1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (83 page)

Another consequence of the strict chronological form employed in this book is the inevitable inclusion of more evidence than is normally considered necessary in books about Henry or Agincourt. Any historian constructing a narrative or argument selects his or her evidence and discards certain details as superfluous to requirements. In a book like this, in which we are trying to explore as many days as possible, it would be wrong to discard some days and not others. The consequences are significant. Consider Henry’s pawning of religious artefacts and relics from the royal chapels from 1 June. Pawning relics to pay soldiers’ wages does not accord with the traditional image of Henry as a pious man. Nor does his dissolution of more then fifty priories. Historians – especially English writers – have tended to present Henry in the best possible light, and have accordingly downplayed or ignored these details. But their place in the calendar structure forces us to confront the apparent inconsistency head-on. It cannot be downplayed or eliminated without distorting our understanding of the man.

This tendency towards comprehensiveness has a literary side-effect. Henry’s chief characteristics are repeated with ongoing force. No one can read this book and not be struck by the number of references to his piety. Similarly, no one can fail to notice the extraordinary degree of organisation and planning required to make the whole Harfleur expedition happen. In a normal history text we would remark on these aspects once or perhaps twice; they would not be repeated so many times. The journal form, highlighting the potential importance of the timing of every reference, forces their repetition. Thus Henry’s main
personality traits are amplified in the narrative. The whole picture is thus proportional to the reality of the man’s daily life (as far as it can be determined from the sources). The references to the difficulties on the march from Harfleur clearly underline the depth of the king’s determination. Similarly the continued paucity of references to women, coupled with the repetition of Henry’s ordinances concerning prostitutes and rape, hammer home the fact that Henry wanted his men to be like him and to love chastity more than the attractions of the fair sex. The result is a behaviour study that represents historical reality in a very different way from a thematic overview.

The form of the chronological year has two further methodological implications. Sometimes it simply is not possible to account for his actions over a period of days. When this happens in a normal history book, it tends not to be obvious; indeed, the historian may not even realise there is a gap – especially if he or she is writing an interpretative account, with a non-narrative structure. In this book, any chronological lacuna is immediately apparent, and it behoves the historian to try and explain it, whether through looking around for the significance of the day (a saint’s feast, perhaps), or by considering circumstantial evidence. Hence the speculation that Henry visited Southampton in advance of the army gathering; we have evidence that he went there not long before May 1415, and we have a gap in the evidence for his stay in London in March. It seems logical to suggest the two might be connected. In this way a precise historical form is valuable for it reveals a gap in the data, and accordingly forces us to consider previously unconsidered questions.

The other methodological implication is chronological precision. The rigid date structure forces the historian to be far more exact about dates, plans, orders, logistics, and the time it took to travel or to send a messenger. Although one often reads in history books that two members of Henry’s council met in London in early February and then led an embassy into Paris on 9 February, this seems impossible when considered in a strict calendar form. Ambassadors habitually took at least fifteen days to go from London to Paris in winter. Similarly it is not reasonable to assume that all the people who apparently witnessed royal charters in the year 1415 were present at the time of sealing or even at the time of granting these documents, for there is incontrovertible evidence that some of them were at Constance.
We repeatedly find that the evidence is conflicting and misleading, and this sometimes includes contemporary records. We cannot simply ignore such documents where they do not accord with convenient or long-accepted interpretations. In a calendar-based book readers can see for themselves that there are glaring inconsistencies in the records and chronicles. Precision of dating is therefore not only possible in this book but structurally built into it to a greater extent than in other studies.

In some cases, the precise calendar-aligned arrangement of events results in small refinements of detail (the date of the above-mentioned embassy’s arrival in Paris is a good example). In others, it reveals significant errors of interpretation that have led to flawed narratives being circulated and widely accepted. For example, in his book
The Medieval Archer
, Jim Bradbury declares that

Agincourt was far from being a battle that Henry planned and sought … In the agreements that Henry made before the campaign in order to obtain the force he needed, it is clear that an expedition to the south figured in Henry’s plans. Frequently the agreements specify what wages will be paid should the soldiers be called upon to go to Southern France.
⁷

On a study of the contemporary evidence in isolation Bradbury is right; many of the indentures for service, which are almost all dated 29 April 1415, give wage rates for fighting in Gascony as well as France. So did the proclamation regarding wages on the third day of the great council of that year (18 April). But as this book shows, this dual wage rate announcement was a smokescreen, created so no French spies would discover where the army was heading. Precise attention to the dating of payments in the Issue Rolls reveals that the decision to head to Harfleur had been made by 16 April at the very latest. Thus we can see that Henry’s deliberate ambiguity on the 18 and 29 April has misled Bradbury into thinking that Agincourt was an unplanned and unsought conflict, fought on the back foot. The exact site of battle may have been unplanned, and obviously the ground conditions were beyond Henry’s control, but the general policy of fighting a battle between Harfleur and Calais, massacring French men-at-arms with longbows, was very carefully planned.

The above shows that there are a number of advantages in the
calendar form, and collectively these go some way to explaining why I have a different reading of the man’s character from other writers. The integration of simultaneous aspects of Henry’s life, the tendency to be comprehensive with regard to the evidence, and the repetition of personal characteristics in proportion to the historical evidence are all key elements explaining why readers of this book may join me in disagreeing with the post-Agincourt, hero-worshipping verdict on Henry adopted by fifteenth-century chroniclers, Shakespeare, and most historians since the sixteenth century.

Having said this, there are certain disadvantages to the form that should not pass without notice. The key one is the literary challenge, mentioned in the prologue. As stated there, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the calendar is a non-literary structure, so the more details one includes in their correct historical place, the more inflexible the narrative becomes. It reminds me of the often-repeated question, ‘How do you stop the facts getting in the way of a good story?’ To this question a historian instinctively replies, ‘the facts
are
the good story’. However, the facts make for a much better story when the author can deploy them at will, and use them within a looser temporal framework. It may be that the more historians meet the challenges of accuracy, fullness and precision, the more difficult it is for them to create a ‘story’, or work of literature, out of the characters and events of the past.

A second disadvantage lies in the limited scope of textual criticism. By discussing the battle of Agincourt within an entry for a single day – 25 October 1415 – it is not possible to include all the varying narratives. While modern scholars describe the various stages by stating that ‘Chronicler X says this, while Chronicler Y claims the opposite’, this style of textual criticism deflates the value of seeing events unfolding. We lose focus on history as a matter of past reality (the goal of historians outside the lecture hall) and become subsumed within history as the analysis of evidence (the prime purpose of history within the lecture hall). Fortunately, given the many detailed contributions from so many academics concerned with Agincourt to date, this is not a problem; those wishing to understand all the various accounts of the battle can make recourse to books by specialists on the battle, especially Anne Curry’s
The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations
.

A third problem of this detailed chronological form is simply the lack of evidence. While certain aspects of Henry’s life are given weight in this book due to their frequent appearance in the contemporary written record, other aspects do not appear at all. We have no chamber accounts for the year 1415, nor any household or great wardrobe accounts (with the exceptions of those concerning military expenditure). One has to ask, therefore, is there a side to Henry that is missing in this book due to the lack of source material for this year? A comparison of the Issue Rolls payments under Henry V with those made under Henry IV does not suggest that there was. Although Henry IV was a similarly serious, religious, dutiful and committed king, he paid for organising jousts, bought hunting birds, enjoyed sword fighting, bought new clothes for his fool, and ‘paid a certain woman 20d for undertaking certain affairs for the king’, which, even if it was wholly innocent, reminds us that he had an illegitimate son.
⁸
In the Issue Rolls of the second and third years of the reign of Henry V there is nothing that approximates to such fun – just the one reference to the dining chamber in the lake at Kenilworth Castle. Nevertheless, questions still remain. There are no references to royal hunts taking place in this year; yet we know Henry V enjoyed hunting. There are no references to his reading either – even though we know that he regularly borrowed books from other people. These aspects of his life are therefore probably under-represented in this book. The same must go for his other interests that are not reflected in the evidence for 1415.

The final problem worth mentioning is a technical one. When were these documents actually drawn up? This question normally presents no significant problem in a less chronologically precise study, but here it matters. Consider the king’s orders to close the ports on 3 July: were these delivered before or after he had heard about the way discussions with the French ambassadors were going? Or had he actually given the orders some time before, perhaps days before, and this was simply the date of enrolment? Doubts about the timing of certain documents might lead to certain inaccurate juxtapositions. We know that some documents were dated long after the events to which they relate. This applies to many entries in accounts, which were settled in retrospect, as well as charters that were supposedly witnessed by people who were not even in England on the stated day. For this reason, precision does not always guarantee correctness.

Overall, despite all the problems and challenges, the form of the single year has proved illuminating, stimulating, challenging and worthwhile. I hope that it stands as an example to show that historical discoveries are not just about finding a new piece of evidence or applying postmodern critical techniques to old evidence. Arranging a large number of facts and observations within a new framework can reveal new meanings, raise new questions, offer new insights, and stimulate discussion. Different biographical viewpoints and different chronological layouts – even different conceptual approaches regarding what history is – all help us to see the past differently, and to interact with it more personally, and to understand humanity over long periods of time.

REINTERPRETATION AND THE HISTORICAL CORRELATIVE

To what extent should we judge historical characters? Outside academia, is there any value in such judgments of individuals from the remote past? Are not historians’ opinions of people who died several hundred years ago as inconsequential as their opinions on the nameless individuals whose bodies once lay under prehistoric burial mounds?

In the past, a historian’s judgment has been seen as an essential part of his or her role. Professor Jack Simmons, reviewing a book on Elizabethan England in 1951, commented that there were four qualities of a great historian: common sense, justice, sympathy and imagination. With regard to justice he declared that this was

not impartiality – the anaemic, remote detachment of a man looking at the whole story from the superior height of a later age, but something much harder to attain: the true justice of a judge who sets out and weighs the evidence and then pronounces upon the question in dispute. The great historians have never shirked this duty of judgment. Rather they have regarded it as one of the main aims of their work.
⁹

I have borne this review in mind ever since reading it, eight years ago; but I have increasingly found myself disagreeing with it. Or, rather, I have found that the point of view of ‘the historian’ in describing the past is a complicated one. While judgments concerning recent social history are important, because they may affect the way we live our
lives today (for example, successes or failures within economic systems, or the National Health Service), the purpose of studying medieval subjects in the public arena is beyond the exercise of judgment; it is an examination of the experiences of the human race over time. It is much more important to understand the past sympathetically – to see why they did what they did, from their own point of view – than to pontificate about those who cannot possibly have known their judge, let alone defend themselves.

Given this suspicion that historical judgment is often unhelpful and unnecessary, this would be the ideal book in which to say that I will leave readers to make their own judgments on Henry V in the year 1415. All the facts that I consider pertinent have been laid out above, and readers may make of them what they will. But in each of my past biographies I have felt obliged to deliver a judgment on the character concerned, and I feel it necessary to do so here. The reason is primarily because reinterpretation has its value, if only as a riposte to what I consider the erroneous judgments of others. Another reason is that, as with the other books, I want to push the understanding of this man a little bit further, to explore the ambiguities and inconsistencies of his behaviour that are so revealing of his character. Finally I want to pursue the reinterpretation in order to say something of the consequences of Henry’s decisions in 1415. We cannot say Henry V was good or bad, or right or wrong, without making huge assumptions about moral values across the ages; but we can reinterpret his character and the consequences of his decisions, and that is the purpose of the remainder of this book.