Similarly, what freedoms did other nobles have whilst waiting for ransoms to be paid after being captured in war?
According to his biographer Jean Lalande (1988), not a lot is known about the captivity of Marshal Jean II Le Meingre, dit Boucicaut. "Skinny John the Second" was captured at Agincourt by a esquire named William Wolf who delivered him directly to King Henry V. He was part of the six high-ranking prisoners caught that day, with the Dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, and the Counts of Eu, Vendôme and Richemont. Their value was not just monetary but also symbolic, as they were the living representation of the French defeat: a chronicler shows them serving the King at a banquet on the night of the 25 October 1415. Other chroniclers depict the prisoners riding "in fine order" but without an armour (whether they could keep bladed weapons is not known). They were kept under close surveillance, placed between the vanguard and the main body of the army while travelling, and lodged close to the King, both for their safekeeping and as an acknowledgemnt of their status. They were housed for a while at the castle of Guines and possibly kept there until they were taken across to England. On 23 November, they were in London, walking after the King and its leading nobles. They were probably accommodated at Windsor from 11 December (Curry, 2006). From 15 June 1418 to 27 February 1420, Boucicaut was detained, with the Counts of Eu and Richemont at Fotheringhay Castle in the county of Northampton. They were in the custody of the English knight Thomas Burton, who was allocated 30 sous a day (later reduced to 23 sous and 3 deniers) for the expense of keeping them. We know that from February 1421 (possibly) to his death in June 1421, Boucicaut was kept at Methley Hall, in the county of York. Moving prisoners from place to place was not uncommon: Charles d'Orléans, the most prestigious prisoner of Agincourt, saw at least 12 "prisons" from 1415 to 1436.
Boucicaut was in an unfortunate situation. Ransoms were a function of the status of the prisoner, of his political or strategic value, and of his estimated wealth: the man had to be rich enough (or have rich enough friends) but the ransom should not leave him and his family destitute. Boucicaut was a high status prisoner, but he was also ruined at the time of Agincourt: he had already been ransomed after the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, later campaigns had made him increasingly poor, and he had been excluded from the inheritance of his (rich) wife Antoinette de Turenne after her death in 1416. In 1419, Boucicaut offered Henry V 60,000 écus d'or (£15,000), 40,000 to be paid immediately and 20,000 after his liberation. The price was huge: the ransom of Charles d'Artois, Count of Eu, was about half of this (32,000 écus d'or, £8,000), and he was released in 1438 after 23 years of captivity. But Boucicaut's ransom was still less than that of Charles, Duke of Orléans: 200,000 écus d'or. Charles had to crowdfund his ransom and was released in 1440. Pope Martin IV, whose envoys were tasked with negotiating the ransom of Boucicaut with Henry V, thought that his finances were too uncertain, and they offered 40,000 to the King, with some guarantees (Boucicaut would serve the Pope and would no longer fight against Henry V). Henry refused, and Boucicaut died a prisoner. The Duke of Bourbon, another prestigious prisoner of Agincourt, had a similar fate and died in London in 1434.
There is limited information about Boucicaut's living accommodations. For Rémy Ambühl (2013), "chivalric conventions required that the conditions of detention related to the rank of the prisoner". High-ranking prisoners of war were normally well treated and typically kept in private properties, in high chambers, since, as Ambühl notes, "the higher, the better was apparently a rule in medieval prisons". The underground pits (fosse) where prisoners were kept in chains were reserved for criminals. However, the rules of chivalry were prescriptive and not always followed, and it did happen that greedy masters (the "owner" of a prisoner) kept their charges in the pit to cut expenses...
Still, high status prisoners were supposed to be privileged: this meant good accommodations, not being tied up or manacled during transportation, and in some cases being granted a regime of "open prison" that allowed the prisoner to move freely from his residence, under the guard of several men of course. Such prisoners would be surrounded with servants and other men attached to their person. In the case of Boucicaut, he had his own chaplain (Brother Honorat Durant, a monk from Aix-en-Provence) and his own barber (Jean Moreau). These two men were next to him when he rewrote his will in May 1421, and he had also three esquires. Talking about the French prisoners of Agincourt, a monk of Saint-Denis wrote that they were "living in the middle of a large society of wealthy Englishmen, compelled to be satisfied with a single servant per prisoner" (cited by Ambühl, 2013). There are examples of prisoners kept with much larger retinues (at some point anyway): Charles d'Orléans had 100 people with him when he was released. As for Boucicaut's activities during that time, little is known, apart the fact that he corresponded with his fellow prisoners, and with the Pope.
The most detailed account of a prisoner's activity is that of Charles d'Orléans and his older brother Jean, Count of Angoulême (who had been a prisoner since 1412). Historian Jean Champion, who wrote a biography of the Duke in 1911, actually put "prison" betwen quotes: Charles led a relatively comfortable life in England. Notably, he demanded and obtained safe-conduct from people from France, who could thus visit him and bring him news, books and money. There were limits to this, though, as messengers were searched and the messages read by the keepers. Charles and his brother had to find secret ways to communicate: according to chronicler Barthélemy de Loches, Jean d'Angoulême once sent his brother a potentially compromising message by hiding it under the tail of the dog that accompanied the messenger (Champion, 1911). Charles had good relations, and even friendly ones, with his keepers. In 1419, Henry V wrote a letter to bishop of Durham asking him to warn Waterton, Charles' keeper at Metheley Hall not to be "blinded" by his charge and to beware the "fair speech and promises" to which Charles was inclined (Askins, 2000). Another keeper, the Earl of Suffolk, shared similar tastes in literature and travelled with Charles several times in the late 1430s. Charles d'Orléans wrote hundreds of poems and songs during his 25 years of captivity (he's now recognized as a major poet), many of them full of longing, melancholy and boredom. However, while this has been taken as proof of his deep sadness, the fact that part of these poems were written in English, as well as the number of books - religion, literature, science - he acquired during his interminable stay, may indicate that he had a great deal of personal interactions with his keepers (Askins, 2000). Of course, Charles was of a much higher status that Marshal Boucicaut, and he was (in 1415) a 19-year inexperienced man, not a potentially dangerous warrior like Boucicaut, so the latter's conditions may have been different.
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