Late Middle Ages

The Battle of Agincourt (1415)

Of the three great English battlefield victories of the Hundred Years’ War — Crécy in 1346, Poitiers in 1356, and Agincourt in 1415 — the last is the one the English-speaking world has remembered most vividly. The sermon of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the king’s “we few, we happy few” of memory, the longbow raining on a cavalry charge in the mud: the story has the simplicity of a parable, and it has been polished for six centuries. The French have remembered it as well, in the long aftermath, as a humiliation. It is now generally agreed that the 25th of October 1415 was a day of unusual miscalculation on the French side, of unusual cohesion on the English, and of unusual historical accident on both.

Henry V in 1415: a king in search of a war

Henry V (1386–1422) took the English throne in March 1413, the second Lancastrian king, son of Henry IV and of Mary de Bohun. He was twenty-six, well educated, athletic, deeply pious, and very serious about the legacy of the Plantagenets. The English claim to the French throne, abandoned as a working policy since 1389, was a kingly inheritance; the duchy of Aquitaine, in revolt against the Valois since 1402, was a pretext. In the summer of 1415 Henry assembled a great army, the largest that England had sent overseas since the beginning of the war. The Retinue Rolls of the army, preserved in The National Archives, list some 2,500 men-at-arms and 7,500 longbowmen, in roughly equal English and Welsh proportions, plus the attendants, pages, and priests who trailed behind. (Anne Curry’s reconstruction, in The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations, gives an effective fighting strength of about 6,000, plus some 12,000 non-combatants.)

The English landed at the mouth of the Seine on 14 August 1415, besieged Harfleur, and took it on 22 September. The campaign, however, had cost more than a month, and the besieging army had been badly reduced by dysentery. The king, having promised his council that he would be home by Christmas and the army that he would march to Calais, set out on 8 October for a march of some 150 miles through enemy territory. The route took the army through Picardy, across the Somme at the fords of Corbie, and into a narrowing corridor of open country. The duke of Burgundy, nominally allied with the English, was immobilised in the Low Countries; the French had time to gather an army under the constable Charles d’Albret, and to take up a position across Henry’s line of march.

The march to Agincourt and the ground

The English reached the crossing of the Ternoise on 24 October, with the French reported to be ahead, between the river and the château of Agincourt. Henry was in a tight corner: his army was tired, sick, and short of food, and a frontal battle was the only way out. The chronicler of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, written in the monastic scriptorium of Syon Abbey within months of the battle, recorded that the army “lay down to rest, in the open field, in the cold of night, in the rain,” and that the king moved among the men, “with no great retinue, calling each man by name.” The famous Crispin’s-day speech of Shakespeare is a literary invention; the king’s actual address, in the words of the Gesta, was shorter and more businesslike.

The ground favoured the English. The English position, between two woods and along a narrowing of the ploughland, was about 1,000 paces wide. The longbowmen were drawn up in the classic English formation, in a V-shape on the flanks, with stakes hammered into the ground in front of them; the men-at-arms were dismounted and stood in the centre, with a small force of horsemen under the Lord Camoys in reserve. The army was divided into three battles: the vanguard under the Duke of York, the main battle under the king, and the rear under Lord Camoys.

The morning of Crispin’s feast

On the morning of 25 October 1415, the French army was drawn up on a low rise, perhaps 600 paces from the English line. The constable, Charles d’Albret, had something over 20,000 men; modern estimates, based on the Chronique de Normandie and the Burgundian chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, run from 20,000 to 30,000. The French vanguard, drawn from the flower of the chivalry of the Île-de-France, was led by the constable and the marshal Jean II Le Maingre, known as Boucicaut; the second battle, also substantial, was commanded by the Dukes of Bar and Alençon; the third, in the rear, was led by the Counts of Marle and Falconberg. Many of the best cavalry were absent: the young Duke of Brittany was ill, the Count of Richemont had been excluded from the council, and the Duke of Orléans, the most experienced captain of the generation, was a prisoner in England. The duke of Aquitaine, the future Charles VII, was a child.

The French were a much heavier force than the English, but they were not properly handled. The constable had wanted to starve the English out, or at least to refuse battle; the council of the dauphin, with the duke of Berry and the count of Bourbon, had overruled him. The result was a long line of mounted men-at-arms advancing uphill through freshly ploughed ground, the longbow falling on them from the flanks. The order to advance, the chronicler of the Relatio triplex de proelio Agincourti reports, was given “with a great shout,” and the first line, finding the soft ground almost impassable, was soon entangled with the second.

The killing of the prisoners

The English longbowmen opened fire when the French were about 250 paces off. The first volleys, fired high and at long range, killed the horses; the next volleys, fired at close range, killed the riders. The French vanguard, packed shoulder to shoulder, could not deploy; the second battle, coming up behind, could not be brought into action. The longbow, the Gesta records, was “shooting so thickly and so sharply that the French could hardly stand”; the arrows of the Welsh archers, fired at ranges of less than 80 paces, penetrated mail and even plate. The first French battle was destroyed within a quarter of an hour; the second, under the Duke of Alençon, fought a desperate action before being overrun.

It was at this point that the king, fearing a French counter-attack by the third battle of the Count of Falconberg, gave the order to kill the prisoners. The order, recorded in the Gesta and in the Relatio triplex, is one of the most controversial in the history of the war. Anne Curry has argued that it was a calculated, even necessary, measure: the prisoners, taken from the first battle, were guarding themselves, and could not be kept; the Gesta says simply that the king, fearing a French attack, “ordered that all the prisoners should be put to death.” A French chronicler, the author of the Chronique de Normandie, thought that perhaps 1,500 French prisoners were killed. The number is uncertain; the event is certain.

The French losses in killed are estimated at 4,000 to 6,000 men. Among the dead were the constable Charles d’Albret, the Duke of Alençon, the Duke of Brabant, the Counts of Marle, of Nevers, of Vaudémont, and more than a hundred of the lesser bannerets. The English losses, by contrast, were extraordinary. The Gesta says that the king “gave thanks to God for a victory that had cost the English so little”; modern estimates suggest 400 to 600 dead, of whom a substantial number died of their wounds in the days after the battle.

The road to Troyes

The English had won the day, but they had not won the war. The army, exhausted, withdrew from the field on the 26th, marched to Calais, and crossed to Dover on 16 November. Henry reached London on the 23rd, and was received with the great procession of triumph that the chroniclers of the Brut and the London chronicles describe in detail. The English, the Gesta records, “wept for joy.” The political consequence of the victory was, however, the campaign of 1417–1419 that ended with the conquest of Normandy and the Treaty of Troyes of 1420. Henry was recognised as regent of France and heir to the French throne; the dauphin was disinherited; Queen Catherine was betrothed to Henry; the infant Henry VI was to be king of both realms.

The Treaty of Troyes, signed on 21 May 1420, was a settlement that would have been unthinkable in 1414. It recognised Henry V, in his own person, as the legitimate heir of the Valois, and Catherine’s children by him as the heirs of Charles VI. The king of France, with a lucid interval and his council of three — the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy, and the Count of Bourbon — accepted the settlement, in part because the alternative seemed to be the total loss of the kingdom to the English. The death of Henry V at the Château de Vincennes, on 31 August 1422, of dysentery contracted during the siege of Meaux, was six weeks before the death of Charles VI; the infant Henry VI, less than a year old, became king of England and of France. The policy that had begun with the chevauchée of 1415 reached, in the treaty of 1420, the high point of the English claim.

The battle of Agincourt itself passed quickly into legend. The Gesta Henrici Quinti was translated into the Life of the Victorious Prince of Tito Livio Frulovisi and, later, into the Henry V of Shakespeare, written in 1599, and the speech on the field of Agincourt is the only one of the king’s speeches that most English readers know. The most detailed modern treatment, that of Anne Curry in Agincourt: A New History (2005), draws on the muster rolls, the treasury receipts, the French and Burgundian chronicles, and the archaeological evidence of the battlefield, and gives a picture of the battle very different from Shakespeare’s, but a picture consistent with the chroniclers of 1415.

References and further reading

  • Anne Curry, Agincourt: A New History (Stroud: Tempus, 2005) and ed., The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000).
  • Christopher Allmand, Henry V (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992; rev. ed. 1997).
  • Andrew Ayton, “The English Army at Agincourt,” in The Hundred Years War, ed. Anne Curry and Michael Hughes (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 153–174.
  • Philippe Contamine, Azincourt (Paris: Perrin, 1964; reissued 2014).
  • Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, vol. III: Divided Houses (London: Faber & Faber, 2009).