The Knight in History (28 page)

The younger John Fastolf was born at Caister in 1380.
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After his father’s death three years later, his mother married a third husband, a squire in the household of the grandmother of the duke of Norfolk.
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The boy may have been educated in the duke’s own household. Unlike Du Guesclin and most earlier knights, he could read and write fluently and by the time of his death had acquired a library of at least twenty-five manuscript books, including Livy, Caesar, and four other histories; an English translation of Vegetius’ treatise on the art of war; and two verse romances.
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He was also proficient with figures and a capable businessman.

When he came of age in 1401, his circumstances were modest. He drew a small yearly income (£46) from two manors at Caister and one at Repps, six miles northwest. He became a squire in the retinue of Thomas of Lancaster, second son of Henry IV, whom he accompanied to Ireland when Lancaster was named lord deputy. There he made a provident marriage in 1408 to Millicent Tiptoft, twelve years his senior but the daughter of a member of the lesser nobility, widow of Sir Stephen Scrope, and possessor of lands in Yorkshire and Wiltshire that gave Fastolf a lifetime income of £240 a year.
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Exactly when Fastolf entered the king’s service in France is unknown. The few notes that survive of the biography written by William Worcester, who served for many years as Fastolf’s secretary, are chiefly a list of offices held by Fastolf from 1412 until his retirement in 1440. From this source we know that in 1412, the last year of Henry IV’s reign, Fastolf was deputy constable of the castle and city of Bordeaux, and in 1413 he became governor of another Gascon castle. In 1415, when Henry V invaded Normandy, opening the second great phase of the Hundred Years War, Fastolf, thirty-five years old but still a squire, contracted to serve as a captain with ten men-at-arms and thirty archers.
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By the time of Fastolf’s contract, the “indenture” system adopted in England in the early years of the Hundred Years War was well established. Mercenaries—mostly foreign knights—had been used in England since the Norman Conquest, but the employment of paid native soldiers was a novelty introduced by Edward I for his Welsh wars of the late thirteenth century. It had proved a brilliant success, ending the crown’s dependence on reluctantly performed feudal service, as well as on reluctantly paid scutage. The last English feudal levy was summoned in 1327 for a Scottish war of Edward II. After that the contract, or indenture, system became standard.
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The new system was financed via parliamentary acquiescence in taxes on movable property, and especially the export tax on English wool, paid by foreign importers. The first indenture contracts were apparently verbal, concluded with the king’s chief barons, who then made subcontracts with recruits. The earliest surviving written subcontract, dating from 1287, between the Welsh marcher (border) lord Edmund Mortimer of Wigmore and a Yorkshire tenant-in-chief, Peter Maulay, specified in minute detail the horses that Peter should bring and the compensation he should receive if they were lost (“one with black feet and having one white foot, price 60 marks
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…one other black horse with two white feet, price 30 marks…one other bay horse, price 18 marks…one sorrel horse, price 18 marks…one piebald horse, price 14 marks…one rouncey [pack] horse, price 100 shillings…”).
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Later contracts established a pattern, spelling out the number of men in the contingent and their status, whether bannerets, knights, squires, mounted archers, or foot archers; the length and place of service; wages and bonuses; expenses; compensation for lost horses; and the disposition of the “advantages of war”: lands and castles seized, prisoners taken, and booty such as jewelry, plate, and coin.

In 1415 the magnates of the kingdom contracted to provide forces for the new campaign in France in which Henry V sought to press his claim to the French crown. A promising occasion was furnished by the mental illness of French king Charles VI and the feud between the supporters of the rival dukes of Orleans and Burgundy. The largest English retinues were provided by the dukes and earls: Thomas, duke of Clarence, 240 men-at-arms and 720 archers;. Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, 200 men-at-arms and 600 archers; Thomas, earl of Arundel, 100 and 300 respectively; and on down to the earl of Salisbury, with 40 men-at-arms and 80 archers. The lesser peers contracted for smaller numbers. Retinues containing twenty or more men-at-arms were “great companies,” all of which in 1415 were commanded by men who ranked at least as knights. Fifty-two lesser captains, among them Fastolf, contracted for from three to nineteen men-at-arms, and a few individual soldiers served with an archer or two and perhaps one companion. Most of the secondary captains were knights, but sixteen, like Fastolf, were squires. The individual soldiers were almost all squires. Men-at-arms and archers were provided in a ratio of approximately one to three, and usually the entire force was mounted, though part of it fought on foot.
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FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PLATE ARMOR:
ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON.
(BODLEIAN LIBRARY, MS. AUCT. D. INF. 2. II, F. 44)

Artillery, which had made its appearance in the fourteenth century, had its own organization. In England as in France, cannon were manned by specialists, artisans drawn from the ranks of the middle and lower classes. Kings employed a master of the artillery, who if not already a knight was usually knighted, and who operated foundry and armory, concluded contracts with the gunners, and commanded them in the field.
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A muster of the army was made at the port of embarkation, where the king’s officials, one the paymaster, wrote down the strength and composition of the retinues; similar musters were made during the campaign, with dates of attendance and absence from the army carefully noted.

The period of service for a military retinue might be a quarter of a year, half a year, three-quarters, a full year, two years, or of indefinite duration. The theater was specified: Brittany, Aquitaine, or Normandy, occasionally with provision for a change in destination. The scale of wages was graduated according to rank and usually specified as the “customary rates of war.” A quarter of a year’s wages were paid in advance, usually when the captain arrived with his men at the port of embarkation. Customarily a bonus, a “regard,” was also specified: 100 marks for the service of thirty men-at-arms for a quarter of a year, paid quarterly. A specially trained king’s clerk and a knight were stationed at the port of embarkation to appraise the retinue’s horses so that restitution could be made in case of loss. Transportation overseas and back for men and horses at the king’s expense was stipulated; an earl could take six horses, a banneret five, a knight four, a sergeant three, and a mounted archer one.

The contract also spelled out the division of the spoils of war. At first the king granted the “advantages of war” to the indenturing captains, reserving for himself only the most strategic castles and lands and the most eminent prisoners, whose captors were promised a “reasonable reward.” Following ancient military custom, captains shared in the spoils of the men who subcontracted with them, usually taking one-third. From about the middle of the fourteenth century it became the practice for captains to pay a third of this third to the king, plus a third of their own personal spoils, giving the king “thirds and thirds of thirds” of all the spoils.
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SIEGE OF A TOWN, FROM THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY
CHRONIQUES D’ANGLETERRE. (BRITISH LIBRARY, MS. ROYAL 14 E IV)

Over the course of Fastolf’s military career, essentially the quarter century from 1415 to 1440, armor continued its evolution. A list of the armor Fastolf owned after his retirement includes three haubergeons, six pairs of cuirasses (front and back plates), several pairs of brigandines, a half dozen pieces of mail, two dozen helmets with and without visors, and various thigh pieces, shoulder pieces, greaves, and other plate.
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By the mid-fifteenth century the haubergeon, a short version of the old hauberk, was universally worn, over a wool or linen jupon, in turn a short version of the old acton, padded but sleeveless, close-fitting and fastened in back by laces or by the new style of fastening, buttons. In Milan, the leading manufacturing center, the complete suit of plate armor was now fixed as consisting of a rounded breastplate cut off at the waist but overlapped by a plackart, or lower plate, attached to it by straps and buckles; a similar compound covering for the back, attached to the breastplate by shoulder straps and waist belt; shoulder pieces; complete arm, thigh, and lower leg pieces, protecting back as well as front; gauntlets of either the old hourglass-glove or the new mitten style, articulated once over the wrist and twice over the fingers; and basinet with hinged visor. The shield had, by mid-fifteenth century, virtually disappeared for mounted combat.
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In the brief, brilliant campaign of 1415 Fastolf proved a skillful captain and respected administrator, in combat and in military government. He participated in the short siege of Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine where the expeditionary force landed, and distinguished himself in the great victory of Agincourt, in which the well-disciplined English archers repeated their Crécy victory against an enemy that had foolishly reverted to the outdated feudal levy. Agincourt was a typical medieval battle, bloody and tactically decisive, with the young duke of Orleans and other notables taken prisoner or slain. Yet like most medieval battles it had little effect on the course of the war. Henry V withdrew to England, leaving a garrison in Harfleur, of which Fastolf shared the command. Two years later, when Henry returned to undertake the conquest of Normandy, Fastolf fought in the sieges of Caen and Rouen and served as military governor of Condé-sur-Noireau, south of Caen. That year, at the age of thirty-seven, he was finally knighted.
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In 1418, revolution in Paris placed the capital in Burgundian hands, and when the following year the duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, was assassinated by the Orleanist-Armagnacs, the new duke converted a secret pact with the English into an open alliance. For a moment it appeared that the adherence of the powerful duke, head of a quasi-independent state as well as of a major Paris faction, would tip the scales decisively in Henry’s favor. The treaty of Troyes, signed in 1420, established the basis for a “dual monarchy” whereby Henry V was to marry the daughter of Charles VI, their son to become king of England and France. The English were invited to garrison Paris’s inner castle, the Bastille, and Sir John Fastolf was named governor. Two years later Henry V’s death of dysentery (August 1422) left an infant heir, Henry VI, under a regency headed by Henry’s able brother, John, duke of Bedford. For grand master of his household, Bedford chose Fastolf.

As the conquest of northern France proceeded, Fastolf served as seneschal (administrator) of Normandy and in 1423 was named “lieutenant” (governor) of Anjou and Maine, provinces in the front line of the war. Later that same year he was sent to recover strongholds in Valois, northeast of Paris, where he captured the castle of Passy-en-Valois and took prisoner its governor, Guillaume Remon, thereby setting in motion a series of events that illustrate both the complexities that the institution of ransom could create and knightly perseverance in its pursuit. Remon was taken to the castle of Rouen, where he was held at Fastolf’s expense, while Fastolf continued on to Maine, where he took part in the capture of Beaumont-le-Vicomte, north of Le Mans. During his absence, the strategic town of Compiègne, north of Passy, was retaken by the French. Bedford assembled forces to recover it, but the town resisted siege. Bedford had recourse to a stratagem. Many of the men in the garrison had previously served under Remon’s command; Bedford brought the prisoner from Rouen and had him paraded under the walls of Compiègne with a rope around his neck, threatening to hang him unless the town capitulated. The garrison yielded, and Remon was released and freed of the obligation to pay ransom. Fastolf demanded compensation. A further complication was that Remon had had in his own custody at the time of the capture of Passy a number of foreign merchants, who had passed from being Remon’s prisoners to being Fastolf’s. Two of the merchants agreed to serve as sureties for payment of the ransom of the entire group. One of them was held in the Bastille, commanded by Fastolf himself, the other in the Chatelet, the prison of the provost of Paris. The prisoners submitted appeals to the Parlement of Paris. Suit and countersuit and jurisdictional disputes consumed four years before Fastolf’s claims were satisfied, and even then he felt that the loss of Guillaume Remon was never compensated. Thirty years later he was still petitioning the king for recompense.
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