A VISIT TO THE BATTLE-FIELDS OF CRESSY AND AGINCOURT.

IN LETTERS ADDRESSED TO H. P. SMITH, ESQ.

BY H. L. LONG, ESQ.

LETTER I.

PASSAGE OF THE SOMME AT THE FORD OF BLANQUETAQUE.

To your suggestions, my dear Smith, I owe the pleasure I have derived from an excursion to Cressy and Agincourt. I could have wished that the same kindly stars which conducted us in early life to explore the Plain of Marathon together had on this occasion combined our visits to the scenes of the glory of the Plantagenets. I should have rejoiced, too, in the guidance of a friend already acquainted with the localities, for our countrymen, who penetrate everywhere, and cannot be supposed to have left unvisited two celebrated spots almost within sight of England, have not, as far as I could discover, published memoranda for the service of succeeding travellers; true it is that the elaborate work of Sir Harris Nicolas on Agincourt has left us nothing to desire in the way of a narrative of the campaign of Henry V. ; but the plan of the battle-field is erroneous, and we have no descriptive sketch of it, or of its approaches from any recent inspection. As far as Cressy is concerned, no English work, that I know of, has appeared on the subject. Froissart is the great authority for Edward's Campaign, and those readers to whom his antique style and language may not be attractive, find him admirably " done into English" by Johnes, who has, with a peculiarly happy spirit, preserved in the translation the quaint gossiping flow of the original. It would seem from Johnes's own showing that the manuscripts of Froissart present considerable diversities, and since his time M. Rigollot has published in the third volume of the "Memoires de la Societé des Antiquaires de Picardie" various fragments of a MS. of Froissart's which exists in the library of Amiens. From this work M. Louandre in his "History of Abbeville and Ponthieu" has drawn copiously to illustrate his account of the Battle of Cressy. M. Bucher des Perthes, whom I had the pleasure of seeing at Abbeville, recommended me M. Louandre's volumes as containing the best and most recent details of the action, and from his stores I shall not hesitate to borrow whenever I find any thing likely to prove of interest to you, and to illustrate the subject of my letter.

The whole campaign of Edward from Cherbourg to the gates of Paris, and thence to Calais, would form an agreeable outline for a drive through France-his terrific march,

Amazement in the van with flight combined
And sorrow's faded form and solitude behind!

with its various scenes and events would be the main object of examina tion, while an abundance of collateral sources of interest would fill up any vacancies which might occur in the progress of tracing his steps. For ourselves, we confined our observations to Picardy, and approached the scene of action at the mouth of the Somme.

You remember how Edward, while Warwick and Harcourt advanced as far as St. Germain and St. Cloud, remained in the nunnery of Poissy until the middle of August, and celebrated there the feast of the Virgin, "sitting at table in his scarlet robes, without sleeves, trimmed with fur and ermine;" and how his adversary, Philip, had quitted Paris, much to the sorrow and terror of its inhabitants, and fixing his head-quarters at St. Denis, collected an army of imposing strength, and of unusual splendour, for three kings served under his banners. It soon became apparent that the English forces could no longer maintain their position in the face of such formidable numbers, and Edward commenced a retreat towards Calais, which had the appearance almost of a flight, inspiring the French with an energy and activity wholly wanting before, and encouraging them to an immediate pursuit of their enemy. But the march of Edward was impeded on reaching the Somme, the bridges were all either destroyed or in possession of well-fortified hostile forces, and Philip approached fully expecting to shut the English up between the river and the sea, and to starve them into a capitulation, or fight them with every advantage on his own side.

On the 23rd of August, 1346, we find the relative positions of the armies to have been thus. Philip was at Airaines, which the English had quitted so precipitately that the French on entering found meat on the spits, bread in the ovens, "et moult tables que les Anglais avaient laissées." Edward after ineffectually attempting to force a passage at Abbeville, had retired, "moult pensif," to Oisemont, and there, apparently not knowing by which way to proceed, proclaimed rewards and liberty to any one among his prisoners who would guide him to a ford by which he might pass the river with safety. A "varlet" of Mons, by name Gobin Agace, undertook to conduct him to a spot, where "twice a day," in the words of Froissart, "the river is passable for twelve men abreast, with water not higher than their knees, over a bottom hard with gravel and white stones.' The English king caught joyfully at this information, and quitted Oisemont at midnight, in order to outstrip the enemy, and reach the river in time to avail himself of the proper state of the tide for effecting the passage. A chemin-de-travers extends from Oisement to St. Valery; of this Edward seems to have availed himself, and although the distance cannot be less than fourteen or fifteen miles, he reached the river at the desired spot at five o'clock in the morning of the 24th of August. It was low-water, and the ford, perfectly practicable, lay before him; but upon the opposite bank was posted a Norman baron, Godemar du Fay, with a force of some thousand men prepared to dispute the passage. No time was to be lost, for an hundred thousand men were close upon his rear, and Edward ordered his marshals with the best of his men-at-arms, to advance into the river, nor did the French wait until their enemy had gained dry ground, but rushing into the bed of the river, the combatants met and fought furiously in the water. The battle was, however, of brief duration, the English column reached the opposite bank, Godemar was totally defeated, wounded, put to flight, and pursued up to the gates of Abbeville.

In the mean time, Philip, following previously from Oisemont, and imagining his prey now fairly within his grasp, reached the south bank of the Somme, time enough to destroy some few unlucky stragglers of the English army, but too late to pursue it across the ford. The tide

was returning, and without exposing himself to the fate of "Busiris and his Memphian chivalry," he could not have attempted the passage. He retired "tout dolent" to Abbeville, and took up his quarters in the monastery of St. Pierre.

The village of Noyelle, less than a mile from the ford of Blanquetaque, was defended by a garrison and a strong château, which now "n'offre plus qu'une vaste butte de decombres entourée de quelques debris de murailles, et de fossés profonds." The labours of the English army, after effecting their passage of the Somme, and putting to flight the forces of Fay, were not entirely over. Noyelle, however, was soon taken, the village was burnt, and the castle would have shared its fate, had not its noble lady, Catharine d'Artois, Countess d'Aumale, found favour in the eyes of Edward. It was true that her daughter's husband and his father were in arms against him, serving under the standard of Philip, but the father (doomed to perish within a few hours on the field of Cressy!) was brother to Geoffroy d'Harcourt, Edward's favourite marshal, and Catharine herself was daughter to his equally favourite adherent, Robert d'Artois, whom he had created Earl of Richmond; thus was she connected with two great men in Edward's service, who had both quitted that of the French monarch out of some pique or disgust, and who, however valiant and faithful in their fealty to their adopted master, can be regarded as little better than traitors. Catharine, too, although constrained to admit Philip's garrison within the walls of her castle, partook of the general dislike, which all the French noblesse at that period entertained towards that monarch. She threw herself at the feet of Edward, and by the intercession of Geoffroy d'Harcourt, preserved her castle and her liberty.

At Noyelle, the English army halted for the night, and Edward's good faith towards his guide, "the varlet," Gobin, is recorded so carefully by the chroniclers, that it seems to have been a surprise to them that he adhered to his promises. Gobin was presented with a hundred nobles of gold, a horse pour se sauver," his freedom being granted together with that of his companions.

Thus it was that the English monarch owed his preservation and that of his army to the happy accident of finding among his humble prisoners a "varlet," who, acting the part of the mouse in the fable of the lion caught in the toils, was enabled to point out the means by which the great enemy of his country could conquer an apparently insuperable obstacle, and extricate himself from his embarrassments. It was reserved for our own days to witness the converse of this remarkable circumstance, when a French sovereign was indebted to English prisoners for his passage across an adverse river. I allude to Napoleon at Givet, on the Meuse; and the anecdote is too curious and too little known, to require an apology for introducing it here as a parallel to the above. I am indebted to a friend for extracting it from the "Guide Pittoresque du Voyageur en France (Paris, 1834).'

"On communique des deux Givets par un beau pont en pierre, dont la construction décrétée par l'empereur en 1810 fut achevée en 1816. Voici à quelle occasion Napoléon ordonna cette construction, l'empereur revenant de la Belgique arriva à Givet par un temps affreux; la Meuse, grossie par de longues pluies, avoit rompu et emporté le pont de bois qui existait depuis longtemps et tombait de vétusté. Ce contretemps

contraria beaucoup l'empereur qui avait hâte d'arriver à Paris; le passage par bateau était extrêmement dangereux, aucun batelier ne voulut le tenter: cependant l'empereur se souvint qu'il y avait a Givet un dépôt de prisonniers Anglais; il ordonna qu'on en fit venir quelques uns devant lui, et aux quels il demanda leur avis sur la possibilité de passer la rivière; un grand nombre de ces marins assurèrent que la traversée, quoique presentant quelques dangers, était cependant possible, et offrirent leurs services, l'empereur en choisit vingt; et, plein de confiance en leur habilité, parvint heureusement à l'autre rive. Les vingt Anglais reçurent avec la liberté, un habillement complet et une récompense pecuniaire. A son retour à Paris Napoléon ordonna la construction du beau pont qui lie aujourd'hui les deux parties de la ville."

I considered the ford of Blanquetaque possessed of quite sufficient interest to invite us to its examination, and accordingly we quitted the great post road at Nouvion, and taking a sandy track over an open undulating country, we drove to Noyelle, and thence by a little road bearing the magnificent appellation of Chemin des Valois, and connecting the eastern end of the village with the bank where the ford begins, we reached Blanquetaque. The wide bed of the Somme, a mile and a half in breadth, and enlarging towards its mouth, where the towns of St. Valery and Le Crotoy confront each other, seemed at first sight an awful place for the existence of a ford of any description. We arranged to arrive there at low water, but the wet sands as we approached them did not present any other appearance than that of water, giving a most perilous aspect to such extensive shoals through which an army would have to wade. But its dangers disappeared upon examination; the sands are perfectly solid and safe, and the current of the Somme occupies but a very narrow space, and is not above a foot and a half in depth; a very civil person employed on the spot as a douanier, explained to us the usual track adopted by any vehicles traversing the river, but at the same time intimated that he was in the habit of walking almost everywhereeven direct to St. Valery itself.

It is not improbable that in the days of Edward, there might have been far greater hazard attending the passage; the continual drift of sand all along this coast must have had no inconsiderable effect in the embouchure of the Somme, and, moreover, a portion of its waters have been diverted from their course to form the canal on the south side of the river between Abbeville and St. Valery. The name of Blanquetaque is nothing more than the Picard pronounciation of Blanche tache, or "white spot." From this circumstance, and from the words of Froissart quoted above, I expected to find in the bed of the river, "gravel and white stones." It was, however, one waste of common sea sand, such as one gallops over on the Sussex coast, between Worthing and Littlehampton. The name is properly given, and well derived from another circumstance. It is well known to all such as attend in the least to the geological features of this part of France, that the chalk hereabouts, sinking under the tertiary formations, forms the lip of a basin of which we are supposed to have the western margin in Hampshire. It is exactly at Blanquetaque that the chalk unites with the superior strata, and exhibits itself for a moment before its disappearance under them in a little cliff formed by the action of the waves at high water. This little cliff, or bank, is the "Blanchetache," which, serving as a landmark, guides the traveller across the

ford in a direct path from the southern side. This chalk is of the soft or free sort, and has this peculiarity, that it appears shivered into small cubiform pieces. It is possible that in its direction southwards under the bed of the river, it may have some effect in supporting and consolidating the sand, forming a sort of natural barrage, which may be the remote cause of the existence of the ford.

It is not, by-the-bye, without some risk of excommunication that I have proposed natural causes to account for the ford at Blanquetaque. The monkish mythology of Picardy assures us of its enjoying a very different, and far more sublime origin. The town of St. Valery bore anciently another appellation, and owes its present name to its famous eponymous saint, the great apostolic hero of Ponthieu, and it is to his miraculous powers that the ford of the Somme is to be ascribed, the "gué, que le corps de St. Valery franchit en 981, n'etant pas connu alors on fut persuadé que les eaux an fleuve se separarent par miracle pour laisser passer cette precieuse relique." But after all, the claim of St. Valery, dead or living, to the merit of being the first of mortals who crossed the estuary of the Somme is not altogether undisputed. "After this, the King of England marched towards Pountife, upon Bartholomew's day, and came to the water of Some, where the French king had laid 500 men-at-arms, and 3000 footmen, purposing to have kept and stopped our passage, but thanks be to God, the K. of England and his host entered the same water of Some, where never man passed before, without loss of any of our men," &c. So says Northburgh, the king's confessor, and campanion in the campaign, in a letter dated from Calais. Northburgh's testimony, as he afterwards became a bishop, must be entitled to implicit credit, but we will leave the saint and the bishop to settle their own differences.

We could not look upon the distant towers of St. Valery, without reflecting upon the other event in English history, more mighty than Edward's adventure, which has distinguished the mouth of the Somme. From St. Valery, Duke William's expedition set forth to overthrow the Saxon dynasty in England, and commence an era for us from which we seem to begin to date as a nation. A note in Thierry's "History of the Norman Conquest," defeats all claim of St. Valery-en-Caux to dispute the honour of witnessing the departure of the Normans.* The Conqueror little thought that within the lapse of three centuries, his descendant and successor on the throne of England would be leading an army of Saxon yeomen into Normandy and Picardy, to requite at Cressy the debt of blood contracted on the fatal field of Hastings.

Not to lose sight of Edward, I must remark that, after passing the night at Noyelle, he proceeded on his way the following morning,

"Some respectable savans have considered that the place to which William's fleet was thus driven, was Valery-en-Caux, and not Valery-sur-Somme, situated beyond the limits of Normandy; but the manuscript recently discovered at Brussels sets all doubt on the point at rest :

'Tuque, velis nolis, tandem tua litora linquens,
Navigium vertis litus ad alterius.

Portus ab antiquis Vimaci fertur haberi,
Quæ vallat portum Somana nomen aquæ.

De super est castrum quoddam Sancti Walarici,

Hic tibi longa fuit difficilisque mora.""

Widon.-Carmen de Hastingæ prælio. Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, iii. 3.