Sir John Fastolf (6 November 1380 – 5 November 1459) was a late medieval English soldier, landowner, and knight who fought in the Hundred Years' War. He has enjoyed a more lasting reputation as the prototype, in some part, of Shakespeare's character Sir John Falstaff. Many historians argue, however, that he deserves to be famous in his own right, not only as a soldier, but as a patron of literature, a writer on strategy and perhaps as an early industrialist.
Lineage and family
Coming from a minor gentry family in Norfolk, John Fastolf was born on 6 November 1380 at the manor house of Caister Hall, a family possession which he later turned into Caister Castle, but of which little now remains aside from the water-filled moat. The son of Sir John Fastolf (died 1383) and Mary Park (died 2 May 1406), he belonged to an ancient Norfolk family originally seated at Great Yarmouth, where it is recorded from the thirteenth century. Notable members of the family in earlier generations included Thomas Fastolf, Bishop of St David's, and his brother, Nicholas Fastolf, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Many of the name had been bailiffs of Great Yarmouth since the time of Edward I, and a certain Hugh Fastolf was sheriff of Norfolk in 1390.
On 13 January 1409, in Ireland, Fastolf married Millicent Tibetot or Tiptoft (1368–1446), daughter and co-heiress of Robert, Lord Tiptoft, and widow of Sir Stephen Scrope (son of Richard, Lord Scrope). This marriage brought him significant amounts of land, including the manors of Castle Combe and Bathampton in Wiltshire, Oxenton in Gloucestershire, and several properties in Somerset and Yorkshire. These lands brought him an income of £240 per annum, a considerable sum which amounted to five times the revenue Fastolf gained from his own estates. He settled an amount of £100 a year on his wife for her own use, but otherwise held her estates for himself until his death, at the expense of Millicent's son by her first marriage, Stephen Scrope (Fastolf's stepson). Fastolf's wife was significantly older than he was. The couple had no children.
Early years
According to Fastolf's biographer Stephen Cooper, given his family's background Fastolf must have received an appropriate education for the standards of the time. In a court testimony given in France, 1435, he claimed to have visited Jerusalem as a boy, between 1392 and 1393, which must have been in the company of Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV. Fastolf is said to have been squire to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, before the latter was banished in 1398.
Fastolf's whereabouts during the Lancastrian coup of 1399 (when Henry IV seized the crown from Richard II) are unknown, but in 1401 he entered the retinue of King Henry IV's second son, Thomas of Lancaster (later Duke of Clarence), under whose service he would remain until 1415. Thomas had been appointed by his father to keep order in Ireland, and it was here that Fastolf first saw military action. Fastolf's commanding officer was Sir Stephen Scrope, whose widow he married after his death in 1408.
Hundred Years' War
Early service in France
From 1415 to 1439, he was in northern France, where he served under Henry V and the king's brother, the Duke of Bedford. He took part in the siege of Harfleur in 1415, but was invalided home and so missed Agincourt, though he returned to defend Harfleur against the French attempt to recapture it in the winter of 1415–1416.
He was Bedford's Master of the Household, and was Governor of the province of Maine and Anjou, and on 25 February 1426, created a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Later in this year he was superseded in his command by John Talbot; and he became a somewhat controversial figure after the Siege of Orléans.
In 1421, during the English occupation of Paris, he became "governor" (effectively, the warden) of the Bastille, probably for a year.
After a visit to England in 1428, he returned to the war, and on 12 February 1429, when in charge of the convoy for the English army before Orléans defeated the French and Scots at the Battle of the Herrings. In his biography of Fastolf The Real Falstaff (2010), Stephen Cooper re-locates this battle from Rouvray-Saint-Denis to Rouvray-Sainte-Croix.
Encounters with Joan of Arc
During the 1429 Siege of Orléans, the French had planned to abandon the city after they heard rumours (which were true) that John Fastolf was coming with a force to reinforce the English besiegers. Jean de Dunois (known as "The Bastard of Orléans" as he was the illegitimate son of Louis I, Duke of Orléans) decided not to tell Joan of Arc and leave her out of leadership decisions, to which she famously responded: