Agincourt (13 page)

Longbows were not only lighter and faster to operate, but also considerably cheaper to make than crossbows. Prices in 1413-15 ranged from less than 1s to just over 2s, at a time when an ordinary archer earned 6d, or half 1s, a day on campaign. The quality of a bow depended on the wood from which it was made. Every English schoolchild knows the story that the ancient yew trees, which grow in so many local churchyards, were planted to provide the archers of England with bows. In fact, English yew was an unsuitable material for bow-making because the changeable climate encouraged its tendency to twist as it grows. (Church property was, in any case, exempt from requisitioning; when Nicholas Frost, the king’s bowyer, was empowered to acquire anything belonging to the bowyers’ trade, including “the timber called bowestaves,” just before the Agincourt campaign, he was not allowed to encroach on Church land.)
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The best bow-staves were cut from a single piece of straight-grained yew, imported from Spain, Italy or Scandinavia, and shaved into shape. Unstrung, the bow would be some six feet long and tapered, with the softer, more flexible sap-wood on the outside and a thicker layer of heart-wood on the inside, a combination that gave the bow its natural elasticity. Nocks made of horn were glued at either end to hold the string, and the whole bow was given several layers of protective wax or oil sealant. A regular maintenance regime of waxing and polishing ensured that the bow did not dry out or crack under the pressure of being strung or fired. Bow-strings, made of hemp or gut, were also waxed or oiled to keep them weather-proof, though this was not always successful. At the battle of Crécy in 1346, the Genoese crossbowmen found out to their cost that the pouring rain had soaked their bow-strings, so that they “could not stretch the cords to the bows so shrunken were they . . . they could not shoot a single bolt.” The English, perhaps because they were more accustomed to rain, had learnt how to deal with such possibilities. According to the French chronicler Jean de Vennette, they “protected their bows by putting the strings on their heads under their helmets,” a habit that is said to have given rise to the expression “keep it under your hat.”
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Archaeological evidence from the wreck of the Tudor warship the
Mary Rose
suggests that the commonest draw-weight of a medieval English military longbow was between 150 and 160 pounds and that it was capable of firing an arrow weighing 4 ounces over a distance of 240 yards. To achieve this, regular use was essential. In 1410 Henry IV had reissued Edward III’s act of 1363 which made archery practice compulsory for all able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and sixty; every Sunday and feast day they were to go to the butts, the local shooting ranges, where targets were set up over measured distances, to “learn and practise the art of shooting . . . whence by God’s help came forth honour to the kingdom and advantage to the king in his actions of war.” Novices would begin with lightweight bows and arrows, progressing to heavier ones as their skill and strength increased. “I had my bows made me according to my age and strength,” wrote Hugh Latimer, the English bishop who was martyred for his Protestant beliefs in 1555; “as I increased in them, so my bows were made bigger and bigger, for men never shoot well, unless they be brought up to it.” He had learnt, he said, “how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow, and not to draw with strength of arms as other nations do, but with strength of the body.” The twisted spines and increased bone density of the over-developed shoulders, upper arms and elbows of the
Mary Rose
archers are testimony to the physical effort required to use the military longbow.
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They also explain why English archers were feared throughout Europe.

Henry V was not prepared to rely entirely on his archers for the Agincourt campaign. His experience of warfare in Wales had taught him the value of siege-craft and the importance of artillery. Although cannons had been around since at least the 1320s (and Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan monk, had discovered how to make gunpowder more than half a century before that), gun technology was still in its infancy. In yet another example of an unholy alliance between Church and state, the skills involved in casting cannons originated, and were honed, in the foundries that made church bells. The reason for this becomes clearer when one realises that the earliest cannons were bell-shaped and made of bronze or brass; the bolts they fired were also made of bronze. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the longer, more familiar tubular design had developed. By the time of the Agincourt campaign, cannons were usually made from long iron strips, heated and hammered together round a removable wooden core and bound round with iron hoops to form the barrel. The guns were breech loading and, depending on the size of the cannon, fired anything from lead pellets, like grapeshot, to round stone balls, which weighed between 5 and 850 pounds. A second separate metal chamber, also tubular in shape, was packed with gunpowder, plugged with a wooden bung and placed behind the barrel on a hollowed-out wooden frame. The cannon was now ready for firing through a touch-hole in the second chamber, but the whole process was so slow and inaccurate that a single shot a day was not uncommon. One gunner who managed to hit three different targets on the same day was assumed to be in league with the devil and sent off on pilgrimage to redeem himself.
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Large ordnance was hugely expensive to make. A single cannon made in Bristol by John Stevens, and laboriously hauled overland to London for the Agincourt campaign, cost Henry V £107 10s 8d. The scale of the investment required in artillery is indicated by Christine de Pizan, in her authoritative treatise,
The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry
, written in 1410. She suggested that anyone planning to besiege a stronghold on a river or by the sea (as Henry was) needed to have 248 cannons, capable of firing stones weighing between one hundred and five hundred pounds, together with thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder, five thousand sacks of charcoal, twenty three-legged braziers with handles for lighting the fuses and twenty bellows. A reinforced cart would be required to transport each cannon, plus a further twenty-five, each pulled by three horses, to carry their supplies. Again, the logistical problems involved in acquiring and, above all, transporting artillery were tremendous. In the fifteenth century, large artillery pieces could be moved an average of only seven and a half miles a day, and in 1409 the great cannon of Auxonne, which weighed some 7700 pounds, managed only three miles a day. Travelling by sea or river was faster and easier, but guns still had to be brought to the port of embarkation and moved into position at the end of their voyage.
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On 22 September 1414, as Henry’s preparations for war stepped up a gear, he commanded Nicholas Merbury, master of the king’s “works, military engines and guns, and of all our ordnance for war,” to find as many stone masons, carpenters, sawyers, joiners and workmen as were “necessary for the construction of the said guns,” together with timber, iron and anything else he required for them, including transport. A similar order addressed to William Wodeward, “ffounder,” and Gerard Sprunk, authorised them to collect copper, brass, bronze, iron and all other kinds of metal to make “certain guns” for the king, but also to restock his kitchen with pots, bowls and kettles for the campaign. Four days later, the king addressed a writ to all the collectors of customs and subsidies and transport wardens in ports throughout the kingdom, prohibiting the exportation of “gunpoudre” without a special licence. This was done “for certain causes,” the mysterious phrase that Henry frequently employed as a somewhat transparent cover for his military preparations.
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William Merssh, the king’s smith at the Tower, was also busy, and as early as February 1414 was looking to employ more workmen to make guns and other ironwork. This was despite the fact that his wife, Margaret, was a professional blacksmith in her own right, who worked alongside her husband in the Tower forge. Payments made to her include one of 35s (almost $1,200 at today’s values) for eighteen pairs of fetters and eight pairs of manacles. Though it flies in the face of modern misconceptions about the medieval period, women were expected to work at their husband’s trade. The Ordinance of Founders of 1390, for instance, stipulated that each master smith could employ only one apprentice, but a special exemption was granted for one man to have two, “because he has no wife.” Her female status did not protect the wife of a “smytheman” from having to do hard labour: she was expected to break up rock, work the bellows and smelt ore. Although she was paid for these tasks, she normally earned only a twelfth of his wage, receiving 1d for his every 1s.
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Smelting iron was a filthy business, as well as a back-breaking one. Iron ore was readily available in almost every English county, and was used to produce nails, horseshoes and tools; better-quality imported iron from Normandy, Spain and Sweden was used for siege engines and weapons. To make iron, crushed iron ore would be layered with charcoal in furnaces that needed to be kept at very high temperatures to extract the molten metal. Steel, which was increasingly used for armour and weapons, was made by a more complex and highly skilled procedure. The iron was sprinkled with a mixture of burnt ox-horn and salt, or, alternatively, smeared with pig fat and covered with strips of goat leather or clay; this was heated red hot, then plunged into water or urine (animal or human) to cool down and harden. It was perhaps not surprising that the records of the city of London were full of complaints about “the great nuisance, noise and alarm experienced in divers ways” by those living close to forges. A particular fear was fire because sparks “so vigorously issued forth from the chimneys,” but the noise levels could be intolerable. The neighbours of one armourer, Stephen atte Fryth’, complained that

the blows of the sledge-hammers when the great pieces of iron called “Osmond” are being wrought into “brestplates,” “quysers,” “jambers” and other pieces of armour, shake the stone and earthen party-walls of the plaintiffs’ house so that they are in danger of collapsing, and disturb the rest of the plaintiffs and their servants, day and night, and spoil the wine and ale in their cellar, and the stench of the smoke from the sea-coal used in the forge penetrates their hall and chambers.
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There had always been forges in the Tower of London and female blacksmiths working there too. During Edward III’s Crécy campaign, Katherine of Bury, the mother of the king’s smith, was paid 8d a day to “keep up the King’s forge in the Tower and carry on the work of the forge” while her son was with the king in France; she was probably highly experienced, for she was also the widow of Walter of Bury, who had been the king’s smith for nine years. This precedent suggests that it is possible that Margaret Merssh also ran her husband’s forge in the Tower while he was away on the Agincourt campaign. The female blacksmith was clearly not a woman to be trifled with: in medieval literary tradition, she had a particularly evil reputation and, like Eve before her, the sins of the world were laid at her feet. The story was that the blacksmith who was asked to make the nails for Christ’s crucifixion could not bring himself to do it and feigned an injury to his hand. His wife had no such qualms, took over his forge and made the nails herself.
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The greatest problem facing Henry V was not so much acquiring the materials of war, but transporting them. An invasion of France, of necessity, demanded the use of ships, and when Henry came to the throne in 1413 the royal fleet consisted of precisely six vessels. His great-grandfather, Edward III, upon whom Henry so often seems to have modelled himself, had been able to call on between forty and fifty royal ships throughout his long reign. Within four years of Richard II’s accession, only five remained, and by 1380 four of these had been sold off to pay Edward III’s debts. Henry IV’s fleet never exceeded six ships and was sometimes reduced to two. Both kings had been forced to rely on seizing privately owned merchant vessels to supplement their fleet when required. This had caused considerable anger and hostility, not least because, until 1380, there was no compensation paid to the ship-owners. Under pressure from the House of Commons, Richard II had then agreed that 3s 4d would be paid for every quarter-ton of carrying capacity, but the usual payment rarely exceeded a paltry 2s and was regularly the subject of bitter complaints in Parliament. Another cause of tension was that the wages of seamen were not always paid from the date of their being pressed into service but from the day they actually sailed.
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Henry V’s reign marked a revolution in the fortunes of the royal fleet. The six ships he had inherited in 1413 had become twelve by 1415 and thirty-four by the time he began his second invasion of France in 1417. The architects of this transformation were a clergyman and a draper. William Catton became clerk of the king’s ships in July 1413, and, like all his predecessors in the post, was a civil servant in minor orders.
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William Soper, who replaced him in 1420, was a wealthy merchant and Member of Parliament from Southampton with extensive shipping interests. Within weeks of his appointment, Catton was given authority to obtain all the materials, sailors and workmen he needed to perform the task of repairing and building up the king’s navy. Soper became officially involved in February 1414, when he obtained a similar commission for the specific purpose of “the making and amending of a great ship of Spain at Southampton.”
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No doubt at least in part because William Soper was based there, Southampton became in effect Henry’s royal dockyard. The port enjoyed great natural advantages: protected from the Channel by the Isle of Wight, the sheltered waters of the Hamble estuary, Southampton Water and the Solent provided a mass of natural harbours and easy access to the French coast that lay opposite. On its doorstep was a seemingly limitless supply of timber from the New Forest for the building and maintenance of the king’s ships. Soper added a new dock and storehouse at Southampton and built more storehouses and wooden defences for the ships under construction at Hamble. For the first time, the English had a naval dockyard that was beginning to rival the great fourteenth-century French shipyards at Rouen.
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