A Great and Glorious Adventure

by Gordon Corrigan

  Once Henry had surrounded Harfleur with the army on land and the fleet blockading any approach from the sea, and had stationed men in small requisitioned boats in the rivers that criss-crossed the area, he was ready to begin his siege. But that was the last thing he wanted to do, for it would cost time, men and money, so he called upon the garrison to surrender what was, after all, legitimately part of the duchy of Normandy and therefore Henry’s rightful inheritance, with a promise that, if they did so, they would not be harmed or plundered. Not surprisingly, the French declined and the siege began. The first problem was to get the English guns close enough to the walls to cause damage, and, having decided that the main point of attack would be the eastern wall and the south-eastern gate, the men-at-arms began to dig trenches to allow them to move the guns under cover from enemy crossbowmen and cannon positioned on the town walls. This was a difficult and unpleasant task given the very high water table and the flooding of much of the area, but eventually the guns were able to begin a bombardment against the south-east barbican and the adjacent walls. In order to protect the guns from counter-battery fire from the walls, an ingenious system of thick wooden planks that were reinforced with iron and hinged was devised. Mounted in front of the guns, they were raised to allow the guns to fire and then lowered to protect against retaliation. The enemy were not idle. By night, they repaired the damage as far as they could by placing tubs full of earth or sand – to be known as gabions in a later war – in any breaches and they covered the streets in earth and animal dung so as to absorb the fall of shot and thus reduce the likelihood of stone balls landing inside the town and disintegrating into showers of deadly splinters. Mindful of the risk of a full-scale escalade, de Goucourt ordered barrels of sulphur and quicklime to be placed along the walls as a blinding agent to be thrown down on attackers, and tubs of oils, pitch and other flammables to be positioned for use against belfries or other siege engines that might try to come up against the walls.

  Steadily, and despite the efforts of the defenders to make good the damage, the defences began to crumble and Henry ordered fascines to be prepared. These were bundles of sticks ten feet long and bound together, to be thrown into the moat to allow men to cross and assault the walls, but, as this was a highly dangerous business, the king decided to try mining first. The Forest of Dean miners were told to dig under the moat and under the walls, and they set to with a will. It would, however, have been impossible to conceal what they were doing from the defenders, even if the ground had not been waterlogged, which made progress painfully slow, and the two attempts at mining were both thwarted by French counter-mines. Eventually, the duke of Clarence’s men captured one of the enemy’s ditches and turned it into a strongpoint from which an assault on the walls could be mounted. Then, on 10 September 1415, the army suffered its first major casualty – not from French guns or crossbowmen, but from dysentery. Richard Courtenay, bishop of Norwich, lasted five days and died on Sunday, 15 September, whereupon Henry sent his body back to England (his tomb is behind the high altar in Westminster Abbey).

  The English had managed partially to flood Harfleur town, and that and the broaching of the ditches by the French had allowed sewage to contaminate the water supply. More would die in the days to come until soon it had become a major epidemic. The day after the bishop died, the French mounted a sally from the town, and recaptured Clarence’s ditch. They were quickly driven off, but for the rest of the day taunts about the laziness of the besiegers were shouted from the ramparts. However, the barbican fell into English hands the next day, 17 September, and was set on fire in the process. Henry sent heralds to the town again to invite surrender, while ordering the army to prepare to assault the walls. All night, the English guns kept up a bombardment on the walls to prevent the defenders from repairing the breaches and to keep them awake, while the men-at-arms positioned themselves for an attack the following morning.

  The attack never happened. In the town, damage to houses and to the inhabitants was considerable; the English had diverted the water supply, rations were running short and dysentery had made its appearance there too. On the morning of Wednesday, 18 September, the garrison commander agreed that, if he was not relieved by the following Sunday, 22 September, he would give up the town. King Henry accepted hostages from the nobility inside Harfleur; a truce was declared and all shelling, mining and attacks by both sides ceased. As pleas for help had gone out to both the French king and the dauphin, de Goucourt had a reasonable expectation that he would still be rescued; unfortunately for him, the king was in the grip of one of his regular bouts of madness and the dauphin was an idle and obese eighteen-year-old uninterested in the tribulations of his subjects. Not all of Henry’s soldiers were happy: if the town was given up by agreement, then the possibilities of plunder would be severely limited, whereas a successful assault would, according to the customs of war of the time, permit an unbridled sack and the profits thereof.

  On the morning of 22 September 1415, Raul, sire de Goucourt, and the sire d’Estouteville, who had been commander of the town before Goucourt’s arrival, appeared before King Henry and handed over the keys to the city. The English army began to repair the damage that they had created – the dung barrels by the captured barbican were still smouldering two weeks later – while Henry stated his demands. Those civilians not required to run essential services within Harfleur and soldiers of no monetary value were expelled and escorted out of the army’s zone of occupation, while, on 27 September, de Goucourt, d’Estouteville and 200 French knights and men-at-arms were allowed to leave, having promised to report at Calais on 11 November with the cash for their agreed ransoms, or jewels or plate in lieu. King Henry now appointed his uncle Thomas Beaufort,86 earl of Dorset and Admiral of England, as warden and commander of Harfleur, the garrison to be his own retinue of 100 men-at-arms and 300 archers. By now, the health of the army was a serious worry. While battle deaths were not excessive, those from dysentery were mounting, and added to them was an outbreak of what was probably food poisoning from eating unripe fruit or contaminated oysters, undercooked shellfish and prawns, which thrive in sewage. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but according to some estimates around 2,000 English soldiers died and around the same number had to be sent back to England, too ill to continue on campaign. Among these latter were the duke of Clarence, the now totally loyal Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, and John Mowbray, second duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal of England.87

  What Henry had hoped would be over in a few days had taken thirty-six and his army had been reduced by a third by sickness and disease and further by battle casualties and a constant trickle of desertion – always a problem when an army was static and there was no immediate prospect of a battle. Nevertheless, the king had succeeded in capturing a major port and had shown himself to be a leader of men and to be concerned about their welfare. All the chroniclers tell how he hardly slept and was constantly around the siege lines at all hours of the day and night encouraging his men – a far cry from the sloth and indifference of French royalty.

  The question was: what to do next? It was getting late in the year and, given the reduced size of his army, going for Paris would be too great a risk and might in any case persuade the Armagnac and Burgundian factions to unite against him. He could not simply re-embark and return to England – Parliament had voted the funds for this expedition and wanted something to show for it, and this early in his reign the young Henry needed a decisive and obvious victory. He wanted to carry out a great chevauchée in the manner of his great-grandfather, Edward III, or his great-great-uncle, the Black Prince, but, unlike them, he wanted to maintain the fiction that French civilians were his loyal subjects, not to be molested. He would only attack armed bodies, and there were only two possible options: he could head for English Bordeaux or for English Calais. Bordeaux was 450 miles away overland, a good month’s march,88 and by now there would be little forage for the horses and it would be difficult to find food for the men. Calais, on the other h
and, was only 170 miles away, and Henry calculated that, if baggage was cut to a minimum and the army was mounted, he could cover that distance in eight days. There was, of course, just a slight possibility that he might be able to win his great victory without adopting any of the courses open, and he sent a herald off to the dauphin offering to fight him in single combat, the winner to have the crown of France. It was a schoolboyish offer, one which the dauphin rightly refused – and, given that Henry was fitter, stronger, harder and far more experienced, he would have been daft to do otherwise.

  The army prepared to set out. We can argue about the exact strengths, but it cannot have been more than 6,000 – 900 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers, according to the Gesta – plus heralds, priests, artisans and servants. They carried rations for eight days, and, given that the type of horse ridden by most of the men needs a minimum of ten pounds of hard feed (oats or barley) and the same weight of hay each day, then a total of around fifty-four tons of horse fodder would have had to be transported, plus spare arrows, tentage, farriers’ forges and armourers’ kits. Some historians have suggested that this entire load was carried on pack animals, but, as the best packhorse can only carry a maximum of 250 pounds,42 then 484 horses would have been needed for the fodder of the warhorses alone, to say nothing of the feed needed by the packhorses themselves. It seems much more likely that baggage-wagons were used, and with horse-feed taking up thirty-six standard wagon-loads, the baggage-train, cut to the minimum though it was, would still have been around seventy or eighty wagons and have taken up a mile and a half of road. It would, however, have been a good deal easier to handle than herds of pack animals.

  Henry’s decision to march for Calais rather than sailing away in safety was not universally welcomed. Some in his council pointed out that the French would feel bound to oppose him and that the English would be vastly outnumbered. Henry is reported to have replied that victory in battle was decided not by numbers but by the will of God – words he had often used in his letters as Prince of Wales during the Welsh wars, when he was writing in Norman French rather than the English which he began to use as king. Whether he really believed that God took a personal interest in the outcome of battles is another matter, but it sounded good and he certainly had great confidence in himself and in his battle-hardened army, depleted though it now was. On Tuesday, 8 October, reminders of the prohibition on burning and looting were promulgated and the army marched off in the usual three battles. Two miles north of Harfleur, they skirted the fortified village of Montevilliers, still held by the French, who made a sally. It was a brief scuffle in which a few of Henry’s men were killed and three captured. No time was wasted in attempting to take the village and the army moved on. Montevilliers remained in French hands, a constant pinprick to the Harfleur garrison, until 1419, when it was taken as part of the subjugation of upper Normandy. Next day, having covered twenty miles, the army passed Fécamp and again the French garrison made a sally and again they were swiftly seen off, but not before a handful of prisoners had been taken on each side. If the intended destination of the English army was not already obvious by their marching north, then intelligence from prisoners would have confirmed the intention to get to Calais.

  While the French reaction to the invasion had been dilatory in the extreme, it had become clear to the council in Paris and even to the dauphin himself that something had to be done, and summonses had been sent out for the French commanders to muster their troops at Rouen, where they would be positioned to intercept the English whether they went for Paris, Normandy, Bordeaux or Calais. Now that it was certain that the English were marching north for Calais, the French army was ordered to concentrate at Abbeville, with the aim of preventing Henry from crossing the River Somme and forcing him to surrender or starve; or, if he did cross, their hope was to block his route to Calais and force him to give battle, whereupon he and his army would be utterly destroyed, the ridiculous English claim to the French throne would be abandoned for all time, and the war would be over. The broad outline of this French plan, if not the detail, would have been known to Henry from prisoners taken, but at this stage he could do little to thwart it – he had to get to Calais.

  On 11 October 1415, the English army reached Arques, four miles south-south-east of Dieppe, having covered the very respectable distance of thirty-five miles in twenty-four hours, when they were fired on by guns from the castle in the centre of the town. Heralds galloped up to the castle walls with Henry’s message: stop firing and let us pass through the town or we will burn it to the ground. The army passed through Arques without opposition. The following day, another twenty miles nearer Calais, there was a stand-off at Eu, where after a brief skirmish a threat to level the town ensured safe passage through it. On 13 October, the vanguard of the English army reached Abbeville on the River Somme. Henry had hoped to cross at Blanchetaque, where Edward III had crossed during his Crécy campaign, but he found all the fords staked and guarded, all the bridges destroyed, and a sizeable detachment of the French army waiting on the northern bank. An opposed river crossing was not an option, particularly against a numerically far superior enemy, and so the only course open now was to head south-east along the left (south) bank of the river in the hope of finding a ford or a bridge further inland, where a crossing could be made unopposed. The English army could move faster than their enemy – the baggage-train, though sizeable, was smaller than that of the French, and the camp-followers, though numerous, were fewer – but not so much faster that they could bounce a crossing easily. On 14 October, Henry was twenty-eight miles from Abbeville and south of Amiens, and, on the 15th, he was held up by the French garrison in the castle of the hamlet of Boves. By now, rations were running very short and a bargain was soon struck: Henry would refrain from attacking the castle and burning the hamlet if the garrison and the villagers would provide him with a resupply of bread and wine, although he issued stern strictures to his own men about excess consumption of the latter.

  Two days later, the English army was at Corbie, only another eight miles up-river, and still they could not shake off the French, who continued to shadow them from the opposite bank. Now, however, Henry might be able to steal a march on his enemy. From Amiens inland the valley of the Somme lies roughly west to east until it gets to Péronne, where it executes a sharp right turn and runs north to south. If the English army struck south-east away from the river, it would have to cover about twenty-five miles before hitting the river again at Nesle, where there was reputed to be a ford, whereas the French would have to march all the way round the bend in the river, a distance of around forty miles, to get to the same place. Nowadays, with accurately surveyed maps, aerial photographs and hand-held Global Positioning Systems, such a march would be simple, but no such aids existed in the fifteenth century: Henry had to rely on those who had served in the area before, either as routiers or in support of Armagnac or Burgundian factions in France’s internal struggles, on local knowledge obtained by questioning civilians, and on reports brought in by mounted patrols that ranged far and wide in front of and to the flanks of the army. By this stage, a mild form of dysentery, or at least the onset of very loose bowels, had caught up with most of the army and rations had been reduced several times. It was wet and it was cold, and there was no time to erect tentage when the army stopped to snatch a few hours’ rest before continuing their march. Despite all that, by the evening of 18 October, the army was within spitting distance of Nesle. Patrols confirmed that there were two fords, neither more than three feet deep (‘no higher than a horse’s belly’) three miles east of the town, and, while the approaches were boggy and the French had felled trees across the tracks leading to them, neither was guarded.89 At the same time, the French had only got as far as Péronne, fifteen miles away. That night, the English infantry prepared the routes down to the fords and the king issued his orders for the crossing. Knowing that the French army, wherever it was, consisted largely of mounted knights, the archers were ordered to cut stakes, each s
ix feet long and sharpened at both ends, that could be driven into the ground as a barrier against cavalry. Although the chronicles say that every archer cut himself a stake, given that the archers would be massed on the wings of the army or on the flanks of the battles, it is more probable that only a proportion of men were to be so equipped – perhaps one in five or one in six.

  It was at this stage that it was reported to the king that a pyx had been stolen from a nearby church. A pyx is a box, often made of precious metal, which contains the consecrated wafer that is believed to be the actual body of Christ and which is used when the priest takes communion to a bedridden or otherwise incapacitated supplicant. To steal such an object was sacrilege, and, in view of the king’s orders that theft of sacred objects would attract the death penalty, unit commanders were ordered to search their men and find the culprit. The thief was found with the pyx, made of copper gilt (cupro deaurato) that he presumably mistook for gold, concealed in his sleeve and was duly hanged outside the church where he had committed the offence. Most modern histories say that the man was an archer, but, given the value and importance of this species of soldier, it is surely unlikely that one would be wasted in this manner..Neither Thomas Walsingham nor the Brut Chronicle mentions the incident at all, and the Gesta simply says that he was an Englishman. It seems more likely that the wretched thief was an expendable asset, and possibly even a servant.