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Introduction
In 1404, during an uneasy peace in the Hundred Years’ War, the Duke of Orléans invited King Henry IV of England to Bordeaux, then in English hands. There they were to do combat — with a few men, or single combat if Henry liked — and the winner would ransom the loser back to his people. Henry played for time, the two princes traded insults and Louis lost his temper.
ABOUT this season,* the Duke of Orleans,* brother to the French king,* a man of no less pride than haughtiness of courage, wrote letters to King Henry, advertising him, that for the love he bare to the noble feats of chivalry, he could imagine nothing either more honourable or commendable to them both, than to meet in the field each part with an hundred knights and esquires, all being gentlemen, both of name and arms, armed at all points, and furnished with spears, axes, swords, and daggers, and there to fight and combat to the yielding;* and every person, to whom God should send victory, to have his prisoner, & him to ransom at his pleasure, offering himself with his company to come to his city of Angulesme,* so that the king would come to the lands of Bordeaux,* and there defend this challenge.
The king of England gravely answered hereunto, that he marvelled why the duke under colour of doing deeds of arms for a vain-glory, would now seek to break the peace betwixt the realms of England and France, he being sworn to maintain same peace, sith* he might further understand, that no king anointed, of very duty, was bound to answer any challenge, but to his peer of equal state and dignity:
Holinshed has just been recording two attempted invasions of the Isle of Wight by French ships, one at Christmas 1403 and another in the New Year. See A Stout Answer.
* Louis I of Orléans (1372-1407) was Duke of Orléans from 1392 to his death. He and his cousin John of Burgundy were rivals for control of France: Louis’s brother King Charles VI was in poor mental health and the two noblemen were in a constant tussle over the Regency. In 1407, John sent a hit squad of eighteen men after him, so Enguerrard de Monstrelet (?1400-1453) tells us; they accosted Louis in the streets of Paris, and assaulted him. “The Duke, astonished at this attack, cried out ‘I am the Duke of Orléans!’, when the assassins, continuing their blows, answered, ‘You are the person we were looking for’.” John openly admitted what he had done.
* Louis’s brother was Charles VI ‘the Mad’ of France. Charles suffered from some mental disorder such as schizophrenia, and Louis and his cousin John of Burgundy waged a tug-of-war over the Regency until John had Louis assassinated in 1407. Charles was succeeded by his son the Dauphin, who became Charles VII. It was the young Dauphin who was defeated at Agincourt by Henry IV’s son, Henry V, in 1415; it was the mature Charles VII who finally wrested England’s French possessions from Henry VI in 1453, and ended the Hundred Years’ War.
* ‘To the yielding’ means ‘until one combatant surrenders’.
* Angoulême, which had been seized from the English by Charles V and given to his son Louis I, Duke of Orleans, in 1394.
* Today Bordeaux is a town in the Gironde Department of France, on the River Garonne. In Henry’s day it was in Guyenne, a region (not always readily distinguished from Gascony to the south) that was under English control from the marriage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 right through to 1453, when Charles VII added it to his bag and cleared the English kings out of all France, save for Calais. See a map at Wikimedia Commons.
* Since. The word comes from Old English ‘siþþan’, ‘since’.
Précis
In 1404, five years into the reign of Henry IV, the king received a challenge from Louis, Duke of Orléans, daring him to come to Bordeaux in France and meet him there in single combat. Henry replied that the Duke was presumptuous in accosting a king so, and upbraided him for imperilling an already fragile peace between the two countries. (60 / 60 words)
In 1404, five years into the reign of Henry IV, the king received a challenge from Louis, Duke of Orléans, daring him to come to Bordeaux in France and meet him there in single combat. Henry replied that the Duke was presumptuous in accosting a king so, and upbraided him for imperilling an already fragile peace between the two countries.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, because, must, or, otherwise, ought, whereas, who.
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