“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them printing their proud hooves …” This edgy start is followed (shades of Iraq) by a long debate among some English clergymen about the legitimacy of an “offensive war”. In a nervous opening, the play begins with a Chorus who entreats the audience to set aside scepticism and enter into the spirit of fighting the French. On closer examination, however, Shakespeare is far from gung-ho. In 1599, cheerfully plundering The Famous Victories of Henry V, he wrote Henry V, one of his most popular plays. In the first place, not even Shakespeare could swallow the Agincourt Kool-Aid. The year 1415 should have been the definitive riposte to 1066, but the after-life of Agincourt is not straightforward. He had, however, done something that had eluded his predecessors: he had avenged the battle of Hastings. His death, from dysentery, in 1422, aged 35, cut short any imperial ambitions. Henry continued to unify his people with aggressive nationalism – successive invasions of France. Also in the vernacular, the Agincourt Carol, several ballads, and a hit play The Famous Victories of Henry V sealed the battle in the amber of folk-memory. At court, the English language was now the medium through which the king, an accomplished spin-doctor, promoted his success. High and low culture responded to Agincourt in several important ways. Already, as “Azincourt” became “Agincourt”, his victory was becoming anglicised. Henry returned to London in triumph, parading through the city on 23 November. Almost as bad, from the French point of view, its governing elite, including dukes and bishops, was annihilated.Įstimates of the English dead, by contrast, range from improbable (100) to plausible (1,500). French sources suggest that they lost between 4,000 and 10,000 men. In his panicky order to execute the hundreds of French prisoners behind his lines, there is evidence that Henry could not quite comprehend the English victory. The English breakthrough seems to have been comparatively swift. Many French knights, trapped inside their expensive armour, suffocated or drowned in the mud.
When the archers ran out of arrows, they turned axes, swords and even mallets against the helpless mass of French chivalry wallowing in the mud.Įveryone agrees it was a massacre. When more heavily armed French knights began to advance on foot, staggering through the mud, they were slaughtered at point-blank range, falling on the bodies of their comrades. Horribly injured horses, running amok, became a cruel part of the bloody mayhem at the clash of French and English forces. Under a murderous hail, the French cavalry was cut to pieces. A well-trainer archer could fire 10 arrows a minute. The king’s counterintuitive move seems to have caught the French off-guard because, waiting no longer, the flower of their cavalry charged towards the English lines.įamously, it was a disaster. He advanced his men, a risky manoeuvre which meant uprooting the defensive stakes behind which his archers were sheltering. As morning passed, Henry was forced into yet another gamble.
The French had the better of this opening. After sunrise, for three hours, they simply held their position and played a waiting game, a strategy favoured by military textbooks. Drawn up in three lines, or “battles”, they embodied shock and awe. On St Crispin’s Day itself, the French were well prepared, young and over-confident. Medieval warfare was medieval: the French vowed to cut off the archery fingers of every captured English bowman. The night before the fighting began, it is said, he ordered his men to wait in the darkness in silence – on pain of losing an ear. Most agree that Henry fielded perhaps 1,500 men-at-arms and about 6,000 archers.Īccording to French sources, anxious to explain a military catastrophe, Henry commanded a ruthless war machine. Recent scholarship puts the disparity at four to three. Some say the French-English ratio was six to one. Almost everything about the Anglo-French bloodbath at the place known as “Azincourt” is disputed, apart from the sensational outcome. Rarely has the fog of war been so impenetrable. No wonder the king heard mass three times on the eve of battle. Outnumbered on foreign soil, he faced an opponent who was fresh and ready for the fray. His Welsh and English army was sick, starving and exhausted. After the debilitating siege of Harfleur, immortalised in “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …”, this was an engagement Henry V did not really want. The fighting took place on a strip of muddy ground sandwiched between two woods, decisive terrain.
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