The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [103]
Fastolf’s career was one of the success stories of the Hundred Years War and is one of the best documented. He was born in 1380, the son of an esquire to Edward III. As a boy he was a page to the Duke of Norfolk. When he came of age in 1401 he inherited only a few farms near Caister and some tenements in Yarmouth, which gave him a total income of £46 a year. In 1409 he improved his finances by marrying Millicent Scrope, the elderly widow of a brother officer, but he gained more from the War, from offices, ransoms and loot. In 1413 he was made deputy constable of the castle and town of Bordeaux, in 1422 one of the King’s Counsellors in France, at a salary of £110, a post which he held until he left France in 1440. He was later Grand Master of the Duke of Bedford’s household. He held over twenty offices at various towns, including the Captaincy of Le Mans, the governorship of Maine and Anjou and finally the governorship of the Channel Islands. After his retirement from active service at the age of sixty, the Council continued to consult him on military matters (though like many other military advisers his advice does not seem to have been taken). His most spectacular coup, the capture of the Duke of Alençon at Verneuil in 1424, brought him prize-money worth £13,000 and with some of this he built his castle at Caister ; its tower had five stories of fine, large rooms with arcaded fireplaces and a summer and a winter hall with rich tapestry hangings. In 1445 his properties in Normandy were still worth £401 a year, though their value had been reduced by enemy raids ; they included ten castles, fifteen manoirs and an inn at Rouen. He foresaw the loss of Normandy and sold some of them. Even after losing the remainder, when he died in 1459 he was worth £1,450 a year from his English estates, nearly all of which had been purchased with his profits of war. The little Norfolk squire, who even at thirty-five had been only an esquire and household man to the Duke of Clarence, had become a Knight of the Garter, a French baron, and had he lived longer would almost certainly have become an English baron as well. In character he was typical of all too many English soldiers of the period. ‘Cruel and vengeable he hath been ever,’ wrote a contemporary who had crossed him, ‘and for the most part without pity or mercy.’
Both Fastolf and the humblest archer profited from the systematic sharing of loot, which was strictly enforced. Henry V’s ordinance of 1419 had confirmed the existing practice which continued until the very end of the War. ‘All maner of captaynes, knyghtes, squyres, men of armes, archers, what so euer they shall be bounde to paye the iijde parte of all theyre gaynes in warre faithfully, and wythout fraude, to theyre imediate captayne or maister, in payne of lesing the hooll.’ This applied to anyone accompanying the troops, ‘physiciens, surgens, barbors, marchauntes, and suche lyke’, who must hand in any plunder to a senior officer. A document survives which lists down to the smallest sum the profits of war made in the year 1443—1444 by the garrison of the fortified islet of Tombelaine, in the sea opposite Mont-Saint-Michel, ‘in the retinue of the high and powerful lord, my lord the ... Earl of Somerset, Captain of the said place’. The archer John Flourison (a Frenchman by his name) ‘took a horse; sold for 6 gold saluts ... took a prisoner ransomed for 12 gold saluts’, while the archer Roger Mill ‘won a sword sold for 37 shillings and 6 pence tournois’. The total of the archers’ profits was £28 17s 6d tournois (£3 4s 2d sterling), a third going to the men-at-arms