XI
The Norman Conquest – In Reverse
‘The King had subdued all Normandy.’
The First English Life of King Henry the Fifth
‘If the expression “bled white” was at any time accurate, it best describes the state of the conquered provinces of France under English rule.’
K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England
When the fall of Rouen became known, the rest of Normandy quickly submitted. Often it was sufficient for Henry’s captains to appear in front of a town or a castle for it to surrender. By the spring of 1419 nearly the entire duchy was in his hands. To the east his line of strongholds reached as far as Mantes on the Seine, only thirty-five miles from Paris. He established his headquarters at Mantes as it could be reinforced swiftly by river. To the south there was a similar line from which to launch the conquest of southern Maine and Anjou. Treaties with the Dukes of Burgundy, Brittany and Alençon ensured that no trouble would come from their direction.
The king at once began to make Normandy an independent state, separate from the rest of France. New government departments were set up – a Norman chancery, a Norman seneschalcy (overseeing all civil and military administration), a Norman exchequer and a Norman admiralty (with responsibility for coastal defences). Bishop Kemp of Rochester became the chancellor, the chief administrative official; William Alyngton, the treasurer; and the Earl of Suffolk, the admiral. There were eight baillis or regional governors, all Englishmen.
A little too much has been made by English historians of Henry’s programme of conciliation; his guarantees of property and privilege, his respect for local institutions, and his strict observance of legality. Admittedly his approach was impressively imaginative, unmatched during the late Middle Ages – though there were no conquests which can really be compared with that of Normandy. However, the reason why the Normans submitted to what the Monk of St Denis calls ‘the odious yoke of the English’ was that they had seen just how incapable was the French monarchy, torn between Armagnacs and Burgundians, of saving them from sharing the fate of so mighty a stronghold as the ducal capital.
No doubt the king’s Norman Conquest in reverse retained Norman institutions, invited Norman noblemen to swear fealty, and employed many Norman clerics in its administration, yet although a few magnates submitted and took an oath of allegiance, the vast majority of the upper nobility refused to do so and were dispossessed. Henry gave their estates to Englishmen, just as William the Conqueror had once bestowed Saxon lands, confiscated from the thanes, on his followers.
The redistribution of land and titles began almost at once. Six great Norman counties were re-allotted during 1418–19; the Duke of Exeter was given that of Harcourt, together with its enormous family stronghold of Lillebonne; the Earl of Salisbury was made Count of Perche; the Earl of Warwick, Count of Aumale; Lord Edward Holland, Count of Mortain; Sir John Grey of Heton, Count of Tancarville; and Sir William Bourchier, Count of Eu. The Duke of Clarence received three viscounties, comprising a vast block of land. (The Duke of Bedford was given nothing for the moment, but by the time he died as ‘Regent of France’ in 1435, he was Duke of Alençon, Duke of Anjou, Count of Maine and Count of Dreux, to mention merely his most senior Norman dignities.) Lord Willoughby secured the lordship of Beaumesnil with other seigneuries and Sir Walter Hungerford became Baron of Le Hommet. Sir Gilbert Umfraville obtained all the estates of his distant kinsman, Pierre d’ Amfreville, at Amfreville-sur-Iton (whence his ancestors had come), together with those of the Seigneur d’Estouteville – once commander of the garrison at Harfleur. Lesser men benefited too, such as Sir John Popham of South Hardeford in Hampshire who became Lord of Thorigny, or Sir Christopher Curwen of Workington in Cumberland who became Lord of Cany in the Caux. In all, some 500 fiefs were confiscated from the French in Normandy.
The disadvantage of such grants was that Henry expected military service in return, just as William I had from the thanes’ dispossessors 350 years before. His grantees had to carry out specified duties, whether providing troops, garrisoning towns or maintaining their castles and manors as fortresses or depots. Umfraville had to furnish twelve men-at-arms and twenty-four archers for the royal army. Hungerford, the royal steward, was obliged to give the king-duke a lance tipped with a fox’s brush every year on the feast of the exaltation of the holy cross – and to produce ten men-at-arms and twenty archers whenever required. Willoughby, besides giving Henry a golden spur at Caen every midsummer’s day, was obliged to ride with the king and bring with him three men-at-arms and seven archers for so long as the war against the French should last. On a humbler level a William Rothelane was committed to finding a guard for part of the town of Coutances, and a Hugh Spencer had to find men for the guard at Harfleur. Such small fry were threatened with death by Henry should they ever dare to try to leave Normandy.1
Most of the new English lords of this Norman Conquest in reverse were small fry, the smallest sort of gentlemen, if that. They did not belong to distinguished or influential families in England; were not men of landed property. Such inducements as a manor house and an estate, often accompanied by a title, and lucrative employment provided attractive reasons for staying and settling. And they could expect more than the mere income from their estates or increment from office. Every garrison captain received one third of his men’s plunder, the ‘spoils of war’ (while remitting another third of it to the king together with a third of his own). There was also the pâtis or protection racket levied on villagers for the maintenance of the local English garrison.
Henry’s attempts at full-scale colonization varied from place to place. His settlement of 10,000 Englishmen at Harfleur was almost certainly intended to create a second Calais. At Cherbourg and Caen – and to a much lesser extent at Rouen, Bayeux and Coutances – it is more likely that he was inspired by memories of Wales, where towns originally intended to be entirely English, but with a strong Welsh element, had remained loyal to the Crown because of the large number of settlers. A fair number of the English who settled in Normandy took French girls as wives.
The king also had a policy of conciliation – he did not want his new subjects in permanent rebellion against him. Apart from military posts, the majority of officials save for the most senior continued to be Frenchmen. Nobles who swore allegiance to him were regranted their lands for the feudal dues by which they had formerly held them from the King of France, with no increase. As always in occupied countries, a few inhabitants profited from the new regime, especially lawyers. The structure of Lancastrian Normandy gave them all sorts of new opportunities, since the judicature was separated from Paris and countless fresh prerogatives and offices made for lucrative disputes in the ducal courts. There were also plenty of posts for bureaucrats in the administration. Some Normans may even have welcomed English rule. Most rejected it.
Many Norman nobles, including all the magnates and great landowners, fled to other parts of France. A number of squires held out in the woods, leading a maquis against the invaders, with the help of the peasants; but as the occupation dragged on they became discouraged. In the end most resistance of this sort was confined to bands whose members were often as much bandits as partisans. The kingdom was so torn between Burgundians and Armagnacs that even the most stubborn can have seen little hope of success.
Jean Juvénal and the Monk of St Denis tell the story of the young Dame de La Roche Guyon, Perette de la Rivière, whose husband had been killed at Agincourt. One of the greatest ladies in Normandy, she held out for three months in her huge castle, on a bluff overlooking the Seine, against a siege conducted by Warwick and Guy le Bouteiller – the former captain of Rouen who had taken the oath of allegiance to Henry, one of the few Normans of rank to do so. Eventually the English, tunnelling up from caves below the castle, mined its walls. When forced to surrender Perette was told by the king that she might keep her lands if either she took the oath or married Guy le Bouteiller. She refused to swear allegiance or marry
someone whom she considered a traitor, particularly when the marriage contract stipulated that any son by Guy would inherit La Roche Guyon, depriving her two sons by her first husband of their patrimony. The Dame de La Roche Guyon preferred to leave Normandy, penniless, with her children.2
During the nineteenth century romantic French historians insisted on seeing every Norman highwayman or outlaw as a hero of the ‘resistance’. And no doubt, although many of the ‘brigands’ in the forest were criminals, perhaps the majority,3 yet a fair proportion were definitely partisans. When the English captured someone in Normandy they would only allow him to ransom himself if he could prove he came from territory which had not yet submitted to the English king – by, for example, showing that he belonged to a dauphinist garrison. Otherwise, from as early as February 1418, by Henry’s express orders, he was treated as ‘a brigand and our enemy’ and hanged. The English deliberately refused to discriminate between partisans and common criminals, both swinging side by side from the same gibbet.
It is obvious from an edict issued by Henry the year before he died, sent to every bailli in Normandy, that he himself was convinced that all too many brigands were noblemen. He says ‘many nobles together with men of the common people’ (plures nobiles et alii populares) had either joined ‘Our enemies’ (the dauphinists) or were else living in woods and caverns as robbers – tacitly admitting that they were prepared to lead a miserable hunted life rather than take an oath of allegiance to him. Whether the brigands were maquis or bandits, Basin makes it plain that everyone thought they only existed in such numbers because of the English occupation – ‘as soon as the English were chased out of Normandy and made to go home, the country was delivered from this pest.’ Furthermore the bishop has no doubt that many ‘brigands’ were motivated primarily by dislike of the occupation:
There were a very large number of ruined and desperate men who, from idleness, hatred of the English, coveting other people’s goods or knowledge that the long arm of the law was seeking them for some crime, had left their fields and houses and, instead of living in towns or castles held by the French, inhabited the most inaccessible depths of the woods in the manner of wild beasts or wolves. Maddened and half-crazed by hunger they would go forth, usually by night when it was dark, to break into the houses of peasants, seizing their goods and dragging them off as prisoners into impenetrable forest fastnesses and there, by all kinds of ill treatment and torture, they would force them to bring great sums of money at an arranged time and place as ransom to purchase their liberty (together with goods indispensable for such a way of life). Failure to deliver meant that those whom the peasants had left as hostages would suffer the most inhuman tortures or the peasants themselves, if the robbers could catch them, would be murdered or else their houses be mysteriously set alight at night and burn down … above all they attacked the English, killing them without pity whenever they had the chance.4
This picture is a little suspect since the author had once been the ‘collaborationist’ Bishop of Lisieux, a willing tool of the English, with good reason to detest such men. Undoubtedly a fair proportion of those hanged by the occupation as ‘brigands’ were dauphinist partisans who received food and shelter from the peasants. Writing about 1470, Basin was sure of one thing about the rebels, reiterating again and again that they had only been there because of the English presence – ‘the country could not be saved from or cleansed of this pest until the English domination was over and it was returned to the French, its natural masters.’
Emigration was ultimately a far more damaging form of resistance to the English than guerilla warfare in the woods. Some noblemen emigrated simply to protect their families but most did so to avoid taking the oath of allegiance. A substantial number of clergy refused to swear allegiance to Henry, including two archbishops of Rouen – only three Norman bishops would so so – and many emigrated, friends collecting their stipends for them since otherwise they might have starved. (Some clerics who stayed pretended they had taken the oath.)
However the vast majority of emigrants, those whom Normandy could least afford to lose, were peasants between the ages of twenty and thirty. They were driven away by war taxation and the brutalities of the army of occupation. Most went to Brittany though some went as far away as Flanders. Henry and his officials were so alarmed by the loss of labour that they made serious efforts to lure the men home.5 This constant bleeding-away of the population was disastrous for Norman agriculture.
It was not just Frenchmen who left. As early as 1416 men were deserting from the Harfleur garrison, sneaking home across the Channel. By the autumn of the following year this trickle of deserters had grown to a flood from all over Normandy. In September 1418 the king wrote to the sheriffs of England complaining of soldiers who ‘without our licence have in great numbers falsely and traitorously withdrawn and returned to our kingdom of England’. By 1418 he was ordering the garrisons at Calais and Harfleur to hang any deserters they could catch. A system of passports was introduced, while Sir Richard Walkstede was given the task of searching every vessel which sailed from Rouen harbour. If such measures prevented men from crossing the Channel they did not stop them deserting. Those forced to stay in France went in fear of being hanged and like the ‘brigands’, many took to the woods and lived by robbery.
Deserters were not the only English to add to the misery of the French country people; the troops who remained with their garrisons were often almost as much of a pest. There was no authority, such as military police, to stand in their way. In February 1418 Henry ordered all garrison captains to punish soldiers who ‘oppressed and pillaged the people’. In theory discipline was enforced by the Constable of England, Clarence, and by the Earl Marshal, Lord Mowbray. Although they appointed commissioners, their control over garrisons was minimal. Every captain received a copy of the king’s regulations to read to his men. They were surprisingly specific, especially with regard to prostitutes – whose money must be confiscated and arms broken – and sanitation: troops had to ‘bury their carrion and bowels about their lodgings and within earth, that no stench be in their lodgings’. There must be no robbing, no seizing of food or livestock.6
Inevitably the garrisons lived off the country. Their pay was usually in arrears; when a rudimentary commissariat was set up to feed them it proved inadequate. A fair proportion of troops were pardoned criminals and in any case there must have been that instinct for vandalism which often emerges among groups of ignorant and aggressive young men who find themselves in a foreign country. The best soldiers are prone to looting, even the British and Americans during World War II, not to mention the Wehrmacht. The occasional murder of a comrade did not incline the English to treat the population any more gently. Since the labour force had already been depleted by the plagues which followed the Black Death, the occupation made it still harder to till the soil – good farmland began to revert to forest. Landowners suffered a dramatic drop in their incomes. Moreover, trade was badly hit by the disruption of communications with the rest of France.
English historians express surprise that so few troops held down Normandy, arguing that it shows acceptance of English rule. The answer lies in the mobility of widely spaced but carefully sited garrisons, often consisting of no more than a dozen archers. Since these were mounted they could cover long distances swiftly along the excellent Norman roads – which compared very favourably to roads in England – to relieve each other or enforce obedience by nicely calculated atrocities.
In the meantime Henry never missed an opportunity of claiming he enjoyed divine favour and his merciless orthodoxy and puritanism impressed many churchmen. One such was the Spanish Dominican, Vincent Ferrer. A hell-fire preacher, Vincent travelled everywhere with an entourage of penitents which included flagellants with bleeding backs. His mission was the denunciation of vice and corruption. When he consecrated the Host at Mass he wept so infectiously that the whole church resounded with the congregation’s wailing. In May 1419 he came to Caen and p
reached before the king and his court, publicly rebuking him for killing so many Christian men and women who had never done him any harm. Henry listened impassively. Afterwards he had Vincent brought to him. His first words were, ‘I am the scourge of God sent to punish the people of God for their sins.’ When Vincent emerged after being closeted alone with him for three hours the simple friar told the waiting courtiers, ‘This morning, before I came hither, I believed that the king your master had been the greatest tyrant among other princes Christian; but now I perceive the contrary, for I assure you he is the most perfect and the most acceptable unto God of all them that be here present this day, and his quarrel is so just and so true that undoubtedly God is and shall be his aid in these wars.’ (One can only guess that Henry had been arguing his view that he had a mission to give good government to France.) This incident, dutifully and perhaps too imaginatively recorded by the Earl of Ormonde, illustrates both the sheer force of the king’s personality and his conviction that God was on his side.7
He advertised the fact that he had come to stay through the medium which circulated most widely – the currency. Some time between January and September 1419 he issued gold moutons, and silver and base-metal gros, all modelled on French coins and probably struck at Rouen. The gold piece bore the letters HFRX, which stood for Henricus Francorum Rex; revealingly, the legend on the reverse was Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat (‘Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ is emperor’), the words of a popular and triumphantly aggressive plain chant motet. The gros were inscribed Sit nomine Domini benedictum (‘May the name of the Lord be blessed.’) Clearly, as in Wales and at Agincourt, the king ascribed his victories to divine favour.
Henry V as Warlord Page 16