Agincourt (20 page)

There was something of a family tradition in minstrelsy, as Roland le Fartere’s descendants learnt to their cost. Henry V’s marshal of his minstrels, John Clyff, who signed the indenture with the king for service on the Agincourt campaign on behalf of his fellows, was the son or grandson of John of Gaunt’s nakerer. Of the remainder whose surnames are not simply a description of the instrument they played, three were members of the Haliday family. Thomas and Walter, who were probably the sons of William Haliday, were among the group of named minstrels who received bequests of £5 each from Henry V’s will and went on to serve his son. A Walter Haliday and a John Clyff, presumably of another generation, were still active in royal service (albeit the house of York, rather than Lancaster) under Edward IV, and in 1469 were granted a licence to establish a guild of royal minstrels.
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The same sort of family tradition affected the heraldic profession. This was not surprising, since heralds had begun life as minstrels, and only achieved their distinctive status as the knowledge required of them grew more specialised and technical. Hereditary badges had been used on the shields of knights and nobles since the twelfth century, developing into a unique heraldic device or blazon for each individual, which heralds were expected to recognise instantly. By the late fourteenth century, heralds had also established themselves as the rule-makers and judges of the chivalric world. As the acknowledged experts on the history and drawing up of blazonry, they were called upon to identify the arms of those fighting in joust, tournament and war, to judge cases of disputed arms and to confirm orders of social precedence. Their knowledge of chivalric conventions and rules of conduct also made them unrivalled masters of ceremony, whose responsibility it was to award the palm of honour to those who displayed outstanding combat prowess and to organise all the social ritual connected with knighthood, from tournament to coronation. Last, but not least, they had become the authors of chivalric record, drawing up reference books of English and continental coats of arms, preserving exceptionally fine examples of jousting challenges and chronicling deeds of chivalry. It was no accident that at least two of the eyewitness accounts of the battle of Agincourt were drawn up by heralds. “Yours is a fair office,” the allegorical figure Dame Prudence declared in one of the popular literary debates regarding heralds written in about 1430, “for by your report men judge of worldly honour.”
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In times of war, heralds had a very important role to play. It was their responsibility to record for posterity the granting of knighthoods in the field, to note the arms and names of those who fought well and, more macabrely, to identify and record the dead; they were sometimes even required to judge who had won the victory. They were also expected to act as messengers between the warring parties, delivering defiances, demanding surrenders and requesting truces or safe-conducts.
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This duty had developed out of their original function of delivering jousting challenges, both nationally and internationally, often to hostile nations. Like knighthood, the possession of heraldic office was regarded as transcending national boundaries and allegiance, ensuring a herald diplomatic immunity and honourable treatment wherever he went in Europe.
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Every nobleman had his own herald, but by the fifteenth century a hierarchy had developed with the kings of arms at the top and pursuivants at the bottom. In England, the kings of arms were royal appointments and the realm was divided into four provinces. England itself had a northern and a southern province, presided over by Lancaster and Leicester kings of arms respectively; then there was also a king of arms for Ireland and for Aquitaine (Guyenne). Despite their names, all were based at court, and all were summoned to attend the king for the Agincourt campaign.
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The other essential profession represented in every major retinue was the medical one. The king himself took his personal physician, Master Nicholas Colnet, and twenty-three surgeons. There was an important distinction between the physician, who was at the top of the medical tree and responsible only for diagnosis and prescription, and the surgeon, who was less learned and more practical, carrying out operations, treating fractures and wounds and applying plasters and purges. Though there was much jostling for position between the two, they were united in their disdain for the barber-surgeons and unlicensed practitioners (usually women) whose ignorance, superstition and lack of skill they deplored. Nevertheless, women were practising as both physicians and surgeons. Westminster Abbey employed women in both capacities, even though it meant that they had to come within the precincts of the monastery and, inevitably, have close physical contact with the monks; they were well paid for their services, too, suggesting that they were effective.
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Most physicians were not only men but also university graduates who had studied for up to fourteen years to obtain a doctorate in medicine. For authority, they relied heavily on classical texts, such as those by Hippocrates and Galen, and for diagnosis, they looked mainly to the analysis of urine, whose colour was compared to a graduated chart that depicted every hue from white to red, including green. Nicholas Colnet was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, who had entered royal service as a clerk and physician in 1411, but owed his advancement to Henry V. In August 1414, at the king’s personal request, Colnet was granted a papal dispensation allowing him to remain a cleric in minor orders, so that his medical services to Henry were not interrupted by ecclesiastical promotion or transfer. He was one of the first to sign an indenture for service on the Agincourt campaign, for which he was to receive the same rate of pay as a man-at-arms, 12d a day, and to bring with him three archers.
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Henry V’s personal surgeon, Thomas Morstede, was one of the most interesting men on the Agincourt campaign. Originally from Betchworth, near Dorking, in Surrey, by 1401 he had moved to London and was working there as a humble “leche.” As a young surgeon, he may have been present when John Bradmore removed the arrow from Henry’s face after the battle of Shrewsbury, an operation he was later able to describe in detail. Like Colnet, he owed his rapid rise to wealth and fame to royal patronage. In 1410 he was retained as the king’s surgeon, on a salary of £40 a year, an office that was confirmed on Henry V’s accession, on condition that the king had exclusive use of his services. At the same time, he was also appointed to the highly profitable post of examiner, or collector of customs, for all vessels passing through the port of London, the actual work being delegated to his deputies. Like Colnet, he signed an indenture for service on the Agincourt campaign on 29 April 1415, having successfully petitioned the king to be allowed to take twelve men of his profession and of his own choosing, together with three archers. Unusually, he was to have the same wages as Colnet, an indication not only of his abilities but also of the enhanced role he was likely to play in a war situation; the other surgeons were to receive 6d a day, in common with the archers.
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A second royal surgeon, William Bradwardyn, was also retained to serve on the Agincourt campaign with a team of nine surgeons under his command. Bradwardyn was older than Morstede, having served Richard II on his Irish expedition in 1394 and been retained by him for life in 1397. The change of regime had not affected his career, though he too seems to have found a patron in the prince of Wales, rather than Henry IV, who preferred foreign doctors.
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Despite Bradwardyn’s evident seniority, it was Morstede who was the chief surgeon in the king’s army. He was clearly an open-minded, dynamic and ambitious man. Frustrated by the traditional rivalry between physicians and surgeons, and by the incompetence of so many of those in the medical profession, he initiated a project in 1423 to found the first English college of medicine. Its aims were to introduce better education and supervision for all those engaged in the medical profession, including the setting of common examinations, inspecting premises stocking medicines, regulating fees and providing free medical care to the poor. The college was to consist of two self-governing bodies, one for physicians and one for surgeons, under the joint leadership of an annually elected rector. Morstede himself was the first master of surgery to be appointed (Bradwardyn, significantly, was only a vice-master). The college collapsed a few years later under the stresses of the antipathy between the two professions, but Morstede did not give up his dream, and in 1435 he was the driving force behind the foundation of the Mystery, or Guild, of Surgeons, a professional body that survives to this day.
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Morstede’s dedication to his profession prompted him to train dozens of apprentices, lend other surgeons books from his extensive library and make regular and generous charitable donations to prisoners and the poor. In 1431 he married a wealthy widow, who was the daughter of John Michell, a former alderman, sheriff and mayor of London; he served as sheriff of London himself in 1436 and, unusually for a surgeon at this time, was granted a coat of arms. By 1436 he was listed as the fourth wealthiest person in the city, having an annual income of £154 ($102,647 at today’s values) from lands in London, Surrey, Essex, Suffolk and Lincolnshire. Possibly Morstede’s greatest claim to fame, however, was that he wrote the
Fair Book of Surgery
, which became the standard surgical textbook of the fifteenth century.
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Written in English, so that it was far more accessible than the Latin tracts and compendia then available, the
Fair Book of Surgery
drew on Morstede’s decades of experience in Henry’s wars and was illustrated with helpful examples of successful operations. It was an eminently pragmatic teaching manual, but it was also an unusually ethical work. Other treatises of this kind had often displayed an unhealthy degree of cynicism. Henri de Mondeville, for instance, recommended that surgeons should use magical cures, not because they worked, but “so that if they do effect a cure the surgeon will be credited with a marvellous piece of work, while if they do not he will not be accused of having omitted some vital step.” Mondeville advised surgeons always to charge for medicine because the more expensive the cure, the more confidence the patient would have in it. He also suggested that all doctors should use big words and, if necessary, make up terms to impress their patients: “the ordinary man believes that pronouncements which he does not understand are more effective than those which he understands perfectly well.” The more imposing the name of the condition, the more ill the patient felt himself to be: “give some awful names to the illnesses of ignorant peasants if you want to get any money out of them,” he suggested.
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Morstede’s attitude and approach were completely different. It was the duty of a surgeon, he wrote, to have a thorough understanding of “the principles of surgery, in theory and in practice, [and] . . . all things which are comprehended in anatomy.” He should be well trained and experienced, with “small fingers and steadfast hands, not trembling, and clear of sight.” Finally, he should be “well mannered . . . gracious to sick folk, and merciful to poor folk, and not too greedy but reasonable, to set his salary considering the labour of the cure, and the worthiness and the poverty of the patient, and not to meddle with no cures that he supposes are not capable of curing.”
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With his emphasis on the importance of anatomy—including a cut-by-cut description of how to dissect a newly dead body, “as of them whose heads have been smitten off or hanged”—Morstede placed a premium on practical experience and observation over simple book-learning. In common with all other medieval practitioners, he might not have realised that the blood circulated continuously round the body, rather than dissipating into the flesh like sap into leaves, but he knew his internal organs, his bones, cartilage, veins and arteries, muscles, ligaments and sinews.
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Death in battle was a possibility that no one preparing to go to France could afford to ignore. Hamon le Straunge, a man-at-arms in the company of Sir Thomas Erpingham, thus made careful provision for his wife, Alienor, in the event of his death, setting his seal to his will on 10 June 1415. The king himself drew up his will on 24 July, leaving generous bequests, ranging from beds to horses, to his “most dear brother” Bedford and his “dearest brother” Gloucester, but nothing at all, not even a personal memento, to his brother Clarence, who would, nevertheless, inherit the kingdom. There were individual bequests, too, for “our most dear grandmother, the countess of Hereford,” for the officers of his household and his chamber, his physician Nicholas Colnet, and his chaplains. Henry’s two religious foundations, the Carthusian monastery at Sheen and the Bridgettine house at Syon, were to benefit from legacies of one thousand marks each. His body was to be buried in the church of Westminster Abbey, where a tomb was to be built, serviced by its own altar.
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As one would expect from so pious a king, Henry also made provision for his own soul, trusting for redemption in the intervention of the virgin Mary and a holy host of angels, saints and martyrs, including his own personal favourites, Edward the Confessor, St John of Bridlington and St Brigit of Sweden. Thirty poor men were to be fed and clothed for a year on condition that they daily repeated the prayer, “Mother of God, remember thy servant Henry who placed his whole trust in thee.” In addition, twenty thousand masses were to be sung as soon as possible after his death, the title and number of each one being laid down with his usual meticulous attention to detail. Though it has been suggested that twenty thousand masses was an excessive number, reflecting a guilty conscience for embarking on an unjust war, such extravagance was by no means unusual in the medieval period. Piety rather than guilt dictated the scale. At the end of the will, which was written in Latin, Henry signed his initials and then added his own personal plea in English, “Jesu Mercy and Gramercy. Lady Marie help.”
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