XV
‘une longue calamité’
Robert Blondel,
Complanctus bonorum Gallorum
‘les povres compaignons des frontieres’
Jean Juvénal des Ursins
The Duke of Normandy and his duchess kept the feast of the Epiphany, always a day of celebration and banqueting, at their beautiful new palace castle of Rouen. The building was not only the symbol of English occupation. It was also a symbol of the impoverishment of the citizens since its gleaming magnificence was in striking contrast to the rest of the city.
For the Norman capital remained largely in ruins throughout the English occupation. Its suburbs, together with any buildings outside the main walls, such as abbeys and churches, which might be used for offensive purposes, had been demolished by the Rouennais themselves in 1418 before the beginning of the siege. Others inside the walls had been destroyed by cannon fire during the siege. Some buildings were requisitioned by the English and not restored to their proper use; among these was the badly damaged abbey of Saint-Ouen, much of which served as a barracks. The citizens were crippled financially by the enormous collective ransom which Henry was still extorting from them. Even he realized they could not find 300,000 gold crowns at once and, after painful wrangling over the value of a crown, it was agreed that it should be paid in annual instalments of 80,000 crowns. After eleven years only 260,000 had been extracted, despite the seizure of hostages. The Earl of Warwick, who negotiated the compromise, was merciless in hunting down those who ran away to neighbouring towns to avoid paying their share, seeing that they suffered ‘imprisonment of their bodies and sale and exploitation of their goods on account of the debts they properly owe to the king’. The impoverishment and depopulation of the local countryside, and of many Norman towns and villages, did not make for prosperity. Above all, the miserable state of occupied Paris (so graphically recorded by the Bourgeois) deprived Rouen of much of the former market for its luxury goods.1
Henry presided over a meeting of the three estates of Normandy – nobles, clergy and bourgeois – which he convened at Rouen. It was also attended by representatives from the estates of the other ‘lands of the conquest’, territory conquered before the Treaty of Troyes. We do not know how many attended. The king-duke exhorted them to be faithful to the provisions of the Treaty of Troyes, explained he was well aware of the lamentable state of the coinage, and asked for advice on the general state of Normandy. Supposedly as a result of their advice, he announced the imposition of a silver levy in order to strike better coins. He also announced the welcome introduction of a uniform standard of weights and measures throughout the duchy, adopting Rouen’s standard for grain. The Earl of Salisbury paid ceremonial homage for his county of Perche, to remind everyone that there was now a new social hierarchy.
The military establishment was exclusively English, from the lieutenant-general down. All captains and lieutenants (commanders and deputy commanders) of garrisons were Englishmen. Besides the towns, there were no less than sixty castles with garrisons. It seems that there were probably about 5,000 English troops in northern France at the time of Henry’s visit to the duchy (a handful of rank and file being renegade Frenchmen). Some 1,600 of them were on the new state’s southern frontier from Avranches to Verneuil, another 1,600 on the eastern frontier from Pontoise up to Eu, and a further 950 in the Seine valley; of the rest 1,400 were distributed among the castles of the English seigneurs, while there were perhaps 150 more along the road leading from Cherbourg through Caen to Evreux. For the moment they had an extremely energetic leader in the king’s lieutenant, Clarence.
A substantial number of garrisons were in towns or castles on the rivers. Not only were these of vital importance for defence, but their barges provided the chief means of travel and trade; the Seine and the Oise played a part in the life of northern France comparable to that of the Missouri and the Mississippi in the old American South, if on a smaller scale. It was essential to control them. Castles along their banks, particularly those which guarded crossings, were occupied by the English who rigorously checked the credentials and cargoes of every boat passing and extracted tolls. At the same time those versatile craft, ballingers, patrolled the river, looking out for enemies on the banks as well as afloat. Reinforcements could be brought very quickly to any fortress under attack. This was of the utmost help to such a small occupying army, whose men had to be dispersed in penny packets. The average strength of the lesser garrisons was a mere three men-at-arms and nine archers – though at the little castle of Pont d’Oue which guarded the bridge over the River Vire there were only eight men under a captain in 1421. The garrisons of privately owned strongpoints were even smaller.
On the civil side, pre-conquest institutions had been taken over as far as was feasible, and traditional privileges were respected. Henry tried to woo the poorer classes, the lesser bourgeoisie and the country people. In 1419 he had issued an ordinance allowing all whose houses were of small value to return to them. He also reduced substantially the gabelle, the hated tax on salt. On the other hand noblemen, whether knights or squires, who had left the duchy were still being shown scant mercy. The king ordered his baillis to discover the names of those nobles who had gone off to join the Armagnacs or the ‘brigands’; it appears that some had entrusted their châteaux or manors to their wives while they themselves were away fighting the English – their estates were now confiscated. The duchy remained so troubled that between May 1421 and September 1422, 386 brigands were captured and hanged. Probably in consequence of this situation Henry had to change his attitude towards the recalcitrant Norman nobility; at the end of 1421 he offered men of all classes a full pardon so long as they returned and took the oath of allegiance before Candlemas (2 February) 1422 in the presence of the nearest bailli or garrison commander on the frontier. However, during his visit at the beginning of 1421, Norman nobles if discovered to be absent were still being expropriated as rebels, and ‘voluntary absence’ was deemed an act of rebellion against the king-duke. He continued to use this as a pretext to obtain lands for his grants to English settlers.
The fate of the exiled nobles was grim, as we know from Robert Blondel. As a young man (he was born about 1390) Blondel had fled in 1418, at the latest, from the Cotentin where his grandfather, the squire Guillaume Blondel, was Seigneur of Ravenoville near Valognes. He took refuge in Paris, where he studied at the university and entered the Church. He wrote three works denouncing the English conquest of Normandy. All are especially interesting in that they describe what happened to the refugees. In theComplaint of All Good Frenchmen of 1420, Blondel laments how, ‘Captive Normandy lies under the yoke of the leopard [of England]. Some are laden with chains while others are dying under torture. There are those who have been killed by the sword, those who have fled the soil of their fathers, those who have despaired and died, ground down by the sheer weight of tyranny. The unhappy exiles lack everything, even somewhere to find a refuge.’2 Looking back from 1449 – ‘soon thirty-five years will have gone by’ – he complains how:
Before the war we were renowned, rich and powerful. Today, broken and crushed by want, we lead the life of beggars. Many among us who are noblemen are forced to take up the most menial employment; some work at the tailor’s trade, others serve in inns, while English cowherds and yokels from the scum strut through our country, grown rich on our inheritances and sporting stolen titles of duke, count, baron or knight.3
He also refers to ‘my country’s incredible devastation’.
Devastation certainly existed in Henry’s time. In December 1421 he issued instructions to the wolf-hunters of the Pays de Caux:
It has come to Our knowledge that, since these our present wars began and because of them, wolves, she-wolves and other ravening beasts have greatly increased in Our said duchy and especially in the bailliwick of Caux, that they have piteously devoured several human creatures at which Our suppliant subjects are so sore affrighted in their simplicity that they dare not stay in their houses in unfenced towns or villages or leave their children, and neglect their labour; so that the said cruel beasts have very much diminished the livestock and produce of the said land, which is nearly devoid of people.
Similar missives of the same date were addressed to wolf-hunters at Carentan, Cherbourg, Bayeux, Gisors and other Norman towns.
Most of the devastation was caused by the English garrisons rather than by wolves. For the troops, whether baillis, captains, men-at-arms or humble archers, were paid erratically. We know that the Earl of Suffolk and Sir Thomas Rokeby received six months’ pay for their men in 1417 but nothing more until mid-1418 and then only enough money for a single quarter. In January 1418 Sir John Pelham wrote from Caen ‘I am here without wages’. In the summer of the same year a soldier at the siege of Cherbourg complains in a letter of ‘the long time we have been here, and of the expenses that we have had at every siege that we have come to, and have had no wages since that we came out of England, so that we have spent all that ever we had, wherefore I beseech you heartily to send me £20’. At the end of 1419 Sir Gilbert Halsale, captain of Evreux, complained he had received neither pay nor provisions since Michaelmas and warned that his men were going to desert, a warning he repeated in 1420 – they were at last paid sometime during the summer.4 Inevitably the troops supported themselves by robbing the peasants.
Henry made superhuman efforts to remedy the situation, personally sending the orders for the payment of each garrison to the treasurer of war. At first the money came from the English exchequer, but later it was supposed to be provided mainly by the Norman treasury. The system did not function properly for the simple reason that the king was often too short of ready cash; the pay of the vitally important garrison at Calais was years in arrears, despite his wish that soldiers should be paid on a monthly basis. He also tried to stop his men living off the country by establishing a commissariat to feed them, something which even Napoleon would find difficult in occupied territory. The Norman vicomtes began supplying the troops with cattle and sheep on the hoof, as well as with wine and cider. In 1420 two royal victuallers were appointed under the treasurer-general of Normandy to deliver food to garrisons, while provisions were shipped over from England. Whether because the operation was too ambitious, or whether as a result of corruption or inefficiency, it failed to solve the problem. Henry was fully aware of the dangers which must ensue. His council said that the king’s soldiers ‘should be compelled to pay for their victuals in the country, the which must needs be done or else, without recovery, Normandy should be lost from him’.
In December 1418 all those who had been injured or plundered by English garrisons were told they might apply to the vicomtes’ courts for redress. In April 1419 Henry gave strict orders that nothing must be taken by troops or officials without down payment in good money. In August that year he commanded the drawing up of a strict code of behaviour for garrisons. In January 1421, during his visit to Rouen with Catherine, the king issued a revealing ‘ordinance’:
The king, learning how some of his English subjects have carried out unjust requisitions and inflicted violence on the poor people, because of which it is feared that merchants may abandon their trade and peasants their labour, forbids the people of the open countryside [‘plat pays’] being made to pay tolls at the gates and bridges of towns and fortresses; the requisitioning of horses and beasts of burden without their owners’ consent; the taking of livestock, victuals, wine or merchandise except for the proper price.
Fines and imprisonment were stipulated. Yet in April 1421 Henry again had to forbid stealing and unofficial levying of the pâtis. Next month Sir John Radcliffe was sent on a tour of inspection to make sure that captains and their garrisons were obeying the king’s orders. But in December the same year we find Henry issuing a further edict in which he complains angrily that his soldiers are still ravaging the countryside; he threatens them with imprisonment if they are caught infringing his ordinances – and with hanging if caught doing it a second time.5
For, while a ferociously effective disciplinarian on campaign, the king had no really effective means of controlling his men from a distance. Basin, who spent many years in Normandy and in Paris when both were under the English occupation, speaks of ‘the insolent and undisciplined English army [insolens illa et indisciplinata … Anglorum milicia]’. Medieval armies were usually without much discipline and tended to rob and bully. Henry, desperate to win popularity with the French, was one of the few commanders who tried to do something about it. He appointed special commissioners to inspect garrisons; the office of Seneschal of Normandy was revived, its holder being charged with investigating the troops’ conduct. It was in vain. There was trouble from all ranks. In 1420 the inhabitants of Mantes complained to the king about the extortionate behaviour of the Earl of March. Then there were the deserters; in August 1422 Henry commissioned the captain of Pont-de-l’Arche to arrest ‘certain vagabond English who wander from place to place robbing and inciting the soldiers to desert’.6 But he was not in a position to apply the one cure for the problem – to see that the troops received regular pay. Even his administrative genius could not discover an alternative to wages.
His prohibition of tolls was not without irony. It seems they were forbidden only if unofficial. Monstrelet records that no one was allowed to enter or leave any of the towns occupied by the English without an expensive permit costing four sous – ‘a useful source of income for the king’ observes the chronicler. For Henry’s thunderbolts at troops who extorted money were directed only against those who did so without authorization. He derived considerable revenue from the pâtis, courses, sauvegardes, billets and congéslevied in his name.7 It is unlikely that the French relished paying dues of this sort officially any more than they did unofficially. Nor is it likely that English troops were any gentler in extracting them.
The attempt to transform Harfleur into an another Calais by replacing its inhabitants with Englishmen was soon recognized as a failure, even if some merchants accepted the royal offer of houses there. (And apparently were still doing so in 1419 when the lieutenant, Sir Hugh Lutterell, was empowered to grant dwellings to any Englishman who applied for them.) The English presence in Harfleur was essentially a military one since, as a seaport, the town commanded the mouth of the Seine. By 1417 at latest Henry had changed his mind, abandoning mass colonization in favour of small settlements which could be integrated into the surrounding community. The settlement at Caen was started immediately after the city’s capture and, clearly by deliberate design, was very much smaller than that at Harfleur, its members living side by side with the French population. Caen was the capital of western Normandy and the centre of the new regime’s financial administration; by the beginning of 1418 a Norman treasury and chambre des compteshad been installed in the city. It was in urgent need of English merchants, soldiers, and of bureaucrats. The merchants’ task was to revive prosperity after the sack and the departure of 500 bourgeois to Anjou. The garrison numbered fifteen men-at-arms and forty-five archers. One of the latter, John Milcent, who became a man-at-arms and was to style himself ‘bourgeois de Caen’, received no less than five houses in the city in early 1421 (with the obligation of manning the watch for four nights a year). There was a particular demand for bureaucrats. In 1419 the chambre des comptes recruited as auditors Roger Waltham, John Brinkley and William Wymington (who married a French girl); in the following year they were joined by John Chepstowe, a priest accountant. A few merchants became tax officials, such as Nicholas Bradkyrk, a draper from London.8
English control of the duchy was constantly threatened. Two exiled Norman grand seigneurs, members of the great family of Harcourt, led their private armies against the English from time to time. They were the Count of Harcourt himself and the Count of Aumale, both of whose counties had been taken away from them by King Henry. The former, Jacques d’Harcourt, who switched his allegiance from the Burgundians to the dauphinists in 1422, led a small force of Norman exiles based in Picardy which occasionally raided across the ducal frontier. His cousin Jean d’Harcourt, based in Anjou, led a similar band on raids of the same sort deep into Normandy; in May 1422 Aumale and the Vicomte de Narbonne with 2,000 men seized Bernay, killing 700 English. Henry gave instructions for all castles which could not be garrisoned adequately to be demolished lest they become rallying points for brigands – ‘concursus brigandorum’.
Even the ducal capital was sometimes at risk. In July 1419 the Earl of Warwick was sent in haste to Rouen by the king to investigate a plot which had recently been detected, presumably a plot to hand the city over to the dauphinists. A similar plot was uncovered in 1422, led by one of the richest goldsmiths in Rouen, Robert Alorge, who was executed. In December 1421 captains of riverside castles were warned to be on the alert to safeguard the capital. Traffic along the Seine was checked constantly, boats moored in unassigned places being sunk.
What unsettled Normandy still more was that, although Henry hoped to reconcile the Normans to his rule, he was forced to impose a new and crushing tax burden on them. The king-duke had to maintain his towns, castles and garrisons, and to subsidize the further enormous war effort needed to subdue the rest of France. He realized that England could not, would not pay any more, as Parliament was beginning to make very clear indeed. He therefore had no alternative than to tax viciously the lands of the conquest. Since Normandy was the land most firmly under English control it was to be the greatest milch cow of all. The Norman estates received some idea of what was in store for them at their meeting with Henry early in 1421.
All classes, even the normally exempt nobility, would have to pay heavier taxes than ever before. Yet the invasion had wrought havoc with the Norman economy. Agriculture, markets and exchanges had collapsed, and seemed unlikely to revive because of the general insecurity. The merchant fleet of every port had been requisitioned to ferry supplies for the English troops from across the Channel. Emigration by the thousand had ruined such industries as Caen’s already declining cloth trade; many exiled weavers set up their looms in Brittany, competing with those who had stayed at home. There were exiled Norman craftsmen all over France, while some of the duchy’s ironworkers had fled as far as Germany.9 The bourgeoisie were additionally demoralized by being rounded up as hostages and shipped over to England; they were always under pressure after any plot or raid in which complicity was suspected. Crushing taxes discouraged everybody. The situation was to improve to some extent under Bedford, a more flexible and humane ruler than his brother, while the new security of the Channel could offer fresh opportunities to Norman ports. Indeed Bedford’s regency was a period of genuine prosperity for the Normans, at least when compared with conditions during his brother’s reign.10
The Normans regarded Henry with awe and fear, in contrast to Bedford of whom they were later to be genuinely fond. English historians tend to dismiss Robert Blondel’s references (in his account of the expulsion of the English from Normandy) to Henry because he wrote long after the king’s death. Yet Blondel was only three years younger than Henry and appears to have a reasonably reliable memory. He describes him as ‘the ferocious and savage king’ (‘ferox et immanis rex’), as ‘a tyrant’, as ‘cruel’.
Attitudes towards the English occupation varied according to class. The nobility’s position was complicated by the fact that marriage and kinship linked them to other noble families all over France and thus to the interrelated and tightly interwoven groups of cousins who made up the nuclei of the dauphinist and Burgundian factions. Norman nobles who were Burgundians were in two minds whether to support or defy the regime; all had kinsmen who had killed, or who had been killed by, dauphinists – one Burgundian source says that the dauphinists committed worse crimes than any ever commited even by demons. The bourgeoisie’s instincts as business men made them prefer ‘collaboration’ with the occupation to resistance – a reaction not unknown during World War II – since they were primarily concerned with the safety of trade and commerce and there were opportunities for profit as tax farmers. (They would be reasonably contented with the relative prosperity which later resulted from Bedford’s shrewd and tactful administration, finding the man and his measures far more sympathetic than his brother.) The class which above all disliked the English was the ordinary people, who suffered most from the attentions of the soldiery and had to pay the bulk of the new taxes.
English settlers were quickly made aware that they were unwelcome in Normandy. The words ‘son of an Englishman!’ were often heard in taverns when drink inflamed tempers, recognized as a deadly insult, the equivalent of ‘son of a Whore!’.11 Some clergy refused publicly to pray for King Henry. Norman farmers and merchants sold grain to dauphinist garrisons across the frontier. The entire countryside was hostile. When travelling, especially through woodland, English troops always had to be on the alert. Whether in citadels or castles, garrisons never dared to relax their guard for an instant. The bocage, or hilly, wooded country, was especially perilous; much of the Duke of Exeter’s county of Harcourt was bocage and his officials were too frightened to collect his rents. There was danger everywhere – danger from dauphinist partisans, danger from brigands. Mass executions and hostage-taking did not solve the problem. The regime held but was always insecure.
It is scarcely surprising that many settlers soon grew homesick for England. The confiscated lands given to them were often no better than wasteland because there were not enough peasants left to work them. They were treated as interlopers and enemies by the local population. Despite the ferocious penalties, they tried to return across the Channel in large numbers. In April 1421 Henry sent orders to the captains of Honfleur and Dieppe, to the lieutenants of Harfleur, Caen and Cherbourg, to stop anybody of any nation (including ‘personas anglicas’), regardless of rank or sex, from departing ‘without our special licence’. All who attempted to leave Lancastrian Normandy without a passport were to suffer death and the confiscation of their property. Even these draconian measures were of no avail. The colony at Harfleur, once 10,000 Englishmen strong, had melted away to a mere handful by the time the French recaptured the port in 1435. After the king’s death the regent, Bedford, showed, by letting settlers go home if they wished, that he regarded his brother’s attempts at colonization as a serious error of judgement.
Henry and Catherine rode out from their Norman capital on 19 January. They were accompanied by the Duke of Bedford, the Earl Marshal, the Earls of March and Warwick, many knights and gentlemen and the great ladies, and King James, their escort consisting of a force of picked men-at-arms and archers. There were loyal greetings and ceremonial gifts as they progressed through Amiens and other towns on their way to Calais. The king was particularly pleased at the compliments paid to his queen by his French subjects – though these may secretly have been inspired more by Catherine being the daughter of their lawful Valois sovereign than by her beauty. At Calais they received a wildly enthusiastic, and no doubt genuinely sincere, welcome from its inhabitants before setting sail.