1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (52 page)

Those 1,500 ships must each have been carrying a minimum of ten men and ten horses, not including mariners. Given that the ships used to patrol the coasts carried between ten men-at-arms for a balinger and forty or fifty for a ship or barge, an army of this scale would have required 1,500 vessels, especially as each man was required to carry food sufficient for three months. Each ship also had to carry heavy artillery and weaponry – millions of arrows and thousands of bows, gunpowder and stone cannonballs – as well as more basic provisions for a siege: such as timber and animals for food in the first days. It was the largest army to leave England since the siege of Calais in 1347 (when Edward III had employed about 32,000 men over the course of a year).
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And at the time it was probably the largest fleet ever to have set out from England. In this context, one can understand Henry’s frustrations and occasional hastiness over the past months. He was taking a massive risk.

Tuesday 13th

It was the fishermen off the coast of Boulogne who first noticed the fleet approaching the French coast.
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The region around their town had been ransacked over recent days by the English of Calais, so they were alert to the danger. But one imagines that they looked at the huge fleet in the Channel with considerable alarm. Especially if they believed that it was heading to their own town.

The men of Boulogne were lucky: Henry was heading elsewhere. At about five o’clock in the afternoon
Trinity Royal
sailed into the mouth of the Seine and dropped anchor near a small hamlet called Chef de Caux, about three miles from the walls of Harfleur on the north bank of the Seine estuary. The banner of the council was unfurled on the
Trinity Royal
, calling all the councillors to a meeting. It was decided that a royal proclamation would be issued to all the ships forbidding anyone, on pain of death, from landing on French soil before the king himself, unless they had the king’s express permission. Everyone was to prepare to land early on the following morning; if the men dispersed in search of plunder, or women, the captains of
the army were liable to lose control. There was also the heavy risk of men in small groups being picked off by the French defenders. Henry had no need to take such risks at this stage of the campaign.

A group of men was selected to go ashore that night and to reconnoitre the immediate vicinity. Henry chose the hugely experienced Sir John Cornwaille, and Cornwaille’s brother-in-arms, William Porter, king’s esquire; and Cornwaille’s stepson, the young and talented earl of Huntingdon. With them went Sir Gilbert Umphraville and John Steward, and a number of mounted men-at-arms.
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Prior information from the men who had travelled through Harfleur over the preceding year led Henry to believe there was a hill nearby, Mont Leconte, on which it would be suitable to make a first camp. The expedition was to explore the area and establish first whether there were Frenchmen guarding this hill. Second, they were to find a suitable place for quartering the royal household. They went ashore in the early hours.

Wednesday 14th

Henry’s attitude to the landing suggests a high state of anxiety. This is entirely understandable: he had 15,000 men and probably twice as many mariners in an extremely vulnerable position. Years of planning, preparation and reconnaissance were being put to the test. Cautious all the way through, he waited until Cornwaille, Porter and Huntingdon had returned before he began to plan his own landing.

Those in the ships around him looked at the beach where they were expected to land. They felt uneasy. As the author of the
Gesta Henrici Quinti
noted,

the shore was very stony, with large boulders against which the ships were liable to be dashed, and with other smaller stones, pebbles handy for throwing, with which the enemy (had they wished to oppose our landing) could have attacked us and defended themselves. And at the back of the shore, between us and the land, deep ditches had been dug that were full of water; and behind these … earth walls of great thickness, furnished with ramparts and angles in the manner of a tower or castle; and between every two ditches the ground was left intact for the breadth of a cubit, permitting only one man at a time to enter or leave.
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The site had been chosen because it was thought to be left unguarded. But there was a good reason why: it was very difficult to land a large force here. A few ships could unload here quickly, maybe – but 1,500? The whole process would take such a long time. About a mile away, to the south of Harfleur, there were fewer stones – but that was no easier a landing place as there was a marsh there that led far inland, with ditches and gullies. The narrow tracks through that marsh would have allowed a few men to hold up several thousand.

Henry and his men took to the barges ‘between the sixth and seventh hour’ – which in this case probably means 6–7 a.m. (reckoning from midnight).
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When Henry landed he fell to his knees and prayed that he might do justice on his enemies. This gesture may have been a spontaneous act – or it may have been a deliberate emulation of his predecessors. It is worth remembering that Edward III had fallen on landing in Normandy on the Crécy campaign, and declared it a welcome embrace from the kingdom of France. This in turn was probably a deliberate emulation of William the Conqueror, who had fallen on landing in England in 1066 and got up with his hands full of sand, declaring he held the kingdom of England in his hands. Also in emulation of past practice, Henry knighted a number of men there on the beach – among them William Porter, Thomas Geney, John Calthorp and John Radcliffe – just as Edward III had knighted his son and other men on landing in 1346.
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Following these ceremonies, he was quickly led to the Mont Leconte, where his priests were able to celebrate Mass, and where the army would camp.

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For the French in the vicinity, there was no question of resisting such a large army. Although the English feared attack, and knew they were hugely vulnerable as they stepped ashore, to stop them would have required a large force of men to be ready to intercept them. The nearest such force (as the crow flies) was one of 1,500 men commanded by Charles d’Albret at Honfleur, on the south side of the Seine. Boucicaut was on the north side of the river – but at Caudebec, about 25 miles to the east.
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He also had about 1,500 men: too few to tackle the English after they had begun to come ashore in large numbers. As for Harfleur itself, there were at most only two small forces present: one hundred
men-at-arms under Jean, seigneur d’Estouteville; and thirty-four men-at-arms in the town, under the command of Lyonnet de Braquemont, Olivier de Braquemont and Jean Bufreuil, together with a small number of crossbowmen under Roland de Gérault.
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These forces could hardly take on an army of more than 11,000 fighting men. Three hundred more men-at-arms were mustering on this very day, commanded by the redoubtable knight, Raoul de Gaucourt; but they were still more than three days’ march away from Harfleur. What defensive precautions had already been undertaken were due to the townsmen themselves. Apart from the possibility that de Gaucourt might yet reach the town before the blockade started, the people of Harfleur and the small garrison were on their own.

Thursday 15th: the Feast of the Assumption

The problems posed by the landing site meant that it would take several days for all the men, horses, equipment and provisions to be taken off the ships. As thousands of men moved in and around the beach, and up the hill to the tents, Henry probably relocated himself to the priory of Graville. Perhaps it was in the church here that he celebrated the feast of the Assumption.

Outside the burning and looting had already started. Pigs, geese and hens were taken, granaries and houses robbed and burnt. The Englishmen – all with the red cross of St George painted on their surcoats – scattered quickly, searching for plunder.
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After a week of being restricted within small ships, they revelled in being on dry land and able to take what they wanted from the country that they had come to destroy.

Friday 16th

Henry had been gathering information on Harfleur for months. Members of his first embassy in 1414 had travelled to France via Harfleur, including Bishop Courtenay, the earl of Salisbury and Lord Grey.
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As we have seen, certain members of the recent embassy had also travelled that way, namely Sir William Bourchier, Sir John Phelip
and William Porter. And these were just the ambassadors who had passed through Harfleur; there must have been many other men besides. So Henry knew more or less what to expect when he looked down over the town and port from the hill to the west.

Harfleur was a medium-sized town, with a population of about five thousand people. A high 2½-mile stone wall, punctuated by two dozen watchtowers and surrounded by ditches, encircled the church of St Martin, the public buildings and houses of the citizens. The wall also enclosed
le clos de galées
: an inner fortified naval port whose walls were higher even than those of the town. The River Lézarde ran down from the north and divided into two: one part ran around the western wall of the town, like a deep moat; the other ran through sluices in the town walls, through the centre of the town itself and into
le clos de galées
. This guaranteed a water supply in a siege, and gave power to two mills just inside the walls. There were three gates: the
Porte Leure
on the west, the
Porte Montivilliers
on the north, and the
Porte Rouen
on the south east. Two large towers guarded the water gate leading to
le clos de galées
; these could raise a great chain between them, preventing the entry of any ships. To the south, on either side of the Lézarde, the town was protected by the marshes that ran down to the sea; these were the same marshes that the English attackers had noticed while waiting to disembark on the rocky shore further to the west.
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Not everything was familiar to Henry; some changes had recently taken place. Around each of the three gates substantial barbicans or bulwarks had been built. These were circular enclosures of tree-trunks lashed together and part-buried in the ground, strengthened with earth mounds and surrounded by water-filled moats. They had spaces in them for small cannon and crossbows to fire at approaching attackers. The road to Montivilliers had been in part taken up, and the stones taken into the town to use in the town’s catapults.
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The river approach to the town had been blocked with sharpened stakes below the water line. Most worrying of all, the sluice gates had been closed on the north, flooding the entire valley. To go around in order to attack the town on the east side now required a journey of nine or ten miles.
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But Henry had set himself upon a path. Since April he had described the expedition’s first aim as seizing Harfleur. It was a matter of pride that he would do what he had set out to do. He ordered
the houses in the suburbs to be burnt and the whole area to be cleared, ready for his siege engines and cannon. The attack would begin the following day.

Saturday 17th

The final provisions, horses and equipment were unloaded from the ships, and the siege began. Henry divided his army into three ‘battles’ or battalions in order to facilitate organisation. His own battle was centrally positioned, facing the
Porte Leure
; the other two were established on his flanks, probably commanded by the dukes of Clarence and York.

The actual order of events thereafter is not easy to determine. In all likelihood Henry set a high priority on bringing up the cannon and the siege engines from the coast. At least one great gun, ‘Goodgrace’, and one siege engine were positioned directly opposite the
Porte Leure
and its barbican.
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He held a council to determine the best way of attacking the town and of supplying the soldiers who were now encamped in the fields to the west. Groups of men were sent out to find food in the villages and farms nearby; they quickly covered a huge area. A twenty-eight-year-old priest from Harfleur, Raoul le Gay, was captured by an English foraging party on the road seven miles east of Harfleur. He was taken back to Santivic, three miles from the main army, and told by a French-speaking English knight that he would be ransomed for 100 crowns. Unfortunately for him, he could not pay. The English decided to take him to the main camp, at Graville.
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It appears likely that it was today that Henry issued his military ordinances – the set of codes of conduct for the campaign. These had been issued to armies since at least Edward III’s campaign in 1346, when an edict had stated that

no town or manor was to be burnt, no church or holy place sacked, and no old people, children or women in his kingdom of France were to be harmed or molested; nor were [the soldiers] to threaten people, or do any kind of wrong, on pain of life and limb.
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For Henry to attack in France and yet be seen as the leader of a moral war he needed to do his best to control the more violent and less humane tendencies of his soldiers. The military ordinances were proclaimed by the captains of the army, and copies were to be given to the captains to ensure that they were obeyed.

Various versions of the ordinances issued by Henry V over the years 1415–21 are extant. The set most likely to have been issued in August 1415 is known by historians as Upton’s ordinances.
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There were fourteen sections, the first being to protect churches and religious buildings and not steal from them, and to respect the Eucharist and the pyx; and the second not to capture or harm any clergymen or women, or to take prisoner any clergymen unless they were armed and hostile, and not to rape any women, on pain of death. The third section stipulated that everyone in the army – including merchants and other non-combatants riding with the army – should obey without question any order from the king, the constable and the marshal of the army. The fourth section specified how the night-time watch was to be maintained, with the constable and marshal again in charge. The fifth ordered captains to be ready to muster their men-at-arms and archers whenever the king or his officers required, on pain of arrest and forfeiture of arms and horse; and the sixth was designed to prevent insurrection and loss of control within the army. For instance, no one was to ‘cry havoc’ – ‘havoc’ being the order by which men on the battlefield could break ranks and steal whatever they wanted – and no one was to ‘cry montez’ (to horse) or other cries that might bring danger to the whole host. No one was to let old feuds and duels govern their conduct in the camp; and no matter what news came to the army, no one was to break ranks.