6 - A Saddle from the Funeral of Henry V

Summary

If the hanging of arms and armour next to the tomb of a knight or king is a well-known practice, the presence of a military saddle among King Henry V’s funeral achievements is more exceptional (Fig. 6.1). Even more exceptional is the preservation of most of the said saddle, as a church environment is far from ideal for the preservation of perishable materials. The earliest mention of Henry V’s saddle can be found in Monumenta Westmonasteriensia, a guide to Westminster’s monuments published by the antiquarian Henry Keepe in 1682. Describing Henry V’s Chantry Chapel, the author mentions ‘two doors on each side of the entrance, with stairs to ascend into the same, where the Saddle which this heroick Prince used in the Wars in France, with his Shield and other warlike furniture is to be seen’. Keepe’s association of the saddle with ‘the wars in France’ probably refers to the French royal arms on the original rich textile cover of the saddle, mentioned in the second-oldest record of it, John Dart’s Westmonasterium published in 1723. Dart describes the ‘trophies of this Warlike Prince’, kept in the chapel, with ‘his Saddle of blue Velvet, pouder’d with Flowers-de-liz of Gold, the Velvet dusty, but substantial, and the Colour tolerably fresh’. This rich cover seems to have quickly deteriorated during the eighteenth century, as in 1783 Richard Gough says in his Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain that the saddle ‘is now reduced to the bare wood and the first covering of buckram on the seat’. These early documents reveal that, like the helm and the shield, the saddle has always been associated with Henry V, and that Keepe’s reference in 1682 implies that it had probably never left the environs of his tomb.

Today, only two other objects of this type can be compared with the Westminster saddle. One of them is a c. 1400 saddle transferred from the archives of Palma de Majorca (Balearic Islands) to the Real Armeria of Madrid in 1831 with a group of pieces that belonged to King Martin I of Aragon (r. 1396–1410).