PART III
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The sheer scale of the French defeat was genuinely humbling, even frightening. Thousands of Frenchmen lay dead on the field of Agincourt. The exact number is impossible to gauge because contemporary chronicle sources vary wildly and there are no comprehensive official administrative records to draw upon. Thomas Walsingham, for instance, gives the very precise figure of 3069 knights and esquires, plus almost a hundred barons, but admits that the number of common people was not counted by the heralds. The chaplain counted ninety-eight men above the rank of banneret, “whose names are set down in a volume of record,” which was probably the same source used by Walsingham. He also says that the French lost a further fifteen hundred and more knights “according to their own estimate,” and between four and five thousand other gentlemen, “almost the whole nobility among the soldiery of France.” On the other hand, the Venetian Antonio Morosini, quoting a letter written at Paris on 30 October, five days after the battle, when no one yet knew for sure what the losses had been, lists (inaccurately) the names of twenty-six barons killed and thirteen taken prisoner, and puts the final number of dead at between ten and twelve thousand, though it is not clear whether this includes commoners.1
What is beyond dispute is not so much the precise magnitude of the French losses, but the fact that the corresponding figures for the English dead were, by any standard, infinitesimally small. Only two magnates lost their lives: Edward, duke of York, and Michael de la Pole, the young earl of Suffolk, whose father had died of dysentery at Harfleur a few weeks earlier. Most chroniclers suggest that somewhere in the region of thirty others were killed, together with some four or five gentlemen, of whom only two are usually named, Sir Richard Kyghley and Daffyd ap Llewelyn. These figures are, as we shall see, a serious underestimate of the true total, though it seems unlikely that the real number was as high as the 1600 “men of all ranks” cited by le Févre,2 if only because this would have been over a quarter of the entire English army and not even the most ardent propagandist could have claimed that such a loss was insignificant.
The most interesting of all the English dead was Edward, duke of York, a man who has been much maligned by posterity. A first cousin of both Richard II and Henry IV, he has been characterised as “unstable and treacherous,”3 a label that could just as easily be applied to every prominent figure who lived through the troubled reign of Richard II and survived the usurpation and change of dynasty. It was the duke’s misfortune to have had to walk a fine political line and to be the victim of both Ricardian and Tudor propagandists (including Shakespeare). A particular favourite of Richard II, he had played a leading role in the arrest of the Appellants and had appealed them for treason in his role as constable of England. On the other hand, he became uncomfortable with Richard’s increasingly despotic behaviour, balked at his decision to exile the future Henry IV and in the end deserted to the latter during the usurpation, as did all but a very few die-hard loyalists.
Although he was implicated by association in both the murder of the Appellant duke of Gloucester and the anti-Lancastrian plots of his sister and brother, his own complicity was never proved. He spent seventeen weeks imprisoned at Pevensey Castle after his sister’s plot was discovered, but he was treated with a kindliness that casts doubt on his guilt and which he remembered many years later with a legacy of twenty pounds to his former jailer in his will. Though some of his lands remained forfeit to the crown, he won back his former posts and served Henry IV with distinction in Aquitaine and Wales; as a result of his role in the Welsh wars, he earned the friendship of the prince of Wales, who personally stood guarantor for his loyalty in Parliament in 1407 and appointed him to positions of trust in his own reign.4
Like many of those in Henry V’s inner circles, including the king himself, Edward was deeply religious and imbued with that particular form of self-abasing piety which was the acceptable, mainstream version of Lollardy. When he made his will, during the siege of Harfleur, he called himself “of all sinners the most wicked and guilty” and requested that, if he died away from home, his corpse was to be taken back with the minimum of ceremony by two of his chaplains, six of his esquires and six of his valets. Six candles only were to burn round his bier and he was to be buried in the collegiate church of St Mary and All Saints, which he had founded at Fotheringhay, in Northamptonshire, three years earlier.5
Like many of his contemporaries, he was a man of literary tastes, who was familiar with, and able to quote from, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. What makes him exceptional is that he was also the author of a treatise on hunting, which he wrote and dedicated to Henry V when the latter was prince of Wales. In his prologue he described it as a “simple memorial,”6 but it is an extraordinary book in many ways. The duke, like most medieval noblemen, was passionate about hunting. For him it was not simply a pleasant pastime, nor even just a practical way of providing fresh meat for the table. It was a battle of wits and skill against a respected quarry, a question of intimate knowledge of habits, habitation and lie of the land, all governed by strictly enforced rules of conduct and etiquette to prevent the killing of breeding animals and those that were too young or inedible, but also to ensure that no part of a carcass was wasted.
Unusually, since the book was designed for the use of the aristocracy, it was not written in French, the language of chivalry, but in English. Much of it is a translation of a famous hunting treatise by Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix, who died in 1391, appropriately enough of a stroke sustained on the hunting field. But the duke of York was no mere translator. He was also Henry IV’s official master of hart-hounds7 and he knew his sport inside out. He therefore drew heavily on his own knowledge to add information that was peculiar to England, and to embellish his original with comments based on his own experience. The Master of Game is an unrivalled source of practical information about the medieval practice of hunting, from the basics of choosing the right dog for the right task, through to the highly prized art of correctly dismembering a carcass. It is not a dull scholarly treatise, but a celebration of one man’s passion, written with a lyricism to rival that of Chaucer. For the duke, no pleasure on earth could rival that of hunting. It was a foretaste of paradise. “Now shall I prove how hunters live in this world more joyfully than any other men,” he had written.
For when the hunter riseth in the morning, and he sees a sweet and fair morn and clear weather and bright, and he heareth the song of the small birds, the which sing so sweetly with great melody and full of love, each in its own language in the best wise that it can . . . And when the sun is arisen, he shall see fresh dew upon the small twigs and grasses, and the sun by his virtue shall make them shine. And that is great joy and liking to the hunter’s heart . . . And when he hath well eaten and drunk he shall be glad and well, and well at his ease. And then shall he take the air in the evening of the night, for the great heat that he hath had, . . . and lie in his bed in fair fresh clothes, and shall sleep well and steadfastly all the night without any evil thoughts of any sins, wherefore I say that hunters go into Paradise when they die, and live in this world more joyfully than any other men.
. . . Men desire in this world to live long in health and in joy, and after death the health of the soul. And hunters have all these things. Therefore be ye all hunters and ye shall do as wise men.8 The manner of the duke’s death is not recorded by contemporaries, but it is suggestive that there was a remarkably high casualty rate among his own retinue. (The legend that he was fat, and was therefore trampled underfoot and suffocated, is a late Tudor invention, though it is still repeated unquestioningly by modern historians.9) The duke had originally indented to serve with 100 men-at-arms and 300 archers, though he ended up taking 340 archers (and had to mortgage his estates to pay their wages before he sailed from Southampton).10 By 6 October, when the exchequer records for the second financial quarter began, two days before the departure from Harfleur, his numbers had been reduced to eighty men-at-arms and 296 archers (four of the latter had been struck off because they could not fire the required minimum ten aimed arrows per minute). During the march he lost three more men-at-arms and three more archers, so his entire company at the battle consisted of 370 men. The records of those who reshipped home from Calais reveal that only 283 of them survived the battle: eighty-six of his esquires and archers—almost a quarter of those present—died at Agincourt with him.11
This high casualty rate tallies with what we know of the course of the fighting. The duke was commanding the English vanguard, which formed the right wing at the battle, and was therefore the recipient of the assault by the French left wing, led by the count of Vendôme, which also suffered very heavy losses.12 The chaplain tells us that the fighting was hardest and the piles of bodies highest round the standards of the three English divisions, so this too suggests that the duke and his men were among those who bore the brunt of the French assault. The information that has survived about other English retinues indicates that the duke’s losses at Agincourt were exceptionally high.13
Sir Richard Kyghley, a Lancashire knight and friend of Sir William Botiller, who had died at Harfleur, had a personal retinue of six men-at-arms and eighteen archers. Sir Richard himself was killed at the battle, with four of his archers, William de Holland, John Greenbogh, Robert de Bradshaw and Gilbert Howson. Although we do not know where or how Kyghley died in the battle, it is interesting to speculate that he may have been in charge of the Lancashire archers and that they may have been on the English right wing, flanking the duke of York’s company. The Lancashire contingents certainly seem to have suffered heavier losses than any other retinue, apart from the duke of York’s, suggesting that they too were in the midst of the fiercest fighting on that wing.14
The other men-at-arms killed at Agincourt whose names have been preserved were also a close-knit group from a single region.15 Daffyd ap Llewelyn, known to his contemporaries as Davy Gam, has acquired semi-legendary status as the Welshman who was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Fluellen (a corruption of Llewelyn). He was also said to have been the subject of a verse by the rebel princeling Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r, describing him as a short, red-haired man with a squint (“Gam” being a Welsh nickname for squinting). Llewelyn had always been a loyal Lancastrian. His lands, which he held from Henry IV, first as earl of Hereford then as king, were principally in Brecon. During the Welsh revolt, his loyalty made him a target for rebels, and in 1412 he had been betrayed into the hands of Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r and held captive until he was eventually ransomed.16
Although he brought a retinue of only three archers to the Agincourt campaign, Llewelyn was knighted on the field, only to fall in the battle. With him died his two sons-in-law Watkin Lloyd and Roger Vaughan, the former of whom had been recruited by John Merbury, the chamberlain of south Wales, as one of a company of nine men-at-arms, fourteen mounted archers and 146 foot archers from Brecon. Vaughan’s widow, Gwladis, married as her second husband William Thomas of Raglan, who was also a veteran of Agincourt, and, like her father, was said to have been knighted on the field.17
Though the picture is inevitably flawed because the available records are incomplete, one can identify at least 112 men from the English side who were killed in the battle, a figure that excludes those who later died of their wounds. Of these, almost exactly two-thirds were archers, whose names have survived only in exchequer records and would not have been recorded by any contemporary chronicler. When we turn to the French side, there are no equivalent administrative records to give us even a hint of the numbers of non-noble men who died. What we do have are lists of men whose names have been recorded only because they were entitled to bear a coat of arms. These lists were usually compiled by heralds, but even they were unable to be comprehensive. This was sometimes because local knowledge was lacking: a Breton chronicler, such as Alain Bouchart, was able to add the names of several Breton knights whom the Armagnac and Burgundian sources had failed to identify. (Bouchart also noted that all three hundred Breton archers, under the command of Jean de Chateaugiron, sire de Combour, “except for very few,” were killed in the battle with him.)18
The main reason the lists of French dead are incomplete is that they were simply so numerous. The final toll included three dukes (Alençon, Bar and Brabant), at least eight counts (Blamont, Fauquembergue, Grandpré, Marle, Nevers, Roucy, Vaucourt and Vaudémont) and one viscount (Pulsaye, younger brother of the duke of Bar), which is suggestive.19 Even the usually indefatigable Monstrelet, who devoted a whole chapter to recording those killed or taken prisoner, managed to record more than three hundred names of the dead before admitting “and many others I omit for the sake of brevity and also because one cannot know how to record them all, because there were too many of them.”20 The fact that the French dead also included an archbishop is shocking. Jean Montaigu, archbishop of Sens, was no ordinary priest. His role in the French army was not the diplomatic or pastoral one of his English colleagues, the bishops of Norwich and Bangor. Nor was he even a clergyman called up to defend his country in the extremes of danger, like those arrayed in England earlier in the summer. He was a member of a rare and dying breed, the militant priest, who was equally at home wielding a sword as a censer. As bishop of Chartres, he had been a member of Charles VI’s romance-inspired Court of Love, set up in 1400 to “prosecute” offences against chivalrous behaviour towards ladies.21 In 1405 his Armagnac loyalties procured him the position of chancellor of France, but he fled when his brother Jehan de Montaigu, grand-master of the royal household, was executed by the Parisian mob in 1409. He was briefly captured at Amiens, wearing a helmet and body armour, only to resurface in 1411, commanding four hundred knights in defence of St Denis against the English and Burgundians at St Cloud. According to the monk of St Denis, who evidently rather admired this muscular Christian, he died at Agincourt “striking blows on every side with the strength of a Hector.” Jean Juvénal des Ursins was less complimentary: the archbishop’s death was “not much grieved over,” he noted, “as it was not his office.”22
There are three things that immediately strike even the most casual reader of the roll-call of French dead. The first is the apparently frivolous fact that so many bore the names of heroes of chivalric romances. There are a host of Lancelots, several Hectors, Yvains and Floridases, a Gawain, a Perceval, a Palamedes, a Tristan and an Arthur.23 Even though the English and French shared the same culture and literature, this is a peculiarly French phenomenon. Romance names were simply not, as a rule, bestowed on the sons of England; “Tristan Anderton, esquire” is a very lonely example among the solid phalanxes of Johns, Williams, Roberts, Thomases, Henrys and Nicholases, which form the bulk of the 430 names listed in the king’s retinue.24 That they were so popular with the French nobility is an indication of the especial devotion to Arthurian romance and its courtly values and aspirations which still endured in the birthplace of chivalry.
The second striking feature of the list of dead is that it reads like a gazetteer of the towns and villages in the vicinity of Agincourt. To take just a few examples at random, Renaud, sire d’Azincourt, and his son Wallerand; Jean and Renaud de Tramecourt; Colart de la Porte, sire de Béalencourt; Raoul, sire de Créquy, and his son Philippe; Mathieu and Jean de Humières (the seigneur de Humières was captured); Alain de Wandonne; Colart and Jean de Sempy; Eustache and Jean d’Ambrines; Jehan de Bailleul.25 These men, and those like them from the wider area, were the petty nobility upon whom depended the administration of the military, financial, judicial and other public affairs of not just the locality but the whole kingdom. The baillis of Amiens, Caen, Evreux, Macon, Meaux, Rouen, Senlis, Sens and Vermandois were all killed, many of them with their sons, and some of them with all the men they had brought from their bailliage, or so the citizen of Paris noted in his journal.26 These men were the landowners, castellans and managers of estates, around whom the economy revolved: of necessity, since they had to be capable of fighting, they were in the prime of life and therefore at their most active. Agincourt cut a great swath through the natural leaders of French society in Artois, Ponthieu, Normandy, Picardy. And there was no one to replace them.
This pattern was repeated on a national scale, with the significant difference that there were plenty of men waiting to step into dead men’s shoes—especially from the Burgundian faction. Most of the important royal officers of state died or were captured at Agincourt. Inevitably, the military contingent was particularly hard hit. In addition to the constable Charles d’Albret, France lost her admiral, Jacques de Châtillon, and her grand-master of the crossbowmen, David de Rambures. Her prévôt of the marshals, Galois de Fougières, who is still remembered as the inspiration for the foundation of the French gendarmerie, was also killed; his body was found on the battlefield and buried in the nave of the abbey church at Auchy, but was exhumed at the request of the Gendarmerie Nationale in 1936 and reburied in the mausoleum of Versailles-Le Chesney.27 Marshal Boucicaut was captured and would die in an English prison.28
The king’s household officers were also cut down in huge numbers. Among the casualties were two of its most senior members, Guichard Dauphin, the grand-master of the household, and Guillaume de Martel, sire de Bacqueville, bearer of the oriflamme, and two of the latter’s sons. As the monk of St Denis lamented, Dauphin (a nephew of Charles d’Albret) and de Bacqueville were not young hot-heads, but “veteran knights, renowned for their high birth and military experience, who had guided the kingdom with their wise counsel”; their deaths were among those most to be regretted because although they had argued against giving battle, they chose to fight in the mêlée, whatever the outcome, rather than retreat with dishonour.29 Louis de Bourbon, count of Vendôme, and Charles d’Ivry, the former ambassadors to England, were both taken prisoner, though the latter was reported dead, with his eldest son, another Charles d’Ivry, who had indeed met his end in the battle.30
As is already apparent from the examples of local men who died at Agincourt, the third most striking aspect of the French list of the dead is that so many of them came not just from the same class but from the same families. From the greatest to the least, almost every family in the north of France with any pretension to nobility of birth lost at least one relative, and in some particularly tragic cases whole families were wiped out. Even the king of France himself was not exempt. Charles VI lost seven of his closest blood relatives in the battle: Jean, duke of Alençon; Edouard, duke of Bar, his brother, Jean de Bar, viscount of Pulsaye, and their nephew, Robert, count of Marle; Charles d’Albret; and finally, perhaps most ironically, both the younger brothers of John the Fearless, Antoine, duke of Brabant, and Philippe, count of Nevers.31
Time and again, the roll-call records brothers or fathers and sons who died together on the field of Agincourt. There are so many examples of these that to list them would be overwhelming, but it is worth pointing out that it is not unusual to find two or even three brothers who lost their lives in the battle. Jehan de Noyelle, a chamberlain of the duke of Burgundy, was killed there with his brothers Pierre and Lancelot, as were Oudart, sire de Renty, and his brothers Foulques and Jean; three brothers of Regnault de Chartres, the archbishop of Reims and chancellor of France, were also among the dead.32 Worse still, Enguerrand de Gribauval and Marie Quiéret lost all four of their sons at Agincourt, and were left with only their daughter, Jeanne, as the sole survivor and heiress to the family estates near Abbeville. It is likely that this was not the end of their suffering, for the Quiérets also lost several other members of their family, including Hutin de Quiéret, who was killed, and Bohort Quiéret, sire de Heuchin, and Pierre Quiéret, sire de Ramecourt, who were both captured. A fourth Quiéret, Jean, escaped with his life.33
A similar tale of unimaginable loss was sustained by David de Rambures, master of the crossbowmen of France, who came from an ancient family of Ponthieu, which traced its ancestry back to a knight who had been on the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century. A Burgundian by allegiance, he had been a member of the king’s council since 1402 and helped to negotiate the Leulinghen truces with England in 1413. As we have seen, he had also been very active in securing local defences in preparation for the English invasion. In 1412 he had embarked on a grand scheme to build a chateau de Rambures, which was to be the future family seat for himself and his heirs. The building work had to be temporarily suspended when de Rambures was summoned to help organise resistance to the English; it would be another half-century before it recommenced. Not only was David de Rambures himself killed at Agincourt, but three of his five sons, Jean, Hue and Philippe; a fourth son, another Jean, was a clergyman and therefore did not take part in the battle. The eldest son, André, survived but lost his inheritance, which was confiscated during the English conquest of Normandy, and it was not until after their withdrawal in 1450 that the family recovered the fledgling chateau and their lands. Like the de Gribauvals, the de Rambures brothers also lost members of their mother’s family, including Philippe d’Auxy, sire de Dampierre, and his son.34
Terrible though it must have been to lose two generations of a single family, there were those unfortunate enough to lose three. Robert, sire de Boissay, was one of the grand old men of French chivalry. He had been a companion of Bertrand du Guesclin, the simple Breton squire who rose to be constable of France and became a national hero for leading the French recovery after the defeat at Poitiers, and he was at du Guesclin’s side when the great man died during the siege of Châteauneuf-de-Randon in 1380. Nine years later, he was one of twenty-two knights who jousted at St Denis before the king, whose councillor and chamberlain he later became. Such was his reputation that, when he was arrested in 1404 and charged with various crimes committed in connection with a conflict of authority between the prévôt of Paris and the grand-master of the king’s household, he was entirely cleared of any wrongdoing: “the said Boissay, whose nobility is known to all, who has served the king so well, and who is wise, rich and an outstanding knight, so steadfast, . . . never accused or convicted of any crime.”35
Inevitably, de Boissay became caught up in the political struggle between the Armagnacs and Burgundians; he and his sons were among those Armagnacs who were violently seized from the dauphin’s household by the Cabochiens and thrown into prison during the revolt of 1413. Despite his advanced age, Robert de Boissay took up arms once again to resist the English invasion. He was killed at Agincourt, together with his two grandsons Colart and Charles. His son-in-law Thibaut de Chantemerle was captured at the battle and apparently never returned home,36 dying while still a prisoner in England. Like the de Rambures family, the de Boissays were dispossessed during Henry V’s conquest of Normandy, and it was many years later before another grandson Laurent de Boissay was able to regain the family lordship of Mesnières.37
Such stories could be told many times over, but one more is worth relating, if only because it gives us a rare glimpse of one of the women who lost so much in the battle. Perrette de la Rivière was the fourth child of Bureau de la Rivière, the friend and confidant of Charles V. Her two brothers Charles and Jacques both attached themselves to the Armagnac cause; Jacques, who was chamberlain to the dauphin, was arrested and imprisoned during the Cabochien revolt of 1413. A report that he had committed suicide in prison was circulated, but in fact he was murdered by the new Burgundian captain of Paris, who hung his body on a scaffold and put his decapitated head on public display. Perrette’s sister Jeanne, a celebrated beauty, married Jacques de Châtillon, the Armagnac admiral of France, and in 1409 Perrette herself married another Armagnac, Gui de la Roche-Guyon, a chamberlain of Charles VI, whose hereditary right it was to bear in battle the “Draco normannicus,” the dragon standard of the dukes of Normandy.38
At the battle of Agincourt, Perrette’s husband and her brothers-in-law Philippe de la Roche-Guyon and Jacques de Châtillon were all killed. Gui had been one of the leaders of the left wing, under the count of Vendôme, which suffered particularly heavy casualties. As bearer of the “Draco normannicus” it was his proud duty never to retreat before the English and it was understood that he would die in its defence. Jacques de Châtillon, who, with Raoul de Gaucourt, had been one of the founder members of the Order of the Prisoner’s Shackle, had taken his place as admiral of France in the vanguard and died there.39 Perrette’s brother, Charles de la Rivière, count of Dammartin, survived the carnage but there was little consolation in his escape: as one of the leaders of the rearguard, he was accused of having fled the field without ever having raised his sword.40
Bereft of almost all the adult males in her family, Perrette had now to take charge of her husband’s estates and bring up her four infants on her own. In her husband’s place, she became châtelaine of La Roche-Guyon, “the most inaccessible and the most impregnable of the castles of Normandy.” When Henry V invaded Normandy a second time, in 1417, one of the first places he occupied was Roncheville, which had belonged to the Roche-Guyons for half a century. As the other castles and towns of the duchy fell to him, La Roche-Guyon stood firm, Perrette having taken the precaution of restocking the fortress with men, arms and supplies. After the fall of Rouen in January 1419, Henry V could no longer afford to leave La Roche-Guyon in enemy hands and sent Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, to capture it.
Despite being one of Henry’s most able captains, the earl met with such decided resistance that he was unable to make any headway. Gui le Bouteiller, the turncoat captain of Rouen and “a person full of experience and resourcefulness,” then advised him to mine the fortress walls from the caves that riddled the neighbourhood. Having held out for several months, Perrette was forced to capitulate to save the lives of her garrison. According to the monk of St Denis, Gui le Bouteiller had his eyes on both the castle and its châtelaine: as a reward for his advice, Henry V granted him the castle and its dependencies in perpetuity for himself and his heirs, and gave his permission for him to marry Perrette. But both men had underestimated the courage and obstinacy of the lady herself. She flatly refused to marry le Bouteiller, not just because she considered him “a disloyal traitor” for taking the oath of allegiance to Henry V after the fall of Rouen, but because she had no intention of disinheriting her two sons by Gui de la Roche-Guyon, the elder of whom was not yet eight years old.
On 2 June 1419 she and her children, with all their moveable goods, left La Roche-Guyon under the king’s safe-conduct, and were brought before him at Mantes. Henry offered to pardon her rebellion against him, if she accepted Gui le Bouteiller as her husband and took the oath of allegiance to him as “the legitimate heir to the throne of France.” Once again, Perrette refused, declaring that ruin was less odious to her than marriage with “the most vile of traitors” and that she recognised only the dauphin as the true heir of France. Unusually, Henry V allowed this defiance to go unpunished and gave the redoubtable Perrette and her brood permission to leave Normandy unmolested and go wherever they pleased.41
In a macabre way, Perrette de la Rivière was more fortunate than some of the other women who lost husbands, fathers, sons and brothers in the battle. At least she knew they were dead, for the bodies of Gui de la Roche-Guyon and Jacques de Châtillon were among the very few to be identified by their servants and recovered from the field.42 For many women there was no such certainty, and for months afterwards they were left in limbo, not knowing the fate of their loved ones or whether they themselves were wives or widows. The emotional distress this caused was exacerbated by the financial problems that the complex situation created.
The sisters of Charles, sire de Noviant, for example, knew that he was killed in the battle because his body was found, but the fate of Jean, his brother and heir, was still not known at the beginning of December. No ransom demand had been received, but the possibility remained that he was still alive and a prisoner somewhere in England. Until Jean’s death was also confirmed, his sisters could not legally inherit the family estates. Though they were granted permission to administer and enjoy the use of them, they could not make any permanent settlement or disposal, and even the most basic transaction was complicated by the inability to pinpoint legal ownership. Ysabeau la Mareschalle, Charles’s childless widow, even had to look to her sisters-in-law to pay her widow’s dower.43
Worse still was the case of the unfortunate Jeanne de Gaillouvel, wife of Pierre de Hellenvillier, the bailli of Evreux, in Normandy. As late as 9 May 1416, almost six months after the battle, she had not yet discovered what had happened to her husband and she and her seven children were in severe financial straits. Pierre de Hellenvillier had held many of his lands, lordships and revenues in chief from the king, but the royal officials had taken them back into the king’s hands, saying that her husband must be dead. Jeanne had clung to the belief that her husband was still alive and made diligent efforts to learn news of him. “She heard some say that her husband was a prisoner of a knight of England called Cornwall, by which she hopes at the blessing of the Lord to have good and certain news soon, hopefully that her husband is living rather than dead.” It would, she pleaded, “be a very hard, costly and damaging thing,” if she were to be deprived of so much of her husband’s income on the mere assumption that he was dead. Jeanne’s request to be allowed to keep the revenues until she had certain news of her husband’s fate was temporarily granted, but it seems likely that it was a lost cause. Sir John Cornewaille was indeed an indefatigable collector of ransomable prisoners, but the name of Pierre de Hellenvillier does not occur among them. He probably lay where he had fallen, unrecognised on the field of Agincourt.44
The problem of identifying the dead was made more difficult than it might have been by the fact that the bodies were systematically plundered. The English, as was their right as victors, had stripped the corpses of any valuables, including armour, jewellery and clothing. These were legitimate prizes of war, some of which would be kept—particularly the weapons and armour, which would replace those lost or damaged by the men-at-arms—but most of which would be sold for profit. There was so much to be taken that Henry, ever conscious of the possibility of a French rally, or an ambush on the road, became concerned that his men were overburdening themselves and gave orders that no one was to acquire more than he needed for himself.45
Once the English had finished, the corpses were despoiled for a second time by the local people, who literally stripped them stark naked. “None of them, however, illustrious or distinguished, possessed at our departure any more covering, save only to conceal his nature, than that with which Nature had endowed him when first he saw the light,” the chaplain noted.46 This was more than just a conventional pious platitude about all men being equal under the skin. Without their banners, pennons, surcoats or coats of arms, it was impossible for the heralds and other armorial experts to identify which individuals had been killed. Once they had also been robbed of their armour and garments, it was not even possible to tell a nobleman from a citizen militiaman.
Identifying the dead was made more difficult by the fact that so many of them had received head and facial wounds. One chronicle claimed that only eighteen out of some five or six hundred Breton dead could be identified “because all the others were so lacerated that no one could recognise them.” This was in part because of the nature of the battle: the arrows had been aimed principally at the visors of the approaching enemy, and those men-at-arms who fell in the crush and the mud were dispatched by the archers, who raised their visors as they lay helpless and stabbed them with their daggers or struck them with their leaden mallets. Some of the dead must also have been the prisoners whose execution Henry had ordered when a French rally seemed likely. Again, head wounds are likely to have been a common cause of death, since the prisoners would all have been unhelmed. It may perhaps be significant in this context that when the body of Antoine, duke of Brabant, was discovered, two days after the battle, it was lying naked a little way from the field. He had a wound to his head but his throat had also been cut. One imagines that he was too important a prisoner to have been executed—but in the heat of battle his makeshift surcoat was evidently not enough to identify and protect him.47
The local Ruisseauville chronicler also claimed that “the king of England had 500 men well armed and sent them amongst the dead, to take off their coats of arms and a great quantity of armour. They had small axes in their hands and other weapons and they cut both the dead and the living in the face so that they might not be recognised, even the English who were dead as well as the others.” Though he was not noted for his accuracy, his story may be substantially true. Le Févre de St Remy also records that Henry V ordered that all the armour, above and beyond that which his men could carry away, was to be gathered together in a single house or barn, which was then to be set on fire. While one can imagine that many of the corpses might have been disfigured in the process of removing their armour, especially as this must have been done in haste, this was not the object of the exercise, but incidental to it. The real purpose was to prevent such a vast cache of armour and weapons falling into the hands of the enemy, enabling them to mount an attack on the rear of the English army as it resumed its march to Calais.48
Before that march could begin, there were other tasks to perform. There were too many bodies lying on the battlefield for the English to contemplate giving them all a Christian burial; we do not even know whether they did this for their own compatriots. Certainly the corpses of some of the more eminent victims—in particular, Edward, duke of York, and Michael, earl of Suffolk—were recovered for removal to England. Given the length of time it would take to transport them, and the lack of facilities to embalm them or encase them in lead to prevent them putrefying, it was the medieval practice to quarter the bodies and boil them until the flesh came away from the bones. This pragmatic but unpleasant procedure meant that the bones could then easily be transported back to England in a simple chest or coffer, to be interred with all due ceremony in their final resting place. Who was responsible for carrying out this gruesome office we do not know, though we can guess that Thomas Morstede and his team of surgeons—if they were not too busy attending the living—were probably involved.49
It would be several days before the rest of the dead were buried. The families of the greater lords sent their servants and priests to search the battlefield for their loved ones. In this way, the bodies of the dukes of Alençon, Bar and Brabant were discovered, together with those of Constable d’Albret, Jacques de Châtillon, Galois de Fougières, the archbishop of Sens and the counts of Nevers and Roucy. Even at this late stage, some men were still found alive under the heaps of dead. Englebert van Edingen, sire de Kestergat, for instance, was discovered lying badly wounded three days after the battle, but even though he was carried to St Pol, he did not recover and died shortly afterwards. Every effort was made to take the dead back to their homes for burial beside their ancestors: the body of Philippe, count of Nevers, was embalmed and taken to the Cistercian abbey of Elan, near Mézières, in the Ardennes; the corpse of his brother the duke of Brabant was embalmed on the field and carried in a formal funeral procession through the grieving towns of his duchy to lie in state in Brussels, before being buried beside his first wife at Tervueren. The duke of Alençon was similarly embalmed so that his body could be taken for burial in the abbey church of St Martin at Sées, but his entrails were interred close to the great altar in the Franciscan church at Hesdin. Guillaume de Longueil, captain of Dieppe, was brought back to the town and buried with due honour in the church of St Jacques, together with one of the two sons who died at Agincourt with him; the body of his other son presumably could not be found.50
Many other members of the local nobility found a final resting place in the churches and abbeys of Artois, Picardy and Flanders, where they were joined by those for whom the journey home was just too far. It was said that so great a number of bodies were brought for burial to the churchyards of Azincourt and Ruisseauville that all further interments there had to be prohibited. The proximity of the two churches at Hesdin, some seven miles from the battlefield, meant that they also received so many corpses that they were obliged to resort to mass graves. Constable d’Albret, far from his native Gascony, was given the place of honour before the grand altar of the Franciscan church, but thirteen other noblemen were interred elsewhere in the building, including two “lords whose names we do not know,” who were buried together by the holy water stoup in the nave. The great abbey church of Auchy-les-Moines at Hesdin provided a final resting place within its walls for fifteen noblemen, including Jacques de Châtillon, his brothers-in-law Gui and Philippe de la Roche-Guyon, who shared a single grave, Guichard Dauphin and eleven others. Despite the fact that four of these, including Galois de Fougières and “le petit Hollandes,” the son of the bailli of Rouen, were interred together, space was at such a premium that twelve more corpses, among them that of Symmonet de Moranvilliers, the bailli of Chartres, had to be buried in a communal grave in the cemetery behind the choir. It can have been small compensation for such indignity that their names and places of burial were assiduously recorded by Montjoie king of arms, with the assistance of Ponthieu and Corbie kings of arms, numerous heralds and pursuivants and the servants of those who had died.51
In the end, it fell to the local clergy to make the necessary arrangements for the interment of the unidentified dead. Louis de Luxembourg, bishop of Thérouanne, in whose diocese Azincourt lay, authorised the consecration of a section of the battlefield. Under the direction of the abbots of Ruisseauville and Blangy, a series of long trenches were dug and somewhere in the region of six thousand corpses received a crude but Christian burial in these anonymous grave pits. A great wooden cross was raised over each mass grave, but no permanent memorial was erected until the nineteenth century and their location is still a matter of dispute today.52 The dead of Agincourt were not the first, nor yet the last, to find an anonymous corner in the graveyard of Europe which is the Somme.