The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward [105]
York was succeeded as Lieutenant-General at Rouen by the Duke of Somerset. On 16 March 1448, despite the unwillingness of their captains, Le Mans and the Maine fortresses were surrendered by specially appointed English commissioners. The truce between England and France was extended until April 1450.
Even in these last years the English behaved as though Normandy would stay in their hands permanently. Henry VI went on granting titles; as late as 1446 Sir William Bourchier, the Captain of Calais, was made Count of Eu. Perhaps there were fewer Englishmen in the duchy than might have been expected ; many settlers had intermarried and some had returned to England—at Harfleur in 1449 there were only 500 English compared with 10,000 put there by Henry V in 1416. But a generation of Normans had known no other government and were genuinely loyal to their English Duke ; there were Anglo-Normans now, just as for three centuries there had been Anglo-Gascons and Anglo-Irish. Indeed, Rouen may well have seemed more English than Dublin. The most solid symbol of Lancastrian rule was the beautiful gold salut, or Anglo-French crown, which continued to be struck until 1449.
England kept fewer troops than ever in the Norman garrisons. Moreover, arrears of pay caused mutinies and a stream of desertions which reduced the number still further : Henry VI’s annual revenue amounted to barely £30,000, when his household cost £24,000 a year and the Crown’s debts had grown to nearly £400,000.
By contrast, France’s finances were in good order. Charles VII’s officials had reintroduced the special taxes levied at the end of John II’s reign and were collecting them with a fair degree of success. Further, the rich merchant and tax-farmer, Jacques Coeur, was the King’s argentier—pay—master of the household—and could supply unlimited liquid cash. Indeed Coeur had amassed sufficient capital to finance campaigns on a truly vast scale.
Charles was already spending large sums on military reform, raising a standing army. In 1445 an edict established fifteen companies of 100 ‘lances’, each lance a unit of six men—a man-at-arms, two archers and three armed supernumeraries. By 1446 Charles had twenty such companies. Someone who saw them marvelled how ‘the men-at-arms were all armed with good cuirasses, armour for their limbs, swords and sallets [light helmets] and most of the sallets were adorned with silver’. The most radical innovation was that the troops were kept on in peace-time and not, as hitherto, dismissed at the end of every short period of hostilities. A real attempt was made to enforce some sort of discipline and to stop the men from living off the country and from levying the pâtis, and they were paid regularly every month. In 1448 another edict ordered the raising of 8,000 ‘franc-archers’ ; every parish had to contribute and equip a crossbowman or archer. Such troops were only paid in wartime but were exempt from taxes in time of peace. Charles also spent much money on artillery and acquired a remarkable master gunner, a Maître Jean Bureau, whom he commissioned to modernize his cannon. Previously the English system of indentured soldiers under contract had produced a professional fighting force infinitely superior to the undisciplined levies of France. But now the odds were in favour of the French with this new, full-time, properly paid army.
Above all the French King himself had at last matured. His natural astuteness and flexibility had been reinforced by an implacable determination. He became a good organizer and a subtle politician, ruthless and unscrupulous, with a nice talent for espionage and bribery—from the early 1440s he had in his pay carefully selected seigneurs in Normandy and Guyenne.
Despite the truce Somerset used the troops evacuated from Maine to seize two Breton fortresses. When King Charles remonstrated, he was told that Brittany was an English fief. Somerset, or perhaps Suffolk behind