John Fastolf

Sir John Fastolf KG (1380 – 5 November 1459) was an English knight during the Hundred Years War, who has enjoyed a more lasting reputation as the prototype, in some part, of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff. Many historians consider, 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.

John Fastolf was the son of a Norfolk gentleman, Sir John Fastolf of Caister-on-Sea. The Fastolf family is recorded at Great Yarmouth 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.

Fastolf is said to have been squire to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, before 1398, and to have served with Thomas of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Clarence, in Ireland during 1405 and 1406. He claimed to have visited Jerusalem as a boy, which must have been in the company of Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV.

On 13 January 1409, in Ireland, Fastolf married Millicent Tiptoft, daughter of Robert, Lord Tiptoft (d.1372), and widow of Sir Stephen Scrope of Castle Combe, Wiltshire. This marriage brought him an income of £240 per annum, a considerable sum.

He served in Gascony in 1413. 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 1415–16. He was Bedford's Master of the Household, and was Governor of the province of Maine and Anjou, and in February 1426 created a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Fastolf was also appointed a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, but the appointment was revoked in 1429. Later in this year he was superseded in his command by John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury; and he became a somewhat controversial figure after the siege of Orléans—see below. 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-Saint-Croix.

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