Henry V as Warlord (20 page)

The river was 400 yards wide and impossible to ford. Its north bank was now guarded by Burgundian troops sent by Duke John. The king selected good swimmers and made them try raising the sunken boats but they were prevented by enemy cannon fire and archery. Then he had small square boats constructed from leather and wickerwork. (These may have been inspired by coracles which he had seen in Wales.) There were some islets between the south bank and the middle of the river and it was possible to push pontoon bridges constructed from hides and poles over, halving the distance. Just before dawn on 14 July, covered by bowmen, Sir John Cornwall and sixty men-at-arms crossed the remaining stretch in the leather boats, a horse carrying two or three light cannon swimming behind. Cornwall was so elated that on the spot he knighted his thirteen-year-old son whom he had brought with him. The bridgehead was speedily consolidated. A full-scale bridge resting on the invaluable leather boats was built and 5,000 Englishmen went over, whereupon the Duke of Clarence blasted the fort into surrender. The ‘most devout king … fell on his knees and gave thanks in great devotion to the immortal God’. In despair Pont-de-l’Arche capitulated on 20 July.

Monstrelet records that Henry installed a strong garrison at Pont-de-l’Arche ‘for dread of which the greater part of the peasantry fled the country with all their possessions’.
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Not only did he now have a bridge across the Seine but, since it straddled the river and was fortified to control the river traffic, he had effectively cut off Rouen, seven miles downstream, from Paris. The Norman capital suddenly found itself isolated, with no hope of receiving troops or supplies. The king could lay siege without too much interruption to what he described in a news letter to his subjects in London as ‘the most notable place in France save Paris’.

Rouen was undoubtably notable, one of the wealthiest and most beautiful of French cities with a population estimated at 70,000. Its cloth and its goldsmiths’ work were the staple of Parisian luxury shops, easily transported up river in normal times. Besides a magnificent cathedral and many rich abbeys and priories it boasted nearly seventy churches within its walls. The houses of its opulent merchants were famous for being built and furnished regardless of cost, its guildhalls more splendid than any in England.

Besides being one of the richest and most beautiful of French cities it was also one of the best defended. It contained over 5,000 men-at-arms under the captain of Rouen, Guy le Bouteiller, a Norman nobleman who was an experienced and able commander. There were also 15,000 militia who included a famous force of picked crossbowmen under Alain Blanchard, another veteran. The abundant artillery was directed by a noted gunner, Jean Jourdain, who had a further 2,000 men to operate it. All the Rouennais had complete and justified confidence in their city’s tall and massive walls, which covered some five miles. These had recently been strengthened against bombardment by an embankment of earth behind them, while there were sixty towers and five great bastions protecting five great gates – cannon bristled from each one as well as from the ramparts. In every tower there were three guns aimed at three different angles. On the wall between each tower was a great cannon mounted low in the earth and ready to fire. There were small guns at regular intervals on the walls set to shoot at close or long range, and between each tower on the parapet were eight small guns for rapid fire. There was also a trebuchet at each gate. (These details are given by an English eye-witness, John Page.)
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The city ditch on those three sides unprotected by the Seine had been deepened and filled with wolf traps, and the suburbs had been ruthlessly demolished – even churches had been razed to the ground. Moreover the city had a good water supply and there had been time to bring in large stocks of food. So confident was the garrison of its ability to beat off any attack that it had given asylum to every refugee from miles around. Above all, the Duke of Burgundy had pledged his word that, come what might, he would relieve the city.

Henry and his army reached Rouen at midnight on 31 July. Next morning the Rouennais awoke to find themselves completely surrounded by English troops – the king knew all about psychological warfare. He set up five fortified camps, linked to each other by trenches. His headquarters were in a Carthusian monastery 1,200 yards to the east of the walls. Clarence was in a partially demolished priory to the west, Exeter at the north end, Huntingdon at the south, on the far bank of the river in the rubble of what had been the suburb of St Sever, and Gloucester was a little to the north of Henry. Three huge chain booms across the Seine, supported by several warships – which had been hauled on wheels overland for nearly four miles, sails unfurled to catch the wind – isolated the doomed city still further. In addition a wooden bridge was built over the Seine five miles above Rouen, a remarkable feat of military engineering which the English named ‘St George’s Bridge’: piles were driven into the river bed, then joined by chains on which planking was laid. The besiegers’ stranglehold was broken only by the fortified abbey and fort of St Catherine on a steep hill of that name to the east, a few hundred yards south of the king’s headquarters. It was partly protected by a belt of marshland and its cannon commanded the road from Paris down which the Duke of Burgundy and his army might march at any moment. Another thorn in the side of the English was Caudebec, a town some miles down stream whose garrison and guns threatened ships bringing supplies and reinforcements up the river to Rouen. However, on 2 September Salisbury stormed the hill of St Catherine and a week later Warwick fought his way into Caudebec.

Henry seems to have anticipated the fall of Caudebec with some confidence to judge from a letter he had written on 16 August to the mayor and aldermen asking them to launch a sort of Evacuation of Dunkirk in reverse: ‘And pray you effectually that, in all the haste ye may, ye will do arm as many small vessels as ye may goodly, with victual and namely with drink, for to come Harfleur and fro thence as they may up the river of Seine to Rouen-ward with the said victual for the refreshing of us and our said host.’ London responded nobly. According to the accompanying letter it sent: ‘thirty butts of sweet wine – ten of Tyre, ten of Rumney, ten of Malmsey – and a thousand pipes of ale and beer, with two thousand and 500 cups for your host to drink.’
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His strategy was simple. Since his cannon could make little impression he intended to starve Rouen into surrendering. Now that Caudebec had fallen food for his men could be brought from England with ease.

While Henry V was waiting for his blockade to take effect he took the opportunity to terrorize the country round about – whatever English historians may say about his desire for conciliation. The Earl of Ormonde’s bastard son, Fra Thomas Butler, Prior of Kilmainham and of the Irish Knights Hospitaller, arrived with 1,500 saffron-cloaked Irish kern – knife and javelin men riding ponies, of the type the king had seen in Ireland as a boy. Knowing perfectly well how they would behave he let them loose on the local population, whereupon they raided far and wide to their hearts’ content, riding back with severed heads and even babies dangling from their horse’s necks. Understandably, the Norman peasantry were terrified of these savages with their war-whoops and bagpipes. Henry himself was shaken by reports of their atrocities and had some of them flogged. He posted them to the danger spots where any attempt at relief was expected to strike first.

The garrison made sortie after sortie from their walls against the English, sometimes in detachments of a thousand men. The besiegers always beat them back though not without loss; the French set man-traps into which they lured their pursuers as they were retreating. When John Blount, the Lieutenant of Harfleur, challenged one of the gate captains to single combat, the Frenchman rode out, knocked Blount off his mount, ran a sword through him and then dragged the body back into Rouen at his horse’s tail. Blount’s friends had to pay 400 gold nobles to recover the corpse. Henry erected a row of gibbets in view of the walls on which he hanged any prisoners. Alain Blanchard retaliated by stringing up English prisoners on the ramparts, with dogs tied round their necks; some captured Englishmen were put in sacks with dogs and thrown into the Seine. If anything the French won the propaganda war; the Vicar-General of Rouen’s spirited excommunication of the English king from the walls was sufficiently impressive to infuriate him.

Food began to be in short supply as early as the middle of August, while the besiegers diverted part of the city water supply. Plague broke out and soon there were piles of dead bodies in the streets. But the Rouennais were confident they would be relieved. It was long before they would contemplate even the possibility of surrender.

Henry was far from sure that their confidence was misplaced. Time and again there were alarming rumours that the Burgundians were marching on Rouen. He kept his men on the alert for their arrival, on one occasion ordering troops to sleep in their armour. Rouen sent daring messengers through the English lines – past the gibbets – begging Duke John to come and save the city. One aged Rouennais priest raised the old Norman cry for assistance against robbers, the ‘
Haro!’
, in front of the duke in King Charles’s presence. The duke promised that he would come. In November news reached the by now starving city that a mighty army was on its way to relieve them and would arrive four days after Christmas, whereupon the defenders went to the churches to give thanks to God and ring the bells. In the event the duke reached Pontoise, only twenty miles away, but came no closer. His men began to squabble with the dauphin’s troops, who were all Armagnacs, and then the army’s food ran out. The relieving force withdrew to Beauvais, still quarrelling, and then disintegrated. Frantic, piteous pleas continued to come from the garrison, beseeching Duke John not to abandon them, to no avail.

John Page, an otherwise completely unknown English soldier who was there, has left a moving account of the siege in doggerel verse, ‘all in raff and not in rime’. While convinced of the justice of his king’s cause, and that Henry was ‘the royallest prince in Christendom’, he was a compassionate man who sincerely pitied the unfortunate Rouennais. He says that the time came when they had no meat other than horsemeat and how when that was gone they were reduced to eating dogs, cats, mice and rats, and finally to any vegetable peelings they could find – they even ate dock roots.
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Pretty girls sold themselves for a piece of bread. The king was unmoved by tales of distress, building massive earthworks and blockhouses, all mounted with cannon, to guard against any attempts at relief or revictualling.

At the beginning of the Christmas season the garrison turned 12,000 ‘useless mouths’ out of the city, in the hope that they would be allowed to depart. But although there were old men and nursing mothers among the groups driven forth from every gate, the king ordered his troops to herd the pathetic exodus back into the ditch, to die slowly from hunger beneath the winter sky and unending downpour. It rained continuously during their weeks of slow death. In the ditch, John Page tells us, ‘one might see wandering here and there children of two or three years old begging for bread since their parents were dead. Those wretched people had only sodden soil under them and lay there crying for food – some expiring, some unable to open their eyes and not even breathing, others as thin as twigs.’

And woman holding in her arm

A dead child and nothing warm
.

And children sucking on the pap

Within a dead woman’s lap
.

One might easily count in the ditch ten or twelve dead to every one alive, who had died so quietly, without call or cry, as if they had died in their sleep. Henry allowed all babies born in the ditch to be hauled up in baskets and christened – after which they were returned to their mothers by basket.

Pious as always, the king marked the feast of Christmas with a truce – to last the twenty-four hours of Christmas day. He sent two priests and three servants into the ditch with food. He also sent his heralds to the captain of Rouen, Guy le Bouteiller, offering a meal to anyone who lacked food, and freedom to come into the English lines to eat it. The captain did not trust him and refused to let the Rouennais take advantage of the offer. Those in the ditch prayed that Henry might ‘win his right’, if we may believe John Page, ‘since Englishmen have tender hearts’.

As John Page also explains (and Vegetius teaches), hunger breaches even stone walls. On the night of New Year’s Eve 1419 a French knight at the Bridge Gate was heard shouting that he wanted to talk to a baron or knight with the right ancestry. Gilbert Umfraville shouted back that he was a knight and told him his name. (He was descended from a Norman knight who had ridden with William the Conqueror.) The French knight thanked God ‘for you are of the ancient blood of Normandy’. Umfraville arranged for envoys from Rouen to come and discuss with the king the possibility of a parley.