But England was suffering internal revolt, and King Richard II, the Black Prince’s son (the Black Prince had died, probably of cancer, before he could inherit the throne), sued for peace with France. In 1396, Richard even made an alliance with the French by marrying the new King Charles VI’s six-year-old daughter Isabelle. In 1398 he went one stage further and accepted a truce with France. Frustrated Englishmen began to moan that Richard II was a closet Francophile, and this was one of the contributory factors to his being deposed in 1399 and (so it was rumoured) poisoned in early 1400 – in those days, you stopped annoying the French at your peril.
The French themselves were not all in favour of appeasement, and might not have accepted the truce if King Charles VI hadn’t been a complete lunatic. He would often run around his castles howling like a wolf, and was convinced he was made of glass and that people wanted to smash him. In a fit of madness, he once killed four of his own courtiers.
This weakness at the top split France into two families warring for power – the Burgundians, led by Charles VI’s cousin Jean de Bourgogne, and the Armagnacs under Louis, Charles’s brother. Soon, both factions were committing atrocities that even outdid the chevauchées. The Armagnacs created a new terror, the écorcheurs (literally ‘men who will skin you alive’), that they inflicted on their own countrymen for a good thirty years.
The only real winners of this long period of in-fighting were the English, who sold their support to first one faction and then the other, promising to intervene but switching loyalties when they were offered more money and territory by the opposing side. And the biggest benefactor of all was a new English king, Henry V, who in 1414 made a treaty with the Armagnacs that at one stroke earned him the regions of Poitou, Angoulême and Périgord in the southwest of France, thereby restoring at least partly England’s old fortunes in that corner of the world.
Henry V, who was only twenty-six when he succeeded to the throne, was surrounded by very eligible male relatives, and needed to prove that he was a strong monarch. He was a born fighter, and wore his hair in the military pudding-bowl style of a helmet-wearing knight rather than the flowing regal locks of his recent ancestors. It is said that he was tall and so strong that he could walk in armour as though he was wearing a light cloak – no doubt because he had been put into battledress at an early age. While away persecuting Wales in his teens, he had been hit in the face by an arrow (they were still excellent shots, those Welsh archers), and was scarred for life – which is one of the reasons why his most famous portraits are all in profile.
Unfortunately for the French, Henry was fanatically religious, and convinced that God wanted him to be King of France. He was also the first non-gay ruler of England since William the Conqueror not to have a string of mistresses – another bad omen for his enemies across the Channel.
What’s more, the French just kept offering themselves up for punishment. In 1414, the two warring factions, the Burgundians and Armagnacs, came to England asking for Henry’s help. Henry replied by demanding the hand of a French princess in marriage, and, while he was at it, the French Crown. When this was refused, he retorted by saying that he had no option but to prepare for war – omitting to mention that he had been recruiting troops and having cannons made for the past year.
He had also been planning the details of his invasion carefully, and, like the Allied armies in 1944, chose to invade France via Normandy rather than the obvious route through Calais. On a sunny Sunday in August 1415, his fleet of 1,500 ships, carrying over 10,000 fighters, as well as horses, cattle and cannons, left the Solent. It must have been a colourful spectacle, with the knights’ banners fluttering in the breeze and Henry’s own ship, the 540-ton Trinité Royale (why he didn’t give it an English name is not clear), sporting a provocative royal standard similar to the one created by Edward III, combining the English lions with the French fleur-de-lis.
The mood amongst the soldiers was optimistic, especially when swans came to swim alongside Henry’s ship – a good sign, because his personal banner featured, in heraldic terminology, ‘a swan with wings displayed argent’.
Henry’s destination was the mouth of the river Seine, at Harfleur. He landed there on around 14 August, and legend has it that, in another parallel with William the Conqueror, on disembarking Henry tripped and fell to his knees. Like William, he reacted quickly, adopting the praying position, and a choir on board his ship began singing (no doubt to cover up the royal mutterings of ‘Oh no, I’ve got sand in my armour’).
The fleet was so big that it took two whole days to unload the ships.* Only when all his men had disembarked did Henry give them the bad news – this was to be no chevauchée. Looting, massacring and wholesale rape were forbidden. The English groan of disappointment was apparently heard as far away as Paris.
Henry immediately set about besieging Harfleur, and was annoyed to find that the Normans had learned a thing or two since Edward III’s unopposed raids. They had built impregnable defences around the town, and the siege of this small port, guarded by only a few hundred troops, dragged on with the English losing alarming numbers of men, not just from cannon fire and crossbow bolts, but also because of disease. It is said that the water was contaminated, and the chronicler John Capgrave wrote that ‘many men died of fruit eating’. French summer fruits were clearly too exotic for the meat-and-turnip Englishmen, and they started to die, suffering what one contemporary picturesquely called ‘a bloody flux’, probably dysentery.
It wasn’t until 22 September that the town finally surrendered, and the English were able to go in and grab rich hostages. Henry spared the poor, valueless citizens of the town, and even let some of them stay there, although he gave all the posh houses to Englishmen.
The problem for Henry was that after a month in Normandy, about a third of his army was dead, a large number had to be sent home on sick leave, and several hundred would have to stay and defend Harfleur. He was forced to abandon his plan to attack Paris, and decided instead to make a dash for the English stronghold of Calais, expecting no trouble on the way because his predecessors there had made such a good job of devastating the countryside and emptying it of opposition.
However, Henry’s plan hit two major obstacles: the first was torrential rain that slowed his progress across country; the second was King Charles VI of France, still nominally in charge of his country. Charles had been informed by escapees from the siege of Harfleur that Henry’s invading force had shrunk to manageable proportions, and he quickly raised an army that headed out of Paris to cut off the English retreat. Other Frenchmen were at work harrying King Harry’s men as they marched northeast, and the Brits were horrified to find that one river crossing after the other was either destroyed or blocked. They had to fight at every bridge and ford, and make an unplanned 70-kilometre detour inland before they could skirmish their way across the Somme.
And then, just as English supplies, troop numbers and morale were at their lowest, the huge French army appeared. Shakespeare puts their number at 60,000 (‘three score thousand’), though he was almost certainly exaggerating to talk up Henry’s achievement; there were probably only 20,000 or 30,000 Frenchmen. Nevertheless, this was at least four times more than Henry’s band of exhausted fugitives.
French messengers came to Henry telling him, rather needlessly, that they intended to fight him and ‘take revenge for his conduct’. But instead of pleading that, for once, he had spared commoners’ lives (not an argument that would have interested the snooty French nobility), Henry typically replied, ‘be all things according to the will of God.’
His men camped that night in a rain-sodden field, probably unmindful of the fact that rain-sodden fields had brought the English good luck at nearby Crécy fifty years earlier. As they sat in the mud, they could see the French camps stretching away to the horizon, their fires blazing, the smells of expertly barbecued French sausages wafting over to torment the Englishmen, who had been living off wet bread, rotten fruit and dysentery bacteria for
the past week. In their hearts, Henry and his men prepared to die.
Agincourt, lost in the mists of time – and geography
The first time I visited Agincourt, I had to give a wry grin at the French attempt to eliminate all memory of their second most famous military defeat ever.* It was even more flagrant than Crécy. It wasn’t just that the museum was confined to two little rooms in an old schoolhouse. There was nothing at all.
Hardly surprising, really, because I was in the wrong place. I’d dropped into the village of Agincourt while on my way to Nancy in the east of France. And, as we all now know thanks to Bernard Cornwell’s novel of the same name, the battle was at Azincourt with a ‘z’, almost 500 kilometres away, near Calais.
This is probably the most annoying thing of all to the French. Not only do we pronounce the battles incorrectly (Crécy should be ‘Cray-see’ and Waterloo ‘Watt-air-loh’), with Agincourt (‘Ah-zan-coor’) we even get the spelling wrong.
But when Henry fought the battle, he didn’t know exactly where he was, and only asked after he’d won. (Understandably – if he’d lost, he’d either have been dead or desperate to forget about the place.) Someone knew the name of the closest castle – Azincourt – and, because there weren’t any road signs around, this was recorded wrongly as Agincourt. Strictly speaking, however, the battle shouldn’t be called that anyway, because Henry’s army was actually positioned at the nearby hamlet of Maisoncelle. But this doesn’t matter either, because the English would only have got that wrong, and called it Maisonette or Maidenhead.
The museum in the village of Azincourt is a marked contrast to the little converted school at Crécy. It is an impressive, modern glass-and-timber building, its curved roof held up by beams in the shape of an English longbow. Inside, visitors are given audio guides with sensors that activate headphones whenever you pass in front of interactive screens. It feels as though you’re walking around listening to the voices of the dead. And the story they tell is much the same as at Crécy – it’s all about French excuses.
Talking heads (literally – the displays include mannequins with television sets on their shoulders) tell you that the French knights had been in the saddle all night long, that it had been raining and horses had churned up the soil, and that the ranks of unmounted French men-at-arms were so tightly packed that they couldn’t swing their weapons. You can press your face into helmets to see how poor the visibility was for these advancing French men-at arms. You can even lift swords and a mace to see how heavy they were. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s monologue,* in which a defiant Henry urges his men to fight for England and St Crispin, is recited by a gloomy, toad-like actor who looks as though he’s about to die of grief.
The question is, how on earth did the French turn certain victory into a national disaster? The ‘flower of France’, which had had a few years to grow back since Crécy, was out in full bloom, and the knights there were so confident of winning that their only worry was that there wouldn’t be enough Englishmen for each of them to kill. It really ought to have been a French walkover.
Resigned to defeat, Henry freed all his hostages and sent them over to the French with a last-minute plea to give him free passage to Calais in exchange for the return of Harfleur. He even offered to pay for any damage his men had done in France. Needless to say, the French refused.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the King wanders around the English camp in disguise bantering with his soldiers, giving them what Shakespeare beautifully calls ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’. In fact, though, the King forbade any noise in the English camp that night, probably hoping to limit defeatist talk, and threatened to cut off the ears of anyone who spoke except to give confession to the chaplains.
Next morning, Henry’s chaplains said Mass three times (better safe than sorry), and the English took up their battle positions, in a similar formation to that at Crécy, with men-at-arms on foot in the centre and two projecting wings of archers. Shakespeare gives King Henry a rousing pre-battle speech that includes the famous lines about his small army being ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers’. This is also where he says that ‘gentlemen in England now a-bed/Shall think themselves accursed they were not here’. In reality, though, the King reminded his men that he was in France to claim his rightful inheritance (meaning that God supported England’s side of the legal argument), and, according to the chronicler Jean Le Fevre, tried to motivate his archers to fight to the death by warning them that the French had threatened to cut off the fingers of any archer they caught. It is doubtful that they believed this, as everyone knew that low-born prisoners were killed out of hand, but it probably got a laugh and encouraged the bowmen to make rude signs at the French knights.
This is often cited as the moment when the two-fingered salute was born, but in fact the theory that it was originally an anti-French gesture is probably unfounded. The connection between the French threat to disable the archers and the V-sign was apparently only made in the 1970s, and did not become really current until the 1990s, during a hate campaign against the European Union in general and France in particular. Desmond Morris’s book Manwatching, published in 1979, comes to no conclusions about the origins of the gesture, and Morris seems to think that the two fingers might represent a vagina. In any case, fifteenth-century chronicles say that Henry warned his men that they would lose three fingers, not two, so the archers would probably have been giving a W-sign, not a Vs-up.
However they gesticulated, what Henry’s men were doing was goading the enemy into an attack. He was probably praying that the French would commit the same error as at Crécy and come charging up the muddy hill. But they had learned some lessons from history, and waited calmly, hoping that the doomed Englishmen would come off their high ground and get the foregone conclusion over with.
This waiting game, though, turned out to be a fatal mistake.
The ‘flower of France’ gets trampled in the mud
At around nine o’clock on the morning of 25 October 1415, St Crispin’s Day, Henry got tired of hanging about and ordered his archers to advance. They did so, in full view of the French, trudging slowly downhill in the mud, hauling their longbows, arrows, and long wooden stakes forward until they were only about 250 metres from the enemy.
This would have been an ideal time for the French to attack, because the archers had no armour or shields and were encumbered by their stakes – their only protection was helmets made out of boiled leather. According to one observer, a French soldier called Jehan de Wavrin, the English even ‘stopped several times to catch their breath’. However, perhaps because of the debacle at Crécy, the French had kept their crossbowmen at the rear, and missed the chance to snipe at the English. What was more, lots of French knights, over-confident of victory later in the day, had gone off for a ride.
Now within longbow range, the English archers erected a protective row of angled stakes and, at their leisure, fired a Crécy-style hailstorm of arrows at the front line of French knights. The horsemen weren’t at full strength for the above-mentioned reason, but, faced with the choice between having their horses killed under them and getting an arrow through the top of their helmets, they charged.
Unbelievably, from then on, the battle was more or less a repeat of Crécy. The French cavalry rode forwards and were either felled by arrows or got themselves impaled on wooden stakes. Injured horses threw their riders, who lay helpless in the mud, weighed down by their armour and unable to get up. The fallen men’s lives were spared temporarily because the unmounted French men-at-arms were now lumbering forward, and the English archers had to stay behind their stakes and keep firing.
The soil at Agincourt is heavy and sticky. I have tried walking a few steps across the battlefield in light shoes and my feet almost immediately doubled in size. Add heavy armour to the gooey equation and for those French men-at-arms it must have been like wading through shin-deep quicksand. Their mobility was further hampered by being packed in a tight formation to limit their vu
lnerability to a frontal barrage; seeing this, the English archers on the wings simply advanced and began firing into the two flanks of the French column.
By the time the men-at-arms reached the English, they were completely exhausted and almost blind – because of the constant threat from the arrows, they had to keep their visors down and could only see through two narrow slits.
A few of them managed to dent the English front line of men-at-arms between the wings of bowmen, but Henry ordered his archers to down bows and join in the hand-to-hand fighting. The densely packed column of Frenchmen now found themselves confronted with mobile fighters who could jump out of range of their swinging maces and deliver deadly stabs to the armpits and thighs, or simply trip the armoured men over.
Soon, just as at Crécy, the muddy field was piled high with dead or flailing Frenchmen lying on their backs like wounded tortoises. As always, the noblest survivors were pulled away to become hostages, the less privileged being finished off where they lay with a misericorde through the eye, heart or throat.
A few highly aristocratic Frenchmen were particularly unlucky. The leader of the men-of-arms, the duc d’Alençon, got as far as a face-to-face encounter with Henry himself, who lost a fleuret of his crown in the fight. But the Duke was quickly surrounded, and he took off his helmet and offered his glove in surrender, the traditional gestures of a beaten knight. Unfortunately for him, an Englishman saw an easy target and stove in the Duke’s head with an axe.
Similarly, the duc de Brabant, arriving late and not wanting to miss the battle, did not take the time to put on his coat of arms. He rushed into the attack dressed as a herald, and when he was beaten in combat and attempted to surrender, he was killed, just as a simple herald would have been.
1000 Years of Annoying the French Page 10