CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CROSSING THE SOMME

Henry had intended to cross the Somme in exactly the same place as had his great-grandfather, Edward III, in 1346, on the campaign that culminated in the spectacular English victory at Crécy. The old Roman ford at Blanche Taque lay between the mouth of the river and the town of Abbeville, nine miles inland. The waters here were tidal, but the great advantage was that the ford itself was wide enough for twelve men to cross at one time. Unfortunately for the English, the French knew their history too and had anticipated that their opponents would take this route. Two days before the English reached Blanche Taque, the news that they were heading there had already spread as far north as Boulogne, and preparations for their reception were well advanced.1

On Sunday 13 October, when Henry’s army was still some six miles away from Blanche Taque, the men of the vanguard captured a French prisoner, who was brought before Sir John Cornewaille for interrogation. He turned out to be a Gascon gentleman in the service of Charles d’Albret, whom he had left earlier that day at Abbeville. Further questioning revealed that d’Albret had a force of six thousand men with him and was waiting to obstruct their passage; what is more, the ford itself had been barricaded with sharpened stakes to make it impassable.2

The prisoner was hastily brought before the king himself and reinterrogated, but he stuck stubbornly to his story and even pledged his life on its truth. Convinced of his honesty, Henry called an immediate halt to the march and summoned his barons to an urgently convened council meeting. After two hours of debate, the decision was taken to abandon the attempt to cross at Blanche Taque. They would have to find a safer, unguarded crossing further upstream. If necessary they would have to go to the very head of the river, which was said to be sixty miles away.

This was the first major setback of the entire campaign, and morale among the rank and file, which had been high as they marched unopposed through Normandy and into Picardy, now began to falter. Ever since they had left Fécamp they had seen tantalising glimpses of the long vista of white cliffs lining the Norman coast as far as Cap Gris-Nez, knowing that the safety of Calais was a mere thirteen miles beyond that point. Never was the old adage “so near, yet so far” so true. Now, instead of the swift, straight road to their destination, they faced a long and uncertain journey, in the knowledge that their rations could not last out and that battle was becoming increasingly likely. It is not difficult to imagine the despair that the sight of the bay of the Somme must have instilled in the English. It was not just its width (more than a mile across at its narrowest point between le Crotoy and St Valery), but the vast and desolate expanse of marshland stretching as far as the eye could see to the west, north and east. As they were about to discover, these marshes were as impenetrable a barrier as the river itself.3

There was no point in lingering at Blanche Taque, so Henry gave the order to move and the army set off again, turning east and taking the south bank of the Somme towards Abbeville. In preparation for their approach, this ancient capital of Ponthieu, which had already twice suffered English occupation, in 1340 and 1369, had powerfully reinforced its defences: 12 cannon, almost 2200 gun-stones and vast quantities of gunpowder had been installed, together with a large contingent from the army gathering at Rouen. This was no simple garrison like that at Harfleur. Some of the greatest names in France were now stationed at Abbeville, headed by Constable d’Albret, Marshal Boucicaut, the count of Vendôme, who was grand-master of the king’s household, Jacques de Châtillon, sire de Dampierre, who was the admiral of France, Arthur, count of Richemont, who was the duke of Brittany’s brother, and Jean, duke of Alençon. Forewarned of this by their Gascon prisoner, the English duly maintained a respectful distance, skirting round Abbeville and settling for the night at Bailleul-en-Vimeu three miles to the south.4

Next morning, they changed tack, cutting north-eastwards in the hope of using the bridge at Pont Rémy. There they not only found that the bridge and the various causeways across the Somme had been dismantled by the local garrison, but, for the first time, they saw a sizeable force of Frenchmen gathered on the opposite bank. Though the English did not know it, they were facing a company led by the father and brothers of Raoul de Gaucourt, and in their eagerness to avenge the shame inflicted on him they were drawn up in full battle order, “as if prepared to engage us there and then.” Even the chaplain, who was timid by nature, could see that this was merely posturing: “the fact that the river at that point had a broad marsh on both sides prevented either of us from coming any closer, so that not one of us, even had he sworn to do so, could have inflicted injury on the other.”5

There now began a deadly game of cat and mouse. As the English pushed on further and further into the interior of France, searching with increasing desperation for somewhere to cross the river, they were shadowed on the opposite bank by a French force, led by Boucicaut and d’Albret, which was determined to prevent their passage. “At that time we thought of nothing else but this,” the chaplain wrote: that, after the eight days assigned for the march had expired and our provisions had run out, the enemy, craftily hastening on ahead and laying waste the countryside in advance, would impose on us, hungry as we should be, a really dire need of food, and at the head of the river, if God did not provide otherwise, would, with their great and countless host and the engines of war and devices available to them, overwhelm us, so very few as we were and made faint by great weariness and weak from lack of food.

On 15 October—the eighth day of their march and the day that they should have reached Calais—the English were almost thirty-five miles away from their planned coastal route and every step was taking them further away from their destination. Tired, hungry and dispirited, the English could only pray that the Blessed Virgin and St George, under whose banners and protection they marched, would intercede for them with the Supreme Judge, and deliver them from the swords of their enemy. Dreams of achieving glory, conquest, plunder had all been forgotten. Only one hope remained: that they would eventually get safely to Calais.6 That day they made another detour to avoid the great Burgundian city of Amiens, capital of Picardy, with its network of little canals and its garden suburbs set in the midst of fens. Did Henry V recall, as he observed the soaring white walls and pinnacles of its glorious thirteenth-century cathedral, that his own great-grandfather, Edward III, had once done homage for Aquitaine to Philippe VI of France in that very place? If he did, the irony that it was the same unresolved quarrel that had brought him to Amiens eighty-six years later cannot have escaped him.

The following day, they pushed on as far as the little town or village of Boves, almost five miles south-east of the centre of Amiens. The town, with its all-important bridges over the river Avre, a tributary of the Somme, lay at the foot of a chalk cliff that was crowned by the white walls of a great twelfth-century castle belonging to Ferri, count of Vaudémont, a younger son of the duke of Lorraine. Although he was a Burgundian by allegiance, he was one of the local nobility who had belatedly responded to the king’s summons to arms and, with a force of three hundred men, was now stationed with Boucicaut’s army on the other side of the Somme.7

Boves was small enough for Henry V to be able to hold it to ransom, as he had done the towns of Arques and Eu; again, there was a military imperative to do so, as he needed to cross the Avre over the town bridges. Once more he sent his messengers to a parley and it would appear that, whatever the loyalties of Ferri de Vaudémont, the captain he had left in charge of the castle garrison was more favourably inclined to the English than his master. Not only did he agree to ransom the village and its surrounding vineyards from burning by meeting the usual demands for bread and wine, he even allowed the army to be billeted within the village overnight.

The garrison was only able to provide eight baskets of bread to feed the six thousand, though the baskets were large enough to need two men to carry each one. There had been a plentiful harvest of grapes, however, so the place was overflowing with wine. The English would not have been human if they had been able to resist such a temptation. They made straight for the winepresses and the barrels full of new vintage, and started to help themselves to this unexpected bounty. While some of his commanders regarded this behaviour with indulgence, believing it to be a much-deserved reward after all their labours and privations, the king eventually called a halt. When someone asked him why, and remarked that the men were only trying to refill their bottles, Henry replied that he did not mind the bottles, but that most of the men were making bottles out of their own stomachs, which did concern him. In the heart of hostile territory and living daily, if not hourly, under the threat of attack, he could not afford to have his army incapacitated through drink. They were vulnerable enough as it was.8

Before they left Boves, the following day, Thursday 17 October, Henry had a further conversation with the captain of the castle. Two of his men-at-arms were now so sick that they were unable to continue on the journey. Henry did not wish simply to abandon them to their fate and the captain courteously agreed that he would take them in and look after them. Having handed over two horses in lieu of payment, Henry gathered the rest of his army together, and once more took to the road.9

After crossing the Avre at Boves, the English returned to the banks of the Somme to resume their search for an unguarded bridge or ford. It was a forlorn hope. Boucicaut and d’Albret were patrolling the opposite bank and every town and castle was on a state of high alert. As the English passed by the walled town of Corbie, about ten miles east of the centre of Amiens, the garrison made a sortie and in the skirmish that followed, the standard of Aquitaine, which was carried by Hugh Stafford, Lord Bourchier, was captured. This was the greatest disgrace that could befall any standard-bearer, whose chivalric duty it was to die in its defence. Fortunately, one of his kinsmen, a young esquire called John Bromley, who was a groom of the king’s chamber, came to Bourchier’s assistance, recovered the standard and succeeded in driving the French back towards Corbie, killing two of them and capturing two men-at-arms.10

This minor success was not enough to gain the bridge over the Somme, which was too well guarded to force a crossing, but the capture of the men-at-arms proved to be a significant stroke of luck: when they were interrogated, they disclosed that the French commanders had taken prudent measures against the huge numbers of archers they knew were in the king’s host. They had assigned “many hundreds” of men-at-arms to special squadrons and mounted them on heavily armoured horses; their specific task was to ride down the English archers, breaking up their formations and reducing the effectiveness of their massed fire-power. On learning this, Henry issued a proclamation throughout the army that every archer was immediately to make himself a six-foot-long wooden stake, sharpened at both ends, and carry it with him. As soon as the French drew near to engage them in battle, the archers were to take up their stations in staggered rows, so that the man on the row behind stood between the two in front of him. Each archer was then to drive one end of his stake into the ground in front of him in such a fashion that the other end was above waist-height and pointing towards the enemy. When the French cavalry caught sight of the stakes as they charged, they would either be forced to withdraw or run the risk of being impaled.11

This was not a new tactic. The “hedgehog” had been a standard defensive manoeuvre for European infantrymen fighting against cavalry since at least the beginning of the fourteenth century, though they used their steel-tipped pikes, rather than improvised wooden stakes, to create the bristling hedgehog effect. The first recorded example of wooden stakes being used specifically to protect archers, however, was comparatively recent and it was an eastern innovation. In 1396 a force of French and Burgundian crusaders had come to grief against the invading Ottoman Turks at the battle of Nicopolis in what is now Bulgaria. The Turks had hidden their foot archers in a dip in the landscape and behind a screen of lightly armed cavalry. Tempted by what appeared to be an outnumbered and outarmed force, the crusaders had charged the Turkish cavalry, whose ranks gave way to reveal a field of stakes behind which the archers had taken cover. Unable to check their charge, the crusaders were easily overwhelmed and slaughtered. Three of the veterans of this battle, who were captured and later ransomed, were none other than the leader of the crusade, John the Fearless, the future duke of Burgundy, who was then count of Nevers, Raoul de Gaucourt, the defender of Harfleur, and Marshal Boucicaut, who was now jointly commanding the forces opposing Henry V.12 So many of the leading nobility of France were killed or captured at Nicopolis that news of the disaster and how it had occurred spread swiftly throughout Europe. Whether the idea of improvising stakes to protect the English archers was Henry’s own or came from Edward, duke of York, as some chroniclers suggest, its genius lay not in complete innovation, but in marrying two established but different precedents: the Turkish use of stakes to protect their archers and the tightly packed formation of the European pikemen.

The French prisoners captured at Corbie may have given Henry other information just as important as that which prompted the adoption of stakes to protect the archers. Some time before he left Corbie, the king learnt that the French army patrolling the crossings from the opposite bank of the Somme was heading for Péronne, a fortified town at the top of a lazy loop in the river. It was therefore extremely unlikely that he would be able to find an unguarded passage anywhere between Corbie and Péronne; even if he did, the French would be swiftly upon him, either attacking him at his weakest as he crossed, or forcing him on to the defensive once he had. The choice of battlefield would be theirs.

It was at this point that Henry took another calculated gamble. In all probability, he was going to have to follow the river all the way to its source before he could turn north and west again towards Calais. Instead of continuing to follow the Somme in all its meanderings, he therefore decided to cut directly across the open country between Corbie and Nesle. Though he risked missing a potentially viable crossing, he would reduce his journey by at least ten miles and bypass the French troops waiting at Péronne. What is more, by doing the unexpected, he stood a chance of catching the French unawares and finding an unguarded crossing further upstream, especially as he would disappear from their sight for perhaps twenty-four hours.

The English army therefore turned south-east and started the long climb up to the Santerre plateau. For many miles now, the journey had become increasingly arduous. The gentle undulations of the Caux peninsula and the flat, featureless landscape of the lower reaches of the Somme had given way to heavily wooded hills and the long, steep ridges that are now associated with the battlefields and trenches of the First World War. The easier terrain of the wide and flat Somme valley was still inaccessible: recent October rains had swollen the river and made the marshes even more treacherous, forcing the army to take the higher, harder ground. As the English reached the plateau above Corbie there was a dramatic change in landscape. A vast expanse of seemingly endless plain now stretched out before them. There were no landmarks to guide them, except the shimmering white walls of Amiens Cathedral rising ghost-like in the distance behind them, and the occasional spire of a village church or a clump of woodland silhouetted against the horizon. For the ordinary rank and file, totally reliant on the king and his officers for leadership in this alien and hostile country, which was so unlike anything they had ever seen at home, it must have been a bewildering and frightening experience. It was also a test of their faith in that leadership.

By the evening of Thursday 17 October, the English army had pushed on another twelve or so miles from Corbie and was encamped between the hamlets of Harbonnières and Vauvillers.13 One of the most famous incidents of the Agincourt campaign now occurred. That morning, in the fields outside Corbie, an English soldier had been brought before the king, charged with the offence of stealing from one of the village churches a pyx, the box which contained the consecrated bread from the Eucharist. There had not been time to deal with him then, but now he was put on trial. The pyx, which he had hidden in his sleeve, was produced. The chaplain, who knew about such things, remarked that it was only made of cheap copper-gilt, although the thief had probably mistaken it for gold. It was a mistake that was to cost him his life. He was found guilty of acting “in God’s despite and contrary to royal decree” and, at the king’s orders, was promptly hanged from a tree in full view of his fellows.14 Significantly, it is the only recorded example of anyone breaking the king’s ordinances throughout the entire campaign.

For the last few days of the march, the increasingly weary English had covered only thirteen or fourteen miles a day. Encumbered with their stakes, progress was inevitably slower, but they were also tired and hungry, reduced to drinking water and eking out their last rations of dried meat with hazelnuts gathered from the hedgerows. By the evening of Friday 18 October, they had reached the neighbourhood of Nesle and decided to camp for the night in the small hamlets scattered outside its fortified walls. Henry sent in his customary message but, for the first time, met with defiance. The townspeople not only refused to supply bread and wine but draped red cloth over their walls, a mysterious gesture whose origin is as unclear as its meaning is obvious. Such an insult could not be allowed to go unpunished and Henry ordered that all the hamlets in the vicinity of Nesle should be burnt to the ground the following morning.15

Before first light, the Virgin and St George answered the prayers of the English with the news that a suitable crossing of the Somme had been found only three miles to the north-east of Nesle. It is unclear how this information came to Henry V. It is possible that the English scouts uncovered its existence on one of their forays but, given the timing, it was more probably one of the villagers who decided to reveal its whereabouts in the hope of saving his home and livelihood from the flames.16 Mounted patrols were immediately dispatched to test the passage and find out the depth of the water and the speed of the current. What they found was not ideal, but it was possible.

There were actually two crossings, both fords, less than two miles apart, at the neighbouring villages of Béthencourt-sur-Somme and Voyennes. They were approached by long, narrow causeways that the French, under instruction from the ubiquitous Boucicaut and d’Albret, had broken up in the middle “in such a way that it was scarcely possible, and then only with difficulty, to ride across the broken parts in single file.” At their deepest points, the waters of the fords came slightly higher than a horse’s belly, but a marsh a mile wide had to be negotiated before reaching the Somme. These disadvantages were outweighed by the fact that the crossings were unguarded. The men of St Quentin, who had been entrusted with the task, had been caught by surprise. What is more, there was no sign of the French army that had dogged their footsteps for so long. The gamble of the short-cut had paid off.17

Early on the morning of Saturday 19 October, under the watchful eye of Sir John Cornewaille and Sir Gilbert Umfraville, the archers of the vanguard began to make their way in single file and on foot across the broken causeways, holding their bows and quivers full of arrows aloft to keep them dry. After they had scrambled onto the opposite bank and taken up a position to protect the rest, Cornewaille, Umfraville and their standard-bearers went over, followed by the men-at-arms, also in single file and on foot. Only when they were all safely across were their horses sent over to join them.

While the vanguard was completing this difficult and dangerous manoeuvre, the rest of the English army was busy pulling down the nearest houses and taking away any ladders, doors and shutters they could find. Once a secure bridgehead had been established on the other side of the Somme, providing covering fire if required, they set to work repairing and rebuilding the gaps in the broken causeways with the wood they had found, together with bundles of sticks, straw and any other materials they could lay their hands on. By one o’clock in the afternoon, the causeways were passable by three men riding abreast, and the full-scale operation of crossing the Somme began. Although it was not ideal that the army should be divided and separated by a distance of almost two miles, it was imperative that the crossing be effected as quickly as possible. The king therefore ordered that the slower baggage should cross by one causeway, probably that at Béthencourt where the lie of the land was flatter, and his fighting men by the other.18

There was an obvious danger that so many men trying to use so narrow a causeway could result in chaos: they were tightly packed together, eager to get across and, if they came under fire from the enemy, might panic in the crush. Foreseeing these dangers, the king stationed himself on one side of the entrance to the ford and a couple of hand-picked men on the other to maintain discipline. His stern presence proved sufficient to quell any unruliness before it began and both the main body of the army and the rearguard reached the opposite bank of the Somme without loss or major incident. Nevertheless, it was after nightfall before the operation was complete and the last men and horses came safely ashore.19

It was impossible for such a huge logistical exercise to take place without attracting attention from the enemy. According to the chaplain, even before a hundred men had waded across the river, small groups of French cavalry began to emerge from the hamlets on the northern side. They sent their swifter outriders on ahead to assess the situation, while the rest made belated attempts to join together into an opposing force. Before they could do this effectively, they were attacked by the mounted patrols of the vanguard, adding to their confusion. By the time they had gathered in sufficient numbers to risk an approach, the English bridgehead was secure and men were pouring across the river to reinforce it. “For this reason,” the chaplain remarked with obvious satisfaction, “the French, taking up a position at a distance and having estimated our capacity to stand firm and their own incapacity to resist, abandoned the place and vanished from our sight.”20

The English spent a cheerful night lodging in and around the hamlets of Athies and Monchy-Lagache, their spirits raised by the boldness and efficiency with which they had so unexpectedly accomplished the river crossing. “We thought it a matter of great rejoicing on our part,” the chaplain wrote, “that we had shortened our march by, as many reckoned, about an eight days’ journey. And we were of the firm hope that the enemy army, the army which was said to be waiting for us at the head of the river, would be disinclined to follow after us to do battle.”21

These hopes were dealt a blow the following morning, Sunday 20 October, when three heralds arrived in the camp with a message from the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon and Constable d’Albret. Though the French cavalry had failed to prevent the English crossing the Somme, they had evidently succeeded in getting information through to their masters very quickly. The letters that the heralds now delivered to Henry were couched in the courtly terms of a jousting challenge. Orléans, Bourbon and d’Albret well knew, they said, that ever since he had left his own realm, his desire had been to have a battle against the French. And so, they, being three princes born of the blood royal of France, were ready to relieve him and fulfil his desire and perform that which he sought; and, if he would care to name a place and a date where he would wish to fight them, they would be happy to meet him there; representatives of each side would choose and notify [the actual site] so that it did not offer any physical advantage to one or the other party, provided that this had the approval of the king, their sovereign lord.22

To modern eyes it seems strange, absurd even, for an invaded nation to give away the critically important military advantages of choosing their own time and place to give battle, especially to a vulnerable enemy that had been forced far from its path and was short of men and supplies. But like Henry V’s challenge to the dauphin, this was an honoured chivalric custom of the time. Similarly, the fact that the terminology was interchangeable with that of a challenge to perform a joust or feat of arms—even to the point of referring to Henry’s “désir” to do battle and the French princes’ wish to relieve him of itdid not mean that this was a game or insincere posturing. The Frenchmen were quite serious.

More interesting than the challenge itself is the fact that it was issued in the names of the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon and the constable of France. All three men enjoyed eminent chivalric reputations. Charles d’Orléans, who had defied the royal command to send his troops but remain at home himself, was now twenty years old, a jouster of note, as well as a talented writer of courtly love poems. Jean, duke of Bourbon, was thirty-four or thirty-five, and, like d’Orléans, had acquired considerable military experience in the recent wars: only a few months previously, he had demonstrated his devotion to knightly ideals by founding the Order of the Fer du Prisonnier, of which Raoul de Gaucourt was a member.23 Charles d’Albret, at forty-six, was the oldest of the challengers. As discussed earlier, by virtue of his office as constable of France he was a veteran military commander, but in his younger days he had also been an ardent jouster and in 1400 he was one of the founding members of Boucicaut’s Order of the White Lady on the Green Shield.24

That men of this calibre should have issued a challenge to battle is not surprising, but the responsibility for doing so should actually have belonged to the dauphin, who was not only a higher representative of the French royal house but also the king’s formally constituted captain-general. The fact that the three men issued the challenge in his place might almost be seen as a public reproach to the dauphin, not only for failing to do so himself, but also for his craven dereliction of chivalric duty in not responding to Henry’s personal challenge to individual combat. That duty his commanders had now taken upon themselves, in order to uphold the honour of France.

Henry’s response to the challenge was everything that the dauphin’s was not. He did not keep the heralds waiting but received them “ceremoniously and honourably,” reading their letters “with great joy” and rewarding them with generous gifts. Although he did not entrust them with a reply, he did send two of his own heralds to the French princes to tell them that “since leaving the town of Harfleur, he had striven and was striving daily to reach his realm of England, and not hiding himself away in walled towns or fortresses. So, if the three princes of France wished to fight him, it was not necessary to pick a day nor a place; for every day they could find him in the open fields without any difficulty.”25 It was a lesson in the art of the courteous and bold response which the dauphin had singularly failed to learn.

As a result of the visit by the French heralds, Henry had to anticipate that he might be forced to a battle as early as the next day. His men had been travelling in battledress—suits of armour for the men-at-arms and padded jerkins and kettle hats for the archers—ever since they left Harfleur. He now gave orders that all those entitled to wear coats of arms should put them on before they left their lodgings the next day, this being a symbol to a potential opponent that they were armed, ready to fight and would not retreat. As he had done at Harfleur, he also made it his own task to go round the army, inspecting their preparations, praising where he found things in good order and offering encouragement to those who needed it.26

On Monday 21 October, the English army set out from Athies and Monchy-Lagache, fully expecting at any moment to find the armed might of France blocking the way to Calais. Tension was high, especially as their route took them uncomfortably close to Péronne. The town was heavily fortified and enclosed within a deep narrow moat and massive red-brick walls; at its centre lay a formidable castle with huge round stone towers, built by Philip Auguste at the end of the twelfth century, punctuating its ancient red-brick curtain walls. It was here that Boucicaut and d’Albret had stationed themselves after following the English from Abbeville.

There was a nervous moment when, as the English skirted the town’s walls at a safe distance to their left, a party of French cavalry made a sudden sortie, perhaps in the hope of acting as a decoy to draw them within range of their artillery. Such was the discipline imposed on the English army that they did not respond to this temptation, and a small force of their own mounted men was able to put the French to flight, though not without loss: a man-at-arms from the earl of Suffolk’s retinue was captured.

A mile beyond Péronne Henry’s troops came across a sight that struck dread into their hearts. The muddy roads were heavily rutted and churned up, indicating that many thousands of Frenchmen had passed that way before them. The message was clear: Constable d’Albret and Marshal Boucicaut had not remained walled up in Péronne but had gone ahead to choose the site for battle. The poor timorous chaplain was quite overcome by this sight. “And the rest of us in the army (for I will say nothing of those in command), fearing battle to be imminent, raised our hearts and eyes to heaven, crying out, with voices expressing our inmost thoughts, that God would have pity on us and, of His ineffable goodness, turn away from us the violence of the French.”27

For three whole days the English continued their march towards Calais, striking out in a north-westerly direction28 to compensate for the long detour they had been forced to make to cross the Somme. Throughout that time, they never caught a glimpse of the enemy. Despite their lack of food and drink, the increasingly hilly terrain and the unrelenting rain and bitter winds that now made every step an effort, they plodded doggedly onwards, crossing the river Ancre at Miraumont on Tuesday 22 October, turning northwards at Beauquesne, bypassing the town of Doullens the next day (no doubt sending the country people scurrying into the sanctuary of the underground city of nearby Naours as they did so) and crossing the river Grouches beneath the walls of the count of St Pol’s great castle at Lucheux. That night they camped out in several hamlets between Bonnières and Frévent, the latter having been taken by the vanguard, in preparation for crossing the river Canche the following morning. The king, however, accidentally rode past the village selected by his scouts for his own lodgings. Even though he was within a bowshot of the place, he refused to turn back. He was wearing his coat of arms and to retreat, even for such an innocuous reason, would be to dishonour them.29

On the next day, Thursday 24 October, after the English had made their way west of the town of St Pol, and were descending the steep valley down to the next river crossing at Blangy, the scouts and mounted patrols brought news to the king that he, probably alone of all his men, had been longing to hear. A French army, many thousands strong, was only three miles away on the other side of the river. A battle was now inevitable, and if the English were not to be caught at a disadvantage, it was imperative that they should cross the river Ternoise as quickly as possible. Six knights from the vanguard were sent ahead to find out whether the ford at Blangy was guarded, and when they reported that it was not, Henry gave orders to proceed with all possible haste.

Having crossed the river, the English had to negotiate the steep hillside facing them. This, too, they achieved without significant incident, but as they emerged over the crest of the hill and onto the plateau before them, the view was dreadful: massed ranks of the French army, marching in battle order with pennons flying, were streaming out of the valley to their right and taking up their position “like a countless swarm of locusts” in a broad field half a mile in front of them. The road to Calais was blocked. “Their numbers,” the chaplain noted grimly, “[were] so great as not to be even comparable with ours.” This was not just the relatively small group that had shadowed their footsteps from Abbeville along the banks of the Somme. That army had now been joined by the belatedly mobilised force of the general call to arms, the fruit of the seed that had been growing for so many weeks at Rouen.30

Yet it was not quite the full military might of France. Although many of his subjects had eventually responded to Charles VI’s summons, John the Fearless was still several hundred miles away in Burgundy, as he had been since at least the beginning of September. His imminent arrival in Flanders had long been expected. His son Philippe, count of Charolais, had written to the Flemish town of Lille on 10 October, for instance, stating categorically that “my father has recently informed me of his departure with all his power to advance against the English in the service of the king.” Whether the count knew it or not, this was simply untrue. The letter was merely a sop thrown to the unfortunate inhabitants of Lille (who stood in the way of the English march from Harfleur to Calais), in an attempt to persuade them that their duke had not altogether abandoned them to their fate. Two days later, John the Fearless sent an embassy to Charles VI, again announcing his mobilisation and impending arrival. Instead, he simply remained in Burgundy, in the company of Henry V’s secret envoy, Philip Morgan, waiting to see what would happen and hoping to seize his chance to march on Paris.31 Burgundian chroniclers, especially those writing during the literary golden age of Philippe’s reign, had the unenviable task of explaining away the absence of both father and son from Agincourt. Most got round the charges of treachery by declaring that John the Fearless had been “forbidden to come,”32 while his nineteen-year-old son, “who desired with all his heart to be present, in person, at the battle,” had had to be physically restrained from joining the French army. His father had ordered that he was not to go, they said, and charged three knights, the sires de Chanteville, de Roubaix and de Laviéville, with the responsibility of ensuring that he did not. “I have heard it said of the comte de Charrollois,” le Févre reported, “that even when he reached the age of sixty-seven, he still regretted that he had not had the good fortune to be at the battle, whether he had died or lived.”33 It was certainly a useful gloss to put on an otherwise inexcusably shameful dereliction of duty.

While Philip Morgan, the English secret envoy, ensured that the duke of Burgundy kept to the terms of his non-interference agreement with Henry V, others were playing a similar role with the duke of Brittany. On 28 July, shortly before he sailed for France, Henry had appointed Master John Hovyngham and Simon Flete to conduct “secret business” with the duke, and truces between England and Brittany were proclaimed during the first week of the siege of Harfleur. On 23 August Hovyngham and Flete left London for Brittany and, like Morgan, did not return until December.34The coincidence of these two missions to Henry’s only French allies during his invasion of their realm is too striking to be ignored. Though Hovyngham and Flete were ultimately successful in trying to persuade the duke of Brittany to remain neutral, they had the more difficult task because he had less to gain than John the Fearless. (His ambitions were limited to increasing the independence of his duchy, rather than controlling the crown of France.)35

Two other French dukes were also absent from the battle: Jean, duke of Berry, and Louis, duke of Anjou, both of whom remained at Rouen and did not advance with the rest of the French army to Amiens. The duke of Berry was seventy-five and his advanced age was sufficient to excuse him an active role in the fighting, but as the uncle of Charles VI, his seniority gave him unusual authority among his warring nephews and great-nephews and would surely have been useful in the councils on the field of battle. Louis d’Anjou had no such excuse, though no one seems to have blamed him in the same way that they later did the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany. Perhaps that was because Berry and Anjou were intended to remain at Rouen as a form of rearguard. They had a small force with them and their presence might have been sufficient to prevent the English retreating, if confronted by the larger army further north. The more likely reason appears to be that they were there simply to protect Charles VI and the dauphin. The royal council that met at Rouen and decided to give battle to the English had also determined that neither the king nor his eldest son was to be there. The duke of Berry, remembering the fate of his father, Jean II, who had been captured by the English at the battle of Poitiers in 1356 and spent many years in prison in England, had argued strongly against giving battle at all. He was, according to his own herald, furious with the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon and Charles d’Albret for issuing their challenge to Henry V and refused to allow the king to leave Rouen. “He said it would be better to lose the battle only, rather than both king and battle.”36

Given that it was obvious that Charles VI’s mental state would render him a liability on the battlefield, the eighteen-year-old heir to the throne should have been the natural choice to lead the army, even if in name only. Henry V had, after all, been actively fighting campaigns in Wales since his early teens and had taken part in a pitched battle before his seventeenth birthday. But Louis de Guienne was not an inspirational figure, least of all one that the peers of France could look to for leadership. “He had a pleasant face,” the registrar of the Paris Parlement observed, “was tall enough, but fat in his body, heavy and slow, and not at all agile.” The reason for the dauphin’s portly frame, according to the monk of St Denis, was the fact that he was indolent and not much given to the practice of arms. He loved to wear jewels and rich clothes, did not mix in a friendly fashion with other lords, unlike his father, and was not affable even to those of his own household. He would not brook any criticism, despite his many faults, which included turning night into day by dining at three or four in the afternoon when he awoke, supping at midnight and falling into bed at dawn. Those who knew him said that if he had lived much longer, he would have surpassed all other contemporary princes in the extraordinary extravagance of his clothes, in the excessive number of his horses and his retinue, and in his showy generosity to the Church. In summary, he was the absolute antithesis of Henry V and not someone to whom the other princes of the blood would willingly defer.37

Even if the dauphin had been of a more martial nature, there were two other reasons that might have explained the decision to keep him away from the battle. The first was entirely practical: the personal risk was too high. Christine de Pizan accepted that “there is no doubt that knights and men-at-arms and the whole army would have greater courage in fighting, seeing their lord in his place, ready to live and die with them,” but even she argued that it was better for him to be absent, because “no one can foresee to which side God will give the good fortune of victory.” If a king or prince was killed, taken prisoner or fled, it was a loss and dishonour not just to himself, but to all his subjects and his country.38

The second reason for keeping the dauphin safely at Rouen with his father was that the Armagnacs in the royal council had no wish to take either of them into the lion’s den. For them, the lion was not Henry V but John the Fearless, and once Henry V had crossed the Somme and continued his journey to Calais, he was marching into the heart of Burgundian territory. Everyone knew that the duke had been recruiting an army and his arrival at its head was still expected on a daily basis. Many believed that he was in alliance with the English and feared that he would join forces with them, especially if tempted by the prospect of crushing an Armagnac army, led by the king of France and his own son-in-law, the dauphin. This spectre was made more serious by the prospect that any conflict would take place in the duke’s lands, which were still smarting from the brutal Armagnac campaign of the previous year. No one knew what might happen. If left in the comparative safety of Rouen, the king and dauphin could swiftly return down the Seine to Paris in the event of an Anglo-Burgundian partnership taking to the field.

So it happened that the thousands of Frenchmen who had willingly answered the call to arms in defence of their country found themselves in an army which, despite its overwhelming superiority in both numbers and armament, lacked the one thing that was absolutely essential. It had no commander. And it was about to face an enemy whose sole advantage was that it was supremely well led.

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