On this day in 1415

 Battle of Agincourt, 1415, from the 'St. Alban's Chronicle' (vellum) Battle of Agincourt, 1415, from the 'St. Alban's Chronicle' (vellum)

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.

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 afterwards the French called 25 October 1415 la malheureuse journée (the unfortunate day). 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.

Portrait of Henry V, late 16th century

Portrait of Charles VI, 19th century

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 harbour 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.

Henry, despite his fervent belief in God’s support,  must have realised 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.

Morning of the Battle of Agincourt, 25th October 1415, 1884 (oil on canvas) by Gilbert, Sir John (1817-97)

Henry’s army was outnumbered, hungry and tired. Jonathan Sumption relates their day of glory

The English army was in poor shape. The men had not eaten properly for several days. They were bivouacked in the open on sodden ground around Maisoncelles, wet through and cold. A steady rain persisted through the night. Only their desperate situation gave them the courage to fight. They were heavily outnumbered, by more than eight to one in cavalry and two to one overall. The priests went through the camp hearing the confessions of men who believed that the next day might be their last. Would that we had ten thousand more of the best archers in England, said Sir Walter Hungerford, one of Henry’s household officers, only to be rebuked by the King in an exchange recorded by his chaplain and later made famous in Shakespeare’s embroidered version.
 Swords such as these were used by men-at-arms throughout the Hundred Years War. The longer grips and heavier blades enabled them to be used with two hands to deliver a more powerful blow. Long sword or ‘sword of war’, probably German, Passau c. 1350 – 1400
‘I would not have a single man more even if I could, for these that I have here with me are God’s people whom he has graciously allowed me. Do you think that even with these few He cannot overcome the pride of the French and all their strength of numbers?’ The two sides went through the motions of diplomacy, a Christian duty of those about to fight a great battle, although now hardly more than a matter of form.
In the recrimination in France which followed the battle there were reports that Henry V had been willing to accept humiliating terms in return for a free passage to Calais, which the French had been too arrogant to accept. In reality the negotiations seem to have consisted of little more than an exchange of the parties’ previous diplomatic positions.
In the French camp all was not well. The Constable and the Marshals were the principal military officers of the Crown. But Charles d’Albret, vacillating and physically unimpressive, had never been much respected. Boucicaut was the most experienced soldier present with a military career extending back to the 1370s. But, as even the great Du Guesclin had discovered, the command of an army was not so much a matter of office as of rank. At Agincourt Albret and Boucicaut were outranked by the nineteen-year-old Duke of Orléans, now fighting his first battle, who as the king’s nephew was nominally ‘chief and sovereign’ of the army. They were also outranked by the disputatious and assertive Dukes of Alençon and Bourbon, who had some military experience and much the loudest voices. Decisions had to be made in committee, often after a good deal of argument. The council of war in the French camp lasted much of the evening. Even now there were men who doubted the wisdom of engaging the English. In their parlous situation Henry’s men were likely to sell their lives dearly.
There was much concern about the English archers. Some of those present, remembering the disasters of the mid-fourteenth century, feared that massed longbowmen would be more than a match for their men-at-arms especially as the latter tended to tire easily in their heavy armour. Why run the risk of battle when the English were on their way home anyway? However, this was a minority view. Politically it was probably unthinkable, after Henry V’s capture of Harfleur and his ostentatious challenges, to let him escape with impunity.
The main argument among the French commanders was about timing. They had almost all of their cavalry with them together with the crossbowmen who had been recruited in mixed companies with the men-at-arms. But fresh companies of volunteers were arriving all the time. The large contingent of the Duke of Brittany was at Amiens and the companies of the Dukes of Anjou and Brabant were reported to be on their way. The unmounted men, mostly infantry and crossbowmen recruited in the northern towns, had been left behind on the road in the rush to cut off the English advance and might not arrive for another day or two. The main question was whether to engage the English first thing the next morning or to wait. The professional captains, led by Albret and Boucicaut, were for waiting. They were receiving reinforcements by the hour and had no difficulty in supplying themselves whereas the English were known to be exhausted and hungry. Delay could only weaken them physically and undermine their morale. But the Dukes of Bourbon and Alençon would have none of this. They thought that the cavalry were strong enough to overcome the English on their own and hinted that the rest were cowards. It was their view which prevailed.
The main elements of the French battle plan had been worked out over the past two weeks. The French commanders assumed that the English would adopt their traditional tactics of placing their men-at-arms in the centre of the line with most of the archers slightly forward of them at the wings. The starting positions suggested for the French units mirrored this arrangement. They proposed to draw up their men on foot between the two lines of woodland in two large battalions, a vanguard with some 4,800 men-at-arms and a rearguard behind with another 3,000 men-at-arms. The Constable and the Marshal and almost all the leading noblemen were assigned stations in the vanguard.
Two cavalry forces were stationed at the wings, one of 1,600 men under the command of the Count of Vendôme and the other of 800 under Clignet de Bréban and Louis de Bosredon. Their task would be to charge and disperse the English archers opposite them in the opening moments of the battle, thus clearing the way for the heavily armed vanguard to advance against the English ranks where their superior numbers could be expected to prevail. The rearguard, under the command of Robert of Bar Count of Marle, was told to stay with their mounts to serve as a tactical reserve.
The problem about this plan was that its main lines had been laid down several days before and took little account of the site. The battlefield was essentially a defile between two forests, about 1,200 yards across at its northern end where the French had encamped for the night, narrowing to about 950 yards further south. It had been chosen at the last moment after only limited reconnaissance because it seemed to offer the best prospect of blocking the advance of the English towards Calais. But it had no other advantages. The confined space prevented the French from making effective use of their superior numbers. The dense forest on either side of the defile protected the wings of the English lines and made it difficult to outflank them. A flanking movement by heavy cavalry had originally been planned on the assumption that the battle would be fought in open country.
But at Agincourt it was necessary to send the flanking force on a long detour round the forest to attack the English formations in the rear. Pitifully small numbers were assigned to it: just 200 men-atarms supported by a crowd of gros varlets mounted on their masters’ horses. The French commanders had no clear plan for deploying the rest of their army. The rearguard received no instructions, and had no leaders, for all of its principal captains including its commander the Count of Marle had insisted on abandoning their companies to fight in the vanguard. The crossbowmen were originally to have been massed at the wings opposite the English archers, but the site was too narrow for them and so they were stationed instead with the rearguard where they were more or less useless. At sunrise on October 25, the French army began to take up its appointed stations. They made an intimidating sight: a forest of lances bearing the banners of several hundred companies. But their formidable aspect masked a disorganised order of battle and the almost complete absence of any proper chain of command.
 These daggers and knives gain their name from the disc-shaped pommel and guard, made of either wood or metal. It was considered a ‘knightly’ weapon, and this popular form continued in use into the 16th century. Rondel dagger, English, c. 1400
Some intelligence about earlier versions of the French plan had reached Henry V, probably from prisoners, during the march up the Somme valley. He sent men-at-arms to reconnoitre the field in the light of the moon and the great bonfires lit by the enemy. With this information he began to array his men at dawn. The English army was drawn up like the French across the whole distance between the two lines of woodland. The small force of men-at-arms along with their armed servants and pages was thinly spread, just four ranks deep with no reserve behind them. They were divided into three battalions, one under the King himself in the centre, another on the right wing under his cousin Edward Duke of York, and a third on the left wing under Thomas Lord Camoys, a recently promoted knight of the Garter then well into his sixties and one of the few men present whose experience of war dated back to the reign of Edward III.
The archers were commanded by Sir Thomas Erpingham, another elderly veteran who had fought with John of Gaunt in Castile and with Bolingbroke in Prussia. Erpingham followed the classic English battle plan, stationing most of the archers on the wings slightly forward of the rest of the line from where they would be able to shoot into the French lines from the flanks as they approached. In addition a number of archers were stationed in small groups in the midst of the men-at-arms. Henry V had learned of the French plan to disperse the archers with cavalry. Some days earlier he had ordered every archer to equip himself with a sharpened stake. These were fixed in the ground sloping outward point first in front of the archers’ positions. Another 200 archers were concealed in a clearing in the woods of Tramecourt close to the French lines to shoot into their flank as they advanced.
The English baggage train was placed to the rear of the lines with the horses, the non-combatants and a small guard in case it was necessary to beat a rapid retreat. Henry himself took up his station in the centre of the line, conspicuous on a white horse, wearing dazzling armour,  an armorial surcoat and a basinet with a sequined coronet on top. The English battle plan relied on the advantages of a strong defensive position and assumed that the enemy would attack first. This is what had happened at Crécy and Poitiers. Henry V deployed his army on the assumption that it would happen at Agincourt. Instead the French stood immobile in their starting positions and waited to be attacked.
It was a sound tactical principle. They knew that the English could not afford to wait. They stood in their lines watching the enemy for at least two hours before Henry V, after a hurried conference with his captains, decided to risk making the first move. ‘Nowe is good time for alle England prayeth for us and therefore be of gode chere and let us go on our jorney,’ he said, according to a London chronicle (or, as another manuscript has it, ‘Felas, let’s go’). At about ten o’clock in the morning Sir Thomas Erpingham, who was standing at the head of his archers in front of the line, threw his baton in the air as the signal to advance. The banners were raised. The whole English army uttered a great cry and began to advance slowly in formation towards the French lines. Every few steps they paused to recover their formation and let out another great cry before resuming their advance.
As soon as the advancing English line came within range of the French the archers planted their stakes in front of them and began to shoot dense volleys of arrows into the French lines. The archers concealed in the Tramecourt woods joined in from the left of the French line. The French were taken by surprise. They had not expected the English to open the attack so soon. They had not even completed their own dispositions. In particular the two cavalry forces on their wings, which were supposed to open the battle, were still in the process of forming up and many of the men had not yet reached their starting positions. The French plan was critically dependent on disabling the English archers before they were within range. So their commanders were forced to charge at once with whatever men they had. As they did so the vanguard began to advance on foot towards the enemy with a great shout of ‘Montjoie’, the ancient war-cry of French royal armies.

How the battle unfolded

The opening charge of the French cavalry went badly wrong from the start. There were too many English archers to be run down by a force of a few hundred heavily armed horsemen. As the horsemen came within range Erpingham shouted out the order ‘Now strike!’ With several thousand archers shooting at once the dense rain of arrows could hardly fail to find targets. Volley after volley of arrows were loosed against the oncoming tide of men and horses. The horses panicked and threw their riders or turned away. Those that reached the English lines shied away from the stakes in the ground or impaled themselves on their sharp points. Shortly, most of the cavalry had turned tail, abandoning their leaders in the midst of the enemy and making headlong back to their own lines. The other cavalry operation to the English rear had been conceived as a spoiling operation designed to disrupt their lines in the critical opening phase of the battle. In the event it did not even achieve that. It was conducted by relatively low-grade cavalry led by three local noblemen and supported by a disorderly mob of gros varlets and some 600 peasants from the surrounding villages. They managed to make their way round the forest and appeared behind the English lines. But instead of attacking the enemy they fell on the baggage park and took to looting before making off with their spoils. This included much of the King’s baggage including his bedding, his cash chests and one of his crowns.
The French vanguard was already in difficulties. It had to advance across ground which had recently been ploughed up. The rain had turned it into a quagmire through which the men-at-arms, encased in heavy steel or mail, found it hard to move. They had been drawn up  in a solid block thirty-one lines deep and crammed into a front too narrow for their vast numbers, making it difficult for them to manoeuvre or maintain their formation. Then, as they struggled forward, the fleeing cavalry collided with them, breaking up their lines and transforming them into a formless mob. The English archers poured arrows into the flanks of the advancing mass of men. The French were shocked by the ease with which the sharp arrowheads penetrated plate and mail at short range. Some companies tried to retreat in the face of the volleys from the archers but found their escape blocked by the men behind them. As they advanced the field narrowed and the men were so tightly crushed together that they could hardly move or raise their weapons. By the time that they reached the English lines they were exhausted. Their sheer weight of numbers forced the English lines back for several yards before they succeeded in stopping the advance.
 The pollaxe was a two-handed infantry weapon designed to hack, crush and pierce armour plates as well as flesh and bone. It was made up of three parts; an axe-blade, rear hammer-head, and a top-spike. Pollaxe, North European, probably English, 1450-1500
Forced to a halt by the English men-at-arms, the French front line found itself pushed over and trampled underfoot by the pressure of the men behind them. There was fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the front line. Henry V had to fight for his life, sustaining a blow to his helmet which knocked one of the fleurons off his coronet. The Duke of York was killed in the mêlée on the right wing where some of the toughest fighting occurred. The King’s brother Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, wounded and pulled to the ground, was saved from death by Henry himself who shielded him with his own body. But the greater part of the French vanguard was immobilised in the crush and unable to reach the English line. The English, said the chronicler Walsingham, ‘wrenched the axes from their hands and slaughtered them like cattle’. The archers, having emptied their quivers, moved in from the wings and attacked them with daggers, hatchets and mallets and weapons scavenged from the bodies on the field. Piles of French dead and wounded some five or six feet high mounted in front of the English lines, which the English began to clamber up in order to attack the advancing ranks behind.
Shortly after midday the force of the French attack failed and the tide turned. The English resumed the offensive, overrunning the remnants of the French vanguard dispersed across the field. At the north end of the field the French rearguard was still intact, standing with their mounts in their starting positions and accompanied by the crossbowmen. They had no orders and almost all their leaders were dead. The English advanced on them and shortly reached their front line. They encountered only perfunctory resistance before the rearguard broke. About 600 men-at-arms of the rearguard were rallied by the Counts of Marle and Faucomberque, who had escaped the carnage. They attempted to disengage and in an act of hopeless heroism charged the English line. Every one of them was killed or captured. The rest mounted their horses, turned and fled the field.
The English had taken few prisoners at the height of the battle. They did not have the numbers to hold them and were afraid that they would rejoin the fray if they were spared. The attack on the baggage park had added to their nervousness. Most of those who tried to surrender were killed on the spot. But as soon as the fight was over the English set about scavenging the battlefield and pulling the great piles of bodies apart in search of survivors who were worth a ransom. A large number of French soldiers were found alive, some of them badly wounded, some half-suffocated under the weight of the dead and injured. They were disarmed and deprived of their basinets, then led away to holding points at the rear.
While this grim business was in progress there was a sudden alarm in the English ranks. There were reports of fresh French troops. A French standard had been seen raised on the field. The reports were confused and inconsistent and it has never been clear who these troops were. It may have been the company of the Duke of Brittany which had left Amiens that morning, too late to take part in the battle. It may have been the men of the lord of Longny, who was also said to have reached the battlefield with 600 men-at-arms of the Duke of Anjou just as the rearguard was abandoning the field. The most plausible account is that Clignet de Bréban had succeeded in rallying some of the remnants of the rearguard and had appeared in the rear of the English positions before being driven off. The English King, his formations dispersed across the field, was afraid that his small force would be overwhelmed. He ordered all the prisoners to be killed except for a few of the most prominent who had already been removed under guard to a place of safety. Prisoners were despatched in hundreds with a sword to the throat or an axe to the head. Others were battered to death with mallets. The Burgundian Ghillebert de Lannoy was shut with a dozen others in a nearby farmhouse which was set on fire. When some of the captors seemed reluctant to kill men who might bring them a fortune in ransoms, the King sent in a company of archers to finish the job. When it became clear that the French had vanished the panic subsided and the slaughter stopped.
 The Warwick shaffron is a head defence for a war-horse and is the earliest surviving piece of European medieval horse armour as well as an important example from the period of Agincourt. Warwick shaffron, European, c. 1400
The best estimate that can be made is that about 700 prisoners in English hands had been killed. In modern eyes the slaughter has always seemed an act of unchivalrous barbarism. But no one held it against the English at the time, even among their enemies. Indeed the Burgundian herald Jean Le Fèvre, who was with the English army, blamed the French rearguard who, by trying to rally after all was lost, had condemned their companions to a brutal death
The prisoners who either survived the massacre or were found after it was over included some of the greatest lords of France. Charles of Orléans, who had been trampled underfoot in front of the English centre, was pulled from the mound of bodies. Arthur de Richemont was found by an archer beneath three layers of bodies, covered in blood and recognisable only by his coat of arms. The Marshal Jean de Boucicaut, the Duke of Bourbon, his cousin Louis Count of Vendôme, who been one of the French ambassadors at Winchester in July, and his stepson Charles Count of Eu, were recognised for the high-ranking figures that they were and escaped the massacre. A few managed to flee when the killing began like Ghillebert de Lannoy, badly wounded in the head and knees, who managed to crawl out of the burning farmhouse where he had been left to die and was recaptured in the fields a short distance away. Most of the others were lucky enough still to be alive when the killing stopped.
The French had suffered a catastrophic defeat. Its measure was the number of casualties. The list of the French dead read like a roll call of the military and political leaders of the past generation. In the failing light after the battle the English archers went through the bodies on the field finishing off the wounded with daggers and stripping the dead. The work was resumed on the following morning. The armorial coats were brought into the English camp to be identified by the heralds. The tally was three dukes, five counts, nearly 100 other great lords and 3,069 knights and squires. At least 2,600 more, who were found without arms to identify them, were included in the body count when the dead were eventually buried. The Duke of Alençon had thrown himself with ferocity into the fight around the English King and had been cut down by one of Henry’s bodyguards as he tried to surrender.
 Arguably the finest surviving late medieval bacinet. Commonly called a ‘pig-faced’ bacinet because of the protruding snout, this helmet was in use between c.1380 and 1420 and was worn by both sides at Agincourt. The Lyle bacinet, North Italian, late 14th century
Anthony Duke of Brabant, John the Fearless’s brother, had arrived from Lens in the middle of the battle having ridden ahead of his troops in his riding clothes with only a handful of companions. Putting on borrowed armour and an armorial banner seized from one of his trumpeters, he had joined the fight in its final moments and had been seen among the prisoners after it was all over. But the English did not recognise him in his improvised garb and cut his throat when the cry went up to kill the prisoners. His younger brother, Philip Count of Nevers, was probably also killed in the slaughter of the prisoners.
Their fate was shared by many other great figures. Seven of the French King’s cousins were among the dead. The Constable, the Master of the Royal Archers, the Master of the Royal Household and the bearer of the Oriflamme of St Denis, in fact every military officer of the Crown was dead except for Marshal Boucicaut who was a prisoner and the Admiral Clignet de Bréban who escaped. Jacques d’Heilly, veteran of campaigns in Scotland and the Gascon march, who had recently broken out of Wisbech castle in England and escaped across the Channel, was found among the dead. Jean de Montaigu, Archbishop of Sens and metropolitan of France, was felled sword in hand in the midst of the mêlée. No fewer than twelve of the twentyone provincial baillis and seneschals north of the Loire were killed or captured. Entire families were wiped out in the male line, fathers and sons, brothers and cousins. In some regions, notably Picardy from which most of the army’s last-minute recruits had come, a whole generation of the territorial nobility was wiped out. The Bourbonnais was described a few years later as ‘devoid of knights and squires on account of the day of the English ... at which most of them had been killed or captured’.
Towards the end of the afternoon the English King summoned the heralds of both sides, who had watched the battle from a distance. The story of his exchange with Montjoie, the French King of Arms, is probably apocryphal, but would later find its way into the pages of the Picard chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet and from him to Shakespeare. The King asked him to confirm the outcome of the battle. ‘This day is yours,’ the herald answered. Then pointing to the castle standing north-west of the battlefield Henry asked its name and was told that it was called Agincourt. ‘Then since battles should be named after the nearest castle, village or town, let this battle for ever more be called the battle of Agincourt.
 book illumination, 15th century
The longbow is an ancient weapon. A pair of yew longbows was found in a Neolithic grave in Yorkshire, proving that the weapon stretches back at least four thousand years, yet it only became a common weapon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and only in certain parts of the British Isles.

The bowman’s tools

  Arrows were made from a variety of woods, aspen and poplar being the most common. They were generally fletched with goose feathers (occasionally peacock or swan), and supplied in bundles (sheaves) of 24. Barbed arrowheads, English 14th – 15th century
Archery, of course, was a very old skill, but the usual bow used for both hunting and war was the short bow. The short bow was much easier to shoot than a longbow. The archer drew the cord to his eye, which meant he could aim down the shaft of the arrow like a rifleman looking along a barrel. So long as the aim was good and the arrow flew true the archer would probably strike his target. The longbow was much more difficult to aim because, to use the full power of the long yew stave, the cord had to be drawn back to the archer’s ear and that broke the relationship of the eye and the arrow-shaft.
When a longbow is full-drawn by a right-handed archer the arrow is pointing to his left and it was necessary to learn how to compensate for that offset. So shooting a longbow becomes an instinctive process in which the brain makes a calculation about range and offset, and that calculation only came with a lot of experience.
The reason the longbow was preferred was, of course, its power. Even a coat of mail was probably sufficient to stop a short bow arrow, but the longbow was far more powerful and could even drive an arrow through plate mail. To gain that power, the bows were extremely stiff. A modern competition bow requires a draw-weight of around forty pounds, but a war bow, in the hands of an archer at Agincourt, needed a draw-weight of at least 120 pounds and sometimes much more. To pull the string just once needed huge strength, while to shoot arrow after arrow needed an immensely strong man, and the necessary muscles took years to develop. The skeletons of mediaeval English archers show distorted upper bones because the normal bone structure did not provide sufficient attachments for the muscles. A longbowman had almost grotesquely over-developed arms, chest and back muscles.
No man could simply pick up a longbow and shoot it. He needed maybe ten years of training, starting as a child, to develop his muscles, increase his bone-mass and acquire the skill of calculating the arrow’s flight.
In 1252 a law required that every man between the ages of fifteen and sixty should equip himself with a bow. Training sessions were ordered by law, usually on a Sunday, and in many villages there is still a street called The Butts which marks the place where archers shot at targets - the butts.
A good war bow was made from yew, but not any yew. The best came from the sunny climates of southern Europe, and soon there was a huge trade importing staves from Italy and southern France. The raw stave looked bicoloured, for it was cut where the dark heartwood met the lighter sapwood, and both were used in the finished bow. The heartwood was stiff and resisted bending, while the sapwood was springy. A bow made of heartwood alone would be too stiff to draw, while a bow made only of sapwood would quickly ‘follow the string’, i.e. become permanently bent and so lose its force. But together they were lethal. When the cord was released the sapwood served to accentuate the heartwood’s natural tendency to straighten, and the longbow was capable of shooting an arrow around 250 yards, the same distance, say, that a good club golfer can drive a ball. The bows were at least the height of a man and their tips were reinforced by notched horn caps which provided lodgement for the waxed hemp strings. Bowyers soon became a powerful craft guild in England.
Arrows were made on an industrial scale. Foresters discovered the shafts, usually of ash, fletchers or fledgers applied the feathers, which on any one arrow all had to be from the same wing of a goose, and blacksmiths made the heads. Millions of arrows were needed and there was an impressive organisation which collected finished arrows from the countryside and stored them in county capitals, eventually passing them onto the Tower of London which was the main armoury for English forces travelling abroad.
The 5,000 English archers at Agincourt could shoot 75,000 arrows in one minute, 750,000 in just ten minutes. The French were not fools. They tried to train their own longbowmen, but the laws they enacted were ineffective and failed. They attempted to import bowyers and fletchers and archers from Britain, but very few succumbed to the temptations. And so, for at least a hundred years, a bow made of yew, the war bow (it was never called the longbow), was king of the battlefield.
The Bard’s cri de coeur Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V was intended as a rallying call for the Normandy landings. Peter Davies examines the cultural legacy of Agincourt From the moment that Shakespeare took it on himself to breathe life into Holinshed’s somewhat inert chronicle of the Hundred Years War, to create his play King Henry V, the Battle of Agincourt was fated to acquire a mythical as well as historical dimension in British annals. Until the 20th century and the Entente Cordiale of 1904 set the seal on the recognition of other threats to national security, mere reference to it served as a rallying cry against the old enemy, France. There had of course been other dramatic accounts of King Harry’s famous victory before Henry V came to the stage in 1599, not least reference in Shakespeare’s earlier plays chronicling the reign of his successor Henry VI. But the dazzling success of Henry V swept them all from centre stage. In Shakespeare’s incarnation the fight at Agincourt appealed to everything the British like to think of as characteristic of themselves as a warrior race: dauntlessness in the teeth of great odds, modesty in the face of a boastful enemy, and above all the upholders of a righteous cause. We shall never know what Shakespeare felt about the kind of success his creation enjoyed. He was not a man in love with war. His most memorable protagonists are complex, flawed individuals. These are in general a far cry from the clean-limbed, straight-thinking young king of England who sets off to humble the kingdom of France armed with the highly dubious advocacy of England’s senior churchmen (who in giving him the go-ahead undoubtedly have their own fish to fry). He would certainly have been astonished at the range of literary effusions it would spawn, from Michael Drayton’s 1606 patriotic choric ode “Fair stood the wind for France” through such novels of the Victorian age as G A Henty’s At Agincourt, a tale of the White Hoods of Paris, to Bernard Cornwell’s recent Azincourt. It would have been quite beyond his imaginings that more that three centuries after his death (and more than 500 years after Agincourt) his play should have been translated into a wholly new artistic medium, cinema, as a morale booster for the forces of democratic allies fighting for their lives against the menace of a fascist autocracy that had most of Europe In its grip. In 1943 Laurence Olivier who had been combining training as a (not very successful) Fleet Air Arm pilot with broadcasting and making propaganda films, was asked by the Ministry of Information to work on a film of Henry V. It was though that the subject would not only in general terms be “good for morale” but, as an account of an expeditionary invasion of enemy territory might resonate with the intended Normandy landings. Churchill took a personal interest. The incongruity of depicting our French allies, shortly to be liberated, in the contemptuous terms Shakespeare’s play does, was not thought to be an obstacle. Wartime Britain was becoming a crowded armed camp in anticipation of D-Day and it was decided to film the battle scenes in spacious neutral Ireland. The hundreds of extras required were also more easy to be come by there. The project grew. Olivier had apparently not wanted to direct the film but did so as well as taking the starring role. His direction was decisive. Shakespeare had been brought to the cinema screen before, but never with entirely satisfactory results. Olivier’s ingenuity solved what had always been seen as insuperable obstacles to success. The film opens with a panorama of London as it might have appeared around 1600, featuring the Globe theatre. As we zoom down into the “Wooden O” the play is about to begin, and we are among the audience settling on their benches, while members of the cast rush about backstage, making adjustments to their costumes. As the play proceeds we gradually move outside the Globe but still, as we reach Southampton and the embarkation of the army, we are among stylized backdrops whose bright colours have been compared with a medieval book of hours. Only at Agincourt are we on location in the “real” world, with the thundering hooves of the French cavalry churning up the soft turf of the battlefield as they ride to their deaths at the hands of the British archers. This process is gradually reversed, eventually depositing us neatly back in the Globe and the audience’s applause to end the film. Henry V was released in November 1944, “dedicated to the commandos and airborne troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture”. It was of course too late to be an inspiration to the troops of the D-Day landings, but was nevertheless regarded as a powerful statement of British values and war aims. School children were sent in coach loads to see it. It was hailed as a triumph, the first time a Shakespeare play had translated to the screen and become commercially successful without sacrificing its author’s essential quality. The American critic James Agee called it “one of the cinema’s great works of art”. His film directing debut was a personal triumph for Olivier. Of his performance The Times remarked that he “plays Henry on a high heroic note and never is there danger of a crack”. Tastes change. Had Olivier after all “gone soft” on the brutality of Agincourt? When Kenneth Branagh’s much darker version of Henry V was screened in 1989 to a generation that had witnessed the horrors of the Falklands conflict on TV, it was regarded by many as “telling war like it is”. Branagh’s distinguished film is a gloomier – certainly muddier – version of events than Olivier’s. Yet seen at this distance from 1989, it is surprising how alike the delivery and mood of such a scene as Henry’s famous “band of brothers“ address to his troops before Agincourt is in both films. Both directors are it seems – as was not the Shakespeare himself? – simply caught up in the moving comradeship and heroism of the moment.