Since 1971, international aid for agricultural research has been shaped by an unusual and ambitious partnership: an organization founded as an ad hoc consortium of national governments, foreign aid offices, philanthropies, United Nations agencies, and international financial institutions that is known today as CGIAR. At its founding, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research was tasked with fostering scientific research that would help “developing nations … increase and improve the quality of their agricultural output.” Representative of an era of broad multilateral cooperation, and reliant on complex international funding networks, CGIAR assumed the profoundly localized mission of reshaping farmers and fields across diverse cultural, economic, and environmental contexts. The tensions arising as researchers and institutions navigated the demands and expectations of these distinct scales form the crux of CGIAR history. They have affected the changing disciplinary orientations of research centers, the ecologies prioritized in breeding, the expectations for intellectual property management, and even the words used to describe crops.

The circulation of data ranked high among the objectives adopted by CGIAR at its founding in 1971. This chapter considers how agricultural experts attempted to realize a desired “full exchange of information” among scientists working at geographically distant sites, in different languages and cultural contexts, with different organisms and research interests from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The chapter focuses on the historical development of “crop descriptors,” today defined as providing an “international format and a universally understood language for plant genetic resources data.” Developers of descriptors aspire to agree on traits and terms that will allow users from diverse institutions and backgrounds to contribute to and extract information from an integrated data infrastructure. The chapter examines crop descriptors as a critical component of CGIAR’s earliest efforts to create “system-wide” research tools and agendas, emphasizing the scientific and political agendas that shaped this top-down systematizing work, finding that it provided an opportunity for CGIAR to instantiate and consolidate its central position in a web of international development initiatives.

At the beginning of Act V of Shakespeare’s King Henry V, Chorus invites his audience to ‘brook abridgement’, in other words to tolerate omission of ‘all the occurrences, whatever chanced’ between the victory at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 and the agreement of the treaty of Troyes on 21 May 1420. Much is indeed omitted. Save for a passing reference by Chorus to the visit to England of the Emperor Sigismund which took place in the spring of 1416, there is no mention at all in the play of events between 1416 and 1419. Yet for the English and their king these years witnessed further substantial achievements in France. In the summer of 1416, an army of at least 7,300 men was raised which was initially intended to be led to France by the king in person but was re-directed, successfully, under the duke of Bedford, to end the French naval blockade of Harfleur. In the summer of 1417 an even larger army was recruited, with which Henry invaded Normandy with conquest his intention. By the summer of 1419 virtually all of the duchy was in his hands, allowing him to begin an advance towards Paris. Instead of the French uniting to resist him, their internal divisions intensified, culminating on 10 September 1419 in the assassination of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, by the supporters of the Armagnac faction led by the Dauphin Charles. Nine months later Henry was recognised as heir to the French throne.

The road from Agincourt to Troyes was undoubtedly less direct than Shakespeare implied. While the victory made the French reluctant to face the English in battle again, it was Henry’s systematic conquest of Normandy which gave the French little choice but to negotiate both before and after Duke John’s assassination. It is important, therefore, to examine more closely the army with which Henry invaded in 1417. While this army has not been completely ignored by historians in the past, research linked to the project ‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England’ makes it possible to study the organisation, structure and personnel of the army in much greater depth.

Historiography and Sources

Any study of the objects as well as their historical and locational context must take account of the pioneering study on the funeral, tomb and chantry chapel published in The Antiquaries Journal in 1914 by William Henry St John Hope (1854–1919). Amongst other fascinating details, Hope noted that, in the chronicler Thomas Walsingham’s account of Henry V’s funeral, there was mention of three armoured horsemen, whose destriers were led to the High Altar of Westminster Abbey, ‘as is customary’, where the riders dismounted and were stripped of their armour. In an anonymous account of the king’s funeral which has been considered contemporary but which survives only in a sixteenth-century text, we read of four mounted men, one bearing a shield with the arms of England, another with the arms of France, with the other two bearing the helms and crest relating to the same. In addition, this account speaks of an ‘Erle armed complet’ but bare headed and carrying a battle axe with the point downwards, described as riding in the funeral procession behind another knight who bore the king’s standard, although there is no mention of the stripping of armour at the High Altar.

Even more significantly in terms of the study of any surviving objects, Hope discovered relevant expenditure in the records of Robert Rolleston, keeper of the Royal Wardrobe, which were preserved in the then Public Record Office, now The National Archives. Amongst various costs for the funeral can be found the purchase of four bastard saddles with harness (selle bastarde cum hernesio), the painting of a crest and helm for the king (pro pictura unius creste et unius helme pro Rege), the stamping of a shield with the arms of the king (pro vapulacione unius scuti de armis Regis), as well as the similar stamping of the saddles (pro vapulacione dictarum sellarum) and of a tunic with the arms of the king (pro vapulacione unius tunice de armis Regis). Here, as in the narrative accounts, we also find frequent reference to the recurrent use of coats of arms associated with the king, on horse trappers (also known as caparisons, cloth coverings for horses), banners, and on the garb of those involved in the funeral procession, indeed anywhere they might be placed.