3Harriss, “Financial Policy,” p. 163. (back to text)
4Ibid., p. 177. (back to text)
5Harriss, “The Management of Parliament,” pp. 137-8, 156; Saul, The Batsford Companion to Medieval England, pp. 200-2. (back to text)
6See, for example, Rotuli Parliamentorum, iv, pp. 3, 15, 34; Harriss, “The Management of Parliament,” pp. 143, 145. (back to text)
7Ibid., pp. 145-6, 158. (back to text)
8Rotuli Parliamentorum, iv, p. 34. (back to text)
9Ibid., iv, p. 35; W&W, i, p. 434. (back to text)
10Memorials of London and London Life, pp. 603-5; Letter-Books, pp. 135, 143; Nicolas, p. 14; Marks and Williamson (eds), Gothic Art for England 1400-1547, p. 206 and fig. 71a. (back to text)
11Foedera, ix, p. 241. The signet was a relatively new seal, introduced by Richard II as a means of bypassing the more ponderous administrations of the great seal (that is, the chancery) and privy seal offices: Saul, Batsford Companion to Medieval England, pp. 112-13. (back to text)
12CPR, p. 329; Nicolas, pp. 13, 14; Foedera, ix, pp. 285-6. (back to text)
13W&W, i, pp. 472-4; Foedera, ix, pp. 268-9; Allmand (ed), Society at War, pp. 136-40. (back to text)
14W&W, i, pp. 477-9; Letter-Books, p. 144. (back to text)
15Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, p. 1570; Foedera, ix, p. 310; Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1300-1500) (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1948), pp. 55, 374; W&W, i, pp. 147 and n. 5, 360-1, 365. For Hende, see Thrupp, op. cit., p. 127. (back to text)
16Morosini, Chronique, pp. 20-3; Jeremy Catto, “The King’s Servants,” in HVPK, p. 82; W&W, i, p. 474. (back to text)
17Ibid., i, p. 474 n. 4; Foedera, ix, pp. 271, 284, 312. (back to text)
18W&W, i, pp. 472 nn. 1-6, 473 n. 6. (back to text)
19Monstrelet, iii, p. 71. (back to text)
20CPR, p. 344. (back to text)
21Maurice Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman (Tempus, Stroud and Charleston, SC, 2002), p. 95; Foedera, ix, p. 216; CCR, pp. 270, 271-2. For examples of indentures for life service, including some issued by Henry as prince of Wales, see Michael Jones and Simon Walker, “Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War 1278-1476,” Camden Miscellany xxxii (Royal Historical Society, London, 1994), pp. 1-190, esp. pp. 139-43. (back to text)
22POPC, ii, pp. 150-1; Curry, p. 414. (back to text)
23MS E101/69/5, TNA; MS E101/47/29, TNA. For published examples of indentures signed on 29 April 1415, see Foedera, ix, pp. 227-38; Nicolas, Appx ii, pp. 8-10. MS E101/45/5, TNA, summarises the terms of 210 indentures for the Agincourt campaign. (back to text)
24At the battle of Agincourt the ratio rose to five to one because so many men-at-arms were invalided home from Harfleur. See below, pp. 208, 219, 260-1, 283. (back to text)
25MS E101/69/5, TNA; Foedera, ix, pp. 223, 230. Welsh foot archers received only 3d a day in 1355 (Strickland and Hardy, p. 204). For the regard, see Ayton, “English Armies in the Fourteenth Century,” in Curry and Hughes, pp. 24-5. (back to text)
26Ayton, “Arms, Armour, and Horses,” in Keen, MW, p. 188; Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, pp. 276-7, 224; Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (Hambledon Press, London and Rio Grande, 1994), pp. 148, 167, 188; D. Knoop and G. P. Jones, The Medieval Mason (3rd edn, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1967), pp. 72, 86-7. (back to text)
27Strickland and Hardy, pp. 204-5. The social status of archers had risen steadily throughout the fourteenth century as the demands of war (in particular, the chevauchée) required them to be mounted. Richard II’s ordinances of war (1385) placed them on a par with men-at-arms, and distinguished them from foot archers, when setting out punishment. Ibid., p. 204. (back to text)
28MS E101/47/29, TNA. The payment for the first quarter was higher than for the second quarter because it was calculated at Gascon rates. (back to text)
29Nicolas, pp. 373-4. (back to text)
30MS E101/47/29, TNA; Nicolas, p. 15. (back to text)
31Ibid., pp. 16-18. (back to text)
32MS E101/69/5, TNA; Foedera, ix, pp. 227-8. For similar indentures, see ibid., pp. 228-30, 233-5, 244, 250. (back to text)
33Ayton, “Arms, Armour, and Horses,” in Keen, MW, p. 191. (back to text)
34Ibid., pp. 191-2, 188, 195. (back to text)
35Ibid., p. 197. For a reference in the king’s ordinances at Rouen in 1419 to “all maner of men, Ryding or taryeng wyth us in oure hoste or vnder our baner, thoughe they Receue no wages of vs or our Realme,” see Allmand (ed), Society at War, p. 82. (back to text)
36MS E101/69/5, TNA. In January 1416, Sir John Grey received a thousand marks (£666 13s 4d) from the king in part payment for the Count of Eu, whom he had captured at Agincourt: Devon, pp. 344-5. See below, pp. 133, 327-8, for examples of ransoms of French prisoners after Agincourt. (back to text)
37Anne Curry, “Sir Thomas Erpingham: A Life in Arms,” in Curry, Agincourt 1415, pp. 74-5 and pls. 23 and 24. For Chaucer’s accounts see MS E101/47/29, TNA. (back to text)
38Ibid., p. 66; MS E101/45/5, TNA. See also Wylie, “Notes on the Agincourt Roll,” pp. 107-8, 140, 111; Nicolas, p. 383. (back to text)
39Foedera, ix, p. 258; Nicolas, pp. 10-11; Maurice Keen, “Richard II’s Ordinances of War of 1385,” in Archer and Walker (eds), Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England, pp. 35-6. (back to text)
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ARMY GATHERS
1W&W, i, pp. 484-6; Letter-Books, p. 138. (back to text)
2St-Denys, v, pp. 512-27; Monstrelet, iii, pp. 73-4. (back to text)
3W&W, i, pp. 505-8; Morosini, Chronique, ii, pp. 34-7. (back to text)
4W&W, i, pp. 500-1. (back to text)
5Carey, Courting Disaster, pp. 93-6, 106-9; Christine de Pizan, The Writings of Christine de Pizan, selected and edited by Charity Cannon Willard (Persea Books, New York, 1994), pp. 17-21; Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity, pp. 24-5. (back to text)
6W&W, i, pp. 500, 502, 503-5. (back to text)
7Ibid., i, pp. 506-7, 505 n. 6. (back to text)
8Foedera, ix, pp. 223, 239-40, 243, 262; CPR, p. 353; POPC, ii, pp. 157, 168; Public Record Office, London: Lists and Indexes Supplementary Series, no. ix, vol. ii (Klaus Reprint Corporation, New York, 1964), Appx, p. 382. (back to text)
9Foedera, ix, p. 223; CCR, pp. 268, 280; Nicolas, p. 385; POPC, ii, pp. 145-7, 165. (back to text)
10Foedera, ix, pp. 255-6; Hitchin, “The Bowman and the Bow,” p. 40. (back to text)
11Pizan, BDAC, p. 214; Foedera, ix, pp. 253-4; CCR, pp. 213-14, 218. (back to text)
12Ibid.; Heath, Church and Realm 1272-1461, p. 284. Arrays of clergy were more frequent in the see of York: they were also called out twice in 1417, again (with the see of Canterbury) in 1418, and several times in 1419. The only bishopric omitted from Henry’s writ was that of Sodor and Man, which until c.1387 had been a Scottish see. Local clergymen who had mustered at Beverley fought against the Scots at the battle of Neville’s Cross (1346), “taking off their shoes and their hoods, [they] showed themselves with swords and arrows at their waists and bows under their arms” (Strickland and Hardy, p. 190). See also ibid., p. 259. (back to text)
13Mowbray MS; ODNB; Harris, “The King and his Magnates,” in HVPK, p. 41. (back to text)
14Mowbray MS, fo. 21. The earl had contracted to serve in person with four knights, forty-five esquires and 150 archers. Like many of those raising retinues, the number of men he actually engaged to fight in his service differed from the figure for which he had contracted, hence the importance of the muster. The earl had received his first payment at the higher Gascon rate; the second payment was made at the French rate. The fact that the earl paid his men at the French rate may indicate that a decision had been taken by 1 July to go to France, rather than Aquitaine. On the other hand, it may simply reflect his shortage of cash: an adjustment could have been made later. (back to text)
1
5Mowbray MS, fo. 21. A further fourteen men, whose status is unclear, were given payments ranging from 21s to 38s under a heading that appears to mean “Regard for Welshmen for the expedition”: at least two of the names are obviously Welsh. (back to text)
16Mowbray MS fo. 21; Forty-Fourth Annual Report, pp. 561-3, 565-70; CPR, p. 370. (back to text)
17Forty-Fourth Annual Report, pp. 566, 561. The archer was John Riggele alias Power, in the retinue of Sir John Fastolf. (back to text)
18Mowbray MS, fo. 13. (back to text)
19Le Févre, i, p. 253. The French similarly cut down their lances to fight on foot at Poitiers (1356): Strickland and Hardy, pp. 234, 249. (back to text)
20Barker, The Tournament in England, pp. 23, 157-8. For a sixteenth-century example, see Marks and Williamson (eds), Gothic Art for England 1400-1547, p. 198. (back to text)
21Mowbray MS, fos 13, 15, 14. (back to text)
22Mowbray MS, fos 12, 11. The shields could have been for Mowbray’s archers, though forty-eight would not have provided enough for even a third of his contingent. (back to text)
23ELMA, p. 181; Strickland and Hardy, p. 201; Mowbray MS, fo. 9. The earl bought thirty-eight “crosses” from Nicholas Armourer: ibid., fo. 13. For the wearing of St George’s cross, see below, p. 162. (back to text)
24Mowbray MS, fos 14-16. (back to text)
25Harriss, “The King and his Magnates,” in HVPK, p. 41; Nicolas, Appx. xvii. (back to text)
26Wylie, “Notes on the Agincourt Roll,” p. 135; Powell, p. 235: MS E404/31/315, TNA. Only a handful of the Welsh archers were mounted. (back to text)
27MS E404/31/386, TNA; MS E101/45/5, TNA. Curry, p. 414, describes them as being from the Forest of Dean, but Greyndor was an Anglo/ Welsh knight from south Wales. (back to text)
28MS E101/45/5, TNA; Nicolas, p. 386; Public Record Office: Lists and Indexes, no. ix, vol. ii, pp. 390-1. Examples are Gerard Van Willighen, Hans Joye, Frederick Van Heritt, Claus Van Roosty and Martin van Osket. (back to text)
29Benedeyt Spina, the envoy who was ordered to bring the brides, was in London on 8 June 1415, but apparently without his charges: as late as 30 October they were still in Aquitaine and the authorities in Bordeaux decided that it was too late in the season to send them: Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V (1399-1422), ed. by J. L. Kirby (HMSO, London, 1978), p. 197 no. 962; Registres de la Jurade, pp. 194, 232, 254, 279. (back to text)
30Nicolas, pp. 386, 388-9; Jim Bradbury, The Medieval Siege (Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 197, 241-2, 270; MS E404/31/409, TNA lists only twenty-five cordwainers, led by George Benet, master cordwainer, not twenty-six as in Nicolas, p. 388. (back to text)
31MS E101/45/5, MS E404/31/437 and MS E404/31/416, TNA; Nicolas, pp. 387-9; W&W, ii, p. 186 n. 2. (back to text)
32Nicolas, pp. 387-9; Wylie, “Notes on the Agincourt Roll,” p. 139. For Bordiu, see Henrici Quinti, Angliae Regis, Gesta, ed. by Bernard Williams (English Historical Society, London, 1850), p. vii. The various identities suggested for the chaplain are discussed, but in the absence of positive evidence, no conclusion is reached in GHQ, pp. xviii-xxiii. (back to text)
33See, for example, the dancing nakerer in the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter: BL MS Add 42130 fo. 176. (back to text)
34Foedera, ix, pp. 255, 260; Southworth, The English Medieval Minstrel, pp. 113-14, 115, 174 n. 47. (back to text)
35Ibid., pp. 47 and n. 21, 117, 15. (back to text)
36Foedera, ix, pp. 255, 260; Southworth, The English Medieval Minstrel, pp. 113-14, 119, 143-6, 174 n. 47, 187. In 1433 Clyff’s widow was still claiming £33 6s for his retinue’s unpaid wages for the Agincourt campaign: see below p. 347. (back to text)
37Maurice Keen, Chivalry (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1984), pp. 126-7, 134-7, 138. (back to text)
38Ibid., p. 134. (back to text)
39Garter king of arms was nevertheless “taken prisoner . . . and his goods taken from him [by] the King’s enemies” when travelling through France on a royal errand to the earl of Warwick in 1438: Devon, p. 436. (back to text)
40Nicolas, p. 387. (back to text)
41Nicolas, p. 387; Foedera, ix, pp. 235-6, 237-8, 252-3; Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), pp. 83, 85-6, 232-4; Talbot and Hammond, The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England: A Biographical Register, p. 100. (back to text)
42Ibid., pp. 220-2; MS E404/31/359, TNA; Foedera, ix, pp. 235-6. (back to text)
43Beck, The Cutting Edge, pp. 85, 92, 79; Foedera, ix, pp. 237-8, 252-3. (back to text)
44Beck, The Cutting Edge, pp. 76-8; Talbot and Hammond, The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England: A Biographical Register, pp. 387-8. (back to text)
45Beck, The Cutting Edge, pp. 63, 67-8. (back to text)
46Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1300-1500), pp. 260, 267 n. 75; Beck, The Cutting Edge, pp. 81-2. (back to text)
47Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), pp. 68-9. (back to text)
48Transcribed from the extracts of Thomas Morstede’s Fair Book of Surgery, given in Beck, The Cutting Edge, pp. 105ff, esp. p. 108. (back to text)
49Ibid.; Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, pp. 165-6. (back to text)
50Will of Hamon le Straunge: MS LEST AE 1, Norfolk Record Office; Foedera, ix, pp. 289-92. (back to text)
51Ibid.; Morgan, “The Household Retinue of Henry V and the Ethos of English Public Life,” p. 65. The famous Gascon knight Jean de Grailly, Captal de Buch (d.1369), directed in his will that fifty thousand masses were to be sung for him in the year after his death: Keen, Chivalry, p. 155. (back to text)
52St-Denys, v, pp. 526-8. (back to text)
53Seward, Henry V as Warlord, p. 63. (back to text)
54St-Denys, v, pp. 526-8. See also Monstrelet, iii, pp. 78-81; le Févre, i, pp. 219-21; and Waurin, i, pp. 174-6. (back to text)
55GHQ, pp. 17-19. (back to text)
56Deuteronomy, ch. xx, v. 10. See also below, p. 174. (back to text)
57Foedera, ix, p. 298; CCR, p. 278; W&W, ii, p. 1; GHQ, pp. 20-1. (back to text)
CHAPTER NINE: “FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE”
1The opening line of Michael Drayton’s seventeenth-century “Ballad of Agincourt.” (back to text)
2GHQ, p. 21; St Albans, p. 89; Robert F. Marx, The Battle of the Spanish Armada 1588 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1965), p. 53. (back to text)
3Vale, English Gascony 1399-1453, pp. 13-14; Blair and Ramsay (eds), English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products, p. 341; Bridbury, England and the Salt Trade in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 80, 110-11, 114; Knoop and Jones, The Medieval Mason, pp. 46, 48. The river Don in Yorkshire supplied a boat for Henry V’s second invasion of France in 1417, so it is reasonable to suppose that similar vessels were also used in 1415: Friel, “Winds of Change? Ships and the Hundred Years War,” p. 189. (back to text)
4Ibid., pp. 183-5; Ayton, “Arms, Armour, and Horses,” p. 198. Sir Robert Knollys’s expeditionary force of 1370, which had a contracted strength of two thousand men-at-arms and two thousand mounted archers, took 8464 horses to France, according to exchequer records. (back to text)
5Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V (1399-1422), p. 161; Richmond, “The War at Sea,” p. 114; GHQ, pp. 20-1; le Févre, i, p. 224; W&W, i, p. 525. The king later decided that those who mustered, but had to be left behind, were not to receive their wages: Foedera, ix, p. 52. (back to text)
6Carpenter-Turner, “The Building of the Holy Ghost of the Tower, 1414-1416, and her Subsequent History,” p. 271. (back to text)
7W&W, ii, p. 2; Armstrong, “The Heraldry of Agincourt,” p. 130. (back to text)
8Elizabeth Danbury, “English and French Artistic Propaganda during the Period of the Hundred Years War,” in Christopher Allmand (ed), Power, Cul
ture and Religion in France c.1350-c.1550 (Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1989), p. 82. When Charles V of France reduced the number of lilies on the French royal coat of arms to three, Edward III followed suit: ibid., p. 87. (back to text)
9Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (Sphere Books, London, 1974), p. 40. (back to text)
10Ibid., pp. 304-6; Keen, Chivalry, pp. 191, 184. For Werchin’s challenge to the Garter knights and, separately, to Sir John Cornewaille, see MS Additional 21370 fos 1-14, esp. fo. 7v, British Library; Barker, The Tournament in England, pp. 41-2, 157. (back to text)
11W&W, ii, pp. 3-4; Armstrong, “The Heraldry of Agincourt,” p. 130; GHQ, pp. 120-1. (back to text)
12Bacquet, p. 109, quoting the accounts of the city of Boulogne which had sent a messenger to Honfleur, “where monseigneur the constable is now.” (back to text)
13Ibid., pp. 22-3. (back to text)
14Trokelowe, “Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti,” p. 333; A. C. Reeves, Lancastrian Englishmen (University Press of America, Washington, DC, 1981), pp. 143-4; MS Additional 21370 fos 4v-14, esp. fo. 10, British Library. Cornewaille’s side of the correspondence relating to the seneschal’s challenge was carried by William Bruges, who was then Chester herald of the prince of Wales. (back to text)
15Catto, “The King’s Servants,” pp. 89-90; Reeves, Lancastrian Englishmen, p. 168; W&W, ii, p. 17 n. 2; Wylie, “Notes on the Agincourt Roll,” pp. 136, 128-9. (back to text)
16GHQ, p. 23 n. 3; W&W, i, pp. 98, 344 and nn. 8 and 9, 345 and n. 2, 435, 536; W&W, ii, pp. 16-17; CPR, p. 359; Nicolas, p. 340. (back to text)
17Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. by A. Kent Hieatt and Constance Hieatt (Bantam Books, New York, 1971), p. 54, l. 276; Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, pp. 208-9. A transcript of the agreement is given in Allmand (ed), Society at War, pp. 32-4. (back to text)
18Reeves, Lancastrian Englishmen, pp. 153, 151, 148; McLeod, pp. 85, 177, 186. Though Cornewaille evaded capture personally, he had to raise enormous sums for the ransom of his stepson, Sir John Holland (who had then become earl of Huntingdon), when he was captured at Baugé in 1421. He was only able to do it by means of assistance from the king, by exchanging one of his own most valuable prisoners and by remitting some of the ransom due to him. And at his death in December 1443, it was discovered that he held £2666 13s 4d in uncashed exchequer tallies, money that was therefore owed to him by the crown, together with debts of more than £723 owed to him for loans by others. As many of the other Agincourt veterans were to discover, receiving payment for their services was neither straightforward nor easy: Reeves, Lancastrian Englishmen, pp. 147, 169-70, 182; McLeod, pp. 252, 275; Michael Stansfield, “John Holland, Duke of Exeter and Earl of Huntingdon (d.1447) and the Costs of the Hundred Years War,” in Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. by Michael Hicks (Alan Sutton, Gloucester and Wolfeboro Falls, 1990), pp. 108-9. (back to text)
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