Six hundred years ago on Sunday, a tired, hungry and outnumbered English army under the command of King Henry V won a victory in France so unexpected and decisive that it has attained almost mystical importance in the self-image and psyche of the English people.
Until now, there has been no apparent connection between the battle of Agincourt, fought in 1415 as part of the Hundred Years War between England and France, and the then impossibly distant Arabian Gulf.
But thanks to a fascinating discovery in the archives of the City of London, such a connection has emerged, telling of a time when the precious harvest of the Gulf was not oil but pearls.
The tale begins on the muddy, bloody field of Agincourt, 70 kilometres south of Calais.
As few as 6,000 English and Welsh troops, wearied by a 420-kilometre march and their ranks thinned by disease and battle, faced a French force of up to 36,000 men, including the much-vaunted cream of French knighthood.
The French officers’ pedigree counted for nothing as they and their foot soldiers were funnelled into a narrow, muddy killing zone between two woods and were picked off mercilessly by English longbow archers.
A bloody three-hour slaughter ensued.
As their own following ranks pushed them on from behind, noble French knights and common soldiery alike became bogged down in the mud, trampling one another into the ooze. Many of France’s finest nobles were said to have drowned in their helmets.
Contemporary chroniclers record that when the deadly arrows ran out, the English bowmen surged forward and finished the grisly task with mallets and axes.
The fighting spirit of the battle of Agincourt, invoked most memorably 185 years later by William Shakespeare in the play Henry V, has been summoned repeatedly over the years by the English to stiffen national sinews at times of crisis.
The 1944 film of the play, starring and directed by Laurence Olivier, was funded by the British government and designed to boost morale in a country ground down by four years of war against Nazi Germany and facing the invasion of France.
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile this day shall gentle his condition; and gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."
Those were the lines Shakespeare ascribed to Henry as he rallied his troops.
But behind the blood and the glory of the fight in France lay the pragmatism of politics and finance.
Henry, desperate for money to pay his troops, had turned to the City of London to fund his ambition to claim the throne of France.
City records show that he put his case to the city elders at the tower of London on March 10, 1415 and that three months later the money was his – 10,000 marks, worth about £2.7 million (Dh15.3m) in today’s money.
Fresh from the battlefield, where he had fought shoulder to shoulder with his men, Henry returned to England on November 16. He did not forget the wealthy supporters who had made it all possible – there would, after all, doubtless be more fighting and expense.
Among the gifts bequeathed to the City of London by Henry in the years after Agincourt is an ornamental staff known as the Crystal Sceptre, which he had made after returning from the battle.
About 43 centimetres long, it is made of gold-inlaid rock crystal, topped off by a crown encrusted with jewels and pearls and inlaid with a piece of parchment bearing the royal coat of arms.
In the past 600 years, the sceptre has left the sanctuary of the 15th-century Guildhall, the headquarters of the City of London, only for royal coronations, at which it is carried by the lord mayor.
The last time it saw the light of day was on June 2, 1953, for the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey.
In all that time, says the City of London, “only a handful of people have seen or touched the Crystal Sceptre, and it has not been previously researched, exhibited, written about, or photographed”. Its origins and history were forgotten.
Now all that has changed, thanks to the determined detective work of independent art historian Dr Michael Hall.
Yesterday, the Crystal Sceptre went on public show for the first in time in 600 years, the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Guildhall art gallery to mark the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt.
Three years ago, Dr Hall was asked by Sir Roger Gifford, the 685th lord mayor of London, to write a guide to the collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings at the city’s Mansion House. That project led to another and a year ago, while researching a book on the gold and silver regalia of the City of London, Dr Hall had his first sight of the sceptre.
“I walked into this brightly lit office and there was a box on the table,” he said. When the lid was lifted, “I was overwhelmed”.
Though the centrepiece of the annual Silent Ceremony, at which the lord mayor takes office, the sceptre had in effect “been hiding in plain sight”, says Dr Hall.
Six centuries old but rarely touch-ed by sunlight, the pearls were in perfect condition.
“Nobody had thought of it as anything other than the Crystal Sceptre. I had absolutely no idea that something like that existed and it was sensational to discover a great big lump of treasure that nobody in my world had ever known about.”
Dr Hall and his colleagues “just sat there with our mouths open”. Then began the painstaking work of unravelling the secrets of the sceptre.
Ploughing through reams of state papers and “pipe rolls” – the records of the exchequer, dating to the 12th century – Dr Hall made two key discoveries that together confirmed the sceptre “must have been made between 1419 and 1421”.
In 1419, city merchant and four-times lord mayor Richard Whittington wrote a book describing the history and ceremonies of the City of London. In it, he mentions various maces, swords and the Silent Ceremony but there is no reference to the Crystal Sceptre.
Two years later, in 1421, Henry V married Catherine of Valois to seal the treaty of Troyes with the French. In February that year he took her back to England to be crowned at Westminster Abbey – and an account of the ceremony describes the lord mayor carrying the sceptre.
The conclusion that the sceptre was Henry’s gift to the City of London is “supposition but logical”, says Dr Hall.
It was more than a merely sentimental gesture of thanks. As in Islamic law today, “the laws of usury in the 15th century didn’t allow interest to be charged, so in discharging his debt to the city he wasn’t allowed to give them any more money than he owed them”.
By chance, several years earlier, Dr Hall had written an essay on the pearl trade of the Gulf and when he saw the pearls adorning the sceptre he “knew exactly where they’d come from and how they would have got to England”.
Here, the experts differ slightly.
Robert Carter, professor of Arabian and Middle East archaeology at UCL Qatar, and author of the 2012 Gulf history Sea of Pearls, says that while “it is impossible to prove where pearls come from, the Gulf did provide most of the world’s pearls for much of history”, and certainly during the 15th century.
At that time the Gulf and the pearling industry were dominated by the kingdom of Hormuz, named for its base on the island at the mouth of the Arabian Gulf off modern-day Iran.
Hormuz, says Prof Carter, “had a strong trading relationship with the Venetians” and the journey of Henry V’s pearls to England almost certainly began in their care.
From Hormuz, Venetian traders had two main routes back to Italy. The first involved camel caravans on the arduous journey up through modern-day Iran, through Isfahan to Tabriz and then on to the Black Sea.
From there, their ships carried the goods past Constantinople, through the Greek islands and up the Adriatic to Venice. Next came the long voyage to Flanders, from where the pearls would have gone to London.
Alternatively, says Dr Hall, “the logical, easiest route in times of peace from Basra and Hormuz to the Mediterranean was up the Gulf, then overland through Fustat [old Cairo] to Alexandria, hence to Venice”.
However, the pearls found their way to the court of Henry V, the tale of the Crystal Sceptre serves as a reminder that the wheels of the world have always been oiled by trade – and that even 600 years ago beneath the waters of the Gulf lay a treasure coveted by distant kingdoms.
newsdesk@theational.ae
• The Crystal Sceptre will be on show at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, until December 3.
