Agincourt (17 page)
The wages for the campaign were to be paid quarterly in advance: the first half of the first quarter was due on signing the indenture and the second on mustering with the correct number of men ready for embarkation. (Henry V was, as one might expect, an absolute stickler for this: every company was mustered regularly before, during and after the campaign, and wages were docked for every missing man.) If the campaign lasted less than a year, then wages were to be paid up to the point of embarkation for the homeward journey, plus eight days’ travelling allowance. As we have already seen, the cash sums required to finance these payments were immense. The first quarter’s wage bill for Chaucer’s company alone—which was around the average size for a man of his standing—amounted to £156 7s 101/2d (almost $104,650 in modern currency).
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The aristocrats fielded much larger companies. Thomas, duke of Clarence, had the largest, with 240 men-at-arms, including himself, one earl, two barons, fourteen knights and 222 esquires, and 720 mounted archers; his brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, came second, with 200 men-at-arms and 600 mounted archers; Edward, duke of York, Thomas, earl of Dorset, and Thomas, earl of Arundel, each fielded 100 men-at-arms and 300 mounted archers.
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As security for the payment of the wages, Henry had to raid his treasure chests once more. Chaucer received jewels and plate to the nominal value of the second tranche due, which the king was obliged to redeem within nineteen months; if he did not do so, then, according to the terms of the indenture, Chaucer and his heirs were to be at liberty to keep, sell or otherwise dispose of the items as they wished, without fear of any impediment or retribution by the king. This was a standard term in all indentures, but it was not one that either party felt obliged to keep. Clarence, for instance, was given “the crown Henry” on condition that it was kept whole and undamaged: in fact, he could not afford to pay his own men and broke the crown up into several pieces, giving a large bejewelled fleur-de-lis and several pinnacles to various knights and esquires, none of which he was able to redeem in his own lifetime.
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Edward, duke of York, and Thomas, earl of Salisbury, also received items of extraordinary workmanship and value: York was given a gold alms dish, “made like a ship, standing on a bear, garnished with nineteen balays [peach-coloured rubies], twelve great and fourteen other pearls, weighing 22 lbs 11/2 oz,” while Salisbury got “a large ship of silver over gilt, with twelve men-at-arms, fighting, on the deck, and at each end of the ship a castle, weighing 65 lbs 3 oz.” The craftsmanship, for which English silversmiths and goldsmiths were famed throughout Europe, counted for nothing: it was the melted-down value of the precious metal, together with the jewels, that gave these objects their value.
Less important men, with smaller retinues, also found themselves in receipt of quite extraordinary items: Sir Thomas Hauley was given a sword garnished with ostrich feathers, which had belonged to the king when prince of Wales; Sir John Radclyff a bejewelled tablet of gold, containing a piece of Christ’s seamless robe; and John Durwade, esquire, “a Tabernacle of gold, within which were an image of our Lady sitting on a green terrage, with the figures of Adam and Eve, and four angels at the four corners.”
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The king’s financial commitment to his men was not limited to paying their wages and the bonus; in every indenture he also undertook to pay the costs of shipping each company to and from France or Aquitaine, together with its horses, harness and supplies. As with the wages, there was a predetermined schedule listing how many horses each man was permitted to take according to his status. The three dukes, Clarence, Gloucester and York, were allowed fifty each, the earls twenty-four, each banneret or baron sixteen, each knight six, each esquire four and each archer one. Again, if we look at Chaucer’s company of forty-eight men, he was expected to travel with a minimum of eighty-four horses at the king’s expense; presumably, had he so wished, he could have taken more at his own cost. Clarence’s company of 960, by comparison, was entitled to take 1798 horses.
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Why were so many horses needed? The army had to be capable of covering long distances at speed but every man-at-arms, even the esquire, was still expected to be able to fight on horseback as well as on foot. Warhorses were highly prized and ferociously expensive, since, like horses used in jousts or tournaments, they had to be intensively trained to act contrary to their natural instincts, so that they would run unswervingly towards opponents, obey commands in the heat of close fighting and remain unpanicked by the noise and press of battle. Though there were breeding programmes in England and Wales, the best horses were usually imported from Spain, Italy or the Low Countries and sold at the great international fairs of Champagne in France and at Smithfield in London.
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Most medieval knights of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries spent anything between £5 and £100 on their warhorse, £25 being an average sum. At the top end of this scale was the courser, standing some fourteen to fifteen hands high, and capable of carrying the weight of a man in a full suit of armour. The courser had both stamina and agility, so it was ideal for campaigning and was the preferred mount of those who could afford it. Those who could not had to make do with a cheaper rouncy; even this was of a better quality than the horse of a mounted archer, which was needed only for travelling, never for a fighting situation, and was usually worth a mere £1.
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The six horses that a knight was permitted to take to war at the king’s expense would fall into three categories: his warhorse, which was probably a courser, and a substitute; a lighter saddlehorse, such as a palfrey, for riding when not in full armour, and one or two rouncies for his servants; and finally one or two packhorses to carry his baggage. The greater the status of the company leader, the more servants and baggage he would be taking with him. Even the humblest esquire, with his four horses, must have been expected to bring a warhorse, a palfrey, a rouncy and a packhorse, a retinue which presupposes that he had at least one or two servants to look after them. Some of these servants may have been archers, but others were undoubtedly just boys or non-combatants, who took no part in the fighting and therefore do not figure in either the indentures or the muster lists, though their presence is acknowledged in other sources.
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The final part of a military indenture, such as the one that Chaucer signed with Henry V, dealt with the important matter of prisoners and prizes. This could be an extremely contentious issue, not least because these winnings did not automatically belong to the person who captured them. Because all the soldiers in the army were paid wages, it was accepted that a proportion of their winnings should be given to their employers. The indenture therefore set out what had become, since the 1370s, the customary division of spoil. The king was to receive one-third of every indenting captain’s personal winnings and one-third of a third of those of his retinue, providing that the value exceeded 10 marks (£6 13s 4d, or almost $4,444 at today’s prices); anything worth less than that remained entirely the captor’s own. In addition, if anyone, of whatever status, captured the king of France, or any of his sons, nephews, uncles, cousins, lieutenants or chieftains, or a king of another country, these prisoners were to be handed over to the king, who was to be the sole recipient of the full value of their ransoms. It was generally understood that compensation would be paid to the original captors, but this was not specified by the indenture, and the amount was left to the king’s generosity.
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The king’s copy of his indentures was preserved in the exchequer, where it was kept in a leather draw-string pouch with the name of the indenting captain on the outside. As the campaign progressed, all relevant documentation would be added to this bag, including the muster rolls and wage claims which enabled the exchequer clerks to work out how much money was owed to each company. By this means, the superb administrative machine of the exchequer, which had been honed by centuries of efficient tax collecting, gives us a unique and almost unprecedented level of insight into the fate of the usually nameless men-at-arms and archers whom chronicle sources ignore. The records of Sir Thomas Erpingham (Shakespeare’s “good old knight”), for example, reveal that he contracted to serve with twenty men-at-arms, including himself, and sixty mounted archers; that two of his men-at-arms, Thomas Geney and John Calthorp, were knighted on landing at Chef-de-Caux but were invalided home from Harfleur and died in England; that another man-at-arms, John Aungers, died at Calais; that only two of his knights, Hamon le Straunge and Walter Goldingham, were present at the battle of Agincourt; that two archers, Henry Prom and Robert Beccles, died at Harfleur, and that another, John de Boterie, was invalided home during the siege; and finally that two more archers were casualties of the war, Richard Chapman dying on the march between Harfleur and Agincourt, and Stephen Geryng at the battle itself, significantly the only one of the entire company to lose his life there.
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Some 250 individual indentures for the Agincourt campaign have been identified, though this may be only a small proportion of the whole, since 632 pouches were purchased for the exchequer in 1416. Even so, 250 was an unprecedented number: nothing like it had been seen before the Agincourt campaign or would be again. Instead of subcontracting the task of providing the entire force to three or four aristocrats, as had always been done in the past, Henry V consciously sought to recruit as widely as possible for his army. A large number of the indentures were for numbers that seem barely worth the trouble of inscribing the parchment they were written on: the deliciously named Baldewin Bugge, for example, contracted to serve with just three archers, but his fellow esquires, John Topclyff, Robert Radclyf of Osbaldeston and William Lee, could only offer two. There are even instances of single archers, such as Richard Shore, John Wemme and Thomas Newman, signing contracts with the king as individuals, though the exchequer clerks’ preference seems to have been that archers proffering their services should be dealt with in groups of at least four and usually twelve, if only for accounting purposes.
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Men such as these would normally have been subcontracted into the retinues of the great lords. William Bedyk, for instance, an esquire who could offer only himself and two archers, was signed up into the company of Thomas, earl of Salisbury, who had contracted to bring forty men-at-arms and eighty mounted archers. The terms of Bedyk’s indenture precisely paralleled that between the earl and the king, even stating explicitly at one point that he was to be paid “in the same manner as our said Lord the King does to the said Earl for people of his condition.” This was a necessary precaution, since it was not unknown for retinue leaders to make a profit out of their indentures: in 1380 Sir Hugh Hastings had received £45 3s for each man-at-arms in his company but paid them only £40, keeping the difference himself. Above and beyond his wages and shipping costs for his little group, Bedyk was to have free food and drink for himself and one valet, or servant, on both sides of the sea; in return he was obliged to give the customary one-third of all his winnings to the earl.
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Though drawing up royal indentures for such small numbers was time consuming and expensive, it had several advantages. It meant that the recruits had a much more direct personal link to the king than was usual and it encouraged their loyalty by suggesting that he valued their contribution, however small, to his war effort. It also meant that, unlike previous campaigns where soldiers would be recruited from within the areas of influence of the great lords who had signed the indentures, Henry V’s army would be drawn from every quarter of the kingdom. As a consequence of this unprecedented level of national involvement, the campaign inspired an exceptional degree of pride and enthusiasm across the country, all of which was centred on the charismatic figure of the king himself.
THE ARMY GATHERS
On 16 June 1415 Henry V rode out of London on his way to Southampton, pausing only to attend services and make offerings at St Paul’s and Southwark. He was accompanied by four members of the extended royal family, Edward, duke of York, Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, Sir John Cornewaille and Sir John Holland, and the earls of Arundel, March and Oxford. The mayor, aldermen and some 340 citizens of London turned out to honour their king by riding some ten miles with him as far as Kingston, where they took their leave and wished him Godspeed on his voyage. According to his instructions, they then returned to the city, to remain there until his return from France.
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The very next day, a French embassy, led by a senior diplomat, Guillaume Boisratier, archbishop of Bourges, landed at Dover. Not realising that Henry had already left London, the ambassadors made their way to the city for an interview with the king. By the time Henry learnt of their arrival he was already at Winchester, some twelve or thirteen miles north of Southampton, where he had taken up residence in Wolvesey Castle. It was here that he summoned the Frenchmen to his presence for what he knew, but they did not, would be the final move in the diplomatic game.
Henry received them graciously but in his most regal manner: bare-headed, but dressed entirely in cloth of gold, and surrounded by members of his great council, including his three brothers. Once more the French declared their desire for a “true, complete and perfect peace” between the two realms and repeated their offer of an enlarged Aquitaine, marriage with Catherine of France and a dowry of eight hundred thousand francs, if only Henry would disband the army which, they knew, he was assembling at Southampton. After some days of inconsequential and half-hearted bargaining, the ambassadors were again summoned to the king’s presence to hear his final answer from the mouth of his chancellor, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. The king and his great council, Beaufort declared, had decided that if the French did not give him Catherine and the duchies of Aquitaine, Normandy, Anjou and Touraine, together with the counties of Poitou, Maine and Ponthieu, “and all the other places which once belonged to his predecessors by right of inheritance, he would not put off his voyage . . . but with all his power he would destroy the realm and the king of France.” At the conclusion of Beaufort’s speech, Henry himself added that, with God’s permission, he would indeed do as the bishop had said, “and this he promised the ambassadors, on the word of a king.”