CHAPTER SEVEN

OF MONEY AND MEN

What will the wise prince . . . do when . . . he must undertake wars and fight battles?” Christine de Pizan asked in The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry. “First of all, he will consider how much strength he has or can obtain, how many men are available and how much money. For unless he is well supplied with these two basic elements, it is folly to wage war, for they are necessary to have above all else, especially money.”¹

Henry V’s bitter experiences of campaigning on a shoestring in Wales had taught him the important lesson that successful warfare had to be properly financed. By the simple expedients of cutting back fraud and waste, restoring central control and auditing, reviewing rents on crown lands and keeping a close eye on expenditure, he had succeeded in improving the traditional crown revenues to the extent that, from some sources, he received more than double the income available to his father. Annuities, or pensions, which his father had cheerfully dished out like sweets to children to win favour, were cut back by half under Henry V—and those receiving them were now compelled to work for them by serving on the king’s expeditions, on pain of losing them altogether.²

Now, in preparation for the Agincourt campaign, Henry ordered his treasurer, Thomas, earl of Arundel, to audit all the departments of state and to report back to him on what income he could expect and what debts he owed “so that before departing the king can make provision according to the burden of each charge; and thus the king’s conscience will be clear and he can set forth as a well ordered christian prince and so better accomplish his voyage to the pleasure of God and comfort of his lieges.”³ These were not just fine words. Every single royal official, from the treasurer of England down to the humblest clerk in the exchequer, knew that the king himself was scrutinising their accounts. Despite all the other demands on his time, no detail was too small, no financial arrangement too complex, to escape his attention. The chance survival of a note by a clerk of the council reveals that even when Henry returned to France in the crisis after the disastrous defeat at Baugé in 1421, he still found time to go through the accounts of one of his officials, who had died four years earlier. Not only that, but he checked the mathematics, signed the accounts with his own hand, and made notes in the margin, indicating which items needed further inquiry from the exchequer auditors. Such personal and meticulous attention to detail was unprecedented and reflected both the energy and commitment that Henry brought to his role as king.⁴

As a result of all these measures, hard cash began to pour into the exchequer at levels undreamt of by Henry’s predecessors. Even so, it was not enough to finance a major campaign outside the realm. For this, the king needed to tax his subjects, something he could not do without the approval of Parliament. The principle had been established in 1254 that a tax which fell on all the people of the realm had to have their common consent and could no longer be approved solely by an assembly of lords; in 1407 it was further accepted that only the House of Commons had the power to grant taxation. The representatives of “the commune of your land,” as the Commons came to describe itself, were the knights of the shire and the burgesses of the towns who were elected in the shire and borough courts, two for each constituency. The lords spiritual and temporal were summoned individually and personally by the king himself. Both houses met separately and together in the king’s palace of Westminster, sometimes in the royal presence, and their meetings provided an opportunity to present petitions for the redress of grievances, to enact statutes, ratify treaties and confirm judgements (such as the condemnations of Cambridge, Scrope and Grey for treason) as well as to grant taxation.⁵

The forty years preceding Henry’s reign had been marked by constant and sometimes bitter conflict between the king and Parliament. All this was to change under the new king. During his years as prince of Wales, Henry had established extremely good relations with the Commons, which were to serve him in good stead when he became king. Parliament met more frequently in his reign than in his father’s, but its sessions were much shorter and, like the king himself, more businesslike and efficient. Working with and through its members, whose advice he actively and genuinely sought, Henry listened and responded to their concerns but also pre-empted their criticism by acting as a model king himself, prompt to do justice, financially efficient, administratively effective. As a result, Henry enjoyed the confidence of his parliaments to a degree that was almost unprecedented.⁶

The most significant result of this collaboration was the willingness of the Commons to grant Henry’s requests for money. Taxation at this period was levied directly and indirectly. The direct taxes were called subsidies, and were levied on the value of movable goods at the customary rates of one-fifteenth in the countryside and one-tenth in the towns. Subsidies were payable by everyone, regardless of rank, and only those having movable goods worth less than 10s were exempt. As far as the towns and villages were concerned, a fixed sum was levied from each one and it was then up to the local assessors to decide what proportion each individual inhabitant should pay. The clergy were also liable to pay subsidies at the higher level of a tenth, but these were granted in their own assemblies, called convocations, which usually met at the same time as Parliament. There was a separate convocation for each see, presided over by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and their grants tended to mirror those made by Parliament. Indirect taxes were principally levied on the export of English wool. English merchants were required to pay 43s 4d for each sack of wool or 240 fleeces, and 100s for each hide; foreign merchants paid proportionately more, at 50s and 106s 4d, respectively. Henry also obtained further taxes of 3s per tun of wine and 12d in the pound on all other merchandise entering or leaving the country, for the specific purpose of funding the safeguarding of the seas. Grants of this kind were usually awarded for a limited term of several years so that the king had to come back to Parliament to obtain their renewal. In the nine and a half years of Henry’s reign, he received more than ten full “subsidies,” all but two of them during the years of intensive war effort between 1414 and 1420. Taxation at these levels had not occurred since the beginning of Richard II’s reign—and then it had caused the Peasants’ Revolt. Henry’s demands, by contrast, were met with scarcely a murmur of protest: as one historian has pointed out, he got more money with less trouble than any other king of England. By exercising his skills in political leadership, he was able to summon his parliaments in the knowledge that they would, by and large, do as he wished.⁷

Henry had been granted a full fifteenth and tenth in his first parliament, in 1413, but, in a move calculated to surprise and endear him to his subjects, had declined to ask for another at his next parliament in April 1414. This proved to be the lull before the storm because his third parliament, held in December of the same year, was asked to grant a double subsidy—not one, but two whole fifteenths and tenths. It fell to the king’s half-uncle Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, who, as chancellor, had to make the traditional opening address to the assembled Lords and Commons, to put forward a persuasive argument. A brilliant orator, he needed all his skills to win the day. Parliament had been called at the king’s command, he declared, to advise how to recover the king’s inheritance, which had long been unjustly detained by the enemy. There was a season for everything. Just as there was a time for a tree to seed, flower, fruit and die, so it was given to men that there should be times for peace, for war and for labour. The king, seeing that peace reigned in his kingdom and that his quarrel was just (both of which were necessary if he was to wage war overseas), had decided that, with God’s assistance, the time was now ripe for putting his purpose into action. He therefore needed three things: the good and loyal counsel of his parliament, the strong and true assistance of his people and a heavy subsidy from his subjects—but, Beaufort added, somewhat lamely, victory would reduce the costs to his subjects and bring great honour.⁸

The double subsidy was duly granted, its approval by the Commons assisted by the fact that the speaker for this parliament was none other than Beaufort’s cousin and Henry’s trusted adjutant Thomas Chaucer. The southern and northern convocations also obliged with grants of two-tenths, having their own reasons to be grateful to Henry V for his stout defence of the Church in the face of the Lollard threat. Fortified with the knowledge that large sums of money would soon be flowing into his treasury, Henry was able to intensify his preparations for war.⁹

Generous though the subsidy grants were, the money could not be collected all at once. Half was to be paid by February 1415 but the second half was not due until a year later. This left Henry with the headache of finding ready cash to pay for his military expenditure in the meantime. There was only one way this could be done: he would have to borrow. Edward III had financed his French wars by loans from the Bardi and Peruzzi banking families of Florence—and had ruined them when he defaulted on their repayments. This was not an option open to Henry V. Instead, he looked to his own subjects to help him finance the forthcoming war.

On 10 March 1415, Henry summoned the mayor and aldermen of London to the Tower and informed them that it was his intention to cross the sea to reconquer the possessions of the crown and that he needed more money. Four days later, Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, the king’s youngest brothers—John, duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester—and Edward, duke of York, met with the city dignitaries at the Guildhall to discuss the matter. London was incomparably the richest city in the kingdom, and, as an international centre of trade, its merchants had greater access to cash than those of most other towns and cities. This was particularly important at a time when most movable wealth, hereditary, ecclesiastical, aristocratic and mercantile, was tied up in goods, especially jewellery and plate, rather than hard cash. It was an indication of how much the king needed the London loan that the mayor was given the seat of honour, and was invited to sit with the archbishop on his right and the royal dukes on his left. This flattery produced the required result. On 16 June the city offered the king a loan of 10,000 marks (almost $4,450,000 today), receiving from him a gold collar called the “Pusan d’Or,” weighing 56 ounces as security for its repayment.¹⁰ The choice of this particular item was pregnant with meaning, for it was an “SS collar,” which had been the livery of the Lancastrians since at least the time of John of Gaunt and was worn by their most important retainers as a symbol of loyalty and allegiance. It was so named because it consisted of a chain of some forty-one S-shaped links, which were made of gold, silver or pewter, according to the rank of the wearer. The “Pusan d’Or” was probably the king’s own collar, since it was made of gold and richly decorated with jewelled and enamelled crowns and antelopes, the former suggesting royal status and the latter being one of Henry V’s personal badges.

Though London was the first and the wealthiest city to be approached for a loan, it was by no means the only one. On 10 May Henry addressed what was, in effect, a begging letter to his “very dear, and loyal, and well beloved” subjects. It was written in French, which was still the language of choice for the English aristocracy, as it had been since the Norman Conquest, and under the signet, the most private and personal of the king’s seals. Since it was dictated by Henry himself, it bore the unmistakable imprint of his character and, as such, it is a very revealing document indeed. The letter was frank and to the point; a persuasive appeal to the recipient’s loyalty, backed up with just the tiniest hint of a threat. As an insight into Henry’s methods of governing, it could not be bettered. It opened by explaining that he was now setting out on his voyage, that he had paid his men the first part of the wages which were due to them and that he had promised them the second on the point of embarkation. The grants and loans he had received from his faithful subjects were not enough to enable him to fulfil that promise, “so that, for lack of this second payment, our said voyage is likely to be delayed, and the first payment, made by us, to be wasted, to the great injury of us, and of our whole realm, which God forbid.” Each recipient was asked, “as you desire the success of our said voyage, and the common good of us and of our whole realm,” to lend such a sum as the bearer of the letter would suggest and to send it “with all the haste that can be made.” “And you ought to take this our prayer tenderly and effectively to heart,” Henry added, “without failing us, or the confidence we have in you.”¹¹

Who could refuse such a very personal and direct appeal? Certainly not the towns, religious communities and individuals to whom the letter was addressed. Richard Courtenay, bishop of Norwich, as treasurer of the king’s chamber, was the official charged with the overall responsibility for raising the money, probably because the chamber was responsible for the many personal items of jewellery and plate that the king had to pledge as security. Richard II’s gold crown, for example, which was studded with 56 rubies, 40 sapphires, 8 diamonds and 7 large pearls, and valued at £800, was pawned for a loan of 1000 marks from the people of Norfolk, who contributed sums ranging from 500 marks from the mayor, sheriffs and citizens of Norwich down to 10 marks from a certain Nicholas Scounfet. A great tabernacle of gold, richly garnished with jewels, which had belonged to the duke of Burgundy, was similarly given as security for 860 marks loaned by a consortium of laymen and clergymen from Devon, including the dean and chapter of Exeter Cathedral, the mayors and citizens of Exeter and Plymouth, and the abbots and priors of Tavistock, Plympton, Launceston and Buckfast.¹²

The biggest loan of all, worth £10,936 3s 8d, came from Roger Salveyn, treasurer of Calais, who would have to wait more than six years for repayment in full. Other towns and cities gave what they could, the sums providing an interesting indication of their comparative wealth. Bristol, for instance, offered £582, Norwich £333 6s 8d, King’s Lynn and Newcastle £216 13s 4d each, York £200, Boston £80, Beverley, Canterbury, Exeter, Northampton and Nottingham £66 13s 4d each, Bridgewater £50, Gloucester, Maidstone and Sudbury £40 each, Bury St Edmunds and Faversham £33 6s 8d, Plymouth £20 and Dartmouth £13 6s 8d. As with subsidies, where a loan came from a town or city, the level was fixed by discussion with the mayor and his officials, who then had to recoup the figure from the inhabitants. The records for a loan of £100 made by the city of Coventry in 1424 reveal that scarcely anyone was exempt and individuals had to pay sums ranging from £1 6s 8d down to the merest 10d (the equivalent of $27.77 today).¹³

It would be surprising if fund-raising on this scale did not meet with protest, particularly from townsmen who had already contributed the first of the two-tenths of the value of their movable goods through the double subsidy of 1414, and were now being asked to contribute to a further “voluntary” loan. They could not even look to the consoling prospect of receiving interest, since usury was strictly prohibited by the Church, and all loans between Christians had to be interest-free. The sum of £100 had been demanded from Salisbury but was reduced, after much hard bargaining, to two-thirds of that figure, which was to be raised from eighty-five of the leading citizens. Even so, it took the threat of the king’s displeasure before the town finally handed over the money. Resentment in Salisbury apparently boiled over when Sir James Harington, bringing his retinue of Lancashire men-at-arms and archers to the muster at Southampton, attempted to cross the Avon by the Salisbury bridge and found himself embroiled in a full-scale affray with the townsfolk, in which four citizens were killed and fourteen thrown over the bridge into the river. In London, too, a grocer, a draper and a ward official were charged with having falsely accused an alderman of having levied a larger sum than was due from them for the city’s loan to the king; they confessed their guilt and were sentenced to a year and a day in Newgate Prison, though this was remitted on payment of a bond for good behaviour.¹⁴

Wealthy individuals, many of whom had lent money to the crown before, were more prepared to come forward with substantial loans. London mercers (textile dealers) were foremost among these. John Hende, for instance, made the largest single loan of £4666 13s 4d (now worth almost $3.2 million) and Richard Whittington, known to generations of English schoolchildren as Dick Whittington of pantomime fame, lent £700. Either a younger son or a member of a junior branch of a family of Gloucestershire gentry, Whittington had made his fortune by coming to London and setting up as a dealer in costly textiles. Having established himself as a supplier of cloth of gold and embroidered velvets worth well over £1000 annually to the royal household, he became an alderman of the city of London, and went on to serve three terms as mayor in 1397-8, 1406-7 and 1419-20, and also as a Member of Parliament in 1416. As mayor of the Staple at Calais, he was one of the wealthiest merchants in the country and could therefore afford to make regular loans to both Henry IV and Henry V, including one of £2000 to the latter soon after his accession.¹⁵

Not all merchants were as willing as Richard Whittington to bankroll the king and his forthcoming war. Resident foreign merchants, who had commercial interests in other countries, including France, were not at all happy at being asked to contribute to the war chest. Antonio Morosini, the Venetian chronicler, complained that many Lombard and Italian merchants were being seized, together with their goods, and were forced to pay the king huge sums to obtain their release. Discreditable though it seems, Morosini was right. On 25 May 1415 ten partners in Italian merchant houses were summoned before the privy council and, when they refused to make loans totalling £2000, were flung into the Fleet Prison—a nicely sardonic touch, since this was the jail for debtors.¹⁶

This sort of action probably had the desired effect, for, by the beginning of June, money from foreign merchants was rolling into the treasury: the Albertis and John Victor from Florence obliged with almost £800 and £266 13s 4d, respectively, Paul de Meulan from Lucca with £132 and Nicholas de Muleyn and his associates from Venice with £660. Perhaps as compensation for their harsh treatment, all were repaid in full within the year, though it was an indication of the strain on the king’s finances that Laurence de Alberti had to accept a novel form of credit, being allowed to bring in five ships without having to pay any duty on their cargoes.¹⁷

The wealth of the Church was also placed at the king’s disposal. It comes as no surprise to find that Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, the wealthiest clergyman in England, lent his nephew almost £2630 in June and July alone, or that Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, and Philip Repingdon, bishop of Lincoln, should also have supported their monarch to the tune of £200 and £400, respectively. Abbots, priors and deans of cathedral chapters also had access to the funds of their communities—though quite where Friar Henry Cronnale, a member of a mendicant order dedicated to poverty, got the £200 he lent is a mystery. What is surprising is the number of relatively humble clergymen who, willingly or not, pledged quite substantial sums: thirteen parsons in the diocese of Durham alone each lent £20 ($13,330 today), as did William Shyrymton, rector of Holt-market, in Norfolk.¹⁸

The complex systems of accounting for this money, the deferral of some repayments (in some cases for many years) and the incomplete nature of the records mean that it is virtually impossible to determine exactly how much Henry managed to raise. The only chronicler to hazard a guess was the Burgundian Enguerrand de Monstrelet, writing thirty years afterwards, whose estimate of 500,000 gold nobles (the equivalent of $111 million today) was accepted by most subsequent chroniclers, English and French.¹⁹ Convenient though this may be, all that can be said with any certainty is that it was a huge sum, and that it was enough not only to pay the army’s wages but also to finance the campaign. Whatever else dictated Henry’s military decisions on the Agincourt campaign, shortage of money was not one of them.

Despite the fact that England had no standing army in medieval times, which meant that every single serving soldier had to be individually recruited, raising sufficient men to fight under Henry’s command was a much easier exercise than finding the cash to pay them. Indeed, in this respect, he had an embarrassment of riches, for he was unable to find places on board for all the men who mustered at Southampton. Even though he issued a last-minute repeat of the order to seize any ships left in the port of London and bring them “with all possible speed” to Southampton, he still had to leave some men behind.²⁰ The old feudal system of owing personal military service for a particular piece of land had long since broken down, though its influence remained. The king still expected his tenants-in-chief to accompany him to war and to bring with them a certain number of men, most of whom would inevitably be drawn from their own landholdings and areas of influence. Instead of being bound by ties of loyalty and obligation, however, these soldiers, from highest to lowest, were bound by written contracts of service, which were legally defined and enforceable by law. England had developed a particularly sophisticated system for raising armies by this method in response to the almost continuous demands of fighting the war in France under Edward III. It was based on the indenture, a single document that consisted of two identical copies of the contract, both signed, witnessed and, where relevant, sealed by the two parties. The document was then cut in two, not in a straight line, but in a wavy or indented one. Each party then took one of the copies. If any dispute arose about the terms and conditions of service, both parties had to produce their copies, which could then be placed together to ensure that the indents matched and that the two were genuinely parts of the original indenture. This simple but ingenious stratagem made it extremely difficult to produce a fake document, or for either party to defraud the other by making changes to his own copy.

There were two types of retaining indenture. One was drawn up to create a contract for service in peace and war, usually for life, the other for a specific military campaign and for a predetermined length of time. Many of the men who fought at Agincourt were there as life retainers of the king or other lord whom they served, and, just as they formed the core of his household in peace, so they were the basis of his military retinue in war. These men were the first Henry would call upon, issuing an order on 22 March 1415 that any knight, esquire, valet or anyone else who was in receipt of a royal fee, wage or annuity granted by Edward III, Richard II, the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Henry IV or himself was to present himself in London by 24 April at the latest.²¹

On 19 April the king entertained the members of his great council—all four royal dukes, together with nine earls, fifteen barons, both archbishops, eight bishops and several abbots of major houses—to breakfast at Westminster Palace and once again sought their approval for his war against France. Having noted that the king had followed their earlier advice to renew his diplomatic efforts and moderate his claims without success, the meeting duly gave the war its formal sanction and put in place the arrangements that would be necessary for its successful prosecution.²²

Ten days later, a large number of temporary military indentures for the Agincourt campaign were signed at Westminster. A typical example was that of Thomas Chaucer, speaker of the House of Commons. In his indenture with the king, Chaucer contracted to serve in person for one year with a company of eleven men-at-arms and thirty-six archers (though, like many other captains, he actually mustered an extra archer when the campaign began).²³ “Men-at-arms” was a loose term that had come to replace “knights” as the standard description of the medieval fighting man. As it included every rank in society, from the king and royal dukes down to the humblest esquire who could afford to equip himself with the basics of horses, arms and armour, the indenture always indicated the status of the men-at-arms. In Chaucer’s case, all his men-at-arms were esquires, including himself. His archers were to be mounted, as were those of most contingents, though some archers were recruited without horses and so presumably travelled, as they fought, on foot. In either case, the archers almost invariably outnumbered the men-at-arms by three to one, a proportion that was unusually high and unique to England.²⁴

The wages for the campaign had been set by the king at the meeting of the great council. The rates were customary and varied according to where the campaign was to be fought. In this case, although the council had discussed an expedition “towards Harfleur and the region of Normandy,” Henry was determined to maintain the military advantage by keeping the enemy guessing as to where he intended to attack. He could not hide the scale of his preparations, but his precise objective in France would remain a secret until after his fleet had sailed. The indentures therefore deliberately left the destination open: service would be required “in our duchy of Guyenne, or in our realm of France,” commencing on the day of muster. Wages would be paid at the daily rate of 13s 4d for a duke, 6s 8d for an earl, 4s for a baron, 2s for a knight, 12d for an esquire and 6d for an archer, mounted or not. Every group of thirty men-at-arms was also entitled to a “regard,” or bonus payment, of 100 marks, which was effectively a form of compensation for the cost of armour and loss of horses. If the expedition went to Aquitaine no bonus would be paid, but the wages of the esquires and archers would be increased to an annual rate of £26 13s 4d and £13 6s 8d, respectively.²⁵

The wages offered for military service in France were proportionately better for those in the lower ranks than for those in the upper echelons of society. The aristocracy were expected to fight by virtue of their birth: the military profession was their calling and duty, and it was not anticipated that they could earn a living from their military wages alone. The same was true of knights, whose outlay in horses, arms and armour for the campaign would probably cost them more than they could expect from a year’s income. (Forty pounds a year of landed or rental income was considered sufficient to support the status of knighthood in the medieval period, and this was also about the sum a knight could expect to earn from a year’s military service at the king’s wages.) For esquires and archers, who made up the backbone of the army, the financial attraction was much greater. An esquire earning £18 5s a year in war was likely to be better off than in peacetime: the London subsidy rolls for 1412 identify 42 citizens who claimed the rank of esquire, but only 12 of them enjoyed a rental income exceeding £15 per annum. An archer was even better off: on a daily wage of 6d, he would receive roughly £9 a year, without having to pay for his food and drink. In civilian life, even highly skilled workmen and craftsmen, such as carpenters, masons and plumbers, generally earned only between 3d and 5d a day, out of which they had to find their own subsistence.²⁶ The prospect of earning 6d a day was also attractive to those of higher social rank. Many of Henry V’s archers were yeomen, farmers and minor landholders with incomes in the region of £5 a year, who could afford to equip themselves with a horse and basic armour; some were even younger brothers or sons of gentry whose family purse was not deep enough to provide the king’s host with more than one man-at-arms. For them, military service in France offered the prospect of advancement, and a number of men who were initially recruited as archers would later be found serving as men-at-arms.²⁷

The wages for the campaign were to be paid quarterly in advance: the first half of the first quarter was due on signing the indenture and the second on mustering with the correct number of men ready for embarkation. (Henry V was, as one might expect, an absolute stickler for this: every company was mustered regularly before, during and after the campaign, and wages were docked for every missing man.) If the campaign lasted less than a year, then wages were to be paid up to the point of embarkation for the homeward journey, plus eight days’ travelling allowance. As we have already seen, the cash sums required to finance these payments were immense. The first quarter’s wage bill for Chaucer’s company alone—which was around the average size for a man of his standing—amounted to £156 7s 101/2d (almost $104,650 in modern currency).²⁸ The aristocrats fielded much larger companies. Thomas, duke of Clarence, had the largest, with 240 men-at-arms, including himself, one earl, two barons, fourteen knights and 222 esquires, and 720 mounted archers; his brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, came second, with 200 men-at-arms and 600 mounted archers; Edward, duke of York, Thomas, earl of Dorset, and Thomas, earl of Arundel, each fielded 100 men-at-arms and 300 mounted archers.²⁹

As security for the payment of the wages, Henry had to raid his treasure chests once more. Chaucer received jewels and plate to the nominal value of the second tranche due, which the king was obliged to redeem within nineteen months; if he did not do so, then, according to the terms of the indenture, Chaucer and his heirs were to be at liberty to keep, sell or otherwise dispose of the items as they wished, without fear of any impediment or retribution by the king. This was a standard term in all indentures, but it was not one that either party felt obliged to keep. Clarence, for instance, was given “the crown Henry” on condition that it was kept whole and undamaged: in fact, he could not afford to pay his own men and broke the crown up into several pieces, giving a large bejewelled fleur-de-lis and several pinnacles to various knights and esquires, none of which he was able to redeem in his own lifetime.³⁰ Edward, duke of York, and Thomas, earl of Salisbury, also received items of extraordinary workmanship and value: York was given a gold alms dish, “made like a ship, standing on a bear, garnished with nineteen balays [peach-coloured rubies], twelve great and fourteen other pearls, weighing 22 lbs 11/2 oz,” while Salisbury got “a large ship of silver over gilt, with twelve men-at-arms, fighting, on the deck, and at each end of the ship a castle, weighing 65 lbs 3 oz.” The craftsmanship, for which English silversmiths and goldsmiths were famed throughout Europe, counted for nothing: it was the melted-down value of the precious metal, together with the jewels, that gave these objects their value.

Less important men, with smaller retinues, also found themselves in receipt of quite extraordinary items: Sir Thomas Hauley was given a sword garnished with ostrich feathers, which had belonged to the king when prince of Wales; Sir John Radclyff a bejewelled tablet of gold, containing a piece of Christ’s seamless robe; and John Durwade, esquire, “a Tabernacle of gold, within which were an image of our Lady sitting on a green terrage, with the figures of Adam and Eve, and four angels at the four corners.”³¹

The king’s financial commitment to his men was not limited to paying their wages and the bonus; in every indenture he also undertook to pay the costs of shipping each company to and from France or Aquitaine, together with its horses, harness and supplies. As with the wages, there was a predetermined schedule listing how many horses each man was permitted to take according to his status. The three dukes, Clarence, Gloucester and York, were allowed fifty each, the earls twenty-four, each banneret or baron sixteen, each knight six, each esquire four and each archer one. Again, if we look at Chaucer’s company of forty-eight men, he was expected to travel with a minimum of eighty-four horses at the king’s expense; presumably, had he so wished, he could have taken more at his own cost. Clarence’s company of 960, by comparison, was entitled to take 1798 horses.³²

Why were so many horses needed? The army had to be capable of covering long distances at speed but every man-at-arms, even the esquire, was still expected to be able to fight on horseback as well as on foot. Warhorses were highly prized and ferociously expensive, since, like horses used in jousts or tournaments, they had to be intensively trained to act contrary to their natural instincts, so that they would run unswervingly towards opponents, obey commands in the heat of close fighting and remain unpanicked by the noise and press of battle. Though there were breeding programmes in England and Wales, the best horses were usually imported from Spain, Italy or the Low Countries and sold at the great international fairs of Champagne in France and at Smithfield in London.³³ Most medieval knights of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries spent anything between £5 and £100 on their warhorse, £25 being an average sum. At the top end of this scale was the courser, standing some fourteen to fifteen hands high, and capable of carrying the weight of a man in a full suit of armour. The courser had both stamina and agility, so it was ideal for campaigning and was the preferred mount of those who could afford it. Those who could not had to make do with a cheaper rouncy; even this was of a better quality than the horse of a mounted archer, which was needed only for travelling, never for a fighting situation, and was usually worth a mere £1.³⁴

The six horses that a knight was permitted to take to war at the king’s expense would fall into three categories: his warhorse, which was probably a courser, and a substitute; a lighter saddlehorse, such as a palfrey, for riding when not in full armour, and one or two rouncies for his servants; and finally one or two packhorses to carry his baggage. The greater the status of the company leader, the more servants and baggage he would be taking with him. Even the humblest esquire, with his four horses, must have been expected to bring a warhorse, a palfrey, a rouncy and a packhorse, a retinue which presupposes that he had at least one or two servants to look after them. Some of these servants may have been archers, but others were undoubtedly just boys or non-combatants, who took no part in the fighting and therefore do not figure in either the indentures or the muster lists, though their presence is acknowledged in other sources.³⁵

The final part of a military indenture, such as the one that Chaucer signed with Henry V, dealt with the important matter of prisoners and prizes. This could be an extremely contentious issue, not least because these winnings did not automatically belong to the person who captured them. Because all the soldiers in the army were paid wages, it was accepted that a proportion of their winnings should be given to their employers. The indenture therefore set out what had become, since the 1370s, the customary division of spoil. The king was to receive one-third of every indenting captain’s personal winnings and one-third of a third of those of his retinue, providing that the value exceeded 10 marks (£6 13s 4d, or almost $4,444 at today’s prices); anything worth less than that remained entirely the captor’s own. In addition, if anyone, of whatever status, captured the king of France, or any of his sons, nephews, uncles, cousins, lieutenants or chieftains, or a king of another country, these prisoners were to be handed over to the king, who was to be the sole recipient of the full value of their ransoms. It was generally understood that compensation would be paid to the original captors, but this was not specified by the indenture, and the amount was left to the king’s generosity.³⁶

The king’s copy of his indentures was preserved in the exchequer, where it was kept in a leather draw-string pouch with the name of the indenting captain on the outside. As the campaign progressed, all relevant documentation would be added to this bag, including the muster rolls and wage claims which enabled the exchequer clerks to work out how much money was owed to each company. By this means, the superb administrative machine of the exchequer, which had been honed by centuries of efficient tax collecting, gives us a unique and almost unprecedented level of insight into the fate of the usually nameless men-at-arms and archers whom chronicle sources ignore. The records of Sir Thomas Erpingham (Shakespeare’s “good old knight”), for example, reveal that he contracted to serve with twenty men-at-arms, including himself, and sixty mounted archers; that two of his men-at-arms, Thomas Geney and John Calthorp, were knighted on landing at Chef-de-Caux but were invalided home from Harfleur and died in England; that another man-at-arms, John Aungers, died at Calais; that only two of his knights, Hamon le Straunge and Walter Goldingham, were present at the battle of Agincourt; that two archers, Henry Prom and Robert Beccles, died at Harfleur, and that another, John de Boterie, was invalided home during the siege; and finally that two more archers were casualties of the war, Richard Chapman dying on the march between Harfleur and Agincourt, and Stephen Geryng at the battle itself, significantly the only one of the entire company to lose his life there.³⁷

Some 250 individual indentures for the Agincourt campaign have been identified, though this may be only a small proportion of the whole, since 632 pouches were purchased for the exchequer in 1416. Even so, 250 was an unprecedented number: nothing like it had been seen before the Agincourt campaign or would be again. Instead of subcontracting the task of providing the entire force to three or four aristocrats, as had always been done in the past, Henry V consciously sought to recruit as widely as possible for his army. A large number of the indentures were for numbers that seem barely worth the trouble of inscribing the parchment they were written on: the deliciously named Baldewin Bugge, for example, contracted to serve with just three archers, but his fellow esquires, John Topclyff, Robert Radclyf of Osbaldeston and William Lee, could only offer two. There are even instances of single archers, such as Richard Shore, John Wemme and Thomas Newman, signing contracts with the king as individuals, though the exchequer clerks’ preference seems to have been that archers proffering their services should be dealt with in groups of at least four and usually twelve, if only for accounting purposes.³⁸

Men such as these would normally have been subcontracted into the retinues of the great lords. William Bedyk, for instance, an esquire who could offer only himself and two archers, was signed up into the company of Thomas, earl of Salisbury, who had contracted to bring forty men-at-arms and eighty mounted archers. The terms of Bedyk’s indenture precisely paralleled that between the earl and the king, even stating explicitly at one point that he was to be paid “in the same manner as our said Lord the King does to the said Earl for people of his condition.” This was a necessary precaution, since it was not unknown for retinue leaders to make a profit out of their indentures: in 1380 Sir Hugh Hastings had received £45 3s for each man-at-arms in his company but paid them only £40, keeping the difference himself. Above and beyond his wages and shipping costs for his little group, Bedyk was to have free food and drink for himself and one valet, or servant, on both sides of the sea; in return he was obliged to give the customary one-third of all his winnings to the earl.³⁹

Though drawing up royal indentures for such small numbers was time consuming and expensive, it had several advantages. It meant that the recruits had a much more direct personal link to the king than was usual and it encouraged their loyalty by suggesting that he valued their contribution, however small, to his war effort. It also meant that, unlike previous campaigns where soldiers would be recruited from within the areas of influence of the great lords who had signed the indentures, Henry V’s army would be drawn from every quarter of the kingdom. As a consequence of this unprecedented level of national involvement, the campaign inspired an exceptional degree of pride and enthusiasm across the country, all of which was centred on the charismatic figure of the king himself.