Prepared for an exhibit at the Royal Armories, this is a collection of essays on various aspects of the battle of Agincourt in 1415, in which the army of Henry V of England defeated French forces sent to intercept him on the way to Calais. Individual sections cover the background of the battle – the English claim to the throne of France that precipitated the 100 Years War, and French politics that made France an opportune target; the battle itself – tactics, armor, weapons, the makeup of the French and English armies, and the location of the battlefield; and the aftermath – French prisoners, war widows, and the battle as portrayed in Shakespeare’s Henry V and Laurence Olivier’s film of that play (although not the Kenneth Branagh version).

My own impression of the battle was probably a common one; the outnumbered and footsore English gained a near miraculous victory over the French due to the deadly English longbow and the arrogance of French knights, who charged into a storm of arrows because it was the chivalrous thing to do. The essays here suggest the reality was somewhat different:

• The English probably weren’t badly outnumbered; chroniclers of the time exaggerated the number of French present. It’s pointed out that most of the chronicles were written by clerics – who probably weren’t good at estimating army size.
• The French really were arrogant; the French did not have unity of command while the English did. Although the French had prepared a quite reasonable battle plan – a copy exists, possibly captured at the battle – but was not put into effect, because Henry V’s didn’t cooperate tactically.
• Henry V had two key tactics: first was having each archer cut a stake that could be positioned in front of the archer formation. Second was to advance to within archery range – taking the stakes along to be repositioned - and opening fire on the French while they were still getting organized. This precipitated the hasty French attack. According to the French battle plan, the cavalry was supposed to sweep up the archers from the flanks while the French foot advance in the center; instead the cavalry charged piece-meal and were repulsed by the combination of arrows and stakes. The disorganized cavalry retreated through their own front ranks; forcing the French missile troops – archers and crossbowmen – backwards, such that they never got into the battle at all. The foot soldiers were also disorganized by the retreating cavalry; they eventually advanced but were defeated in detail.
• There’s some doubt about the “arrow storm”. The longbow was certainly a fearsome weapon, and there are various accounts of knights pinned to their horses by arrows or having arrows punch right through their armor as they trudged up the slope, bent forward as if they were walking into a hailstorm. Some accounts I’ve read of English archery tactics suggest the longbow was an “indirect fire” weapon; only the front ranks of archers could see their targets; the rest fired based on distance, to drop their arrows in from above. Contemporary accounts have archers practicing by shooting at a square of cloth spread on the ground; i.e., not being able to see the target but only knowing its distance. However, this book points out that each archer was supposed to have a sheaf of 24 arrows, and could get off 10 arrows a minute – which means that the “arrow storm” could only have lasted a little more than two minutes. What was going on, then? Is the “indirect fire” idea false and were the archers more selective about targets? Was their arrow resupply available? The authors don’t speculate.

That brings up “hand strokes”. The popular concept – think Game of Thrones, for example – has armored knights swinging heavy blows with their swords. The authors here note that late medieval armor, such as worn at Agincourt, was pretty much immune to sword blows. Instead, swords of the time were prying weapons – sharp points that could be worked into a joint in an opponent’s armor, and thick blade cross sections that would resist breaking while levering a joint open enough to stab. That would have made knight-to-knight combat rather strange looking; two guys with swords maneuvering around trying to get an opening into a shoulder or groin joint. Swords or the time were often “bastard” or “hand and a half”, or had a ricasso – an unsharpened length of blade in front of the hilt; either allowed the user to get more leverage for prying.

It’s noted that many of the English archers got into hand to hand combat at Agincourt, using mauls or axes to pummel French knights into submission. This points up the disorganization of the French attack; there’s no way lightly armored archers could have gone up against an organized unit of heavily armored footmen fighting side by side; instead they must have picked off isolated individuals that could be attacked from the rear or sides. Similarly, French footmen that made it all the way to the English ranks would have been individuals or small groups facing a line of armored knights and defeated in detail.

A final mystery; in 1818 Lieutenant Colonel John Woodford did some excavation at the battle site; he claimed to have found a “burial pit” with “…a quantity of bones & the remains of sculls [sic] – particularly teeth”. Most of his records have been lost, but there’s an annotated map by Woodford in the British Library. In 2002, archaeologists went to the site equipped with metal detectors, magnetic survey equipment, and soil resistivity probes. They found lots of artifacts – from modern all the way back to a flint tool – but nothing “…that could definitely be dated to the medieval period” and “… no evidence of medieval conflict”. The supposed “burial pit” area described by Woodford had “No evidence of either skeletal remains or any buried features of artefacts [sic]…”; just clean and apparently undisturbed soil. So what’s up with that? The same geophysical methods had been used at the site of the battle of Towton from the War of the Roses, a few decades after Agincourt, and found “hundreds” of artifacts related to that battle, so there’s probably nothing wrong with the methodology. Did Woodford have the wrong location? Were the skeletal remains Woodford claimed misinterpreted? Are the locations wrong? Obviously more research is necessary.

Abundantly illustrated. An n extensive and thorough bibliography. Individual essays are of uneven quality as is expected in a composite work such as this but all are worth reading. ( )