Agincourt (46 page)

Just how many prisoners were now in English hands is a matter as hotly disputed and as irresolvable as the number of combatants in the French army. The lowest contemporary estimate comes from an English source, Thomas Walsingham, who suggested that 700 men were captured at the battle; le Févre puts the figure at 1600 and says that they were “all knights or esquires,” a statement that is likely to be true, given that anyone of lower rank would not be worth ransoming. Both the monk of St Denis, with 1400, and the chronicler of the nearby abbey of Ruisseauville, with 2200, are in the same sort of region, as is the report that went to the council of Constance suggesting 1500.
⁷

Whatever their actual numbers, it is indisputable that they included some of the greatest men in the kingdom: Charles, duke of Orléans; Jean, duke of Bourbon; Charles, count of Eu; Louis, count of Vendôme; and Arthur, count of Richemont; together with the paragon of French chivalry Marshal Boucicaut. It was a disaster for the Armagnac cause on an epic scale. With the exception of the dauphin, who would die, unlamented, only a couple of months later in December 1415, the seventy-five-year-old duke of Berry, who would die the following year, and Louis, duke of Anjou (whose force of 600 men failed to arrive in time for the battle, turning tail and returning to Rouen without striking a blow when they encountered some of the French fleeing from the field), every Armagnac leader of any consequence had been killed or taken captive.

As evening approached and even the skies wept over the blood-soaked field of Agincourt, Henry decided that it was too late to resume his journey to Calais. However objectionable it might be to have to spend the night in such close proximity to the piles of unburied dead, his men were desperately short of rest and sleep. They needed to gather their strength, and the French baggage wagons, abandoned on the field, offered them a welcome and ready supply of provisions after the tight rationing of the previous weeks. The king himself retired to his former lodgings at Maisoncelle, where, as they were bound to do by the terms of their indentures, his captains surrendered to him all the princes of the blood royal and French commanders who had been captured. According to one source, written almost a quarter of a century later by an Italian under the auspices of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, Henry required the most noble of his French prisoners to serve him at his feast that night. Though the story obtained popular currency because it was repeated by Tudor historians, it does not occur in any eyewitness or contemporary account, and seems to have been an embellishment. After all, as le Févre de St Remy pointed out, most of the prisoners had been wounded and therefore would not have been in a fit state to wait upon their conqueror. In any case, this was not a moment for the sort of ruthless humiliation of his prisoners which Henry had displayed at the public surrender of Harfleur. Instead, he treated them with grace and punctilious politeness, speaking courteously and comfortingly to them, ensuring that the wounded were treated and offering food and wine to them all.
⁸

Very early the next morning, on Saturday 26 October, the king left his lodgings and escorted his prisoners in a final penitential act of walking over the battlefield. “It was a pitiful thing to see the great numbers of the nobility who had been killed there for their sovereign lord, the king of France,” le Févre remarked: “they were already stripped naked as the day they were born.” Even at this late stage the living could still be found under the piles of the dead. Those who were capable of identifying themselves as being of noble birth were taken prisoner; the rest, including those too severely wounded to travel, were put to death.
⁹

The king now gave the command for his army to resume its journey towards Calais. The remarkable reversal in fortune that had befallen them the previous day was acknowledged by the decision that although they would still march in their customary battle formation, the order to wear coats of arms was rescinded; the English were no longer expecting or looking for a fight. Monstrelet tells us that three-quarters of them now had to travel on foot. Many horses on both sides were undoubtedly killed in the battle, despite the fact that all the English and most of the French had not used them for fighting. It is a matter of record in the royal accounts for the period that the king alone lost twenty-five, in addition to a further twenty that died on the march. Despite these heavy losses, the number of horses shipped back to England at the end of the campaign still outnumbered the men. Even the duke of York’s retinue, which had suffered especially high casualties in the battle, returned with 329 horses as opposed to only 283 men. If three-quarters of the English army really did have to resume their march on foot, it can only have been because their horses were required for carrying the wounded, the prisoners and possibly booty, but it seems more likely that Monstrelet’s claim was simply an exaggeration.
¹⁰

Nevertheless, the English progress towards Calais was unusually slow. They had some forty-five miles to cover and it took them a full three days. After the high drama and tension of the journey to Agincourt, the remainder of the march was such an anticlimax that even the chaplain passed over it without any comment. This cannot have entirely reflected the actual mood of those in command, for Henry at least was aware that, despite his victory, his men were not yet out of danger. Jean, duke of Brittany, with his Breton forces, was not so far away at Amiens. Louis d’Anjou’s six hundred men, under the command of the sire de Longny, were even closer, having come within three miles of the conflict before turning to flee. And no one knew for sure where John the Fearless was, or whether he would put in a belated appearance with the Burgundian forces he had claimed to be raising for so long. There could be no certainty that the alliances with the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy would hold in the light of the capture of the former’s brother, Arthur, count of Richemont, and the deaths of both the latter’s brothers, Antoine, duke of Brabant, and Philippe de Nevers, at Agincourt. The English could not afford to relax their guard against the possibility of an ambush until they finally reached the safety of the Pas-de-Calais.

In the event, the march passed off without any serious incident, though the accounts of the town of Boulogne record that some stragglers in the English army were captured by the men of the garrison and imprisoned in the belfry.
¹¹
By the evening of Monday 28 October the army had reached the fortified town of Guînes, which lay within the Pas-de-Calais, and was second only to Calais in its importance. They were welcomed with all due solemnity by the captain of the garrison and Henry, together with his most notable prisoners, spent the night there. The rest of the army pressed on to Calais, which lay only a few miles further north. If they had expected a hero’s welcome, they were mistaken. The citizens of Calais were understandably nervous about admitting almost six thousand half-starved and battle-hardened armed men through their gates. Provision had been made for the army’s arrival: food, beer and medicines had already been sent over from London in abundant quantities, but a shortage of bread was almost inevitable. Anxious to avoid a clash between the soldiers and the citizenry, or the even worse prospect of gangs of armed men rampaging through the streets taking by force what they could not acquire by purchase, the town authorities gave orders that only the leaders of the English army were to be admitted within its walls. The rest, including the less important French prisoners, were to remain encamped outside.
¹²

The wisdom of this move was readily apparent. There was much hard bargaining between the Agincourt veterans, who were desperate for food and drink, and the hard-nosed traders of Calais, who had an eye on the spoils of battle. The former naturally resented the latter, accusing them of exploiting their situation and forcing them to sell their booty and their prisoners at a mere fraction of their true value, simply in order to obtain the necessaries of life. In fact, a trade in prisoners, especially, was inevitable. Not everyone who had captured a Frenchman could afford to keep him indefinitely: in addition to paying for his living expenses, there was also the cost of his shipment back to England to consider. Many of the prisoners were also wounded and in need of medical care and treatment, which was an expensive luxury at the best of times, but an essential investment if the prisoner was to be kept alive for ransom. And the hope of obtaining large sums of money at some future date was not necessarily as attractive a prospect as that of realising cash in hand.

Unfortunately, we do not know the exact process by which the figure for the ransom was calculated, other than that it had to be agreed between the captor and his prisoner. A ransom of less than 10 marks (the equivalent of almost $4,444 today) was entirely at the disposal of the captor, whatever his rank, so there must have been a strong temptation to set this as the ceiling value. On the other hand, captors were under pressure from superior officers to obtain the best possible price. According to the terms of their indentures, anyone in the English army who captured a prisoner worth more than 10 marks was obliged to pay a third of the ransom to his own captain, whether that captain was head of a tiny retinue or the king himself. Where the captain had been personally retained by the crown, his indenture obligated him to pay a third of that third directly to the king.
¹³
With the eye of the king fixed firmly upon them, and a comprehensive list of all prisoners being drawn up by his clerks at Calais, underselling of ransoms was not likely to be a common practice.

Henry himself remained only a single night at Guînes, making a triumphant entry into Calais on Tuesday 29 October over the Nieulay bridge, which had been hastily repaired “against the arrival of the king after his victory at Agincourt,” and along the causeway that led to the town gates. There he was welcomed by its captain, his old friend Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, and a vast crowd of excited citizens. Escorted through the streets by the priests and clergymen of the town, clad in their ecclesiastical robes, bearing the crosses and banners from their respective churches and singing the
Te Deum
, he was hailed on every side by men, women and children crying, “Welcome to the king, our sovereign lord!” Making his way to the castle, where he was to lodge until his passage home could be organised, he paused only to give thanks at the church of St Nicholas for his victory. Ironically, eleven years earlier, the same church had witnessed the marriage of Richard II to the infant Isabelle of France, a union that had been intended to end the decades of warfare which Henry had now rekindled.
¹⁴

Henry was committed to remaining in Calais until 11 November 1415. On that day, all those who had previously surrendered to him, both at the fall of Harfleur and at various stages on the march to Agincourt, were under oath to give themselves up to him again as his prisoners. To a man they did so. Unbelievable as it may seem to a more cynical modern world, they came voluntarily and without any compulsion, other than the power of chivalric ideology. They could have chosen to ignore their obligation: they were at liberty in their own country and the English were not in a position to round them up and throw them into jail. They could have claimed that their oaths were invalid because they were obtained under duress. They could have excused themselves on the grounds of sickness or the needs of their families. Instead, they chose honour before dishonour and keeping faith to perjury. They did so in the knowledge that they faced financial ruin, years in foreign captivity and possibly even execution.

Raoul de Gaucourt, the former captain of Harfleur, rose from his sickbed at Hargicourt, near Amiens, and, despite being wasted by the dysentery that had had him in its grip since the final days of the siege, made his way to Calais to surrender to Henry V. With him went at least twenty-five of his former companions, including Jean, sire d’Estouteville, Georges de Clère and Colard Blosset. As de Gaucourt later recounted, when he and d’Estouteville appeared before Henry, they demanded that, as they had fulfilled their part of the agreements concluded at the surrender of Harfleur, he should now keep those undertakings that had been given on his part. We do not know what those undertakings were, though de Gaucourt seems to have believed that, having come to Calais as required by his oath, he would now be released again on parole to raise his ransom. But whatever promises had been made by the king’s negotiators, Sir Thomas Erpingham, Henry, Lord Fitzhugh, and the earl of Dorset, Henry himself refused to be bound by them: “he replied, that whatever these parties might have said to us, we should all remain prisoners.”
¹⁵
As de Gaucourt and his companions were to learn to their cost, their defiance of the king in holding Harfleur for so long against him would be neither forgiven nor forgotten. Their captivity would endure long after most of the prisoners taken at Agincourt had been released.

The logistical problem of transporting such vast numbers of prisoners ensured that only the most important would be taken back to England. Those who were of lesser value, or who could provide security for their ransoms, were released on oath to raise the money within a specified term. Others, including those who were too sick or badly wounded to travel, remained in custody but were dispersed to various strongholds throughout the Pas-de-Calais. Not all of them survived: Robin de Hellande,
bailli
of Rouen, for instance, was still in captivity when he died on 15 December 1415, and two of the eleven prisoners in the custody of Ralph Rocheford, captain of Hammes, died during the course of 1416.
¹⁶
A contributory factor in the deaths of Rocheford’s prisoners may have been that he was allowed only 3s 4d a week (the medieval equivalent of $111 today) for each man’s living expenses: though this was about the same as a skilled workman could expect to earn at the time, it was considered to be the minimum amount necessary for a prisoner of knightly lineage, and contrasts sharply with the 10s 9d allowed to each of the Harfleur defendants during their imprisonment in the Tower of London. Medical expenses were an additional burden: the cure of Jean, sire d’Estouteville’s long illness in 1418 cost the king 40s ($1,317 at modern values) “for divers medicines” purchased from the royal physician, Master Peter Altobasse.
¹⁷