Not that being taken prisoner would have saved him, because what shocks the French most about the Battle of Agincourt or Azincourt is not so much the way in which three successive waves of their men went waddling helplessly through the mud to their deaths in an almost exact repetition of the errors at Crécy, but the fate of the prisoners.
Estimates vary as to the number of hostages taken in the first couple of hours of the battle, but French sources put it as high as 1,500. Having surrendered, they were under oath not to rejoin the fighting, and were probably confident of going home again as soon as their relatives had taxed the local peasantry enough to pay the ransom.
However, the lord of a nearby chateau, a man called Ysambart d’Azincourt, had noticed the ruckus going on down the road, and went out with a horde of some 600 locals to have a go at the undefended English baggage carts, which were carrying the plunder that Henry’s men had dragged from Harfleur. Seeing an attack at his rear, and fearing that the French hostages, if freed, would rejoin the battle, Henry ordered each man to execute his prisoners.
This order didn’t go down well with the soldiers who had nabbed such valuable human booty, so Henry was forced to send 200 of his most bloodthirsty and lower-class archers to do the job. Before long, the unarmed, and often trussed-up, French gentlemen were being beaten, stabbed or burnt to death.
Even today, outrage about this massacre can be felt in every French source relating to the battle, although one could argue that this is a bit rich coming from a country that indulged in the wholesale public guillotining of its own aristocracy at the end of the eighteenth century. It’s true, killing the prisoners was a savage act by a supposedly chivalrous king, and contrary to all the rules of fifteenth-century warfare, but it was done while the battle was still hanging in the balance. Although things were definitely going in Henry’s favour, there were still enough French soldiers in the area to attack the English from the rear or the flank and win a victory. Or, perhaps more sensibly, wait until Henry’s army moved on – as they would have to do, being sorely short of food – and then pick them off in skirmishes all the way to Calais.
But French chroniclers say that the survivors were ‘sickened at the bloodshed’ (scared of getting thrown into the mud and spiked, one could argue), and the remaining knights decided not to attack. Many turned and went home – one of them, Jean, Duke of Brittany, doing a bit of unpatriotic pillaging of northern France with his Breton soldiers as he went.
Henry’s troops rested the night at Maisoncelle and then went out to the battlefield next morning to ‘clear up’. As usual, the dead were stripped of their valuable weapons and jewellery and the wounded were asked whether they were in Who’s Who, and, if not, sent to join the list of the dead.
In all, the French had lost some 10,000 men, including – yet again – the ‘flower of France’ (they seem to have had several bouquets of these aristocratic petals). This compares to English losses of around 300, with just ten or so noble names amongst them.
Only when the English had left the area did the French come out of the woods. The retinues of the aristocratic dead found their masters and took the bodies back home for burial. The rest of the casualties were stripped naked by the local peasants and left to rot. It was not until several days later, on the orders of a nobleman who had lost several members of his family, that a mass grave was dug and, according to contemporary accounts, 5,800 bodies were buried, with a thick hedge of thorns planted around the site so that dogs and wolves would not dig up the bones.
Henry and his exhausted men, meanwhile, dragged themselves the 80 kilometres to Calais, where many of the soldiers managed to lose all their booty paying extortionate prices for food and drink. Henry himself claimed the most valuable prisoners and got them on board ships bound for England.
Despite a raging storm, all his ships arrived home safely, and Henry’s conviction that God was on his side must have been stronger than ever. How else could he explain the way in which such a total, disabling victory over the cream of the French army had been won by a tired-out band of lower-class English dysentery-sufferers?
What Henry didn’t know was that England was soon to come up against an equally low-class French opponent, a fervent believer who would reverse the tide of recent history …
* And whose diet is, of course, frogs. Although in the fourteenth century ‘frog’ was not yet an insult applied to the French – it was usually aimed at the marsh-living Dutch.
* The Church in those days seems to have taken a much more liberal line on those Ten Commandments that deal with killing people and coveting your neighbour’s chattels.
* The medieval French term for men-at-arms, gent d’armes, is the origin of the word gendarme.
* I love that ‘again’, as if God had turned on the sun just to annoy the French.
* This is of course the Prince of Wales’s motto to this day, though subsequent princes have not adopted John of Bohemia’s custom of fighting while tied up and blind. Except at private parties, of course.
* This should not be confused with the modern word for trucker, and it is generally safe to go in roadside restaurants with a ‘Routiers’ sign outside.
* Stories that say this was because of a French dockers’ strike are untrue.
* After Waterloo, of course. They don’t really remember Crécy or Trafalgar; they think that Napoleon’s failure to get to Moscow was a strategic withdrawal; and they don’t regard the Nazi Occupation as a defeat – it was more of a waiting period until Charles de Gaulle was ready to come back and seal victory.
* Contrary to popular belief, Henry doesn’t give his ‘once more unto the breach, dear friends’ speech before Agincourt. As the breach image suggests, he’s talking at the siege of Harfleur, and referring to holes in the town walls. This is why he mentions that if they fail, they will ‘close up the wall with our English dead’.
4
Joan of Arc: A Martyr to French
Propaganda
Concerning Lady Joan, whom they call the Virgin, on this day a sermon was preached at Rouen, while she was on a scaffold so that everyone could see very clearly that she was in male clothing, and there she was told the great and powerful ills that she had brought down on Christendom … and several great, enormous sins that she did commit, and cause to be committed, and how she caused ordinary people to commit idolatry because by her false hypocrisy they followed her as a holy virgin.
A typically biased English view of Joan of Arc, aka ‘The Witch of Orléans’, one might assume.
But the above is actually a translation of a French text, the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, a contemporary record of life and current opinion in the city between 1405 and 1449. And while the anonymous author wasn’t a fan of Joan’s, he wasn’t just some pro-English collaborator, either. Elsewhere, he is shocked that the English ‘burn those they can’t ransom, rape nuns and eat meat on a Friday’, and writes scathingly that ‘the English, by nature, always want to fight their neighbours for no reason, which is why they always die badly’.
The modern French opinion of Joan of Arc couldn’t be more different. She is credited with winning the Hundred Years War by ‘booting the English out of France’, and is revered as a military heroine – the French navy has a helicopter carrier called Jeanne d’Arc, and during the Second World War she was the reason for the Free French adding the Cross of Lorraine (her home region) to their flag. Her status as an icon is so strong that she inspired one of the first movies ever made: a film by the Lumière brothers that dates back to 1899. (Though it must have been hard making a silent movie about a girl who hears voices.)
Most of all, Joan is seen as a martyr at the hands of ‘les Anglais’, a saint who was burnt at the stake in Rouen in 1431 by the tyrannical English invaders. During the Second World War this viewpoint was exploited in propaganda by the pro-Nazi Vichy government – when the Allies were bombing strategic Nazi sites in Normandy, posters were put up in Rouen, saying, ‘they always return to the scene of th
eir crimes.’
But, as is so often the case, the French have a completely skewed view of history where Joan is concerned. If you look at the less romanticized contemporary opinions of her, you will find that not only did Joan fail to boot the English out of France (how could she if she’d already been burnt by them in Rouen?), but by the end of her life she was regarded as something of a pest by her own king and his military leaders. And, to cap it all, she wasn’t a victim of English tyranny at all – she was, in fact, betrayed and tried by Frenchmen.
So, Joan of Arc, a martyr? Yes – to French propaganda.
Joan’s mission: to save the Dolphin
Joan was not, as the French usually think, a poor shepherd girl. She was born in about 1412 into a relatively well-off peasant family. Her father, Jacques, was a landowner, with some 20 hectares (about 50 acres) to his name, and a prominent member of the community in the village of Domrémy in northeastern France, on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne. The d’Arc family apparently gave generous gifts to the needy, so they must have been comparatively rich.
Joan was, however, something very rare for the times: a low-born girl who wanted to act to save her country. And by the time she heard the first patriotic voices in her head, in 1425, France was in dire need of a saviour.
After Agincourt, King Henry V of England had taken a lesson from his archers, and dealt a death-blow to the French while they were down. He had colonized Normandy much as William the Conqueror had done to England, bleeding it dry of money and anything saleable. He had more or less tricked the lunatic King Charles VI of France into a treaty that declared Charles’s own son, the Dauphin,* ineligible to rule France, and guaranteed that Henry V and his heirs would inherit the French throne on Charles VI’s death. To cement the deal, Henry married Charles’s daughter, Catherine, and for their honeymoon the warlike English king took his new bride on a siege.
Henry then fired the flames of the civil war raging in France by allying with Duke Philip ‘the Good’ of Burgundy against the Armagnac faction (supporters of the disinherited Dauphin). Soon Anglo-Burgundian armies were occupying Paris and pillaging and besieging the whole of France north of the Loire. Henry V himself joined in the fighting, but contracted dysentery during the siege of the town of Meaux just east of Paris, and died in 1422, aged only thirty-five. Henry’s son duly became King Henry VI of England and France, and upheld the family tradition of pillaging and besieging France.
One of the villages plundered by the Anglo-Burgundians around this time was Domrémy, home of the d’Arc family. All the villagers’ cattle were stolen, the church was burnt, and Joan’s family had to flee to the nearby town of Neufchâteau to escape a hideous death. And it was during this exile in 1425 that the thirteen-year-old Joan heard voices telling her to liberate France and put the Dauphin on the throne.
This call to arms came, she later said, from Saints Michael, Margaret and Catherine – an interesting choice of saints (if she chose them, that is, and didn’t actually receive a visit), because both Margaret and Catherine were martyred for refusing to marry pagan men and were usually depicted carrying swords to lop off the heads or other offending bits of unwanted male suitors. Michael, meanwhile, although an archangel, was always depicted in armour. An angel in battledress might seem something of a contradiction to modern minds, but in medieval times it was a symbol of divine-led resistance.
After three years of being urged on by the voices, Joan finally left home with one of her brothers to undertake her holy mission. That’s not what she told her parents, however – a typical sixteen-year-old, she said she was just going over to see a cousin who was about to have a baby.
In her own mind, however, Joan was very sure of her motives. She had been brought up by a fervently religious mother who had been on several pilgrimages, and she must have believed that the voices really were visitations from God rather than her own brain telling her she was fed up with living under constant threat from Anglo-Burgundian looters.
Joan marched straight off to see the local capitaine (a sort of sheriff), a nobleman called Robert de Baudricourt, and announced that she had been sent by God to save France. Unsurprisingly, he told his servants to beat ‘the mad girl’ and send her home. She was, after all, just a female peasant, and was not expected to have more brains or initiative than the animals on her daddy’s farm.
However, Joan did not give up. She seems to have possessed the natural charisma of someone who is utterly convinced that their cause is just, and her claim to be on a divine mission struck a chord with the people of her region who were desperate for a sign that someone up there was thinking of them. Word of Joan’s voices spread rapidly, and it was said that she was the embodiment of a prophecy made by a mystic called Marie d’Avignon that a ‘virgin girl from the borders of Lorraine’ would come to save France. (Which was a prophecy that Joan would have known about, by the way.)
Hope, which had been extinguished for a hundred years by war and plague, began to glimmer again in French hearts, all of it focused on the small girl with big ideas. Baudricourt finally gave in to pressure from Joan’s supporters and offered her an armed escort as far as Chinon, over 500 kilometres away, where the Dauphin was based.
By now, Joan’s fame was spreading, and soldiers flocked to join the procession. The adolescent girl was turning into a liberation movement; every supporter she gained made her even more certain that God was on her side. News of her imminent arrival reached the Dauphin, who wasn’t sure he wanted ‘help’ from someone who heard voices – his father, remember, was a raving lunatic. So for two whole days he kept her waiting outside the castle walls.
At this time, Chinon was undergoing a renaissance. Back in the 1150s, Henry II of England had chosen it as a royal capital, and transformed its simple fortress into a magnificent chateau that dwarfed the small market town on the bank of the river Vienne below. In the intervening centuries, the castle had lost some of its glory, and had been used by at least one French king as a dungeon. But Charles VII’s arrival, with his retinue of troops and courtiers, had changed all that, and by 1429 Chinon was fluttering with royal banners again, abuzz with its own importance.
Making the uppity peasant girl wait was a tactic to impress on her that Charles was the star around here, not her. Joan didn’t take long to make her mark, though. As soon as she was given permission to enter the castle, one of her first ‘miracles’ occurred – she was crossing the drawbridge when a guard taunted her: ‘Is that the famous virgin? By God, let me have her for one night, and she won’t be a virgin any more,’ he scoffed.
Joan must have been used to this kind of ‘wit’, because she retorted with something along the lines of: ‘It might be dangerous to take the Lord’s name in vain when you’re so close to death.’
The man later fell in the moat and died. ‘A prophecy come true!’ cried Joan’s supporters. ‘Which one of those religious nuts pushed me?’ gurgled the dying guard.
Believers in Joan’s saintliness cite her first meeting with the Dauphin as more proof that she really had been given divine insight. Wanting to test her, the Dauphin arranged for Joan to come to a crowded reception room, where she was greeted by an impostor claiming to be the Prince. Without a second’s hesitation, Joan ignored the fake Dauphin and turned to the true one, who had been standing amongst his courtiers, and embraced his knees before calling him ‘sweet king’.
A miracle? Maybe. But Joan had almost certainly been briefed on what the Dauphin looked like, and he was reputed to be short and knock-kneed, with small squinty eyes and a receding chin. Given that most of his courtiers would have been chosen for their looks, he probably wasn’t that hard to pick out.
To test whether Joan really was the girl in Marie d’Avignon’s prophecy, and sent by God rather than the devil, the Dauphin had her questioned by a committee of clergymen, and asked a group of respectable ladies to confirm her virginity. She passed both exams, and, with religious sincerity and sexual inexperience apparently being considered excell
ent qualifications for a career in the military, she was given a suit of armour and an army of 4,000 men and sent to Orléans, which had been under siege by the English for six arduous months.
Again, doubters on Joan’s own side put obstacles in her way. Although the English were camped on the north bank of the Loire, she was sent by French commanders to the south bank. It was explained to her that it would be useful if her men escorted boats carrying supplies down the Loire and into Orléans – the siege wasn’t a total blockade, more of a long, continuous attack. Although initially furious at being prevented from having a go at the English, Joan finally relented, and her convoy entered the city to a rapturous welcome – and not just because her arrival meant that there would be wine on the table again. Accompanied by all the local nobility, she went on a torchlight parade through the streets and was hailed by the crowds as their saviour. The celebrations weren’t spoilt when one of the torches set her pennant alight. On the contrary, when she swiftly put out the flames, it was heralded as another miracle.
The result of all this was that when Joan, in her white armour, attacked the English troops occupying a small fortified building outside the city walls, not only were her own men fired up with the certainty that victory had been promised to them by God and his visiting saints, but the English, who had heard about Joan, were completely terrified. In their minds, either she really was guided by angels or she was a witch sent by the devil.
When the spooked Englishmen ran for it, Joan’s reputation soared even higher. And from now on, Joan’s mere presence at a siege or battle was enough to send the Anglais into rapid retreat; four victories were won in the space of a week, including the lifting of the siege on Orléans. Suddenly, even the most sceptical French commanders wanted Joan as a mascot.
1000 Years of Annoying the French Page 11