Agincourt (22 page)

Under cover of darkness Henry sent a scouting party ashore to explore the lie of the land and find suitable quarters. The man chosen to lead this party, and the one to whom the glory of being the first to land in France was therefore given, was his twenty-year-old cousin Sir John Holland. That Henry should entrust him with such a mission was significant, for there were others, such as Clarence, Gloucester and Dorset, who had better claims in terms of both rank and military experience. It was an opportunity for Holland to prove his worth and finally step out of the shadow of his father’s execution for treason by Henry IV. He seized it with both hands and despite his youth would serve with distinction on this campaign and become one of Henry V’s most able and dependable commanders in France.

Though Holland was nominally in charge of the scouting party, Henry ensured that his lack of years and experience were offset by those chosen to accompany him. These were, or became over the course of the campaign, a tightly knit little group who, with Holland himself, would, time and again, be entrusted with actions requiring particular courage and military skill. Foremost among them was Holland’s stepfather, Sir John Cornewaille, one of the most widely respected chivalric figures of the day, even though he was still in his mid-thirties. The son of a West Country knight and a niece of the duke of Brittany, he had first come to prominence in 1400, when he was imprisoned for marrying Henry IV’s sister, Elizabeth of Lancaster (Holland’s mother), without the king’s permission. Even though she was some years older than he and already twice-widowed, it was said that the marriage was a love-match, and that she had fallen for him when she watched him defeat a French knight in a joust at York that year. Cornewaille certainly excelled at combats of this kind, and earned himself an international reputation for his success in them. In September 1406 he defeated some Scottish knights in jousts held in London, and in June 1409 he performed the feat of arms to which he had been challenged by Jehan Werchin, seneschal of Hainault. This latter event, which took place over a period of three days in Lille, was a single combat, fought
à outrance
—that is, with the normal weapons and armour of war, “which accomplishment is the greatest honour to which prowess and chivalry can aspire.” Cornewaille distinguished himself, fighting several courses each with lance, sword, dagger and axe in turn, and at the end he was presented with a gold collar set with jewels by John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, who had presided over the whole event. In 1412 he also fought a challenge at Smithfield in London against the Armagnac knight Tanneguy de Chastel, who had been captured in a Breton raid on the Devon coast in 1404.
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Cornewaille’s military career had been equally bold and idiosyncratic. Its highlights had included defeating a French assault on Blackpool, in Lancashire, in 1404; commanding an English mercenary troop of sixty men-at-arms and five hundred archers on behalf of the duke of Burgundy at the battle of Othée in 1408; and accompanying Thomas, duke of Clarence, as one of the leaders of the abortive invasion of France in 1412. He had indented to serve Henry V for the Agincourt campaign with a substantial company of thirty men-at-arms and ninety archers (the future earl, his stepson, could only afford to take twenty and sixty, respectively).
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William Porter was another member of the scouting party. A squire of the chamber for both Henry IV and Henry V, he had served on several important diplomatic missions for the latter, including being sent “on secret business” to King João of Portugal in 1413 and on Bishop Courtenay’s embassy to Paris in the winter of 1414-15. He was clearly high in Henry V’s favour. He received a personal legacy of a gold cup, a horse and £6 in cash in the king’s will, was given some of the lands in the south-east of England confiscated from Henry, Lord Scrope, and in 1422 was appointed an executor and administrator of the king’s revised will. Although he had indented to serve with a retinue of eight men-at-arms and twenty-four archers, he was nominally, at least, supposed to be in the company of Michael de la Pole, son and heir of the earl of Suffolk. Why he was picked for the scouting party is therefore unclear, but it may have been connected to the fact that he was John Cornewaille’s brother-in-arms.
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Porter and Cornwaille were real examples of what is often dismissed as simply a literary conceit. Like the most famous fictional pair of brothers-in-arms, Arcite and Palamon from Geoffrey Chaucer’s
The Knight’s Tale
, they had sworn a mutual oath to assist each other, “Til that the deethe departe shal us tweyne.” Though brotherhood-in-arms had idealistic overtones, arising out of the concept that the oath had originally been administered while mingling the blood of the two parties, it was in practice a much more formal legal relationship, very similar to the system of retaining, except that it was made between equals, rather than lord and man. The agreement between Porter and Cornewaille has not survived, but one drawn up between two English esquires, Nicholas Molyneux and John Wynter, at Harfleur in 1421, is a model of its kind. It had been made, they declared, “to increase and augment the respect and brotherhood which has for long existed between the said Molyneux and Wynter, so that it may henceforth be even stronger and more enduring, the said persons have personally sworn to become brothers in arms; that is to say, that each shall be loyal to the other without fraud or deception.” The principal heads of their agreement were that they should each be responsible for raising the first thousand pounds of the other’s ransom, in the event of either of them being captured; that one would remain hostage for both and the other seek to raise their joint ransoms, if both were captured; that all profits of war they won between them should be sent to London for safekeeping, until they could be invested in the purchase of land in England; and that the survivor (having made provision for any widow and children of the deceased) should inherit the full value of all their joint winnings.
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The brotherhood-in-arms that existed between Cornewaille and Porter must have been particularly lucrative, given the former’s military prowess and the latter’s diplomatic and administrative skills. Little is known about Porter’s financial affairs, but Cornewaille displayed a business acumen to rival his martial abilities. As early as 1404 he had purchased a Norman knight and some of the French prisoners captured in the raid on Dartmouth as an investment in their ransoms, something he would do again after Agincourt, when he bought a part share in the count of Vendôme from Henry V for 20,000 crowns. In 1412 the hostages kept as collateral for the payment of the 210,000 gold écus with which the Armagnacs bought off Clarence’s English forces were placed in Cornewaille’s hands, and a tenth of the entire sum was specifically allocated to him. It was said that he built his magnificent new home, Ampthill Castle in Bedfordshire, out of his profits of war, and his long and loyal service certainly earned him an elevation to the peerage. When he became Lord Fanhope in 1436, his annual income was said to be in excess of £800 (the equivalent of $533,232 today).
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In fact, much of his fortune rested on his marriage, which brought him a vast income from lands and rents, especially after Parliament granted his wife her dower rights in her first husband’s estates in 1404. He had to wait many years—twenty-eight in the case of the 1412 debt—to get the payments due to him for ransoms, during which time he had to keep his noble prisoners in the style to which they were accustomed.

The final member of the elite group that led the scouting party was another knight who would pay the ultimate price for his service in France. Sir Gilbert Umfraville was a nephew of the Sir Robert Umfraville who had played such an opaque role in relation to the Scottish invasion that was part of the Cambridge plot. Sir Gilbert’s loyalty was beyond question: like Porter, he had been a knight of the chamber since the beginning of Henry V’s reign. Like Cornewaille, he indented to serve with a substantial retinue of thirty men-at-arms and ninety archers, suggesting he had a considerable fortune at his disposal. With his fellow Garter knight Cornewaille, he would be entrusted with the joint leadership of the first battalion on the march from Harfleur to Agincourt.
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The scouting party that slipped ashore before dawn on Wednesday, 14 August 1415, was entrusted with several tasks, the two most important being to discover what resistance might be expected and to identify the best route to Harfleur. It is inconceivable that spies had not already provided the king with much of his geographical information before he set sail, but the medieval world lacked the main resource of modern travellers, friendly or hostile: the map, as we know it today, simply did not exist. Medieval
mappae mundi
, or world maps, like the famous late thirteenth-century one at Hereford Cathedral, were intended to be only a symbolic representation of the known inhabited world. The comparative sizes and distances between places did not reflect geographical fact, or even the state of current knowledge, but rather their importance historically and, especially, in relation to Christianity. Maps were oriented towards the east (hence the word “oriented”), rather than the north as they are today, and Jerusalem, as the most important city in Christ’s life and death, lay at their centre. The scientific world was aware that a fourth, antipodean continent existed, besides Asia, Europe and Africa, but the Church resisted the idea and had burnt two university professors from Padua and Bologna in the early fourteenth century for insisting that it was true. The idea that people in the Middle Ages believed that the world was flat or disc shaped, and that they might fall off if they went to its edge, is a modern myth based on a misunderstanding of the concept of the
mappa mundi
. Observers seeing the shape of the shadow of the earth during a lunar eclipse, or watching a ship’s hull disappear before its masts as it sailed over the horizon, had been aware of the curvature of the earth’s surface since classical times, and this knowledge had not been lost. By the fifteenth century, astronomical studies had reinforced this to the point that it was simply taken for granted that the world was spherical. Texts of every kind compared the earth to an apple or an egg, and medieval illustrations often depicted Christ holding the world—as an orb or a sphere—in his hands.
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A
mappa mundi
was of no use to anyone wanting to plan a journey. Established routes were therefore of prime importance. Crusaders and pilgrims, for instance, relied on being given an itinerary to follow: when they reached a named place en route, they would ask for directions to the next on the list. (That was the main reason why so many of them passed through Venice, rather than other Mediterranean ports, on their way to the Holy Land.) This sort of information was obviously not available to an invading army: military objectives were not the same as holy places. Merchants, who were the most regular travellers of the Middle Ages, together with diplomats, similarly relied on established trade routes and, wherever possible, preferred to journey by sea or river rather than over land. For this purpose, they had developed rudimentary navigational charts as early as the thirteenth century. Within two hundred years, the Italians, who had a virtual monopoly on producing them, had mapped out the coastline of most of Europe and the Mediterranean in a form that would be more recognisable to modern eyes than that of the
mappa mundi
. Unfortunately, again, for the potential invader, the interiors of the countries remained a blank: large cities and commercial centres were named, but only as a list of names along the nearest coastline and without reference to their distance from it. Other than giving a general indication of which country to aim for, if one wished to go to a particular place, these maps were also useless for military purposes.
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What was an invading army to do? Spies would, no doubt, have provided the groundwork and merchants from England and her allies visiting the busy port of Harfleur would have been able to give details of the layout of the city and its neighbourhood. For the rest, they would have to rely on what intelligence could be gleaned from the investigations of scouting parties and the interrogation, by force, bribery or persuasion, of local people. The choice of landing site at Chef-de-Caux does not seem to suggest any sophisticated prior intelligence; even the French admitted that it could easily have been defended and an English landing prevented. As with all this stretch of Normandy coastline, the shore was a mass of shingle, cast up into a bank by the action of the tides. According to Henry V’s chaplain, who is our main eyewitness of the campaign, it was also strewn with large boulders, which were a major hazard to the barges and skiffs ferrying the troops, horses and supplies from the ships. On the landward side of this shingle ridge, the French had prepared a set of shoreline defences, consisting of thick earthen walls, “furnished with angles and ramparts . . . after the manner of the walls of a tower or castle,” and a series of water-filled ditches, between which “the earth was left intact for the breadth of a cubit, permitting only one man at a time to enter or leave between them.” Beyond the man-made ditches, there was the natural hazard of tidal salt-water marshes to negotiate, again along treacherous narrow paths, which left the invaders seriously exposed to danger.
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It should have been easy for the French to prevent the landing. Even though not a hand was raised against them, it still took the English three days to disembark, during which time they were at their weakest and constantly vulnerable to attack. The French also had the advantage of an inexhaustible supply of ready ammunition, in the form of the stones from the beach and riverbed. “However,” the chaplain remarked, “as a result of their slackness, folly, or, at any rate, lack of foresight, the place was left completely undefended by men when, as far as one could judge, the resistance of a few, had they but had manly hearts, would have kept us at bay certainly for a long time and perhaps indefinitely.”
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