scholarly journals ‘La maleureuse bataille’: fifteenth-century French reactions to Agincourt

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-377
Author(s):  
Craig Taylor

Abstract This article examines the military and political impact of the battle of Agincourt in France and the way in which this defeat was remembered up until the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The English presented their victory as a sign of God’s support for Henry V and his claims in France, but the French preferred to understand their defeat as a divine punishment for their sins. This led to debate about who had incurred God’s wrath, as civilians blamed soldiers, soldiers blamed their aristocratic leaders, and partisans for the Armagnac and Burgundian factions blamed one another. But most French commentators attempted to bridge these divisions, or at least to minimize the damage by attributing the disaster to the actions of foolish young hot-heads and to cowards. This avoided the need to name and shame specific noblemen, but also meant that only the most traditional lessons were highlighted from this defeat.

1957 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 91-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. B. McFarlane

If we may believe John Leyland, a tradition widely current throughout England in the 1530's attributed some of the costliest building of the later middle ages to warriors who had returned home laden with the spoils of France. Everywhere that the antiquary travelled, from Ampthill in Bedfordshire to Hampton Court near the Welsh border, from Streatlam in county Durham to Farleigh, Somerset, he was told of castles raised in stone and brick ‘ex spoliis nobilium bello Gallico captorurn’, sometimes of a whole mansion paid for from the proceeds of a single battle; and that not merely in the great days of Edward III and Henry V, but also when John of Bedford was ‘governor and regent’ of his dead brother's hard-pressed conquest. So Henry Vffl's subjects, not least those descended from the military captains of the Hundred Years War, were firmly convinced. Members of the Tudor nobility were willing, nay anxious, to swallow some very improbable stories about their family-origins and in a good many cases their faith in a particular forebear's achievement, indeed his very existence, may be open to question. But the fact remains that within a century of Bedford's death the spoils of France were generally regarded as at least a plausible explanation of a family's sudden wealth and of its capacity to embark upon a large-scale building project. There are signs that it had already won acceptance in the lifetime of Leyland's precursor, William Worcester, whose birth in the year of Agincourt and long residence in the household of Sir John Fastolf, the Regent's major-domo from 1422 to 1435, entitle him to speak with more authority.


Author(s):  
Valery Sanzharov ◽  
◽  
Galina Sanzharova ◽  

Introduction. According to the latest research, the managerial genius of Henry V was most fully manifested in the military, financial and diplomatic fields. The authors analyze in detail the royal diplomacy, which has not been the subject of special study. Diplomacy is analyzed as a space of political communication. Methods and materials. The basic methods of historical analysis were used to work with the material. The sources used in the work are diplomatic documents (treaties, “memorandums”, instructions to ambassadors and their correspondence with monarchs, decisions of royal councils, discussion of the course and results of negotiations in parliament) and chronicles. In historiography, the problem is traditionally considered within the framework of works devoted to the personality of Henry V or the history of the Hundred Years War. Analysis. The article analyzes three phases and three components of English diplomatic policy from the coming of Henry V of Lancaster to power to his invasion of Normandy: 1) negotiations with both sides of the intra-French conflict in order to prevent their reconciliation. 2) the territorial claims of Henry V in France (territory in exchange for giving up the “rights” of inheritance). 3) diplomatic activity as a disguise of preparation for war (territory in exchange for peace). Results. The authors concluded that the English in the years 1413–1415 are moving from military mercenarism on the side of one of the warring groups in the intra-French conflict to declaring themselves as one of the parties to the struggle for power in France with their rights and claims. The diplomacy of the English crown pursued the intentions of 1) demonstrating the impossibility of achieving the claims of the royal house of England on the continent peacefully; 2) maintaining schism and confrontation within the highest French nobility; 3) ensuring international recognition of the English monarch’s right to intervene in the intra-French conflict.


1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. S. L. DAVIES

The English occupation of Tournai has recently generated far-reaching claims about its importance; allegedly Tournai provided a foretaste of certain developments of the Henrician Reformation. This article argues that Tournai was treated as an integral part of Henry VIII's ‘kingdom of France’ and its status consistently distinguished from that of the English kingdom. It was not, as has been suggested, granted representation in the English parliament. The argument that advanced ideas of ‘sovereignty’ derived from fifteenth-century French thought entered into English political discourse through Tournai is also countered. Important jurisdictional points were raised, notably over the administration of the bishopric, involving three powers, England, France, and the Habsburg government of Flanders. But Henry's insistence on his rights as a sovereign prince were directed against France, not, as has been claimed, against the papacy. Nothing in Henry's dealings with Tournai transcended well-established English doctrine and practice about the relationship between the political authority and the church. Nor did Henry's treatment of the conquered town evoke novel doctrines of royal power; it followed closely precedents set by Henry V. The conquest of Tournai increased the self-confidence of Henry VIII's government in both domestic and international affairs; but largely through Henry's belief that he was successfully emulating the military achievement of Henry V, not through any input of novel political doctrine.


1966 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 179-190
Author(s):  
C. T. Allmand

None will be surprised that there were English clergy in France and Normandy during the period of the Lancastrian occupation in the fifteenth century. What is perhaps surprising is that there were so few of them. Writing on Henry V, Professor Waugh noted that only about twenty of their names were to be found in the Norman Rolls for the last two years of the reign. While it is not always possible to agree with Waugh over the names of clergy whom he considered to be English, his estimate was on the whole correct. It is difficult to question it, since it is sometimes impossible to distinguish French from English names when given in Latin versions. Even Waugh’s contention that few Englishmen were appointed to ecclesiastical positions before 1421 can only be modified in detail: it cannot be gainsaid completely.


Author(s):  
Antonio Urquízar-Herrera

Chapter 3 approaches the notion of trophy through historical accounts of the Christianization of the Córdoba and Seville Islamic temples in the thirteenth-century and the late-fifteenth-century conquest of Granada. The first two examples on Córdoba and Seville are relevant to explore the way in which medieval chronicles (mainly Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his entourage) turned the narrative of the Christianization of mosques into one of the central topics of the restoration myth. The sixteenth-century narratives about the taking of the Alhambra in Granada explain the continuity of this triumphal reading within the humanist model of chorography and urban eulogy (Lucius Marineus Siculus, Luis de Mármol Carvajal, and Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza).


Author(s):  
Rebecca Skreslet Hernandez

The final chapter brings the discussion of al-Suyūṭī’s legal persona squarely into the modern era. The discussion explores how contemporary jurists in Egypt use the legacy of the great fifteenth-century scholar in their efforts to frame their identity and to assert authority as interpreters and spokesmen for the Sharīʿa in a political arena that is fraught with tension. In the midst of Mursī’s embattled presidency, leading scholars at Egypt’s state religious institutions rushed to news and social media outlets to affirm their status as representatives of “orthodoxy” and to distance themselves from more extreme salafī trends that threaten to change the way Islamic law is practiced in the modern Egyptian state. It is striking how closely the image of the moderate Sunni, Sufi-minded, theologically sound scholar grounded in the juristic tradition (according to the accepted legal schools) fits with the persona that al-Suyūṭī strove so tenaciously to construct.


Author(s):  
Steven Gunn

Henry VIII fought many wars, against the French and Scots, against rebels in England and the Gaelic lords of Ireland, even against his traditional allies in the Low Countries. But how much did they really affect his subjects? And what role did Henry’s reign play in the long-term transformation of England’s military capabilities? This book searches for the answers to these questions in parish and borough account books, wills and memoirs, buildings and paintings, letters from Henry’s captains, and the notes readers wrote in their printed history books. It looks back from Henry’s reign to that of his grandfather, Edward IV, who in 1475 invaded France in the afterglow of the Hundred Years War, and forwards to that of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, who was trying by the 1570s to shape a trained militia and a powerful navy to defend England in a Europe increasingly polarized by religion. War, it shows, marked Henry’s England at every turn: in the news and prophecies people discussed, in the money towns and villages spent on armour, guns, fortifications, and warning beacons, in the way noblemen used their power. War disturbed economic life, made men buy weapons and learn how to use them, and shaped people’s attitudes to the king and to national history. War mobilized a high proportion of the English population and conditioned their relationships with the French and Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. War should be recognized as one of the defining features of life in the England of Henry VIII.


Author(s):  
S. P. Oakley

After a brief introduction on stemmatic method, this book contains genealogical investigations of the textual traditions of Quintus Curtius Rufus and then Dictys Cretensis. The sections on each author begin with a list of MSS and incunables that will be discussed (they number just over 150 for Curtius, about 80 for Dictys) and then a survey of existing scholarship. There then follows the classification of the MSS and incunables; most of the MSS of both authors were produced in Italy in the fifteenth-century. In the section on Curtius MSS B = Bern, Burgerbibliothek 451, Br = Brussels 10161, and A= Paris, lat. 5720, owned by Petrarch are shown to have been very productive. For Dictys it is argued that a stemma codicum can be established. First witnesses related to G = Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 197 (these include an important lost MS of Poggio) are discussed, then those related to MS E, the codex Aesinas, owned by Stefano Guarnieri. There follows discussion of the archetype, of the way in which proper attention to the stemma codicum can improve the text, and of the excerpts from Dictys found in MSS of Dares.


1980 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Coad

We publish below a list of writers and journalists abducted by the security forces and numbered among the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina since 24 March 1976, the date of the military coup that installed General Jorge Rafael Videla in power. Two eye-witness accounts illustrate the way in which such abductions usually take place. Finally, Robert Cox, editor-in-exile of the daily newspaper Buenos Aires Herald, describes how independent-minded journalists and the families of los desaparecidos ( ‘the disappeared’) have been affected. The material is introduced by Index on Censorship's researcher on Latin America, Malcolm Coad.


2009 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Baki Tezcan

AbstractA short chronicle by a former janissary called Tûghî on the regicide of the Ottoman Sultan Osman II in 1622 had a definitive impact on seventeenth-century Ottoman historiography in terms of the way in which this regicide was recounted. This study examines the formation of Tûghî's chronicle and shows how within the course of the year following the regicide, Tûghî's initial attitude, which recognized the collective responsibility of the military caste (kul) in the murder of Osman, evolved into a claim of their innocence. The chronicle of Tûghî is extant in successive editions of his own. A careful examination of these editions makes it possible to follow the evolution of Tûghî's narrative on the regicide in response to the historical developments in its immediate aftermath and thus witness both the evolution of a “primary source” and the gradual political sophistication of a janissary.


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