Agincourt (40 page)

It was Sir Thomas Erpingham who now had the responsibility of ensuring that the deployment of the archers was not jeopardised by Henry’s decision to move all his battle lines forward. The king was taking an enormous risk, particularly with regard to his archers. They had first to pull out their stakes, which was in itself a difficult task, since they had been hammered into the muddy earth at sufficient depth to resist the weight of a charging horse. Because of the angle at which the stakes had to project towards the enemy, the archers would not have been able to pull them out from behind, but would have had to go round in front of them, exposing themselves to enemy action while they did so. This dangerous manoeuvre had to be repeated once they had taken up their new positions as the archers would have had to stand with their backs to the enemy—this time within their artillery range—to hammer in the stakes again.

This was the obvious moment for the French to launch an attack, when the archers were at their most vulnerable, preoccupied with their tasks and unprotected by their stakes. Yet the cavalry corps designated for the task did not even attempt to mount a charge and the crossbowmen and gunners failed to shoot. Instead, the whole French army seems to have stood and watched as Henry ordered his banners forward with the cry, “In the name of Almyghti God, and of Saint George, Avaunt baner! and Saint George this day thyn helpe!” (or, depending on the source, possibly the more prosaic “Felas, lets go!”). His troops roared out their battle-cries, his musicians sounded their trumpets and drums and the whole army advanced in battle formation towards the French lines. Incredible though it seems, the English were allowed to take up their new position and replant the archers’ stakes without any opposition. They were now within longbow shot of the enemy.
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Where was the French cavalry at this crucial moment? The answer is unclear. Chronicle accounts of the battle are confused, sometimes contradictory and often dictated by nationalist pride or party politics. The Breton Guillaume Gruel claimed that there were large numbers of “Lombards and Gascons” among the cavalry and accused these “foreigners” of fleeing at the first fusillade from the English archers. Others, such as the monk of St Denis and Gilles le Bouvier, laid the blame squarely at the door of the Armagnacs Clignet de Brabant and Louis de Bourdon, who were in command of the elite cavalry corps. The only thing most French chroniclers agreed on was that at the moment when they should have launched their cavalry charges against the English archers many of the mounted men-at-arms were not at their stations and were simply not to be found. Gilles le Bouvier, for example, asserts that they simply did not expect the English to attack, so some of them had wandered off to warm themselves and others were walking or feeding their horses.
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In other words, it was a classic case of being caught by surprise. And in this instance the sheer size of the French army was a major impediment to effective action. If the cavalry were at the rear, and not on the wing, they could not have observed the English advance and reacted promptly. Instead, valuable time would have been lost in relaying the information down the line and then in attempting to rally and mobilise their scattered forces. By the time sufficient mounted men-at-arms had gathered to launch a cavalry charge, it was too late. The English had taken up their new position and were now not only firmly entrenched behind their stakes again, but, having advanced into the narrower gap between the woodlands of Azincourt and Tramecourt, were protected on their flanks.
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It would now be impossible for the French to carry out their planned manoeuvre of riding round in a semicircular pincer movement to attack the English archers from the sides. Instead, they would have to do exactly what they had been trying to avoid: launch a frontal assault straight into the firing line of the archers.

Anywhere between 800 and 1200 mounted men-at-arms should have rallied to the standards of Clignet de Brabant and Louis de Bourdon; perhaps as few as 420 did so. It was a catastrophic diminution in numbers because the effectiveness of a cavalry charge depended on the weight behind it. Not only did the French not have enough mounted men to ride down the massed ranks of English archers; they were also unable to maintain the serried ranks that were the other component of a successful all-out strike. This was the result not just of a lack of discipline—a charge the chroniclers were quick to throw at them—but more of the state of the battlefield. Henry’s wisdom in sending out scouts in the middle of the night to test the ground now paid dividends. As the French cavalry discovered to their cost, the heavy rain had turned the newly ploughed fields into a quagmire of thick mud and surface water, slowing down their horses and causing them to slip, stumble and even fall. In such conditions it was difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a united front for what was supposed to be an irresistible onslaught.
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In the event, therefore, only 120 men-at-arms charged from one side of the French vanguard and 300 from the other towards the archers on each wing of the English army. Because their own lines were much broader than those of the English and the woods on either flank effectively channelled them inwards, the French were forced onto a converging trajectory over the battlefield. The men-at-arms of the vanguard, who had begun their own advance immediately after the cavalry set off, therefore found themselves in increasing difficulty as they got closer to the enemy because they were compelled to cover more of the same ground that the cavalry had already ridden over. The combined weight of heavily armed men-at-arms, charging on armoured horses, had churned up the already wet and muddy ground to such a depth that those on foot now found themselves floundering in mud up to their knees. The problem was exacerbated for each row of densely packed men-at-arms following in the footsteps of the men in front. Dragged down by the weight of their own armour, their plate-clad feet slipping as they tried to keep their balance on the uneven, treacherous ground, and struggling against the suction of the mud at every step, it is not surprising that they too were unable to maintain the good order in which they had set out.

As the French cavalry bore down on the English archers, answering the English battle-cries with their own “Montjoie! Montjoie!,” Sir Thomas Erpingham, who had dismounted and joined the king on foot in the front of the main battle, threw his baton of office into the air as a signal to fire and shouted the command “Now strike!”
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Five thousand archers then raised their longbows and loosed a volley of arrows so dense, so fast and so furious that the sky literally darkened over as though a cloud had passed before the face of the sun. One can imagine how the English stood listening to the reverberations from the bow-strings and the whistling of the flights as they sped through the air, followed, after a few heart-stopping moments, by the thud of bodkin arrowheads striking through plate-metal armour and tearing into flesh, and the screams of the wounded and dying. The terrified horses, maddened by the pain of the arrows, plunged, reared and fell, throwing off their riders beneath their flailing hooves and into the suffocating mud. Those horses that got as far as the front line were either impaled on the stakes or wheeled round to avoid them and fled out of control: a very few managed to escape into the neighbouring woodland, but most were either struck down by the deadly hail of arrows or galloped back—straight into their own advancing front lines, scattering them and trampling them down in their headlong flight.
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Three of the cavalry leaders were themselves killed in this first assault. Robert de Chalus, Ponchon de la Tour and Guillaume de Saveuses all suffered the same fate: their horses were brought down by the stakes, causing them to fall among the English archers, who promptly dispatched them.
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Tensions within the leadership of the cavalry unit might have contributed to its ignominious performance. Guillaume de Saveuses, “a very valiant knight,” had ridden ahead of his companions, expecting them to follow. They did not. It may have been that they were deterred by the hail of arrows and the stakes, but it may also have been because de Saveuses and his two brothers Hector and Philippe were prominent Burgundians in a primarily Armagnac force. Hector had been a notorious captain of a gang of men-at-arms who had plundered and terrorised large areas of Picardy; captured by the Armagnacs while supposedly on a pilgrimage to Paris, he had escaped execution only through the intervention of the countess of Hainault and two Armagnacs whom his brother Philippe had captured in retaliation and forced to intercede on his behalf.
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One can well imagine that there was no sympathy, very little trust and probably some rivalry between men such as the de Saveuses brothers and their fellow captains who were loyal to the Armagnac cause. The relationship with their nominal leader Clignet de Brabant, in particular, was fraught with difficulties. De Brabant was an Armagnac through and through, a chamberlain of Charles d’Orléans and a renowned jouster, who had chivalrously dropped his own lance in a feat of arms against a Portuguese knight earlier in the year because his opponent’s visor had flown open. Like the de Saveuses brothers, he had a reputation for roaming the countryside round Paris at the head of an armed band, terrorising the inhabitants and laying waste their lands. Though he did this in pursuit of the Armagnac cause, he had his own personal reasons for loathing the Burgundians, who, four years earlier, had executed his brother as a rebel after besieging and capturing the town of Moismes, of which he was captain.
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There were also private quarrels between the leaders of this group, as well as the more obvious political ones. Not many years earlier, Geffroi de Boucicaut and Jean Malet, sire de Graville, had had a very public falling-out. They had both fallen in love with the same woman, Charlotte de la Cochette, a maiden in the queen’s household. De Boucicaut, a younger brother of the more famous marshal, had struck de Graville in a jealous rage and de Graville had sworn to exact his revenge before the year was out. At around eight o’clock on the evening of the last day of the year, he had therefore set upon de Boucicaut in the streets of Paris and given him a severe beating. Neither de Boucicaut nor de Graville forgot or forgave the insult he had received, and the whole shabby episode was gleefully immortalised by the chroniclers, the tabloid journalists of the time.
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However great the horsemanship skills or the superiority of their armour that had led to the selection of the men-at-arms for the prestigious cavalry force, these were probably not enough to outweigh the political and personal rivalries between their leaders. Why should a de Saveuses take orders from de Brabant? Why should de Brabant risk his own life to come to the aid of Guillaume de Saveuses? Why should de Boucicaut fight side by side with the man who had humiliated him so publicly? However much they hated the English, these men hated one another even more.

What is most striking about the leaders of the cavalry corps is not so much their failure to achieve their military objective in the battle, but the fact that they almost all escaped with their lives. Clignet de Brabant, Louis de Bourdon, Hector and Philippe de Saveuses, Geffroi de Boucicaut, Jean Malet, sire de Graville, Georges, sire de la Trémouille (another unsavoury character who, some years later, dragged the sire de Giac naked from his bed, drowned him and married his widow),
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Jean d’Angennes, Alleaume de Gapannes, Ferry de Mailly,
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all survived and evaded capture. This made them unique among the companies who fought for France that day and lends weight to the contemporary complaint that, after their abortive attempt to destroy the English archers, they made no further effort to rejoin their compatriots in the fight.
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In the words of Gilles le Bouvier, apart from the handful who were killed, “all the rest failed to do their duty, for they fled shamefully, and never struck a blow against the English.” As a herald, and a recorder of such things, he duly noted the names of each of these leaders on a roll-call of eternal dishonour.
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The failure of the cavalry attack had far more serious consequences for the Frenchmen following in its wake than for those actually taking part in it. As they toiled through the churned-up mud and tried to avoid being trampled by the fleeing horses, they were completely at the mercy of the English archers, who bombarded them with volley after deadly volley. Arrows flew so thick and fast that the French were convinced that Henry had planted a secret ambuscade of two hundred selected archers in the woods of Tramecourt to attack them from the flanks as well. (The story was repeated by several chroniclers, but flatly denied by le Févre de St Remy: “I have heard it said and certified as the truth by an honourable man who, on that day, was with and in the company of the king of England, as I was, that he did no such thing.”)
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The accepted tactical response to a bombardment of this kind was to return similar fire. This the French were unable to do. Most of their own crossbowmen and archers were at the rear of their ranks and therefore unable to get a clear sight line at the enemy or, indeed, to inflict a comparable mass volley without injuring or killing their own men, who stood between them and their targets. Those on the flanks were in a better position to do so, but they could not maintain the speed or fire-power of the English longbows. The French artillery—consisting of catapults and some cannon—made a desultory attempt to launch a bombardment but, from fear of the English arrows, they were over-hasty in taking their aim, did little damage and, as the chaplain related with evident satisfaction, beat a hasty retreat. They succeeded in inflicting some casualties, for the exchequer records note that Roger Hunt, an archer in the retinue of the Lancashire knight Sir James Harington, had the misfortune “to be killed at the battle of Agincourt
cum uno gune
[with a gun].”
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