Introduction

There may be no better-documented battle than that at Agincourt, France, on 25 October 1415.  History provides us with three eyewitnesses and seven contemporary accounts of the fight.  After six hundred years, the battle site remains relatively unchanged.  The battle is named after a nearby fortified location.  Modern historians tell us that in the thirteenth century, war was viewed as part of the legal due process of settling differences of opinion over property claims.  In this case, it was Henry V’s claim of the French throne.

The Battle of Agincourt was part of England and France’s Hundred Years’ War (1337 – 1453).  The conflict grew into a broader power struggle involving factions from across Western Europe, fueled by emerging nationalism (actually lasting 116 years), interrupted by several periods of truce.  It was also a time of innovations in military technology and tactics, the creation of standing armies, and chivalry.

Henry V of England was also known as Henry of Monmouth.  He served as king from 1413 until he died in 1422.  Henry’s reign was short but remarkable in that he transformed England into one of the most potent European powers of the day.  Henry V is immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henriad plays.

Henry V gained military experience fighting under his father, Henry IV, in the Welsh revolt of Owain Glyndwr and Northumbria.  His decision to invade France followed the failure of negotiations with the French.  Note: at the time, the official language of the English royal court was French.  Henry claimed the throne of France through his great-grandfather, Edward III, and his lineage to William the Bastard (also known as the Conqueror).

Conflict — England and France

Historians argue that English kings were prepared to renounce their claim to the throne of France if French royalty would acknowledge England’s claim to Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany, Flanders, Touraine, and Normandy — and pay an indemnity of 1.6 million gold crowns owed to England from the ransom of John II.  Moreover, Henry V agreed to marry Catherine, the daughter of Charles VI of France (for a dowry of 2 million gold crowns).

By 1415, negotiations had come to a complete halt, with the English claiming that Charles VI had mocked Henry V.  Charles VI may have mocked the English king, but the man was beset with a psychotic disorder that made him incapable of proper governance.  The King’s Privy Council would not allow a French king to mock their liege lord, so on that basis, the Council approved a war with France.

Henry’s army landed in northern France on 13 August 1415, carried there by a vast fleet.  We believe this fleet involved between 1,000 to 1,500 ships.  His army of around 12,000 men and upwards of 20,000 horses besieged the port town of Harfleur.  The siege took longer than expected but fell on 22 September.  Henry’s army did not push on until around 8 October  —when the traditional campaigning season ended.  By then, the English army had suffered many casualties due to disease.  Rather than retire, though, Henry decided to march his 9,000 remaining troops through Normandy to the town of Calais, the English stronghold in northern France.  It was in Henry’s mind to demonstrate his capacity to rule that which was his by right.  And, historians say, the king intended to provoke a French response.

While Henry was laying siege to Harfleur, Charles I d’Albret, the Constable of France, assumed command of the French Army assembling at Rouen.  France intended to assemble around 9,000 highly trained troops, which Charles d’Albret used to block Henry’s advance along the River Somme.  For a time, the French succeeded in pushing Henry south, away from Calais, until Henry discovered a proper place to ford his army at Péronne, Somme, south of Béthencourt-sur-Somme.  From there, Henry continued his northward march.

Without a river to defend, the French hesitated to commit to battle.  Charles was content to shadow the English while he put out a call for local nobles to join his army.  By 24 October, both armies were poised for battle.  Still, the French declined Henry’s provocations as more and more troops filtered into the French camp.  Part of this ploy was a French offer to re-open negotiations, which King Henry dismissed.  He instead moved his army forward to commence a fight.  What Henry wanted, however, was for the French to attack him.  He was in a much better position to fight a defensive battle than one involving a frontal assault.

Henry’s army was in a poor state.  There was little food.  The men had marched 260 miles in only two weeks and suffered from sickness.  Equally alarming, the French far outnumbered their English enemy — and Charles d’Albret, realizing the state of Henry’s army, intended to wear the English down without a fight.

Archaeologists do not know the precise location of the battle.  All that can be said is that, given the lack of physical evidence, the fight may have occurred in a narrow strip of land between the wood of the present sites of Tramecourt and Azincourt (Agincourt).

Early on 25 October, Henry deployed his army across a 750-yard defile.  He divided his men into three groups.  Edward, the Duke of York, commanded the right wing.  Henry oversaw the center formation, and Baron Thomas Camoys led the left wing.  Camoys was a veteran of many engagements.  King Henry fielded 1,500 men at arms with around 7,000 longbowmen.  Sir Thomas Erpingham, another veteran, commanded the king’s archers.  Historians believe it is likely that the English adopted their usual battle formation of longbowmen on either flank, with men at arms in the center.  Henry may also have stationed several longbowmen in the center as direct support artillery.  Men at arms were placed in line, shoulder to shoulder, in four ranks.  The English drove wooden stakes into the ground at angles as a defense against French cavalry — a trick they learned from the Ottoman Turks.

Englishmen made their confessions before the battle.  Worried that the French would launch a surprise assault, Henry kept his men focused.  He assembled the men in battle formation the night before and ordered their complete silence.  It would be a desperate fight; King Henry committed to winning or dying in the attempt.

Some sources claim that Henry concluded his speech by telling his men that the French had boasted that they would cut off two fingers from the right hand of every archer so that he could never again draw a longbow.  We don’t know whether the king ever mentioned this.  The matter is still debated by those with access to historic documents.  It is more likely that death would come to any prisoner of war who could not be ransomed.

Charles d’Albret commanded 10,000 men at arms and another 4 – 5,000 footmen (archers, cross-bowmen (called arbalétriers) and shield-bearers.  Each man at arms would likely be accompanied by his gros valet, an armed servant, which could add another 10,000 fighting men.  The English were powerfully outnumbered.

D’Albret arranged his troops into two main groups: a vanguard up front and a main battle behind, both composing men at arms on foot.  A cavalry force would focus on an assault of English bowmen to clear the way for the infantry to advance.  A smaller mounted force would attack the rear of the English army to route the baggage train and logisticians.

As a point of honor, many French noblemen demanded (and received) a place on the front lines, where they would have a greater chance for glory and valuable ransoms.  The result of these demands was that most of the men-at-arms were massed in the front lines, in front of the other troops.  In essence, the entire French front was packed solid with combatants.  As for French bowmen, d’Albret regarded them as unnecessary and relegated them to positions in the rear of his formation.

Because of the lack of battle space, d’Albret formed a third battle group, a rearguard largely mounted and comprised of valets tending to the horses that belonged to the men-at-arms.  The vanguard numbered around 4,800 men, with 3,000 men-at-arms, arrayed in tight formations of sixteen ranks each.  Each rank was positioned a bowshot length from the other.  Charles d’Albret and nearly every leading nobleman stood in the vanguard.  An additional six hundred dismounted men stood in each wing.  Count Vendome commanded the left, Count Richemont the right.  The cavalry answered to Clignet de Breban and Louis de Bosredon.  Other than the two hundred men assigned to assault the English baggage train, d’Albret had no plan for the rest of his army.

Battle Terrain

The land upon which this battle occurred had been recently plowed.  Dense woodlands hemmed it in.  The terrain favored the English because of its narrowness and the thick mud through which the French would have to move.  The battle started in an orderly fashion but quickly became a mêlée of dreadful confusion.  The English account of the fight explains: “For when some of them, killed when the 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.”  (Source: Gestra Henrici).

Although the French initially pushed the English back, they became so closely packed that their close quarters prohibited them from using their weapons properly.  It was almost as if 5,000 well-armed men had decided to commit mass suicide.  Worse, heavy rain transformed the recently plowed field into a morass of heavy, clingy mud.  One witness, a monk known as St. Denis, told of French soldiers marching through mud where they sank to their knees and became fatigued before they could reach the enemy’s line.  Once these advancing soldiers were knocked to the ground, he likely drowned in the mud as soldiers behind him fell on top of him.

The Fight

On the morning of 25 October, Charles d’Albret was content to await the arrival of additional men.  The Duke of Brabant led 2,000 men forward, the Duke of Anjou around six hundred, and the Duke of Brittany an estimated 6,000, but d’Albret waited for more men — for some reason, he anticipated thousands more.  There was also a suggestion among the French that as soon as the English saw so many French noblemen, they would withdraw from the field.

At three hours after sunrise, there still was no fighting.  There were only two kinds of soldiers on the field: those moving around and anticipating an overwhelming victory and those not moving at all.  The English had no interest in moving because they had already occupied their fighting ground.

Henry’s army was pathetic.  The men suffered from hunger, illness, and exhaustion.  The king favored a defensive fight but was wary of moving his men, halting them, and trying to reorganize them for a defensive fight.  It would entail abandoning his preferred position and starting over to position his men in the face of an advancing army that outnumbered him.

D’Albret’s scheme of maneuver was a disaster for the French from the first moment.  With French archers and crossbowmen deployed behind and to the sides of the men-at-arms, they had no part to play in the battle beyond an initial volley of arrows.  The French cavalry might have devastated the English line, but the French mounted assault only occurred after some delay — ostensibly because the French were waiting for an English charge that never materialized.

When the French cavalry did charge, it was an epic disaster.  Mounted knights were unable to outflank the English bowmen and could not mount an effective charge through the sharpened stakes.  Historian John Keegan opines that the bowmen’s main target in this initial assault was the horses.  If the archers struck the horses in the side or flank, the horses would become dangerously out of control.  The mounted charge and subsequent retreat churned up the already muddy terrain between the French and the English.  St. Denis reported that the wounded horses galloped through the advancing infantry, scattering, and trampling them down in their headlong flight from the battlefield.

French men-at-arms closed to around 1,000 yards while under the English assault of a terrifying hail of arrows.  French knights considered that their armor plate provided such good protection that they didn’t need their shields — and in cases involving men-at-arms who could afford the new plate armor, this is probably true — at least partially.  The armor may have protected them from 500 to 1,000 yards, but it may not have been accurate at a closer range to English bowmen or about the armor protecting limbs or the side of one’s head.  Historians tell us that the English longbow could penetrate wrought-iron breastplates at short range and the thinner armor within 250 yards. 

St. Denis explained that to protect themselves as much as possible from the arrows, French knights had to lower their visors and bend their helmeted heads to avoid being shot in the face, as the eye- and air holes in their helmets were among the weakest points in the armor.  This head-lowered position restricted their breathing and their vision.  They then had to walk several hundred yards through deep mud in a press of comrades while wearing armor weighing 50 or more pounds — lethal missiles falling all around, forced to step over fallen comrades.

Surviving men-at-arms reached the front of the English line and successfully pushed it back, but the English longbowmen on the flanks continued to shoot at point-blank range.  When the longbowmen ran out of arrows, they dropped their bows and used axes, swords, and mallets to assault the confused, disordered, tired, and wounded Frenchmen.  The French troops could not cope with thousands of lightly armored bowmen.  But it was even worse than this.  The Frenchmen were overheated, had difficulty breathing, and were so tired they could barely lift their weapons in self-defense, much less an all-out assault.

There were so many pitfalls during the battle, among them the danger of being knocked or pushed to the ground and unable to get up again.  As the fight developed, the French second rank joined in, and the third, and they too were soon swallowed up.  Unaware of what was happening in the front ranks, the men in the rear pushed forward — adding to the disaster.  French warriors died by the thousands.  At the end, the English piled mountains of dead bodies.

Charles d’Albret was killed.  King Henry unhesitatingly fought the French in hand-to-hand combat.  According to Gesta Henrici, Henry became aware that his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had been wounded in the groin.  The king unhesitatingly moved his household guard and stood over his brother in the front rank of the fighting until Humphrey could be dragged to safety. 

The battles’ only French success was their attack on the lightly protected English baggage train, with a local knight leading a small number of men-at-arms and around 600 peasants.  The attackers seized some of Henry’s treasures, including a jeweled crown.  Historians cannot say whether the attack was part of a plan or mere banditry.  In some accounts, the attack happened towards the end of the battle, leading the English to think they were being attacked from the rear.  Other accounts report that the attack occurred at the beginning of the battle.  We simply do not know.

Executing French Prisoners

Placing aside when the assault on the baggage train may have occurred, at some point after the initial English victory, King Henry became alarmed at the possibility that the French were regrouping for another attack.  Were they?  Historians say that what alarmed the English was a French rearguard in the process of regrouping that gave the impression of an impending attack.  Thinking they were still in danger from this overwhelming French army, Henry ordered his prisoners to be put to death.  On this topic, one should remember three things: First, executing prisoners was a standard practice in the thirteenth century.  Second, it incentivized the troops to fight — and win.  Third, the number of French prisoners outnumbered the men remaining in Henry’s army — which explains why the English executed several thousand prisoners.  One could argue that it was out of necessity.  Historian John Keagan believed Henry’s purpose was not to kill these men but to terrorize the French Army and give their commanders pause to think the battle could be resumed.  If true, it worked.

Conclusion

France’s defeat at Agincourt was a catastrophe — for them.  Six thousand of their soldiers lay dead.  Among them, around 120 great lords, including d’Albret, three dukes, nine counts, one viscount, an archbishop, an admiral, the master bowman and his three sons, and five thousand knights.  Of the prisoners, we think between 700 and 2,100.  Among these, the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the Counts of Eu Vendome, Richemont (brother of the Duke of Brittany and step-brother to Henry V, John II, Count of Harcourt, and Jean II Le Maingre, Marshal of France.  English losses included 112 killed in the fighting but six hundred dead, including the Duke of York and Earl of Suffolk.

Most of us may not even know about the Battle of Agincourt were it not for the writing of William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616).  Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s premier dramatist.  He was born and died at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire.  Visiting his home was an interesting experience.

Shakespeare’s work, Henry V, is a history play believed to have been written around 1599.  It focuses on the king, and on events immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt.  The play is part of a series of works, including Richard II and Henry IV (in two parts).  Henry V has been filmed on two occasions: 1944 and 1989.  Shakespeare’s famous St. Crispin’s Day speech follows as King Henry tries to motivate his officers, given the overwhelming number of French enemies awaiting them later in the day.  Kenneth Branagh does an excellent job in the role of King Harry. 

From Henry V (1989)