Agincourt (43 page)

The most interesting of all the English dead was Edward, duke of York, a man who has been much maligned by posterity. A first cousin of both Richard II and Henry IV, he has been characterised as “unstable and treacherous,”
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a label that could just as easily be applied to every prominent figure who lived through the troubled reign of Richard II and survived the usurpation and change of dynasty. It was the duke’s misfortune to have had to walk a fine political line and to be the victim of both Ricardian and Tudor propagandists (including Shakespeare). A particular favourite of Richard II, he had played a leading role in the arrest of the Appellants and had appealed them for treason in his role as constable of England. On the other hand, he became uncomfortable with Richard’s increasingly despotic behaviour, balked at his decision to exile the future Henry IV and in the end deserted to the latter during the usurpation, as did all but a very few die-hard loyalists.

Although he was implicated by association in both the murder of the Appellant duke of Gloucester and the anti-Lancastrian plots of his sister and brother, his own complicity was never proved. He spent seventeen weeks imprisoned at Pevensey Castle after his sister’s plot was discovered, but he was treated with a kindliness that casts doubt on his guilt and which he remembered many years later with a legacy of twenty pounds to his former jailer in his will. Though some of his lands remained forfeit to the crown, he won back his former posts and served Henry IV with distinction in Aquitaine and Wales; as a result of his role in the Welsh wars, he earned the friendship of the prince of Wales, who personally stood guarantor for his loyalty in Parliament in 1407 and appointed him to positions of trust in his own reign.
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Like many of those in Henry V’s inner circles, including the king himself, Edward was deeply religious and imbued with that particular form of self-abasing piety which was the acceptable, mainstream version of Lollardy. When he made his will, during the siege of Harfleur, he called himself “of all sinners the most wicked and guilty” and requested that, if he died away from home, his corpse was to be taken back with the minimum of ceremony by two of his chaplains, six of his esquires and six of his valets. Six candles only were to burn round his bier and he was to be buried in the collegiate church of St Mary and All Saints, which he had founded at Fotheringhay, in Northamptonshire, three years earlier.
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Like many of his contemporaries, he was a man of literary tastes, who was familiar with, and able to quote from, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. What makes him exceptional is that he was also the author of a treatise on hunting, which he wrote and dedicated to Henry V when the latter was prince of Wales. In his prologue he described it as a “simple memorial,”
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but it is an extraordinary book in many ways. The duke, like most medieval noblemen, was passionate about hunting. For him it was not simply a pleasant pastime, nor even just a practical way of providing fresh meat for the table. It was a battle of wits and skill against a respected quarry, a question of intimate knowledge of habits, habitation and lie of the land, all governed by strictly enforced rules of conduct and etiquette to prevent the killing of breeding animals and those that were too young or inedible, but also to ensure that no part of a carcass was wasted.

Unusually, since the book was designed for the use of the aristocracy, it was not written in French, the language of chivalry, but in English. Much of it is a translation of a famous hunting treatise by Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix, who died in 1391, appropriately enough of a stroke sustained on the hunting field. But the duke of York was no mere translator. He was also Henry IV’s official master of hart-hounds
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and he knew his sport inside out. He therefore drew heavily on his own knowledge to add information that was peculiar to England, and to embellish his original with comments based on his own experience.
The Master of Game
is an unrivalled source of practical information about the medieval practice of hunting, from the basics of choosing the right dog for the right task, through to the highly prized art of correctly dismembering a carcass. It is not a dull scholarly treatise, but a celebration of one man’s passion, written with a lyricism to rival that of Chaucer. For the duke, no pleasure on earth could rival that of hunting. It was a foretaste of paradise. “Now shall I prove how hunters live in this world more joyfully than any other men,” he had written.

For when the hunter riseth in the morning, and he sees a sweet and fair morn and clear weather and bright, and he heareth the song of the small birds, the which sing so sweetly with great melody and full of love, each in its own language in the best wise that it can . . . And when the sun is arisen, he shall see fresh dew upon the small twigs and grasses, and the sun by his virtue shall make them shine. And that is great joy and liking to the hunter’s heart . . . And when he hath well eaten and drunk he shall be glad and well, and well at his ease. And then shall he take the air in the evening of the night, for the great heat that he hath had, . . . and lie in his bed in fair fresh clothes, and shall sleep well and steadfastly all the night without any evil thoughts of any sins, wherefore I say that hunters go into Paradise when they die, and live in this world more joyfully than any other men.

. . . Men desire in this world to live long in health and in joy, and after death the health of the soul. And hunters have all these things. Therefore be ye all hunters and ye shall do as wise men.
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The manner of the duke’s death is not recorded by contemporaries, but it is suggestive that there was a remarkably high casualty rate among his own retinue. (The legend that he was fat, and was therefore trampled underfoot and suffocated, is a late Tudor invention, though it is still repeated unquestioningly by modern historians.
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) The duke had originally indented to serve with 100 men-at-arms and 300 archers, though he ended up taking 340 archers (and had to mortgage his estates to pay their wages before he sailed from Southampton).
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By 6 October, when the exchequer records for the second financial quarter began, two days before the departure from Harfleur, his numbers had been reduced to eighty men-at-arms and 296 archers (four of the latter had been struck off because they could not fire the required minimum ten aimed arrows per minute). During the march he lost three more men-at-arms and three more archers, so his entire company at the battle consisted of 370 men. The records of those who reshipped home from Calais reveal that only 283 of them survived the battle: eighty-six of his esquires and archers—almost a quarter of those present—died at Agincourt with him.
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This high casualty rate tallies with what we know of the course of the fighting. The duke was commanding the English vanguard, which formed the right wing at the battle, and was therefore the recipient of the assault by the French left wing, led by the count of Vendôme, which also suffered very heavy losses.
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The chaplain tells us that the fighting was hardest and the piles of bodies highest round the standards of the three English divisions, so this too suggests that the duke and his men were among those who bore the brunt of the French assault. The information that has survived about other English retinues indicates that the duke’s losses at Agincourt were exceptionally high.
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Sir Richard Kyghley, a Lancashire knight and friend of Sir William Botiller, who had died at Harfleur, had a personal retinue of six men-at-arms and eighteen archers. Sir Richard himself was killed at the battle, with four of his archers, William de Holland, John Greenbogh, Robert de Bradshaw and Gilbert Howson. Although we do not know where or how Kyghley died in the battle, it is interesting to speculate that he may have been in charge of the Lancashire archers and that they may have been on the English right wing, flanking the duke of York’s company. The Lancashire contingents certainly seem to have suffered heavier losses than any other retinue, apart from the duke of York’s, suggesting that they too were in the midst of the fiercest fighting on that wing.
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The other men-at-arms killed at Agincourt whose names have been preserved were also a close-knit group from a single region.
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Daffyd ap Llewelyn, known to his contemporaries as Davy Gam, has acquired semi-legendary status as the Welshman who was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Fluellen (a corruption of Llewelyn). He was also said to have been the subject of a verse by the rebel princeling Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r, describing him as a short, red-haired man with a squint (“Gam” being a Welsh nickname for squinting). Llewelyn had always been a loyal Lancastrian. His lands, which he held from Henry IV, first as earl of Hereford then as king, were principally in Brecon. During the Welsh revolt, his loyalty made him a target for rebels, and in 1412 he had been betrayed into the hands of Owain Glyn Dw?246-136?r and held captive until he was eventually ransomed.
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Although he brought a retinue of only three archers to the Agincourt campaign, Llewelyn was knighted on the field, only to fall in the battle. With him died his two sons-in-law Watkin Lloyd and Roger Vaughan, the former of whom had been recruited by John Merbury, the chamberlain of south Wales, as one of a company of nine men-at-arms, fourteen mounted archers and 146 foot archers from Brecon. Vaughan’s widow, Gwladis, married as her second husband William Thomas of Raglan, who was also a veteran of Agincourt, and, like her father, was said to have been knighted on the field.
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Though the picture is inevitably flawed because the available records are incomplete, one can identify at least 112 men from the English side who were killed in the battle, a figure that excludes those who later died of their wounds. Of these, almost exactly two-thirds were archers, whose names have survived only in exchequer records and would not have been recorded by any contemporary chronicler. When we turn to the French side, there are no equivalent administrative records to give us even a hint of the numbers of non-noble men who died. What we do have are lists of men whose names have been recorded only because they were entitled to bear a coat of arms. These lists were usually compiled by heralds, but even they were unable to be comprehensive. This was sometimes because local knowledge was lacking: a Breton chronicler, such as Alain Bouchart, was able to add the names of several Breton knights whom the Armagnac and Burgundian sources had failed to identify. (Bouchart also noted that all three hundred Breton archers, under the command of Jean de Chateaugiron, sire de Combour, “except for very few,” were killed in the battle with him.)
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The main reason the lists of French dead are incomplete is that they were simply so numerous. The final toll included three dukes (Alençon, Bar and Brabant), at least eight counts (Blamont, Fauquembergue, Grandpré, Marle, Nevers, Roucy, Vaucourt and Vaudémont) and one viscount (Pulsaye, younger brother of the duke of Bar), which is suggestive.
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Even the usually indefatigable Monstrelet, who devoted a whole chapter to recording those killed or taken prisoner, managed to record more than three hundred names of the dead before admitting “and many others I omit for the sake of brevity and also because one cannot know how to record them all, because there were too many of them.”
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The fact that the French dead also included an archbishop is shocking. Jean Montaigu, archbishop of Sens, was no ordinary priest. His role in the French army was not the diplomatic or pastoral one of his English colleagues, the bishops of Norwich and Bangor. Nor was he even a clergyman called up to defend his country in the extremes of danger, like those arrayed in England earlier in the summer. He was a member of a rare and dying breed, the militant priest, who was equally at home wielding a sword as a censer. As bishop of Chartres, he had been a member of Charles VI’s romance-inspired Court of Love, set up in 1400 to “prosecute” offences against chivalrous behaviour towards ladies.
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In 1405 his Armagnac loyalties procured him the position of chancellor of France, but he fled when his brother Jehan de Montaigu, grand-master of the royal household, was executed by the Parisian mob in 1409. He was briefly captured at Amiens, wearing a helmet and body armour, only to resurface in 1411, commanding four hundred knights in defence of St Denis against the English and Burgundians at St Cloud. According to the monk of St Denis, who evidently rather admired this muscular Christian, he died at Agincourt “striking blows on every side with the strength of a Hector.” Jean Juvénal des Ursins was less complimentary: the archbishop’s death was “not much grieved over,” he noted, “as it was not his office.”
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There are three things that immediately strike even the most casual reader of the roll-call of French dead. The first is the apparently frivolous fact that so many bore the names of heroes of chivalric romances. There are a host of Lancelots, several Hectors, Yvains and Floridases, a Gawain, a Perceval, a Palamedes, a Tristan and an Arthur.
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Even though the English and French shared the same culture and literature, this is a peculiarly French phenomenon. Romance names were simply not, as a rule, bestowed on the sons of England; “Tristan Anderton, esquire” is a very lonely example among the solid phalanxes of Johns, Williams, Roberts, Thomases, Henrys and Nicholases, which form the bulk of the 430 names listed in the king’s retinue.
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That they were so popular with the French nobility is an indication of the especial devotion to Arthurian romance and its courtly values and aspirations which still endured in the birthplace of chivalry.

The second striking feature of the list of dead is that it reads like a gazetteer of the towns and villages in the vicinity of Agincourt. To take just a few examples at random, Renaud, sire d’Azincourt, and his son Wallerand; Jean and Renaud de Tramecourt; Colart de la Porte, sire de Béalencourt; Raoul, sire de Créquy, and his son Philippe; Mathieu and Jean de Humières (the seigneur de Humières was captured); Alain de Wandonne; Colart and Jean de Sempy; Eustache and Jean d’Ambrines; Jehan de Bailleul.
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These men, and those like them from the wider area, were the petty nobility upon whom depended the administration of the military, financial, judicial and other public affairs of not just the locality but the whole kingdom. The
baillis
of Amiens, Caen, Evreux, Macon, Meaux, Rouen, Senlis, Sens and Vermandois were all killed, many of them with their sons, and some of them with all the men they had brought from their
bailliage
, or so the citizen of Paris noted in his journal.
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These men were the landowners, castellans and managers of estates, around whom the economy revolved: of necessity, since they had to be capable of fighting, they were in the prime of life and therefore at their most active. Agincourt cut a great swath through the natural leaders of French society in Artois, Ponthieu, Normandy, Picardy. And there was no one to replace them.