SUMMARY http://agincourt600.com/index.php/history/157-did-a-dog-fight-at-agincourt

The well-known story that Sir Peter Legh of Lyme was wounded at the battle of Agincourt, and that his dog, a Lyme mastiff, stood over him for the remainder of the battle, probably originated in a familystory attached to a piece of stained glass in a series of Labours ofthe Months, but was popularised during the rise Victorian dog fancying. Legh’s actual service at Agincourt and his later death after the siege of Meaux have been well known to historians, but have frequently been overwhelmed by the retelling of the story of the loyal mastiff. An investigation into the family’s relationship with its own military service reveals much about the use of medievalwarfare in the elaboration of family traditions.

Philip Morgan

Keele University

AGINCOURT, SIR PETER LEGH OF LYME (d.1422), ANDHIS DOGDid a dog fight at Agincourt? The answer is, alas, probably not, buteven the most cursory internet search using the subject terms ‘Agincourt’ and ‘dog’, or better still ‘mastiff,’ will produce legion sites, many incestuous of each other, asserting that Sir Peter Legh of Lyme (d.1422) in Cheshire was wounded at Agincourt, and that his dog, a Lyme mastiff, stood watch over him during the remainder of the battle. The current Wikipedia entry may stand as the typical example, and reads

“Sir Piers Legh II (died 16 June 1422), also known as Sir Piers de Legh and Peers Legh, was the second generation of the Leghs of Lyme.

He was wounded in the Battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415. His mastiff stood over him and protected him for many hours through the battle. The dog returned to Legh's home andwas the foundation of the Lyme Hall Mastiffs. Five centuries later, this pedigree figured prominently in founding the modern English Mastiff breed. An old stained glass window remains in the drawing room of Lyme Hall portraying Sir Piers and his devoted mastiff.

He was injured again in action in 1422 and died as a result of his wounds in Paris. He was buried at St Michael's Church, Macclesfield in the Legh Chapel, which had been built to receive his body.”

Wikipedia contributors, "Piers Legh II," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Piers_Legh_II&oldid=630080538 (accessed November 24, 2014).

Is there any truth to this story? Perhaps the better question is , what is the evidence for the story and, as we shall see, its changing shape? The search says a good deal about the historic relationship of families to events in which they were involved, and about the ways in which mere participation on its own has often been taken as evidence of courage. The assertion of participation is a claim to special and heroic status, and to have fought at Agincourt, as indeed at Crecy and Poitiers, or to have come with theconqueror and fought at Hastings, are the old and worn currency of many families, remembered, reinvented and reasserted at regular intervals.

The Wikipedia entry cites only secondary sources, but does suggest that there is a piece of ‘old stained glass’ at Lyme Park, a National Trust house in east Cheshire and one of the Legh estates inthe fifteenth century. In 1466 Lyme was a ‘fine hall with a high chamber, kitchen, bakehouse and brewery, with a barn, stables and bailiff’s house,’ surrounded by an extensive park.1 But, that is notthe place to start; the glass must come later. What then is the earliest reference to the dog at Agincourt? It makes an understated appearance in Evelyn, lady Newton’s history of her family, publishedin 1917, but not in the discussion of Sir Peter Legh himself. Elsewhere in the book she wrote , 'tradition states the second Sir Piers [Peter] had one of these dogs (a Lyme mastiff) with him at thebattle of Agincourt.’ There is no mention here of a wound, nor of the dog standing guard. The immediate context was a discussion of a notable breed of dog, the Lyme Hall mastiff, ‘now, alas, threatenedwith extinction’. 2 Her work followed and was built upon that of Cheshire’s laborious and correctantiquaries of the 1870s and 1880s,1 The Legh of Lyme Survey, transcribed and translated by John and Barbara Fothergill (Ranulf Higden Society, 2011), 218-224, map on 224, 533-40.2 Lady Newton, The House of Lyme from its foundation to the end of the eighteenth century (1917), 7, 42.

Figure 1: Webb's popular study,one of the first to include

notably Thomas Helsby, the editor of thesecond edition of George’s Ormerod’s1819 county history, John Earwaker andWilliam Beamont. Working at much thesame time as each other these authorscombed the public and private recordsrelating to Cheshire families; Beamonthad access to the archive of the Leghfamily itself. All three refer to PeterLegh’s service at Agincourt, and to hiswounds, but tellingly none recounts thestory of the mastiff in the battle.3 Thehistorian could be forgiven forhypothesising that the story had itsorigins at the time of Lady Newton’swriting in 1916, perhaps in the contextof the First World War. But he would be wrong, and the silence of the antiquaries becomes the more interesting as a result.

The story of the Agincourt mastiff seems to have had a wide currencyin print in the second half of the nineteenth century, not in the antiquarian literature but in that relating to Victorian dog fancying. Elite patronage and the regularisation of dog fancying gave well-bred dogs a new status as expressions of social rank; The Kennel Club Stud Book of 1874 effectively initiated formal pedigree record-keeping.4 Lyme Mastiffs had been exhibited from at least 1865.5 The earliest printed reference which I have been able to trace of the Lyme Mastiff at Agincourt appears in 1872 in a book byHenry Fennel Whitcombe , writing pseudonymously as Henry Webb.6 Webb’s version of the Lyme mastiff also appeared in contemporary news reports of the Crystal palace dog show of 1871.7 At much the same time William Legh of Lyme built a new rock-faced buff

3 G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester (2nd ed., T. Helsby, 1882), III, 673; J.P. Earwaker, East Cheshire: past and present (1880), 293; William Beamont, A History of the House of Lyme (1876), 35.4 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate. The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), ch. 2 passim.5 The Kennel Club Stud Book, ed. Frank Pearce (1874), 485-6, 577.6 H. Webb, Dogs, Their Points, Whims, Instincts, and Peculiarities With a Retrospection of Dog Shows (1872).7 Manchester Guardian, 3 June 1871; Glasgow Herald, 5 June 1871; Baily's Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes (London, England), Saturday 1 July 1871, 210.

sandstone kennels at Lyme in a stretched H-shaped plan, now a grade II listed building.8 He may also have commissioned the noted London-based animal painter, John Trivett Nettleship, who exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1874, to produce the painting of a Lyme mastiff which is known to have hung in the house as early as 1879. The final accolade was the adoption of the tale in literature aimed at children, Gordon Stables including the Lyme mastiff at Agincourt in his 1880 article ‘Boys’ dogs and all about them’.9

For how long the Agincourt tale had been current in the family is far from clear, but other contributions to the story of Peter Legh’sservice only a decade earlier had made no mention of the mastiff. In1861 John Leigh, Manchester’s first medical officer of health as well as a poet and amateur geologist, had published a ballad on the

family composed, as

the preface claimed, ‘during visits to Lyme as the writer's contribution to the evenings' entertainments at that delightful mansion. The traditions on which they are founded were related by the late Mr. Legh [Thomas Legh d. 1857] and amplified by his accomplished lady’.10 Much of the ballad provides explanations of estate place-names, notably Knight’s Low and Lady Croft, also known as Lady’s grave. In the title ballad Sir Percy Legh is wounded defending Henry V at Agincourt, and is carried from the field to languish in one of the camp tents. Henry V, visiting his defender after the battle, assures Legh

“Nay, say not so my noble knight,Thy king shall nurse thee tenderlie,For thou didst save him in the fight,And he will give his love to thee."They carried him to Paris town,They carried him right carefullie,And there he felt his strength was goneAnd gently laid him down to die.

8 http://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MNA120067&resourceID=6. (Accessed 4 December 2014).9 The Boy's Own Paper, Saturday, 24 April 1880, 471. 10 The Ballad of Sir Percy Legh; or the legend of the Knight's Low and the Lady's Grave (Manchester, 1861).

Figure 2: Lyme Park. A Lyme mastiff painted by Nettleship.

If, as seems likely, the Mastiff story came into prominence after the Ballad of Sir Percy Legh, what was its source? We are, at last, back to the old stained glass. Illustrations of the Lyme Mastiffs exhibited by the Devon breeder J.D.

Kingdon in the 1860s and 1870s are accompanied by a roundel of stained glass from Lyme Park, allegedly showing a Lyme mastiff. Webb’s 1872 account, much copied, also included the comment, ‘In the grand drawing-room window, amid the blazon of heraldry, showing the quarterings of the Arms of the illustrious families with whom the Leghs have intermarried, may still be seen the potrait of Sir Percy Legh Baronet [sic], who fought at Agincourt; and also the likeness of the mastiff bitch, who is alleged to have defended him from the assaults of camp marauders’.11

Figure 3: The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 7 July 1877 with Lyme Park glass atthe lower centre

11 Bradford Observer, 1 February 1873, 3.

Lyme became the principal seat of the family only in the late sixteenth century, and was substantially remodelled c.1570. The three-light bay window in the drawing room of today’s house is an assemblage of glass, partly from elsewhere in the house and partly from Disley church, a chapel of the Legh family contracted in 1495, built 1510-24 and glazed in the 1580s. Most of this glass was installed at Lyme Park when the church itself was reglazed in 1835.But, the bay also contains earlier glass which cannot have come fromDisley church. For our purposes the crucial window is that showing the arms of Sir William Cecil (d.1598) which is surrounded by fragments of roundels, probably late fifteenth century, which show some of the labours of the month, including a man holding a leasheddog. Such seasonal illustrations are common across several media in the middle ages. These examples are now argued to be from East Anglia.12 Whatever the origin of this roundel it is unlikely, eitherto have depicted Sir Peter Legh or his dog, or the Agincourt legend.More probably the glass itself served as a prop to the tale. The inventor and the occasion are likely to remain lost. But, the Victorian age seems to represent the crucial elaboration.

12 Penny Hebgin-Barnes, The Medieval Stained Glass of Cheshire (2010), 128-46, esp. the discussion of 1a at p.30.

Figure 4: The bay at Lyme Park. The leashed dog appears to the right of the lowest light in the left-hand window. Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi.

What then of Peter Legh’s service at Agincourt and his wounding there? The reader who still has the stamina will suspect that this too has been the subject of elaboration and retelling. But, our context is earlier and belongs to the family’s move to Lyme Park as their principal residence in the sixteenth century and to the early-modern world of heraldic visitations in which gentry families established, asserted or recovered their social standing through theantique possession of arms. We should start with the most public demonstration of lineage, the decoration of the Legh chapel. The church of St Michael, Macclesfield, a chapelry of the great Cheshireparish of Prestbury in which Lyme Park itself stood received a chantry chapel dedicated to the Legh family, probably in 1422, but the chapel itself was rebuilt in 1620 by Sir Peter Legh (d.1636).

This Sir Peter seems to have responsible for the brass (330mm x 613 mm) now mounted murally. It reads:

Here lyeth the bodie of Perkin a LeghThat for King Richard the death did die.Betrayed for righteovsnesAnd the bones of Sir Peers his SonneThat with King Henrie the fift did wonneIn Paris.This Perkin serv'd King Edward the Third and the Black Princehis sonne in all their warres in France and was at the Bat-tell of Cressie, and hadd Lyme given him for that service.And after their deathes served King Richard the Secondand left him not in his trovbles bvt was taken with him,and beheaded att Chester by King Henrie the Fovrth, Andthe sayd Sir Peers his sonne served King Henrie the fift,and was slaine at the Battell of Agencovrt.In their memorie Sir Peter Legh of Lyme Knight descendedfrom them fynding the sayd ould verses written vppon astone in this Chappell, did re-edifie this Place Ano Diii 1620.13

13 Earwaker, op.cit, ii, 501.

Figure 5: The Legh brass in the Legh chapel, Macclesfield

There are two careers here, the Peter Leghs pere et fils. The extra-judicial murder of Peter Legh by Henry Bolingbroke in Chester duringthe deposition campaign in 1399 is well evidenced. The details of his son’s career and alleged death at Agincourt are more problematic. The brass claims to be two texts, text A in lines 1-6 and text B in lines 7-17, each independent of the other, the first six lines having been carved on a now lost ledger stone, but copied and glossed in a new brass of 1620. That both texts might in fact have been composed by Sir Peter Legh (d.1636) would be a routine hypothesis, but there are hints that text A may indeed be independent and represent an earlier tomb. There is here no claim of presence at Agincourt, and no claim that Peter Legh’s body was returned to Macclesfield from France, merely the bones. The source for Peter Legh’s service under Henry V in Paris is impeccable.

A fifteenth-century missal now held at Lyme Park is prefaced by a calendar in use from c.1439 to 1541 to which obits have been added, including those of Peter Legh (d.1422) and his wife Joanna (d.1439).

Peter’s obit, in the text hand of the calendar, is added to the feast of St Richard of Chichester, 16 June, as follows:

Obitus Petri Legh militis qui obiit apud Parys anno domini millesimo cccco xxiio littera dominicalis d.14

[Obit of Sir Peter Legh who died in Paris in 1422 Dominical Letter D]15

The 16 June 1422 was a Tuesday. In France the siege of Meaux to the east of Paris had ended on 10 May and Henry V and his wife, Katherine, celebrated Whitsun in Paris. The king was clearly ill by the time he reached Senlis on 12 June, and most historians have assumed a chronic intestinal condition, probably dysentery, acquiredduring the siege. He died on 31 August. Quite where Sir Peter Legh died is not clear. ‘Paris’ might encompass several of the nearby centres of English activity. But, the date of his death must suggestthat, like the king, he may have died of illness rather than from wounds. Whilst Henry’s body was embalmed for its return to Canterbury, the reference to ‘bones’ on the Macclesfield brass may suggest that Peter Legh’s body was first boiled to facilitate the simpler return of his bones.16

Figure 6: The Lyme missal recording the death of Sir Peter Legh in 1422.

But, by 1620 the seductive quality of death at Agincourt in 1415 hadoverwhelmed the equally honourable but more prosaic death from disease in Paris in 1422. The steps in this displacement can be reconstructed. During the course of the sixteenth century a view of the martial past of England’s north-west, including both Cheshire and Lancashire, became part of a cultural vocabulary, most often

14 Lyme Park, Legh of Lyme missal, f.3v.15 There are seven dominical letters, A to G, employed to calculate the dateof Easter and also the days of the week on which particular dates fell.16 Christopher Allmand, Henry V ( 1992), 170-1; Malcolm Mercer, Henry V. The rebirth of chivalry (2004), 78.

voiced at heraldic visitations from the 1530s onwards, with major visitations in 1580 and 1620. In 1636 the Rev. Richard James, antiquary, linguist and traveller, visited south-east Lancashire, Commenting on a famous window at Middleton parish church in his Iter Lancastrense he wrote

..Larroue, thy camaradesOf men theis were, which feare would never shadesOf death in warlike service; Agincourt,Cressy, Poitiers, and Floddon field reporte17

Cheshire families, like their neighbours, competed to populate English armies at the great battles of the late middle ages, findingample opportunities in, for example, the fact that the names of Sir James Audley’s heroic esquires at the battle of Poitiers in 1356 had not been recorded by Froissart when he told their story.18 The battles became the war, and presence at Crecy, Poitiers or Agincourtwas the badge of the Tudor and Jacobean gentry of the north-west. The Leghs of Lyme shared in the enterprise. In the 1587 edition of his chronicles, the Cheshire-born Raphael Holinshed recorded the capture of the comte de Tancarville at the siege of Caen in July 1346.

The constable, and the earle of Tankeruile tooke a tower at the bridge foot, thinking there to saue themselues, but perceiuing the place to be of no force, nor able long to hold out, they submitted themselues vnto sir Thomas Holland. But here whatsoeuer Froissard dooth report of the taking of this tower, and of the yéelding of these two noble men, it is to beproued that the said earle of Tankeruile was taken by one surnamed Legh, Peter Legh, ancestor to sir Peter Legh now liuing, whether in the fight or within the tower, I haue not to saie: but for the taking of the said earle, and for his other manlike prowes shewed here and elsewhere in this iournie, king Edward in recompense of his agréeable seruice, gaue to him a lordship in the countie of Chester called Hanley, which the said sir Peter Legh now liuing dooth inioy

17 Richard James, Iter Lancastrense, ed. Thomas Corser, Chetham Society, vii (1845), 3.18 H.J. Hewitt, The Black Prince’s Expedition 1355-57 (Manchester, 1958), 192-3.

and possesse, as successor and heire to his ancestor the foresaid Legh, to whom it was so first giuen.19

The Legh submission to the 1580 visitation by Robert Glover told thesame story thus:

Piers Legh of Hanley beheaded by K.H.4. Ao 1399. Had Hanley given him by R 2 for taking the Earle of Tanckarville at Cressy.

The Siege of Caen, less noble and heroic, has been replaced by the battle of Crécy a month later. There is no guile here. The climax ofthe campaign in 1346 was the battle and it was the battle that gave its name to the event. Probably in much the same way Piers [Peter] Legh’s father’s death was reported thus:

Sir Piers Legh of Hanley slaine at the Bataille of Agincourt Ao

1415.20

But, Peter Legh of Lyme Handley (d.1399) did not fight at Crécy, anddid not capture the comte de Tancarville at Caen. These actions werethose of his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Danyers of Bradley, (Lancashire) who later received an annuity of forty marks for later being involved in the rescue of Edward, the Black Prince’s banner during the battle of Crécy. In 1398, long after Danyers’ death, his daughter, Margaret, and her third husband, Peter Legh, received a grant from Richard II of Lyme Handley in the forest of Macclesfield in lieu of the annuity.21 The grant brought Lyme into the Legh familyand the new family merely incorporated the story of its coming into their own history. Peter Legh inherited the place of Sir Thomas Danyers in the honour of the family. That honour relied upon Crécy. In 1687, eight generations later, William Shippen’s funeral sermon for Richard Legh of Lyme praised the family name thus:

19 http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/texts.php?text1=1587_4116.20 The Visitation of Cheshire in the Year 1580 by Robert Glover, ed. J.P. Rylands (1882), 152-3. The claim was repeated in the visitation of 1613 though by then Leghhad become a baronet, Pedigrees made at the Visitation of Cheshire, 1613 edd. Sir GeorgeArmytage and J.P. Rylands, Record Society of Lancashire & Cheshire, viii (1909), 141.21 Richard Barber, Edward III and the Triumph of England (2013), 234-7; Appendix II to The Thirty-Sixth Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (1875), 292; Ormerod, History, iii, 671.

In shadowing out a more particular, though but faint Idea of this Excellent Person, I need not borrow any Colour from his Blood; nor reflect any Lustre upon his Character, from the shining Vertues and Noble Acts of his Ancestors; which have Adorned his Family with many Royal Badges of their Loyalty andEminent Services to the Crown: though the Honourary Augmentation of a Hand and Banner to their Arms, and of the Mannor of Hanley with its Franchises and Priviledges to their Estate, will never suffer the brave Atchievements of Advancingthe Black Princes Standard at the famous Battle of Cressey, and the taking Prisoner Count Tanquervile the Norman, (that bitter Enemy to theEnglish Monarch and Nation) to be forgotten; not to mention, that the most Noble Order of Bannerets, wherewith several of his Progenitors have been honoured, sufficiently proclaim their Martial Vertues and Performances.22

But, did Legh’s son fight and receive wounds at Agincourt? And, washe knighted on the field? There are two major lists which name Cheshire soldiers who fought during the Agincourt campaign. The latesixteenth-century ‘Agincourt Roll’ was probably derived from the nowlost roll of the controller of the king’s household, Sir Robert Babthorp, submitted to the exchequer in November 1416.23 A more localised list was that of, Sir William Troutbeck, the chamberlain of Chester in 1415 who paid for some 247 archers on the campaign.24 ASir Peter Leygh appears in the former, with a retinue of five men-at-arms; a plain Peter Legh in the latter with a retinue of ten archers. The two lists are not easily reconciled with each other. But, it seems a reasonable assumption that Peter Legh of Lyme did indeed perform service on the Agincourt campaign, and that whilst hewas not described as a knight before the campaign, that he is so described afterwards.25 The title of banneret must be a later fanciful embellishment. The wound, it seems likely, was a conflation

22 William Shippen, The Christians triumph over death a sermon at the funeral of Richard Legh of Lime in the county Palatine of Chester, Esq., at Winwick in the county Palatine of Lancaster Sept. 6. 1687.23 Anne Curry, The Battle of Agincourt. Sources & Interpretations (2000), 407-8.24 TNA SC6/776/4 m2d. The names are reproduced on the medieval soldier database, www.medievalsoldier.org. See also, Anne Curry, Agincourt. A new History(2005), 60.25 Appendix II to The Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (1876), 699, 446.

with Legh’s known death in Paris some seven years later. The occasion for the knighting is not recorded. Peter Legh of Lyme did serve at Agincourt, and in later campaigns in France, dying, probably of illness in 1422. His dog, it seems, must have stayed at home.

PHILIP MORGAN

KEELE UNIVERSITY