Agincourt

Historical Note

The battle of Agincourt (Azincourt was and remains the French spelling) was one of the most remarkable events of medieval Europe, a battle whose reputation far outranked its importance. In the long history of Anglo-French rivalry only Hastings, Waterloo, Trafalgar, and Crécy share Agincourt’s renown. It is arguable that Poitiers was a more significant battle and an even more complete victory, or that Verneuil was just as astonishing a triumph, and it’s certain that Hastings, Blenheim, Victoria, Trafalgar, and Waterloo were more influential on the course of history, yet Agincourt still holds its extraordinary place in English legend. Something quite remarkable happened on 25 October 1415 (Agincourt was fought long before Christendom’s conversion to the new-style calendar, so the modern anniversary should be on 4 November). It was something so remarkable that its fame persists almost six hundred years later.

Agincourt’s fame could just be an accident, a quirk of history reinforced by Shakespeare’s genius, but the evidence suggests it really was a battle that sent a shock wave through Europe. For years afterward the French called 25 October 1415 la malheureuse journée (the unfortunate day). Even after they had expelled the English from France they remembered la malheureuse journée with sadness. It had been a disaster.

Yet it was so nearly a disaster for Henry V and his small, but well-equipped army. That army had sailed from Southampton Water with high hopes, the chief of which was the swift capture of Harfleur, which would be followed by a foray into the French heartland in hope, presumably, of bringing the French to battle. A victory in that battle would demonstrate, at least in the pious Henry’s mind, God’s support of his claim to the French throne, and might even propel him onto that throne. Such hopes were not vain when his army was intact, but the siege of Harfleur took much longer than expected and Henry’s army was almost ruined by dysentery.

The tale of the siege in the novel is, by and large, accurate, though I did take one great liberty, which was to sink a mineshaft opposite the Leure Gate. There was no such shaft, the ground would not allow it, and all the real mines were dug by the Duke of Clarence’s forces that were assailing the eastern side of Harfleur. The French counter-mines defeated those diggings, but I wanted to give a flavor, however inadequately, of the horrors men faced in fighting beneath the earth. The defense of Harfleur was magnificent, for which much of the praise must go to Raoul de Gaucourt, one of the garrison’s leaders. His defiance, and the long days of the siege, gave the French a chance to raise a much larger army than any they might have fielded against Henry if the siege had ended, say, in early September.

Harfleur did finally surrender and was spared the sack and the horrors that had followed the fall of Soissons in 1414. This was another event that shocked Europe, though in the case of Soissons it was the barbaric behavior of the French army toward its own citizens that provoked the shock. There is a rumor that English mercenaries took money to betray the city, which explains the actions of the fictional Sir Roger Pallaire, but in the context of the Agincourt campaign the significance of Soissons was its patron saints, Crispin and Crispinian, whose feast day was, indeed, 25 October. For many in Europe the events of Saint Crispin’s Day in 1415 demonstrated a heavenly revenge for the horrors of the sack of Soissons in 1414.

Common sense suggests that Henry should have abandoned any thoughts of further campaigning after Harfleur’s surrender. He could have just garrisoned the newly captured port and sailed home for England, but such a course would have amounted to a virtual defeat. To have spent all that money and, in return, gained nothing more than a Norman harbor would have looked like a paltry achievement and, damaged as French interests were by the loss of Harfleur, the possession of the city gave Henry very little bargaining power. True it was now English (and would remain so for another twenty years), but its capture had wasted precious time and the necessity of garrisoning the damaged city took still more men from Henry’s army so that, by the time the English launched their foray into France, only about half of their army was able to march. Yet Henry did decide to march. He rejected the good advice to abandon the campaign and instead set his small, sickly army the task of marching from Harfleur to Calais.

This was not, on the face of it, an enormous challenge. The distance is about 120 miles and the army, all of it mounted on horseback, might expect to make that journey in about eight days. The march was not undertaken for plunder, Henry had neither the equipment nor the time to lay siege to the walled towns and castles (into which anything valuable would have been taken as the English approached) that lay on the route, nor was it a classic chevauchée, one of those destructive progresses through France whereby English armies laid waste to everything in their path in hope of provoking the French to battle. I doubt that Henry did hope to provoke the French to battle because, despite his fervent belief in God’s support, he must have realized the weakness of his army. If he had wanted battle it would have made more sense to march directly inland, but instead he skirted the coastline. It seems to me he was “cocking a snook.” At the end of an unsatisfactory siege, and facing the humiliation of returning to England with no great achievement, he merely wished to humiliate the French by demonstrating that he could march through their country with impunity.

That demonstration would have worked well if the fords at Blanchetaque had not been guarded. To reach Calais in eight days he needed to cross the Somme quickly, but the French had blocked the fords and so Henry was driven inland in search of another crossing, and the days stretched from eight to eighteen (or sixteen, the chroniclers are maddeningly vague about which day the army left Harfleur) and the food ran out, and the French at last concentrated their army and moved to trap the hapless English.

And so Henry’s risibly small army met its enemy on the plateau of Agincourt on Crispin’s Day, 1415. Without knowing it, that army had just marched into legend.

In 1976, when Sir John Keegan wrote his magnificent book, The Face of Battle, he was able to write of Agincourt “the events of the Agincourt campaign are, for the military historian, gratifyingly straightforward…there is less than the usual wild uncertainty over the numbers engaged on either side.”

Alas, that confidence has vanished, if not for the events, at least for the numbers engaged. In 2005 Professor Anne Curry, who is among the most respected authorities on the Hundred Years’ War, published her book Agincourt: A New History, in which, after detailed argument, she proposed that the numbers engaged on either side were much closer than history has ever allowed. The usual consensus is that about 6,000 English faced around 30,000 French and Dr. Curry amended those figures to 9,000 English and 12,000 French. If true, then the battle is an impostor, for its fame surely rests on the gross imbalance between the two sides. Shakespeare could hardly be justified in writing “we few, we happy few” if the French were very nearly as few.

Now Sir John Keegan was right in describing any attempt to assess numbers engaged in a medieval battle as beset by “wild uncertainty.” We are fortunate that a number of eyewitnesses wrote descriptions of the battle, and we have other sources from writers who left accounts shortly after, but their estimates of the numbers vary enormously. English chroniclers assess the French forces as anything from 60,000 to 150,000, while French and Burgundian sources offer anything from 8,000 to 50,000. The best eyewitnesses cite French numbers as 30,000, 36,000, and 50,000, all contributing to the wild uncertainty that Dr. Curry made even wilder. In the end I decided that the generally accepted figure was correct, and that around 6,000 English faced approximately 30,000 French. This was not, I must stress, the result of close academic study on my part, but rather a gut instinct that the contemporary reaction to the battle reflected that something astonishing had taken place, and what is most astonishing about the various accounts of Agincourt is that disparity of numbers. An English chaplain, present at the battle, estimated that disparity as thirty Frenchmen for every Englishman, an obvious exaggeration, yet strong support for the traditional view that it was the sheer numerical inequality of the engaged forces that persuaded folk that Agincourt was truly extraordinary. Still, I am no scholar, and rejecting Dr. Curry’s conclusions seemed foolhardy.

Then, in the same year that Dr. Curry’s history appeared, Juliet Barker’s book, Agincourt, was published and proved to be a vivid, comprehensive, and compelling account of the campaign and the battle. Juliet Barker acknowledges Dr. Curry’s conclusions, yet courteously and firmly disagrees with them, and as Juliet Barker is as fine a scholar as she is a writer, and as, like Dr. Curry, she had done her research among the French and English archives, I felt more than justified in following my instinct. Any reader who wishes to know more about the campaign and battle would do well to read all three of the books I have mentioned: The Face of Battle by John Keegan, Agincourt: A New History by Anne Curry, and Agincourt by Juliet Barker. I should also acknowledge that, although I used many many sources to write this novel, the one book to which I turned again and again, and always with pleasure, was Juliet Barker’s Agincourt.

What is beyond contention is the disparity within the English army. It was primarily an army of archers who, when they left England, outnumbered the men-at-arms by about three to one, but by St. Crispin’s Day had a preponderance of nearly six to one. You can find still more argument, endless argument, about how those archers were deployed, whether they were all on the flanks of the English army, or were arrayed between or in front of the men-at-arms. I cannot believe archers were placed in front, simply because of the difficulty of extricating them through the ranks before the hand-to-hand fighting began, and believe that the vast majority were indeed on the left and right of the main line of battle. A good discussion of archery in battle can be found in Robert Hardy’s terrific book, Longbow: A Social and Military History.

I have tried, as far as possible, to follow the real events that took place on that damp Saint Crispin’s Day in France. In brief it seems certain that the English advanced first (and it seems Henry really did say “let’s go, fellows!”) and re-established their line within extreme bowshot of the French army, and that the French, foolishly, left that maneuver uncontested. The archers then provoked the first French attack with a volley of arrows. That first assault was by mounted men-at-arms who were supposed to scatter and so defeat the feared archers, but those attacks failed, partly because horses, even wearing armor, were fatally vulnerable to arrows, and because of the stakes that formed enough of an obstacle to take any impetus out of the charge. Some of the retreating French horses, maddened by arrows, appear to have galloped into the first advancing French battle, causing chaos in its close-packed ranks.

That first battle, probably consisting of about 8,000 men-at-arms, already had severe problems. The fields of Agincourt had recently been plowed for winter wheat and it is true, as Nicholas Hook says, that you plow deeper for winter wheat than for spring wheat. It had also rained torrentially the previous night, and so the French were trudging through sticky clay soil. It must have been a nightmare. No one could hurry, and all the while the arrows were striking and, the closer the French came to the English line, the more lethal those arrow strikes were. There is more argument about the effect of arrows, with some scholars claiming that even the heaviest bodkin, shot from the strongest yew bow, could not pierce plate armor. Yet why else would Henry have so many archers? The arrows could pierce plate, though the strike had to be plumb, and undoubtedly the best plate, such as that made by the Milanese, was better able to resist. If nothing else the arrow-storm forced the French to advance with closed visors, severely restricting their vision.

A good archer could shoot fifteen accurate arrows in a minute (I’ve seen it done with a bow that had a draw-weight of 110 pounds, some twenty to thirty pounds lighter than the bows carried at Agincourt, but far heavier than any modern competition bow). Assume that the archers at Agincourt averaged a mere twelve a minute and that there were 5,000 bowmen; that means in one minute 60,000 arrows struck the French, a thousand arrows a second. It also means that in ten minutes the archers would have shot 600,000 arrows and the conclusion is that they must have run out of arrows fairly quickly. Yet what that storm of arrows achieved was to drive the flanks of the disordered French advance inward, onto the waiting English men-at-arms. That shrinking of the French line must have exposed the flanks of the English army, both composed of archers, to the French crossbowmen, but there is no evidence that the French seized the opportunity. Apart from a few volleys at the very beginning of the battle the French archers appear to have taken no part, a fatal error that must be ascribed to the abysmal lack of leadership on the French side.

The battle lasted between three and four hours, yet it was probably as good as over in the very first minutes when the leading French battle struck home. The French men-at-arms were weary, half blinded, disordered, and mud-crippled. What seems to have happened is that their leading ranks went down quickly and so formed a barrier to the men behind who, in turn, were being pushed onto that barrier by the rearmost men. So the French stumbled into the English weapons and the English (with some Welsh and a few Gascons) had more freedom to fight and to kill. That first French battle had contained most of France’s high nobility, and so it went to the slaughter and the great names fell; the Duke of Alençon, the Duke of Bar, the Duke of Brabant, the Archbishop of Sens, the Constable of France, and at least eight counts. Others, like the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Bourbon, and the Marshal of France, were captured. The English did not have it all their own way; the Duke of York was killed, as was the Earl of Suffolk (his father had died of dysentery at Harfleur), but English casualties seem to have been remarkably slight. Henry undoubtedly fought in the front rank of the English and all eighteen Frenchmen who had sworn an oath of brotherhood to kill him were killed instead. Henry’s brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was badly wounded in the fight and it is said that Henry stood over him and fought off the Frenchmen trying to drag the injured duke away.

The second French battle went to reinforce the first, but by now the French were trying to fight across a barrier of dead and dying men, and they were also fighting the English archers who had abandoned their bows and were now wielding poleaxes, swords, and mallets. The advantage the English archers possessed was maneuverability; unencumbered by sixty pounds of mud-weighted armor they must have been lethal in their attacks. I cannot confirm that the British two-fingered salute began at Agincourt as a taunt to the defeated French, demonstrating that the archers still possessed their string fingers despite French threats to sever them, but it seems a likely tale.

Sometime after the advance of the second French battle a small force of horsemen, led by the Sire of Agincourt, attacked the English baggage. This event, and the apparent readiness of the remaining Frenchmen to attack, persuaded Henry to issue his order to kill the prisoners. That order appals us today, yet the contemporary chroniclers do not condemn it. By that stage there were around two thousand French prisoners close behind the English line that was half expecting an attack by another eight thousand, so far unengaged, Frenchmen. Those prisoners could well have swung the battle by assailing Henry’s rear, and so the order was given to the evident displeasure of many English men-at-arms (who were losing valuable ransoms). Henry sent a squire and two hundred archers to do the killing instead, though it was evidently stopped fairly quickly when it became apparent that the raid on the baggage did not presage an attack from the rear, and that the threat of the third French battle had evaporated. The French had taken enough, their survivors began to leave the battlefield, and Henry had won the extraordinary victory of Agincourt. Wild uncertainty surrounds the casualties, but undoubtedly the French suffered dreadful losses. An English eyewitness, a priest, recorded ninety-eight dead from the French nobility, around 1,500 French knights killed, and between four and five thousand men-at-arms. French losses were in the thousands, and might well have been as high as 5,000, while English losses were most likely as small as 200 (including one archer, Roger Hunt, killed by a gun). The battle was a slaughter that, like the sack of Soissons, shocked Christendom. It was an age inured to violence. Henry did burn and hang the Lollards in London, and he executed an archer for stealing the copper-gilt pyx during the march to Agincourt, but those events were commonplace. Soissons and Agincourt, uncannily linked by Saints Crispin and Crispinian, were thought extraordinary.

Except for Thomas Perrill, I took all the names of the archers at Agincourt from the muster rolls of Henry’s army, which still exist in the National Archives (readers wanting a more accessible source can find the names printed in Anne Curry’s appendices). There really was a Nicholas Hook at Agincourt, though he did not serve Sir John Cornewaille, who was indeed the tournament champion of Europe. His name is often spelled Cornwell, a slight embarrassment, as he is no relation.

The field of Agincourt is remarkably unchanged, though the flanking woods have shrunk somewhat and the small castle that gave the battle its name has long disappeared. There is a splendid little museum in the village, and a memorial and battle-map at nearby Maisoncelles, which was where the English baggage was raided (much of Henry’s lost treasure was later recovered). A calvary on the battlefield marks the supposed spot of one of the grave-pits where the French buried their dead. Harfleur has vanished, subsumed into the greater city of Le Havre, though traces of the medieval town do still exist. Petrochemical works now stretch where the English fleet landed.

Henry V’s leadership was an undoubted contribution to the unlikely victory. He went on fighting in France and eventually forced the French to yield to his demands that he was the rightful king, and it was agreed that he would be crowned on the death of the mad King Charles, but Henry was to die first. His son was crowned King of France instead, but the French would recover to expel the English from their territory. Marshal Boucicault, a great soldier, was to die in English captivity, while Charles, Duke of Orleans, was to spend twenty-five years as a prisoner, not being released until 1440. He wrote much poetry during those years and Juliet Barker, in Agincourt, translates a verse he wrote during his time in England, a verse that can bring an end to this story of a battle long ago: