PART II
CHAPTER NINE
On Sunday, 11 August 1415, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, Henry V gave the signal that launched the invasion of France. Fifteen hundred ships—a fleet twelve times the size of the Spanish Armada2—now weighed anchor, hoisted sail and made their way into the Channel from the shelter of Southampton Water and the Solent. Unlike the huge Spanish galleons of the sixteenth century, these were not purpose-built warships but a motley collection of privately owned merchant vessels: great ships that braved the Atlantic to bring wine from Aquitaine and carry the highly prized heavy woollen broadcloth to the continent; smaller coastal traders importing salt from Bourgneuf Bay in Brittany and exporting salted herring from Yarmouth to the Low Countries and the Baltic; even river boats, the freight carriers of the inland waterways, supplying everything from stone and marble for building cathedrals to hides for making leather boots, gloves and saddles.3 There were ships of every size and shape: cogs and carracks, galleys and balingers. Most were built in the distinctive northern style of clinker construction—their hulls composed of a series of overlapping planks from the keel upwards—with a single mast and one square or rectangular sail, but some were lighter Mediterranean vessels, double-masted, with triangular sails and banks of oarsmen. Those ships that had been converted into fighting vessels sported small wooden castles at both prow and stern; others had been fitted with rows of stalls to carry horses, a small ship like a cog having the capacity to carry only thirty, at a time when transport for some twenty-five thousand was needed.4
Many of the ships had gaily painted hulls, carried rows of white shields bearing the red cross of England along their sides, and flew sails, pennons and banners decorated with heraldic beasts and coats of arms. Some were privately owned by retinue commanders, like the four carracks provided by Sir John Holland, but most were impressed, like the four vessels, two each from Bayonne and Dartmouth, which conveyed the 180 men in Sir Thomas Carew’s company. Frustratingly, a number of men who had mustered at Southampton had to be left behind for lack of shipping, and approximately one hundred ships also failed to join the fleet, either because they could not catch the tide or because they were not ready to sail. Three more were lost when they caught fire, a routine hazard of life on board ship, which was probably an accident but may have been connected with the Cambridge plot, since burning the fleet to prevent the expedition sailing had been one of the options discussed by the conspirators.5
At the head of the fleet, escorted by the admiral, Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, and a convoy of fifteen ships carrying 150 men-at-arms and 300 archers, sailed the Trinity Royal. At 540 tons, this was one of the largest ships in northern Europe.6 She had just returned to sea after a two-year refit and there was now no mistaking whom she carried on board, or the purpose of his voyage. The royal coat of arms, a shield quartered with the three lions of England and the three fleurs-de-lis of France, was painted on her sail. A golden crown adorned her top-castle and a gilded sceptre, worked with three fleur-de-lis, decorated the capstan. At the deckhead stood the carved wooden figure of a crowned leopard, another heraldic beast associated with the kings of England. Painted and gilded, it carried six shields, four of which bore the king’s arms within a collar of gold, and two the arms of the patron saint of England, St George, within the Garter, the emblem of the English order of chivalry. At the mast and on the rear deck flew four of the banners that would also be carried at Agincourt: the royal arms; the arms of St George; the arms of Henry’s royal ancestor, St Edward the Confessor; and the curious cipher representing the Trinity.7
This display of heraldry was not simply the unavoidable ragbag of inheritance. It was deliberately chosen, a carefully thought-out piece of visual propaganda, whose meaning would be as clear to anyone connected with the profession of arms as that of the religious paintings and artefacts in medieval churches. Even the royal coat of arms made a provocative statement. The ancient arms of England, borne by every king since Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth century, had been three golden lions on a red background. This had changed only at the start of the Hundred Years War when Edward III made a symbolic statement of his claim to the throne of France by quartering them with the French royal arms, the golden fleurs-de-lis scattered on a blue background.8 Edward III had also, at about the same time, unilaterally adopted St George as the patron saint of England. The significance of this gesture was that St George had previously been recognised throughout Europe and the Christian east as the patron saint of all knighthood. By making him exclusively English, Edward III identified himself and his country as the embodiment of the treasured chivalric values that the saint represented. The seemingly miraculous English victories at Crécy, in 1346, and Poitiers, a decade later, could therefore be seen as indisputable proof that the saint had withdrawn his favour from the French (with whom the very concept of chivalry had originated) and become a partisan of England.9
The Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III after Crécy and dedicated to St George, was a celebration of English military supremacy, and its twenty-six members were admired and envied throughout Europe. When Jehan Werchin, the young seneschal of Hainault who would later be killed at Agincourt, was seeking to establish a reputation for prowess in 1408, he did it by issuing a jousting challenge to the Knights of the Garter, whom he regarded, quite literally, as the heirs of the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table and therefore the champions of England. (His offer to fight them all at once brought a mild reproof from Henry IV, who said such a thing was unheard of in the ancient chronicles of the Round Table, and was therefore inappropriate; he should fight against a single representative.) Likewise, the greatest honour Henry V could bestow on Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, whose alliance he was seeking in the war against France in 1416, was the Order of the Garter. The insignia and the ceremonies associated with the order were highly prized as the visible symbols of a knightly reputation won by outstanding courage and loyal service. It was no accident that Garter knights, such as Sir John Cornewaille (who had independently accepted another of the seneschal of Hainault’s challenges to a feat of arms), were to play a prominent role in the Agincourt campaign, deliberately seeking out the most dangerous—and therefore the most honourable—exploits to perform.10
The heraldic displays on the Trinity Royal were visual assertions of Henry’s royal status, his claim to the throne of France, and English military supremacy; the religious banners declared that this earthly army also enjoyed the patronage and protection of the heavenly hosts. At least three other ships, all members of Henry’s embryonic royal navy, bore his personal devices painted on their sails: the Katherine de la Tour and the Nicholas de la Tour displayed an antelope and a swan respectively, and the third, an unnamed vessel, the ostrich feathers, which had been his badge as prince of Wales. Given the importance of these symbols, and the medieval weakness for anything that smacked of prophetic insight, the appearance of a flock of swans swimming through the fleet as it left the Isle of Wight was guaranteed to gladden every English heart as the perfect omen.11
Most of those on board had no idea whether they were heading straight across the Channel for France or taking the much longer sea voyage that would eventually bring them to Aquitaine. Speculation as to their ultimate destination must have intensified as they saw the white cliffs of the Normandy coastline looming. Would they land, as Clarence had done three years earlier, at St-Vaast-la-Hougue on the Cotentin peninsula? Or would they attack one of the prosperous seaports to the east—Boulogne, perhaps, or Dieppe or Fécamp?
Two days after they had put to sea, about five o’clock in the afternoon, the fleet sailed into the bay that lies at the mouth of the river Seine. There they dropped anchor in the lee of the Chef-de-Caux (now Cap de la Hève), the westernmost tip of the great chalk headland that is the Roman nose on the face of upper Normandy. It was not an obvious place for a landing, even though the cliffs here rose less steeply and were more accessible than their precipitous and crumbling neighbours on the Channel coast. The gentler wooded slopes of the southern shore of the bay were more vulnerable to invasion—which is why Constable d’Albret was lying in wait for them there with a force of fifteen hundred men.12
Henry V was almost certainly unaware of their presence, but he had chosen his landing site, in the small bay of Sainte Adresse, with care. Only a few miles away, hidden from view on the landward side by a wooded bluff, lay his objective: the royal town and port of Harfleur.
Henry’s first action after dropping anchor was to unfurl the banner that was the signal to his captains to attend a meeting of the council on board the Trinity Royal. Knowing that his knights and esquires would be vying with each other to achieve the honour of being the first to set foot in France, he then gave orders that no one, on pain of death, was to land before he did and that everyone should prepare to disembark the following morning.13 Discipline, strictly enforced, was to be the watchword of his entire campaign.
Under cover of darkness Henry sent a scouting party ashore to explore the lie of the land and find suitable quarters. The man chosen to lead this party, and the one to whom the glory of being the first to land in France was therefore given, was his twenty-year-old cousin Sir John Holland. That Henry should entrust him with such a mission was significant, for there were others, such as Clarence, Gloucester and Dorset, who had better claims in terms of both rank and military experience. It was an opportunity for Holland to prove his worth and finally step out of the shadow of his father’s execution for treason by Henry IV. He seized it with both hands and despite his youth would serve with distinction on this campaign and become one of Henry V’s most able and dependable commanders in France.
Though Holland was nominally in charge of the scouting party, Henry ensured that his lack of years and experience were offset by those chosen to accompany him. These were, or became over the course of the campaign, a tightly knit little group who, with Holland himself, would, time and again, be entrusted with actions requiring particular courage and military skill. Foremost among them was Holland’s stepfather, Sir John Cornewaille, one of the most widely respected chivalric figures of the day, even though he was still in his mid-thirties. The son of a West Country knight and a niece of the duke of Brittany, he had first come to prominence in 1400, when he was imprisoned for marrying Henry IV’s sister, Elizabeth of Lancaster (Holland’s mother), without the king’s permission. Even though she was some years older than he and already twice-widowed, it was said that the marriage was a love-match, and that she had fallen for him when she watched him defeat a French knight in a joust at York that year. Cornewaille certainly excelled at combats of this kind, and earned himself an international reputation for his success in them. In September 1406 he defeated some Scottish knights in jousts held in London, and in June 1409 he performed the feat of arms to which he had been challenged by Jehan Werchin, seneschal of Hainault. This latter event, which took place over a period of three days in Lille, was a single combat, fought à outrance—that is, with the normal weapons and armour of war, “which accomplishment is the greatest honour to which prowess and chivalry can aspire.” Cornewaille distinguished himself, fighting several courses each with lance, sword, dagger and axe in turn, and at the end he was presented with a gold collar set with jewels by John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, who had presided over the whole event. In 1412 he also fought a challenge at Smithfield in London against the Armagnac knight Tanneguy de Chastel, who had been captured in a Breton raid on the Devon coast in 1404.14Cornewaille’s military career had been equally bold and idiosyncratic. Its highlights had included defeating a French assault on Blackpool, in Lancashire, in 1404; commanding an English mercenary troop of sixty men-at-arms and five hundred archers on behalf of the duke of Burgundy at the battle of Othée in 1408; and accompanying Thomas, duke of Clarence, as one of the leaders of the abortive invasion of France in 1412. He had indented to serve Henry V for the Agincourt campaign with a substantial company of thirty men-at-arms and ninety archers (the future earl, his stepson, could only afford to take twenty and sixty, respectively).15
William Porter was another member of the scouting party. A squire of the chamber for both Henry IV and Henry V, he had served on several important diplomatic missions for the latter, including being sent “on secret business” to King João of Portugal in 1413 and on Bishop Courtenay’s embassy to Paris in the winter of 1414-15. He was clearly high in Henry V’s favour. He received a personal legacy of a gold cup, a horse and £6 in cash in the king’s will, was given some of the lands in the south-east of England confiscated from Henry, Lord Scrope, and in 1422 was appointed an executor and administrator of the king’s revised will. Although he had indented to serve with a retinue of eight men-at-arms and twenty-four archers, he was nominally, at least, supposed to be in the company of Michael de la Pole, son and heir of the earl of Suffolk. Why he was picked for the scouting party is therefore unclear, but it may have been connected to the fact that he was John Cornewaille’s brother-in-arms.16 Porter and Cornwaille were real examples of what is often dismissed as simply a literary conceit. Like the most famous fictional pair of brothers-in-arms, Arcite and Palamon from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, they had sworn a mutual oath to assist each other, “Til that the deethe departe shal us tweyne.” Though brotherhood-in-arms had idealistic overtones, arising out of the concept that the oath had originally been administered while mingling the blood of the two parties, it was in practice a much more formal legal relationship, very similar to the system of retaining, except that it was made between equals, rather than lord and man. The agreement between Porter and Cornewaille has not survived, but one drawn up between two English esquires, Nicholas Molyneux and John Wynter, at Harfleur in 1421, is a model of its kind. It had been made, they declared, “to increase and augment the respect and brotherhood which has for long existed between the said Molyneux and Wynter, so that it may henceforth be even stronger and more enduring, the said persons have personally sworn to become brothers in arms; that is to say, that each shall be loyal to the other without fraud or deception.” The principal heads of their agreement were that they should each be responsible for raising the first thousand pounds of the other’s ransom, in the event of either of them being captured; that one would remain hostage for both and the other seek to raise their joint ransoms, if both were captured; that all profits of war they won between them should be sent to London for safekeeping, until they could be invested in the purchase of land in England; and that the survivor (having made provision for any widow and children of the deceased) should inherit the full value of all their joint winnings.17
The brotherhood-in-arms that existed between Cornewaille and Porter must have been particularly lucrative, given the former’s military prowess and the latter’s diplomatic and administrative skills. Little is known about Porter’s financial affairs, but Cornewaille displayed a business acumen to rival his martial abilities. As early as 1404 he had purchased a Norman knight and some of the French prisoners captured in the raid on Dartmouth as an investment in their ransoms, something he would do again after Agincourt, when he bought a part share in the count of Vendôme from Henry V for 20,000 crowns. In 1412 the hostages kept as collateral for the payment of the 210,000 gold écus with which the Armagnacs bought off Clarence’s English forces were placed in Cornewaille’s hands, and a tenth of the entire sum was specifically allocated to him. It was said that he built his magnificent new home, Ampthill Castle in Bedfordshire, out of his profits of war, and his long and loyal service certainly earned him an elevation to the peerage. When he became Lord Fanhope in 1436, his annual income was said to be in excess of £800 (the equivalent of $533,232 today).18 In fact, much of his fortune rested on his marriage, which brought him a vast income from lands and rents, especially after Parliament granted his wife her dower rights in her first husband’s estates in 1404. He had to wait many years—twenty-eight in the case of the 1412 debt—to get the payments due to him for ransoms, during which time he had to keep his noble prisoners in the style to which they were accustomed.
The final member of the elite group that led the scouting party was another knight who would pay the ultimate price for his service in France. Sir Gilbert Umfraville was a nephew of the Sir Robert Umfraville who had played such an opaque role in relation to the Scottish invasion that was part of the Cambridge plot. Sir Gilbert’s loyalty was beyond question: like Porter, he had been a knight of the chamber since the beginning of Henry V’s reign. Like Cornewaille, he indented to serve with a substantial retinue of thirty men-at-arms and ninety archers, suggesting he had a considerable fortune at his disposal. With his fellow Garter knight Cornewaille, he would be entrusted with the joint leadership of the first battalion on the march from Harfleur to Agincourt.19
The scouting party that slipped ashore before dawn on Wednesday, 14 August 1415, was entrusted with several tasks, the two most important being to discover what resistance might be expected and to identify the best route to Harfleur. It is inconceivable that spies had not already provided the king with much of his geographical information before he set sail, but the medieval world lacked the main resource of modern travellers, friendly or hostile: the map, as we know it today, simply did not exist. Medieval mappae mundi, or world maps, like the famous late thirteenth-century one at Hereford Cathedral, were intended to be only a symbolic representation of the known inhabited world. The comparative sizes and distances between places did not reflect geographical fact, or even the state of current knowledge, but rather their importance historically and, especially, in relation to Christianity. Maps were oriented towards the east (hence the word “oriented”), rather than the north as they are today, and Jerusalem, as the most important city in Christ’s life and death, lay at their centre. The scientific world was aware that a fourth, antipodean continent existed, besides Asia, Europe and Africa, but the Church resisted the idea and had burnt two university professors from Padua and Bologna in the early fourteenth century for insisting that it was true. The idea that people in the Middle Ages believed that the world was flat or disc shaped, and that they might fall off if they went to its edge, is a modern myth based on a misunderstanding of the concept of the mappa mundi. Observers seeing the shape of the shadow of the earth during a lunar eclipse, or watching a ship’s hull disappear before its masts as it sailed over the horizon, had been aware of the curvature of the earth’s surface since classical times, and this knowledge had not been lost. By the fifteenth century, astronomical studies had reinforced this to the point that it was simply taken for granted that the world was spherical. Texts of every kind compared the earth to an apple or an egg, and medieval illustrations often depicted Christ holding the world—as an orb or a sphere—in his hands.20
A mappa mundi was of no use to anyone wanting to plan a journey. Established routes were therefore of prime importance. Crusaders and pilgrims, for instance, relied on being given an itinerary to follow: when they reached a named place en route, they would ask for directions to the next on the list. (That was the main reason why so many of them passed through Venice, rather than other Mediterranean ports, on their way to the Holy Land.) This sort of information was obviously not available to an invading army: military objectives were not the same as holy places. Merchants, who were the most regular travellers of the Middle Ages, together with diplomats, similarly relied on established trade routes and, wherever possible, preferred to journey by sea or river rather than over land. For this purpose, they had developed rudimentary navigational charts as early as the thirteenth century. Within two hundred years, the Italians, who had a virtual monopoly on producing them, had mapped out the coastline of most of Europe and the Mediterranean in a form that would be more recognisable to modern eyes than that of the mappa mundi. Unfortunately, again, for the potential invader, the interiors of the countries remained a blank: large cities and commercial centres were named, but only as a list of names along the nearest coastline and without reference to their distance from it. Other than giving a general indication of which country to aim for, if one wished to go to a particular place, these maps were also useless for military purposes.21
What was an invading army to do? Spies would, no doubt, have provided the groundwork and merchants from England and her allies visiting the busy port of Harfleur would have been able to give details of the layout of the city and its neighbourhood. For the rest, they would have to rely on what intelligence could be gleaned from the investigations of scouting parties and the interrogation, by force, bribery or persuasion, of local people. The choice of landing site at Chef-de-Caux does not seem to suggest any sophisticated prior intelligence; even the French admitted that it could easily have been defended and an English landing prevented. As with all this stretch of Normandy coastline, the shore was a mass of shingle, cast up into a bank by the action of the tides. According to Henry V’s chaplain, who is our main eyewitness of the campaign, it was also strewn with large boulders, which were a major hazard to the barges and skiffs ferrying the troops, horses and supplies from the ships. On the landward side of this shingle ridge, the French had prepared a set of shoreline defences, consisting of thick earthen walls, “furnished with angles and ramparts . . . after the manner of the walls of a tower or castle,” and a series of water-filled ditches, between which “the earth was left intact for the breadth of a cubit, permitting only one man at a time to enter or leave between them.” Beyond the man-made ditches, there was the natural hazard of tidal salt-water marshes to negotiate, again along treacherous narrow paths, which left the invaders seriously exposed to danger.22
It should have been easy for the French to prevent the landing. Even though not a hand was raised against them, it still took the English three days to disembark, during which time they were at their weakest and constantly vulnerable to attack. The French also had the advantage of an inexhaustible supply of ready ammunition, in the form of the stones from the beach and riverbed. “However,” the chaplain remarked, “as a result of their slackness, folly, or, at any rate, lack of foresight, the place was left completely undefended by men when, as far as one could judge, the resistance of a few, had they but had manly hearts, would have kept us at bay certainly for a long time and perhaps indefinitely.”23
The mortifying failure of the French to offer even a token resistance seemed inexplicable, even to their compatriots. An invasion had been expected since the failure to agree terms during Bishop Courtenay’s embassy to Paris. In April 1415 a great council of the realm had been called, which had decided that, due to Charles VI’s incapacity, the eighteen-year-old dauphin, Louis de Guienne, should be appointed captain-general with authority to organise resistance. Men-at-arms throughout France were to be put on alert so that they were ready to resist the English, garrisons in towns and castles near the sea were to be reinforced and money was to be made available for war. As a result of these decisions, Robin de Hellande, the bailli of Rouen, was one of many royal officials who received orders to prepare against an English landing. The Caux region, including Harfleur, fell within his bailiwick, and the defences erected along the shore at Sainte Adresse were his responsibility, whether or not they had been built directly under his personal supervision.24
After the return to Paris of the archbishop of Bourges and his fellow ambassadors from their abortive mission to Winchester, preparations had been stepped up another gear. On 28 July Charles d’Albret, the constable of France, and Marshal Boucicaut were appointed king’s lieutenant and captain-general respectively, and dispatched to Normandy, each at the head of an army fifteen hundred strong. Not knowing where the English would strike, they had divided their forces, d’Albret setting up his headquarters at Honfleur, the greatest fortified town on the southern shore of the Seine estuary, and Boucicault at Caudebec, a town some twenty-five miles away as the crow flies on the north bank of the Seine, which guarded the first river crossing. Between them, they were within striking distance of most of Normandy. The defence of Ponthieu and Artois was delegated by d’Albret to a nobleman of that region, David, sire de Rambures, who was also a councillor and chamberlain of Charles VI, captain of Boulogne and master of the crossbowmen of France.25
It was fishermen from Boulogne who first raised the alarm that the English fleet had set sail and was heading for France. The town officials promptly sent a messenger, Jacques Rolequin “the younger,” to forewarn other likely targets on the coast, the town of Etaples, at the mouth of the river Canche, and le Crotoy and St Valery, the twin guardians on either shore of the bay of the Somme. On his return, Rolequin did not have time to draw breath before being posted further afield, this time to Abbeville, Dieppe and Honfleur, with the latest news that the fleet had now entered the Seine. Though it took him a lengthy ten days to complete this second mission, it is clear that other messengers were also plying the roads with news of the progress of the English invasion.26 As a result of this network of communication, all the coastal towns of the region were in a state of constant alert and prepared for attack.
This explains the evident effort that had gone into building the physical defences at Chef-de-Caux, but it does not explain why they were unmanned. It is possible that there had been so many false alarms that the locals did not expect a genuine one, but even so the landing would have been observed. The monks at the priory of Graville, perched high on an eminence above the bay, had a bird’s-eye view of the entire operation and cannot have failed to send messengers over the hill to Harfleur. (The square Norman tower and the soaring walls of Graville’s abbey church of Sainte Honorine would also have made it an obvious landmark from the sea.) Even Constable d’Albret, on the opposite shore at Honfleur, must have seen the fleet at anchor and realised what was happening. Why, then, did no one attempt to resist the landing? The simple answer is that it was impractical. It would have taken the constable’s army the best part of two days to get to Sainte Adresse by land, by which time it would be too late. The only chance of fighting off the invasion would have been as the disembarkation began—and at that point it would have been all too easy for Henry to divert his fleet elsewhere, including Honfleur, which was only some five miles away across the bay. The little garrison of Harfleur could have taken a stand but, in doing so, it would have had to abandon the defence of the town, leaving it vulnerable to attack from those still on board ship in the bay. From a purely pragmatic military point of view, it was better to retreat behind the walls of the great fortified towns, which could only fall to a lengthy siege, than to risk everything in open combat.
Despite the fact that this sort of defensive strategy had been standard policy throughout the Hundred Years War, there were, inevitably, rumours of treason. The monk of St Denis, a contemporary chronicler of these events, claimed that the local inhabitants would undoubtedly have risen to the occasion, as they had done many times before, if they had not believed that the noblemen of the area, who had rallied to the standard of Constable d’Albret, would do the job for them. “I ought to say, without embarrassment, because it is the truth,” the monk wrote, “that the constable compromised himself on this occasion in the eyes of wise and thoughtful men.” At a later council of war, the bastard brother of the duke of Bourbon, “a man in the springtime of early youth, but bold and rash in character,” dared to say what many others thought, and accused d’Albret of treason in failing to prevent the landing. It was said that, as a member of the diplomatic embassy to England earlier that year, the constable had promised Henry V that he would not oppose him and, therefore, although he was not far away when the English descended, this was the reason for his inaction. Worse still, he was accused of having, in the French king’s name, ordered the local men-at-arms who came to him seeking leadership to return to their homes and not to resist the invasion. The story was patently untrue—d’Albret had not been on a diplomatic mission to England since 1413—but even his advocates could only offer the lame excuse that he had given these orders because he underestimated the strength of the English army.27 The truth was that it was impossible for him to guard the entire length of the Channel coast and, having expected the invasion to take place on the southern shore of the Seine, d’Albret was in the wrong place when it came and too far away to rectify his mistake. This error, right at the beginning of the campaign, would have terrible consequences, seriously compromising both his authority and his ability to persuade the other army leaders to any future course of action.
By Saturday 17 August, Henry had completed the disembarkation of his troops and supplies without incident. According to one source, when the king himself came ashore, shortly after dawn on the first day, he fell on his knees and prayed that God would give him justice against his enemies. As was customary on such occasions, he took the opportunity to bestow knighthoods on several esquires, including Sir John Cornewaille’s brother-in-arms, William Porter, and Thomas Geney and John Calthorpe, who were both in the retinue of Sir Thomas Erpingham, the steward of the king’s household. The king himself took up residence at the ancient priory of Graville, on the hillside overlooking the landing site, from which vantage point he could watch the progress of the disembarkation. His brothers found quarters nearby, but the rest of the army had to find lodgings where they could, in the “hamlets, closes, and orchards” on the steep slopes of the little valley behind the shore.28
After the long wait in Southampton and the days of close confinement on board ship, there was inevitably a strong temptation to run riot and, especially, to loot the farms and houses in the vicinity. Several places had already been burnt before Henry reined in his troops by issuing a set of ordinances that were to be the code of conduct for the campaign. The ordinances have not survived, but were neatly summarised by Henry’s chaplain. On pain of death there was to be no more arson; churches, sacred buildings and their property were to be preserved intact; and finally, “no one should lay hands upon a woman or on a priest or servant of a church, unless he happened to be armed, offered violence, or attacked anyone.”29
The issuing of ordinances of this kind was a customary practice, dating back at least to Edward III’s reign. They were a vital means of controlling an army, especially one raised by indenture. Every army raised by this method was effectively a new creation, so it was essential to reissue new ordinances each time an indentured group was gathered together. By the fifteenth century there was a standard format: the ordinances Richard II issued at Durham in 1385, on his way to invade Scotland, were substantially the same as those Henry V himself would draw up at the siege of Mantes in July 1419, or those proclaimed by the earl of Leicester for his soldiers in the Low Countries in 1584. The ordinances always opened with the statement “that all manner of persons, of what nation, estate or condition they be, shall be obedient to our lord the king, to his constable and marshal, under penalty of everything they can forfeit in body or goods.” In addition to the clauses mentioned by our chronicler, the English chaplain, a whole series of clauses dealt with internal army discipline, insisting that every man should remain in the company to which he belonged and wear the badge of his captain; everyone in the army, regardless of rank, was also to wear “a large sign of the arms of St George before, and another behind upon peril that if he be hurt or slain in default thereof, he who shall hurt or slay him shall suffer no penalty for it.” (The obverse of this was that if an enemy was captured wearing the St George’s cross, his life was forfeit.) Unauthorised battle-cries, such as “montez” (to horse) or “havoc” (break ranks and seize booty, hence Shakespeare’s famous line, “Cry, ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war”), were prohibited by threat of summary execution, since they could shatter discipline and imperil the whole army.30 All gains of war were to be divided three ways, one-third going to the king, one to the captain, and one to the captor. This was to hold good even if the captor was a person serving without pay in the army. The precise etiquette of taking a prisoner was also laid down: a captor should take his prisoner’s parole (an admission of surrender and oath not to escape) and with it a tangible piece of evidence, such as a glove or bascinet, as pledge and proof. The captor was then under a duty to protect his prisoner’s life; if he left him alone and undefended, another captor could take him and was then entitled to his ransom. Finally, every prisoner had to be presented as soon as possible to the captor’s captain, who then had to pass him on to his superiors for interrogation. Once this had taken place, the prisoner’s safekeeping was again entrusted to the captor and his captain, though he could not be released, even to seek money for his ransom, without a written pass, authorising his departure and providing him with the king’s protection against arrest or harm. This could only be obtained from Henry himself, or the constable or marshal acting in his name, and it was to be observed on pain of death. All disputes between individuals or companies were to be dealt with by the constable or marshal, as were all breaches of the ordinances.31
There was nothing new in the ordinances of 1415, but, as Henry V had demonstrated so often before, he was able to take a customary practice and give it new life and vigour by effective enforcement. The unusual discipline of the English army was something even its enemies commended. The monk of St Denis reported that the English regarded it as an almost unpardonable crime to have prostitutes in their camp and behaved more considerately towards the French than vice versa; they observed the rules of military discipline strictly, he noted, and obeyed the orders of their king to the letter. This discipline unquestionably derived from Henry himself. To maintain his claim that his invasion was a just one, he needed to ensure that his soldiers observed the customary laws of war. This was not simply altruism of the sort advocated by Christine de Pizan, who had declared that it was “dangerous in time of war for an army to be more driven by greed for pillage than by the intention to preserve the righteousness of their cause or the honour of chivalry or to gain praise.” It was also a pragmatic recognition that a disciplined army was stronger and more efficient, while a local populace that was not maltreated would be less likely to respond with violence or sabotage.32
Henry’s ordinances can be seen working in practice, albeit slowly and creakily, in the case of one of the first French prisoners to fall into English hands. Raoul le Gay, a twenty-eight-year-old priest, was captured on 16 August, while the disembarkation was still taking place. Le Gay was trying to follow his employer, a rich burgess, who lived in the suburbs of Harfleur and had fled to Rouen on learning of the English landing, when he was captured by a group of seven scouts or foragers, who spoke no French and evidently thought they had caught a spy. They deprived him of his tunic, knife and purse, tied his hands behind his back and demanded a ransom of one hundred francs, which he could not pay. After a couple of days, he was taken before their superior officer, an elderly knight, who asked him the name of the commander at Harfleur, which he claimed not to know, and then lost interest in him. His plight was noticed by a young Englishman, who spoke to him in Latin, suggesting that he probably realised that le Gay was a priest, despite the fact that he was dressed in secular clothing and wore a cap hiding his tonsure. He ordered him to be taken before the earl of Dorset, who questioned him in French and detained him for a further seven days.
On the tenth day of his captivity, he was brought before Henry V, who, alone among all his officers, enquired whether this priest had been captured in arms. Having discovered that he had not and that his capture was therefore in contravention of the ordinances, Henry still did not let him go, suggesting that he too thought le Gay was a spy. The priest was therefore handed into the custody of Richard Courtenay, bishop of Norwich, who offered to release him on condition that he carried a letter to none other than the astrologer Jean Fusoris in Paris. The letter was highly compromising, referring in what was obviously code to certain “pumpkins, melons, almonds and other fruits,” which Fusoris was to obtain from the prior of the Celestines in Paris, and send back to Courtenay, who would pay him for them. Fusoris was told that in his reply he was not to mention his own or Courtenay’s name, for the matter was a secret from everyone except Henry, “who is most discreet, as you know.” Le Gay was also entrusted with a verbal message, to tell Fusoris that the king of England had landed with fifty thousand men, four thousand barrels of wheat, four thousand casks of wine, twelve large guns and sufficient material to sustain a six-month siege of Harfleur. He was to ask Fusoris whether Charles VI was in one of his mad phases and would oppose the English, if the dauphin, the duke of Burgundy or any other lords would be with him, and, if so, with how many men.
Courtenay gave le Gay a safe-conduct allowing him to pass through English lines and a purse, containing the letters and twenty gold crowns, which he hid beneath his shirt. On 29 August he was released, having spent thirteen days in English custody. Lacking the courage to make his way to Paris, he fled back to Montivilliers, where, until only a few months previously, he had been the chaplain of the abbess. Instead of going straight to the convent or to the local authorities with the information he had gained, he skulked about the town until he was denounced by a Benedictine monk from Honfleur, who had also been an English prisoner and knew that le Gay was carrying enemy letters. Le Gay confessed, pleading that he had not intended to deliver them, but both he and Fusoris were arrested and imprisoned, and the latter was put on trial for high treason before the Parlement of Paris. Le Gay’s protestations of innocence were eventually accepted, but it was almost a year before Fusoris was able to exchange his Parisian prison cell for house arrest and the rural banishment that was to last until the end of his days.33
By the standards of the day, le Gay had been treated comparatively well while he was a prisoner in English hands. He complained that he had been kept short of food and drink (he did not like English beer) and held for too long, but he had not been physically or verbally abused and he had been released without having to pay a ransom. Given the magnitude of the military operation taking place, delays in his being referred up the chain of command were inevitable, especially as he could not, or would not, impart any useful information.
On Saturday 17 August, the day after le Gay’s capture, the slow process of unloading everything needed for the campaign from the ships was completed. Having issued his ordinances, Henry now ordered his forces to take up the places allocated to them in the customary three “battles,” or divisions, known as the van (because they generally went “avaunt” or before), the centre and the rear. Taking his own place at the head of the centre, he gave the command to move off and the vast cavalcade of men, horses, cannon, siege engines and wagons began the ascent that would lead them over the hill from Graville to Harfleur.34 One can only begin to imagine the terror that must have struck the hearts of the people of the town when they looked up and saw that seemingly numberless host, its banners fluttering in the breeze and armour glinting in the sun, massing on the crest of the hill and poised, like some great hawk, ready to fall upon its prey below. The king of England, who had failed to obtain his “just rights and inheritances” through diplomacy, had come to claim them by the sword. The war was about to begin in earnest.