There were two types of retaining indenture. One was drawn up to create a contract for service in peace and war, usually for life, the other for a specific military campaign and for a predetermined length of time. Many of the men who fought at Agincourt were there as life retainers of the king or other lord whom they served, and, just as they formed the core of his household in peace, so they were the basis of his military retinue in war. These men were the first Henry would call upon, issuing an order on 22 March 1415 that any knight, esquire, valet or anyone else who was in receipt of a royal fee, wage or annuity granted by Edward III, Richard II, the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Henry IV or himself was to present himself in London by 24 April at the latest.21
On 19 April the king entertained the members of his great council—all four royal dukes, together with nine earls, fifteen barons, both archbishops, eight bishops and several abbots of major houses—to breakfast at Westminster Palace and once again sought their approval for his war against France. Having noted that the king had followed their earlier advice to renew his diplomatic efforts and moderate his claims without success, the meeting duly gave the war its formal sanction and put in place the arrangements that would be necessary for its successful prosecution.22
Ten days later, a large number of temporary military indentures for the Agincourt campaign were signed at Westminster. A typical example was that of Thomas Chaucer, speaker of the House of Commons. In his indenture with the king, Chaucer contracted to serve in person for one year with a company of eleven men-at-arms and thirty-six archers (though, like many other captains, he actually mustered an extra archer when the campaign began).23 “Men-at-arms” was a loose term that had come to replace “knights” as the standard description of the medieval fighting man. As it included every rank in society, from the king and royal dukes down to the humblest esquire who could afford to equip himself with the basics of horses, arms and armour, the indenture always indicated the status of the men-at-arms. In Chaucer’s case, all his men-at-arms were esquires, including himself. His archers were to be mounted, as were those of most contingents, though some archers were recruited without horses and so presumably travelled, as they fought, on foot. In either case, the archers almost invariably outnumbered the men-at-arms by three to one, a proportion that was unusually high and unique to England.24
The wages for the campaign had been set by the king at the meeting of the great council. The rates were customary and varied according to where the campaign was to be fought. In this case, although the council had discussed an expedition “towards Harfleur and the region of Normandy,” Henry was determined to maintain the military advantage by keeping the enemy guessing as to where he intended to attack. He could not hide the scale of his preparations, but his precise objective in France would remain a secret until after his fleet had sailed. The indentures therefore deliberately left the destination open: service would be required “in our duchy of Guyenne, or in our realm of France,” commencing on the day of muster. Wages would be paid at the daily rate of 13s 4d for a duke, 6s 8d for an earl, 4s for a baron, 2s for a knight, 12d for an esquire and 6d for an archer, mounted or not. Every group of thirty men-at-arms was also entitled to a “regard,” or bonus payment, of 100 marks, which was effectively a form of compensation for the cost of armour and loss of horses. If the expedition went to Aquitaine no bonus would be paid, but the wages of the esquires and archers would be increased to an annual rate of £26 13s 4d and £13 6s 8d, respectively.25
The wages offered for military service in France were proportionately better for those in the lower ranks than for those in the upper echelons of society. The aristocracy were expected to fight by virtue of their birth: the military profession was their calling and duty, and it was not anticipated that they could earn a living from their military wages alone. The same was true of knights, whose outlay in horses, arms and armour for the campaign would probably cost them more than they could expect from a year’s income. (Forty pounds a year of landed or rental income was considered sufficient to support the status of knighthood in the medieval period, and this was also about the sum a knight could expect to earn from a year’s military service at the king’s wages.) For esquires and archers, who made up the backbone of the army, the financial attraction was much greater. An esquire earning £18 5s a year in war was likely to be better off than in peacetime: the London subsidy rolls for 1412 identify 42 citizens who claimed the rank of esquire, but only 12 of them enjoyed a rental income exceeding £15 per annum. An archer was even better off: on a daily wage of 6d, he would receive roughly £9 a year, without having to pay for his food and drink. In civilian life, even highly skilled workmen and craftsmen, such as carpenters, masons and plumbers, generally earned only between 3d and 5d a day, out of which they had to find their own subsistence.26 The prospect of earning 6d a day was also attractive to those of higher social rank. Many of Henry V’s archers were yeomen, farmers and minor landholders with incomes in the region of £5 a year, who could afford to equip themselves with a horse and basic armour; some were even younger brothers or sons of gentry whose family purse was not deep enough to provide the king’s host with more than one man-at-arms. For them, military service in France offered the prospect of advancement, and a number of men who were initially recruited as archers would later be found serving as men-at-arms.27
The wages for the campaign were to be paid quarterly in advance: the first half of the first quarter was due on signing the indenture and the second on mustering with the correct number of men ready for embarkation. (Henry V was, as one might expect, an absolute stickler for this: every company was mustered regularly before, during and after the campaign, and wages were docked for every missing man.) If the campaign lasted less than a year, then wages were to be paid up to the point of embarkation for the homeward journey, plus eight days’ travelling allowance. As we have already seen, the cash sums required to finance these payments were immense. The first quarter’s wage bill for Chaucer’s company alone—which was around the average size for a man of his standing—amounted to £156 7s 101/2d (almost $104,650 in modern currency).28 The aristocrats fielded much larger companies. Thomas, duke of Clarence, had the largest, with 240 men-at-arms, including himself, one earl, two barons, fourteen knights and 222 esquires, and 720 mounted archers; his brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, came second, with 200 men-at-arms and 600 mounted archers; Edward, duke of York, Thomas, earl of Dorset, and Thomas, earl of Arundel, each fielded 100 men-at-arms and 300 mounted archers.29
As security for the payment of the wages, Henry had to raid his treasure chests once more. Chaucer received jewels and plate to the nominal value of the second tranche due, which the king was obliged to redeem within nineteen months; if he did not do so, then, according to the terms of the indenture, Chaucer and his heirs were to be at liberty to keep, sell or otherwise dispose of the items as they wished, without fear of any impediment or retribution by the king. This was a standard term in all indentures, but it was not one that either party felt obliged to keep. Clarence, for instance, was given “the crown Henry” on condition that it was kept whole and undamaged: in fact, he could not afford to pay his own men and broke the crown up into several pieces, giving a large bejewelled fleur-de-lis and several pinnacles to various knights and esquires, none of which he was able to redeem in his own lifetime.30 Edward, duke of York, and Thomas, earl of Salisbury, also received items of extraordinary workmanship and value: York was given a gold alms dish, “made like a ship, standing on a bear, garnished with nineteen balays [peach-coloured rubies], twelve great and fourteen other pearls, weighing 22 lbs 11/2 oz,” while Salisbury got “a large ship of silver over gilt, with twelve men-at-arms, fighting, on the deck, and at each end of the ship a castle, weighing 65 lbs 3 oz.” The craftsmanship, for which English silversmiths and goldsmiths were famed throughout Europe, counted for nothing: it was the melted-down value of the precious metal, together with the jewels, that gave these objects their value.
Less imp
ortant men, with smaller retinues, also found themselves in receipt of quite extraordinary items: Sir Thomas Hauley was given a sword garnished with ostrich feathers, which had belonged to the king when prince of Wales; Sir John Radclyff a bejewelled tablet of gold, containing a piece of Christ’s seamless robe; and John Durwade, esquire, “a Tabernacle of gold, within which were an image of our Lady sitting on a green terrage, with the figures of Adam and Eve, and four angels at the four corners.”31
The king’s financial commitment to his men was not limited to paying their wages and the bonus; in every indenture he also undertook to pay the costs of shipping each company to and from France or Aquitaine, together with its horses, harness and supplies. As with the wages, there was a predetermined schedule listing how many horses each man was permitted to take according to his status. The three dukes, Clarence, Gloucester and York, were allowed fifty each, the earls twenty-four, each banneret or baron sixteen, each knight six, each esquire four and each archer one. Again, if we look at Chaucer’s company of forty-eight men, he was expected to travel with a minimum of eighty-four horses at the king’s expense; presumably, had he so wished, he could have taken more at his own cost. Clarence’s company of 960, by comparison, was entitled to take 1798 horses.32
Why were so many horses needed? The army had to be capable of covering long distances at speed but every man-at-arms, even the esquire, was still expected to be able to fight on horseback as well as on foot. Warhorses were highly prized and ferociously expensive, since, like horses used in jousts or tournaments, they had to be intensively trained to act contrary to their natural instincts, so that they would run unswervingly towards opponents, obey commands in the heat of close fighting and remain unpanicked by the noise and press of battle. Though there were breeding programmes in England and Wales, the best horses were usually imported from Spain, Italy or the Low Countries and sold at the great international fairs of Champagne in France and at Smithfield in London.33 Most medieval knights of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries spent anything between £5 and £100 on their warhorse, £25 being an average sum. At the top end of this scale was the courser, standing some fourteen to fifteen hands high, and capable of carrying the weight of a man in a full suit of armour. The courser had both stamina and agility, so it was ideal for campaigning and was the preferred mount of those who could afford it. Those who could not had to make do with a cheaper rouncy; even this was of a better quality than the horse of a mounted archer, which was needed only for travelling, never for a fighting situation, and was usually worth a mere £1.34
The six horses that a knight was permitted to take to war at the king’s expense would fall into three categories: his warhorse, which was probably a courser, and a substitute; a lighter saddlehorse, such as a palfrey, for riding when not in full armour, and one or two rouncies for his servants; and finally one or two packhorses to carry his baggage. The greater the status of the company leader, the more servants and baggage he would be taking with him. Even the humblest esquire, with his four horses, must have been expected to bring a warhorse, a palfrey, a rouncy and a packhorse, a retinue which presupposes that he had at least one or two servants to look after them. Some of these servants may have been archers, but others were undoubtedly just boys or non-combatants, who took no part in the fighting and therefore do not figure in either the indentures or the muster lists, though their presence is acknowledged in other sources.35
The final part of a military indenture, such as the one that Chaucer signed with Henry V, dealt with the important matter of prisoners and prizes. This could be an extremely contentious issue, not least because these winnings did not automatically belong to the person who captured them. Because all the soldiers in the army were paid wages, it was accepted that a proportion of their winnings should be given to their employers. The indenture therefore set out what had become, since the 1370s, the customary division of spoil. The king was to receive one-third of every indenting captain’s personal winnings and one-third of a third of those of his retinue, providing that the value exceeded 10 marks (£6 13s 4d, or almost $4,444 at today’s prices); anything worth less than that remained entirely the captor’s own. In addition, if anyone, of whatever status, captured the king of France, or any of his sons, nephews, uncles, cousins, lieutenants or chieftains, or a king of another country, these prisoners were to be handed over to the king, who was to be the sole recipient of the full value of their ransoms. It was generally understood that compensation would be paid to the original captors, but this was not specified by the indenture, and the amount was left to the king’s generosity.36
The king’s copy of his indentures was preserved in the exchequer, where it was kept in a leather draw-string pouch with the name of the indenting captain on the outside. As the campaign progressed, all relevant documentation would be added to this bag, including the muster rolls and wage claims which enabled the exchequer clerks to work out how much money was owed to each company. By this means, the superb administrative machine of the exchequer, which had been honed by centuries of efficient tax collecting, gives us a unique and almost unprecedented level of insight into the fate of the usually nameless men-at-arms and archers whom chronicle sources ignore. The records of Sir Thomas Erpingham (Shakespeare’s “good old knight”), for example, reveal that he contracted to serve with twenty men-at-arms, including himself, and sixty mounted archers; that two of his men-at-arms, Thomas Geney and John Calthorp, were knighted on landing at Chef-de-Caux but were invalided home from Harfleur and died in England; that another man-at-arms, John Aungers, died at Calais; that only two of his knights, Hamon le Straunge and Walter Goldingham, were present at the battle of Agincourt; that two archers, Henry Prom and Robert Beccles, died at Harfleur, and that another, John de Boterie, was invalided home during the siege; and finally that two more archers were casualties of the war, Richard Chapman dying on the march between Harfleur and Agincourt, and Stephen Geryng at the battle itself, significantly the only one of the entire company to lose his life there.37
Some 250 individual indentures for the Agincourt campaign have been identified, though this may be only a small proportion of the whole, since 632 pouches were purchased for the exchequer in 1416. Even so, 250 was an unprecedented number: nothing like it had been seen before the Agincourt campaign or would be again. Instead of subcontracting the task of providing the entire force to three or four aristocrats, as had always been done in the past, Henry V consciously sought to recruit as widely as possible for his army. A large number of the indentures were for numbers that seem barely worth the trouble of inscribing the parchment they were written on: the deliciously named Baldewin Bugge, for example, contracted to serve with just three archers, but his fellow esquires, John Topclyff, Robert Radclyf of Osbaldeston and William Lee, could only offer two. There are even instances of single archers, such as Richard Shore, John Wemme and Thomas Newman, signing contracts with the king as individuals, though the exchequer clerks’ preference seems to have been that archers proffering their services should be dealt with in groups of at least four and usually twelve, if only for accounting purposes.38
Men such as these would normally have been subcontracted into the retinues of the great lords. William Bedyk, for instance, an esquire who could offer only himself and two archers, was signed up into the company of Thomas, earl of Salisbury, who had contracted to bring forty men-at-arms and eighty mounted archers. The terms of Bedyk’s indenture precisely paralleled that between the earl and the king, even stating explicitly at one point that he was to be paid “in the same manner as our said Lord the King does to the said Earl for people of his condition.” This was a necessary precaution, since it was not unknown for retinue leaders to make a profit out of their indentures: in 1380 Sir Hugh Hastings had received £45 3s for each man-at-arms in his company but paid them only £40, keeping the difference himself. Above and beyond his wages and shipping costs for his little group, Bedyk was to have free food and drink for himself and one valet, or servan
t, on both sides of the sea; in return he was obliged to give the customary one-third of all his winnings to the earl.39
Though drawing up royal indentures for such small numbers was time consuming and expensive, it had several advantages. It meant that the recruits had a much more direct personal link to the king than was usual and it encouraged their loyalty by suggesting that he valued their contribution, however small, to his war effort. It also meant that, unlike previous campaigns where soldiers would be recruited from within the areas of influence of the great lords who had signed the indentures, Henry V’s army would be drawn from every quarter of the kingdom. As a consequence of this unprecedented level of national involvement, the campaign inspired an exceptional degree of pride and enthusiasm across the country, all of which was centred on the charismatic figure of the king himself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ARMY GATHERS
On 16 June 1415 Henry V rode out of London on his way to Southampton, pausing only to attend services and make offerings at St Paul’s and Southwark. He was accompanied by four members of the extended royal family, Edward, duke of York, Thomas Beaufort, earl of Dorset, Sir John Cornewaille and Sir John Holland, and the earls of Arundel, March and Oxford. The mayor, aldermen and some 340 citizens of London turned out to honour their king by riding some ten miles with him as far as Kingston, where they took their leave and wished him Godspeed on his voyage. According to his instructions, they then returned to the city, to remain there until his return from France.1
The very next day, a French embassy, led by a senior diplomat, Guillaume Boisratier, archbishop of Bourges, landed at Dover. Not realising that Henry had already left London, the ambassadors made their way to the city for an interview with the king. By the time Henry learnt of their arrival he was already at Winchester, some twelve or thirteen miles north of Southampton, where he had taken up residence in Wolvesey Castle. It was here that he summoned the Frenchmen to his presence for what he knew, but they did not, would be the final move in the diplomatic game.
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