In Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” the king, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, tells his army that anyone who doesn’t wish to soldier on will be allowed to return home from France: “He which hath no stomach to this fight, / Let him depart; his passport shall be made, / And crowns for convoy put into his purse.”
Henry’s reference to a passport, it turns out, is a bit of an anachronism. As Patrick Bixby notes in “License to Travel,” the word passeport did not emerge in French until 1420, five years after Agincourt, to “denote a certificate for the free circulation of merchandise.” The term entered English as “pasportis” and came to signify a safe-conduct pass later in the 15th century, but the first record of it in the form that Shakespeare uses appears in John Baret’s English-Latin-French dictionary of 1574.
‘License to Travel’ Review: The Customs of the Countries
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