From The Drinks Business:
Trapped, far from home and outnumbered, the English army squares up to a powerful French host and prepares to do battle on the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinan.
“Dieu de batailles! Where have they this mettle?
Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull,
On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale,
Killing their fruit with frowns? Can sodden water,
A drench for sur-rein’d jades, their barley-broth,
Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?
And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine,
Seem frosty?”
Charles d’Albret, Henry V, Act 3, scene v.
After a tense standoff on the 24th the English passed a miserable night on the field. They were close enough to the French to hear the voices of the enemy drifting towards them on the night air and Henry had ordered them not to light fires to keep their positions secret.
So quiet were the English that at one point the French were worried they’d secretly marched away during the night. The French, famously but like all good stories probably fancifully, spent the night drinking wine, boasting and dicing for who would take which English noblemen prisoner.
It rained that night too. Since ancient times it had been noted that rainstorms often presaged great battles. Four hundred years later British officers who’d fought in Spain would remark that the night before nearly every major engagement was heralded by a thunderstorm. It rained heavily before Waterloo in 1815 too and in both instances, redcoat and archer spent the night lying shivering on the sodden plough that, on the morrow, might be their grave.
The next day the two armies drew up for battle, the archers hammered stakes into the ground to deter the French cavalry while the many flags that bobbed and fluttered over their ranks, provided one of the most colourful aspect of the battle – certainly when compared to the principal antagonists on the English side.
Many (author included) will have first been introduced to the period and the battle through Laurence Olivier’s masterly 1944 version of Shakespeare’s Henry V, in a film for which the term “Glorious Technicolor” might have been invented and still isn’t quite enough to describe the spectacle on display. The day is a blaze of sunshine, everyone is scrupulously clean and the French knights are lowered onto their horses with Heath Robinson-esque systems of winches and pulleys.
The reality though was rather different. The English army was tired, hungry, unshaven, cold and, after a night in a muddy field, indescribably filthy. The armour of the men-at-arms would have been rusting through constant use and exposure to rain, rivulets of water running down their helmets staining their faces with russet streaks.
The debate still flows back and forth as to exactly how outnumbered the English were: 10 to one, four to five? What is not in doubt and should not be forgotten is that they were certainly outnumbered, desperate and extremely miserable. Not only were they soaked from the previous night’s downpour, they were hungry, cold and miserable.
If this ragged and bedraggled, semi-naked army didn’t look particularly heroic it probably felt even worse than it looked.
The course of the battle is relatively straightforward but new research is greatly adding to our understanding of it – not unlike the comparatively more recent battle of Waterloo. It was certainly not a simple case of waves of French cavalry breaking on the medieval prototype of the “Thin Red Line”; of valiant but arrogant French knights mown down by the Maxim gun of its day – the longbow – before everyone cried “God, for Harry!” and that was that.
There was a French cavalry charge but the day was effectively decided on foot in a scrum of sheer bloody murder typical of medieval battles.
The professionalism of the English soldiery, particularly the skill of the archers, is often stressed and they were both well-drilled and veterans of campaigns in France and Wales but while the militia levies of the arriere-ban upon which the more feudal French armies still relied were of limited military use, the French knights and other men-at-arms themselves were no less “professional”, as the term was then understood, and as skilled as any in Europe in a stand-up fight. Among them there were veterans of the failed Nicopolis crusade, the various battles of the Hook and Cod Wars and the more recent skirmishes and sieges of the Armagnac-Burgundian civil war.
Were the French overconfident? Probably and rightly so. They had the English trapped, there were many more of them and the longer they waited the more Frenchmen arrived to swell their ranks as the English grew weaker.
The main French problem, which was increasingly becoming clear, was with the lack of any recognised commander and with it effective battlefield command and control. Nominally under the command of the experienced commander-in-chief of the army Constable Charles d’Albret and his lieutenant, Marshal Jean le Maingre known as ‘Boucicaut’, the arrival of so many mighty dukes who had their own ideas about how best to fight the battle led to a compromised command system, and subsequent confusion and dithering as a result.
Knowing the sick and staving English grew weaker by the hour, d’Albret and Boucicaut were apparently happy to wait and perhaps even force the English into capitulation without having to fight a battle at all. On the other hand, the more hot headed nobles were all for wiping the contemptible little army from the face of the Earth without further ado. How hard could it be?....
....MUCH MORE
After the Battle:
....An example of the hoops which Henry made some of his captives jump through before they could obtain their freedom and how not just money was sometimes accepted as payment is that of Raoul de Gaucourt and Jean d’Estourville, who had led the defence of Harfleur.
Incredible as it might seem to us, once Harfleur fell and the two knights became prisoners they was released on parole and ordered to present themselves to the king at Calais on 11 November. Despite being weak from dysentery contracted during the siege, they and several other captives duly hauled themselves from their sick beds in order to fulfill their word of honour.
Unlike Charles of Orléans who idled in his gilded cage, de Gaucourt and d’Estourville were set a sort of Herculean cum-Sisyphean series of tasks by Henry.
He suggested they would be best employed, to begin with, in helping secure the release of numerous English prisoners then in French hands and added they might also track down one of Henry’s crowns and other jewels that had been lost during the battle when the French had attacked the English baggage train, “which would be a great thing for us to recover.” Oh, and might they also take an order for 200 casks of ‘Beaune’[12] wine while they were about it?
De Gaucourt was paroled on 3 April 1416 and set off for France where he secured the release of the majority of the prisoners. He then found Henry’s crown, coronation orb and a golden cross containing a fragment of the “true cross” and the seals of the King’s chancery but many of the other jewels were too widely dispersed. He ordered the wine and went back to England. Henry though was not entirely satisfied. So de Gaucourt hired a ship, hopped back to France, secured the ransom of the remaining prisoners, gave them new clothes and shipped them all back to London and put them up in the Tower at his own expense, arriving back at about the same time as the wine and jewels he’d found on his previous trip. The whole experience left him out of pocket to the tune of 13,000 crowns.
In the end he would spend 10 years in English captivity, Henry recognising he was too formidable an opponent to be let go too easily. He was right, once back in France Raoul became a companion of Joan of Arc with whom he raised the siege of Orléans. He died an extremely old man for his times aged 80 or 90 having seen the English completely expelled from both Guyenne and Normandy.....
Previously:
1415: Wine and the Agincourt campaign, Pt I (logistics and supply)
Booze, very important in world history....
1415: Wine and the Agincourt campaign Pt II (what did 15th century wine taste like?)
For more on the ‘Beaune’ of the time see January 5's:
"Canicule, fraîcheurs, vendanges (France, XVe–XIXe siècles)" Dog-days, cold periods, grape-harvests (France, 15-19th centuries)
In particular the link for:
The longest homogeneous series of grape harvest dates, Beaune 1354-2018, and its significance for the understanding of past and present climate
