‘Shirburgh is goon, and we have not now a foote of londe in Normandie’, James Gresham wrote to John Paston on 17 August 1450. Cherbourg occupies a special place in the history of the Lancastrian occupation of Normandy. It was not only the last stronghold to fall to the French but also, almost exactly thirty-two years earlier, it had been the last in western Normandy to fall to the English. Standing on the northernmost tip of the Cotentin peninsula, the castle enjoyed quadruple concentric defences: a curtain wall with a range of towers; a large moat; a second set of massive walls encircling both castle and town; and the sea which, at high tide, turned Cherbourg almost into an island. The castle was capable of holding a garrison of a thousand men and had never been taken by assault since the town walls were built in the mid-fourteenth century. No wonder Froissart could boast that Cherbourg was ‘un des forts chateaux du monde … en lieu impossible pour assieger ni pour ostoier’.

Clearly Froissart was exaggerating: no castle, not even Cherbourg, was impregnable. If it could not be taken by force, or if its garrison could not be starved into submission, then other ways and means could always be found. The two sieges of Cherbourg, which top and tail the period of the Lancastrian occupation, are a case in point. In 1418 it took five months of siege by land and sea before its defenders finally capitulated, agreeing on 22 August to surrender on 29 September if no relief was forthcoming from Charles VI in the interval. The siege of 1450 was much shorter but the garrison still held out for several weeks against a combined assault from the elite forces of the count of Clermont, the constable and the admiral of France, assisted by an innovative deployment on the tidal sands of Bureau's feared artillery.

In both instances, however, the sieges were brought to an end not because supplies had run out but because inducements were offered to the defenders.