Footnote 139: It is quite impossible to reconcile the different accounts of the loss on the part of the English. Walsingham speaks of thirty only having fallen; De Fenin reports them to have been four or five hundred; whilst Monstrelet raises the number to sixteen hundred.
On the part of the French, Le Fevre says, that from a hundred to six score princes fell, and about seven or eight thousand of noble blood. In the Annales Ecclesiastici of Baronius, continued by Raynaldus, the statement of Theodoric Niemius is quoted, who says (unquestionably without authority) that Henry advanced from Harfleur with sixty thousand men, besides two thousand in attendance on the carriages. He affirms that the French had one hundred thousand men; among whom were one thousand Italians, commanded by Buligard, who had long governed Genoa in favour of the French. He says, moreover, that more than five thousand five hundred French nobles were slain; and fifteen hundred taken prisoners, and carried to England.[(back)]
Footnote 140: Hume, with his usual inaccuracy, asserts that the French army at Agincourt was headed as well by the Dauphin, as by all the other princes of the blood. The Dauphin wished to assist his countrymen, when they resolved to intercept the invaders; but, as we are expressly told by Le Fevre (c. 59), was not suffered to join the rendezvous. This is not the only mistake into which Hume has fallen in his account of this battle. In one paragraph he reports Henry to have been under the necessity of marching by land from Harfleur to Calais, in order to reach a place of safety from which he might transport his soldiers back to England; in another paragraph he represents him (with the same temerity which had been evinced by his predecessors before the battles of Poictiers and of Cressy) to have ventured without any object of moment, and merely for the sake of plunder, so far into the enemy's country as to leave himself no retreat. He tells us, moreover, that "Henry was master of fourteen thousand prisoners," whom he afterwards says that the King "carried with him to Paris, thence to England." Hume took this also without inquiry. Walsingham says, "Henry took (as they say—ut ferunt,—as though even that estimate required to be supported by common report,) seven hundred prisoners;" and of his prisoners, how many soever they were, he transported (as Des Ursins tells us) only the most considerable to England, dismissing the rest under promise to bring their ransom to him in the field of Lendi, on the feast of St. John in the summer, and, if he were not there, they should be discharged of the debt.[(back)]
Footnote 141: Of this gallant Welshman, the following account is taken from the Appendix of the "Battle of Agincourt." "Dr. Meyrick (now Sir Samuel) says, Davydd Gam, i.e. Squint-eyed David, was a native of Brecknockshire, and, holding his land of the honour of Hereford, was a strenuous supporter of the Lancastrian interests. He was the son of Llewellyn, descended from Einion Sais, who possessed a handsome property in the parishes of Garthbrengy and Llanddeu. In consequence of an affray in the high street of Brecknock, in which he unfortunately killed his kinsman, he was compelled to fly into England to avoid a threatened prosecution, and became the implacable enemy of Owain Glyndowr, whom he attempted to assassinate. Gam, it may be supposed, was his nick-name, as he called himself David Llewellyn; and there are good grounds for supposing that Shakspeare has caricatured him in Captain Fluellin. His descendants, however, conceiving that his prowess more than redeemed his natural defect, took the name of Game. Sir Walter Raleigh has an eulogium upon his bravery and exploits on the field of Agincourt, in which he compares him to Hannibal. He was knighted on the field with his two companions in glory and death, Sir Roger Vaughan, of Bedwardine in Herefordshire, and Sir Walter, or rather Watkin Llwyd, of the lordship of Brecknock. Sir Roger had married Gwladis, the daughter of Sir David Gamme, who survived him, and became the wife of another hero of Agincourt, Sir William Thomas of Raglan; and Sir Watkin was by his marriage related to Sir Roger."
The Author gives this passage as he finds it, without having attempted to verify the statement as to David Gamme's descent or history. Certainly the testimony which Sir Samuel Meyrick makes Sir Walter Raleigh bear to his "bravery and exploits on the field of Agincourt," cannot be fairly extracted from Sir Walter's own words: "But if Hannibal himself had been sent forth by Mago to view the Romans, he could not have returned with a more gallant report in his mouth than Captain Gamme made unto King Henry the Fifth, saying, 'That of the Frenchmen there were enow to be killed, enow to be taken prisoners, and enow to run away!'" We have no doubt of Captain Gamme's gallant bearing at Agincourt; but Raleigh refers to nothing beyond his report of the numbers of the enemy.—Raleigh, book v. sect. 8.[(back)]
Footnote 142: The fact is recorded in the Patent Rolls, P. 2, 3 Hen. V.[(back)]
Footnote 143: The spot from which the battle of Agincourt took its name has been confounded with a place named Azincourt, near the town of Bouchain in French Flanders. On the position of the real field of battle, and its present condition, the Author has much satisfaction in making the following extract from a paper read before the Royal Society of Literature, April 4, 1827, by John Gordon Smith, M.D. who had visited and examined the spot under circumstances of peculiar interest:
"Perhaps I may be pardoned for relating that I had the honour to receive a Waterloo medal on the field of Azincour, or rather, that I had the fortune to belong to one of the British regiments that signalized themselves in the campaign of 1815, and which afterwards was invested with the above-mentioned mark of their sovereign's approbation on the very spot which, nearly four hundred years before, was the scene of the scarcely less glorious triumph of Harry the Fifth of England. In 1816 a portion of the British army was cantoned in the immediate neighbourhood of this celebrated field, and the corps in which I then served made use of it during several months as their ordinary drill-ground.... We amused ourselves with reconnoitring excursions, comparing the actual state of the localities with authentic accounts of the transactions of 1415. The changes that have taken place have been singularly few, and an attentive explorer would be able to trace with considerable accuracy the greater part of the route pursued by the English army in their retreat out of Normandy towards Calais. The field of Azincour remains sufficiently in statu quo to render every account of the battle perfectly intelligible; nor are those wanting near the spot, whose traditionary information enables them to heighten the interest with oral description, accompanied by a sort of ocular demonstration.
"Those who travel to Paris by way of St. Omer and Abbeville, pass over the field of the battle, which skirts the high road to the left, about sixteen miles beyond St. Omer; two on the Paris side of a considerable village or bourg named Fruges; about eight north of the fortified town of Hesdin; and thirty from Abbeville. All accounts of the battle mention the hamlet of Ruisseauville, through which very place the high road to Paris now passes.
"Azincour is a commune or parish consisting of a most uninteresting collection of farmers' residences and cottages, once however distinguished by a castle, of which nothing now remains but the foundation. The scene of the contest lies between this commune and the adjoining one of Tramecour, in a wood belonging to which latter the King concealed those archers whose prowess and vigour contributed so eminently to the glorious result. Part of the wood still remains; though, if I remember rightly, at the time of our visit, the corner into which the bowmen were thrown had been materially thinned, if, indeed, the original timber had not been entirely cut down, and its place been scantily supplied by brush or underwood. Some of the trees, however, in the wood of Tramecour were very old in 1816.