16Foedera, ix, pp. 80-7; W&W, i, pp. 102-4, 103 n. 6, 104 n. 4. (back to text)
17Powell, pp. 203-6; Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise in XVth Century England (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1925), pp. 83-4, 85-7; Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “Naval Warfare After the Viking Age, c.1100-1500,” in Keen, MW, p. 235. (back to text)
18In the Leicester Parliament of 1414, Henry introduced another exceptional measure, extending the definition of high treason to include breaking a truce or a safe-conduct, or aiding someone else who did so; the punishment, as for all treasons, was drawing, hanging and quartering. The justification for including this new category of offence was that truces and safe-conducts were granted and guaranteed by the king’s word or promise; breaches of them therefore impugned the king’s honour and injured his majesty in the same way that other treasonable offences did. The Statute of Truces was deeply unpopular and had to be amended in 1416 to make allowances for letters of marque, but it was highly effective in curtailing acts of piracy by English subjects: Rotuli Parliamentorum, iv, pp. 22-3; John G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970), pp. 128-9. (back to text)
19Foedera, ix, p. 84. See also below pp. 258-9. (back to text)
20Foedera, ix, pp. 35, 56-9; W&W, i, p. 152 and n. 2; Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Histoire de Charles VI, ed. by J. A. C. Buchon (Choix de Chroniques et Mémoires sur l’Histoire de France, iv, Paris, 1836), p. 478; St-Denys, v, p. 353. (back to text)
21W&W, i, pp. 153-5; Foedera, ix, pp. 58-9. (back to text)
22Foedera, ix, pp. 91-101. (back to text)
23Ibid., ix, pp. 102-4. (back to text)
24St-Denys, v, pp. 158, 228; Juvénal des Ursins, Histoire de Charles VI, pp. 487, 493. Juvénal des Ursins, an eyewitness of events in Paris, commented that “even the English princes were divided by the quarrel between Burgundy and Orléans, for the dukes of Clarence and of Gloucester, the king’s brothers, and with them the duke of York, favoured the Orléanists; while the king and the duke of Bedford, likewise his brother, were inclined to the Burgundians”: ibid., p. 497. (back to text)
25Vaughan, p. 206. (back to text)
26Foedera, ix, pp. 136-8. Opening negotiations for other marriages did not breach Henry’s undertaking to the French, which only gave his promise not to contract a marriage. A nice distinction but a legal one. (back to text)
27Ibid.; Hovyngham had negotiated the truces with Castile and Brittany. (back to text)
28Vaughan, p. 207; Foedera, ix, p. 138. The power to receive the duke’s homage was given on 4 June 1414, the same day as the other instructions. (back to text)
29POPC, ii, p. 141. (back to text)
30Foedera, ix, pp. 131-2, 208-11. (back to text)
31Shakespeare, Henry V, Act I, Scene 2, ll. 261-3. (back to text)
32St Albans, p. 83; Usk, p. 253. For the tennis balls story, see, for example, Brut, ii, pp. 374-5; Capgrave, pp. 129-30; Thomas Elmham, “Liber Metricus de Henrico Quinto,” Memorials of Henry the Fifth, King of England, ed. by Charles Augustus Cole (Longman and Co., London, 1858), p. 101. (back to text)
33Monstrelet, iii, pp. 59-62; Bourgeois, pp. 58-61. (back to text)
34Foedera, ix, pp. 212-14. (back to text)
35Letter-Books, p. 135; Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries, ed. by Henry Thomas Riley (Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1868), pp. 603-5. (back to text)
36W&W, i, p. 94-9. (back to text)
37See above, pp. 66, 68. (back to text)
CHAPTER FIVE: SCOTS AND PLOTS
1ELMA, pp. 305-6; E. W. M. Balfour-Melville, James I, King of Scots, 1406-37 (Methuen, London, 1936), p. 22. (back to text)
2Ibid., pp. 25-6. (back to text)
3Ibid., pp. 26, 31-3. (back to text)
4Ibid., pp. 34-5; Patricia J. Bradley, “Henry V’s Scottish Policy—a Study in Realpolitik,” in Documenting the Past: Essays in Medieval History Presented to George Peddy Cuttino, ed. by J. S. Hamilton and Patricia J. Bradley (Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 179-80. (back to text)
5W&W, i, pp. 34-6; Powell, pp. 136-7. (back to text)
6This had not prevented it being breached, spectacularly, on two recent occasions. In 1378 two men, who had refused to hand over to John of Gaunt a prisoner captured eleven years earlier at the battle of Najera, escaped from the Tower and fled to sanctuary at Westminster; they were pursued by the constable of the Tower and fifty armed men, who forced their way in, slew one of the men and the sacristan and abducted the other. Nine years later, in 1387, Sir Robert Tresilian, the chief justice, was accused of treason by the Appellants (of whom the future Henry IV was one) and claimed sanctuary at Westminster; he too was abducted by force, tried and executed: Heath, Church and Realm 1272-1461, pp. 209-11. (back to text)
7Ibid., p. 211. (back to text)
8W&W, i, p. 36; Powell, p. 138. Although this phrase is now commonly rendered “hanged, drawn and quartered,” this is not the order in which the process took place. The convicted person was drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, hanged and then quartered; sometimes the traitor was cut down from the gallows while still alive, disembowelled (his entrails being burnt before him), beheaded and then quartered. In either case, the body parts were displayed in prominent public places to deter other traitors. (back to text)
9Devon, pp. 325, 326-8, 332; St Albans, p. 77; Brut, ii, p. 373. It was said that Richard had been kind to Henry, when, as a child, he had been a hostage at the royal court (not that this had prevented the future Henry IV from returning at the head of an army to usurp the throne). Lancastrian propagandists even said that Richard had predicted that the young Henry would fulfill Merlin’s prophecy that a prince should be born in Wales, whose praise would one day ring round the world. St Albans, p. 77, suggests that Henry venerated Richard as if he were his own father, but as this is said in the context of the reburial, it may be applicable only to that act. It does not seem to me to warrant the claims of later chroniclers and historians that the two had been like father and son. (back to text)
10Balfour-Melville, James I, King of Scots, 1406-37, p. 55; Bradley, “Henry V’s Scottish Policy—a Study in Realpolitik,” pp. 180-1. (back to text)
11Ibid., pp. 178, 181. (back to text)
12G. L. Harriss, “The King and his Magnates,” in HVPK, pp. 31-51. Percy was to be partially reimbursed by Murdoch himself: Balfour-Melville, James I, King of Scots, 1406-37, p. 65. (back to text)
13St Albans, p. 86; W&W, i, pp. 517, 520 (where Talbot is wrongly called Henry); Balfour-Melville, James I, King of Scots, 1406-37, pp. 62-3; Bradley, “Henry V’s Scottish Policy—a Study in Realpolitik,” pp. 182-3; T. B. Pugh, “The Southampton Plot of 1415,” in Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages: a Tribute to Charles Ross, ed. by Ralph A. Griffiths and James Sherbourne (Alan Sutton, Gloucester and St Martin’s Press, New York, 1986), p. 66; CPR, p. 339. (back to text)
14Balfour-Melville, James I, King of Scots, 1406-37, p. 63; CCR, p. 278; Bradley, “Henry V’s Scottish Policy—a Study in Realpolitik,” pp. 183-4. (back to text)
15Original Letters Illustrative of English History, pp. 45-6; Pugh, “The Southampton Plot of 1415,” p. 65; “The Conspiracy of the Earl of Cambridge against Henry V,” 43rd Report of the Deputy Keeper of Public Records (HMSO, London, 1882), App I, §5. (back to text)
16Pugh, “The Southampton Plot of 1415,” pp. 83, 64. (back to text)
17The Scottish link, for instance, was established beyond doubt, which was not surprising, given the northern English origins of most of the conspirators, Cambridge included (Cambridge lived on his brother’s charity at Conisburgh Castle, near Doncaster, in Yorkshire). Murdoch’s abduction in Yorkshire makes sense if its purpose was to enable the plotters to use him as a bargaining counter with the Scots—and Cambridge was able to tell Grey that Murdoch was safe in their hands a week later. He was also able to produce a letter that he said wa
s from the duke of Albany, offering to send him Percy and the “Mommet” in return for his son. A Welsh supporter of Oldcastle was captured near Windsor Castle, where King James had been held; he was carrying large sums of money and a list of places between Windsor and Edinburgh (the medieval equivalent of a modern map), and confessed that he had been trying to assist the Scottish king’s escape. As we have seen, there was indeed a Scottish invasion only nine days before March revealed the plot to Henry V, even though Umfraville routed it, rather than joined it. The “crown of Spain on a pallet,” which Cambridge had promised to display in Wales, together with a banner of the arms of England, when March was proclaimed king, was actually in his possession: Henry V had given it to him as security for the wages of the men whom he had contracted to take with him on the Agincourt campaign. (back to text)
It should not be forgotten, either, that the muster at Southampton provided the perfect cover for the plotters to raise an army. The leading conspirators were all committed to providing some of the biggest contingents of the forthcoming campaign. Cambridge and March had each undertaken to bring sixty men-at-arms and one hundred and sixty mounted archers, Scrope to bring thirty men-at-arms and ninety mounted archers. All in all, including the forty knights or esquires whom the Lollards had promised would desert from the muster to support an uprising, the conspirators could count on raising a force of almost eight hundred armed and fully equipped men from within their own ranks before they had even left Southampton: “The Conspiracy of the Earl of Cambridge against Henry V,” p. 582; W&W, i, pp. 518-9; Bradley, “Henry V’s Scottish Policy—a Study in Realpolitik,” p. 183; Nicolas, pp. 373-4, 385; James Hamilton Wylie, “Notes on the Agincourt Roll,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd series, vol. v (1911), pp. 136-7.
18ELMA, p. 324. (back to text)
19Brut, ii, pp. 375-6; St Albans, pp. 87-8; W&W, i, pp. 507-8. Cambridge, who was probably illegitimate, had inherited nothing from his nominal father and was financially entirely dependent on the goodwill of his brother, Edward, duke of York. Grey, who had already been outlawed twice for failure to pay debts, received a payment in May 1415 of £120 from the exchequer in compensation for giving up his post as constable of Bamburgh Castle, a sale that may have been forced on him by his need to fulfil his contract with the king to raise twenty-four men-at-arms and forty-eight archers for the Agincourt expedition: ODNB; Pugh, “The Southampton Plot of 1415,” pp. 71-3, 79; W&W, i, p. 517 n. 3. (back to text)
20Pugh, “The Southampton Plot of 1415,” pp. 62-4, 67-9, 83-4; W&W, i, pp. 523-33; CPR, p. 409; Powell, p. 131. (back to text)
21Original Letters Illustrative of English History, p. 48; CPR, p. 349. (back to text)
22Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages, p. 222. (back to text)
23There was an ironic postscript to the story. Less than three months after Cambridge’s execution, Edward, duke of York, was one of the two English magnates who fell at the battle of Agincourt. Had the earl of Cambridge remained loyal to Henry V, he would have inherited his brother’s title, lands and wealth, and achieved the position of power and influence he craved, without resorting to the treason that cost him his life. (back to text)
CHAPTER SIX: “HE WHO DESIRES PEACE, LET HIM PREPARE FOR WAR”
1Vegetius, De Re Militari, quoted by Pizan, BDAC, p. 27 n. 23. (back to text)
2W&W, i, pp. 38, 39 n. 9. (back to text)
3Ibid., pp. 45-6, 39 and nn. 1, 3-7. (back to text)
4Ibid., i, p. 41 and nn. 4-6. “Scuratores” was a Calais-specific term for scouts, and not “scourers” as W&W translate the word: see R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List (published for the British Academy, Oxford University Press, London, repr. 1980), p. 170. (back to text)
5John Kenyon, “Coastal Artillery Fortification in England in the Late Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries,” in Curry and Hughes, pp. 146-7; Michael Hughes, “The Fourteenth-Century French Raids on Hampshire and the Isle of Wight,” ibid., pp. 133-7. (back to text)
6Rotuli Parliamentorum, iv, p. 53; Kenyon, “Coastal Artillery Fortification in England in the Late Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries,” p. 146. (back to text)
7W&W, i, pp. 161, 160 n. 1. (back to text)
8During a lull in the fighting at Poitiers (1356), English archers ran forward to pull arrows from the ground, and from dead or wounded men and horses; they were then able to use these against the next French attack: Strickland and Hardy, p. 301. (back to text)
9Paul Hitchin, “The Bowman and the Bow,” in Curry, Agincourt 1415, pp. 44, 46-7. The English were defeated at Ardres (1351) when the archers ran out of arrows too early: Strickland and Hardy, p. 231. (back to text)
10Hitchin, “The Bowman and the Bow,” pp. 45-6 and illustration, though the “type 16” arrowhead is actually on the third row, not the second, as it is captioned. (back to text)
11Strickland and Hardy, p. 313; Robert Hardy, “The Longbow,” in Curry and Hughes, p. 168. (back to text)
12Andrew Ayton, “Arms, Armour, and Horses,” in Keen, MW, p. 205 and illus., p. 72; Jim Bradbury, The Medieval Archer (Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1985, repr. 2002), pp. 146-50. Strickland and Hardy, pp. 34-48, effectively demolish the myth of the shortbow, a third category of weapon which was an invention of nineteenth-century military historians. (back to text)
13W&W, i, p. 159 n. 7; Ayton, “Arms, Armour, and Horses,” p. 204; Foedera, ix, p. 224. (back to text)
14Hitchin, “The Bowman and the Bow,” pp. 42-4; Ayton, “Arms, Armour, and Horses,” p. 204; Bradbury, The Medieval Archer, p. 107. But see Strickland and Hardy, p. 227. (back to text)
15Ibid., pp. 17-18, 199, 30; Hardy, “The Longbow,” p. 179. (back to text)
16Maurice Keen, “The Changing Scene: Guns, Gunpowder, and Permanent Armies,” in Keen, MW, pp. 274-5 and illus. p. 156; Clifford J. Rogers, “The Age of the Hundred Years War,” ibid., pp. 156-8; Richard L. C. Jones, “Fortifications and Sieges in Western Europe, c.800-1450,” in ibid., pp. 180-2; Pizan, BDAC, pp. 122-3; Robert D. Smith, “Artillery and the Hundred Years War: Myth and Interpretation,” in Curry and Hughes, pp. 156-7; Richard L. C. Jones, “Fortifications and Sieges in Western Europe, c.800-1450,” in Keen, MW, p. 182. (back to text)
17Nigel Ramsey, “Introduction,” in John Blair and Nigel Ramsay (eds), English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products (Hambledon Press, London and Rio Grande, 1991), p. xxxii; Pizan, BDAC, pp. 117-19; Jones, “Fortifications and Sieges in Western Europe, c.800- 1450,” p. 181. (back to text)
18Foedera, ix, pp. 159, 160; CPR, p. 292. (back to text)
19W&W, i, pp. 161 n. 2, 265 n. 2; Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England 450-1500 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1995), p. 162; Jane Geddes, “Iron,” in Blair and Ramsay (eds), English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products, p. 187. (back to text)
20Ibid., pp. 168, 170-2, 174-5. (back to text)
21Ibid., pp. 186 and 187 (fig. 86). See plate 5. (back to text)
22C. F. Richmond, “The War at Sea,” in Fowler, pp. 111-12, 108. (back to text)
23This meant that although he was a clergyman, he had not progressed to the rank of priest nor taken his final vows as a monk. Most clerks in the royal services were of this rank and never became fully ordained. (back to text)
24Richmond, “The War at Sea,” pp. 112-13; W. J. Carpenter-Turner, “The Building of the Holy Ghost of the Tower, 1414-1416, and her Subsequent History,” The Mariner’s Mirror, 40 (1954), p. 270; W. J. Carpenter-Turner, “The Building of the Gracedieu, Valentine and Falconer at Southampton, 1416-1420,” ibid., p. 56. (back to text)
25Ibid., pp. 65-6; Richmond, “The War at Sea,” pp. 112-13, 104-7. (back to text)
26Carpenter-Turner, “The Building of the Gracedieu, Valentine and Falconer at Southampton, 1416-1420,” pp. 62-3; Carpenter-Turner, “The Building of the Holy Ghost of the Tower, 1414-1416, and her Subsequent History,” pp.
271, 273. The sums involved equate to almost $1,352,400 and $2,999,430 in modern currency, but there was almost certainly further expenditure. (back to text)
27Richmond, “The War at Sea,” pp. 121 n. 55, 113-14. (back to text)
28CPR, pp. 294-5; W&W, i, p. 448 and n. 2. (back to text)
29Fernández-Armesto, “Naval Warfare after the Viking Age, c.1100- 1500,” pp. 238-9; Ian Friel, “Winds of Change? Ships and the Hundred Years War,” in Curry and Hughes, pp. 183-5. (back to text)
30Foedera, ix, pp. 215, 216; W&W, i, pp. 45, 104. (back to text)
31Vaughan, pp. 241-4. See above, pp. 62-3, 65-6 for the Anglo-Burgundian negotiations. (back to text)
32Registres de la Jurade: Délibérations de 1414 à 1416 et de 1420 à 1422: Archives Municipales de Bordeaux (G. Gounouilhou, Bordeaux, 1883), iv, p. 193. (back to text)
33Foedera, ix, p. 218; Antonio Morosini, Chronique d’Antonio Morosini 1414-1428, ed. by Germain Lefèvre-Pontalis and Léon Dorez (Librairie Renouard, Paris, 1899), ii, pp. 20-5, 34-5, 44-5. (back to text)
34Foedera, ix, pp. 224, 238-9, 248-9; CPR, pp. 325, 329, 343; CCR, p. 232. (back to text)
35Foedera, ix, pp. 250-1, 261; CPR, pp. 327, 346. (back to text)
36Foedera, ix, pp. 251-2, 253; CCR, pp. 214, 217, 218. (back to text)
37Ibid., p. 278; Foedera, ix, pp. 288-9; H. J. Hewitt, “The Organisation of War,” in Fowler, pp. 81-2. (back to text)
38See, for example, Henry’s writ of 26 May 1415 to the sheriff of Kent: Foedera, ix, p. 251. (back to text)
CHAPTER SEVEN: OF MONEY AND MEN
1Pizan, BDAC, p. 19. (back to text)
2Harriss, “Financial Policy,” in HVPK, pp. 163-74. See also Edmund Wright, “Henry IV, the Commons and the Recovery of Royal Finance in 1407,” in R. E. Archer and S. Walker (eds), Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss (Hambledon Press, London and Rio Grande, 1995), pp. 65-81. (back to text)
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