The new order commanded, “on the faith and loyalty that you owe us and on pain of all that you can forfeit,” that proclamations were to be made everywhere and “so often that no one can pretend ignorance”; anyone who refused to go to the dauphin immediately, armed and ready to fight, should be imprisoned, have their goods seized and have men billeted upon them at their expense. Any town which could spare any “engines, cannon and artillery” was to send them also, without delay.45 The fall of Harfleur did what the English invasion had failed to do: it galvanised French officialdom into action. Men who had been torn between their loyalty to the king and to the duke now rose in defence of their homeland. As the English made their way across Normandy into Picardy, the great French army rumoured to be gathering at Rouen became a reality.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CROSSING THE SOMME
Henry had intended to cross the Somme in exactly the same place as had his great-grandfather, Edward III, in 1346, on the campaign that culminated in the spectacular English victory at Crécy. The old Roman ford at Blanche Taque lay between the mouth of the river and the town of Abbeville, nine miles inland. The waters here were tidal, but the great advantage was that the ford itself was wide enough for twelve men to cross at one time. Unfortunately for the English, the French knew their history too and had anticipated that their opponents would take this route. Two days before the English reached Blanche Taque, the news that they were heading there had already spread as far north as Boulogne, and preparations for their reception were well advanced.1
On Sunday 13 October, when Henry’s army was still some six miles away from Blanche Taque, the men of the vanguard captured a French prisoner, who was brought before Sir John Cornewaille for interrogation. He turned out to be a Gascon gentleman in the service of Charles d’Albret, whom he had left earlier that day at Abbeville. Further questioning revealed that d’Albret had a force of six thousand men with him and was waiting to obstruct their passage; what is more, the ford itself had been barricaded with sharpened stakes to make it impassable.2
The prisoner was hastily brought before the king himself and reinterrogated, but he stuck stubbornly to his story and even pledged his life on its truth. Convinced of his honesty, Henry called an immediate halt to the march and summoned his barons to an urgently convened council meeting. After two hours of debate, the decision was taken to abandon the attempt to cross at Blanche Taque. They would have to find a safer, unguarded crossing further upstream. If necessary they would have to go to the very head of the river, which was said to be sixty miles away.
This was the first major setback of the entire campaign, and morale among the rank and file, which had been high as they marched unopposed through Normandy and into Picardy, now began to falter. Ever since they had left Fécamp they had seen tantalising glimpses of the long vista of white cliffs lining the Norman coast as far as Cap Gris-Nez, knowing that the safety of Calais was a mere thirteen miles beyond that point. Never was the old adage “so near, yet so far” so true. Now, instead of the swift, straight road to their destination, they faced a long and uncertain journey, in the knowledge that their rations could not last out and that battle was becoming increasingly likely. It is not difficult to imagine the despair that the sight of the bay of the Somme must have instilled in the English. It was not just its width (more than a mile across at its narrowest point between le Crotoy and St Valery), but the vast and desolate expanse of marshland stretching as far as the eye could see to the west, north and east. As they were about to discover, these marshes were as impenetrable a barrier as the river itself.3
There was no point in lingering at Blanche Taque, so Henry gave the order to move and the army set off again, turning east and taking the south bank of the Somme towards Abbeville. In preparation for their approach, this ancient capital of Ponthieu, which had already twice suffered English occupation, in 1340 and 1369, had powerfully reinforced its defences: 12 cannon, almost 2200 gun-stones and vast quantities of gunpowder had been installed, together with a large contingent from the army gathering at Rouen. This was no simple garrison like that at Harfleur. Some of the greatest names in France were now stationed at Abbeville, headed by Constable d’Albret, Marshal Boucicaut, the count of Vendôme, who was grand-master of the king’s household, Jacques de Châtillon, sire de Dampierre, who was the admiral of France, Arthur, count of Richemont, who was the duke of Brittany’s brother, and Jean, duke of Alençon. Forewarned of this by their Gascon prisoner, the English duly maintained a respectful distance, skirting round Abbeville and settling for the night at Bailleul-en-Vimeu three miles to the south.4
Next morning, they changed tack, cutting north-eastwards in the hope of using the bridge at Pont Rémy. There they not only found that the bridge and the various causeways across the Somme had been dismantled by the local garrison, but, for the first time, they saw a sizeable force of Frenchmen gathered on the opposite bank. Though the English did not know it, they were facing a company led by the father and brothers of Raoul de Gaucourt, and in their eagerness to avenge the shame inflicted on him they were drawn up in full battle order, “as if prepared to engage us there and then.” Even the chaplain, who was timid by nature, could see that this was merely posturing: “the fact that the river at that point had a broad marsh on both sides prevented either of us from coming any closer, so that not one of us, even had he sworn to do so, could have inflicted injury on the other.”5
There now began a deadly game of cat and mouse. As the English pushed on further and further into the interior of France, searching with increasing desperation for somewhere to cross the river, they were shadowed on the opposite bank by a French force, led by Boucicaut and d’Albret, which was determined to prevent their passage. “At that time we thought of nothing else but this,” the chaplain wrote: that, after the eight days assigned for the march had expired and our provisions had run out, the enemy, craftily hastening on ahead and laying waste the countryside in advance, would impose on us, hungry as we should be, a really dire need of food, and at the head of the river, if God did not provide otherwise, would, with their great and countless host and the engines of war and devices available to them, overwhelm us, so very few as we were and made faint by great weariness and weak from lack of food.
On 15 October—the eighth day of their march and the day that they should have reached Calais—the English were almost thirty-five miles away from their planned coastal route and every step was taking them further away from their destination. Tired, hungry and dispirited, the English could only pray that the Blessed Virgin and St George, under whose banners and protection they marched, would intercede for them with the Supreme Judge, and deliver them from the swords of their enemy. Dreams of achieving glory, conquest, plunder had all been forgotten. Only one hope remained: that they would eventually get safely to Calais.6 That day they made another detour to avoid the great Burgundian city of Amiens, capital of Picardy, with its network of little canals and its garden suburbs set in the midst of fens. Did Henry V recall, as he observed the soaring white walls and pinnacles of its glorious thirteenth-century cathedral, that his own great-grandfather, Edward III, had once done homage for Aquitaine to Philippe VI of France in that very place? If he did, the irony that it was the same unresolved quarrel that had brought him to Amiens eighty-six years later cannot have escaped him.
The following day, they pushed on as far as the little town or village of Boves, almost five miles south-east of the centre of Amiens. The town, with its all-important bridges over the river Avre, a tributary of the Somme, lay at the foot of a chalk cliff that was crowned by the white walls of a great twelfth-century castle belonging to Ferri, count of Vaudémont, a younger son of the duke of Lorraine. Although he was a Burgundian by allegiance, he was one of the local nobility who had belatedly responded to the king’s summons to arms and, with a force of three hundred men, was now stationed with Boucicaut’s army on the other side of the Somme.7
Boves was small enough for Henry V to be able to h
old it to ransom, as he had done the towns of Arques and Eu; again, there was a military imperative to do so, as he needed to cross the Avre over the town bridges. Once more he sent his messengers to a parley and it would appear that, whatever the loyalties of Ferri de Vaudémont, the captain he had left in charge of the castle garrison was more favourably inclined to the English than his master. Not only did he agree to ransom the village and its surrounding vineyards from burning by meeting the usual demands for bread and wine, he even allowed the army to be billeted within the village overnight.
The garrison was only able to provide eight baskets of bread to feed the six thousand, though the baskets were large enough to need two men to carry each one. There had been a plentiful harvest of grapes, however, so the place was overflowing with wine. The English would not have been human if they had been able to resist such a temptation. They made straight for the winepresses and the barrels full of new vintage, and started to help themselves to this unexpected bounty. While some of his commanders regarded this behaviour with indulgence, believing it to be a much-deserved reward after all their labours and privations, the king eventually called a halt. When someone asked him why, and remarked that the men were only trying to refill their bottles, Henry replied that he did not mind the bottles, but that most of the men were making bottles out of their own stomachs, which did concern him. In the heart of hostile territory and living daily, if not hourly, under the threat of attack, he could not afford to have his army incapacitated through drink. They were vulnerable enough as it was.8
Before they left Boves, the following day, Thursday 17 October, Henry had a further conversation with the captain of the castle. Two of his men-at-arms were now so sick that they were unable to continue on the journey. Henry did not wish simply to abandon them to their fate and the captain courteously agreed that he would take them in and look after them. Having handed over two horses in lieu of payment, Henry gathered the rest of his army together, and once more took to the road.9
After crossing the Avre at Boves, the English returned to the banks of the Somme to resume their search for an unguarded bridge or ford. It was a forlorn hope. Boucicaut and d’Albret were patrolling the opposite bank and every town and castle was on a state of high alert. As the English passed by the walled town of Corbie, about ten miles east of the centre of Amiens, the garrison made a sortie and in the skirmish that followed, the standard of Aquitaine, which was carried by Hugh Stafford, Lord Bourchier, was captured. This was the greatest disgrace that could befall any standard-bearer, whose chivalric duty it was to die in its defence. Fortunately, one of his kinsmen, a young esquire called John Bromley, who was a groom of the king’s chamber, came to Bourchier’s assistance, recovered the standard and succeeded in driving the French back towards Corbie, killing two of them and capturing two men-at-arms.10
This minor success was not enough to gain the bridge over the Somme, which was too well guarded to force a crossing, but the capture of the men-at-arms proved to be a significant stroke of luck: when they were interrogated, they disclosed that the French commanders had taken prudent measures against the huge numbers of archers they knew were in the king’s host. They had assigned “many hundreds” of men-at-arms to special squadrons and mounted them on heavily armoured horses; their specific task was to ride down the English archers, breaking up their formations and reducing the effectiveness of their massed fire-power. On learning this, Henry issued a proclamation throughout the army that every archer was immediately to make himself a six-foot-long wooden stake, sharpened at both ends, and carry it with him. As soon as the French drew near to engage them in battle, the archers were to take up their stations in staggered rows, so that the man on the row behind stood between the two in front of him. Each archer was then to drive one end of his stake into the ground in front of him in such a fashion that the other end was above waist-height and pointing towards the enemy. When the French cavalry caught sight of the stakes as they charged, they would either be forced to withdraw or run the risk of being impaled.11
This was not a new tactic. The “hedgehog” had been a standard defensive manoeuvre for European infantrymen fighting against cavalry since at least the beginning of the fourteenth century, though they used their steel-tipped pikes, rather than improvised wooden stakes, to create the bristling hedgehog effect. The first recorded example of wooden stakes being used specifically to protect archers, however, was comparatively recent and it was an eastern innovation. In 1396 a force of French and Burgundian crusaders had come to grief against the invading Ottoman Turks at the battle of Nicopolis in what is now Bulgaria. The Turks had hidden their foot archers in a dip in the landscape and behind a screen of lightly armed cavalry. Tempted by what appeared to be an outnumbered and outarmed force, the crusaders had charged the Turkish cavalry, whose ranks gave way to reveal a field of stakes behind which the archers had taken cover. Unable to check their charge, the crusaders were easily overwhelmed and slaughtered. Three of the veterans of this battle, who were captured and later ransomed, were none other than the leader of the crusade, John the Fearless, the future duke of Burgundy, who was then count of Nevers, Raoul de Gaucourt, the defender of Harfleur, and Marshal Boucicaut, who was now jointly commanding the forces opposing Henry V.12 So many of the leading nobility of France were killed or captured at Nicopolis that news of the disaster and how it had occurred spread swiftly throughout Europe. Whether the idea of improvising stakes to protect the English archers was Henry’s own or came from Edward, duke of York, as some chroniclers suggest, its genius lay not in complete innovation, but in marrying two established but different precedents: the Turkish use of stakes to protect their archers and the tightly packed formation of the European pikemen.
The French prisoners captured at Corbie may have given Henry other information just as important as that which prompted the adoption of stakes to protect the archers. Some time before he left Corbie, the king learnt that the French army patrolling the crossings from the opposite bank of the Somme was heading for Péronne, a fortified town at the top of a lazy loop in the river. It was therefore extremely unlikely that he would be able to find an unguarded passage anywhere between Corbie and Péronne; even if he did, the French would be swiftly upon him, either attacking him at his weakest as he crossed, or forcing him on to the defensive once he had. The choice of battlefield would be theirs.
It was at this point that Henry took another calculated gamble. In all probability, he was going to have to follow the river all the way to its source before he could turn north and west again towards Calais. Instead of continuing to follow the Somme in all its meanderings, he therefore decided to cut directly across the open country between Corbie and Nesle. Though he risked missing a potentially viable crossing, he would reduce his journey by at least ten miles and bypass the French troops waiting at Péronne. What is more, by doing the unexpected, he stood a chance of catching the French unawares and finding an unguarded crossing further upstream, especially as he would disappear from their sight for perhaps twenty-four hours.
The English army therefore turned south-east and started the long climb up to the Santerre plateau. For many miles now, the journey had become increasingly arduous. The gentle undulations of the Caux peninsula and the flat, featureless landscape of the lower reaches of the Somme had given way to heavily wooded hills and the long, steep ridges that are now associated with the battlefields and trenches of the First World War. The easier terrain of the wide and flat Somme valley was still inaccessible: recent October rains had swollen the river and made the marshes even more treacherous, forcing the army to take the higher, harder ground. As the English reached the plateau above Corbie there was a dramatic change in landscape. A vast expanse of seemingly endless plain now stretched out before them. There were no landmarks to guide them, except the shimmering white walls of Amiens Cathedral rising ghost-like in the distance behind them, and the occasional spire of a village church or a clump of woodland silhouetted against the horizon. For the ordina
ry rank and file, totally reliant on the king and his officers for leadership in this alien and hostile country, which was so unlike anything they had ever seen at home, it must have been a bewildering and frightening experience. It was also a test of their faith in that leadership.
By the evening of Thursday 17 October, the English army had pushed on another twelve or so miles from Corbie and was encamped between the hamlets of Harbonnières and Vauvillers.13 One of the most famous incidents of the Agincourt campaign now occurred. That morning, in the fields outside Corbie, an English soldier had been brought before the king, charged with the offence of stealing from one of the village churches a pyx, the box which contained the consecrated bread from the Eucharist. There had not been time to deal with him then, but now he was put on trial. The pyx, which he had hidden in his sleeve, was produced. The chaplain, who knew about such things, remarked that it was only made of cheap copper-gilt, although the thief had probably mistaken it for gold. It was a mistake that was to cost him his life. He was found guilty of acting “in God’s despite and contrary to royal decree” and, at the king’s orders, was promptly hanged from a tree in full view of his fellows.14 Significantly, it is the only recorded example of anyone breaking the king’s ordinances throughout the entire campaign.
For the last few days of the march, the increasingly weary English had covered only thirteen or fourteen miles a day. Encumbered with their stakes, progress was inevitably slower, but they were also tired and hungry, reduced to drinking water and eking out their last rations of dried meat with hazelnuts gathered from the hedgerows. By the evening of Friday 18 October, they had reached the neighbourhood of Nesle and decided to camp for the night in the small hamlets scattered outside its fortified walls. Henry sent in his customary message but, for the first time, met with defiance. The townspeople not only refused to supply bread and wine but draped red cloth over their walls, a mysterious gesture whose origin is as unclear as its meaning is obvious. Such an insult could not be allowed to go unpunished and Henry ordered that all the hamlets in the vicinity of Nesle should be burnt to the ground the following morning.15
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