais merchants (who had bought them from the troops) when it was found that they could not pay their ransoms.
So certain was Henry of God’s favour that he proposed to his commanders that the army should attack some neighbouring French town. They listened with incredulity, pointing out he had very few troops, many of them badly wounded while others were still suffering from the bloody flux and that everyone wanted to go home. He had to agree to return to England.
The Sieurs d’Estouteville and de Gaucourt, with others paroled at Harfleur, came, as ‘faithful captives’, to Calais and surrendered to the king. Now he was ready to depart, sailing on Saturday 16 November during a raging storm. Two ships sank and the Frenchprisoners on board the royal ship found the voyage worse than their worst moments at Agincourt – they were deeply impressed by their captor’s seemingly cast-iron stomach.9