1415 Henry V's Year of Glory by Ian Mortimer

Author:Ian Mortimer [Ian Mortimer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448103775
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 25th

The siege had now been underway for a week, and the siege engines and cannon had continued bombarding the town, day and night. The author of the Gesta remarked that

within a few days, when by the violence and fury of the stones the barbican was in the process of being largely demolished, the walls and towers from which the enemy had discharged their offensives were rendered defenceless with their ramparts destroyed; and truly fine buildings, almost as far as the middle of the town, were either totally demolished or threatened with inevitable collapse or, at least, their framework falling apart.82

For Henry, this was now becoming a problem. He wanted to take Harfleur and hold it; but if the inhabitants and soldiers under Raoul de Gaucourt held out until the town was destroyed, he would not be able to defend it against the French counter-attack, whenever that might come. Then he would find himself defending nothing but a pile of rubble, and trapped against the coast. The truth was that his strategy of taking the town quickly was likely to leave the town in ruins long before the inhabitants’ food supplies ran out. The effect on his nerve and the nerves of his fellow councillors cannot be known; but it would be foolish to suppose that the situation was anything but deeply worrying.

The destruction of the town was not Henry’s only concern. Raoul de Gaucourt was rallying the defenders to fight with crossbows, guns, catapults, and siege engines of their own. From the barbican outside the Porte Leure they shot and fired at the attackers, and also from behind screens erected in the openings of shattered walls and broken towers. In addition, by night, when it was difficult for the archers to pick off the defenders, they started to rebuild the damaged walls and the barbican, re-laying the stones and placing large tubs filled with earth, dung, sand and stones. Walls teetering or collapsing they shored up in a similar way, using bundles of faggots set solid with clay, earth and dung. They also lay clay, dung and earth over the streets and lanes to soak up the impact of crashing stones and masonry, so that projectiles would not bounce off the hard ground into buildings but would get swallowed up in the mud.

For Henry the obvious next step was a full-scale assault on the walls with scaling ladders, or through the breaches he had made. Overcoming the defenders in this way would preserve what remained of the defences. But his first attempts to overwhelm the walls proved futile. The defenders had filled jars with a compound made from sulphur and quicklime to throw in the eyes of the men who attacked. They had also gathered barrels of inflammable powders, oils and fat; if any siege equipment came close – such as a wooden tower to launch an onslaught on the walls – then they set light to the barrels and poured them over the wooden apparatus. The author of

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