Deo gratias Anglia (Ex. 11-15), the carol in honor of Henry V, celebrates not a festival but a great
event—one well known to fans of Shakespeare’s history plays (or Laurence Olivier films). Found in a
parchment roll copied some time during the first half of the fifteenth century, it commemorates the triumph
of 25 October 1415, when King Henry and his small but well-equipped force of longbow men defeated a
much larger French army on the field of Agincourt (now Azincourt) near Calais in the far north of France,
near the point of shortest distance across the English Channel. It was the most important English victory in
the Hundred Years War, a territorial conflict that actually lasted (off and on) for 116 years, from 1337 to
- In the battle’s aftermath, England conquered and occupied much of northern France.
By 1420 Henry was able to march into Paris and (with the help of the Holy Roman Emperor and the
Duke of Burgundy, his secret allies) claim—or, as he insisted, reclaim—the French throne. A treaty
signed that year would have made him king of France after the death of the current ruler, Charles VI,
whose daughter Catherine he agreed to marry. Henry died in 1422, before the terms of the treaty could be
carried out (since Charles VI still lived). But the English armies continued to enjoy victories until by
1429 almost all of France north of the Loire River was in English hands. (It was at this point that the
French rallied under Joan of Arc and eventually reclaimed most of their territory for the hereditary French
heir, Charles VII.)
As the reader has surely guessed, there was an important musical repercussion from the political
events just described. The English occupation of northern France in the 1420 s and early 1430 s brought a
host of English “magnates” and administrators, both military and civil, to French soil. At their head was
John of Lancaster, the Duke of Bedford, Henry’s brother. Henry left behind a nine-month-old son and heir,
Henry VI, who as the grandson of Charles VI was also heir by treaty to the French throne. (He was
actually crowned in Paris in 1431, during the English occupation, but never reigned in France.)
Bedford and his brother Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, were named joint regents until the king
came of age. Bedford had primary responsibility for prosecuting the war with France and administering
the English occupation, duties that required his continued residence on French soil until his ally the Duke
of Burgundy turned against him and made a separate peace with the French heir. From 1422 until his death
in 1435, four years after he ordered the burning of Joan of Arc (who had been captured by the
Burgundians, everybody’s false friend, and sold to the English for a ransom), the Duke of Bedford was the
effective ruler of France.
Bedford maintained a regal traveling household and retinue, including a chapel. Based largely in
Paris, it was staffed by a substantial musical corps. The Duke also held many estates in Normandy,
forfeited by French nobles who had been defeated and evacuated in the course of the English advance.