When Henry V set out from Harfleur the bulk of the French army was still encamped on the banks of the Seine at Vernon. The Dauphin had been there for nearly a month. Contemporaries were puzzled and frustrated by his immobility, especially once the extent of the English losses became known.— The truth was that he did not dare to move west against the English forces at Harfleur because it would have left Paris uncovered at a time when the Duke of Burgundy’s intentions were unclear.
John the Fearless had intended from the outset to extract the maximum of political advantage from the crisis. At the end of June 1415 he had sent his ambassadors before the Dauphin with a list of his demands. There were two main ones: access to the King and the immediate proclamation of a general amnesty for his Parisian allies. When these demands were rejected out of hand he had responded by raising an army estimated at 3,000 men in his Burgundian domains and in those of his allies the Dukes of Lorraine and Savoy. They had been allowed to rampage unchecked across Champagne and Brie. Mounted raiders led by John’s protégé Elyon de Jacqueville, the notorious Cabochian leader of 1413, had spread through the country east of the capital, moving north towards Soissons and south towards Sens, burning and looting as they went. A delegation of royal councillors led by the Dauphin’s chancellor Jean de Vailly had gone before the Duke of Burgundy in the castle of Rouvres outside Dijon to reason with him. But John the Fearless was not to be reasoned with and his old enemy Jean de Vailly was perhaps the worst person to try. He received little more than practised evasions. The Duke agreed to swear to observe the peace of Arras, which he had hitherto declined to do, but only subject to a reservation that made the gesture largely meaningless. The Dauphin, he stipulated, must grant the general amnesty for which John had been holding out for the past year. Otherwise he would not commit himself to anything. Negotiations were pursued fitfully through August and September and resulted in an untidy compromise on the question of the amnesty. The government agreed to extend it to all but forty-five named ringleaders of the tumults in Paris. The Duke of Burgundy for his part agreed with ill grace to withdraw the reservations to his oath.
There was then a fresh bone of contention as the Duke and the Dauphin’s councillors fell out over John’s participation in the campaign against the English. John declared himself ready to join the fight against the English with all of his considerable strength. This, however, was the last thing that the Dauphin wanted. John’s presence would have divided the army into rancorous tribes and made it practically impossible to exclude him from the King’s presence. So he called on the Duke to send 500 of his best men-at-arms and 300 bowmen to join the army but to stay away himself. A similar request was addressed to the Duke of Orléans. John the Fearless declared himself insulted and disparaged. He was a peer of France, he said, one of the closest kinsmen of the King and by rights among his chief counsellors. He would attend in person with his entire host or there would be no assistance from him at all. The result of this prolonged stand-off was that throughout August and September, when the Dauphin was trying to concentrate his strength against the English outside Harfleur, he was obliged to look over his shoulder at the enemy in his rear. There were persistent rumours that the Duke of Burgundy was acting in concert with the English. He denied the rumours and they were in fact untrue. But people could hardly be blamed for believing them.—
The news of Henry V’s plan to bolt for Calais jolted the French commanders into action. They learned of the English King’s intentions before he had left Harfleur, some time in the first week of October. The reports led to an immediate change of strategy. Urgent steps were taken to put troops into Paris and secure the city against the Duke of Burgundy. Meanwhile Charles d’Albret marched rapidly north from Vernon in the hope of cutting off the English at the Somme. With him went the principal French captains including Marshal Boucicaut, Arthur de Richemont and the Duke of Alençon, and all the men then available. The Dauphin left for Rouen where the remaining princely retinues were due to muster in a few days. These moves seriously wrong-footed Henry V. Covering about twenty miles a day his army took five days to cross the Pays de Caux and the plain of southern Picardy, a creditable achievement. But as they approached the Somme it became clear that the French had beaten them to it. Fifteen miles south of the river they encountered a large French garrison at Eu, which sortied from the gates and attacked their left flank. Prisoners who fell into English hands spoke of powerful concentrations of troops ahead. Henry V had been planning to cross the Somme at the ford of Blanchetaque, where men could wade across the river at low tide as Edward III and his army had done in 1346 before the battle of Crécy. But the French had already anticipated this. On 12 October outriders brought in a Gascon prisoner, a retainer of the Constable, who told them that Albret was already in Abbeville. Blanchetaque, he told them, was heavily guarded. Over the next twenty- four hours English scouts confirmed his statement. The French, they reported, had staked the ford at Blanchetaque and were holding the north bank of the river in force. All the bridges and causeways upstream had been broken. The English army was caught between Albret’s army on the Somme and the fresh army now gathering behind them at Rouen. Their route to Calais was barred. Fortune, declared the French commanders, had delivered the enemy trussed and bound into their hands.—
The English King halted his columns south of Abbeville on 12 October 1415 and summoned his captains for a council of war. Edward III had fought his away across the ford of Blanchetaque in 1346, but after a long discussion Henry V’s captains decided that this was too risky. Instead they decided to move east up the left bank of the Somme in search of a crossing. The first day of the march showed what was in store. Abbeville, where they had hoped to seize a bridge, was heavily defended. Pont-Rémy, five miles upstream, had an unfortified stone bridge but the masonry had been broken and the French were drawn up in battle order on the north side. As the English marched along the south bank of the Somme the Constable, accompanied by the Duke of Alençon and the Counts of Richemont and Vendôme, followed them with a large mounted force from the opposite side. Much of the riverbank was marsh, defying attempts to improvise a crossing. The bridges and the fords had been made impassable, as the scouts had warned them. The ground ahead of them had been abandoned and wasted to prevent them from foraging. Their stores were low and the men hungry. On 15 October they passed the walls and towers of Amiens. Here their rations ran out. They made for Boves, a small, unwalled town with a castle commanding a bridge over the River Avre. The castle was garrisoned. But its defenders were not strong enough to dispute the army’s passage. They made a deal to avoid the destruction of their town, supplying the invaders with bread and wine to fill their bellies and allowing them to rest for the night. On the next morning the English were able to cross the Avre unmolested. On 17 October they arrived opposite the walled town of Corbie. The bridge here was intact, but it was too strongly defended to allow them to cross.—
From Corbie the Somme takes a great loop east to Peronne and then south to the fortress-town of Ham. Henry V seized the opportunity to shake off the French Constable’s army. Marching cross-country he cut across the loop and regained the Somme near the walled town of Nesle late on 18 October. When the army arrived outside Nesle, Albret, who had had to follow the sinuous bends of the river, had got no further than Peronne, ten miles from the English as the crow flies but separated from them by a bleak district of marsh and scrub with no direct roads. Three miles east of Nesle the English scouts found two usable fords by the villages of Bethencourt and Voyennes. The men of Saint-Quentin had been charged with the defence of these crossings. But they had left them unguarded and the work of hacking up the causeways was unfinished. It was still just possible for men to cross them in single file. On the morning of 19 October the archers of the van crossed the river, followed by the cavalry companies of Sir John Cornwall and Sir Gilbert Umfraville. Once a secure bridgehead had been established on the other side the engineers put down faggots and straw over the causeway and constructed a timber carriageway with staircases, doors and window- frames pillaged from nearby houses. The men could now cross three abreast over one ford while the baggage and equipment was hauled across at the other. Towards the end of the afternoon some companies of French cavalry arrived from Péronne and Saint-Quentin. They hovered on the fringes of the English army waiting for reinforcements. But it was already too late to interfere. Shortly, they vanished. By nightfall the whole of the English army was across together with its horses, equipment and baggage.—
Ninety miles away at Rouen the recruitment of the second French army had not gone well. The Dauphin had arrived in the city on about 12 October followed shortly by the Dukes of Berry, Anjou, Bourbon and Bar and John the Fearless’s brother the Count of Nevers with their contingents. On about 17 October Bourbon, Bar and Nevers left for the Somme with every man available. The continual tumults of court and council over the past years had taken their toll on recruitment. Charles of Orléans sent the 500 men-at-arms that had been asked of him but was forbidden to appear in person until the Dauphin finally relented at the last minute. Charles VFs council appears to have relented in the Duke of Burgundy’s case too but his attitude remained as opaque as ever. In early October he told his officials that he had already left to join the Dauphin and would appear in person with his son the Count of Charolais and the entire nobility of Flanders and Artois at his back. In fact John had not left. Instead he had sent his councillor Regnier Pot to haggle with the Dauphin and in the meantime his troops had been told not to leave for the army until he gave them the word. Regnier Pot’s demands are not recorded but presumably fell on deaf ears, for John the Fearless never did give the word. Philip of Charolais, who was at Oudenarde in Flanders, actually set out with his company but stopped at Arras waiting for the orders which never came.
The Duke of Brittany hedged his bets as he had always done. He had recently renewed the maritime truce between Brittany and England for ten years on terms which fell only just short of a treaty of neutrality. When he received Charles Vi’s summons his first reaction was to send his emissaries before John the Fearless in Burgundy to concert their responses. Both men saw the crisis as an opportunity to promote their own interests. They waited on events in case the defeat of France had more to offer them than victory. John V came to Rouen with his company. But when he arrived he coolly informed the King that he would proceed no further unless Charles ceded to him the French royal enclave at Saint-Malo in northern Brittany.—
On 20 October 1415 the royal council met in the castle of Rouen. A messenger had arrived from the commanders on the Somme with a report on the situation. The main body of the French army was encamped between Bapaume and Miraumont about ten miles north of the Somme across the road to Arras. The Constable was at Péronne with most of the leading French captains and a large force of cavalry. Charles of Orléans had arrived from the Foire the night before. Bourbon, Bar and Nevers had crossed the Somme at Corbie with the companies from Rouen and joined them that morning. The plan was to fall back on Bapaume and then withdraw to the line of the River Scarpe north-west of Arras where they would be standing directly across Henry V’s route to Calais. They asked for the King’s authority to force him to battle there. Thirty-five men sat at the council which considered this proposal. Apart from the King, the Dauphin and the Dukes of Berry, Anjou and Brittany, it was largely an official and ecclesiastical gathering. Fouis of Anjou was the only experienced soldier present but he was a sick man and his military career had been distinctly chequered. The Duke of Berry, in keeping with his long-standing aversion to the risks of war, was profoundly sceptical about the whole idea of fighting a decisive battle with the English. The Duke of Brittany, having obtained the grant of Saint-Malo from the King, was obstructive. He doubted whether the French army was strong enough without the Duke of Burgundy’s contingent and declared that for his part he would have nothing to do with it unless John the Fearless was there. This aroused fierce controversy. Most of those present were intensely suspicious of John and had no desire to submit to his terms. In any event there was now no prospect of his getting there in time. After a long discussion it was agreed by a majority of thirty to five to order the Constable to engage the English army before they could reach Calais. Although it had been proclaimed far and wide since August that the campaign against the English would be conducted by the King and the Dauphin in person it was decided that both of them should stay in Rouen together with the Dukes of Berry and Anjou. ‘I would have exposed myself to every danger if I had had my way ... It is the proper part of kingship,’ Charles VI later recalled, ‘but my councillors would not have it.’ The battle of Poitiers was in everyone’s mind. Better to lose a battle, said Jean de Berry, than a battle and a king too.—
By their own reckoning the French had 6,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 bowmen under arms. By the standard of previous royal armies these were modest numbers. A fresh summons was issued from Rouen calling on every man-at-arms to make his way day and night to the Constable’s banner. An emissary was sent to the Count of Charolais at Arras to beg him to bring his company. The French captains at Peronne sent their own plea to Charolais and another to John the Fearless’s brother Anthony Duke of Brabant. These appeals met with mixed success. The Duke of Brabant, who was more than a hundred miles away at Louvain, achieved prodigies of efficiency and valour and succeeded in collecting a substantial force within a day or two of receiving the call. Charolais on the other hand refused to move without his father’s authority and later withdrew from Arras to Aire-sur-la-Lys on the frontier of Flanders. But many of his troops slipped away without leave and joined the army on their own initiative. The Duke of Brittany left Rouen immediately after the council meeting and entered Amiens on 22 October with a substantial company. A place had been reserved for him in the van of the French army. But John waited inexplicably at Amiens for three days as messengers arrived with ever more desperate appeals from the commanders of the army to join them. Meanwhile, volunteers streamed into the French camp in small companies. Crossbowmen and infantry were urgently raised in the industrial towns of Picardy and sent forward to the Somme front. The new arrivals increased the cavalry strength of the French army, according to the most reliable estimates, to between 8,000 and 9,000 men-at-arms in addition to bowmen and infantry, perhaps 14,000 troops in all. But it remained very largely an army of committed adherents of the Armagnac party. The rest of France stood apprehensively aside.—
The leaders of the French army had already anticipated the council’s decision. On the morning of 20 October 1415 the Constable and the Dukes of Bourbon and Orléans sent three heralds into the English camp with a challenge to battle. Let the English King appoint deputies to agree a day and a place with them, they said, and provided that Charles VI consented they would meet him there. Henry V dismissed the heralds with a tip of 100 crowns and a livery robe. Later that day he sent his own emissaries back with his response. He was not skulking behind stone walls, he said. He would head through open country for Calais, neither seeking nor avoiding battle. If they wanted a battle they knew where to find him without needing to agree a time and place. Meanwhile he told his own army to put on their armour and prepare for a great battle at any time. The English army resumed its march on 21 October. For four days they crossed the plain of southern Artois. The need to maintain close formation in case of attack made foraging for food all but impossible. Black skies and constant heavy rain added to their misery. The French army retreated before them at least a day ahead, leaving the churned up ground on either side of the road as marks of their passage. Their commanders planned to intercept the English army somewhere on the route to Calais where they could fight with advantage. But it had to be far enough south to rule out the threat of being attacked in the rear by the garrison at Calais. The Duke of Clarence was known to have landed there with his company on his way home. The French, who did not know the condition of his men, entertained real fears that he might try to join forces with his brother in Picardy.—
The major obstacle in Henry’s path was the walled city of Arras, which was the hub of the road system of the region. The English army would have to find a route round it. The French commanders anticipated that their adversary would leave Arras to his right and make for Aubigny- en-Artois, the first usable crossing of the River Scarpe west of the city, before regaining the main road to Calais. Their original plan was to block his path there. The French cavalry must have reached the Scarpe by about 22 October. The English King tried to get ahead of them by taking a more westerly route. The French moved west along the valleys of the Scarpe and the Ternoise to preempt him. On about 23 October the French reached Saint-Pol on the River Ternoise. The English reached the river at Blangy some twelve miles downstream on the following day, 24 October. They seized the bridge at Blangy in a sharp encounter with a small company of French troops who were about to destroy it, and succeeded in bringing the whole of the army safely across the river. For a moment it looked as if they had outmarched their enemy. In front of them a steep escarpment rose some 300 feet from the north bank of the Ternoise to a broad plateau extending north to Saint-Omer and east to the Flemish cities of Lille and Douai. When the first detachments of the English army reached the summit their hearts sank. About half a mile away the entire French cavalry could be seen moving west across the plain in compact battalions Tike a swarm of locusts’ to cut them off.—
The English had been outmanoeuvred at every point. Their scouts rode ahead of the army and returned to report that the French were making for Ruisseauville. From the bridge of Blangy the road passed due north towards Ruisseauville, an important staging post on the route to Flanders. Towards dusk the first French horsemen reached the road ahead of the English as it passed between the villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt. As the rest of the French cavalry caught up with them they drew up their troops across the English line of march. From the French positions the road sloped gently away to the south. On either side, it was flanked by open fields, and beyond the fields by dense woodland. As darkness fell, the English army came into view. Henry V advanced to within about a thousand yards of the French lines before halting his columns. A slight dip in the ground separated the two armies, but they were clearly visible to each other in the gloaming, and so close that the English could hear the music, chatter and the neighing of horses coming from the enemy lines. The French had expected to fight that afternoon.
When the failing light made that impossible, they determined that the English should not escape them the next day. They built great bonfires to light up the landscape and posted scouts across the countryside to warn them in case their enemy should try to slip away in the night. The battle which Henry V had tried to avoid was now inevitable.—
The English army was in poor shape. The men had not eaten properly for several days. They were bivouacked in the open on sodden ground around Maisoncelles, wet through and cold. A steady rain persisted through the night. Only their desperate situation gave them the courage to fight. They were heavily outnumbered, by more than eight to one in cavalry and two to one overall. The priests went through the camp hearing the confessions of men who believed that the next day might be their last. Would that we had ten thousand more of the best archers in England, said Sir Walter Hungerford, one of Henry’s household officers, only to be rebuked by the King in an exchange recorded by his chaplain and later made famous in Shakespeare’s embroidered version: T would not have a single man more even if I could, for these that I have here with me are God’s people whom he has graciously allowed me. Do you think that even with these few He cannot overcome the pride of the French and all their strength of numbers?’ The two sides went through the motions of diplomacy, a Christian duty of those about to fight a great battle, although now hardly more than a matter of form. In the recrimination in France which followed the battle there were reports that Henry V had been willing to accept humiliating terms in return for a free passage to Calais, which the French had been too arrogant to accept. In reality the negotiations seem to have consisted of little more than an exchange of the parties’ previous diplomatic positions.—
In the French camp all was not well. The Constable and the Marshals were the principal military officers of the Crown. But Charles d’Albret, vacillating and physically unimpressive, had never been much respected. Boucicaut was the most experienced soldier present with a military career extending back to the 1370s. But, as even the great Du Guesclin had discovered, the command of an army was not so much a matter of office as of rank. At Agincourt Albret and Boucicaut were outranked by the nineteen-year-old Duke of Orléans, now fighting his first battle, who as the king’s nephew was nominally ‘chief and sovereign’ of the army. They were also outranked by the disputatious and assertive Dukes of Alençon and Bourbon, who had some military experience and much the loudest voices. Decisions had to be made in committee, often after a good deal of argument. The council of war in the French camp lasted much of the evening. Even now there were men who doubted the wisdom of engaging the English. In their parlous situation Henry’s men were likely to sell their lives dearly. There was much concern about the English archers. Some of those present, remembering the disasters of the mid-fourteenth century, feared that massed longbowmen would be more than a match for their men-at-arms especially as the latter tended to tire easily in their heavy armour. Why run the risk of battle when the English were on their way home anyway? However, this was a minority view. Politically it was probably unthinkable, after Henry V’s capture of Harfleur and his ostentatious challenges, to let him escape with impunity.
The main argument among the French commanders was about timing. They had almost all of their cavalry with them together with the crossbowmen who had been recruited in mixed companies with the men- at-arms. But fresh companies of volunteers were arriving all the time. The large contingent of the Duke of Brittany was at Amiens and the companies of the Dukes of Anjou and Brabant were reported to be on their way. The unmounted men, mostly infantry and crossbowmen recruited in the northern towns, had been left behind on the road in the rush to cut off the English advance and might not arrive for another day or two. The main question was whether to engage the English first thing the next morning or to wait. The professional captains, led by Albret and Boucicaut, were for waiting. They were receiving reinforcements by the hour and had no difficulty in supplying themselves whereas the English were known to be exhausted and hungry. Delay could only weaken them physically and undermine their morale. But the Dukes of Bourbon and Alençon would have none of this. They thought that the cavalry were strong enough to overcome the English on their own and hinted that the rest were cowards. It was their view which prevailed.—
The main elements of the French battle plan had been worked out over the past two weeks. The French commanders assumed that the English would adopt their traditional tactics of placing their men-at-arms in the centre of the line with most of the archers slightly forward of them at the wings. The starting positions suggested for the French units mirrored this arrangement. They proposed to draw up their men on foot between the two lines of woodland in two large battalions, a vanguard with some 4,800 men-at-arms and a rearguard behind with another 3,000 men-at-arms. The Constable and the Marshal and almost ah the leading noblemen were assigned stations in the vanguard. Two cavalry forces were stationed at the wings, one of 1,600 men under the command of the Count of Vendôme and the other of 800 under Clignet de Bréban and Louis de Bosredon. Their task would be to charge and disperse the English archers opposite them in the opening moments of the battle, thus clearing the way for the heavily armed vanguard to advance against the English ranks where their superior numbers could be expected to prevail. The rearguard, under the command of Robert of Bar Count of Marie, was told to stay with their mounts to serve as a tactical reserve.
The problem about this plan was that its main lines had been laid down several days before and took little account of the site. The battlefield was essentially a defile between two forests, about 1,200 yards across at its northern end where the French had encamped for the night, narrowing to about 950 yards further south. It had been chosen at the last moment after only limited reconnaissance because it seemed to offer the best prospect of blocking the advance of the English towards Calais. But it had no other advantages. The confined space prevented the French from making effective use of their superior numbers. The dense forest on either side of the defile protected the wings of the English lines and made it difficult to outflank them. A flanking movement by heavy cavalry had originally been planned on the assumption that the battle would be fought in open country. But at Agincourt it was necessary to send the flanking force on a long detour round the forest to attack the English formations in the rear. Pitifully small numbers were assigned to it: just 200 men-at- arms supported by a crowd of gros varlets mounted on their masters’ horses. The French commanders had no clear plan for deploying the rest of their army. The rearguard received no instructions, and had no leaders, for all of its principal captains including its commander the Count of Marie had insisted on abandoning their companies to fight in the vanguard. The crossbowmen were originally to have been massed at the wings opposite the English archers, but the site was too narrow for them and so they were stationed instead with the rearguard where they were more or less useless. At sunrise on 25 October the French army began to take up its appointed stations. They made an intimidating sight: a forest of lances bearing the banners of several hundred companies. But their formidable aspect masked a disorganised order of battle and the almost complete absence of any proper chain of command.—
Some intelligence about earlier versions of the French plan had reached Henry V, probably from prisoners, during the march up the Somme valley. He sent men-at-arms to reconnoitre the field in the light of the moon and the great bonfires lit by the enemy. With this information he began to array his men at dawn. The English army was drawn up like the French across the whole distance between the two lines of woodland. The small force of men-at-arms along with their armed servants and pages was thinly spread, just four ranks deep with no reserve behind them. They were divided into three battalions, one under the King himself in the centre, another on the right wing under his cousin Edward Duke of York, and a third on the left wing under Thomas Ford Camoys, a recently promoted knight of the Garter then well into his sixties and one of the few men present whose experience of war dated back to the reign of Edward III.
The archers were commanded by Sir Thomas Erpingham, another elderly veteran who had fought with John of Gaunt in Castile and with Bolingbroke in Prussia. Erpingham followed the classic English battle plan, stationing most of the archers on the wings slightly forward of the rest of the line from where they would be able to shoot into the French lines from the flanks as they approached. In addition a number of archers were stationed in small groups in the midst of the men-at-arms. Henry V had learned of the French plan to disperse the archers with cavalry. Some days earlier he had ordered every archer to equip himself with a sharpened stake. These were fixed in the ground sloping outward point first in front of the archers’ positions. Another 200 archers were concealed in a clearing in the woods of Tramecourt close to the French lines to shoot into their flank as they advanced. The English baggage train was placed to the rear of the lines with the horses, the non- combatants and a small guard in case it was necessary to beat a rapid retreat. Henry himself took up his station in the centre of the line, conspicuous on a white horse, wearing dazzling armour, an armorial surcoat and a basinet with a sequined coronet on top.—
The English battle plan relied on the advantages of a strong defensive position and assumed that the enemy would attack first. This is what had happened at Crecy and Poitiers. Henry V deployed his army on the assumption that it would happen at Agincourt. Instead the French stood immobile in their starting positions and waited to be attacked. It was a sound tactical principle. They knew that the English could not afford to wait. They stood in their lines watching the enemy for at least two hours before Henry V, after a hurried conference with his captains, decided to risk making the first move. ‘Nowe is good time for alle England prayeth for us and therefore be of gode chere and let us go on our jorney,’ he said, according to a London chronicle (or, as another manuscript has it, ‘Felas, let’s go’). At about ten o’clock in the morning Sir Thomas Erpingham, who was standing at the head of his archers in front of the line, threw his baton in the air as the signal to advance. The banners were raised. The whole English army uttered a great cry and began to advance slowly in formation towards the French lines. Every few steps they paused to recover their formation and let out another great cry before resuming their advance. As soon as the advancing English line came within range of the French the archers planted their stakes in front of them and began to shoot dense volleys of arrows into the French lines. The archers concealed in the Tramecourt woods joined in from the left of the French line. The French were taken by surprise. They had not expected the English to open the attack so soon. They had not even completed their own dispositions. In particular the two cavalry forces on their wings, which were supposed to open the battle, were still in the process of forming up and many of the men had not yet reached their starting positions. The French plan was critically dependent on disabling the English archers before they were within range. So their commanders were forced to charge at once with whatever men they had. As they did so the vanguard began to advance on foot towards the enemy with a great shout of ‘Montjoie’, the ancient war-cry of French royal armies.
The opening charge of the French cavalry went badly wrong from the start. There were too many English archers to be run down by a force of a few hundred heavily armed horsemen. As the horsemen came within range Erpingham shouted out the order ‘Now strike!’ With several thousand archers shooting at once the dense rain of arrows could hardly fail to find targets. Volley after volley of arrows were loosed against the oncoming tide of men and horses. The horses panicked and threw their riders or turned away. Those that reached the English lines shied away from the stakes in the ground or impaled themselves on their sharp points. Shortly, most of the cavalry had turned tail, abandoning their leaders in the midst of the enemy and making headlong back to their own lines. The other cavalry operation to the English rear had been conceived as a spoiling operation designed to disrupt their lines in the critical opening phase of the battle. In the event it did not even achieve that. It was conducted by relatively low-grade cavalry led by three local noblemen and supported by a disorderly mob of gros varlets and some 600 peasants from the surrounding villages. They managed to make their way round the forest and appeared behind the English lines. But instead of attacking the enemy they fell on the baggage park and took to looting before making off with their spoils. This included much of the King’s baggage including his bedding, his cash chests and one of his crowns.— The French vanguard was already in difficulties. It had to advance across ground which had recently been ploughed up. The rain had turned it into a quagmire through which the men-at-arms, encased in heavy steel or mail, found it hard to move. They had been drawn up in a solid block thirty-one lines deep and crammed into a front too narrow for their vast numbers, making it difficult for them to manoeuvre or maintain their formation. Then, as they struggled forward, the fleeing cavalry collided
with them, breaking up their lines and transforming them into a formless mob. The English archers poured arrows into the flanks of the advancing mass of men. The French were shocked by the ease with which the sharp arrowheads penetrated plate and mail at short range. Some companies tried to retreat in the face of the volleys from the archers but found their escape blocked by the men behind them. As they advanced the field narrowed and the men were so tightly crushed together that they could hardly move or raise their weapons. By the time that they reached the English lines they were exhausted. Their sheer weight of numbers forced the English lines back for several yards before they succeeded in stopping the advance. Forced to a halt by the English men-at-arms, the French front line found itself pushed over and trampled underfoot by the pressure of the men behind them. There was fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the front line. Henry V had to fight for his life, sustaining a blow to his helmet which knocked one of the fleurons off his coronet. The Duke of York was killed in the mêlée on the right wing where some of the toughest fighting occurred. The King’s brother Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, wounded and pulled to the ground, was saved from death by Henry himself who shielded him with his own body. But the greater part of the French vanguard was immobilised in the crush and unable to reach the English line. The English, said the chronicler Walsingham, ‘wrenched the axes from their hands and slaughtered them like cattle’. The archers, having emptied their quivers, moved in from the wings and attacked them with daggers, hatchets and mallets and weapons scavenged from the bodies on the field. Piles of French dead and wounded some five or six feet high mounted in front of the English lines, which the English began to clamber up in order to attack the advancing ranks behind.
Shortly after midday the force of the French attack failed and the tide turned. The English resumed the offensive, overrunning the remnants of the French vanguard dispersed across the field. At the north end of the field the French rearguard was still intact, standing with their mounts in their starting positions and accompanied by the crossbowmen. They had no orders and almost all their leaders were dead. The English advanced on them and shortly reached their front line. They encountered only perfunctory resistance before the rearguard broke. About 600 men-at- arms of the rearguard were rallied by the Counts of Marie and
Faucomberque, who had escaped the carnage. They attempted to disengage and in an act of hopeless heroism charged the English line. Every one of them was killed or captured. The rest mounted their horses, turned and fled the field.—
The English had taken few prisoners at the height of the battle. They did not have the numbers to hold them and were afraid that they would rejoin the fray if they were spared. The attack on the baggage park had added to their nervousness. Most of those who tried to surrender were killed on the spot. But as soon as the fight was over the English set about scavenging the battlefield and pulling the great piles of bodies apart in search of survivors who were worth a ransom. A large number of French soldiers were found alive, some of them badly wounded, some half- suffocated under the weight of the dead and injured. They were disarmed and deprived of their basinets, then led away to holding points at the rear.
While this grim business was in progress there was a sudden alarm in the English ranks. There were reports of fresh French troops. A French standard had been seen raised on the field. The reports were confused and inconsistent and it has never been clear who these troops were. It may have been the company of the Duke of Brittany which had left Amiens that morning, too late to take part in the battle. It may have been the men of the lord of Longny, who was also said to have reached the battlefield with 600 men-at-arms of the Duke of Anjou just as the rearguard was abandoning the field. The most plausible account is that Clignet de Breban had succeeded in rallying some of the remnants of the rearguard and had appeared in the rear of the English positions before being driven off. The English King, his formations dispersed across the field, was afraid that his small force would be overwhelmed. He ordered all the prisoners to be killed except for a few of the most prominent who had already been removed under guard to a place of safety. Prisoners were despatched in hundreds with a sword to the throat or an axe to the head. Others were battered to death with mallets. The Burgundian Ghillebert de L annoy was shut with a dozen others in a nearby farmhouse which was set on fire. When some of the captors seemed reluctant to kill men who might bring them a fortune in ransoms, the King sent in a company of archers to finish the job. When it became clear that the French had vanished the panic subsided and the slaughter stopped. The best estimate that can be made is that about 700 prisoners in English hands had been killed. In modern eyes the slaughter has always seemed an act of unchivalrous barbarism. But no one held it against the English at the time, even among their enemies. Indeed the Burgundian herald Jean Le Fèvre, who was with the English army, blamed the French rearguard who, by trying to rally after all was lost, had condemned their companions to a brutal death.—
The prisoners who either survived the massacre or were found after it was over included some of the greatest lords of France. Charles of Orléans, who had been trampled underfoot in front of the English centre, was pulled from the mound of bodies. Arthur de Richemont was found by an archer beneath three layers of bodies, covered in blood and recognisable only by his coat of arms. The Marshal Jean de Boucicaut, the Duke of Bourbon, his cousin Louis Count of Vendôme, who been one of the French ambassadors at Winchester in July, and his stepson Charles Count of Eu, were recognised for the high-ranking figures that they were and escaped the massacre. A few managed to flee when the killing began like Ghillebert de L annoy, badly wounded in the head and knees, who managed to crawl out of the burning farmhouse where he had been left to die and was recaptured in the fields a short distance away. Most of the others were lucky enough still to be alive when the killing stopped.—
The French had suffered a catastrophic defeat. Its measure was the number of casualties. The list of the French dead read like a roll call of the military and political leaders of the past generation. In the failing light after the battle the English archers went through the bodies on the field finishing off the wounded with daggers and stripping the dead. The work was resumed on the following morning. The armorial coats were brought into the English camp to be identified by the heralds. The tally was three dukes, five counts, nearly 100 other great lords and 3,069 knights and squires. At least 2,600 more, who were found without arms to identify them, were included in the body count when the dead were eventually buried. The Duke of Alençon had thrown himself with ferocity into the fight around the English King and had been cut down by one of Henry’s bodyguards as he tried to surrender. Anthony Duke of Brabant, John the Fearless’s brother, had arrived from Lens in the middle of the battle having ridden ahead of his troops in his riding clothes with only a handful of companions. Putting on borrowed armour and an armorial banner seized from one of his trumpeters, he had joined the fight in its final moments and had been seen among the prisoners after it was all over. But the English did not recognise him in his improvised garb and cut his throat when the cry went up to kill the prisoners. His younger brother, Philip Count of Nevers, was probably also killed in the slaughter of the prisoners.
Their fate was shared by many other great figures. Seven of the French King’s cousins were among the dead. The Constable, the Master of the Royal Archers, the Master of the Royal Household and the bearer of the Oriflamme of St Denis, in fact every military officer of the Crown was dead except for Marshal Boucicaut who was a prisoner and the Admiral Clignet de Bréban who escaped. Jacques d’Heilly, veteran of campaigns in Scotland and the Gascon march, who had recently broken out of Wisbech castle in England and escaped across the Channel, was found among the dead. Jean de Montaigu, Archbishop of Sens and metropolitan of France, was felled sword in hand in the midst of the mêlée. No fewer than twelve of the twenty-one provincial baillis and seneschals north of the Loire were killed or captured. Entire families were wiped out in the male line, fathers and sons, brothers and cousins. In some regions, notably Picardy from which most of the army’s last- minute recruits had come, a whole generation of the territorial nobility was wiped out. The Bourbonnais was described a few years later as ‘devoid of knights and squires on account of the day of the English ... at which most of them had been killed or captured’.
Towards the end of the afternoon the English King summoned the heralds of both sides, who had watched the battle from a distance. The story of his exchange with Montjoie, the French King of Arms, is probably apocryphal, but would later find its way into the pages of the Picard chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet and from him to Shakespeare. The King asked him to confirm the outcome of the battle. ‘This day is yours,’ the herald answered. Then pointing to the castle standing north-west of the battlefield Henry asked its name and was told that it was called Agincourt. ‘Then since battles should be named after the nearest castle, village or town, let this battle for ever more be called the battle of Agincourt.’—
The casualties in medieval battles were usually very unequal because most of them occurred at the very end in the pursuit or afterwards as the wounded were finished off on the ground. Estimates of English casualties vary from nine or ten to thirty-three, most of them among the lightly protected archers. A few bodies, including the Duke of York and the young Earl of Suffolk, were brought back to England for burial, but most were collected in a nearby barn which was then torched as the English prepared to resume their march. The French dead were left naked on the battlefield. For days afterwards servants and clerks searched the battlefield looking for their masters among the disfigured corpses. Most of the more famous dead were eventually claimed by their families or carried off for burial a few miles away in the church of the Franciscans of Hesdin. Some 5,800 corpses lay rotting on the ground until eventually three great trenches were dug across the field to receive them.—
The first news of the battle reached Rouen on the following morning. The whole court was stunned. The King, the Dauphin and the Duke of Berry wept. They were not alone. ‘There is no path or lane, no town or village in France which does not feel the wound,’ wrote the young Norman poet Robert Blondel. The immediate reaction to the defeat is painfully reflected in the lamentations of the official historiographer whose work is probably the earliest French account of the battle. ‘O everlasting shame’, he cried as he described the herding of some of the noblest figures in France Tike serfs’ into the prisoners’ pens after being defeated by ‘worthless, low-born’ archers. He reviewed the military history of France going back to the Gauls’ attack on ancient Rome to illustrate the scale of the catastrophe. ‘But the worst of it was that France will become the laughing stock of every foreign nation.’ Writing home from Paris the Aragonese ambassador reported that this was the ‘common sentiment here’. Men said that no greater loss, no comparable dishonour had befallen France in a single day for three hundred years.
Shock quickly gave way to recrimination. Public opinion blamed the moral failings of the French nobility just as it had done after the military disasters of the previous century. Moralists blamed the whole mentality of the military class: their love of luxury and vice, their violence against churchmen and women, their blasphemous language, their lust for booty and above all their encouragement of the corrosive divisions of France since the murder of Louis of Orléans. It was a judgment curiously similar to Henry V’s own. ‘I know that God by his grace has given me this victory over the French not for any worth of mine but to punish them for their sins,’ Henry is said to have told his wretched prisoner Charles of Orléans, who was so dejected that he could neither eat nor drink, ‘for if I am rightly informed,’ he continued, ‘there has never been such disorder, hedonism, sinfulness and vice as reigns in our time in France.’ The inclination of so many Frenchmen to accept this verdict infuriated the intensely patriotic royal secretary Jean de Montreuil. Writing within a few weeks of the battle he railed against the prevailing tide of fatalism and self-doubt. England had been conquered by the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes and the Normans ‘but never once since there were kings to defend her has France been conquered by any foreigner’. Sluys, Crécy and Poitiers had been great English victories in their day but the armies and fleets of Charles V had undone them all. Agincourt would be a mere flash in the pan as they had turned out to be. In a chess tournament, said Jean, the winner of twenty games is the champion not the player who can only manage four or five.—
The course of the battle itself, once the details became known, seemed to bear out the pessimists. It was generally attributed in France, as it was in England, to the arrogance, treachery, vanity and cowardice of those who were there or should have been. Arrogance had led the commanders in the fateful council of war on the eve of the battle to decide to fight on the following day without waiting for the lowly infantry of the towns and to send all their bowmen to the rear. Treachery had persuaded John the Fearless and John Duke of Brittany to hold back their troops when they could have brought a decisive accession of strength to the French army. Vanity had propelled all the leading noblemen present to demand a place in the vanguard. But the charge which hurt most was cowardice. For years afterwards those who had fled with the rearguard were discreetly pointed out at gatherings. A year or two after the battle Alain Chartier wrote the Livre des Quatre Dames, the first of a number of long poems written at the lowest point of France’s fortunes in which he lamented the ills of his country. Which of the four ladies of his title had the greatest cause for grief? All four had lovers or husbands who were present at the battle. One had been killed. The second was a prisoner in England. The third had never been found, one of the thousands of anonymous corpses tipped into the trenches at Agincourt or perhaps held in some nameless English dungeon. But the unhappiest was the wife of the fourth, who had been stationed with the rearguard and left the field without striking a blow, thus condemning the other three to their fate.—
These sweeping judgments were unfair, however widely accepted. It was an act of folly to allow the entire leadership of the army to station themselves in the front line, thus ensuring that there would be no overall direction once the battle had started. But the main factors in the defeat were the immense power of massed archers, especially when deployed against cavalry, and the choice of a site which prevented the French from exploiting their numerical superiority. The French certainly did not lack courage. The vanguard threw themselves with heroic fury into the fight and the rearguard only abandoned the field when the battle was already lost. Nor did they lack numbers. They were unable to deploy all the men- at-arms they had and would have gained nothing by waiting for reinforcements. The infantry could have contributed nothing to the strength of the French advance. The crossbowmen were all urban recruits who are unlikely to have been equipped with modern weapons and could never have matched the range or rate of fire of the English longbowmen. They would simply have got in the way, as they had at Crecy seventy years before. Jean de Bueil was only nine years old when his father was killed at Agincourt. But he grew to understand that the failings of the French army were entirely at the level of command. Half a century later, when as a hardened veteran he came to distill a lifetime’s experience of war in Le Jouvencel, he derived two lessons from the defeat: ‘Take up the best position you can as soon as you can,’ and ‘A dismounted army should always wait for the enemy.’—
The news of the battle, which reached London four days after it was fought, transformed the fortunes of the house of Lancaster. In the first place it put an end to doubts about the durability of the dynasty. We cannot know how many Englishmen agreed with the views attributed to Richard Bruton, the canon of Wells cathedral who was said to have declared ten days before the battle that neither Henry V nor his father had been true kings, that Scrope and the other Southampton plotters had had the right idea and that he (Bruton) would willingly spend his own money to help put the house of Lancaster off the throne. The sentiment was probably common enough to have created serious problems for the King if he had been defeated. As it was, after the battle Bruton was denounced by the papermaker with whom he had shared his thoughts. From time to time malcontents could still be found to appeal to the memory of Richard II, but support for the impostor Thomas Ward became increasingly idiosyncratic even in Scotland. Henry Talbot, the squire who had tried to raise Yorkshire for the Southampton plotters, continued to promote the cause of the Pseudo-Richard and was eventually executed at Tyburn in 1417. Sir John Oldcastle remained on the run until later that year when he was captured on the Welsh march and burned in London, proclaiming to the last his faith in the living Richard. Ward himself died largely forgotten in Stirling castle in 1419. He had no successors. After Agincourt there would still be localised rebellions over specific grievances as there always had been. But the dynasty’s legitimacy would not be challenged by a major rebellion until the 1450s.—
After thirty years of growing Parliamentary scepticism the battle persuaded Henry V’s subjects that the English Crown’s long-standing ambitions in France were not only achievable but just. In a letter of congratulation addressed to the King shortly after the battle Chancellor Beaufort compared his nephew to Judas Maccabeus, Saul, David, Solomon and Alexander the Great. ‘The winter of sloth and idleness, timidity and folly has passed away and the spring flowers of youth and martial vigour are here ... What wise man, I ask, looking back on this campaign, will not stand amazed and attribute it to the power of God himself?’ The King, said Beaufort, need have no fears about the availability of funds to complete his work in France. The Commons and the convocations of the Church would sing his praises and open their coffers for the ‘Prince of Priests’. And so it proved.
On 4 November 1415 Parliament opened in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster in an atmosphere of general euphoria. The King was still at Calais. In his absence his place was taken by his brother John Duke of Bedford, Keeper of England. In an opening address which perfectly captured the abiding themes of Henry V’s propaganda, Chancellor Beaufort declared that ‘we must honour the King because he has honoured God Almighty’. Beaufort gave a carefully crafted version of what was to become the standard Lancastrian myth, regularly reiterated in Henry’s propaganda and in chronicles, poems and songs before it was revived nearly two centuries later in the midst of another great war in Shakespeare’s Henry V. The whole course of the campaign, said Beaufort, had been the work of God. Forced to resort to war by the deviousness and intransigence of the French, Henry had invaded France and captured Harfleur (‘the strongest town in this part of the world’) by the grace and favour of God. The Lord had then struck down much of the English army with dysentery and allowed the King to advance with his tiny force into Picardy against the whole chivalry of France so that there could be no doubt that it was by divine intervention that he had triumphed. At length they had reached Calais with ‘the greatest honour and profit that the English realm ever had in so short a time’. Now, said Beaufort, it was for his subjects to do their duty. The King’s great enterprise having begun so propitiously, they could not allow it to founder for want of money. ‘As he did unto us,’ intoned the Bishop, ‘so let us do unto him.’ They responded as Beaufort had predicted in his letter. The second instalment of the subsidy granted at the end of the previous year, which was due to be collected in February 1416, was brought forward to December and a fresh subsidy was granted for collection in November 1416. In addition the Commons made an unprecedented grant of the wool subsidy and the tunnage and poundage duties for the rest of Henry’s life, dispensing with any need for further reference to Parliament. Reciting their reasons, the Commons acknowledged the inadequacy of the King’s ordinary revenues for the great and just enterprise that he had undertaken and declared their desire to mark the King’s ‘surpassing courage’. The assembly was dissolved on 13 November after sitting for only a week, one of the shortest and most compliant Parliaments of the fifteenth century. A few days later the convocation of Canterbury matched the Commons’ grants with two clerical tenths.—
Henry himself landed at Dover on 16 November 1415 and made for the royal manor of Eltham. A week later, on 23 November, the King rode to Blackheath to be received by the Mayor and aldermen of London and several thousand liverymen dressed in red robes with red and white parti¬coloured hoods, all bearing the emblems of their trade. At ten o’clock in the morning the King entered the city over London Bridge. It was the most exuberant royal entry since the return of the Black Prince after the Poitiers campaign more than half a century before. The pageant which greeted him was a visual representation of the themes expounded in the Chancellor’s address to Parliament. The city was decked out with giant allegorical figures of David and Goliath and tableaux vivants of angels, prophets, apostles and the kings, martyrs and confessors of England. Timber arches and towers adorned the streets. Banners stretched across the carriageways bore mottos repeating the theme of Chancellor Beaufort’s address to Parliament: ‘Welcome Henry the Lifte, Kinge of England and of Fraunce’, ‘The city of the King of Justice’, ‘Honour and glory be to God alone’ and even ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’. The implicit references to Christ entering Jerusalem can have escaped no one. Here was a new England, the chosen instrument of God’s will. Henry’s claim to divine sanction for his wars was never more clearly asserted than in these extraordinary celebrations.
The King himself played out his role with the sense of theatre that he never lost. Wearing a simple purple gown, his face impassively solemn, he rode through the streets of his capital accompanied by a small entourage comprising the officers of his household, the leading French prisoners and a guard of soldiers. At Cheapside, the broadest open space within the walls, the crowd was so dense that the procession could hardly get past. Sixteen mitred bishops and abbots greeted him at the steps of St Paul’s to escort him to make his offering at the high altar. The din of choirs, braying horns and mass cries of ‘Noel’ was deafening. It took five hours for the King’s party to pass through the city from London Bridge to Ludgate and then along the Strand to Westminster.—
The lesser French prisoners had almost all been released before the army left Calais. They were ransomed, generally for quite small amounts, or allowed to leave on their parole, or sold to ransom brokers who paid cash up front and took the risks of default. The more valuable and influential captives were brought to England, most of them by the King, who exercised his right to acquire them from their captors. They followed in Henry’s footsteps to be exhibited like trophies to the crowds in London and Westminster and to decorate his court at Windsor. The English King had no intention of admitting them to ransom until it suited him politically. He kept them in England for use as bargaining counters in future dealings with the French. None of them was destined to be released in Henry’s lifetime apart from Arthur de Richemont, who would be paroled in exceptional circumstances in 1420.
Shortly before Christmas 1415 Raoul de Gaucourt and other prisoners of Harfleur were incarcerated in the Tower of London. The Dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, Arthur de Richemont, the Counts of Vendôme and Eu and Marshal Boucicaut enjoyed a better fate, at least initially. They were moved to and fro between the Tower, the Palace of Westminster and Windsor castle, where they appear to have been accommodated in comfort and allowed some freedom of movement. Some of them had relatives or friends in England, like Charles of Orléans, whose brother John had been a hostage for the performance of the treaty of Buzançais since 1412, and Arthur de Richemont, whose mother the dowager Queen, widow of Henry IV, sent him gifts of money and clothing. They were all rich men, apart perhaps from Boucicaut, with the resources to soften the hardships of captivity. They summoned their own servants from France to attend to their comforts. They paid for friends and counsellors to visit them. Charles of Orléans maintained an account with a Florentine banker in London into which large sums were transferred by his staff at Blois. He brought over books for his library, gold and silver plate for his table, chandeliers for his rooms and linen for his bed as well as an ample French-speaking secretarial staff with which he endeavoured to run his domains from England. The Duke of Bourbon, a man of more worldly tastes, brought over his huntsmen and falconers, his hawks and his hounds and whole shiploads of wine. None of this, however, was likely to compensate for the boredom of confinement or disguise their fallen status. Men who had been among the great political figures of France were now condemned to become distant and impotent witnesses of the great events unfolding there. The Duke of Orléans was destined to remain in captivity for a quarter of a century. The poems which he wrote from his prison are filled with a melancholy regret for the lost years, ‘banished from the house of Love, struck out of the book of Joy’. T am the heart shrouded in black,’ he sang.