ABSTRACT
Henry V’s death left his successor with a very intractable problem in the relationship of the two Lancastrian kingdoms, of England and France. English interests and aspirations were at once tightly associated with his French conquests, and insufficiently so. Up to 1419 it had always seemed likely that Henry would be content with Normandy and with the re-establishment of the boundaries of 1360 in Gascony. Englishmen, who were well aware of the advantage of such conquests to their commerce, shipping and defence, were prepared to pay for them. The advantage to them of the conquest of the whole of France was not so obvious, and they were not keen to shoulder the fiscal burden that it might involve. But Henry, through the terms of the Troyes settlement of 1420, had (probably deliberately) made it difficult to separate the two objectives. The Treaty of Troyes accepted that Normandy was part of France and should revert to the French crown at Charles VI’s death. This made it difficult to distinguish between limited English objectives in northern France and Henry’s own objective of complete conquest.
