The Battle of Agincourt, 1415: the longbow's day

On the evening of 24 October 1415 two armies camped close to each other in Artois, in northern France, while rain fell on the freshly plowed fields between them. One was a small English army that had been marching for more than two weeks, short of food and riddled with dysentery. The other was the army of the kingdom of France, larger by far, led by the great nobles of the realm. By the next afternoon the French army had been destroyed, and the name of a small village, Azincourt, which the English called Agincourt, had entered the history of war.²

Background: Henry V's war

Agincourt was a battle of the Hundred Years' War, the long, intermittent struggle between the kings of England and France over the French crown and English lands in France, which Henry's great-grandfather Edward III had pressed with such success. After the English victories of the 14th century the fighting had died down into truces and negotiations. Henry V, who became king in March 1413, revived the claims: he demanded not only Aquitaine but also Normandy and other former English lands, terms the French would not accept.⁵ › The Battle of Crécy, 1346

France was in no state to resist. King Charles VI suffered from bouts of mental illness, and the great princes of his blood, led by the Dukes of Burgundy and Orléans, fought each other for control of the government. Henry's preparations, by contrast, were thorough: he paid for the invasion with loans and parliamentary taxes, pawning even royal plate as security for wages, and gathered a fleet in the ports of southern England.⁶

In mid-August 1415 the English army landed in Normandy near Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, and laid siege to the town. The siege took longer than planned. Fever and dysentery spread through the camp in the marshes around the walls, and by the time Harfleur surrendered on 22 September, after more than five weeks, the army had lost many men to disease, death and desertion.⁷

Henry decided not to sail home but to march overland to Calais, the English town on the coast of Picardy. He left Harfleur on about 8 October. French troops held the crossings of the lower Somme, so the English had to march far upstream before they could get across. The detour gave the French time to gather an army in front of them, and on 24 October the English found it barring the road near Agincourt.⁸

Armies and commanders

Henry commanded the English army in person. He was 28 or 29, depending on which year of birth is accepted, and had been king for two and a half years. With him were his brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and his cousin Edward, Duke of York. The archers were the backbone of the army: the dismounted men-at-arms stood in the center, and the archers were grouped in wedges on the flanks and along the front.⁹

The French army was commanded by the Constable of France, Charles d'Albret, and the Marshal, Jean le Meingre, known as Boucicaut. With them were the Dukes of Orléans, Bourbon and Alençon and many of the great lords of northern France, and Anthony, Duke of Brabant, a younger brother of the Duke of Burgundy, rode hard to join them.¹⁰

How large the two armies were is still argued. Britannica gives the common estimate of about 6,000 English against 20,000 to 30,000 French, a ratio of up to five to one. Anne Curry of the University of Southampton, working from muster rolls and pay records, puts the English at about 8,500 and the French at around 12,000, a far narrower gap; she argues that the larger French figures would not even have fitted onto the field. Writing in 1885, Charles Oman still gave the French sixty thousand men, a number no one now accepts.¹¹

The battle in phases

The field. The two armies faced each other across open, newly plowed fields between the woods around the villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt. The ground narrowed toward the English end, so the French could not spread out and use their numbers to outflank the English line. After a week of rain the soil was soft and heavy.¹²

The stakes. In front of them the archers drove sharpened stakes into the ground, angled toward the enemy, as a barrier against charging horsemen. Behind that hedge of points the bowmen waited for the French to come within range.¹³

The waiting. For hours that morning neither side moved. The French, who were blocking the road to Calais, could afford to wait for reinforcements or for hunger to do their work; the English could not. Between ten and eleven o'clock Henry ordered his line forward until the French were within bowshot, and the archers opened fire. The battle had begun.¹⁴

The cavalry charge. Mounted men on the French flanks charged first, against the archers. They failed. The stakes stopped them, the arrows brought down men and horses, and only a fraction of the riders reached the English line before they were driven back.¹⁵

The advance through the mud. Behind them the main French line came on foot, most of the men-at-arms having sent their horses to the rear. Weighed down by their armor, they plodded across the soaked plowland under the arrows. As the field narrowed they were pressed tighter and tighter together, until many could barely lift their weapons.¹⁶

Turning point: the melee

When the exhausted first line reached the English, the archers put down their bows and joined the men-at-arms with swords, axes and whatever came to hand. Lightly equipped and fresh, they moved freely among the French knights, who were stuck in the mud and jammed together. Men fell and could not rise as others fell on top of them, and the dead lay heaped in front of the English line. The second French line, pushing forward behind the first, only added to the crush.¹⁷

Henry fought in the thick of it. The chroniclers record that a French knight got close enough to strike his helmet and break off part of the crown he wore on it. On the English side the Duke of York was killed, and with him the young Earl of Suffolk and the Welsh squire Dafydd Gam, known as Davy Gam.¹⁸

Then came the darkest moment of the day. With the battle apparently won and the English busy gathering prisoners, word came that the French were attacking the baggage in the rear; local lords with a band of peasants had in fact plundered it. At the same time part of the French army seemed to be rallying for a fresh attack. Fearing that his prisoners would take up arms again, Henry ordered them killed, and many were. Nicolas, writing in 1833, stressed that the order is admitted without exception by the contemporary writers, many of them French. The Southampton historian Rémy Ambühl, studying about 100 ransom contracts, found that men of every rank were still held for ransom afterwards, which suggests that the killing, if it took place, did not spare the great lords at the expense of the humble.¹⁹

Aftermath

The battle had lasted perhaps three hours. How many English died is uncertain: the English chroniclers gave anything from 17 to about 100, the French from 300 to 1,600, and Britannica estimates about 400. The French dead were counted in thousands, about 6,000 by Britannica's estimate and 7,000 according to the Pas-de-Calais tourist board, many of them nobles. The Dukes of Alençon and Brabant were among the dead; the Dukes of Orléans and Bourbon were found alive among the bodies and taken to England as prisoners.²⁰

The English marched on to Calais and sailed home in November; Henry landed at Dover on 16 November. In London the news had already set the bells ringing and the mayor walking to Westminster to give thanks at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, where a Te Deum was sung for the victory. On 23 November the city gave the king a triumphal entry with pageants and choirs, and the song now known as the Agincourt Carol, with its refrain “Deo gratias Anglia,” may have been written for it.²¹

Agincourt did not end the war, but it changed its course. The French nobility, weakened and divided, could not meet the next English invasion. Henry returned and conquered Normandy town by town, taking its capital, Rouen, after a long siege. By the Treaty of Troyes of 21 May 1420 he was recognized as regent and heir of France, and on 2 June he married Catherine, daughter of Charles VI, at Troyes. He did not live to wear the French crown: he died at Vincennes on 31 August 1422.²² › The Battle of Verneuil, 1424

Legacy and memory

In England the victory set off an outpouring of national feeling, and Anne Curry argues that Agincourt became bound up with the idea of Britishness itself: the struggle of little England against the world, won by the common archer. For military historians it became, with Crécy and Poitiers, one of the classic victories of the English longbow over the knight. Charles Oman, writing in 1885, judged that the French could not have broken the English line by a frontal attack even on dry ground, and that the Constable should never have attacked at all.²³ › Longbow vs crossbow

Shakespeare restaged the battle in Henry V in 1599, with its Saint Crispin's Day speech and its “band of brothers,” and Curry argues that his version is the one most people still carry in their heads. She has also traced the myths that grew around the battle: the story that English archers invented the two-fingered V sign to show the French they still had their fingers has no medieval source at all, and the Welsh, often said to have made up much of the army, were in fact about 500 archers and a handful of men-at-arms.²⁴

In France the day is remembered as a disaster that struck down the flower of the nobility. In England, from the late 16th century, families began to claim ancestors at the battle and to set the word Agincourt in their coats of arms. Curry has built a database of the men of the campaign from muster rolls and pay records against which such claims can now be checked.²⁵ › Battles won against the odds

Visiting the battlefield today

The battlefield lies in the countryside of the Seven Valleys (7 Vallées) in the Pas-de-Calais. In the village of Azincourt the Centre Azincourt 1415, a museum and interpretation center, follows the campaign from the English landing to the battle and shows how people in the region lived in the 15th century. From there visitors can go out onto the battlefield itself, and an observation tower gives a view over the fields where the armies met.²⁶ › 25 October in military history