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By Root 807 0

those in the ditch began to die miserably. ‘There’ relates John Page, ‘one might see wandering here and there children of two or three years old begging for bread as their parents were dead. These wretched people had only sodden soil under them and they lay there crying for food—some starving to death, some unable to open their eyes and no longer breathing, others cowering on their knees as thin as twigs. A woman was there clutching her dead child to her breast to warm it, and a child was sucking the breast of its dead mother. There one could easily count ten or twelve dead to one alive, who had died so quietly without call or cry as though they had died in their sleep.’ It was scarcely better inside the city.

On New Year’s Eve 1419 a French knight shouted from a gate that the defenders wished to parley. Their envoys visited Henry at his headquarters on 2 January ; after making them wait while he finished hearing Mass, he berated them for keeping him out of his own city, ‘which is my rightful heritage’. He also refused to let the poor people leave the ditch—his comment was, ‘Who put them there?’ (‘I put them not there and that wot ye.’) The envoys ‘treated day, they treated night, with candle and torches bright’, the negotiations dragging on for ten days, Henry insisting all the time that ‘Rouen is my heritage’. Eventually terms were agreed; if no relief had arrived by 19 January the city would surrender at noon on that day and pay an indemnity of 300,000 gold crowns. However, the garrison would be allowed to march off, though without their arms and on condition of not fighting against the English for a year, and so long as they took an oath of allegiance the citizens might keep their houses and goods. No relief came. The day after the surrender Henry rode in with dramatic modesty, dressed in black and accompanied by a single squire bearing a lance with a fox’s brush on its tip—a favourite badge of the King. Most of the citizens who watched him were skin and bone with sunken eyes and pinched noses, and could scarcely talk or even breathe—their skin was as dull as lead. ‘They looked like those effigies of dead kings that one sees on tombs.’ Henry gave thanks at the cathedral with his usual ostentatious piety.

After two months at Rouen, repairing its defences and organizing the new administration, Henry was ready for a further campaign. In the meantime his captains had captured other Norman towns—Mantes, Honfleur, Dieppe, Ivry, La Roche Guyon, Fécamp. Only the impregnable abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel held out on the coast. By the end of the year the English were undisputed masters of all Normandy, including the Vexin. Furthermore, in July Henry seized Pontoise and was now within striking distance of Paris.

The English occupation of Normandy had a certain resemblance to the Norman conquest of England. Although a few became faithful servants of the Plantagenets, the native nobility were largely dispossessed, their estates being given to Englishmen. In 1418-1419 alone, six Norman counties were re-allotted. Henry’s brother, heir and righthand man, the Duke of Clarence, received three viscounties (territorial units, not just titles). The Duke of Exeter, the King’s uncle, had the great county of Harcourt, with all that family’s princely possessions, and the important castle of Lillebonne. The Earl of Salisbury became Count of Perche. Grants were according to rank, and these new nobles of Normandy had to perform specified military duties in proportion to the value of the fief, such as garrisoning towns, providing troops or maintaining their châteaux as fortresses and depots. Many captains obtained castles and manors on similar conditions, though the King threatened these lesser men with death if ever they left Normandy. In addition there was a limited attempt at colonization ; 10,000 English were established at Harfleur and there were smaller settlements at Caen and Honfleur, while houses were confiscated and given to Englishmen in most Norman towns. Many of these settlers married Norman girls. However, full-scale colonization was