Raising Taxes ‘pour Resister aux Angloiz’ in the Year of Agincourt
[HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR.]
Royal order in French authorising payment to various officials engaged in raising a levy (‘aide’) at Avranches in order to resist the English (‘pour resister aux Angloiz’), to remove from the country several mercenaries (‘faire vvidier hors du royaume plusieurs pillars’) and to provide for various affairs touching the king and the good of his realm.
Paris, 30 March 1415.
204 x 315 mm, 19 lines written in a French secretary hand in dark brown ink, signed by the royal secretary ‘Chastemer’ at foot and with the remains of three small heraldic wax seals applied directly to the vellum, late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century inscription ‘30 mars 1415’ in top left-had corner; soiled, worn and very creased, small holes in corners where once perhaps sealed with thread, but in good condition and entirely legible.
Added to your basket:
Royal order in French authorising payment to various officials engaged in raising a levy (‘aide’) at Avranches in order to resist the English (‘pour resister aux Angloiz’), to remove from the country several mercenaries (‘faire vvidier hors du royaume plusieurs pillars’) and to provide for various affairs touching the king and the good of his realm.
A royal order to pay officials involved in raising a levy at Avranches, issued a few months before the battle of Agincourt.
On 10 March 1415, at the Tower of London, Henry V had announced his intention to invade France ‘with no small army . . . to reconquer the lands pertaining to the inheritance and the crown of his realm’. Shortly afterwards Charles VI ordered an initial levy of taxation to fund preparations for defence. The present document, however, seems to relate to an earlier levy: in an order of 22 June 1414, Charles’s commissioners had instructed that a payment be made to one Colin Duhamel for having brought to Paris the sums raised during the election of Avranches, these sums being intended to reduce John the Fearless to obedience (‘pour mettre et réduire à son obeisance Jehan de Bourgogne et ses complices rebelles et désobéissans’; see J. Tardif, ed., Monuments historiques, 1866, p. 436). Following the signing of the Peace of Arras between Charles VI and John the Fearless in February 1415, these funds could presumably be diverted to meet other needs such as a potential English invasion.
The present document authorises payment of 25 livres tournois to the elected officials for their services and salaries during the imposition of the ‘aide’ (the total value being 50 livres tournois, so there were evidently two such officials), 80 livres tournois to the ‘Receveur’, Robert des Preaulx, 100 sols tournois to Jean Rossignol for bringing to Paris ‘le double de lestat’, and eight livres tournois for the clerk who prepared the ‘co[m]missions du taux’ for the various towns’ portions of the levy.
The royal secretary ‘Chastemer’ is doubtless Antoine Chastemer, a native of Beauvais: see H. Denifle, Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis vol. IV, 1897, p. 92, where he is recorded among the ‘nomina magistrorum nationis Picardorum’ in a 1403 register of supplicants for benefices. Denifle notes that in the Supplicationes of Pope Martin V Chastemer is recorded in 1417 as a secretary and notary of Charles VI and that he sought a parish in the diocese of Chartres (‘An. 1417 ut secret. et notar. Caroli Franc. regis affertur, et petit paroch. eccl. de Novovico Carnotens. dioec. ([Suppl. Mart. V], no. 101, fol. 276b)’, idem p. 95 n. 20).
The months leading up to the English invasion of France have, until recently, received patchy treatment by historians, English scholars tending to concentrate on the military campaign itself and French scholars preferring to ignore the entire episode.
