After Agincourt

After Agincourt After Agincourt William Worcester’s Lost Journal edited by Stephen Cooper 1 After Agincourt Copyright Stephen Cooper, 2013 The right of Stephen Cooper to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 2 After Agincourt For William 3 After Agincourt Contents Editor’s Preface Sir John Fastolf’s accompt of the burning of John Badby, 1410 I September, 1444 II October III November IV December V January, 1445 VI February VII March VIII April IX May X June XI July XII August 4 After Agincourt Editor’s Preface This Journal, which I have entitled After Agincourt, was written by William Worcester over a period of twelve months in 1444-5. It describes a very different country from the one we inhabit today. The Kingdom of England was surrounded by enemies. The Welsh were a subject people, but one which had come within an ace of throwing off English rule only thirty years before. The Scots were inveterate enemies, universally hated in England, especially in the northern counties. The French were a constant threat, much more populous and powerful than the English, and quite determined to reclaim the territories which the King of England still held on to, in Aquitaine and Normandy. Henry V’s startling victory at Agincourt in 1415 seemed like a distant memory three decades later. Superficially, there were many similarities between the England of 1444 and the England of 2014. We had a monarch and a bi-cameral Parliament then, and London dominated the life of the nation financially and politically, while most of the wealth was in the South-East. Yet appearances can be deceptive. The King ruled as well as reigned. Parliament existed to assist the Crown, not to limit its power. Democracy, in so far as men thought about it at all, was an unspeakable Greek practice, the equivalent of mob rule. The population of the country had been drastically reduced by the Black Death of 1348 and subsequent outbreaks of plague, and was tiny, compared to what it is today. Most people lived in the countryside and they earned their living by farming. It was no part of the function of government to promote economic growth. Most men had no aspiration to ‘rise’ in society. The expectation was that you stayed in the station to which you had been born and life for most people was nasty, brutish and above all short. Around a third of the population was in holy orders. There were hundreds of monasteries and other religious houses, not visibly in decline. The major buildings of the day were built to honour God, not Mammon. The fate of the individual soul was paramount. Sexual intercourse was considered an unclean act, the product of the Original Sin committed by Adam and Eve, which had condemned all mankind to a miserable life, subject only to the promise of redemption through Christ and the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Yet, although that Church was ubiquitous, the Lollard heresy, the first in England for a thousand years, had gained manie adherents. Likewise, the monarchy, though divinely ordained, was far from being 5 After Agincourt totalitarian in the modern sense. It lacked the power to impose its will, since there was no police force, no standing army outside Normandy, and no Royal Navy. Law and order was largely left to local authorities and England was a much more violent place then, than it is now. William Worcester (1415 - c.1482) was born in Agincourt year. He came from Bristol, was educated at Oxford and became scrivener, or secretary, to Sir John Fastolf (c.1380 - 1459). He joined Fastolf’s service some time before 1439, when the Knight retired to England, after manie years’ service to the Crown. They lived at Fastolf Place, or Palace, in Southwark, gradually moving to the sumptuous castle Sir John was built at his birthplace of Caister in Norfolk. Fastolf was one of the richest men in England, but he was never a member of the aristocracy, though he was made Baron of Sillé-le-Guillaume, in France. He was lord of a large number of manors, spread throughout manie counties. Some of these, notably Castle Combe in Dorset and Bentley in Yorkshire, had come to him when he married a wealthy and older widow, Millicent Scrope, in 1409. The marriage was childless but Fastolf held on to her manors after Millicent died in 1445. Millicent had a son by her previous marriage, Stephen Scrope, who became Fastolf’s ward. Stephen ought by rights to have inherited his parents’ estates in 1445, but Fastolf kept Scrope waiting until his own death in 1459. Stephen Srope never forgave Fastolf for the way he had been treated. Fastolf lived was a soldier, landowner and litigant and he lived in the public eye. His alleged ‘desertion’ of Sir John Talbot at Patay in 1431, when he ‘fled the field’ and left an entire English army to its fate, made him notorious. It is less well known that he was a writer, the author of the first military tract written in English, and a prime mover in a small literary circle which included Worcester, Scrope and Peter Basset, who wrote a chronicle of the French wars at his master’s request. Worcester is altogether more obscure than his master; but as Fastolf’s secretary, he had occasion to travel the length and breadth of the South of England. As he did, he compiled a guidebook, somewhat akin to Cobbett’s Rural Rides, which we know as The Itineraries and which was completed some time in the 1470s. The Itineraries is an invaluable source for historians of all kinds today, though it is a long and rambling work, full of lists, and tells us nothing of Worcester’s privat life. Worcester’s other works included the Annales Rerum Anglicarum, (‘Annals of the History of England’), the Acta Domini Johannis Fastolf (‘The Deeds of Master John Fastolf’) and The Boke of Noblesse, begun in the 1450s and finished in 1475. He is also known to have collaborated with Scrope on The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, a very boring compendium of sayings, reflections and moral tales; and there is also his Topography of Medieval Bristol. Literary historians have long suspected that he wrote 6 After Agincourt another work, but believed that it was lost long ago, and possibly never completed. I think I can now claim to have discovered this.1 The text I now present to the public was discovered by me some years ago in the McFarlane library in Magdalen College, Oxford. It is not like any of Worcester’s other books. For a start, it is a ‘juvenile’ work, in the sense that it was written much earlier than any of his other known works, before he was married, or indeed had any experience of women, though he was 30 at the time. More importantly, it is highly unusual. It is not a chronicle or history or travelogue or work of theology, and it was written in English, when it was still common to write in Latin or French. It was evidently begun when Sir John Fastolf asked Worcester to prepare a tract, similar to several which he is known to have written himself, to explain why the English had triumphed at Agincourt, and why triumph had been followed by disaster. In Fastolf’s view the answer was very simple: the country had gone to the dogs; but Fastolf was old and Worcester was young, and the younger man was reluctant to agree with his master’s pessimistic view. Worcester struggled with this commission. In fact, he found it impossible to write the book Fastolf required, though his notes clearly informed the later Boke of Noblesse. What he did manage to do was to record his thoughts on the subject, and on manie others, with a remarkable frankness and in a way which is most untypical of his other writings, especially The Itineraries. In doing so, he may have achieved something which he certainly never set out to do, and written the earliest English diary that is now available to us. What do we learn from Worcester’s Journal? Principally, I think, that late medieval men (and women) had a much wider variety of opinions than we might think, if we only considered works which were intended to be read by others. For, in William Worcester’s day, there was no ‘Press’ and no recognition of a right to freedom of expression. If a man wrote, or even spoke, words against the King, he might be executed for treason, and in a very horrible way. If he wrote or spoke words critical of the Church or the Faith, he might be burnt at the stake, under the terms of the Statute of Heresy - De Heretico Comburendo - of 1401; but neither of these risks seems to have troubled our William. He that felt he could write what he liked in the privacy of his chamber over the barge-house in Caister Castle, and say what he liked to his friends and acquaintances. His text shines a light into manie dark places. For the sake of clarity I have modernised the punctuation in Worcester’s text and some of the spelling, but not all. Since I thought it was important to retain as much of the flavour of his writing as possible. For those who would like to know more about him, I would recommend the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and 1 I have included in the text some letters and documents, which were evidently inserted before the Fastolf Papers as a whole were taken by cart from Caister to the recently-founded Magdalen College in Oxford, around 1480.

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