Henry V as Warlord (21 page)

When they arrived the following day Henry, very much in character, made them wait until he had finished hearing Mass. When at last he saw them he had a scowling face. One of them remarked that Rouen was no mean city, whereupon the king replied fiercely, ‘It is
mine
and I will have it!’ When they pleaded for the folk in the ditch he answered, ‘Fellows, who put them there?’ Full scale negotiations for surrender began the following day, in two tents in Gloucester’s camp. When the ditch was again brought up the king listened coldly and refused to let the ‘useless mouths’ out, asking who had placed them in it. ‘I put hem not there and that wot ye!’ He insisted that Rouen was his by right, rebuking the envoys for having ‘kept my city, the which is mine inheritance’. He harped at length on this favourite theme; ‘Rouen is my heritage’. According to the
First English Life
he demanded, ‘Or else, peradventure, you take upon you the judgement of my title? Know you not how many castles, cities and defensible places have been by us obtained and gotten, and how often from the field with victories have we chased our adversaries? Were not these signs of justice?’
⁵
It was yet another repetition of his claim that God was on his side, that he was justified by signs of divine approval.

The negotiations broke down and the envoys returned to Rouen. However, the city’s poor had had enough and accused the rich of being murderers – ‘false traitors, assassins and ruffians’ – threatening to kill them rather than die of hunger. The envoys went back to argue with the English king. They ‘treated day, they treated night, with candle and torches bright’. Finally, largely through the mediation of Archbishop Chichele of Canterbury and the city’s clergy, Rouen agreed to surrender within eight days, on 19 January, if it had not been relieved by noon on that date, and to pay an indemnity of 300,000 gold crowns. Eighty hostages were taken – twenty knights or squires and sixty bourgeois – to serve as guarantees until the ransom was paid. On Henry’s insistence they also agreed to hand over the Vicar-General of Rouen, Robert de Livet, whose excommunication of him the king had found so insulting, and Alain Blanchard, captain of the crossbowmen. Livet was handed over ‘fast bound in irons, from which he never departed until he miserably finished his life’, Henry committing him ‘unto obscure prison’. Blanchard was immediately hanged from a gibbet.

On the afternoon of 19 January the king, in gold robes of state and seated on a throne, received the keys of Rouen at his headquarters in the Carthusian monastery. He then named the Duke of Exeter as captain of the city, ordering him to occupy it the same night. Next day, escorted by four vested prelates and seven vested abbots, Henry rode up to the main gate. He was met outside it by the clergy of Rouen bearing no less than forty-two processional crosses – each of which he kissed in turn. Then he rode into his city of Rouen, wearing his by now customary gloomy expression, without pomp or trumpets, in black but with a gold train reaching down as far as the ground, on a black charger with black trappings. He was accompanied by a single squire, bearing a lance with a fox’s brush at the tip – a favourite Lancastrian badge. He went straight to the cathedral to hear a thanksgiving Mass before installing himself in the castle.

The citizens who watched King Henry ride by were mere skin and bone, with hollow eyes and pinched noses. They could scarcely breathe or talk. (Though the
Brut
, a contemporary English chronicle, claims, ‘They cried all “Noel” as high as they might yell.’)
⁶
Their skin was as dull as lead and they looked like those effigies of dead kings one sees on tombs. There were corpses lying in every street and crowds by the hundred begging for bread. The king had food sent into the city, since the Rouennais were now his loyal subjects, but the deaths continued for days afterwards, quicker than the carts could carry them away for burial.

According to the terms of the surrender, save for those specifically excepted, the defenders were to be allowed to leave if they wished to do so. Henry had his own thrifty views on how they should depart. ‘The garrison were ordered to march out by the gate leading towards the Seine,’ Monstrelet tells us, ‘and were escorted by the English as far as the bridge of St George where they were searched by commissaries from the king who took all their money and valuables from them, giving two sous in return. Some noblemen were even stripped of their handsome coats, made of marten skin or embroidered with gold, and made to exchange them for worthless old garments.
⁷
The proceeds went to swell the royal coffers.

XI

The Norman Conquest – In Reverse

‘The King had subdued all Normandy.’

The First English Life of King Henry the Fifth

‘If the expression “bled white” was at any time accurate, it best describes the state of the conquered provinces of France under English rule.’

K. B. McFarlane,
The Nobility of Later Medieval England

W
hen the fall of Rouen became known, the rest of Normandy quickly submitted. Often it was sufficient for Henry’s captains to appear in front of a town or a castle for it to surrender. By the spring of 1419 nearly the entire duchy was in his hands. To the east his line of strongholds reached as far as Mantes on the Seine, only thirty-five miles from Paris. He established his headquarters at Mantes as it could be reinforced swiftly by river. To the south there was a similar line from which to launch the conquest of southern Maine and Anjou. Treaties with the Dukes of Burgundy, Brittany and Alençon ensured that no trouble would come from their direction.

The king at once began to make Normandy an independent state, separate from the rest of France. New government departments were set up – a Norman chancery, a Norman seneschalcy (overseeing all civil and military administration), a Norman exchequer and a Norman admiralty (with responsibility for coastal defences). Bishop Kemp of Rochester became the chancellor, the chief administrative official; William Alyngton, the treasurer; and the Earl of Suffolk, the admiral. There were eight
baillis
or regional governors, all Englishmen.

A little too much has been made by English historians of Henry’s programme of conciliation; his guarantees of property and privilege, his respect for local institutions, and his strict observance of legality. Admittedly his approach was impressively imaginative, unmatched during the late Middle Ages – though there were no conquests which can really be compared with that of Normandy. However, the reason why the Normans submitted to what the Monk of St Denis calls ‘the odious yoke of the English’ was that they had seen just how incapable was the French monarchy, torn between Armagnacs and Burgundians, of saving them from sharing the fate of so mighty a stronghold as the ducal capital.

No doubt the king’s Norman Conquest in reverse retained Norman institutions, invited Norman noblemen to swear fealty, and employed many Norman clerics in its administration, yet although a few magnates submitted and took an oath of allegiance, the vast majority of the upper nobility refused to do so and were dispossessed. Henry gave their estates to Englishmen, just as William the Conqueror had once bestowed Saxon lands, confiscated from the thanes, on his followers.

The redistribution of land and titles began almost at once. Six great Norman counties were re-allotted during 1418–19; the Duke of Exeter was given that of Harcourt, together with its enormous family stronghold of Lillebonne; the Earl of Salisbury was made Count of Perche; the Earl of Warwick, Count of Aumale; Lord Edward Holland, Count of Mortain; Sir John Grey of Heton, Count of Tancarville; and Sir William Bourchier, Count of Eu. The Duke of Clarence received three viscounties, comprising a vast block of land. (The Duke of Bedford was given nothing for the moment, but by the time he died as ‘Regent of France’ in 1435, he was Duke of Alençon, Duke of Anjou, Count of Maine and Count of Dreux, to mention merely his most senior Norman dignities.) Lord Willoughby secured the lordship of Beaumesnil with other
seigneuries
and Sir Walter Hungerford became Baron of Le Hommet. Sir Gilbert Umfraville obtained all the estates of his distant kinsman, Pierre d’ Amfreville, at Amfreville-sur-Iton (whence his ancestors had come), together with those of the Seigneur d’Estouteville – once commander of the garrison at Harfleur. Lesser men benefited too, such as Sir John Popham of South Hardeford in Hampshire who became Lord of Thorigny, or Sir Christopher Curwen of Workington in Cumberland who became Lord of Cany in the Caux. In all, some 500 fiefs were confiscated from the French in Normandy.

The disadvantage of such grants was that Henry expected military service in return, just as William I had from the thanes’ dispossessors 350 years before. His grantees had to carry out specified duties, whether providing troops, garrisoning towns or maintaining their castles and manors as fortresses or depots. Umfraville had to furnish twelve men-at-arms and twenty-four archers for the royal army. Hungerford, the royal steward, was obliged to give the king-duke a lance tipped with a fox’s brush every year on the feast of the exaltation of the holy cross – and to produce ten men-at-arms and twenty archers whenever required. Willoughby, besides giving Henry a golden spur at Caen every midsummer’s day, was obliged to ride with the king and bring with him three men-at-arms and seven archers for so long as the war against the French should last. On a humbler level a William Rothelane was committed to finding a guard for part of the town of Coutances, and a Hugh Spencer had to find men for the guard at Harfleur. Such small fry were threatened with death by Henry should they ever dare to try to leave Normandy.
¹

Most of the new English lords of this Norman Conquest in reverse were small fry, the smallest sort of gentlemen, if that. They did not belong to distinguished or influential families in England; were not men of landed property. Such inducements as a manor house and an estate, often accompanied by a title, and lucrative employment provided attractive reasons for staying and settling. And they could expect more than the mere income from their estates or increment from office. Every garrison captain received one third of his men’s plunder, the ‘spoils of war’ (while remitting another third of it to the king together with a third of his own). There was also the
pâtis
or protection racket levied on villagers for the maintenance of the local English garrison.

Henry’s attempts at full-scale colonization varied from place to place. His settlement of 10,000 Englishmen at Harfleur was almost certainly intended to create a second Calais. At Cherbourg and Caen – and to a much lesser extent at Rouen, Bayeux and Coutances – it is more likely that he was inspired by memories of Wales, where towns originally intended to be entirely English, but with a strong Welsh element, had remained loyal to the Crown because of the large number of settlers. A fair number of the English who settled in Normandy took French girls as wives.

The king also had a policy of conciliation – he did not want his new subjects in permanent rebellion against him. Apart from military posts, the majority of officials save for the most senior continued to be Frenchmen. Nobles who swore allegiance to him were regranted their lands for the feudal dues by which they had formerly held them from the King of France, with no increase. As always in occupied countries, a few inhabitants profited from the new regime, especially lawyers. The structure of Lancastrian Normandy gave them all sorts of new opportunities, since the judicature was separated from Paris and countless fresh prerogatives and offices made for lucrative disputes in the ducal courts. There were also plenty of posts for bureaucrats in the administration. Some Normans may even have welcomed English rule. Most rejected it.

Many Norman nobles, including all the magnates and great landowners, fled to other parts of France. A number of squires held out in the woods, leading a
maquis
against the invaders, with the help of the peasants; but as the occupation dragged on they became discouraged. In the end most resistance of this sort was confined to bands whose members were often as much bandits as partisans. The kingdom was so torn between Burgundians and Armagnacs that even the most stubborn can have seen little hope of success.

Jean Juvénal and the Monk of St Denis tell the story of the young Dame de La Roche Guyon, Perette de la Rivière, whose husband had been killed at Agincourt. One of the greatest ladies in Normandy, she held out for three months in her huge castle, on a bluff overlooking the Seine, against a siege conducted by Warwick and Guy le Bouteiller – the former captain of Rouen who had taken the oath of allegiance to Henry, one of the few Normans of rank to do so. Eventually the English, tunnelling up from caves below the castle, mined its walls. When forced to surrender Perette was told by the king that she might keep her lands if either she took the oath or married Guy le Bouteiller. She refused to swear allegiance or marry someone whom she considered a traitor, particularly when the marriage contract stipulated that any son by Guy would inherit La Roche Guyon, depriving her two sons by her first husband of their patrimony. The Dame de La Roche Guyon preferred to leave Normandy, penniless, with her children.
²

During the nineteenth century romantic French historians insisted on seeing every Norman highwayman or outlaw as a hero of the ‘resistance’. And no doubt, although many of the ‘brigands’ in the forest were criminals, perhaps the majority,
³
yet a fair proportion were definitely partisans. When the English captured someone in Normandy they would only allow him to ransom himself if he could prove he came from territory which had not yet submitted to the English king – by, for example, showing that he belonged to a dauphinist garrison. Otherwise, from as early as February 1418, by Henry’s express orders, he was treated as ‘a brigand and our enemy’ and hanged. The English deliberately refused to discriminate between partisans and common criminals, both swinging side by side from the same gibbet.