Breaking the Bonds 1360-1415 Chivalry and Betrayal: The Hundred Years War

It's hard to imagine today that there was ever a time

when England and France were more

than two separate countries.

But 700 years ago, our ruling classes

had been bound by shared values,

locked together by one culture

in a marriage that had lasted 300 years.

But in the mid 14th century, it had hit the rocks.

What followed was the longest and bloodiest divorce in history.

I'm going to tell the story of over 100 years of war

when little England dared to challenge

the mighty superpower that was France,

and refused to give up.

In the first 20 years of this war, King Edward III had humiliated

the formidable French army in battle.

He'd sacrificed the bonds once shared to win,

and set England on a path from which there was no way back.

Now I'll explore the impact that leaders like Richard II

and Henry V had on the very foundation of society,

and I'll show how this war shaped and changed us -

helping make England what it is today.

In this episode, the wheel of fortune turns full circle.

England falls from glory into chaos

until one king snatches the greatest military victory of the war,

in a battle that would become synonymous with Englishness itself.

And I'll reveal how, out of this turmoil,

a uniquely English culture emerged.

For 20 years England and France had been locked in a brutal struggle

over possession of England's ancestral lands

in Gascony and Normandy, and the English King Edward III's

proclaimed right to the French crown.

Edward had clawed his way to victory

and at the battle of Poitiers, had achieved the unimaginable.

The English had captured the French king,

paraded him through the streets of London

and bought him here in triumph.

With their king held prisoner, the French had no choice

but to sign a humiliating agreement known as the Treaty of Bretigny.

The Treaty gave the English King full sovereignty,

not just of his own territories,

but over a massively enlarged Gascony, or Aquitaine.

Nearly a third of the country was now ruled by the English.

The document shows that France was forced to hand over

swathes of territory that had been conquered

by the great warrior king of England, Edward III.

In this image, the two kings are holding hands

in the presence of a cardinal,

symbolising their new-found friendship.

Once this document was signed,

England and France were officially at peace.

But that would mean something very different

on either side of the Channel.

For England, peace meant security and prosperity.

And it wasn't just the king

who could enjoy the rewards of victory.

So did the knights who'd fought at his side.

Medieval warfare was a profitable business,

not just from plunder, but from the demand of ransoms

on prisoners taken at the battlefield.

England was fat with the spoils of war.

That meant the nobility could indulge

in passion projects like this.

As a cultural historian,

I'm fascinated by The Great Hall at Berkeley Castle.

It was built by a veteran of the war, Lord Berkeley.

Known as Thomas the Rich,

this soldier was a collector of property and land.

He had a household of more than 300 people,

and owned over 15,000 horses.

The fighting classes loved to express their status

through extravagant gestures -

Thomas filled one of his hunting parks not just with any old deer,

but with purely albino ones.

England at this time was rich, but she was also confident.

And you can see that reflected in places like this.

Berkeley Castle is a military structure,

but it doesn't feel like a fortress.

It was also about comfort.

Throughout the country,

the English nobility weren't just building castles but stately homes,

as they revelled in their new-found sense of security.

In the first round of the Hundred Years' War,

England had come out on top.

She'd reached the ideal medieval state -

a popular and victorious king was in charge,

with a contented and loyal nobility beneath him.

In France, the situation was very different.

With Jean II in captivity, there was no king in charge.

The rudderless country, which had been the jewel of Europe,

was dissolving into chaos.

Ravaged by 20 years of war,

it was now being overrun by terrifying bands

of out-of-work English soldiers, known as freebooters.

So, Ian, it wasn't very peaceful in France at this time, was it?

It wasn't very peaceful at all.

The fundamental point is it's very difficult in any age

to disband an army. And it's exceptionally difficult

in the 14th century.

I mean, war had made these people what they were, really.

It had given them a great opportunity

and they want to carry on fighting.

They ransack the countryside, they ransack towns,

doing all manner of unspeakable things,

and the French hate them,

and no one really can get the numbers together to stop them.

Incidentally they did actually fight each other,

so they victimised each other too.

These men don't have any principles, really.

Because they're not affiliated specifically with anyone.

No, they're all in it for themselves.

The only thing that gives them any cohesion is

they tend to be led by strong knights,

who take advantage of these freebooters

to carry on a sort of illegal war in France,

a sort of unofficial war,

and that's sort of not disapproved of by Edward III.

It's interesting, isn't it -

peace doesn't really apply to this period.

No, that idea of knightly leadership,

that's embedded in society - you can't just turn it off

because we happen to have had a peace treaty.

These people believe in military endeavour

and bravery as their raison d'etre.

We think of peace as being a normal state of affairs,

they thought of conflict as a normal state of affairs

and if you could take advantage of conflict,

you wanted to perpetuate that state.

England had France at her mercy, but in April 1364,

the death of a king would swing the balance of power.

After eight years' captivity, Jean II died.

According to the medieval conventions of chivalry,

shared by England and France,

only now could his eldest son step forward.

Jean II's heir was Charles V. He was a scholarly and pious leader,

but he had a steely determination to restore France's honour.

Charles announced the Treaty of Bretigny void

and declared war on England.

Nine years of so-called peace were now over.

The French King wasn't made for fighting.

He was frail and plagued by mysterious illnesses.

But he was determined to bring order to his country

and to get the English out.

To do that, he'd have to choose his generals wisely.

In 1370, Charles made this man, Bertrand Du Guesclin,

his commander in chief. In many ways it was an unusual decision.

The post usually went to someone of the highest nobility, knightly

in stature, manners and looks. Du Guesclin was none of those things.

He was the son of a minor noble, short in stature

and careless about his appearance. But Du Guesclin was exactly

what Charles needed. He was a born fighter.

The poet Jean de Cuvelier wrote that even

when Du Guesclin was a child his parents despaired over his violence.

Apparently he was always ready for a fight. He was a gang leader

and organised his friends into rival groups.

To fight this war, France had always stuck to the rules of chivalry,

even when the English hadn't.

But Charles was ready to do things differently.

The French had learnt their lesson the hard way

at the battles of Poitiers and Crecy.

Now they refused to meet the English in pitched battle.

Instead, Charles set Du Guesclin on a strategy of ambushes,

night-time raids and scorched-earth tactics across English-held territories.

This suited Du Guesclin perfectly.

Free from the chivalric conventions of the battlefield,

he used English guerrilla tactics against the English.

Within a year, he'd won back the provinces of Poitou and Saintonge.

And Charles had another ace up his sleeve.

In this war, control of the sea meant power.

England couldn't defend her territories in France if she wasn't able to reach them.

If Charles could gain custody of the Channel, he could squeeze the English out of France.

By 1377, Charles had amassed an enormous fleet of ships

which he sent charging across the sea.

England had nothing to match it.

And the French king wasn't stopping there.

For Charles, it wasn't enough to simply drive the English

out of France. He wanted to avenge the horrors their freebooters had wrought,

and the best way to do that was to attack them on their own shores.

Charles understood that the art of war was changing.

He launched a series of devastating raids on defenceless towns

and villages along the south coast.

I'm with Dr Susan Rose, an expert on this kind of total war.

We have one account of a sea raid on a Cornish village.

They would come in on one tide and get into the village,

get the crossbowmen off, attack the village,

set it on fire, and then, if there were ships in the harbour, tow them out.

So they would do that between two tides, so in on the flood,

-out on the ebb. That's six hours...

-Gosh!

..to create terror in the village,

and of course, by the time they were leaving,

the entire neighbourhood would have been in an uproar.

And in this particular instance in Cornwall,

they gathered on the cliffs on each side of the entrance to the harbour

and were firing down, throwing rocks. But the galleys had

the tide under them and could get out to sea and away.

It sounds really quick. It must have been absolutely terrifying.

They'd lost their homes, they'd lost their means of livelihood.

They might have lost family members, then, of course, it would spread down

the coast like wildfire. Everybody knew the French were coming, the French were coming.

And then the commons petition the King. You know, "Our villages are in ruins,

"our ships are gone. What are you doing about it?"

And they get the answer,

"Well, the King and the council will advise themselves," i.e. nothing!

In fact, there was very little England could do.

The once-triumphant country was now unable to defend herself.

Behind this massive reversal of fortune is the mysterious story of one man's demise.

The clues lie here at Westminster Abbey.

While France was raiding the coast of England, the great warrior king,

Edward III, had been on the throne for a staggering 50 years.

Edward had been a brilliant strategist, both at home and abroad.

It was his sheer force of will that had brought England glory.

He was held up as the ideal of a medieval king...

..described by the chronicler Walsingham as "benevolent, merciful and magnificent".

But for the last ten years of his reign, Edward was

far from the victorious leader that he'd once been.

He'd lost control of his court and his men at arms. A rumour emerged

that the king was senile and it stuck.

For centuries to come, the king's senility was

blamed for England's decline.

But here, at the Abbey museum, a unique object tells a different story.

I've come to look at it with historian Nigel Saul.

So, Nigel, this is the funeral effigy of Edward III?

Yes, that's right. What we're looking at is a death mask,

a face of plaster cast, actually, from the king's face at the moment of his death,

and it forms the head of this wooden funeral effigy,

the earliest to survive,

which would have been made so as to be placed on top of the coffin.

So we're looking at the actual likeness of the king?

That is why it's so remarkable.

It's an extraordinarily macabre likeness because - look at it closely -

the eyes are painted. The eyebrows, they were made from dog's hair.

Remember that all the tomb effigies here at Westminster Abbey,

they are merely idealised representations. This is authentic.

We are looking at the face of the man exactly as he looked at the moment that he died.

And what does this likeness show us, then?

Something very important and remarkable.

What we normally read

is that the poor old boy went senile in his last years.

It doesn't appear to have been senility in the conventional sense.

It was a physical problem. When we look closely at the face,

we see that the mouth is distorted -

it's twisted down slightly on the left.

Almost certainly he'd suffered a stroke,

perhaps a succession of strokes.

And this must have had a profound effect on the governance of the country, then?

Yes, he was physically incapacitated, he was laid low.

He was incapable of governing, so people took advantage of him.

They were ripping him off.

They were stuffing the medieval equivalent of five pound notes into

brown paper envelopes, creaming off the money that should have gone into

the war effort. So there was a lot of criticism of corruption at court.

It was becoming merely a centre of sleaze and dishonour.

In this conflict, the fortunes of both England

and France were inextricably bound up with the character

and strength of the man in charge.

It was Edward's slow disintegration that had allowed Charles V to seize the advantage for France.

To change that, England desperately needed a new leader.

On the 21st of June 1377, Edward died.

But the crisis continued.

There was no heir to replace him.

England's great hope, Edward's eldest son, the Black Prince,

hero of the Battle of Poitiers,

had died of dysentery the year before his father.

Next in line to the throne was Edward's grandson, Richard,

but he was just a ten-year-old boy.

Just at the time when England most needed a strong king,

the only option was for power to go to Richard's uncle, Edward's third son,

the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt.

John of Gaunt would lead the country until Richard came of age.

But this unpopular stand-in was not what England needed.

The England he'd inherited wasn't an easy country to rule.

Rumblings of social discontent were more dangerous than they might seem.

England and France were living in the aftermath of the Black Death.

It's thought that these bones at the church of St Leonard's

in Kent were moved here to clear space in the overcrowded graveyard.

In France, the social depravations of the disease were

contained by King Charles's stable economy and clever leadership.

In England, the hated John of Gaunt faced a near-impossible task.

The plague had wiped out half the population, which meant half the tax revenue.

England was already broke after years of mismanagement and war.

John of Gaunt would have to find some way to make up the deficit.

But raising taxes wasn't as easy as it had once been.

The plague had changed the balance of power.

Labourers were now in short supply. Those who had survived had begun to realise

that they could command higher wages and better rights.

The general population had more power than it had ever had before.

Throughout the country, there were stirrings of social unrest

as people began to question the status quo.

The stage was set for a perfect storm.

In June 1381, southern England was again under attack.

Some 10,000 men thronged across the original London Bridge,

but this had nothing to do with the French.

This was an attack on England by the English.

After years of plague, failed war, oppression and incompetence,

the peasantry had had enough.

They rose up in the largest mass rebellion in English history

and marched on London.

This was a class war led by a man from Kent,

Wat Tyler, labelled by the aristocratic chronicler Froissart as,

"A tiler of roofs and a wicked and nasty fellow."

Together with a rebel priest, John Ball,

he managed to unite discontented peasants and labourers.

Their cause? To abolish serfdom

and remove what they saw as the incompetent

and corrupt traitors ruling in the name of the boy king, Richard.

The trigger for the rebellion was the introduction of a new poll tax

by the Chancellor, Archbishop Simon Sudbury.

Now the rebels were after anyone connected with government, tax or law.

John of Gaunt was an obvious target, but he was away in Scotland.

The 14-year-old Richard was in the safest place in southern England, the Tower of London.

With him was the man responsible for the poll tax, Simon Sudbury.

If there was one man in England more hated than Gaunt, it was him.

The terrified Sudbury had hidden in the chapel at the top of the White Tower.

Apparently, here in St John's Chapel,

Simon Sudbury offered up prayer after prayer.

In his chronicles, Froissart wrote,

"You can well imagine what a frightening situation it was for the King

"and those with him, with those evil men yelling and shouting outside like devils."

Tyler's men believed that their concerns would be met

if they could only speak to the King himself.

On the 14th of June, Richard was sent out to hear their requests.

As he did so, the impossible happened.

For the first time in English history, a mob broke into the tower.

They forced their way into the chapel

and found the terrified Chancellor.

Sudbury was dragged from the building.

In the Suffolk village of Sudbury,

some remarkable evidence of what happened next still survives.

I've come to see it for the first time with Professor Caroline Wilkinson.

This is our little hole in the wall.

SHE LAUGHS

Oh, my gosh! Wow!

So, this is the head of Simon of Sudbury.

Oh, my goodness! So this is the man that was at the heart

of the Peasants' Revolt, the Lord Chancellor.

-It's an incredible thing.

-It is.

-It's mummified?

Yes, so you can see it's not just skeletal. Mostly on this side and the base,

you can see this mummified soft tissue.

-Oh, my goodness!

-So you kind of can see the nose.

You can't really see the lips, but you can see some shapes.

So can we get him out?

We can. And you can touch him, if you like. I've got another pair of gloves.

Oh, wow! OK.

This will be an experience.

OK, so now you can see this bit of cheek

that's bending in over the lower jaw.

We've got this pretty well-preserved ear, or most of an ear.

-Have you got it?

-I have.

-It doesn't show exactly what he looked like,

but it's enough to give you a sense of the person.

You can feel the texture of the skin through the gloves. It's absolutely incredible.

-Oh, my goodness. I'm going to hand it back.

-OK.

So what can we tell about what happened to him?

Well, the interesting thing about Simon's remains is that we can see here the cervical vertebrae,

and you can see that it's been cut. So you can see this surface here...

-Oh, yes!

-..where you can see the inside of the bone rather than the outside surface,

so it's sliced through here, sliced through the spinous process,

and partially severed the body, which is this round part of the vertebra,

so what that suggests is that we've got a blow from behind him,

from the right-hand side, swinging into the neck and partially severing

the neck, so this blow stopped and didn't go all the way through the neck.

So he's beheaded but what this seems to suggest is that it wasn't a clean cut?

No, it certainly doesn't look that way.

It must have taken more than one blow to decapitate him.

What happened once he died?

The story is that his head was put onto a spike on London Bridge

and then, apparently, the people of Sudbury went and rescued the head

-and brought it back to the church.

-Wow!

It seems poll taxes never worked for anyone.

Sudbury's head is a potent symbol of how England was changing.

400 years before the French Revolution,

this Peasants' Revolt shook the nobility of England to its core.

The time had come for the uprising to be stopped

and it would fall to the boy Richard to do it.

The King, with his men at arms,

rode out to the grounds of St Bartholomew's Church in Smithfield.

What happened here was the first great test of Richard II

and arguably his most important battle.

The 14-year-old king met Wat Tyler and his followers, supposedly to address their concerns.

This is the classic image of that confrontation.

It seems that Wat Tyler was surrounded by the King's knights

and stabbed in the neck and the stomach.

Richard, in a moment of quick-thinking,

rode into the middle of the rebel throng, who didn't yet know

that their leader was dead and declared, "You shall have no captain but me.

"Just follow me to the fields without

"and then you can have what you want."

The rebels, convinced that Richard would keep his word, left London and dispersed.

They had, of course, been duped.

The ringleaders of the uprising were hunted down and hanged,

and hundreds of their followers were imprisoned.

The nobility ruthlessly re-imposed their power.

Professor Caroline Barron has researched the impact of the Peasants' Revolt.

Caroline, was it inevitable that the Peasants' Revolt would fail?

Yes, but it had a very strong shock effect on the governing classes

who had no idea that ordinary peasants could send

letters to each other, communicate and organise something so massive.

And in that sense, I think we could draw a parallel with 9/11,

because the attack on the World Trade Center

was highly organised and I think it really took the world by surprise

that people who, perhaps none of us had paid much attention to

or didn't think were very sophisticated or technically very sophisticated,

were actually able to achieve something so remarkable

and so devastating. So in that sense, the shock effect was the same.

So it affects the medieval mind?

Yes. It didn't achieve anything in practical terms for those

who took part, but what it did achieve was it made

the imposition of extra taxation much more difficult, obviously,

after that, and they inevitably made the governing classes

take account of the wishes, the needs, the ambitions

of a whole group of people they'd probably not really considered before.

As the bond with their French counterparts broke down,

the English nobility faced the challenge of a new relationship with their own people.

It hasn't got the legendary status of Poitiers or Agincourt,

but for me, the Peasants' Revolt is one of the defining battles of the 14th century.

The people had spoken and future kings would ignore them at their peril.

The French had made full use of England's internal distractions.

By the time Charles V died, to be replaced by his son,

Charles VI, all that remained of the lands the English

saw as their rightful heritage was a small area around Bordeaux

and the tiny corner of Calais.

To regain both their ancestral rights

and their honour in France, England's only hope was the 22-year-old King Richard.

In 1389, he'd announced that he was taking control of the government

instead of John of Gaunt.

At last the rightful king, the grandson of Edward III, was in charge.

Surely he could change England's fortunes.

Here at the National Gallery is a piece of medieval art which

gives us a unique insight into the kind of king Richard II would be.

This is the Wilton Diptych.

It's one of the finest pieces of medieval art in the world.

It's particularly remarkable because it was commissioned

by King Richard himself as his portable altarpiece.

I can just imagine him kneeling in front of it as he prayed.

As an artwork itself, the diptych is special.

It's exceptionally well-executed and detailed.

If you look at the King's crown, the gold leaf has been punched

with minute dots to give it greater texture

and then the paint has been applied for pearls,

raised up from the surface to give it a three-dimensional quality.

The Wilton Diptych is a personal piece of art. It shows how Richard saw himself.

For him, kingship was a divinely-given right.

He's even had the angels portrayed wearing his symbol, the white hart.

The intricate details of the diptych tell us

something else about Richard's reign.

Richard is wearing not just his own heraldry,

but also the collar of the King of France, Charles VI.

He's shown in the company of three saints -

John the Baptist, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr.

But there's one saint who's notably absent -

St George, the warrior saint.

The message is clear and it would have

filled the military elite of England with horror.

Richard was a king who loved peace.

Luckily for Richard, across the Channel, his new counterpart,

Charles VI, who would become known as Charles the Mad, was equally unambitious.

Neither king had an appetite for war, and in 1389, they agreed a truce.

The war might be on hold, but England and France were still growing apart.

England was finding her own identity.

For the last three centuries, the English nobility had spoken French.

English was a lesser language, spoken only by the so-called "ordinary people".

In the 1380s, it became increasingly fashionable to speak English.

And this delicate parchment is a symbol of that change.

For me, it's one of the defining objects of our history.

And it opens, "Here beginneth the book of the Tales Of Canterbury."

It's the oldest surviving copy

of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and it's known as the Hengwrt manuscript.

This 600-year-old manuscript was created by a scribe working directly for the poet.

Geoffrey Chaucer was the son of a merchant,

but he had close links with the nobility and served in Richard's court.

You'd expect high-status poetry like this to be written in French,

but instead it's written in the language of the populace,

the vernacular, English.

In 1384, the Bible had been translated into English.

And by the end of the 14th century, French would all but disappear.

Everyone in England would speak English.

It's not just the language that's important,

it's also the style in which it's written.

Just look at this bit. Here's Chaucer on women.

READS TEXT

-TRANSLATES:

-You super wives, stand at defence,

since you are strong like a great camel.

Chaucer's pugnacious style came to be seen as quintessentially English.

The witty satire seemed to epitomise England's growing sense

of identity as a feisty, independent nation.

It wasn't just in literature

that an English national identity was flourishing.

Before the war, England had looked to France

as an arbiter of architectural style and taste.

Since 1066, English architecture was dominated by the Norman style.

You can see it here, in the nave of Gloucester Cathedral

in these fat, strong columns.

Norman architecture was all about the practical,

keeping the building up.

But as you step around this corner, just look at this.

This is what happened

when the English began to break away from France.

Instead of copying French architecture, we developed our own.

This is English Perpendicular Gothic.

The building's structure is hidden behind delicate stonework.

You've got these straight lines and much more emphasis

on the vertical thrust upwards of the building.

It's no longer supported by squat columns,

but spanned by flying buttresses.

Created in the shadow of the Black Death,

this perpendicular style was an attempt to lift

the desperate prayers of those below upwards to the heavens.

English masons became some of the best in Europe.

They also created this elaborate latticed stonework

known as fan vaulting.

This distinctive English style

was soon being copied by the French.

This time of peace became an era of English self-expression

and artistic magnificence.

But there was a problem with Richard's reign.

I think it's best demonstrated

by a remarkable document at the National Archives.

This is Richard's treasure roll,

a record of all the precious objects he had accumulated.

The things described are all gold, silver or bejewelled.

This is just a third of it.

When it's fully open it's 28 metres long.

It's the longest surviving treasure roll

for any Medieval English king and it lists the modern equivalent

of over a billion pounds' worth of trinkets, ornaments and jewellery.

Richard's spending made him unpopular with the people.

They understood when their taxes were being used by a king

to wage war on the French. As we've seen,

there were benefits to be had from military success.

But Richard wasn't spending money on war.

To the people, it seemed he was indulging

his personal pleasures at public expense.

But Richard had a bigger problem than the people.

In 1397, he clashed with a group of nobles who opposed the peace.

Among them his cousin, the son of John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke.

Unable to accept any challenge to his authority,

Richard had Henry exiled to France, but he didn't stop there.

A year later, when John of Gaunt died,

Richard extended Bolingbroke's exile

and seized the inheritance left to him by his father.

Richard had gone a step too far.

What happened here in August 1399

would change the course of the war and English history.

At Conwy Castle in North Wales,

Richard paid the price for his tyrannical behaviour.

Henry Bolingbroke had come back to England with an army,

determined to reclaim the vast family wealth

stolen from him by his cousin Richard.

But Henry was to go much further than that.

Henry found that across the country,

support for the ineffective King Richard had gone.

Froissart claimed that the population of London hated him so much

that every time they mentioned his name they added,

"Damn and blast the dirty bugger."

Richard was so unpopular,

Henry realised there was more within his grasp than just his inheritance.

The most powerful nobles in England were declaring their loyalty to him.

If he could track Richard down,

Henry could force him to hand over the crown.

Richard, who was in hiding here, knew the net was closing in.

In a last desperate effort he agreed to meet Henry's negotiator,

the Duke of Northumberland.

In this very chapel, Northumberland swore an oath on ancient relics

that he and Bolingbroke meant Richard no harm

and that it was safe for him to leave the castle.

But it was a trap.

The minute Richard set foot outside of the castle,

he was seized by Northumberland's men

and taken in triumph to Henry.

Richard, this man who had believed so completely

in the invincibility of kingship, had no choice but to step down.

Richard had failed to realise that in England the Peasants' Revolt

had changed what it meant to be king.

While France would endure the follies of their ineffective monarch,

the people and parliament of England

crowned the audacious Bolingbroke Henry the IV.

Richard's reign of peace was over.

A year later he died alone in Pontefract Castle,

starved to death at his cousin Henry's command.

Henry had got what he wanted, but the crown had lost its sanctity.

Henry's 14-year reign was marred by continual plots against him

and opposing claims to the throne.

Beset by internal conflict,

the glory that had seemed within Henry's grasp melted away.

And with it, any hope of resuming the war with France.

When he died in 1413,

he told his son that the crown had never been his.

That son, who in Shakespeare's legend

was already trying on the crown as his father lay dying,

would become an icon of English history - Henry V.

Henry seemed to be everything England needed.

He was popular with both the court and the people

and had had the sort of upbringing

almost designed to make him the perfect king.

Even as a young prince,

Henry was out defending challenges to his father's crown.

There's one account that really sums this up for me.

It was written by the King's own surgeon.

It describes the aftermath of the Battle of Shrewsbury.

The 16-year-old Henry took an arrow to the face.

It lodged itself six inches deep into the skull.

The surgeon's report describes how he had to enlarge

the space around the arrowhead using probes

so he could get right underneath it and pull it out.

This was all conducted without anaesthetic.

Henry must have been scarred for life.

It's perhaps why the only portrait of him that survives

shows just his left side.

This was the kind of leader England had been waiting for.

But Henry was the son of a usurper

and that shadow hung over his entire reign.

He was determined to prove the validity, the divinity

of his kingship and for me it's that drive, that inner conflict

that would dictate the course of history for decades to come.

Henry would have to earn his right to kingship.

Although much had changed in England,

there was still only one way to prove his legitimacy.

Henry re-launched the war with France.

By now, the French king Charles the Mad was living up to his name

having tried to kill his own council

in the first of many bouts of insanity.

The chaos that had ensued was too good

an opportunity for an English king to miss.

It was from here at Portchester Castle that Henry

launched his invasion of France.

On Sunday 11th August,

1,500 ships set sail across the Channel.

It was a fleet 12 times the size of the Spanish Armada.

On board were some 8,000 archers and 2,000 men at arms.

Henry knew that to secure his position this had to be

not just his war, or even his knights' war, but England's war.

He turned this into a campaign about national honour and prestige.

Some accounts say Henry's ship was emblazoned with heraldry.

On the main sail was the royal coat of arms.

It was changed at the beginning of the 100 Years War

by Edward III to show not just the three lions of England,

but also the fleur-de-lis of France.

And on the rear deck flew the banner of St George.

Henry was going to restore King Edward's conquests.

But more than that, he was going to prove that God

was on his side and on the side of the English.

What happened next has gone down in history as one of the greatest

and most miraculous of Medieval victories.

But it could have been very different.

Henry had landed in Harfleur. His aim was to take the town

and use it as base from where he could conquer Normandy

and strike down river at Paris.

But Harfleur proved hard to break.

It took six weeks of bloody siege to gain control of the town.

Henry faced disaster - his losses were

so great he was forced to abandon his original plan.

His council advised that his only option was to sail back to England.

But Henry wasn't about to leave France with nothing.

He proposed that his exhausted army,

by now ridden with dysentery and disease,

would embark on a chevauchee, a raid through the countryside,

160 miles towards English-held Calais.

There were rich pickings to be had,

but after three months, Henry had lost a third of his men.

And he hadn't realised that his every move

was being tracked by the French as they managed to gather

one of the largest armies of the war.

They finally caught up with him about 35 miles from Calais

outside this small village - Agincourt.

Historian Ian Mortimer is an expert on the battle that followed.

This was such a historically important site.

This is the very place - this is the place where English history is made,

150 yards over there, you've got the mass grave of the French victims

of the battle and this is the spot between where two armies were drawn up.

Down there, right across the battlefield over there

is where the English archers

and men at arms had lined up ready to face the French.

The French were up there, towards the top of the hill,

waiting for the English to move north because they knew they wanted to get to Calais and to safety.

And for a long time, it looked like nothing was going to happen.

English drawn up, the French just held them back.

And then Henry made an amazing decision,

because normally English archers had won battles

by waiting to be attacked and as the army charged towards you,

then you shot them.

But in this case, he bought all the army forward

and that's when the battle really began.

The English attacked the larger army of the French.

Henry's decision seemed like insanity.

But these were two very different armies.

Henry's was modelled on Edward III's,

made up largely of skilled soldiers of all classes,

fighting for one national cause.

The French force was led by knightly men at arms,

many from independent duchies, they were unified only by the ties

of chivalry, the code of conduct they had always fought by.

It rained the night before the battle, which was a major factor.

The French tried to do what they do best, which is charge.

The ground was too boggy, it was too messy

and they basically slipped and the horses careered into each other.

They were slowed by the mud and the English archers were able

to get close enough to shoot their arrows and kill the frontline.

And that's crucial because the French had put all their best knights,

their grandest men right at the front of the army.

So English archers, peasants,

were shooting the great men of France from the moment go.

The people behind couldn't draw their swords and support them,

they couldn't charge either, so the entire charge was basically stopped.

They're just ploughing into this line

and the English can just take them out then?

Absolutely. The French charging knights have no reverse gear.

They can't suddenly go back and it really became a scrum in which

Englishmen were killing trapped Frenchmen.

A lot of Frenchmen actually suffocated

under the weight of their comrades on top of them.

But at the end of the day, it was a victory that Henry had no

right to expect because his men were demoralised and weak.

He had fewer soldiers and he was very, very lucky.

Lucky and he is a good military leader, isn't he?

He gets involved in this himself.

It's Henry who keeps everybody together - sheer force of will.

He's a most incredible man.

I think he's quite a cold man. I think the golden-boy image

you get from Shakespeare is very misleading,

but he really is as brave as people think he is.

He's an extraordinary character when you look at him up close.

In these blood-soaked fields, Henry the son of the usurper,

achieved what he'd set out to do.

The cream of French nobility lay dead, cut down in their prime.

Now no one could deny Henry the English crown...

..and with that his claims in France.

Henry had proved the divine right of his kingship -

God was on his side, and on the side of England, united behind him.

He had turned a feudal struggle for territories

into a nationalistic war for supremacy.

Next, the 100 Years War becomes a battle for the moral high ground.

Henry continues his invasion of France

and claims the French crown for his son.

France finally strikes back,

united behind a peasant girl who would become a saint.

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