XVIII

Lancastrian France

‘ung royaulme dyabolique’

Jean Juvénal des Ursins

‘“The three Frances”. In its simple way that formula marks one of the most sombre moments in the nation’s history.’

Jean Favier, La Guerre de Cent Ans

There were now three Frances – ruled respectively by the heir and regent, the Duke of Burgundy, and the dauphin. As Chastellain puts it, Henry V ‘came into France at a time of divison, and amidst this division estranged still further by his sword those who were divided’.

In 1422 Henry’s position in France appeared most impressive. ‘All the country across the Loire is black and obscure, for they have put themselves into the hands of the English,’ laments Jean Juvénal. Invincible in the field, a commander to whom no fortress was impregnable, the king controlled a third of the country and the capital. It genuinely seemed that one day he might be crowned and anointed at Reims with the oil of clovis as king of France. Some modern English historians give an impression that France was too divided by regional loyalties, so much without a sense of nationalism that the inhabitants of Lancastrian France accepted the regime, that a Franco-English monarchy might have survived. Certainly many Frenchmen ‘collaborated’ but to claim, like one distinguished twentieth-century English historian, that the Rouennais ‘settled down without a murmur under the sway of a descendant of their ancient dukes’, is a distortion.¹ Henry’s so-called policy of conciliation was accompanied by what Edouard Perroy terms ‘a regime of terror’.² When Perroy wrote this he himself was on the run from the Gestapo.

Discussing ‘Lancastrian France’ one has to distinguish between the duchy of Normandy (with the neighbouring territory conquered before the Treaty of Troyes) and the small area including Paris which was technically Henry’s ‘kingdom of France’. The duchy was very much an occupied country whereas the kingdom was more like a puppet state. In the latter all officials save the military were Frenchmen. Most of them were Burgundians and the appointment of many must have been due to Duke Philip’s influence, though not invariably – there were occasional grumbles at the removal of Burgundian nominees. The English population of ‘occupied’ Paris was seldom more than 300; at one moment (after Henry’s death) the garrison in the Bastille consisted of eight men-at-arms and seventeen archers. The official in charge of Parisian police was a Frenchman, and so was the president of the parlement. So few English can scarcely have been much in evidence in a city whose population remained at well over 100,000 despite famine and a mass exodus. Jean Favier says that one was most likely to see them in the taverns, and they were good customers of the Glatigny prostitutes or at the Tiron brothel.³

However, the Parisians’ comparative freedom from English rule must not be seen out of context. The ‘lands of the conquest’ were a mere dozen miles away, while Paris was ringed by fortresses with English garrisons, the nearest being at Bois-de-Vincennes only three miles off. The one at Pontoise numbered 240 men and reinforcements could be rushed up river into the capital at a moment’s notice. On occasion the force at the Bastille could show that it was perfectly adequate for cowing the Parisians, its archers running through the streets and shooting at them and at their windows indiscriminately. Moreover it was backed up by a large milice recruited from the citizens; crossbowmen and spearmen who could at least be trusted to fight against the dauphinists of whom they were even more frightened than of the English. The former Armagnacs, who called such militiamen ‘faux français’, had some nasty massacres to avenge and their raids on the city’s suburbs rivalled those of the English in ferocity. This relative freedom and the dauphinist threat did not mean that the Parisians were any the more inclined to like Henry’s troops. That staunch Burgundian, the Bourgeois of Paris, pitied the king’s prisoners, and the city’s prisons were filled to overflowing by his prisoners more than once.

Even an English chronicler, Walsingham, has to admit that Henry was most unpopular in Paris, that force was sometimes needed to control its people.⁴ Some of its clergy were openly dauphinist. In December 1420 the chapter of Nôtre Dame elected Jean Courtecuisse Bishop of Paris – a man of exemplary life who was an avowed dauphinist – despite Henry’s attempts to bully the canons into choosing a Burgundian nominee. At one moment Exeter, the military governor, put two of them under house arrest. The chapter also refused to contribute to the cost of a detachment of militia which the city had to send to the siege of Meaux. Visiting Nôtre Dame Henry gave the derisory (for a king) offering of two nobles – a noble was worth a third of a pound. Eventually he persuaded the pope to appoint Courtecuisse to another see.

There is more than enough evidence to show that in both the kingdom and the duchy the French population bitterly resented the English presence; the way in which invaders from across the Channel had taken advantage of their civil war to conquer and dominate them. Agincourt was a truly national catastrophe, shared by Burgundians and Armagnacs alike, its memory remaining firmly in their minds. The latter blamed the English for their sufferings even more than they did the Burgundians. ‘This storm of misery unleashed on us by the people of England,’ (‘le gent d’Angleterre’) says the chronicler Jean Chartier.⁵

Bishop Basin gives a horrific picture of the sort of lives which English settlers must have lived in Lancastrian France. Although he is writing specifically about a truce in Maine and Anjou during the 1440s, such conditions must have been the norm everywhere, from the very beginning. His is the evidence of an eyewitness who had lived under the English occupation until he was nearly forty:

Shut up for years without almost any respite behind the walls of towns, castles or fortresses, living in fear and danger as though condemned to life imprisonment, they were marvellously happy at the thought of emerging from their long and frightening incarceration. It was sweet to them to have escaped all the perils and alarms among which they had lived since childhood till the days of white hair or extreme old age.⁶

Moreover we know that in Normandy, for example, the population had fallen by a half after eight years of English occupation, partly because of famine but principally because of emigration by all classes – whether dispossessed seigneurs, ruined bourgeois, starving peasants or despairing beggars. Admittedly the misery from which they fled was partly due to dauphinist raiders and brigands but neither would have come but for Henry’s invasion.

Most of the Normans, Picards and Champenois who emigrated did so because of social and economic distress.⁷ The presence of more than sixty garrisons in the countryside meant ruin for many farmers in the conquered territories. Since these were irregularly paid and there was no real commissariat despite Henry’s efforts, the troops had little choice but to continue living off the country, requisitioning food, drink, fodder and anything else they wanted from the locals; even the irreplaceable oxen which drew the ploughs might be slaughtered, while horses and farm carts must have been taken on a very large scale. No doubt the big Percheron horses made excellent remounts for men-at-arms. The peasants were further demoralized by having to pay protection money and tolls, by the harassment of their womenfolk and by all the evils which accompany armies of occupation. In Normandy, where the English were most numerous (and which had suffered a series of bad harvests before their arrival), agriculture all but collapsed. As has been seen, the king was unable to control his troops.

Worse still, many soldiers regarded the country people – which meant the overwhelming majority of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen – as their natural prey. Again, Basin writes of what he had witnessed himself:

The troops on both sides, constantly raiding each other’s territory, dragged the peasants away to their castles and fortresses where they incarcerated them in noisome prisons or at the bottom of deep pits, torturing them in every conceivable way, trying to force them to pay the heavy ransoms which they demanded of them. In the cellars and vaults beneath every castle or tower one would always find poor peasants snatched from their fields, a hundred or two hundred, sometimes even more, depending on the number of kidnappers. Often many, incapable of paying the sums demanded, found no mercy from the raiders and died from hunger, weakness or vermin.⁸

Some enterprising English soldiers did not even bother to imprison their prey, like an archer from the Alençon garrison who simply went round the local villages by himself seizing the peasants’ goods ‘for ransom’, forcing them to buy back their own property, until in despair they beat him to death.⁹

Jean Juvénal’s diocese of Beauvais was in conquered territory and in a letter of 1440 to the estates general he recounts what his people had suffered over the years: ‘The poor have been killed, taken prisoner and dragged off, plundered, robbed and tyrannized, have lost their flocks, and the land is all destroyed and desolate, while the churches and houses have been broken into, burnt and wrecked and lie in ruins, and they have killed many of my poor people in prison or by some other means.’ While admitting that many of these evils – ‘cruel, damnable and detestable tyrannies’ – have been inflicted by brigands or French troops, he regards the English as primarily responsible; ‘they have committed all the crimes and inhumanity that any enemy could’. He complains that: ‘little children have been led away into captivity and God knows what sort of life they lead in England among those who trouble and tyrannize us.’ (There was a market for such children in England, where they were sold as ‘servants’ – a euphemism for slaves.) He continues, ‘many little maidens, virgins and well born too, have been taken off by force or some other means and made the chambermaids and bawds of lewd youths, thieves, murderers and vagrants.’ The bishop tells how at St Médard near Noyon in Picardy the English ‘found a church which had been fortified a little as a refuge for poor labourers; and this they took and set on fire, killing two or three hundred’. Monstrelet confirms him, recording that ‘over 300 persons or more’ were burnt to death. No wonder that Juvénal regarded the death of Henry V as among ‘the marvels wrought by God’.¹⁰

Many peasants fled to the towns, to starve in deserted houses as ‘useless mouths’. It has been calculated that even in good times a quarter to a third of the population of late medieval towns were indigent. In any case, as Juvénal explains, the townsmen too were in despair since ‘most of the seaports as well as the ports along the river have been destroyed and there is no more trade’.¹¹ In addition Henry’s devaluations of the currency, together with the new taxes, caused them serious hardship. At the end of 1421 Henry imposed a silver levy throughout the lands of the conquest on all ranks of society on (according to Monstrelet) ‘churchmen, knights, squires, ladies, damsels, burgesses and anyone thought able to pay it, in accordance with the pleasure and discretion of the tax collectors’. Needless to say, there were ‘great murmurings and discontent’. The realm’s gold crowns had already been devalued in October from nineteen to eighteen sols. When a new silver coinage was issued by Henry it contained so little silver as to be almost valueless, if Chastellain is to be believed. The merchants, no less than the peasants, suffered from robbery and kidnapping. (A pardon dated November 1424 was granted to one Enguerrand de Monstrelet, ‘captain of the castle of Freneuch’, exempting him from penalties he might have incurred in waylaying and robbing certain merchants of between 400–500 crowns.)¹²

The clergy suffered as well, frequently finding that their cloth was no protection. Churches, monasteries and hospitals were all sacked and pillaged, often with bloodshed. As the sole source of poor relief in the fifteenth century was the Church, which provided what might be called the social services, this caused much misery among the swarms of beggars who roamed the streets after losing their livelihood as a result of the war. During his researches into petitions to Rome for relief on behalf of ecclesiastical property destroyed at this time, Henri Denifle was struck by how ‘the King of England and the Duke of Bedford, who did not hesitate to ask the pope for favours for their own people, never once asked him to help a ruined French church. Yet so many churches had been left in ruins by the English!’¹³ He concluded that they deliberately omitted to do so because they did not want to contribute, however indirectly and however little, to the resources of Charles VI or the dauphin.

Juvénal recounts in his letter what happened to clerics who supported the dauphin:

And as for the poor priests, churchmen, monks and other poor workers staying faithful to you, they take them and imprison them, putting them in irons, in cages, in pits and ugly places full of vermin and leave them there to die of hunger, as indeed several have died. And God knows the dreadful things they do to them; they roast some, they tear out the teeth of others, while some are beaten with great rods; and they are never set at liberty until they have paid more money than their entire possessions are worth. And even when they are let go, their limbs are usually so crippled that they are never whole again.¹⁴

As has been seen, Henry himself was not above dragging dauphinist prelates off for ransom. Even clerics who had taken the oath of allegiance to him were not safe; in 1422 the canons of Rouen complained formally about being attacked on the Norman roads by English soldiers. No doubt a good deal of clerical harassment was by brigands but Jean Juvénal makes it clear in his letter that he blames the English troops most of all.

Henry’s attitude towards the Church was inconsistent. ‘What shall I say of your sacrilege, o cruel King Henry, prince of the sacrilegious,’ cries Robert Blondel.¹⁵ The king ‘worried little about divine wrath’ the Monk of St Denis tells us, ‘and when his soldiers had looted with their sacrilegious hands churches consecrated to God, he would send home to England the relics they had stolen’.¹⁶ This was certainly very different from his ostentatiously correct behaviour during the Agincourt campaign. Perhaps he had come to think that such incidents were unavoidable. In fairness to Henry and his men, it must be said that everyone’s views on churchmen and church property had been distorted by the papal schism which had only recently ended. Previously schismatics had been regarded as no better than infidels, and French and English had supported different popes.

There was particular sympathy for the peasants among those in high places, to a surprising extent for so hierarchical a society. Pity was perhaps to be expected from churchmen but scarcely from fashionable poets who wrote for the ruling classes, even if it was theoretically a knight’s chivalrous duty to protect the weak. Alain Chartier, born a Norman at Bayeux in 1388 and the brother of Jean Chartier the chronicler, was successively secretary to Charles VI and the dauphin. (One often finds Alain’s signature next to that of the dauphin at the bottom of the latter’s letters.) He was both near the centre of power and a poet who, in his own day at least, was compared to Petrarch. In his Quadrilogus Invectif, apparently written at the end of 1422, he roundly blames the French nobility for not doing enough to protect the peasantry, though at the same time he regards the entire French people, of every degree, as having to some extent contributed to the ruin of France. He mourns how in 1422 he has seen ‘a foreign king gain glory from our shame and ignominy, batten on our plunder, cast scorn on our exploits and on our courage’, and believes that ‘the hand of God was on us and his anger set in motion this scourge of persecution’ – an obvious reference to Henry V.¹⁷ Indeed it was the French peasantry who, more than anyone else, suffered from the English king’s ambition for a period of over thirty years.

Lancastrian France and the lands which bordered it became very like a desert during the years of occupation and warfare. To quote Bishop Basin yet again:

From the Loire up to the Seine and from thence to the Somme, the peasants had been killed or had fled until all the fields were for a long time, indeed for many years, left not only without being tilled but without any men to till them, save for a few rare patches of land … We ourselves have seen the vast plains of Champagne, of the Beauce, of the Brie, of the Gâtinais, Chartres, Dreux, Maine and Perche, of the Vexin (French as well as Norman), the Beauvaisis, the Pays de Caux, from the Seine as far as Amiens and Abbeville, the countryside round Senlis, Soissons and Valois right up to Laon and beyond towards Hainault absolutely deserted, uncultivated, abandoned, empty of inhabitants, covered with scrub and brambles; indeed in most of the more thickly wooded districts dense forests were growing up … All that people were able to cultivate in such areas at that time was in and around towns, fortresses or castles, sufficiently close to them for a lookout on the top of a tower or some other vantage point to see the raiders approaching. Sounding a bell, a horn or some other instrument he would signal to everyone working in the fields or in the vineyards to come back inside the fortifications.

This practice was so normal and widespread that nearly everywhere oxen and work horses, as soon as they were unharnessed from the carts when the lookout’s signal was heard, would, at once and without being driven, return at a mad gallop to the place where they knew they would be safe. Sheep and pigs acquired the same habit. But in the aforesaid provinces, throughout the whole territory such towns and strong places were rare since so many had been burnt down, demolished or left in ruins by the enemy and since remained uninhabited. The very land tilled in the hiding places round the fortresses seemed very small and almost nothing in comparison to the vast extent of all those fields which stayed completely deserted, without a single soul to cultivate them.¹⁸

Henry attributed all this misery and destruction to the French having denied him his ‘right’. In any case, as he had told Vincent Ferrer, he was ‘the scourge of God sent to punish the people of God for their sins’. He is called a scourge by several contemporary French writers, such as Alain Chartier, though the only English mention of the term is in The First English Life.¹⁹

His relationship with the Burgundians was thoroughly uneasy. The English presence in France was deeply resented by them. We know from the chronicle of Georges Chastellain that the Burgundians disliked the English intensely. They included not only the Duke of Burgundy’s subjects and clients but all those Frenchmen who detested the Armagnacs. And the Armagnacs made up the bulk of the dauphinist party – indeed most people, like the Bourgeois of Paris, referred to the dauphinists as ‘Armagnacs’, or ‘Ermynaks’ as the English termed them. They had no chance whatever of driving Henry out while he remained allied with Duke Philip. In consequence until the duke should change his mind about the English the inhabitants of the conquered territories had no alternative but to give their allegiance to the foreign king if they wished to stay there – unless they took to the woods. Although the Burgundian chroniclers testify to considerable respect for the Englishman’s harsh justice and genuine admiration for him as a soldier, they are less admiring about other aspects of his character. Nor did they relish his ferocity towards Frenchmen of the other political faction, his ferocious handling of dauphinist prisoners.

Chastellain gives a good idea of what the Burgundians, and especially those around the duke, thought of Henry. Despite the prolixity and artificiality of his cumbersome prose, this poet, herald, soldier and courtier was a writer of penetrating and vigorously independent judgement, a realist with deep psychological insight:

He [Henry] was foe to every brave and valiant man in the realm, and would have liked to exterminate them all, whether in battle or by some other more cunning means under a pretext of justice. Even those who were now fighting by his side and through whom he ruled and held sway in France, the Burgundians, he wished to supplant and keep down in subjection; he wanted the very name and race to be extinguished in order that he might live there alone with his Englishmen, and might be able to re-people and take possession of the entire land [of France] with his own people. And it is easy to conceive what a semblance of feigned affection he showed towards the young prince, Philip, whom he knew to be of a high and proud courage, powerful in lands and lordships, and truly a man quite bold enough to resist the greatest king on earth and say to him ‘I do only what it pleases me to do.’ … he [Henry] had never liked his father, the Duke John, since he was a proud man and opposed to him, so that he could not bend him to his will as he very much wanted, for he was the only man who could have thwarted his designs, at whose death he never knew greater joy.²⁰

The same well-informed, balanced observer adds: ‘Praise be to God! this kingdom has been delivered from a hard persecuter … the ancient enemy … a cruel man.’ He also describes him as ‘a tyrant and a persecuter’. Significantly, Chastellain recalls that ‘it was by his hand, as though beneaththe scourge of God, that the noble blood of France was so piteously shed at Agincourt.’²¹ For it is too easily forgotten that probably as many Burgundians as Armagnacs had been killed during that battle, including Duke Philip’s two uncles.

There was clearly a problem of communication between Burgundians and English. Some English gentry and clergy spoke and even wrote French of a sort, but while still used in administration and the law it had ceased to be the first language of the ruling class. No doubt after several months in France the men must have picked up a few words, like the Tommies’ French of World War I (immortalized in ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’). Almost no Frenchmen can have had even a smattering of English, apart from returned captives or Henry’s subjects in Guyenne. The fifteenth-century poet Jean Régnier describes seeing a wretched English prisoner surrounded by jabbering Frenchmen, unable to make himself understood or to understand and repeatedly crying out in terror, ‘God and Our Lady help me!’²²

The Burgundians would have been uncomfortably aware of the reputation for ferocity enjoyed by Henry and his subjects. Even during the previous century Froissart considered that ‘underneath the sun there is no race more dangerous or more cruel than the English’. In 1411 Jean de Montreuil alleged that for a hundred years they ‘have killed or caused the death of more Christians than any other nation’.²³ Robinet, the contemporary translator of the Norman refugee, Blondel’s Complaint of All Good Frenchmen, described them as having ‘eyes gleaming as treacherously as the devil’s, foam flecking their teeth like a wild boar in rut’. He adds that wherever they found themselves they were not slow to shed blood.²⁴ At the end of the fifteenth century so restrained an observer as Philippe de Commynes commented that the English were extraordinarily savage tempered, especially those who had never been out of England.²⁵

As always, the English were quite oblivious of what foreigners thought. In any case, unlike the French, the war did not affect their day-to-day lives at home. A modern historian has written: ‘even a casual reading of the Paston Letters would suggest that it was as remote from the consciousness of English shire society in the fifteenth century as the Napoleonic wars and nineteenth century India are in the novels of Jane Austen.’²⁶ However, everyone must have met neighbours who had served in France and all admired their hero king, no doubt much in the way that their descendants would admire Nelson or Wellington.

Meanwhile there were many matters which demanded King Henry’s urgent attention. Dauphinists on the Oise were threatening to cut one of the main links between Flanders and Paris. Jacques d’Harcourt, the dispossessed Norman magnate, was raiding throughout Picardy and into Normandy. The Duke of Brittany was proving tardy in ratifying the Treaty of Troyes and in recognizing Henry as his overlord. Down in the Pyrenees the Count of Foix, having extorted money to fight the dauphinists who were troubling the borders of Guyenne, was prevaricating before doing so. The Emperor Sigismund was far too busy coping with the nightmare menace of the terrible Hussite armies – Slav Lollards – in his new kingdom of Bohemia to spare the troops which he had once promised Henry, sending a polite but final refusal.

Moreover, although a brilliant piece of siegecraft, the capture of Meaux had solved nothing. No doubt it was an exceptionally strong town with an unusually strong garrison and generally recognized as such, so that a considerable moral victory had been won, and no doubt a number of other dauphinist fortresses had been cowed into surrendering. Nevertheless its possession was not of decisive importance. The heir and regent of France was faced by the prospect of an unending series of similar sieges, which were likely to last a lifetime if he persisted in trying to reduce his stubbornly hostile new subjects to obedience.

Such obedience was an impossibility. Amazingly, there are still modern English historians who believe Lancastrian France might have become an enduring reality had Henry lived. Yet nearly 150 years ago Pierre-Adolphe Chéruel, one of the much decried ‘patriotic’ school of French historians, published a history of Rouen under the English occupation. It contains the following letter:

We have recently learned from the great and piteous clamour that within the duchy of Normandy many who call themselves our officers, baillis, captains and etc. have committed and are committing great wrongs, excesses and abuses, taking advantage of their position to do so, to the prejudice of public welfare, such as: breaking into churches and stealing the goods therein; seizing and raping women, married and unmarried; cruelly beating the poor people, carrying off their horses with other beasts of burden and their seed corn; occupying the houses of churchmen, nobles and others against their will, demanding heavy tolls and quantities of merchandise at the city gates which they are supposed to guard; extorting levies of food from towns and parishes with law-abiding subjects; forcing men to perform more guard duties at towns and fortresses than is their obligation and making them pay huge sums if they go absent; seizing our poor subjects, beating them, judging them without trial and confining them in prisons or in their homes, robbing them of their goods, or seizing the same either without payment or else fixing the price. And, moreover, it is said that the baillis and captains do not keep the troops in their garrisons as they should do, that the baillis, often being at the same time captains of the [strong] places in their bailiwicks, farm out their clerkships, seals and lieutenancies to unworthy persons, and abuse the taking of provisions and other goods at their own price and pleasure.²⁷

This letter is not fabricated by Chéruel. It was written by John, Duke of Bedford, the new ‘Regent of France’, on 31 January 1423 – a mere five months after his brother’s death. If the dauphinist and Burgundian armies robbed, at least they spoke the same language. The people of Lancastrian France simply wanted the English to go away.

Henry’s tools, his troops, were an insuperable barrier between him and his ‘subjects’. His army doomed his regime from the very start. He knew that relations with the conquered population must be improved, and even the most ‘patriotic’ of France’s nineteenth-century historians acknowledge that his efforts to do so were not far short of incredible. But it was all in vain. ‘If the expression “bled white” was at any time accurate it best describes the state of the conquered provinces of France under the English garrisons’ is McFarlane’s comment.²⁸

Even so, just after he died and his body had been taken back to England for burial, a French nobleman would joke grimly (so Monstrelet heard) that the king had left his boots behind.²⁹ The borders of Lancastrian France continued to expand for some years after his death. As late as 1433, when in reality the tide had turned against them, Bishop Jean Juvénal des Ursins could say in a notably gloomy and despairing letter that the English ‘are waging a fierce war, gaining more territory in which no one stays or even makes a pretence of staying, save for the poor companions of the frontier [les povres compaignons des frontières] who love honour’.³⁰ Lancastrian France would take a surprisingly long time to die, outliving its creator by nearly thirty years.

Chastellain has a strange story – ‘told me by a high and noble baron, the Seigneur de La Trémonille’ – about a holy man who visited Henry sometime during 1421. He was the hermit of Sainte-Claude in Flanders, John of Ghent, famous for his gift of second sight. (Later he prophesied the birth of Louis XI.) He warned the king to change his ways since God was growing displeased at the way he was treating the Christian people of France ‘whose cries beneath your scourge have aroused his pity’. He explained that Henry had enjoyed divine favour because he had persecuted heretics so ardently when Prince of Wales, but that if he went on scourging the French like this he would have a very short life. At first Henry was somewhat shaken. Then he laughed.³¹