Battle of Agincourt
Henry V destroyed a French army at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 with a force perhaps a fifth its size. He had landed in Normandy in August with about 12,000 men and spent five weeks taking Harfleur, which cost him a third of his army to dysentery. Rather than sail home he marched for Calais — a decision that was partly bravado — and found the fords of the Somme held and had to go far inland. By the time the French intercepted him he had perhaps 6,000 men, most of them archers, exhausted and short of food. The French had somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000, the flower of their nobility, and the confidence that goes with it. The ground decided it. The two armies faced each other across a recently ploughed field, narrowing between two woods, after a night of heavy rain. The French men-at-arms advanced on foot in armour weighing perhaps thirty kilos, into mud, through arrow fire from the flanks, into a front too narrow for their numbers — so that the rear ranks pushed the front ones into a crush in which men fell and drowned in the mud and could not get up. The archers dropped their bows and killed the fallen with mallets and daggers. Perhaps 6,000 French died, including three dukes and eight counts, against a few hundred English. Henry ordered the prisoners killed mid-battle, fearing a counterattack, and his knights refused; archers did it. Shakespeare made the day a national possession, and the two-fingered gesture attributed to the archers has no medieval source at all.
- Year: 1415 CE
- Category: Military
