CHAPTER TWELVE

THE MARCH TO CALAIS

Henry’s decision to march his army overland to Calais was a calculated risk. It was also very much a personal one. A large majority of his council advised against it, fearing that the dwindling English forces would be an easy prey for the French multitudes that had been gathering at Rouen for over a month.1 In the meetings that took place after the fall of Harfleur, Clarence argued that the English should return home immediately by sea as being “the next and surest way”: they had lost too many men, both to the sickness and death wrought by dysentery and to manning the garrison, to run the risk of a journey to Calais overland, “and most especiallie considering the greate and infinite multitude of theire enemies, which then were assembled to prevent and hinder the King’s passage by land, whereof by theire espies they had knowledge.” In anyone else’s mouth this would have appeared sound enough reasoning—and there were plenty of others who shared his view—but coming from Clarence this reluctance to engage with the enemy was open to sinister interpretation. His well-known sympathy for the Armagnac cause cast a shadow of suspicion, long and dark, over his motives, his advice, his actions.

Clarence could not have openly defied his brother by refusing to go—that would have been an act of high treason—but he was reckless enough to make his feelings known. If he was not prepared to run the risk of the march to Calais, thus causing a very dangerous confrontation with the king, or would only go with a bad grace that might affect the morale of the men and provide a focus for discontent, then it was in everyone’s interest that an honourable exit should be found for him. Clarence’s name duly appeared on the rolls of the sick and at the beginning of October he received his licence to leave the army and return home. Though it is true that his retinue had been severely affected by dysentery, Clarence’s own actions do not suggest a man suffering from a debilitating disease. Instead of going straight home, he took ship for Calais, where his arrival with “such a great number of men” caused panic in neighbouring Boulogne, which immediately sent off a messenger to Abbeville to inform Constable d’Albret. Fears that Clarence was about to launch a second invasion from Calais were unfounded, but the author of The First English Life, who did not know that Clarence was supposed to be ill, assumed that he had been sent back to England to take charge of the fleet, perhaps because the admiral, the earl of Dorset, had been left to captain Harfleur.2

Though he lacked his brother’s intellectual qualities, Clarence was still every inch the soldier. As noted earlier, Jean Fusoris had contrasted Clarence’s martial character with that of Henry V, whom he thought more suited for the Church than for war. This opinion must have struck a chord with many of the other royal councillors who advised against the proposal to march to Calais. In response to their protestations about the inequality of the size of the respective armies, Henry serenely countered by “relying on divine grace and the justice of his cause, piously reflecting that victory consists not in a multitude but with Him for Whom it is not impossible to enclose the many in the hand of the few and Who bestows victory upon whom He wills, whether they be many or few.”3 It was an argument that Henry had advanced before,4 and, in an age of faith, it was unanswerable. What is more, it was not simply unthinking piety. Henry was well aware that every military treatise since classical times had expounded the view that a small, well-trained army could defeat a larger one. Christine de Pizan, for instance, discussed the subject at length in The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry.

One finds that many armies have been thrown into disarray by their own greater number rather than by enemy forces. And why is this so? Certainly there are good reasons, for a great multitude is more difficult to maintain in good order and is often in trouble because it requires more provisions, is more quarrelsome, and is subject to more delays on the roads . . . For this reason . . . the ancients who had mastered such things useful in battle, knowing the perils from experience, placed a higher value on an army well taught and well led than a great multitude.5 As Vegetius himself had said, rather more succinctly: “Bravery is of more value than numbers.”6

Orders were issued for those selected for the march to equip themselves with enough provisions to last for eight days. It has often been suggested that this was a serious miscalculation and that Henry had been overly optimistic about the length of time it would take to get to Calais. In the light of hindsight, this was clearly the case. On the other hand, without the benefit of that future knowledge, Henry and his advisors had to plan reasonably and appropriately. It was important for the men to have enough supplies to get them to Calais, but they also needed to be able to travel lightly and not be weighed down with unnecessary baggage.

The eight-day figure was not simply plucked out of the air. Despite the fact that he had no maps to calculate his route, Henry knew he would need to cover an average of just under nineteen miles per day, which was perfectly reasonable given that nineteen miles was the acknowledged medieval standard for travelling by land. The ever-reliable Vegetius had stated that an army marching on foot should be able to cover at least twenty miles in only five hours in summertime; had Henry been able to achieve this, his eight days would have taken him well beyond Calais. The English army was disciplined and mostly mounted, but it was not a Roman legion accustomed to long route marches, and it could travel only as fast as its slowest members. Even so, given a longer travelling day, it should have been able to cover the same distance within the eight days for which supplies were allotted, especially as it would be possible to supplement these rations along the way.7

Before the march began, Henry once more issued a set of ordinances in accordance with customary practice and the laws of war. It was going to be of the utmost importance that his small army stayed together and that neither individuals nor companies were tempted to stray by the prospect of plunder, prisoners or even chivalric dreams of a heroic encounter with the enemy. Henry was determined to maintain order among his own men, but also that this would not be a traditional chevauchée. His objectives were to challenge the French military and to get to Calais: he did not wish to despoil, massacre or exploit the civilian population. The presence of his army, sweeping through northern France, would be enough to strike terror into the hearts of those living there. With an eye to the longer term, it was important that he did not alienate those whom he hoped and believed would be his future subjects. He therefore decreed that, on pain of death, there should be no burning or laying waste of property or land, that nothing should be taken “except food and what was necessary for the march” and that no “rebels” were to be captured, unless they were offering resistance.8

There is some confusion as to when the army actually set off from Harfleur. Contemporary English sources, who were best placed to know, variously date it to 6, 7, 8 or 9 October. The exchequer accounts paying the wages of the men who went on the march would seem to provide conclusive evidence that it was 6 October, “on which day they left the town of Harfleur with the lord king heading for the battle of Agincourt.” Most of the wage accounts for those who remained in the garrison also run from 6 October, though some begin two days later. Of the three English chroniclers writing before 1422, Thomas Walsingham avoids giving any date at all, Thomas Elmham plumps for 9 October, which was the feast of St Denis, and the chaplain—the only one actually present on the march—miscalculated his dates and gave two conflicting ones.9

The reason for this confusion is that there was no single universal system of dating in medieval times. There were only two constants. The first was the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. It divided the year into twelve months and 365 days, with an extra day at the end of February every fourth year to catch up the discrepancy between the arithmetically calculated year and the solar year as observed by astronomers. The second constant, the “year of grace,” was introduced in AD 535 by the Church in Rome. This drew a definitive line between the pagan and Christian eras, dividing them into years reckoned before the incarnation (BC—Before Christ) and after it (AD—Anno Domini—the Year of Our Lord). The English, led by the example of the Venerable Bede, had adopted this system by the eighth century; by the fifteenth century it had spread across all of western Europe, except Portugal, which until 1420 clung to 38 BC as the beginning of its era.10

Though the introduction of the “year of grace” or AD system brought some measure of uniformity and certainty to the chronologies of western Europe, it had one basic flaw. No particular date was designated for the start of the year. There were, therefore, any number of conflicting dates. Some were logical, like Christmas Day, the day celebrated as Christ’s birth, or Lady Day, otherwise known as the Feast of the Annunciation, which fell on 25 March and was the day that the angel informed Mary that she was to have a child. Others were totally illogical, such as Easter Day, which varied from year to year. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church, which preferred to start the year with one of its major Christian festivals, successfully opposed attempts to revert to the pagan Roman practice of beginning the year on 1 January. Even though the spread of Protestantism in the sixteenth century gave it renewed credibility, it was not formally adopted in England as New Year’s Day until 1 January 1752.11

To complicate matters still further, there were other ways of calculating the year. In the Middle Ages each new year began according to the local customary practice or the particular allegiance of the person computing it. In England, the financial and legal years were divided into terms, Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter and Trinity, the new year beginning with Michaelmas on 6 October. These cut across the most popular form of reckoning, which was the regnal year, dating from the start of a new king’s reign. Regnal years were used by those in the employment of popes and bishops, kings and princes, and therefore, of necessity, varied from region to region. The regnal year of Henry V, for example, began on 21 March 1413, the first full day after his father’s death.12

Throw into this equation the fact that most dates were not given as simple consecutive numbers and that there was an uneasy mismatch between the Christian and Julian calendars, which were both in use at the same time, and one can begin to see why historians and chronologers in the Middle Ages sometimes made mistakes. In the Christian calendar, dates were referred to as the names of Church festivals and saints’ days, including not only the day itself but the day before (pridie and vigilia) and “the day after” (crastinum). In the Julian calendar, every month was unequally divided into the periods of calends, nones and ides, within which the days were counted in numerically descending order. According to this system, our 25 October was thus the eighth day before the calends of November, whereas 30 October was only the third.

A medieval writer wishing to give the date of the battle of Agincourt would have several options before him. Chivalric authors tended to go for the easy option: Monstrelet, for example, simply called it “Friday, the xxvth day of the month of October, one thousand four hundred and fifteen.”13Ecclesiastical writers, including chroniclers and clerks in the royal administration, perhaps because they were more numerate and more obligated to abide by Church practices, used the more complicated systems. A Church-trained English and French chronicler would have described the same event in different terms. Neither would have referred to it as being fought on 25 October, but on the Feast of St Crispin and St Crispinian. The Englishman might have placed it “in the third year of our lord king Henry the fifth of that name after the conquest.” His French counterpart, writing in the name of Charles VI, would have described it as being “on the Feast of St Crispin and St Crispinian, in the thirty-fifth year of our reign.” That was why every medieval chronicler and clerk had to have a set of chronological tables to hand whenever computing a date.

It was not even easy to tell exactly what time it was. Although it was generally accepted that there were twenty-four hours in a day, how these hours were measured varied. There were three systems in use in the early fifteenth century. One was the early medieval custom of splitting the day into two periods, from sunrise to sunset, and sunset to sunrise, each of which was artificially subdivided into twelve unequal hours. In winter, the daylight hours would be shorter and the night-time ones longer, a situation that reversed in summer. The second method also varied according to the season, and was determined by the seven canonical hours that marked the principal daily services in the church; they began with Prime at daybreak and ended with Vespers as darkness fell. The advantage of this system was that, although it varied from place to place because it depended on the time that the sun rose and the hours were again of uneven length, the services were marked by the ringing of bells in monasteries and parish churches, which were audible to the people living around them. Like the schoolbells and factory horns of the modern world, these determined the length of the working day for the vast majority of people.14

The third method of telling the time, which was only reluctantly adopted in some monastic houses, was entirely divorced from the seasons. Mechanical clocks divided the day into twenty-four hours of equal length and measured from midnight to midnight. Sundials and hourglasses, filled with water or sand, had been in use for centuries, but the new clocks were made out of precision-crafted moving parts of iron. The earliest recorded example in England was made in 1283 by the canons of Dunstable Priory, but the oldest surviving one, in Salisbury Cathedral, dates from a century later. Many of these clocks were works of remarkable craftsmanship: in 1322 the priory of Norwich Cathedral had one with a large astronomical dial and automata, including fifty-nine images and a procession of monks. By the fifteenth century, mechanical clocks dictated the time in most Benedictine houses and were displayed on churches and other buildings for the benefit of the wider population.15

Our poor chaplain, trying to work out the date of the king’s departure from Harfleur, had to struggle with all the conflicting elements of the medieval calendar. In his praiseworthy efforts to be precise, he merely muddied the waters. They had set off, he decided, “on Tuesday, the day before the feast of St Denys, on the nones of October.” The feast of St Denis was 9 October, and in 1415 it fell on a Wednesday, so the day before would indeed have been a Tuesday. Unfortunately, the nones of October, according to the classical Roman calendar, were on 7 October. It is likely that this was just a slip of the pen, or of the finger as he cross-checked his chronological tables.16

What is more difficult to explain is why the chaplain thought they left Harfleur on Tuesday 8 October, when the exchequer records explicitly state that it was on Sunday 6 October. There is no obvious answer to this question, but it is likely that the exchequer arbitrarily selected 6 October for reasons of administrative convenience, that being the first day of the new financial quarter for the campaign. All that can be said for certain is that the chaplain was there in person and that, in view of his profession, he would surely have known if they had set off on a Sunday. On this admittedly slim basis for a decision, we shall follow the chaplain, but bearing in mind that he may have been a couple of days out on his reckoning.17

On Tuesday 8 October, therefore, the king, with his nine hundred men-at-arms, five thousand archers and numberless assorted civilians, including the royal surgeons, minstrels, heralds and chaplains, set out from Harfleur by the Montivilliers road. As was the customary practice, the army had been divided into the three battles, or divisions, in which it would fight. The honour of leading the vanguard, or first division, fell once more to the indomitable Sir John Cornewaille and Sir Gilbert Umfraville. The main body of the army was led by the king himself, with some of his younger and less experienced noblemen, including his twenty-four-year-old brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, twenty-year-old Sir John Holland, who had distinguished himself at the landing and during the siege in the company of his stepfather, and John, Lord de Roos, who had inherited his father’s estates the previous year and was still only eighteen or nineteen. The leadership of the rearguard, like that of the vanguard, was entrusted to seasoned campaigners, in this case the veteran Edward, duke of York, and Richard de Vere, earl of Oxford.18

Within the three divisions, it is likely that the men were still grouped according to the retinues into which they had originally been recruited. There was, in other words, no separating out of the men-at-arms from the archers, even though the latter now outnumbered the former by more than five to one, instead of the usual ratio of three to one favored by the English. What must have taken place, however, was a considerable amount of reorganisation. Many retinues, including Clarence’s, which, with almost a thousand men, had been the single largest company at the beginning of the campaign, had lost their leaders. Many more had seen their numbers reduced by as much as a third. In order to maintain the command structure and discipline, it was important that new leaders should be appointed. In some cases this meant that someone from within the retinue took over, as Sir Thomas Rokeby did when the earl marshal was invalided home. In others, particularly where large numbers of archers were involved, the men would be reassigned to other retinues to restore their numbers to a fighting unit.19

Given the distance that the army had to travel and the possibility that it would soon have to face battle, it is likely that most if not all the men were mounted. There were plenty of surplus horses at Harfleur, for the priority had been to ship home the men who were sick, rather than their mounts. Together with all the spare horses that everyone above the rank of archer was permitted to take, and the packhorses required to carry the baggage, there must have been a minimum of twelve thousand horses in the column, and it may well have been double that figure.20 Though the horses were essential for the army’s speed and mobility, their presence in such large numbers meant that it would be difficult to keep them all adequately fed and watered on the journey.

The English could not, and did not, expect their march to be unopposed. On 7 October William Bardolf, the acting lieutenant of Calais, wrote to John, duke of Bedford, Henry’s lieutenant in England, warning him that he had heard reports from both France and Flanders that “without fail” the king would have battle against his adversaries within fifteen days at the latest. Around five thousand Frenchmen had already assembled and “a notable knight,” with a force of five hundred men, had also been posted to the defence of the French frontier against the Calais marches. A reluctant bearer of bad tidings, Bardolf excused himself by explaining that “I thought I ought to tell you this.”21

Bardolf’s reports were entirely accurate. Ever since 2 August, when the truces between England and France in this area had elapsed, the Calais garrison had launched a number of diversionary raids to distract the French away from Harfleur during the invasion and siege. David, sire de Rambures, grand-master of the crossbowmen of France and captain of Boulogne, had been sent to defend the area from the depredations of the garrison. Despite anguished messages from the townsmen of Boulogne, who sought him out at Fécamp and Rouen, it was not until Harfleur was on the very point of surrender that de Rambures at last obtained permission to send the sire de Laurois, commander of Ardres, with a force of five hundred men, to garrison Boulogne.22 The arrival of de Laurois and his men was a serious setback to Henry’s plans. He had intended that a three-hundred-strong force from Calais should be sent to Blanche Taque to secure the river crossing of the Somme in readiness for his own arrival. The heightened state of security around the Pas-de-Calais would now make it nearly impossible for this expeditionary force to reach the Somme. When it eventually set out, it was ambushed and overwhelmed by a band of Picards, who killed some of the men and took the rest prisoner, intending to hold them to ransom. The failure of this venture would have important consequences for the English army’s attempts to cross the Somme, the single greatest barrier between them and the safety of Calais.23

While Henry was besieging Harfleur, Charles d’Albret and Marshal Boucicaut had anticipated his next move by destroying bridges and breaking causeways across all the major rivers and reinforcing and resupplying the towns and castle garrisons throughout Normandy and Picardy. The preparations at Boulogne, which was close to the Pas-de-Calais and therefore faced a double threat of a combined assault from the king in the south-west and the Calais garrison in the north-east, were typical. Strict orders had been given as early as 15 September that the nightly watches were to be augmented with dogs and lanterns set beyond the moat; during the day, watchmen were also to be stationed on the hills above the town, to give early notice of an English approach. The embrasures in the town walls and towers were widened to facilitate crossbow fire, miners were hired and the suburbs were cleared away in anticipation of a siege. David, sire de Rambures, provided a “long bombarde” which was mounted on the walls and the town’s own cannon was brought up from the guildhall. Gunners were brought in to man the artillery and supplies of saltpetre and the other ingredients required for making gunpowder were bought from St Omer.24

There was little that could be done to protect the country people, but this was an area that had been invaded and had suffered the depredations of war so many times that its inhabitants had long ago learnt that their safety depended on their ability to disappear into local forests and caves. In some instances, caves provided a remarkably sophisticated refuge. At Naours,25 just to the north of Amiens, subterranean chalk quarries had been artificially enlarged and used as places of safety for centuries. Working along the seams of chalk, which were sandwiched between layers of impenetrable silex, an underground city had been created which was capable of sheltering up to two thousand people at once, together with their sheep, cattle, horses and mules. Twenty-eight galleries led to three hundred chambers, each one large enough to house a family of eight, and to a number of public rooms, including a chapel, a law court and a jail. Excavated at three different levels, between 100 and 140 feet below ground, the cave system was naturally dry, enjoyed a constant temperature of 48 degrees Fahrenheit and had access to the river for water. Six chimneys provided ventilation and enabled food to be cooked. So that the smoke did not betray the presence of the people hiding below, the outlets were over 130 feet away and two of the chimneys vented into the local millers’ houses on top of the hill, giving the impression that the smoke came from their own domestic fireplaces. Any intruders who stumbled upon the entrances found themselves lost in a maze of narrow winding corridors, or ambushed when bending double below doorways deliberately set too low.

So well hidden and secure was this underground city that it was in constant use from Roman times until the end of the seventeenth century. Rediscovered in 1887, after a lapse of almost two hundred years, it found a new lease of life in the bloodbath of the twentieth century, serving as the headquarters of English, Canadian and Australian troops in the First World War and of Rommel in the Second. Nevertheless, early fifteenth-century graffiti and coins dating from the reign of Charles VI, which were discovered in the lowest-level chambers and galleries, indicate that the people of the Naours district also fled there in response to Henry V’s invasions of Normandy.

The news that Henry was making preparations for his army to march towards Calais was already known as far afield as Boulogne on 6 October, but it was 11 October before the men of that town knew for certain that he had indeed left Harfleur and was heading for Blanche Taque. From the moment of its departure the progress of the English army was observed and the vital information relayed by couriers on horseback to Constable d’Albret and Marshal Boucicaut at Abbeville. It says much for their military leadership and organisation that the English would not take a single town or castle by surprise.

The English army was only two miles outside Harfleur when it came under attack for the first time. As it passed within half a mile of Montivilliers, Colard, sire de Villequier, and twenty-five crossbowmen launched an ambush. It was easily beaten off, but not without casualties: Geoffrey Blake was killed and an esquire, two archers and three cordwainers (leather-workers) were captured.26 From Montivilliers, the English made their way northwards and slightly eastwards across the Caux plateau towards the town of Fécamp on the Norman coast. This was not the most direct route, but, in the absence of maps and in hostile country, the coastline was the best possible visual guide to enable them to get to Calais and they would stay within a couple of miles of it for as long as possible.

Fécamp, like Montivilliers, was a small town dominated then, as now, by a huge eleventh-century abbey church with the distinctive squat and square Norman tower at its centre. Both had strong links with the English monarchy and with Henry V’s own claims to the duchy of Normandy. William the Conqueror’s father had rebuilt the abbey of Montivilliers after its destruction by the Vikings and had installed his sister as abbess: the Conqueror himself had celebrated his victory at the battle of Hastings in the abbey church at Fécamp. According to at least one chronicler, Henry had expressed a great desire “to see those lands, whereof he ought to be Lord” and he was now about to get his wish.27

The energetic David, sire de Rambures, had anticipated Henry’s descent on Fécamp and got there before him. Five years earlier, the town had been the victim of an English sea-raid in which some four hundred houses were burnt and half the population driven out. Perhaps as a result of this attack, the castle was in a state of disrepair, so de Rambures placed military necessity before piety and put a large garrison into the famous abbey: the church, with its rough-hewn exterior walls and great flying buttresses, surrounded by the high walls and towers of the monastery, was just as defensible as any military fortification. And the abbot of Fécamp was likely to have been sympathetic, since he was the brother of Jean, sire d’Estouteville, who had led the defence of Harfleur with Raoul de Gaucourt; in September he had made his own preparations for an English offensive by drawing up an inventory of all the abbey’s goods. His efforts were in vain, for Henry V had no intention of engaging in either a siege or an assault. When he made his appearance before the town on 9 October, he merely skirted round it and continued on the road eastwards towards Dieppe. Once again, however, the French garrison was able to pick off a few English stragglers, capturing a man-at-arms, William Bramshulf, and two archers, Edward Legh and John de Rede.28

On Friday 11 October the English arrived on the outskirts of Dieppe. They had now travelled some fifty-five miles in three days, and were almost exactly on target for achieving their goal of reaching Calais within eight days. Only five weeks earlier, Master Jean de Bordiu had reported to his native Aquitaine that Dieppe was the next major town on the king’s list, scheduled for conquest after the fall of Harfleur.29 Now, however, Henry gave the place a wide berth and headed inland along the south bank of the river Arques to find a crossing. Four miles away, in the shadow of a spectacular twelfth-century fortress that commanded the length and breadth of the wide valley at the confluence of the tributary rivers Béthune and Varenne, lay the small town of Arques and its bridges. The garrison here had taken the precaution of barricading the narrow bridges, but had not actually destroyed them, so they were still usable.

The presence of such a powerful castle was an indication of the strategic importance of the place and should have deterred any attack. Yet Henry, an experienced soldier and master tactician, had no qualms about forcing a passage under the nose of the garrison. He knew that, although the castle itself was virtually impregnable, the town was its weak point. Unlike the great merchant towns of Normandy and Picardy—Harfleur, Dieppe, Abbeville, Amiens, Péronne, Boulogne—Arques had neither walls nor ramparts to defend itself. If the castle garrison was outnumbered or outmanoeuvred, it could retreat behind the safety of its curtain walls or into its keep: though room might be found for the civilian population, their property was at the mercy of marauders.

It was absolutely necessary that the army should cross the river, so this time Henry V did not shirk a conflict. He ordered his men to take up their battle positions in full view of the castle and made himself conspicuous by appearing in the front ranks. (His banners and coat of arms blazoned across his chest would have marked him out, even if he had not been wearing his helm with its crown.) The garrison made a half-hearted attempt at defiance, lobbing a few gun-stones to prevent him coming any closer, but without inflicting any damage. The news of what had happened to Harfleur had already spread right across the duchy of Normandy and the garrison at Arques had no wish to become martyrs to the king of England’s cause. When he sent a deputation to its defenders, threatening to burn the town and the surrounding countryside if they did not permit him free passage, they gave up all pretence of resistance and quickly came to terms. That same day, they handed over the hostages and the bread and wine for his troops which he had demanded as the price of sparing the locality, removed the tree trunks barricading the bridges and the entrance to the town, and allowed the king and his army to pass through to the other side without any impediment.30

What happened at Arques was to become the pattern for the remainder of Henry’s campaign. He would carefully avoid the major walled towns, but the presence of a castle, no matter how intimidating or well garrisoned, would not deflect him from his planned route.

On 12 October, having spent the night in the fields near Arques, the English recommenced their journey up the coast, making their way towards Eu, “the last town in Normandy.” As their scouts approached, some of the garrison sallied out to meet them. What followed was a chivalric encounter worthy of the pages of Froissart. Among the Frenchmen was “a very valiant man-at-arms,” the appropriately named Lancelot Pières, who was anxious to demonstrate his prowess against the invaders. He therefore couched his lance under his arm as a sign of challenge, which was accepted by one of the English knights or esquires, who responded by doing the same. The two men charged towards each other, but before Pières could get his blow in, he was himself hit in the stomach with the steel blade of his opponent’s lance, which slid between the plates of his armour. Knowing that he was mortally wounded, he did not flinch, but revenged his own death by killing his opponent. Those who were witnesses to this deadly joust of war observed that the two men had clashed with such force that their lances had passed right through each other’s body. This exploit won Lancelot Pières a small place in the annals of French chivalry, though his equally deserving opponent died anonymously, and therefore, on his terms, in vain. After this individual encounter, the English scouts succeeded in driving the rest of those involved in the sortie back into the town, inflicting further deaths and injuries, but also incurring some wounds themselves.31

Fighting a scouting party was one thing, but when the massed ranks of the main body of the English army advanced towards Eu, the garrison prudently decided to remain behind its great walls. After his success at Arques, Henry determined to try the same tactic again. As his men settled down for the night in the neighbouring towns and villages, he sent messengers to Eu, demanding specified quantities of food and wine in return for not laying waste to the entire district. This had the desired effect. Hostages were handed over, bread and wine were rapidly produced and the troops in the garrison sat on their hands as the English prepared to move off the next day.32

So far, the march to Calais had proceeded exactly according to plan. Although the French chroniclers rehearsed the customary chorus that the English had wantonly burnt and destroyed everything in their path33 (as would have happened on a traditional chevauchée), this was patently not the case. The mere threat had been sufficient to bring the indigenous population to heel. The French had behaved as they always did when faced with an English chevauchée, retreating behind their fortifications and offering the line of least resistance, in order to get the enemy to move on and out of their neighbourhood as rapidly as possible.

But of course this was no ordinary chevauchée. Its objective was to provoke a pitched battle, and some of the prisoners who had been taken along the way now reported that a great French army was poised to fight within the next two days. “But there were different opinions amongst us as to when battle would be joined,” the chaplain commented. Some thought that the Armagnac leaders would not dare to leave Rouen and march against them, for fear that the duke of Burgundy would seize the opportunity either to attack them from behind or to return in triumph to Paris. Others believed that whatever their differences in the past, the dukes of Burgundy and Orléans would unite in the face of the English challenge.34 Although the Peace of Arras had been agreed between the Armagnacs and Burgundians in September 1414, and had been formally concluded and celebrated in Paris in February 1415, John the Fearless had not been happy with its terms. Though it was supposed to offer an amnesty to all involved in the partisan fighting, a royal ordinance of 2 February had unilaterally excluded five hundred of his own Parisian supporters, the Cabochiens, who had been exiled from Paris in 1413. When the duke learnt that his own ambassadors had accepted this, he was furious and reprimanded them severely. The Armagnacs in the dauphin’s entourage “are only trying by all the means that they can think of and imagine to bring about the total destruction of us and of ours,” he raged; “we inform you that the things that have been done are and will be displeasing to us . . . and we do not want you to proceed with them in any way whatsoever. And if, which God forbid, [the dauphin] . . . remains and persists absolutely in this purpose and there is no possibility of another arrangement honourable for us and ours, we would like you to depart and take leave of him.”35 While the other French princes and their partisans up and down the country took their oaths to abide by the terms of the treaty, the duke of Burgundy remained aloof, insisting that the five hundred Cabochiens should be included in the general amnesty before he would swear himself. It was not until 30 July, only a few days before the English invasion began, that he finally submitted. Even then, he did so conditionally, having a formal document drawn up in secret by papal notaries in which it was stated that his oath was dependent on the dauphin pardoning all his supporters, including the Cabochiens. In the letters he sent to the dauphin, recording his oath, he also included a clause implying that he would only regard it as valid if the Armagnac princes implemented their part of the treaty.36

Throughout August, while the English besieged Harfleur, the duke and the dauphin were locked in a dispute about the wording of the oath. The dauphin demanded that it should be unconditional; the duke insisted that all his supporters should be pardoned. The deadlock might have remained unresolved, had it not been for the presence of Henry V and his army in Normandy. The Armagnacs already had their suspicions that the duke was in league with the invaders, but they could not afford to drive him openly into the arms of the English. On 31 August the dauphin finally gave way and issued a royal amnesty to all but forty-five of the Cabochiens. The duke responded by reissuing his letters in September, with the offending contingency clause removed. Nevertheless, he continued to press for the pardon to be extended to the last forty-five throughout the autumn—and also continued to harbour the exiles in his own lands. To outward appearances, the Peace of Arras had at last been formally ratified by all parties, but no one who knew anything of the duke believed that he was fully committed to it.37

And of course there were persistent rumours that John the Fearless was in league with the English. Although the offensive and defensive alliance he had suggested to Henry V the previous summer had not come to anything, it seems likely that the duke had indeed made a secret pact with the king that he would not resist an English invasion of France. As we have seen, English envoys were allowed to recruit ships for the campaign in Holland and Zeeland, areas that were within the Burgundian sphere of influence.38 Contingents of English mercenaries, said to be archers, were present in the Burgundian garrisons of both Soissons and Arras when they were besieged by the Armagnacs in 1414. With typical medieval xenophobia, the English archers at Soissons were accused of betraying the town to the Armagnacs by opening one of the gates, and forty of them were later hanged, though this was more likely to be because they were English and mercenaries, rather than for any betrayal, real or imagined.39

In addition to this circumstantial evidence, there is no doubt that the duke of Burgundy was in contact with the English throughout the summer and autumn of 1415. In July Burgundian ambassadors spent sixteen days in England, negotiating an alliance at the very time when the final embassy of the Armagnac archbishop of Bourges failed to secure peace: members of his party observed a herald in the Burgundian livery among the crowds at Winchester as they left. (Another Burgundian herald, the future chronicler Jean le Févre, was to accompany the English army throughout the Agincourt campaign.) On 10 August, the day before the invasion fleet sailed, in what must have been one of his last acts before leaving, Henry appointed Master Philip Morgan, a highly skilled lawyer, to make final arrangements for an alliance with the duke. Morgan left London on 19 August and did not return until 19 December; the exchequer accounts refer to him as an “ambassador on secret business to the duke of Burgundy” and he was evidently successful for “letters of peace with the duke of Burgundy sealed with his own seal” were deposited in the exchequer on 10 October, fifteen days before Agincourt.40

John the Fearless had not gone to the assistance of Henry V at Harfleur, as some Armagnacs had suspected he would. Yet rumours were rife throughout Europe that, while the dauphin and the Armagnacs were preoccupied in resisting the English, the duke intended to raise his own force and march on Paris. As we have just seen, there were those in the English army who believed this would happen as soon as the dauphin moved from Rouen to engage them in battle. In Paris itself, where the duke had always enjoyed great popular support, the citizens were in a state of high excitement anticipating his return. The wife of one of the exiled Cabochiens received a letter from her husband the very week that Harfleur fell, telling her to get twenty crowns and meet him at a certain town on 20 October because the duke of Burgundy would be there with a large army. Not having the money herself, she borrowed it from a relative, who promptly informed the authorities. Terrified of another bloody revolt, they did not wait for the king’s order but immediately changed all the city’s officers, barricaded the gates and made preparations for a siege. Though this proved to be a false alarm, it was a credible enough threat to be reported as a fact in Venice that the duke had indeed entered Paris again.41

In this highly charged and deeply distrustful atmosphere, it was not surprising that the dauphin and his advisors had tried to persuade the dukes of Burgundy and Orléans to send their men to the muster at Rouen, but to remain at home themselves. John the Fearless penned a caustic reply. It was addressed to the king rather than the dauphin, and though it was couched in the deferential terms due from a faithful subject, it was pregnant with menace. Despite his deep loyalty to the crown, the duke declared he could not forget the insult proffered to him by asking him to remain at home when every other prince of the blood had been summoned to the assistance of France. His honour, which he valued more than anything else on earth, was impugned by this request. Nevertheless, it was the duty of all good friends and subjects to lend a hand in this crisis, so he intended to save the kingdom from its peril and uphold his own position as the premier duke of France by sending far more than the five hundred men-at-arms and three hundred archers who had been requested. The letter was accompanied by two others, written in a similar vein, by the duke’s leading vassals.42

In the meantime, the duke had also written to all his subjects, in Picardy and elsewhere, ordering them to make themselves ready to accompany him when he sent for them, but also specifically forbidding them from going “at the command of any other lord, whoever he might be.”43 This order could be interpreted two ways. Either it was intended to ensure that, if those of the Burgundian allegiance did go to war, it was only under his personal command or, alternatively, that they did not go to war at all. If the duke really had made a non-interference pact with Henry V, then he needed to prevent his own men from rising in defence of their homeland. Whatever the reason, his order put the nobility of Picardy in an impossible situation. They would have to choose between obeying their king or their duke.

Since they had failed to respond to the issuing of the general call to arms, a number of nobles from Picardy received personally addressed royal commands to come with all their forces to assist the dauphin, on pain of incurring the king’s indignation.44 When this, too, failed to bring them to heel, the royal orders were reissued on 20 September in terms that left their recipients in no doubt that they had incurred the king’s grave displeasure. “Through the negligence and delays you and others have made in executing our orders and for lack of help and aid, our noble and good and loyal subjects within the town of Harfleur, despite making a very great and notable defence, have been compelled to render the town by violence, because they could no longer resist the oppression and force of our enemies.” The blame for the fall of Harfleur was thus placed squarely on the shoulders of the local nobility, despite the rather poignant fact that the town had not yet formally surrendered and its defenders were still forlornly waiting the answer to their final plea for aid.

The new order commanded, “on the faith and loyalty that you owe us and on pain of all that you can forfeit,” that proclamations were to be made everywhere and “so often that no one can pretend ignorance”; anyone who refused to go to the dauphin immediately, armed and ready to fight, should be imprisoned, have their goods seized and have men billeted upon them at their expense. Any town which could spare any “engines, cannon and artillery” was to send them also, without delay.45 The fall of Harfleur did what the English invasion had failed to do: it galvanised French officialdom into action. Men who had been torn between their loyalty to the king and to the duke now rose in defence of their homeland. As the English made their way across Normandy into Picardy, the great French army rumoured to be gathering at Rouen became a reality.

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