Henry V as Warlord (35 page)

Some enterprising English soldiers did not even bother to imprison their prey, like an archer from the Alençon garrison who simply went round the local villages by himself seizing the peasants’ goods ‘for ransom’, forcing them to buy back their own property, until in despair they beat him to death.
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Jean Juvénal’s diocese of Beauvais was in conquered territory and in a letter of 1440 to the estates general he recounts what his people had suffered over the years: ‘The poor have been killed, taken prisoner and dragged off, plundered, robbed and tyrannized, have lost their flocks, and the land is all destroyed and desolate, while the churches and houses have been broken into, burnt and wrecked and lie in ruins, and they have killed many of my poor people in prison or by some other means.’ While admitting that many of these evils – ‘cruel, damnable and detestable tyrannies’ – have been inflicted by brigands or French troops, he regards the English as primarily responsible; ‘they have committed all the crimes and inhumanity that any enemy could’. He complains that: ‘little children have been led away into captivity and God knows what sort of life they lead in England among those who trouble and tyrannize us.’ (There was a market for such children in England, where they were sold as ‘servants’ – a euphemism for slaves.) He continues, ‘many little maidens, virgins and well born too, have been taken off by force or some other means and made the chambermaids and bawds of lewd youths, thieves, murderers and vagrants.’ The bishop tells how at St Médard near Noyon in Picardy the English ‘found a church which had been fortified a little as a refuge for poor labourers; and this they took and set on fire, killing two or three hundred’. Monstrelet confirms him, recording that ‘over 300 persons or more’ were burnt to death. No wonder that Juvénal regarded the death of Henry V as among ‘the marvels wrought by God’.
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Many peasants fled to the towns, to starve in deserted houses as ‘useless mouths’. It has been calculated that even in good times a quarter to a third of the population of late medieval towns were indigent. In any case, as Juvénal explains, the townsmen too were in despair since ‘most of the seaports as well as the ports along the river have been destroyed and there is no more trade’.
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In addition Henry’s devaluations of the currency, together with the new taxes, caused them serious hardship. At the end of 1421 Henry imposed a silver levy throughout the lands of the conquest on all ranks of society on (according to Monstrelet) ‘churchmen, knights, squires, ladies, damsels, burgesses and anyone thought able to pay it, in accordance with the pleasure and discretion of the tax collectors’. Needless to say, there were ‘great murmurings and discontent’. The realm’s gold crowns had already been devalued in October from nineteen to eighteen sols. When a new silver coinage was issued by Henry it contained so little silver as to be almost valueless, if Chastellain is to be believed. The merchants, no less than the peasants, suffered from robbery and kidnapping. (A pardon dated November 1424 was granted to one Enguerrand de Monstrelet, ‘captain of the castle of Freneuch’, exempting him from penalties he might have incurred in waylaying and robbing certain merchants of between 400–500 crowns.)
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The clergy suffered as well, frequently finding that their cloth was no protection. Churches, monasteries and hospitals were all sacked and pillaged, often with bloodshed. As the sole source of poor relief in the fifteenth century was the Church, which provided what might be called the social services, this caused much misery among the swarms of beggars who roamed the streets after losing their livelihood as a result of the war. During his researches into petitions to Rome for relief on behalf of ecclesiastical property destroyed at this time, Henri Denifle was struck by how ‘the King of England and the Duke of Bedford, who did not hesitate to ask the pope for favours for their own people, never once asked him to help a ruined French church. Yet so many churches had been left in ruins by the English!’
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He concluded that they deliberately omitted to do so because they did not want to contribute, however indirectly and however little, to the resources of Charles VI or the dauphin.

Juvénal recounts in his letter what happened to clerics who supported the dauphin:

And as for the poor priests, churchmen, monks and other poor workers staying faithful to you, they take them and imprison them, putting them in irons, in cages, in pits and ugly places full of vermin and leave them there to die of hunger, as indeed several have died. And God knows the dreadful things they do to them; they roast some, they tear out the teeth of others, while some are beaten with great rods; and they are never set at liberty until they have paid more money than their entire possessions are worth. And even when they are let go, their limbs are usually so crippled that they are never whole again.
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As has been seen, Henry himself was not above dragging dauphinist prelates off for ransom. Even clerics who had taken the oath of allegiance to him were not safe; in 1422 the canons of Rouen complained formally about being attacked on the Norman roads by English soldiers. No doubt a good deal of clerical harassment was by brigands but Jean Juvénal makes it clear in his letter that he blames the English troops most of all.

Henry’s attitude towards the Church was inconsistent. ‘What shall I say of your sacrilege, o cruel King Henry, prince of the sacrilegious,’ cries Robert Blondel.
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The king ‘worried little about divine wrath’ the Monk of St Denis tells us, ‘and when his soldiers had looted with their sacrilegious hands churches consecrated to God, he would send home to England the relics they had stolen’.
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This was certainly very different from his ostentatiously correct behaviour during the Agincourt campaign. Perhaps he had come to think that such incidents were unavoidable. In fairness to Henry and his men, it must be said that everyone’s views on churchmen and church property had been distorted by the papal schism which had only recently ended. Previously schismatics had been regarded as no better than infidels, and French and English had supported different popes.

There was particular sympathy for the peasants among those in high places, to a surprising extent for so hierarchical a society. Pity was perhaps to be expected from churchmen but scarcely from fashionable poets who wrote for the ruling classes, even if it was theoretically a knight’s chivalrous duty to protect the weak. Alain Chartier, born a Norman at Bayeux in 1388 and the brother of Jean Chartier the chronicler, was successively secretary to Charles VI and the dauphin. (One often finds Alain’s signature next to that of the dauphin at the bottom of the latter’s letters.) He was both near the centre of power and a poet who, in his own day at least, was compared to Petrarch. In his
Quadrilogus Invectif
, apparently written at the end of 1422, he roundly blames the French nobility for not doing enough to protect the peasantry, though at the same time he regards the entire French people, of every degree, as having to some extent contributed to the ruin of France. He mourns how in 1422 he has seen ‘a foreign king gain glory from our shame and ignominy, batten on our plunder, cast scorn on our exploits and on our courage’, and believes that ‘the hand of God was on us and his anger set in motion this scourge of persecution’ – an obvious reference to Henry V.
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Indeed it was the French peasantry who, more than anyone else, suffered from the English king’s ambition for a period of over thirty years.

Lancastrian France and the lands which bordered it became very like a desert during the years of occupation and warfare. To quote Bishop Basin yet again:

From the Loire up to the Seine and from thence to the Somme, the peasants had been killed or had fled until all the fields were for a long time, indeed for many years, left not only without being tilled but without any men to till them, save for a few rare patches of land … We ourselves have seen the vast plains of Champagne, of the Beauce, of the Brie, of the Gâtinais, Chartres, Dreux, Maine and Perche, of the Vexin (French as well as Norman), the Beauvaisis, the Pays de Caux, from the Seine as far as Amiens and Abbeville, the countryside round Senlis, Soissons and Valois right up to Laon and beyond towards Hainault absolutely deserted, uncultivated, abandoned, empty of inhabitants, covered with scrub and brambles; indeed in most of the more thickly wooded districts dense forests were growing up … All that people were able to cultivate in such areas at that time was in and around towns, fortresses or castles, sufficiently close to them for a lookout on the top of a tower or some other vantage point to see the raiders approaching. Sounding a bell, a horn or some other instrument he would signal to everyone working in the fields or in the vineyards to come back inside the fortifications.

This practice was so normal and widespread that nearly everywhere oxen and work horses, as soon as they were unharnessed from the carts when the lookout’s signal was heard, would, at once and without being driven, return at a mad gallop to the place where they knew they would be safe. Sheep and pigs acquired the same habit. But in the aforesaid provinces, throughout the whole territory such towns and strong places were rare since so many had been burnt down, demolished or left in ruins by the enemy and since remained uninhabited. The very land tilled in the hiding places round the fortresses seemed very small and almost nothing in comparison to the vast extent of all those fields which stayed completely deserted, without a single soul to cultivate them.
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Henry attributed all this misery and destruction to the French having denied him his ‘right’. In any case, as he had told Vincent Ferrer, he was ‘the scourge of God sent to punish the people of God for their sins’. He is called a scourge by several contemporary French writers, such as Alain Chartier, though the only English mention of the term is in
The First English Life.
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His relationship with the Burgundians was thoroughly uneasy. The English presence in France was deeply resented by them. We know from the chronicle of Georges Chastellain that the Burgundians disliked the English intensely. They included not only the Duke of Burgundy’s subjects and clients but all those Frenchmen who detested the Armagnacs. And the Armagnacs made up the bulk of the dauphinist party – indeed most people, like the Bourgeois of Paris, referred to the dauphinists as ‘Armagnacs’, or ‘
Ermynaks
’ as the English termed them. They had no chance whatever of driving Henry out while he remained allied with Duke Philip. In consequence until the duke should change his mind about the English the inhabitants of the conquered territories had no alternative but to give their allegiance to the foreign king if they wished to stay there – unless they took to the woods. Although the Burgundian chroniclers testify to considerable respect for the Englishman’s harsh justice and genuine admiration for him as a soldier, they are less admiring about other aspects of his character. Nor did they relish his ferocity towards Frenchmen of the other political faction, his ferocious handling of dauphinist prisoners.

Chastellain gives a good idea of what the Burgundians, and especially those around the duke, thought of Henry. Despite the prolixity and artificiality of his cumbersome prose, this poet, herald, soldier and courtier was a writer of penetrating and vigorously independent judgement, a realist with deep psychological insight:

He [Henry] was foe to every brave and valiant man in the realm, and would have liked to exterminate them all, whether in battle or by some other more cunning means under a pretext of justice. Even those who were now fighting by his side and through whom he ruled and held sway in France, the Burgundians, he wished to supplant and keep down in subjection; he wanted the very name and race to be extinguished in order that he might live there alone with his Englishmen, and might be able to re-people and take possession of the entire land [of France] with his own people. And it is easy to conceive what a semblance of feigned affection he showed towards the young prince, Philip, whom he knew to be of a high and proud courage, powerful in lands and lordships, and truly a man quite bold enough to resist the greatest king on earth and say to him ‘I do only what it pleases me to do.’ … he [Henry] had never liked his father, the Duke John, since he was a proud man and opposed to him, so that he could not bend him to his will as he very much wanted, for he was the only man who could have thwarted his designs, at whose death he never knew greater joy.
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The same well-informed, balanced observer adds: ‘Praise be to God! this kingdom has been delivered from a hard persecuter … the ancient enemy … a cruel man.’ He also describes him as ‘a tyrant and a persecuter’. Significantly, Chastellain recalls that ‘it was by his hand, as though beneath
the scourge of God
, that the noble blood of France was so piteously shed at Agincourt.’
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For it is too easily forgotten that probably as many Burgundians as Armagnacs had been killed during that battle, including Duke Philip’s two uncles.

There was clearly a problem of communication between Burgundians and English. Some English gentry and clergy spoke and even wrote French of a sort, but while still used in administration and the law it had ceased to be the first language of the ruling class. No doubt after several months in France the men must have picked up a few words, like the Tommies’ French of World War I (immortalized in ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’). Almost no Frenchmen can have had even a smattering of English, apart from returned captives or Henry’s subjects in Guyenne. The fifteenth-century poet Jean Régnier describes seeing a wretched English prisoner surrounded by jabbering Frenchmen, unable to make himself understood or to understand and repeatedly crying out in terror, ‘God and Our Lady help me!’
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