Excerpts from The Face of Battle:
A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme (1976)
By John Keegan
Agincourt is one of the most instantly and vividly visualized of all epic passages in English history, and one of the most satisfactory to contemplate. It is a victory of the weak over the strong, of the common soldier over the mounted knight, of resolution over bombast, of the desperate, cornered and far from home, over the proprietorial and cocksure . . . it is an episode to quicken the interest of any schoolboy ever bored by a history lesson, a set-piece demonstration of English moral superiority and a cherished ingredient of a fading national myth. It is also a story of slaughter-yard behavior and of outright atrocity.
The Campaign
The events of the Agincourt campaign are . . . gratifyingly straightforward to relate. For, as medieval battles go, it is surprisingly well-documented . . .
In the late summer of 1415 Henry V, twenty-seven years old and two years King of England, embarked on an invasion of France. He came to renew by force the claims of his house to the lands it had both won and lost during the previous century in the course of what we now call the Hundred Years War. England had not, of course, lost all her French possessions . . . But the possessions to which she had been given title in 1360 at the Treaty of Bretigny, which concluded Edward III’s campaign of conquest, were very wider, embracing in Poitou and Aquitaine north and east of Bordeaux almost a third of the territory of France. It was these lands which Henry V was bent on repossessing, though he was also prepared to revive, it would appear, English claims to the Duchy of Normandy, of which King John had been disinherited in 1204 . . . [78-79]
The English army found what shelter it could for the night in and around the village of Maisoncelles, ate its skimpy rations, confessed its sins, heard Mass and armed for battle. At first light knights and archers marched out and took up their positions between two woods. The French army, composed almost exclusively of mounted and dismounted met-at-arms, had deployed to meet them and was in similar positions about 1,000 yards distant. For four hours both armies held their ground. Henry apparently hoped that the French would attack him; they, who knew that sooner or later he would have to move—either to the attack, which suited their book, or to retreat, which suited them even better—stood or sat idle, eating their breakfasts and calling about cheerfully to each other. Eventually Henry decided to up sticks (literally: his archers had been carrying pointed stakes to defend their lines for the last week) and advance on the French line. Arrived within 300 yards—extreme bowshot—of the army, the English archers replanted their stakes and loosed off their first flights of arrows. The French provoked by these arrow strikes, as Henry intended, into attacking, launched charges by the mounted men-at-arms from the wings of the main body. Before they had crossed the intervening space they were followed by the dismounted men-at-arms who, like them, were wearing full armour. The cavalry failed to break the English line, suffered losses from the fire of the archers, and turned about. Heading back for their own lines, many riders and loose horses crashed into the advancing line of dismounted men-at-arms. They, though shaken, continued to crowd forward and to mass their attack against the English men-at-arms, who were drawn up in three groups with archers between them and on the right and left flank. Apparently disdaining battle with the archers, although they were suffering losses from their fire, the French quickened their steps over the last few yards and crashed into the middle of the English line. For a moment it gave way. But the French were so tightly bunched that they could not use their weapons to widen the breach they had made. The English men-at-arms recovered their balance, struck back and were now joined by numbers of the archers, who, dropping their bows, ran against the French with axes, mallets and swords, or with weapons abandoned by the French they picked up from the ground. There followed a short but very bloody episode of hand-to-hand combat, in which freedom of action lay almost wholly with the English. Many of the French armoured infantrymen lost their footing and were killed as they lay sprawling; others who remained upright could not defend themselves and were killed by thrusts between their armour-joints or stunned by hammer-blows. The French second line which came up, got embroiled in this fighting without being able to turn the advantage to their side, despite the addition they brought to the very great superiority of numbers the French already enjoyed. Eventually, those Frenchmen who could disentangle themselves from the melee made their way back to where the rest of their army, composed of a third line of mounted men-at-arms, stood watching. The English who faced them did so in several places, over heaps of dead, dying or disabled French men-at-arms, heaps said by one chronicler to be taller than a man’s height. Others were rounding up disarmed or lightly wounded Frenchmen and leading them to the rear, where they were collected under guard . . . [81-84]
These are the bare outlines of the battle, as recorded by seven or eight chroniclers, who do not materially disagree over the sequence, character or significance of events. Of course, even though three of them were present at the scene, none was an eyewitness of everything, or even very much, that happened. An army on the morrow of a battle, must, nevertheless, be a fairly efficient clearing-house of information, and it seems probable that a broadly accurate view of what had happened—that not necessarily why and how it had happened—would quickly crystallize in the mind of any diligent interrogator, while a popularly agreed version, not dissimilar from it, would soon circulate within, and outside, the ranks. It would seem reasonable therefore to believe that the narrative of Agincourt handed down to us is a good one; it would in any case be profitless to look for a better. [85-86]