Agincourt (34 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ordinary 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.
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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.
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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.
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Before first light, the Virgin and St George answered the prayers of the English with the news that a suitable crossing of the Somme had been found only three miles to the north-east of Nesle. It is unclear how this information came to Henry V. It is possible that the English scouts uncovered its existence on one of their forays but, given the timing, it was more probably one of the villagers who decided to reveal its whereabouts in the hope of saving his home and livelihood from the flames.
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Mounted patrols were immediately dispatched to test the passage and find out the depth of the water and the speed of the current. What they found was not ideal, but it was possible.

There were actually two crossings, both fords, less than two miles apart, at the neighbouring villages of Béthencourt-sur-Somme and Voyennes. They were approached by long, narrow causeways that the French, under instruction from the ubiquitous Boucicaut and d’Albret, had broken up in the middle “in such a way that it was scarcely possible, and then only with difficulty, to ride across the broken parts in single file.” At their deepest points, the waters of the fords came slightly higher than a horse’s belly, but a marsh a mile wide had to be negotiated before reaching the Somme. These disadvantages were outweighed by the fact that the crossings were unguarded. The men of St Quentin, who had been entrusted with the task, had been caught by surprise. What is more, there was no sign of the French army that had dogged their footsteps for so long. The gamble of the short-cut had paid off.
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Early on the morning of Saturday 19 October, under the watchful eye of Sir John Cornewaille and Sir Gilbert Umfraville, the archers of the vanguard began to make their way in single file and on foot across the broken causeways, holding their bows and quivers full of arrows aloft to keep them dry. After they had scrambled onto the opposite bank and taken up a position to protect the rest, Cornewaille, Umfraville and their standard-bearers went over, followed by the men-at-arms, also in single file and on foot. Only when they were all safely across were their horses sent over to join them.

While the vanguard was completing this difficult and dangerous manoeuvre, the rest of the English army was busy pulling down the nearest houses and taking away any ladders, doors and shutters they could find. Once a secure bridgehead had been established on the other side of the Somme, providing covering fire if required, they set to work repairing and rebuilding the gaps in the broken causeways with the wood they had found, together with bundles of sticks, straw and any other materials they could lay their hands on. By one o’clock in the afternoon, the causeways were passable by three men riding abreast, and the full-scale operation of crossing the Somme began. Although it was not ideal that the army should be divided and separated by a distance of almost two miles, it was imperative that the crossing be effected as quickly as possible. The king therefore ordered that the slower baggage should cross by one causeway, probably that at Béthencourt where the lie of the land was flatter, and his fighting men by the other.
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There was an obvious danger that so many men trying to use so narrow a causeway could result in chaos: they were tightly packed together, eager to get across and, if they came under fire from the enemy, might panic in the crush. Foreseeing these dangers, the king stationed himself on one side of the entrance to the ford and a couple of hand-picked men on the other to maintain discipline. His stern presence proved sufficient to quell any unruliness before it began and both the main body of the army and the rearguard reached the opposite bank of the Somme without loss or major incident. Nevertheless, it was after nightfall before the operation was complete and the last men and horses came safely ashore.
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It was impossible for such a huge logistical exercise to take place without attracting attention from the enemy. According to the chaplain, even before a hundred men had waded across the river, small groups of French cavalry began to emerge from the hamlets on the northern side. They sent their swifter outriders on ahead to assess the situation, while the rest made belated attempts to join together into an opposing force. Before they could do this effectively, they were attacked by the mounted patrols of the vanguard, adding to their confusion. By the time they had gathered in sufficient numbers to risk an approach, the English bridgehead was secure and men were pouring across the river to reinforce it. “For this reason,” the chaplain remarked with obvious satisfaction, “the French, taking up a position at a distance and having estimated our capacity to stand firm and their own incapacity to resist, abandoned the place and vanished from our sight.”
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The English spent a cheerful night lodging in and around the hamlets of Athies and Monchy-Lagache, their spirits raised by the boldness and efficiency with which they had so unexpectedly accomplished the river crossing. “We thought it a matter of great rejoicing on our part,” the chaplain wrote, “that we had shortened our march by, as many reckoned, about an eight days’ journey. And we were of the firm hope that the enemy army, the army which was said to be waiting for us at the head of the river, would be disinclined to follow after us to do battle.”
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