Battle of Agincourt
Based on Wikipedia: Battle of Agincourt
On the morning of October 25th, 1415, roughly nine thousand exhausted, starving, dysentery-ridden English soldiers faced an army at least twice their size across a muddy field in northern France. By the end of that day, the French nobility would be decimated, medieval warfare would be changed forever, and the English would have won one of history's most improbable victories.
The Battle of Agincourt wasn't supposed to happen this way.
A King With Something to Prove
Henry V of England was twenty-eight years old and had been king for only two years. His father, Henry IV, had seized the throne from Richard II, which meant the family's claim to power was shaky at best. The young king needed a spectacular military victory to silence his critics and unite his fractious nobles behind him.
France seemed like the obvious target. England had been fighting France, on and off, for nearly eighty years in what historians would later call the Hundred Years' War. The conflict was ostensibly about who had the rightful claim to the French throne—Edward III of England had claimed it through his mother in 1337—but really it was about land, power, and money.
Henry had a particular advantage in timing. King Charles VI of France suffered from severe mental illness. During his episodes, he sometimes believed he was made of glass and would shatter if touched. He couldn't dress himself. He couldn't recognize his own wife. France was effectively ruled by competing factions of nobles who spent as much time fighting each other as they did worrying about the English.
Negotiations between England and France dragged on through 1414 and into 1415. Henry demanded the return of lands that had once belonged to English kings, plus the right to marry Catherine, the French princess, along with a dowry of two million crowns. The French counter-offered with a smaller dowry and less territory. By spring of 1415, talks had broken down completely. Henry told his council he felt the French had mocked him and his claims.
On April 19th, 1415, Henry asked his Great Council to authorize war. This time, they agreed.
The Siege That Went Wrong
Henry's invasion fleet—probably several hundred ships carrying around twelve thousand men and as many as twenty thousand horses—landed on the Norman coast in mid-August. The army included something unusual for its time: a dedicated medical corps. Thomas Morstede, the king's personal surgeon, had been contracted to bring a team of surgeons and makers of surgical instruments. Henry was planning for a long campaign.
The first target was Harfleur, a fortified port town at the mouth of the Seine River. Henry expected it to fall quickly. It didn't. The siege dragged on for five weeks. Disease swept through the English camp—probably dysentery, that scourge of medieval armies, caused by contaminated water and poor sanitation. By the time Harfleur finally surrendered on September 22nd, Henry had lost perhaps a third of his force to illness and death.
The smart move would have been to sail home. Henry had captured a valuable port. He could declare victory and return in the spring with fresh troops.
But that wasn't the kind of victory Henry needed. A single town after five weeks of siege wouldn't silence the skeptics back home. He needed something more dramatic.
So Henry made a decision that seemed almost suicidal: he would march his remaining nine thousand men overland through Normandy to Calais, the English-held port on the northern tip of France, roughly one hundred sixty miles away. The march would demonstrate his right to rule French territory by actually walking through it with an army. It would also, he hoped, provoke the French into giving him the pitched battle he wanted.
The French obliged.
The Long March
The English army left Harfleur on October 8th and headed north. Almost immediately, things went wrong. The River Somme, which Henry needed to cross, had been blocked by the French. Every ford and bridge was either defended or destroyed. Henry was forced to march inland, away from his destination, searching for a crossing point.
Meanwhile, his men were dying. The dysentery that had plagued them at Harfleur continued to ravage the army. Food ran short. The autumn rains began, turning roads into muddy channels that exhausted men and horses alike.
After more than a week of marching the wrong direction, the English finally found an undefended crossing near Béthencourt, about sixty miles south of where they'd hoped to cross. They made it to the other side on October 19th and turned north toward Calais.
But the French army was waiting for them.
The French had spent the previous weeks gathering forces from across the kingdom. Unlike Henry's professional army, paid wages to fight, the French army was assembled through a call to arms—the semonce des nobles—summoning every knight and lord who owed military service. Thousands answered the call. By the time the English spotted the French army blocking the road to Calais on October 24th, they were facing a force of perhaps fourteen thousand men, with more arriving by the hour.
The Duke of Brabant was marching to join with two thousand men. The Duke of Brittany was bringing six thousand more. If the French simply waited, they would soon outnumber the English three or four to one.
The Night Before
On the evening of October 24th, both armies camped within sight of each other near a small village called Azincourt. The French, confident in their overwhelming numbers, apparently spent the night in high spirits, gambling on dice for which nobles would capture which English lords for ransom.
The English mood was different. Henry ordered complete silence throughout the camp, on pain of having an ear cut off. He wanted his men focused and alert against surprise attack. Priests moved through the ranks, hearing confessions. In medieval armies, battle was preceded by spiritual preparation—soldiers wanted to die with their souls cleansed of sin.
Henry himself walked among his troops that night, talking to them, encouraging them. He would later become famous for this kind of personal leadership, immortalized in Shakespeare's portrayal of the king mingling with common soldiers on the eve of battle.
What did he tell them? According to some accounts, he said the French had boasted they would cut off two fingers from the right hand of every English archer they captured, making it impossible for them to ever draw a bow again. Whether this was true, or propaganda to stiffen English resolve, historians still debate. What seems certain is that any archer captured alive could expect little mercy. Unlike knights, who could be ransomed for profit, common soldiers had no value as prisoners.
The Battlefield
The exact location where the armies clashed on the morning of October 25th remains uncertain. The traditional site is a narrow strip of open farmland between two patches of dense woodland, near the modern village of Azincourt. Recent scholarship has suggested the battle may have been fought slightly to the west. After six hundred years, the physical evidence is thin.
What we do know is that the terrain heavily favored the English. The field was narrow—perhaps seven hundred fifty yards wide—which meant the French couldn't use their superior numbers to overlap and surround the English line. The woods on either side channeled any attack directly into the English formation.
More importantly, it had been raining heavily. The field, recently ploughed, was a sea of thick, sucking mud.
Henry arranged his army in a single line across the narrowest part of the field. He placed his fifteen hundred men-at-arms—professional soldiers in full plate armor—in the center, standing shoulder to shoulder, four ranks deep. On each flank, and possibly interspersed throughout the line, he positioned his archers.
There were about seven thousand of them.
The English Longbow
The longbow was England's secret weapon, and it had been winning battles for nearly a century. At Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356, English archers had devastated French cavalry charges, proving that disciplined missile fire could stop armored knights in their tracks.
The weapon itself was deceptively simple: a stave of yew wood, roughly six feet long, with a draw weight of perhaps one hundred forty pounds. To pull a longbow required years of training and exceptional upper body strength. The skeletons of medieval English archers show distinctive deformations in their arm and shoulder bones from decades of practice.
But the results were devastating. A trained archer could loose twelve arrows per minute, each one capable of penetrating armor at two hundred yards. Seven thousand archers shooting together could darken the sky with nearly eighty-five thousand arrows every minute. The noise alone—the whistling of arrows in flight, the thump of impacts, the screams of wounded horses and men—must have been terrifying.
At Agincourt, the archers had prepared a defensive trick. Each man carried a sharpened wooden stake, about six feet long. Before the battle began, they pounded these stakes into the ground at an angle, points facing outward, creating a barrier against cavalry charges. This tactic may have been borrowed from the Ottoman Turks, who had used it successfully against French knights at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396.
The French Disaster
The French army was organized quite differently. Their force consisted primarily of men-at-arms—nobles and knights in full plate armor—arranged in three massive blocks, or "battles." The vanguard, or front line, contained nearly five thousand men. The main battle behind it held another three thousand. A third formation, mounted on horseback, waited in the rear.
Flanking the vanguard were two cavalry forces, perhaps eight hundred to twelve hundred men total, whose job was to charge the English archers and scatter them before the main infantry assault.
It was a reasonable plan. The problem was execution.
Every French nobleman wanted to be in the front line, where the glory was. The vanguard became so crowded with lords and knights jostling for position that there was no room for the archers and crossbowmen who were supposed to support them. These missile troops were pushed to the rear, where they would be useless.
The result was an army that was almost entirely heavy infantry, packed so tightly together that many men could barely swing their weapons.
For three hours after sunrise on October 25th, neither side moved. The French were waiting for reinforcements—thousands more troops were still marching toward the battlefield. Henry was hoping the French would attack first, giving his archers the advantage of shooting at an advancing enemy.
Eventually, Henry lost patience. His men were exhausted, hungry, and sick. Every hour they waited made them weaker. Around eleven in the morning, he ordered his army to advance.
The English moved forward slowly, stopping several times to allow the archers to pull up their stakes and replant them. They halted when they were within extreme bowshot range of the French lines—perhaps three hundred yards—and planted their stakes one final time.
Then the archers began to shoot.
The Killing Ground
The French cavalry charges, which were supposed to scatter the English archers, failed almost immediately. The horses, already struggling through ankle-deep mud, balked at the wall of sharpened stakes. Arrows struck from the flanks. Knights fell. Riderless horses panicked and ran, some of them crashing back into the French lines and adding to the chaos.
Then the French infantry advanced.
Five thousand armored men began slogging forward through the mud. Full plate armor of the period weighed about sixty pounds. The mud was knee-deep in places. Men who had been standing still for hours were already cold and stiff. Now they had to walk three hundred yards through a ploughed field turned into a swamp, all while thousands of arrows rained down on them.
Contemporary accounts describe the exhaustion:
"They were marching through the middle of the mud where they sank up to their knees. So they were already overcome with fatigue even before they advanced against the enemy."
Those who made it to the English line found themselves packed even tighter together. The narrow field compressed the French formation like a funnel. Men couldn't raise their arms to strike. The French monk of St. Denis wrote that the vanguard "found itself at first so tightly packed that those who were in the third rank could scarcely use their swords."
When the front ranks of French knights finally crashed into the English men-at-arms, they pushed them back—at first. But then the English archers, having exhausted their arrows or finding their targets too close for bowfire, threw down their bows and charged into the melee from the flanks.
The archers carried mallets, hatchets, and short swords. They wore little armor, which meant they could move quickly through the mud. They swarmed over the exhausted, nearly immobile French knights, finding gaps in armor, pulling men down into the mud, finishing them with daggers thrust through visors.
The Gesta Henrici Quinti, a chronicle written by someone who was probably there, describes what happened:
"For when some of them, killed when battle was first joined, fall at the front, so great was the undisciplined violence and pressure of the mass of men behind them that the living fell on top of the dead, and others falling on top of the living were killed as well."
The French became so compressed that they couldn't fight, couldn't retreat, couldn't even fall down without being trampled. Some knights, knocked to the ground, drowned in the mud inside their own helmets.
The main French battle tried to advance and met the same fate. The third formation, still mounted, watched the carnage from a distance and eventually withdrew without engaging.
By early afternoon, it was over.
The Killing of the Prisoners
The aftermath of Agincourt included one of the most controversial episodes in medieval military history.
As the French attack collapsed, English soldiers began taking prisoners—nobles and knights who could be ransomed for enormous sums. Ransoming captives was a fundamental part of medieval warfare, both an economic system and a code of honor that gave defeated knights an incentive to surrender rather than fight to the death.
But at some point during the battle, Henry ordered the prisoners killed.
The traditional explanation is that Henry learned the French rearguard was preparing another attack, and he couldn't spare men to guard prisoners while simultaneously defending against a new threat. Some accounts mention a French attack on the English baggage train, which may have alarmed Henry about his vulnerable rear. Others suggest he was simply worried about the still-massive French reserves.
Whatever the reason, Henry commanded his soldiers to execute their captives. Many English knights refused—not out of humanitarian concern, but because they were effectively being ordered to destroy their own winnings. In the end, Henry detailed a squad of two hundred archers to carry out the killing.
The exact number of prisoners executed is unknown. It may have been several hundred. The episode troubled contemporaries and has troubled historians ever since. Even by the standards of medieval warfare, killing ransomable prisoners was unusual and disturbing.
The Butcher's Bill
The French losses at Agincourt were catastrophic. At least five thousand men died, including the Constable of France, Charles d'Albret, three dukes, ninety counts, and over fifteen hundred knights. The Duke of Orléans and Marshal Boucicaut were among the prominent prisoners. An entire generation of French nobility was killed or captured in a single afternoon.
English losses were remarkably light—perhaps a hundred to five hundred dead, depending on the source. Among them was Edward, Duke of York, Henry's cousin and commander of the right wing, who reportedly died of suffocation after being trampled in the melee.
The disparity is almost unbelievable. A force outnumbered roughly two to one killed or captured nearly half the enemy army while suffering only minimal casualties itself. It was one of the most lopsided victories in military history.
Why Did It Happen?
Military historians have spent centuries analyzing Agincourt, trying to understand how such an overwhelming French advantage turned into such a complete disaster.
The terrain was crucial. The narrow field neutralized French numbers. They couldn't flank the English line or bring their full force to bear. The mud exhausted the French infantry before they even reached the enemy.
The longbow mattered, but perhaps not in the way popular imagination suggests. The arrows probably didn't kill many armored knights outright—plate armor was specifically designed to deflect arrow points. But the constant barrage disrupted formations, wounded horses, and added to the chaos and exhaustion of the French advance.
French tactical mistakes compounded the problems. The cavalry charges failed to clear the archers. The infantry advanced on foot through terrible ground against a prepared defensive position. The archers and crossbowmen who might have provided suppressive fire were shoved to the rear and never engaged.
But perhaps the most important factor was cultural. French knighthood in 1415 was still deeply invested in an ideal of personal valor and individual combat. Every knight wanted to be in the front, to personally face the enemy, to win glory and ransoms through his own hand. This impulse created the deadly overcrowding that immobilized the French formation.
The English, by contrast, fought as a disciplined unit. The archers, who comprised nearly eighty percent of Henry's army, were common soldiers with no aristocratic pretensions. They fought together, moved together, and when the moment came, attacked together from the flanks with ruthless efficiency.
The Aftermath
Henry V entered Calais on October 29th, having lost perhaps a third of his army to disease and battle. He sailed for England in mid-November and was greeted with rapturous celebrations. The victory at Agincourt transformed him from a young king with a questionable claim into a national hero, the greatest warrior-king since Edward III.
For France, the disaster deepened the ongoing civil war between rival noble factions. With so many leaders dead or captured, the kingdom had no effective government. Henry would return in 1417 with a larger army and spend the next three years systematically conquering Normandy.
In 1420, the Treaty of Troyes recognized Henry as heir to the French throne. He married Catherine of Valois, the French princess he had demanded years earlier. Their son would be crowned King of France and England.
But Henry never enjoyed his triumph. He died of dysentery—the same disease that had weakened his army at Harfleur—in August 1422, at the age of thirty-five. The child who inherited his dual crown was nine months old.
Within a decade, a teenage peasant girl named Joan of Arc would reverse the English conquests and crown a new French king at Reims. By 1453, England would lose everything in France except Calais.
Agincourt, in the end, was a spectacular victory that changed very little. The Hundred Years' War would continue for another thirty-eight years. France would eventually win. But the battle itself—the image of Henry V standing with his men against impossible odds, the longbowmen defying the flower of French chivalry—became one of the founding myths of English national identity.
The Legend
Nearly two centuries after the battle, William Shakespeare wrote Henry V, cementing Agincourt's place in English culture forever. Shakespeare's Henry delivers the famous St. Crispin's Day speech before the battle, promising his soldiers that "gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here."
The play presents the battle as a triumph of English courage and unity against overwhelming odds. It's stirring drama. It's also propaganda, written during the reign of Elizabeth I, when England was again facing the threat of invasion from a continental superpower—this time Spain rather than France.
The real battle was messier, uglier, and more contingent than the legend suggests. The French made terrible mistakes. The terrain was freakishly favorable to the English. The weather was awful. Henry's decision to march through Normandy was probably reckless. His order to kill the prisoners was brutal even by contemporary standards.
But something extraordinary did happen on that muddy field in October 1415. A small, sick, exhausted army beat a much larger force through discipline, firepower, and sheer determination. The battle demonstrated that the age of armored cavalry was ending, that disciplined infantry with missile weapons could defeat the mounted knight.
Agincourt didn't end the Middle Ages. But it pointed toward a future where wars would be won by professional armies rather than feudal levies, by tactics rather than individual valor, by the common soldier rather than the noble knight.
Six centuries later, we're still talking about it.
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