Agincourt

by Juliet Barker

  Henry V’s personal surgeon, Thomas Morstede, was one of the most interesting men on the Agincourt campaign. Originally from Betchworth, near Dorking, in Surrey, by 1401 he had moved to London and was working there as a humble “leche.” As a young surgeon, he may have been present when John Bradmore removed the arrow from Henry’s face after the battle of Shrewsbury, an operation he was later able to describe in detail. Like Colnet, he owed his rapid rise to wealth and fame to royal patronage. In 1410 he was retained as the king’s surgeon, on a salary of £40 a year, an office that was confirmed on Henry V’s accession, on condition that the king had exclusive use of his services. At the same time, he was also appointed to the highly profitable post of examiner, or collector of customs, for all vessels passing through the port of London, the actual work being delegated to his deputies. Like Colnet, he signed an indenture for service on the Agincourt campaign on 29 April 1415, having successfully petitioned the king to be allowed to take twelve men of his profession and of his own choosing, together with three archers. Unusually, he was to have the same wages as Colnet, an indication not only of his abilities but also of the enhanced role he was likely to play in a war situation; the other surgeons were to receive 6d a day, in common with the archers.43

  A second royal surgeon, William Bradwardyn, was also retained to serve on the Agincourt campaign with a team of nine surgeons under his command. Bradwardyn was older than Morstede, having served Richard II on his Irish expedition in 1394 and been retained by him for life in 1397. The change of regime had not affected his career, though he too seems to have found a patron in the prince of Wales, rather than Henry IV, who preferred foreign doctors.44 Despite Bradwardyn’s evident seniority, it was Morstede who was the chief surgeon in the king’s army. He was clearly an open-minded, dynamic and ambitious man. Frustrated by the traditional rivalry between physicians and surgeons, and by the incompetence of so many of those in the medical profession, he initiated a project in 1423 to found the first English college of medicine. Its aims were to introduce better education and supervision for all those engaged in the medical profession, including the setting of common examinations, inspecting premises stocking medicines, regulating fees and providing free medical care to the poor. The college was to consist of two self-governing bodies, one for physicians and one for surgeons, under the joint leadership of an annually elected rector. Morstede himself was the first master of surgery to be appointed (Bradwardyn, significantly, was only a vice-master). The college collapsed a few years later under the stresses of the antipathy between the two professions, but Morstede did not give up his dream, and in 1435 he was the driving force behind the foundation of the Mystery, or Guild, of Surgeons, a professional body that survives to this day.45

  Morstede’s dedication to his profession prompted him to train dozens of apprentices, lend other surgeons books from his extensive library and make regular and generous charitable donations to prisoners and the poor. In 1431 he married a wealthy widow, who was the daughter of John Michell, a former alderman, sheriff and mayor of London; he served as sheriff of London himself in 1436 and, unusually for a surgeon at this time, was granted a coat of arms. By 1436 he was listed as the fourth wealthiest person in the city, having an annual income of £154 ($102,647 at today’s values) from lands in London, Surrey, Essex, Suffolk and Lincolnshire. Possibly Morstede’s greatest claim to fame, however, was that he wrote the Fair Book of Surgery, which became the standard surgical textbook of the fifteenth century.46 Written in English, so that it was far more accessible than the Latin tracts and compendia then available, the Fair Book of Surgery drew on Morstede’s decades of experience in Henry’s wars and was illustrated with helpful examples of successful operations. It was an eminently pragmatic teaching manual, but it was also an unusually ethical work. Other treatises of this kind had often displayed an unhealthy degree of cynicism. Henri de Mondeville, for instance, recommended that surgeons should use magical cures, not because they worked, but “so that if they do effect a cure the surgeon will be credited with a marvellous piece of work, while if they do not he will not be accused of having omitted some vital step.” Mondeville advised surgeons always to charge for medicine because the more expensive the cure, the more confidence the patient would have in it. He also suggested that all doctors should use big words and, if necessary, make up terms to impress their patients: “the ordinary man believes that pronouncements which he does not understand are more effective than those which he understands perfectly well.” The more imposing the name of the condition, the more ill the patient felt himself to be: “give some awful names to the illnesses of ignorant peasants if you want to get any money out of them,” he suggested.47

  Morstede’s attitude and approach were completely different. It was the duty of a surgeon, he wrote, to have a thorough understanding of “the principles of surgery, in theory and in practice, [and] . . . all things which are comprehended in anatomy.” He should be well trained and experienced, with “small fingers and steadfast hands, not trembling, and clear of sight.” Finally, he should be “well mannered . . . gracious to sick folk, and merciful to poor folk, and not too greedy but reasonable, to set his salary considering the labour of the cure, and the worthiness and the poverty of the patient, and not to meddle with no cures that he supposes are not capable of curing.”48

  With his emphasis on the importance of anatomy—including a cut-by-cut description of how to dissect a newly dead body, “as of them whose heads have been smitten off or hanged”—Morstede placed a premium on practical experience and observation over simple book-learning. In common with all other medieval practitioners, he might not have realised that the blood circulated continuously round the body, rather than dissipating into the flesh like sap into leaves, but he knew his internal organs, his bones, cartilage, veins and arteries, muscles, ligaments and sinews.49

  Death in battle was a possibility that no one preparing to go to France could afford to ignore. Hamon le Straunge, a man-at-arms in the company of Sir Thomas Erpingham, thus made careful provision for his wife, Alienor, in the event of his death, setting his seal to his will on 10 June 1415. The king himself drew up his will on 24 July, leaving generous bequests, ranging from beds to horses, to his “most dear brother” Bedford and his “dearest brother” Gloucester, but nothing at all, not even a personal memento, to his brother Clarence, who would, nevertheless, inherit the kingdom. There were individual bequests, too, for “our most dear grandmother, the countess of Hereford,” for the officers of his household and his chamber, his physician Nicholas Colnet, and his chaplains. Henry’s two religious foundations, the Carthusian monastery at Sheen and the Bridgettine house at Syon, were to benefit from legacies of one thousand marks each. His body was to be buried in the church of Westminster Abbey, where a tomb was to be built, serviced by its own altar.50

  As one would expect from so pious a king, Henry also made provision for his own soul, trusting for redemption in the intervention of the virgin Mary and a holy host of angels, saints and martyrs, including his own personal favourites, Edward the Confessor, St John of Bridlington and St Brigit of Sweden. Thirty poor men were to be fed and clothed for a year on condition that they daily repeated the prayer, “Mother of God, remember thy servant Henry who placed his whole trust in thee.” In addition, twenty thousand masses were to be sung as soon as possible after his death, the title and number of each one being laid down with his usual meticulous attention to detail. Though it has been suggested that twenty thousand masses was an excessive number, reflecting a guilty conscience for embarking on an unjust war, such extravagance was by no means unusual in the medieval period. Piety rather than guilt dictated the scale. At the end of the will, which was written in Latin, Henry signed his initials and then added his own personal plea in English, “Jesu Mercy and Gramercy. Lady Marie help.”51

  Four days after making his will, Henry wrote for the final time to Charles VI of France. Ostensibly it was a last-ditch attempt to avert war: a personal appeal from
one man to another, prompted by the dictates of conscience and, in particular, a wish to avoid bloodshed. Henry pleaded for a settlement of their quarrel and the restoration of peace between two great nations which were “once united, now divided.” Charles should know, he declared, that “we call to witness in conscience the Supreme Judge, over whom neither entreaties nor bribes can prevail, that, in our sincere zeal for peace, we have tried every way possible to obtain peace. If we had not done so, we would have rashly given away the just title of our inheritance, to the eternal prejudice of posterity.”52

  For many modern commentators this letter is simply another example of Henry’s hypocrisy: he was mouthing platitudes about peace and justice but, in reality, “whatever the cost, he wanted war.”53 Such an interpretation misses the point. It is true that the king had no intention of abandoning his campaign at this late stage and that this “last request” was pregnant with threat—it was written “at the very moment of making our crossing” and dated from “our town of Southampton on the sea shore”—making it clear that invasion was imminent. It is also true that he did not expect to extract any further concessions from the French that would be substantial enough to persuade him to call off the expedition. It is even true that the letter was a useful tool in the propaganda war because it could be copied and distributed to allies of both sides as evidence of the English willingness to compromise. (It was no accident that transcripts of it were to appear in many contemporary chronicles.)54

  Nevertheless, this “last request” was not a cynical, empty gesture. Henry was, with his customary attention to detail, following precisely the code of conduct that governed the medieval laws of war. If Henry V’s war to recover his rights in France was to be accepted as morally justified in the eyes of the world and, more importantly, of God, it was crucial that every step he took along the path was correct and followed the prescribed form. He had already consulted the “wise men” of his kingdom both in Parliament and in his great council. More recently, he had taken the second step of consulting impartial international opinion on the justice of his cause, ordering notarised transcripts to be made, under the seal of the archbishop of Canterbury, of the 1412 Treaty of Bourges, in which the Armagnac princes had recognised English sovereignty in Aquitaine. He had sent these copies to Constance (now in Switzerland), where the general council of the Church was in session, and to European princes, including the Holy Roman Emperor, “to this end: that all Christendom might know what great acts of injustice the French had inflicted on him, and that, as it were reluctantly and against his will, he was being compelled to raise his standards against rebels.”55

  The third and final step in this quasi-judicial process was to set out the case before the adversary himself and ask for the restitution of his rights. Henry’s letter to Charles VI had taken precisely this form. In it he made a point of citing the twentieth chapter of the biblical book of Deuteronomy, which formed the basis of the medieval laws of war and commanded that “when you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.”56 It was a quotation that would appear repeatedly on Henry’s lips and dictate his actions throughout the coming war with France.

  There was now nothing left to be done except to begin the enterprise that had been so long in preparation. On 29 July Henry gave the order for everyone engaged in his service to embark upon the ships allocated to them and to be ready to sail by 1 August at the latest. The discovery of the Cambridge plot and the necessity of dealing with the culprits caused an unexpected delay, but six days later Henry left Portchester Castle on board a barge, which took him out into the deeper waters between Southampton and Portsmouth, where his flagship, the Trinity Royal, was waiting for him. As soon as he was on board, the signal was given for all the ships of the fleet in the various ports and harbours along the south coast to make haste to join him. All he needed was a favourable wind as he prepared to set sail for France.57

  PART II

  THE AGINCOURT CAMPAIGN

  CHAPTER NINE

  “FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE”1

  On Sunday, 11 August 1415, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, Henry V gave the signal that launched the invasion of France. Fifteen hundred ships—a fleet twelve times the size of the Spanish Armada2—now weighed anchor, hoisted sail and made their way into the Channel from the shelter of Southampton Water and the Solent. Unlike the huge Spanish galleons of the sixteenth century, these were not purpose-built warships but a motley collection of privately owned merchant vessels: great ships that braved the Atlantic to bring wine from Aquitaine and carry the highly prized heavy woollen broadcloth to the continent; smaller coastal traders importing salt from Bourgneuf Bay in Brittany and exporting salted herring from Yarmouth to the Low Countries and the Baltic; even river boats, the freight carriers of the inland waterways, supplying everything from stone and marble for building cathedrals to hides for making leather boots, gloves and saddles.3 There were ships of every size and shape: cogs and carracks, galleys and balingers. Most were built in the distinctive northern style of clinker construction—their hulls composed of a series of overlapping planks from the keel upwards—with a single mast and one square or rectangular sail, but some were lighter Mediterranean vessels, double-masted, with triangular sails and banks of oarsmen. Those ships that had been converted into fighting vessels sported small wooden castles at both prow and stern; others had been fitted with rows of stalls to carry horses, a small ship like a cog having the capacity to carry only thirty, at a time when transport for some twenty-five thousand was needed.4

  Many of the ships had gaily painted hulls, carried rows of white shields bearing the red cross of England along their sides, and flew sails, pennons and banners decorated with heraldic beasts and coats of arms. Some were privately owned by retinue commanders, like the four carracks provided by Sir John Holland, but most were impressed, like the four vessels, two each from Bayonne and Dartmouth, which conveyed the 180 men in Sir Thomas Carew’s company. Frustratingly, a number of men who had mustered at Southampton had to be left behind for lack of shipping, and approximately one hundred ships also failed to join the fleet, either because they could not catch the tide or because they were not ready to sail. Three more were lost when they caught fire, a routine hazard of life on board ship, which was probably an accident but may have been connected with the Cambridge plot, since burning the fleet to prevent the expedition sailing had been one of the options discussed by the conspirators.5

  At the head of the fleet, escorted by the admiral, Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, and a convoy of fifteen ships carrying 150 men-at-arms and 300 archers, sailed the Trinity Royal. At 540 tons, this was one of the largest ships in northern Europe.6 She had just returned to sea after a two-year refit and there was now no mistaking whom she carried on board, or the purpose of his voyage. The royal coat of arms, a shield quartered with the three lions of England and the three fleurs-de-lis of France, was painted on her sail. A golden crown adorned her top-castle and a gilded sceptre, worked with three fleur-de-lis, decorated the capstan. At the deckhead stood the carved wooden figure of a crowned leopard, another heraldic beast associated with the kings of England. Painted and gilded, it carried six shields, four of which bore the king’s arms within a collar of gold, and two the arms of the patron saint of England, St George, within the Garter, the emblem of the English order of chivalry. At the mast and on the rear deck flew four of the banners that would also be carried at Agincourt: the royal arms; the arms of St George; the arms of Henry’s royal ancestor, St Edward the Confessor; and the curious cipher representing the Trinity.7

  This display of heraldry was not simply the unavoidable ragbag of inheritance. It was deliberately chosen, a carefully thought-out piece of visual propaganda, whose meaning would be as clear to anyone connected with the profession of arms as that of the religious paintings and artefacts in medieval churches. Even the royal coat of arms made a provocative statement. The ancient arms of England, borne by every king since Richard
the Lionheart in the twelfth century, had been three golden lions on a red background. This had changed only at the start of the Hundred Years War when Edward III made a symbolic statement of his claim to the throne of France by quartering them with the French royal arms, the golden fleurs-de-lis scattered on a blue background.8 Edward III had also, at about the same time, unilaterally adopted St George as the patron saint of England. The significance of this gesture was that St George had previously been recognised throughout Europe and the Christian east as the patron saint of all knighthood. By making him exclusively English, Edward III identified himself and his country as the embodiment of the treasured chivalric values that the saint represented. The seemingly miraculous English victories at Crécy, in 1346, and Poitiers, a decade later, could therefore be seen as indisputable proof that the saint had withdrawn his favour from the French (with whom the very concept of chivalry had originated) and become a partisan of England.9

  The Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III after Crécy and dedicated to St George, was a celebration of English military supremacy, and its twenty-six members were admired and envied throughout Europe. When Jehan Werchin, the young seneschal of Hainault who would later be killed at Agincourt, was seeking to establish a reputation for prowess in 1408, he did it by issuing a jousting challenge to the Knights of the Garter, whom he regarded, quite literally, as the heirs of the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table and therefore the champions of England. (His offer to fight them all at once brought a mild reproof from Henry IV, who said such a thing was unheard of in the ancient chronicles of the Round Table, and was therefore inappropriate; he should fight against a single representative.) Likewise, the greatest honour Henry V could bestow on Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, whose alliance he was seeking in the war against France in 1416, was the Order of the Garter. The insignia and the ceremonies associated with the order were highly prized as the visible symbols of a knightly reputation won by outstanding courage and loyal service. It was no accident that Garter knights, such as Sir John Cornewaille (who had independently accepted another of the seneschal of Hainault’s challenges to a feat of arms), were to play a prominent role in the Agincourt campaign, deliberately seeking out the most dangerous—and therefore the most honourable—exploits to perform.10