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AGINCOURT.

I BEGIN this series of CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL TRACTS with a word which never fails, whenever it is pronounced, to fill the minds of Englishmen with ideas of the prowess and splendid achievements of their ancestors, to remind them of what they are capable in a great struggle, when a struggle shall become necessary, and thus to sustain their spirits in a time of danger, and to establish and secure their national independence ;—and, with an event most important in its results to two great kingdoms, formed for perpetual friendship and the unceasing interchange of kind offices, but too long divided, formerly by uncertain principles of regal succession, and latterly by mistaken views of policy and interest. And that no more may be expected than what this small Tract will be found to satisfy, I beg, in the first instance, to state explicitly what it is that I now propose to do, and what relative to the subject does not fall within the compass of my design.

I do not then mean to enter into the question of the grounds and reasons of the claim which the descendants of Isabella of France set up to the crown of France, or into the argument on either side, historical, political, legal, or moral. On one part of the argument I may perhaps hereafter enter, should I ever complete a design, long entertained, of laying before the public A GENEALOGICAL HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PRINCES OF THE HOUSE OF ANJOU, with all their home and foreign alliances.

I do not propose to enter at all on the negociations or any other part of the political history of those times, or on the more occult reasons which are supposed to have induced the King of England to undertake, at that particular period, so vast and dangerous an enterprise. Nor do I propose to give any regular account of the campaign, or even of the two great events which occurred in the course of it-the Siege of Harfleur and the Battle of Agincourt.

What I propose is only this:-to offer an instalment from evidence, which, having been for centuries deeply buried in the unknown masses of the national records, has lately been by me brought to light, in pursuance of orders from the Right Hon. the Master of the Rolls, the general custos of the ancient records of the kingdom, towards a complete list of the English commanders who served with the king in that expedition, most of whom were present at the battle, with, in most cases, the number of the retinue which each commander undertook to bring into the field, derived from the same evidence, and in some instances notices of events happening to the contingents, when the evidence supplies them. I do not propose to go for either name, retinue, or events, beyond the line within which, to my own knowledge, all that will be stated rests on contemporary authority of the most unquestionable kind. And having done this, I stop. It is no part of my design to make the fact of a particular person having been present in this expedition, a pretext for compiling a biographical notice of him, which would be very easily. done with respect to many of them, and could not be done at all with respect to others. Occasionally I may take a fact from Dugdale to complete the story, but this will rarely be done and having mentioned Dugdale, I will add that, though many of the persons whose names will come before us are to be found in his

'History of the Baronage,' yet with all his knowledge of the national records, he was not in the least acquainted with those on which I proceed, so that this little Tract contains several things which will require to be added to his account of the peers of the reign of King Henry the Fifth, whenever that great work of his shall be remodelled and rewritten.

For the same reasons for which I withhold myself from attempting to compile lives of the several persons whose names will come before us, I shall forbear from any attempt at deducing genealogical lines from the heroes of Agincourt, and shewing who in these times may claim the honour of being their representatives, according to the principles of family representation as understood in England. This, as before stated, would be no difficult task in respect of some, impossible in respect of others. I may remark, however, that the cases would be but few, in which even the best informed genealogical antiquary could shew a male heir (by which I mean a person descended in an unbroken male line) to any of those heroes, in any conspicuous position in the country. Look only at the List of Earls, Barons, Bannerets, and Knights how few of the names are now eminent in England. There are some striking remarks on the rapid extinction of male lines in the Preface to Dugdale's Baronage. But we need not look so far back as to the persons of whom he treats, many of whom lived in ages of civil war, and when the triumph of parties in the State was too often signalized by the violent deaths of their opponents. King James the First created thirty-one earldoms, to continue as long as there were male heirs of the grantee existing: only nine of which now remain. King Charles created thirty-three, of which only seven remain; that is, sixteen out of sixty-four families at the end of little more than two centuries. Of the twenty-nine created by King William and

:

This is a curious subject,

Queen Anne, nineteen are extinct.

never investigated as it ought to be.

It requires the joint aid of the minute historian and the statistical inquirer, and then comes the mathematician to determine the law of extinction.

But since there are families who are jealous of the honour of their house in having had a member of it present at the battle of Agincourt, I beg to add (1) that there may be collateral descendants in male sequence from families who had a member of their house at that battle, though not descended of that particular member himself; and (2) that though this Tract may be safely appealed to as an authority for the fact that the person named was in the expedition, or at least covenanted to go, it cannot be accepted as containing proof of the negative, or that a person affirmed to have been in the expedition, was not actually in it. And this for two reasons; first, that he might be in the retinue of some superior person to himself, and so not in the class of those who indented with the king, or who accounted with him when the war was over; and secondly, that the records of his indenting or accounting may have been lost, as it is evident too many have been. THIS TRACT CONTAINS AFFIRMATIVE PROOF, BUT IT MUST NOT BE SUPPOSED TO DECIDE THE QUESTION AGAINST ANY CLAIMANT TO THIS HONOUR.

Nor must it be supposed that I have gone to all accessible sources of information, to make from them as complete a list as it might be possible to frame, of persons who are to be considered as commanders in the expedition. I have not gone to any of the printed historical writers, either old or recent; and as to lists in manuscript at the Museum or the Heralds' College, I take the liberty to pass them over, as being evidence of a class inferior to that on which I proceed. And as to other national records of that period, I have made but little use of them, but I

have looked into them so far as to become persuaded that there is for this purpose nothing at all comparable to the particular documents from which this list is compiled. The Rotuli Franciæ of that year, so imperfectly described by Carte, might have yielded a name or two more, but whatever was derived from that source would have come with less of the high authority which belongs to the statements I am about to make, as it would have been for the most part only notices of letters of protection or letters of safe conduct granted in that year, which might or might not have been given to persons who had commands in the expedition.

It is now time to describe the particular kind of evidence out which the following list is gathered.

The armies of the kings of England, in the fifteenth century, were made up of contingents, brought into the field by particular persons, who entered into indenture with the king to serve in person with a certain number of followers, for a fixed period, and on such terms as were agreed upon. These indentures with King Henry, form the first class of the evidence on which we proceed. The next are indentures for Prest Money, that is payment for a quarter's service before the service had been performed. For this money, indentures of receipt were given, of which, however, only two files at present are known to exist, and these are not with the other documents here used, but among the miscellaneous records preserved in the Chapter House at Westminster. Thomas, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, the Lord Treasurer of England, is in these, the contracting party for the king, through the agency of John de Everdon. But in this great expedition, the king not only agreed to engage the services of the lords and others, on certain terms, but he placed in their hands articles of plate, jewellery, and even crowns and coronets,

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