Normandy

The real genius of Henry V, and the real story of his success revealed itself not at Agincourt, but two years later, in 1417, when, using Harfleur as his base, he launched a campaign to conquer Normandy from the French. Agincourt was incidental to this great achievement. To launch a proper conquest, extraordinary efforts had to be made. As early as February 1417, orders went out that six wing feathers be plucked from every goose in twenty English counties and sent to the Tower of London for the flighting of arrows. In Parliament, to raise taxation, Henry Beaufort compared the King’s labours over the past six Parliaments to God’s creation of the world in six days. Even then, the crown jewels had to be pawned to secure loans, the greatest of them from Beaufort himself, the start of a process by which Beaufort, and his resources as bishop of Winchester, came to underwrite crown finance. By the 1430s, it was the bishop who in effect controlled the purse strings and hence the strategy of the Hundred Years War. In Normandy itself, Henry won a series of great victories. His cannon beat down the walls of the city of Caen. The city’s population was deliberately massacred, in accordance with Biblical precedent, and to warn other towns against resistance. Within a year, the port of Cherbourg had fallen, with Cherbourg and Caen in 1418, as in 1944, crucial to the supply of English troops operating in Normandy. The duchy’s capital, Rouen, was besieged from July 1418 and in January 1419 surrendered, offering an indemnity of £50,000.

The engines of the 1060s had been put into reverse. An English King now seized the places of William the Conqueror’s birth and burial. The surrender of Caen to Henry V was itself effected by a monk of the abbey of St-Etienne, William the Conqueror’s great Benedictine foundation, who is said secretly to have shown the English how to penetrate the town’s defences. From the moment that Rouen fell, Henry V began to invite the reissue of charters granted by his Norman and Plantagenet ancestors to Norman beneficiaries. Such large numbers of monasteries and private individuals queued up to have their ancient charters confirmed that Henry V’s ‘Norman Rolls’ remain one of our richest sources of information for grants made in the eleventh and twelfth, not just in the fifteenth century. Once again, history loomed large.

Yet, rather than attempt to rebuild the landholding patterns of the twelfth-century, to restore such families as Beauchamp or Neville or Fitzalan to their ancestral estates, the King encouraged an entirely new bonanza of land grants and land grabbing amongst his captains and associates. As in other colonial situations, most obviously as in the Roman conquests of antiquity, Norman estates were bundled up and handed over wholesale to the victors of 1418. The profits here were immense. It was from these spoils of war, in part from rents newly granted in Normandy, in part from his ransoming of French prisoners, that a man like Sir John Fastolf, future patron of the Paston family, acquired the resources to build a moated castle for himself at Caister in Norfolk, to patronize scholars and the Church, to establish himself as a Knight of the Garter and as a great man within his county, and to build up his collections of manuscripts and carpets, tapestries and jewels: a vast pile of bling purchased with the more than £20,000 that he is estimated to have gained from the conquest and colonization of Normandy and Maine. Fastolf’s profits were exceptional even by the standards of a kleptomaniac age. Nonetheless, they speak of the wealth that might be made from England’s old world colonies: a colonial land grab taking place across the English Channel, only seventy years before the rulers of Spain instituted a rather more famous land grab of their own, in the new worlds opening up across the Atlantic.