Agincourt (16 page)

The biggest loan of all, worth £10,936 3s 8d, came from Roger Salveyn, treasurer of Calais, who would have to wait more than six years for repayment in full. Other towns and cities gave what they could, the sums providing an interesting indication of their comparative wealth. Bristol, for instance, offered £582, Norwich £333 6s 8d, King’s Lynn and Newcastle £216 13s 4d each, York £200, Boston £80, Beverley, Canterbury, Exeter, Northampton and Nottingham £66 13s 4d each, Bridgewater £50, Gloucester, Maidstone and Sudbury £40 each, Bury St Edmunds and Faversham £33 6s 8d, Plymouth £20 and Dartmouth £13 6s 8d. As with subsidies, where a loan came from a town or city, the level was fixed by discussion with the mayor and his officials, who then had to recoup the figure from the inhabitants. The records for a loan of £100 made by the city of Coventry in 1424 reveal that scarcely anyone was exempt and individuals had to pay sums ranging from £1 6s 8d down to the merest 10d (the equivalent of $27.77 today).
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It would be surprising if fund-raising on this scale did not meet with protest, particularly from townsmen who had already contributed the first of the two-tenths of the value of their movable goods through the double subsidy of 1414, and were now being asked to contribute to a further “voluntary” loan. They could not even look to the consoling prospect of receiving interest, since usury was strictly prohibited by the Church, and all loans between Christians had to be interest-free. The sum of £100 had been demanded from Salisbury but was reduced, after much hard bargaining, to two-thirds of that figure, which was to be raised from eighty-five of the leading citizens. Even so, it took the threat of the king’s displeasure before the town finally handed over the money. Resentment in Salisbury apparently boiled over when Sir James Harington, bringing his retinue of Lancashire men-at-arms and archers to the muster at Southampton, attempted to cross the Avon by the Salisbury bridge and found himself embroiled in a full-scale affray with the townsfolk, in which four citizens were killed and fourteen thrown over the bridge into the river. In London, too, a grocer, a draper and a ward official were charged with having falsely accused an alderman of having levied a larger sum than was due from them for the city’s loan to the king; they confessed their guilt and were sentenced to a year and a day in Newgate Prison, though this was remitted on payment of a bond for good behaviour.
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Wealthy individuals, many of whom had lent money to the crown before, were more prepared to come forward with substantial loans. London mercers (textile dealers) were foremost among these. John Hende, for instance, made the largest single loan of £4666 13s 4d (now worth almost $3.2 million) and Richard Whittington, known to generations of English schoolchildren as Dick Whittington of pantomime fame, lent £700. Either a younger son or a member of a junior branch of a family of Gloucestershire gentry, Whittington had made his fortune by coming to London and setting up as a dealer in costly textiles. Having established himself as a supplier of cloth of gold and embroidered velvets worth well over £1000 annually to the royal household, he became an alderman of the city of London, and went on to serve three terms as mayor in 1397-8, 1406-7 and 1419-20, and also as a Member of Parliament in 1416. As mayor of the Staple at Calais, he was one of the wealthiest merchants in the country and could therefore afford to make regular loans to both Henry IV and Henry V, including one of £2000 to the latter soon after his accession.
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Not all merchants were as willing as Richard Whittington to bankroll the king and his forthcoming war. Resident foreign merchants, who had commercial interests in other countries, including France, were not at all happy at being asked to contribute to the war chest. Antonio Morosini, the Venetian chronicler, complained that many Lombard and Italian merchants were being seized, together with their goods, and were forced to pay the king huge sums to obtain their release. Discreditable though it seems, Morosini was right. On 25 May 1415 ten partners in Italian merchant houses were summoned before the privy council and, when they refused to make loans totalling £2000, were flung into the Fleet Prison—a nicely sardonic touch, since this was the jail for debtors.
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This sort of action probably had the desired effect, for, by the beginning of June, money from foreign merchants was rolling into the treasury: the Albertis and John Victor from Florence obliged with almost £800 and £266 13s 4d, respectively, Paul de Meulan from Lucca with £132 and Nicholas de Muleyn and his associates from Venice with £660. Perhaps as compensation for their harsh treatment, all were repaid in full within the year, though it was an indication of the strain on the king’s finances that Laurence de Alberti had to accept a novel form of credit, being allowed to bring in five ships without having to pay any duty on their cargoes.
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The wealth of the Church was also placed at the king’s disposal. It comes as no surprise to find that Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, the wealthiest clergyman in England, lent his nephew almost £2630 in June and July alone, or that Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, and Philip Repingdon, bishop of Lincoln, should also have supported their monarch to the tune of £200 and £400, respectively. Abbots, priors and deans of cathedral chapters also had access to the funds of their communities—though quite where Friar Henry Cronnale, a member of a mendicant order dedicated to poverty, got the £200 he lent is a mystery. What is surprising is the number of relatively humble clergymen who, willingly or not, pledged quite substantial sums: thirteen parsons in the diocese of Durham alone each lent £20 ($13,330 today), as did William Shyrymton, rector of Holt-market, in Norfolk.
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The complex systems of accounting for this money, the deferral of some repayments (in some cases for many years) and the incomplete nature of the records mean that it is virtually impossible to determine exactly how much Henry managed to raise. The only chronicler to hazard a guess was the Burgundian Enguerrand de Monstrelet, writing thirty years afterwards, whose estimate of 500,000 gold nobles (the equivalent of $111 million today) was accepted by most subsequent chroniclers, English and French.
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Convenient though this may be, all that can be said with any certainty is that it was a huge sum, and that it was enough not only to pay the army’s wages but also to finance the campaign. Whatever else dictated Henry’s military decisions on the Agincourt campaign, shortage of money was not one of them.

Despite the fact that England had no standing army in medieval times, which meant that every single serving soldier had to be individually recruited, raising sufficient men to fight under Henry’s command was a much easier exercise than finding the cash to pay them. Indeed, in this respect, he had an embarrassment of riches, for he was unable to find places on board for all the men who mustered at Southampton. Even though he issued a last-minute repeat of the order to seize any ships left in the port of London and bring them “with all possible speed” to Southampton, he still had to leave some men behind.
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The old feudal system of owing personal military service for a particular piece of land had long since broken down, though its influence remained. The king still expected his tenants-in-chief to accompany him to war and to bring with them a certain number of men, most of whom would inevitably be drawn from their own landholdings and areas of influence. Instead of being bound by ties of loyalty and obligation, however, these soldiers, from highest to lowest, were bound by written contracts of service, which were legally defined and enforceable by law. England had developed a particularly sophisticated system for raising armies by this method in response to the almost continuous demands of fighting the war in France under Edward III. It was based on the indenture, a single document that consisted of two identical copies of the contract, both signed, witnessed and, where relevant, sealed by the two parties. The document was then cut in two, not in a straight line, but in a wavy or indented one. Each party then took one of the copies. If any dispute arose about the terms and conditions of service, both parties had to produce their copies, which could then be placed together to ensure that the indents matched and that the two were genuinely parts of the original indenture. This simple but ingenious stratagem made it extremely difficult to produce a fake document, or for either party to defraud the other by making changes to his own copy.

There were two types of retaining indenture. One was drawn up to create a contract for service in peace and war, usually for life, the other for a specific military campaign and for a predetermined length of time. Many of the men who fought at Agincourt were there as life retainers of the king or other lord whom they served, and, just as they formed the core of his household in peace, so they were the basis of his military retinue in war. These men were the first Henry would call upon, issuing an order on 22 March 1415 that any knight, esquire, valet or anyone else who was in receipt of a royal fee, wage or annuity granted by Edward III, Richard II, the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Henry IV or himself was to present himself in London by 24 April at the latest.
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On 19 April the king entertained the members of his great council—all four royal dukes, together with nine earls, fifteen barons, both archbishops, eight bishops and several abbots of major houses—to breakfast at Westminster Palace and once again sought their approval for his war against France. Having noted that the king had followed their earlier advice to renew his diplomatic efforts and moderate his claims without success, the meeting duly gave the war its formal sanction and put in place the arrangements that would be necessary for its successful prosecution.
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Ten days later, a large number of temporary military indentures for the Agincourt campaign were signed at Westminster. A typical example was that of Thomas Chaucer, speaker of the House of Commons. In his indenture with the king, Chaucer contracted to serve in person for one year with a company of eleven men-at-arms and thirty-six archers (though, like many other captains, he actually mustered an extra archer when the campaign began).
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“Men-at-arms” was a loose term that had come to replace “knights” as the standard description of the medieval fighting man. As it included every rank in society, from the king and royal dukes down to the humblest esquire who could afford to equip himself with the basics of horses, arms and armour, the indenture always indicated the status of the men-at-arms. In Chaucer’s case, all his men-at-arms were esquires, including himself. His archers were to be mounted, as were those of most contingents, though some archers were recruited without horses and so presumably travelled, as they fought, on foot. In either case, the archers almost invariably outnumbered the men-at-arms by three to one, a proportion that was unusually high and unique to England.
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The wages for the campaign had been set by the king at the meeting of the great council. The rates were customary and varied according to where the campaign was to be fought. In this case, although the council had discussed an expedition “towards Harfleur and the region of Normandy,” Henry was determined to maintain the military advantage by keeping the enemy guessing as to where he intended to attack. He could not hide the scale of his preparations, but his precise objective in France would remain a secret until after his fleet had sailed. The indentures therefore deliberately left the destination open: service would be required “in our duchy of Guyenne, or in our realm of France,” commencing on the day of muster. Wages would be paid at the daily rate of 13s 4d for a duke, 6s 8d for an earl, 4s for a baron, 2s for a knight, 12d for an esquire and 6d for an archer, mounted or not. Every group of thirty men-at-arms was also entitled to a “regard,” or bonus payment, of 100 marks, which was effectively a form of compensation for the cost of armour and loss of horses. If the expedition went to Aquitaine no bonus would be paid, but the wages of the esquires and archers would be increased to an annual rate of £26 13s 4d and £13 6s 8d, respectively.
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The wages offered for military service in France were proportionately better for those in the lower ranks than for those in the upper echelons of society. The aristocracy were expected to fight by virtue of their birth: the military profession was their calling and duty, and it was not anticipated that they could earn a living from their military wages alone. The same was true of knights, whose outlay in horses, arms and armour for the campaign would probably cost them more than they could expect from a year’s income. (Forty pounds a year of landed or rental income was considered sufficient to support the status of knighthood in the medieval period, and this was also about the sum a knight could expect to earn from a year’s military service at the king’s wages.) For esquires and archers, who made up the backbone of the army, the financial attraction was much greater. An esquire earning £18 5s a year in war was likely to be better off than in peacetime: the London subsidy rolls for 1412 identify 42 citizens who claimed the rank of esquire, but only 12 of them enjoyed a rental income exceeding £15 per annum. An archer was even better off: on a daily wage of 6d, he would receive roughly £9 a year, without having to pay for his food and drink. In civilian life, even highly skilled workmen and craftsmen, such as carpenters, masons and plumbers, generally earned only between 3d and 5d a day, out of which they had to find their own subsistence.
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The prospect of earning 6d a day was also attractive to those of higher social rank. Many of Henry V’s archers were yeomen, farmers and minor landholders with incomes in the region of £5 a year, who could afford to equip themselves with a horse and basic armour; some were even younger brothers or sons of gentry whose family purse was not deep enough to provide the king’s host with more than one man-at-arms. For them, military service in France offered the prospect of advancement, and a number of men who were initially recruited as archers would later be found serving as men-at-arms.
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