3

Agincourt and Normandy

So seduced are we by the idea of Shakespeare’s ‘happy few’ that the scale of Henry V’s invasion of France tends to go unrecognized. Henry’s expedition of 1415 was the first time since Edward III’s of 1359 that an English king had led a force to France in person, and he was intent upon making a substantial showing. His army, approaching 12,000, was larger than that of 1359 and not much smaller than that of 1346 with which Edward III had gained his celebrated victory at Crécy. On that occasion, Edward had conducted a raid across Normandy but had made no permanent conquests. By contrast, Henry V was determined to take and occupy French territory. To that end, he engaged troops for the lengthy and costly period of twelve months, requiring them to provision themselves with a three months’ supply of food, an indication that he envisaged the men being used in sieges rather than the destructive burning and pillaging of the chevauchée, in which living off the land was an essential part of strategy. Indeed, Henry also took a strong force of gunners, miners, masons and other support staff appropriate to siege warfare.

Henry’s strategy was a new departure in English war policy and reveals an ambitious as well as an imaginative approach. Tenure of territory, especially the wealthy and economically important duchy of Normandy, offered the prospect of considerable financial benefit. At the parliament of November 1414, the chancellor had pointed out that ‘if their prince had a greater increase in his patrimony, it will be possible to reduce the burdens on his subjects’.¹ Moreover, Henry may already have had in mind a distribution of conquered lands to his soldiers. Securing Norman ports would also remove the threats posed to English shipping: Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, had been a particular hotbed of the piracy condoned by the French government. Given the strong mercantile lobby in Parliament and in London, this strategy would be appealing at home. Furthermore, it was relatively easy to resupply and reinforce Normandy from England. Conquests would fortify Henry’s negotiating position with the French as well as demonstrating on the European stage that the English were a force to be reckoned with.

Henry’s presence in France would be an intolerable insult to the French, who would be bound to respond and bring him to battle, something which, given the size of his army, would be a considerable challenge as it would take the French both time and money to raise a force large enough to face him, thereby giving him time to establish his position by conquering territory. That said, if Henry had hoped to benefit from the legacy of tensions between the rival French factions, the Armagnacs and Burgundians, either by allying with one of them or expecting them to be weakened by their earlier divisions, then he would be disappointed. The reconciliation they had made on 23 February persisted.

The initial advantage lay with Henry as invader. The French could not raise an army quickly enough to bring to battle his large army during his siege of Harfleur (17 August–22 September 1415) and made no effort to do so. Yet the campaign did not go as planned. Harfleur proved more difficult to take than he had expected: the siege dragged on for five weeks. Henry had adopted a threatening tone, claiming his powers according to Chapter 20 of the Book of Deuteronomy to act savagely against the town and its inhabitants if it refused to surrender. Indeed, he is the first Western European king known to have explicitly cited this biblical precedent in war, which allowed rulers to act harshly against places which they considered to be theirs by right and which resisted their authority. He had first alluded to it in the final letter he had sent to Charles VI on 28 July before he launched his invasion.² The unnamed author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti (‘Deeds of Henry the Fifth’), a priest accompanying Henry’s army, tells us that as soon as he had come to the throne, the king had ‘written out for himself the laws of Deuteronomy in his bosom’,³ suggesting this biblical awareness may have been linked to his religious transformation on accession. The townspeople decided to surrender when Henry threatened to launch an assault and when they discovered that the French king and his son were not able to relieve the siege because they could not raise a large enough army at this point.

Henry’s strong belief that it was God who had given him the victory coloured the manner of his entry to Harfleur, barefoot and culminating with prayers and oblations at the Church of Saint-Martin. This did not disguise his intention to make the town a second Calais, expelling much of the population and encouraging English settlers with a promise of houses and even a charter of liberties. But the victory came at a cost. His army was too large to be kept in one confined location for so long and, thanks to the insanitary conditions, was stricken by dysentery. At least 1,330 had to be invalided home, with an unknown number dying at the siege. These included Henry’s long-standing friend and adviser Richard Courtenay, who died at Harfleur on 15 September. Henry’s devotion to him was such that his body was taken back to England for burial near to the king’s own proposed tomb in Westminster Abbey. A second close friend, the Earl of Arundel, had been invalided home but died in England on 13 October; the king’s brother Thomas had also returned home sick.

Harfleur’s defences had been so badly damaged by English bombardment that Henry had to install an exceptionally large garrison of 1,200 men under Thomas Beaufort, Earl of Dorset, to ensure that the French would not be tempted into an early attempt at recovery. With at least a third of his men no longer free to continue the campaign, and with autumn drawing on, Henry abandoned efforts to progress deeper into France and decided to withdraw to the English port of Calais. While making preparations to do so, he sought both to test and insult the French by summoning the dauphin, Louis, to personal combat, the winner to succeed Charles VI at his death.⁴ He did this just to show that he had the upper hand as he knew it would generate no response.

Although Henry’s campaign had demonstrated the English ability to invade and damage France, his conquests had not been as extensive or achieved as quickly as he had hoped. By withdrawing now he could limit the financial burden, enabling him to recover more easily the jewels and plate distributed to his captains as security for the wages of the second three-month period of service. Not confident of making further conquests at this stage, he was keen to minimize risks in the hope of coming back to France in a stronger position later. By moving away from Harfleur towards Calais, which he did between 6 and 8 October, it was less likely that the French would make an immediate attempt to retake Harfleur. Rather, they would be tempted to pursue Henry as he made his way northwards.

He did not wish to face the French in battle at this point. His initial route close to the coast of Upper Normandy shows that he wanted to get to Calais as quickly as possible: the author of the Gesta anticipated that the march north would take eight days once the army had set out from Harfleur.⁵ But, having arrived at the mouth of the Somme, Henry learned that the French had assembled a large army on the north bank of the estuary, thereby blocking his route to Calais. Knowing how vulnerable his army would be if intercepted during or immediately after crossing a wide river, since it could not easily be put into battle formation, Henry moved eastwards along the south bank of the Somme to seek a safer crossing. The Gesta portrays his eventual crossing of the river on 19 October over sixty miles inland as a major military achievement, one that was likely to enable Henry to avoid an engagement: ‘we were of the firm hope that the enemy army … would be disinclined to follow after us to do battle’.⁶ The crossing put the onus on the French to intercept him before he reached Calais. Thus, on 20 October, the French commanders, already gathering their forces at Péronne, sent heralds to Henry to tell him that they would do battle with him before he reached the town. It is possible that they had chosen Aubigny as the battle location at this point, but since Henry deliberately moved off in a different direction, still trying to avoid battle, the French ended up intercepting him close to Agincourt (the present-day village of Azincourt), thirty-four miles south of Calais as the crow flies.

At first sight, advantages in a pitched battle lay with the French. Henry’s army had been reduced in size to about 8,500 and had a preponderance of archers, over 80 per cent of the total force, who were not fully armed and therefore vulnerable in the face of a cavalry charge. Some of the French army had shadowed Henry’s march and even before he crossed the Somme he was anticipating being brought to battle. At Corbie on 17 October, he had ordered his archers to provide themselves with six-foot-long stakes sharpened at each end to place in the ground in front of them to protect them against the expected French cavalry attack. We must assume that he, or others in his company, had heard of the effectiveness of stakes at Nicopolis in 1396 in protecting the Ottoman forces and thereby contributing to their victory against the allied crusader forces. Throughout the march he also imposed strict discipline on his troops, even making soldiers who found wine at one of the castles en route empty out the bottles they had filled.

Henry’s leadership did much to keep up English spirits. This was particularly valuable when the English arrived at Agincourt on 24 October and saw a large French host blocking their route. He expected battle to be given that day. Drawing up his troops, he ‘very calmly and quite heedless of danger, gave encouragement to his army’.⁷ In fact, the French chose not to engage. A delay suited them since it would increase English anxiety as well as allow for their latecomers to arrive. As it transpired, not all did come in time to fight. The Duke of Brittany, for instance, was still at Amiens on 25 October, and although the Duke of Brabant did reach Agincourt, it was not until most of the battle was over.

The French did not have as large an army as they had hoped. Knowing exactly how many they had is problematic but the numbers could not have been nearly as high as the often ridiculously inflated figures given in the chronicles. A tax to support 6,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 gens de trait (crossbowmen as well as longbowmen) had been levied, and we can add in others raised by the semonce des nobles (a summons to the nobility and those ‘accustomed to follow the wars’ to provide service, although usually still in expectation of pay), from Normandy and Picardy (according to the chroniclers’ lists of dead, most of the slain came from these areas) as well as troops from the north-eastern borders. A total around 12,000 is not unrealistic, and still considerably more than the 8,500 or so in Henry’s army. But while the English benefited from the fact they had been together for over two months under a king who had grown into a strong and charismatic leader, and had had time to work out tactics, the French army had come together in dribs and drabs. It had been decided that Charles VI and the dauphin would not participate (a sign that the French continued to be worried about Henry’s potential strength). Therefore the leading commander was Charles, Duke of Orléans, with little military experience, who had been intruded at the last minute into an existing battle plan drawn up for an engagement closer to the Somme. Initially the Dukes of Burgundy and Orléans had both been told to keep away from the battle, the French crown being mindful of the long-running dispute between them.

On the morning of 25 October, both sides drew up their forces. The French placed in their vanguard a large proportion of their men-at-arms, perhaps as many as 5,000, intending to roll over by their sheer weight of numbers the small number of their English counterparts (who cannot have exceeded 1,500 men-at-arms) and to capture the king. The French had at least one further large division of men-at-arms, but it is not certain whether they had a third division at the rear. They were reluctant to deploy their crossbowmen and longbowmen, perhaps because they saw them as too few in number in comparison with the English missile-men and therefore vulnerable against the weight of English arrow power. Crossbows needed time for reloading and the soldier was exposed in the meantime. They decided to have the cavalry forces on each flank charge against the English archers to knock them out of the fight. This was a sensible move in principle but it did not work as planned. First, it seems that troops were reluctant to join the cavalry force since they preferred to fight in the vanguard, where the more valuable prisoner gains were likely to be made. Therefore the cavalry forces were not large enough to be effective. It may be also that the French who had been detailed to the cavalry charge against the archers realized the devastating effect arrows would have on horses, which were not usually well armoured, and preferred not to join the charge against the archers. Secondly, because Henry had protected his archers with stakes, this made it difficult for the charge to keep up the necessary momentum. Thrown into disarray, the horsemen turned to retreat, only to collide into their next ranks and into the vanguard of French men-at-arms advancing on foot.

Henry’s success derived chiefly from his astute deployment of archers. With such a large number at his disposal, he placed them on the flanks as well as in front of his three divisions of men-at-arms. Protected by the stakes, they were able to keep up a veritable barrage of arrows against which the French cavalry and foot advance was impeded. The arrow storm created a frightening situation into which the French had no choice but to try to keep going. A natural funnelling effect ensued, with the advancing foot soldiers becoming so closely packed they could not even raise their weapon arms. Men fell and others fell on top of them. It appears also that the ground over which the French had to advance was muddy from the nature of the soil, newly sown crops and the overnight rain. Many died from suffocation or effectively drowned in the mud, never even reaching the English men-at-arms to engage with them.

Henry had been astute in his positioning, the result no doubt of scouting on the eve of battle. As head of the smaller army, he had adopted a defensive position even if he had had to make an initial move forward to a new position in order to goad the French into attack (another sign that they were still hoping for more reinforcements to arrive). He commanded the centre battle. All accounts emphasize his personal valour: his brother Humphrey fell but the king stood over him to protect him until he could be taken to safety. Henry participated fully in the fight, leading his troops by example. His cousin Edward, Duke of York commanded the vanguard, the English first division which bore the brunt of French attack, the duke thereby falling in action. The rearguard was under the command of Thomas, Lord Camoys, who had married into the fringes of the royal family, and who, as a seasoned sixty-five-year-old, was able to hold the line and confidence of his troops while they awaited the attack.

With their advance slowed, the French men-at-arms were an easy target for the English. Even the archers, despite their lack of weaponry, could climb on to the piled-up French and use whatever they had to hand – hammers, axes and daggers – to despatch men who under other circumstances would be too well armed for them to challenge at all. As a consequence, the later French divisions, seeing what was happening, simply left the field. In this context, the size of the French army was immaterial since by no means everyone took part. Henry considered the battle won, and stood down his army, ordering men to search through the heaps of French for prisoners. There was enough of a time lapse for prisoners to be rounded up. But at some point – we do not know exactly how much later – a shout went up that the French were intending to launch a new attack. This was probably the late arrival of the Duke of Brabant. Henry realized his army was in no position to respond. Men had taken off their helmets and gauntlets and were out of position. Therefore he ordered the prisoners to be killed. In the reminiscence of Ghillbert de Lannoy, who was in 1415 chamberlain to Philip, son of Duke John of Burgundy:

I was wounded in the knee and head and lay with the dead. When the bodies were searched through I was taken prisoner … and kept under guard for a while. I was then led to a house nearby with 10 or 12 other prisoners who were all wounded. And there, when the duke of Brabant was making a new attack, a shout went up that everyone should kill his prisoners. So that this might be effected all the quicker, they set fire to the house where we were.⁸

Callous as this act appears to be (other sources suggest prisoners were killed by weapons too), Henry had been placed in a vulnerable position. To protect his own men, he had to act quickly and decisively. No contemporary source makes any criticism of his decision to kill the prisoners. All save one connect it to the real danger of a new French attack. (The exception is the chronicler Pierre Fenin’s link to the attack on the English baggage train, an event which certainly took place but during the initial stages of the battle, leading to the loss, among other things, of some of the king’s own possessions.) It was fully accepted that no commander could endanger his own side: French and Castilian prisoners were ordered by the Portuguese commanders to be killed during the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 when it was believed that a new attack was imminent. Nor could Henry allow a victory which he had already won to be taken from him. This also explains why he moved away from the battlefield quickly on the following day, and maintained a defensive position on his march to Calais, which he reached on 29 October.

For many today, the Battle of Agincourt stands as Henry’s main achievement. Yet it was hardly a decisive victory in the way Poitiers (1356) had been, since it had seen the capture of the King of France, thereby requiring the French to negotiate his release and to agree to a treaty which gave Edward III substantial territory in France. Neither Charles VI nor the dauphin was present at Agincourt, and the prisoners were not so politically important that they would force the French to the negotiating table. Agincourt resembled Crécy in that respect. Like Crécy, too, there were very low rates of mortality on the English side and large numbers on the French, a situation which made the French reluctant ever to meet the English in battle again. Unlike Crécy, however, Agincourt saw large numbers of French captives – even after the killing of the prisoners – which offered potential profit to the crown as well as its soldiers. At least 320 prisoners are known, with an authenticated figure of around 500 dead. This contrasts with estimates of English dead, which some sources place as lower than 30 but which probably exceeded 100. Even so, the extent of victory is revealed by the asymmetric effects of the battle on the armies. Henry’s victory redeemed what might otherwise have been a disappointing campaign for the English. Battles were relatively scarce, and ones on this scale involving a crowned head even rarer. But the political advantage for Henry in England was immense and perhaps the greatest impact of the battle. It secured his position once and for all, and he did much to exploit the victory to enhance his kingship.

He may initially have contemplated continuing the campaign. That was the impression he wanted to give to the parliament which opened on 4 November 1415 while he was still absent in France. The chancellor’s opening speech reported his successes at Harfleur and Agincourt – ‘praise be to God, with the greatest honour and gain which the realm has ever had in so short a time’ – but warned that without further financial assistance this ‘propitious, honourable and profitable expedition’ could not continue. The Lords and Commons were invited to consider ‘how provision could be made in this matter … such as will be suitable for the completion and continuation of the expedition’.⁹ Whether Henry really was considering prolonging the campaign, perhaps with an attack on the Burgundian-held stronghold of Ardres on the edge of the Calais march, seems unlikely: if so, he appears to have been dissuaded by his leading captains. More likely, the king was worried about his financial resources more generally, and felt that Parliament would be more likely to vote him another tax if it believed he wanted to continue in arms. And so it turned out: after the instalment of the lay subsidy scheduled for payment in February 1416 had been brought forward to December 1415, a new subsidy had been granted for November 1416 and the king had been awarded the trade taxes for life, he announced the campaign completed and brought his army home. Parliament closed on 13 November. Three days later, Henry landed in England.

On 23 November he entered London in triumph, with the citizens arranging and paying for a series of tableaux in his honour and also theirs, to emphasize the status of the city itself and their own prestige. At the end of London Bridge the giants Gog and Magog, traditional guardians of the city, were dressed in all their finery, ‘bent upon seeing the eagerly awaited face of their lord and welcoming him with abundant praise’.¹⁰ En route the king was greeted by choirs and heraldic displays. The tower of the water conduit at Cornhill was covered with crimson cloth and decorated with the royal arms as well as those of St George, St Edward the Confessor and St Edmund. As the king passed it, ‘a company of prophets’ with white hair, golden copes and turbans released, ‘as an acceptable sacrifice to God for the victory’, sparrows and other small birds. ‘Some descended onto the king’s breast, some settled upon his shoulders, and some circled around in twisting flight’, while the prophets chanted ‘sing to the Lord a new song, Alleluia’.¹¹ At the Cheapside cross, a choir of beautiful young maidens adorned in white, ‘sang “Welcom Henry ye fifte, Kynge of Englon and of Fraunce” as if to another David coming from the slaying of Goliath, who might appropriately be represented by the arrogant French’.¹² This was not a Roman-style triumph, however. The king was accompanied not by his whole army but by a small retinue, and only the six most important prisoners were paraded. Onlookers were struck by the king’s humble demeanour, which underlined his constant emphasis on the God-given nature of his victory. The procession culminated in religious devotion at Westminster Abbey.

All mention of Agincourt after the event was consciously linked to God’s support for the king. The idea of God-given victory was not new, but Henry pushed it to new heights as part of his vision of kingship. It was also fanned by his advisers – at least one of whom, notwithstanding the king’s self-conscious projection of humility, was worried that the victory would go to the king’s head:

Thy royal majesty deems and firmly holds, as I presume, that not thy hand, but the outstretched hand of God, hath done all these things, for His own praise, the honour and glory of the English nation, and the eternal memory of the royal name … Moreover, it is fitting that your royal highness should not boast of the past, but be anxious for the future; neither let the power of our enemies drag us back; let not their astuteness disturb us; nor let any fair promises seduce any one.¹³

The author of these words was, very probably, Henry’s uncle and chancellor, Henry Beaufort: if so, they were perhaps written with Henry’s behaviour as prince, as well as king, in mind.

But if the implication of these words was that Agincourt provided a decisive advantage in terms of Anglo-French politics, it did not prove to be the case. Indeed, rather than respond to the crushing defeat with diplomatic efforts to come to terms, the French aimed to strike back as fast as possible, with an attempt to recover Harfleur. The English conquest was proving very difficult to sustain, especially in terms of supplying food to the garrison there; indeed, increasingly desperate sorties in March 1416 had ended in near disaster, with losses of both men and horses. By early April, the French had laid a naval blockade against the town and had established garrisons on the landward side. The Earl of Dorset, who had been appointed captain of Harfleur at its surrender, was at the end of his tether by the middle of the month. He had written to the royal council on several occasions for food, artillery and other items, ‘but,’ he noted in a strongly worded despatch, ‘nothing has been provided’, which was ‘extremely disappointing to myself and the loyal subjects of the king … if meat is not sent as soon as possible we will have to return at Whitsun’ (7 June).¹⁴

Since late January that year, Henry had been drawing up plans to lead another expedition to France.¹⁵ But while Parliament, sitting again throughout March and April 1416, agreed to bring forward to June the subsidy due for payment in November, the problem of Harfleur forced Henry on to the defensive. In late May and early June, an army of 7,500 was raised to save Harfleur, its ratio of one man-at-arms to two archers, as opposed to the one to three preferred for land campaigns, reflecting the intention to use it at sea, where longbowmen were not needed in large numbers.

But although Henry had moved to the Southampton area in early July, he did not participate in the naval campaign that followed, which was under the command of his brother John, Duke of Bedford. Two months earlier, Henry had welcomed Sigismund of Luxemburg, the king of the Germans, whom the English already called emperor, who had arrived in England keen to broker peace between England and France for the sake of a solution at the Council of Constance to the papal schism. Sigismund’s visit was a diplomatic coup for Henry – European rulers rarely deigned to cross the Channel – and he responded in kind, spending lavishly on entertaining his imperial visitor and, on 24 May, investing him with the Order of the Garter. It was, apparently, Sigismund who persuaded Henry that it was too dangerous for him, and potentially harmful to the common good, ‘for the king to risk the perils of the sea in person’.¹⁶

At the end of May, Sigismund was joined in England by William, Count of Holland, Zealand and Hainault, with the idea that both should try to broker a settlement between England and France. But their solution – that Harfleur should be placed in the emperor’s hands – was acceptable neither to Henry (who had added it to the gains made by Edward III at the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 as essential to any peace) or the French, who assumed they would soon retake the town. Accepting failure, Sigismund was willing to enter into a perpetual alliance with Henry, which was sealed at Canterbury on 15 August – the very same day, as chance would have it, that the navy led by his brother John, Duke of Bedford routed the French at the Battle of the Seine, and saved Harfleur for the English.

The Treaty of Canterbury recognized Henry’s rights against the French and in theory offered imperial support in their implementation – although, as it transpired, the emperor never would give military aid to Henry. But the treaty was significant simply in its signing. Here was evidence that Henry, based on his successes against the French, was now seen as a serious player in Europe. Equally significant was a meeting brokered by Count William, to take place at Calais the following October, between Henry and William’s brother-in-law, John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy.

What both parties hoped to get out of this meeting, and what exactly happened at it, remains shrouded in mystery. According to one undated English diplomatic source, Duke John was inclined to support Henry’s claim to the French crown; another, however, reports that, when offered by Henry a share in any future French conquests, the duke refused.¹⁷ It is unlikely that any understanding between Henry and Duke John was reached. Furthermore, Burgundian power in France was uncertain at this point since the duke had neither a formal role in government nor any control of the king. Indeed, his purpose in agreeing to a meeting with the English king was simply to remind his internal enemies in France, the Armagnac party, that he could stir up trouble if he felt so inclined.

That autumn it soon became apparent that Henry was bent on a new land campaign in France, with or without Burgundian aid. Although his victories had made the winning of support at home easier, it was by no means guaranteed: Henry still had to engage in the politics of persuasion. At the parliament which began at Westminster on 19 October 1416, Chancellor Henry Beaufort’s opening speech emphasized not only the king’s martial successes in France in 1415 but also his efforts at the Leicester parliament of 1414 to have law observed within the realm. The speech included the call ‘let us make wars so that we might have peace, for the end of war is peace’.¹⁸ A war, therefore, represented firm kingship towards achieving ‘justice’ at home and abroad. In this, Beaufort reflected how Henry wanted to portray himself: as a just and peaceful king. Keen as he was to go to war, he was equally anxious to be seen to avoid shedding Christian blood. Here, then, war was portrayed not as an end in itself but as a way of bringing – or, more accurately, forcing – the French to peace. This would, it was implied, be a long campaign, but confidence in a positive outcome was encouraged by a biblical analogy. Reference was made to the fact that this was the king’s sixth parliament. As with the Creation, which came to full fruition on the seventh day, a perfect and early completion was surely at hand.

The Commons were persuaded, and granted a double lay subsidy, worth £76,000, three-quarters of which they generously agreed could be collected by February 1417. Such an arrangement gave Henry much more cash in hand than he had had for his campaign of 1415, two years before, and allowed him to begin raising troops as soon as the money started coming in. But another decision at the parliament also reveals that there had been some reservations about the credit mechanisms Henry had used for mobilizing troops in 1415. Although it was agreed that current tax income could be used as security for loans, the king had to promise to work hard to repay them; his brothers Thomas and John were also placed under obligation to do this should the king die in the meantime.

Here, Henry revealed himself as a skilled negotiator, willing to compromise in order to achieve his desired outcome, something also seen in his efforts to deal with other financial issues still outstanding from 1415 concerning his use of jewels for the wages of the second quarter of service. The indentures for the Agincourt campaign had committed Henry to redeem the pawned royal jewels within nineteen months – that is, by January 1417, which was now only a couple of months away. Meanwhile, on 19 November 1416, the day after Parliament ended, a list of those who fought at Agincourt was delivered by Sir Robert Babthorpe, controller of the king’s household, to the Exchequer. This surely reflects the views of the nobility that, before indentures for a new campaign were drawn up, the crown needed to settle its Agincourt debts: many of Henry’s captains had ended up paying soldiers from their own pockets.

The king was also asked to answer other unresolved matters. These concerns, in fact, are revealed by a set of council minutes for 6 March 1417, in which both the questions and the king’s answers are noted. The fifth question posed to Henry concerns ‘whether those accounting for men killed at the battle of Agincourt should have allowed to them the whole of the second quarter or only to the day of their death’. Henry replied that ‘they should be allowed as the others who are now living’.¹⁹ In other words, anyone killed at Agincourt was – like the survivors – to be deemed eligible to receive pay for the whole campaign. Therefore there was no need to record the Agincourt dead in the post-campaign accounting process, and it is why we have an incomplete knowledge of English fatalities. Henry’s was a generous gesture, one useful for a king to make when on the point of recruiting a new army, and one which would also help to renew in people’s minds the glory of the victory of 1415.

At the end of the parliament, Thomas Beaufort, who had defended Harfleur so vigorously in the aftermath of its conquest, was promoted from Earl of Dorset to Duke of Exeter: a reminder to the nobility and gentry, if one was needed, of the potential rewards for military service. An aggressively anti-French tone was also present in Parliament’s confirmation of Henry’s alliance with Sigismund, which, although an ‘act of love’ on the part of the emperor, none the less showed the French in a bad light and encouraged both the English as well as Sigismund’s subjects to take up arms against them.²⁰ With the country gearing up for war, Henry granted a petition of the Fletchers of the City of London that clog makers should no longer be permitted to use aspen, since the timber was needed to make arrows, but only on the proviso that ‘fletchers throughout the realm sell their arrows at a more moderate and reasonable price in future than they had sold them for previously’. Henry wanted to prevent producers exploiting what was obviously going to be increased demand for armaments as he prepared for his next campaign in France.²¹ Meanwhile, both convocations of clergy, in the province of York as well as Canterbury, were equally generous in their tax grants. As a result, more money poured into the Exchequer in 1416–17 than at any other period between 1399 and 1485.

In the following months, Henry drew heavily on the glorious memory of Agincourt to ramp up public support for the forthcoming campaign. At his behest and with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, the Canterbury convocation agreed in December 1416 to a broad programme of commemoration for 25 October in the years to come. In the Canterbury province, prayers were to be shared on that day between Crispin and Crispinian, whose feast it was, St John of Beverley (whose feast of translation, when his body had been moved to a new shrine, was on the same day) and other martyrs. In contrast to the elevation in January 1416 of the feast of St George to the status of a double religious feast, where there was no mention of the battle, the wording of the December 1416 order invoked the battle explicitly: ‘the gracious victory granted by the mercy of God to the English on the feast of the translation of the saint (St John of Beverley) to the praise of the divine name and to the honour of the kingdom of England’.²²

Meanwhile, from February 1417 onwards, Henry set about mobilizing an army of at least 10,000 men, slightly smaller than his invasion force of 1415 but with similar proportions of men-at-arms and archers, with departure arranged for late July. Henry deliberately chose the date of his landing as 1 August, the feast of St Peter ad Vincula (St Peter in Chains), the notion being that, just as the apostle Peter was freed by an angel from King Herod’s captivity, so Henry was liberating the Normans from the shackles of French rule. He was undertaking not simply a campaign of conquest but also a highly orchestrated recreation of the English duchy of Normandy, with the King of England as its duke. There had been elements of this in 1415, but nothing to compare with the comprehensiveness of the 1417 programme.

The duchy had been in the hands of the French crown for over two hundred years, ever since King John had lost it in 1204. In 1259, Henry III had acknowledged its surrender, dropping the title ‘Duke of Normandy’ which English kings had held since 1066. Now, in 1417, Henry’s programme stressed two things. One was an appeal to Norman separatism. Despite the long tenure by the King of France, the duchy’s inhabitants remained suspicious of the power of a distant Paris, sentiments that Henry was keen to exploit to his own advantage, offering the Normans their rights and privileges so long as they accepted his rule.

The second, complementary, aspect of his Norman policy was a deliberate invocation of the Anglo-Norman past, reinforcing Normandy’s sense of separatism from France, and appealing to an English public. A crucial element was the granting of lands in Normandy to his soldiers and administrators as a kind of Norman Conquest in reverse. This policy, termed by historians the ‘Lancastrian land settlement’, persisted to the 1440s, throughout the English tenure of the duchy. Henry saw it as a way of generating a sense of investment in his war aims: those to whom lands were given were obliged to defend them, much as grantees in Ireland, Wales and Scotland had been in earlier generations. The terms of grants often involved service in defence of royal castles, as well as in the royal army, at the grantee’s own expense. The settlement thus gave the king military resources, thereby reducing the burden on English finances. It also gave him substantial means of reward and patronage, suitable for all ranks of the army, ranging from a house in one of the captured towns for an archer and a whole county with its title for a high-ranking nobleman. In essence, Henry recreated ‘feudalism’ in Normandy. He used it to supplement the royal rights in France which he took over by virtue of his claim to the throne, especially the semonce des nobles, deploying it not only to call out the native nobility but also those to whom he had given lands.

An essential part of Henry’s programme was a financial administration for the duchy through the establishment of a chambre des comptes (chamber of accounts) at Caen, his administrative capital, so that revenues came to him rather than to the French king in Paris. In time, as the conquest was secured, it was envisaged that the Estates of Normandy – an assembly made up of representatives of clergy, nobility and townsmen – could be called and taxation raised, in the hope that Henry’s duchy would be self-financing. Although a separate Chancery enrolment (the Norman rolls) was initiated for the conquest, Henry was also keen to take over the existing administrative structures of the duchy such as the bailliages – administrative subdivisions under the French equivalent of sheriffs. He would appoint trusted Englishmen as baillis, but shrewdly ensured that lower-ranking officials, such as the vicomtes, were local men – with local knowledge – who had accepted English rule.

In order to implement this impressive political programme, Henry first needed a successful military campaign. It began on 1 August 1417, his entire army landing at the mouth of the River Touques in Lower Normandy: as in 1415, Henry initially kept his army together to besiege Caen but, in contrast with his first campaign, he also took care to establish smaller bridgeheads along the coast first. The capture of Caen took only two weeks, thanks largely to bombardment and the townspeople’s early recognition that further resistance would only be to their disadvantage when there was no chance of a French army relieving the siege. With Caen taken, Henry was able to march directly south, capturing places as he went, thereby cutting Lower Normandy in half. Such quick and impressive success persuaded Parliament, meeting in mid November 1417, to agree another double lay subsidy: remarkable generosity given that they had made a similar award the previous year. As the chancellor put it: ‘the king’s great merits and illustrious virtues meant that he fully deserved such splendid honours’.²³

By 24 November – indeed, probably from the moment of his landing – Henry styled himself Duke of Normandy as well as King of France. His generally conciliatory policy towards his conquered people, supported by strict discipline over his troops, was aimed at encouraging local acceptance. Only where Henry met with resistance did he act harshly. As a result, relatively few Norman knights and gentry chose exile rather than submission.

With the fall of Falaise at the turn of the year, Henry was able to divide his army under the command of his brothers Thomas and Humphrey, so that the areas to the east and west could be taken simultaneously. On 30 July 1418, with Lower Normandy in his hands, he began the siege of Rouen. This was the campaign’s most formidable challenge to date for, as Henry noted in a letter to the city of London on 10 August, it was ‘the most notable place in France save Paris’.²⁴ Well aware of the significance of the city militarily and politically, Henry was prepared to use any means to take it without extensive bombardment or assault, but in doing so, he also risked giving the French time to organize a counter-offensive to relieve the city. Determined to starve the city out, he refused to let even women and children leave.

The siege of Rouen lasted six months and when, in January 1419, it finally surrendered – the anticipated French relief force having been scuppered by a renewed outbreak of factional infighting – was the largest city ever to be taken by siege during the whole of the Hundred Years War. Henry appeared in the robes of the Duke of Normandy in the Norman capital, where he made various edicts in that guise to an assembly of Norman knights and townsmen, and also placed a high collective ransom on the city.

With the surrender of Rouen, the rest of Upper Normandy fell with little resistance. Save for the island of Mont-Saint-Michel, which never fell to the English, Henry was master of the whole duchy, able to implement all the elements of his Norman programme. His 1417–19 campaign was remarkable, testimony to his ever-increasing capacity as commander as well as ruler. Normandy would always mean something special to Henry: when he came to a final treaty with the French at Troyes in May 1420, he kept the duchy for himself until such time as he would inherit the French crown. That he had achieved a high level of success in winning the hearts and minds of the Normans is also indicated by the outpouring of grief at his death, and the loyalty they showed to his successors. Key to this was the strict military discipline he imposed, particularly in regulating relations between soldiers and civilians, and creating mechanisms for local inhabitants to lodge complaints. He took a notably hard line with camp followers, reflecting his own moral transformation on accession.

There is strong evidence that Henry was prepared in the summer of 1419 to agree a diplomatic settlement which would give him Normandy as a completely sovereign possession, without any obligation to pay homage to the French crown for it. That summer, his successes prompted approaches from both French factions, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. In the face of Henry’s advance, the French had maintained a united front until the summer of 1418, when the Burgundian duke John the Fearless seized Paris as well as the king and queen, forcing the then dauphin, Charles, to flee south – divisions that contributed to the failure of the French to intervene to rescue Rouen. Now, Henry was keen to negotiate with both parties – the Burgundian-controlled royal government as well as the Armagnac opposition, led by the dauphin – because he saw this as a means of keeping them divided, and ruling. His biggest concern was their reconciliation: a united France remained a formidable enemy.

Negotiations with the dauphin came first, at Alençon in October 1418. Henry, as he always had, set his demands high, now adding Normandy, Touraine and Maine to the lands stipulated in the Treaty of Brétigny, and even including Flanders as a reward for an alliance against Burgundy.²⁵ The dauphin was willing to give him Normandy – which in Henry’s view was an empty gesture since God had already delivered it into his hands. None the less, he was willing to consider a long truce, during which he dropped the title of King of France in return for a large payment.

The following month saw negotiations at Pont-de-l’Arche with the Burgundian-controlled royal government. Henry demanded the Brétigny terms plus Normandy in full sovereignty, as well as a dowry of 1 million écus for marriage to Charles VI’s daughter Catherine, whose hand in marriage he had requested four years before. Then, he had been rebuffed. Now, the situation was rather different. Henry, fully aware of his strong military position, was simply playing with his enemy. The continuing mental illness of Charles VI made it unclear whether anyone in the French camp had the authority to negotiate a settlement. In the words of the chronicler Jean Le Fèvre, the French ‘were unable to treat with Henry, the dauphin is not yet king, and the duke of Burgundy does not possess the royal inheritance’.²⁶

While the negotiations stalled, over the course of the spring of 1419 Henry strengthened his position in Normandy, conquering places on its northern frontier, which provided a buffer zone (called by the English the pays de conquête) against Paris. When, between late May and June, he met again with the Burgundian-controlled government at Meulan, they were prepared to offer the Brétigny terms plus Normandy and his dowry demands. Significantly, the eighteen-year-old Princess Catherine was brought to Meulan, where Henry saw her for the first time. Even without injecting a romantic element into Henry’s chaste military existence, it was clear that the king was keen to marry, and to marry only Catherine: indeed, this had been the most consistent element in all of his negotiations from 1413 onwards. The meeting also brought him into direct contact with Charles VI and his queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, for the first time since they had all attended the wedding of Richard II to Catherine’s sister Isabella near Calais nearly a quarter-century before.

The negotiations at Meulan are well documented, even to detailing how a special terrain was selected and demarcated by wooden palisades, and divided by two trenches into three parts.²⁷ The French would be located in the area nearest to Meulan and the English in the part furthest away; the middle section would be a neutral zone, where the negotiators met. The French, moreover, had a solid fence built around the middle section, high enough to protect against English arrows should things get nasty. This middle section was accessible only by three fenced passages and contained two separate tents at each side, one for each monarch and his counsellors. Exactly thirty-six feet from each tent, and within a further palisade, was the pavilion for actual negotiations.

Such elaborate arrangements, as well as the double royal presence, highlight the serious intent of both parties. That Catherine was there, too, indicates that a betrothal was the anticipated outcome. The fact that the negotiations covered detailed matters, including the restoration of lands and benefices in Normandy to those who supported the Burgundian regime, also suggests that a settlement was in sight. A letter sent home by an Englishman on 14 July reported that Henry had been hoping that the French would fulfil their promise that he and his heirs would have ‘all that was contained in the Great Peace [Brétigny] … the duchy of Normandy hool and all that the kynge had goten on the Frensh ground, to holde all thise things of God only and nat of noon Erthly creature’. But then, the writer continued, just when the negotiations were on the brink of being concluded and treaties drawn up, they had hit a brick wall. Suddenly, the accommodating behaviour of the French changed to obfuscation. In the words of the English writer, ‘the French partie hath comen with diverses demandes and questions’. As these were fully intended to do, they caused delays, and the atmosphere had, accordingly, deteriorated: ‘now at this tyme it is nat knowen whethir we shal have werre or pees’.

As the writer went on to tell his recipient in England, John the Fearless and the dauphin had been holding their own convention at Paris in the meantime. The duke, present for some of the time at Meulan, had been playing a double game, and as the writer explained, ‘They have sette hem tweyne [together] in reste and in accord.’ Their agreement had been proclaimed in Paris on 11 July, promising to work together to drive out the English, with orders that no one should henceforth make quarrel because of the name of Burgundian or Armagnac, ‘for which accord it is supposed in the Kynges host rather werre than pees’.²⁸ It was precisely the outcome that Henry did not want.

Despite Henry’s strength, as the letter writer had noted, the newly unified French were more interested in war than a negotiated settlement. Henry’s hand was forced: without hesitation, he advanced towards Paris.

Taking the towns of Pontoise and Gisors, he was at the outskirts of Paris by mid August, when his brother Thomas, at Henry’s order, rode up to the gates of Paris, a dramatic gesture intended to put pressure on the French towards reopening diplomatic channels. Whether Henry could realistically have seized the French capital is doubtful. Rouen had taken him six months, and now he had considerably fewer troops with him, having installed garrisons to secure his recent conquests en route to Paris. Furthermore, while the French had been divided during the siege of Rouen, now they threatened unity.

But before Henry needed to make up his mind whether to lay siege to Paris, the French tore themselves apart, in a way which gave the English king more success in France than he could ever have imagined. On 10 September 1419, Duke John and the dauphin were due to meet on the bridge at the town of Montereau, on the Seine east of Paris, for further discussions on their co-operation. As the duke moved on to the bridge, one of the dauphin’s henchmen struck him in the face with an axe, killing him instantly. The factional conflict had degenerated into a vendetta, Duke John murdered in revenge for his assassination of Louis, Duke of Orléans twelve years before. Whether the dauphin was personally complicit remains uncertain. Only sixteen, he was presumably easily influenced by those who had previously been in the service of the dukes of Orléans, and who had carried out the murder of Duke John at Montereau. Despite their attempted reconciliation in the face of the English threat, ‘the two factions were as far apart as they had ever been’.²⁹ Not without cause did a Carthusian friar, almost exactly a century later, show Francis I, King of France, the skull of John the Fearless, observing ‘this is the hole through which the English entered France’.³⁰ That hole effectively made Henry V the ruler of France.