By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  Henry provided a striking contrast to the frequently incapacitated French king. Contemporaries portrayed Henry as he wished to be perceived: energetic, thoughtful, just, decisive, devout – and a fearless war leader. Henry, like Richard the Lionheart, was always ready to lead from the front – something which must have impressed the French as their own king was clearly not up to the task (he thought that he was made of glass and would therefore shatter easily). Military prowess was considered an essential element of medieval monarchy, and Henry was going to enhance – and then exploit – his martial reputation for all it was worth. France was to be his theatre of spectacle and the dominant theme of his reign.

  After a long period of detailed planning and preparation, Henry embarked for France from Southampton in August 1415. His army was a large one – up to twelve thousand strong, it included the active participation of most of the nobility – and represented the English nation in arms. Henry’s first target was Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine. From here, the French could threaten English shipping in the Channel and launch raids on the south coast. For the English, Harfleur not only offered the defensive merits of protecting their maritime interests; more importantly, it meant they could threaten Rouen, the capital of Normandy. One French contemporary considered Harfleur as the key to Normandy; Henry fully appreciated this and invested the town energetically, hoping for its quick capitulation. Unexpectedly, despite the fierce bombardment and mining operations, the town held out for five weeks, much to Henry’s deep vexation, surrendering only on 22 September. Henry immediately followed the victory with another propaganda victory: a direct challenge to the heir to the French throne to meet in a duel, a contest between their nations’ leading champions which would settle the war without further bloodshed. As expected, the French did not respond to the bearding, not deigning to pick up the gauntlet.

  With the first objective taken, if somewhat belatedly, a council of war was convened to decide the next move. The precise aims of the expedition have never been entirely clear to historians; nor do they seem to have been all that apparent to the English, as they debated what their next steps should be. Keith Dockray is convincing in his belief that the whole campaign was, beyond an initial step in recovering the duchy of Normandy, predominantly opportunistic, its eventual shape depending on what the first stages of the incursion achieved.

  With a third of the English force either killed, sick, returned home or garrisoning Harfleur, many of Henry’s commanders advised the King to return directly home with a limited, but highly respectable, victory under his knightly belt. They were overruled by the belligerent Henry, who insisted that the army undertake a 120-mile march to Calais from where they would only then take ship back to England. His decision has perplexed some historians. Presumably his fleet was still at Harfleur, so why force his exhausted troops, weakened by fighting, casualties, dysentery, cold and hunger, to endure this further pain? In reality, it was to be a show of force and another propaganda exercise: a victorious king making a procession through his territory, daring the enemy to move against him (while almost certainly hoping it would not) while simultaneously making his presence known, impressing the inhabitants of Normandy as to who was their true lord and master. Once again, Henry was reinforcing his warrior-king image. His contemporaries fully understood the meaning of this move: Adam Usk likened Henry’s actions to that of a brave lion; John Hardyng underscored the king’s military machismo even more directly: Henry ‘went through France like a man’.34

  The march might have been expected to take eight or nine days. About fifteen days in, delayed by broken bridges and the search for a crossing over the river Somme, the English were still two days away from Calais. But here, at Agincourt, they came to a complete halt: the French, who had been shadowing Henry’s movements while their own forces steadily built up, blocked their way with a larger army, led by the chivalry of France. The opposing forces engaged each other on 25 October.

  The fame of the battle of Agincourt has largely rested on a number of myths. A television documentary from 2004, despite the inclusion of some leading medievalists (who were, presumably, selectively ignored), trotted out five leading myths in its first two minutes. It claimed that the ‘Age of Chivalry’ died at Agincourt. One purpose of this book is to show that the concept of chivalry was limited in military practice and frequently ignored, as it was on many occasions before Agincourt; the battle had little effect on overall concepts and practice of chivalry one way or the other. The film claimed that the longbow was the devastating new weapon of the English; it had been in operation for centuries. It claimed that England and especially France were emerging nation states; but this process had begun much earlier in both countries, thereby permitting both countries to draw on patriotic support. Strangely, it labelled Agincourt as the last major pitched battle of the medieval age; there were to be many, many more. And, in the most persistent myth of all and the one which affords the English victory its mythic status, it stated the long-held belief that the French army comprised up to twenty-five thousand soldiers, outnumbering the English by at least three to one, and perhaps by as much as six to one. Anne Curry, the leading authority on the battle, has very recently calculated the real figures as between eight and nine thousand on the English side, facing approximately twelve thousand French. She also suggests that the French, too, were likely to have been weary and disheartened.

  There are many accounts of the battle from contemporaries, or written shortly afterwards, allowing a reasonably accurate picture of the engagement to emerge. The armies faced each other across a large ploughed field, sodden from days of rain and increasingly churned into a quagmire by thousands of feet and hooves. Henry raised the spirits of his men with battlefield orations as he rode along the ranks, his helmet surmounted by a gold crown. He had deployed his forces in classic formation: three battles (troop formations) of dismounted men-at-arms, with himself at the centre, and his archers on the flanks so that they could shoot obliquely at the advancing French, capturing them in a crossfire. Most archers stood behind sharpened stakes as defence against cavalry; others were positioned in the woods that bordered the field on either side. The French were also drawn up into three battles but, unlike the English, these were in linear form, one behind the other. The van consisted of dismounted knights and archers, including crossbowmen (one French chronicler said that the archers played no part in the whole encounter); cavalry was placed on its left and right flank. The centre was similarly comprised, but without flanking horse; at the rear the heavy cavalry was grouped in force.

  The armies stood facing each other for some time in a stand-off. Henry ended the waiting at about eleven o’clock by advancing his army to a relatively narrow part of the field, making a French flanking manoeuvre more difficult, and putting his archers, carrying their stakes with them, within bowshot of the French, now some 250 yards away. The archers loosed their arrows with the desired effect: the French front battle lost its cohesion. First their crossbowmen withdrew from range while the arrow storm provoked a disorganized charge by the flanking cavalry. This was roundly beaten off with the loss of its leader, whose horse had become impaled on a stake. Thomas Elmham, writing perhaps just three years after the battle, offers a graphic description of what unfolded:

  The troops of the French rushed forward against the archers. In the face of a storm of arrows they began to turn back. Their nobility in the front, divided into three groups, advanced [on foot] towards our banners in the three positions. Our arrows carried and penetrated, and the enemy was worn out under the weight of their armour. Some of our king’s trustworthy men pressed down the enemy who penetrated the line with axes and the latter fell down. The living were pushed [from behind] towards death. The living went under the dead. The battle lines piled in. The English rose up against the companies of the French as they came to grips. The French fell before the power of the English. Flight from there was not open to them. They killed them, they captured them and kept them for ransoming �
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  In this way, the first disorganized charge and flight of the French cavalry threw their whole army into disarray. The bulk of the French troops had to force themselves forward by pressing against those in front of them; in full armour, and carrying shortened lances for fighting on foot, they were exhausted just by trying to engage the English across the boggy battlefield. All the while English bodkin arrows penetrated French plate armour and caused tremendous casualties. But momentum and sheer weight of numbers carried the French into the English lines, where there was fierce fighting. In the ensuing mêlée, the Earl of Suffolk and the leading noble, the Duke of York, were killed, the latter most probably from having his helmet smashed into his skull.

  Even Henry himself was threatened. A hit squad of eighteen knights had vowed to kill or capture Henry; all died in the attempt. But the Duke of Alençon did reach Henry, striking him on the head and detaching one of the fleurets from his crown. The Duke asked for quarter but was cut down by a knight yielding an axe. Henry, not surprisingly, is praised by English chroniclers for his bravery, standing over wounded nobles and defending them from certain death at the hands of the French. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham depicts him in true heroic fashion: ‘The king himself, not so much as a king but as a knight, yet performing the duties of both, flung himself against the enemy. He both inflicted and received cruel wounds, offering an example in his own person to his men by his bravery in scattering the opposing battle lines with a battle axe.’36 Note how even the King is using an axe when the sword is the true symbol of chivalry. Yet so thick was the mêlée there was hardly room to wield one.

  By this stage, the archers had abandoned their bows and set to work on the crush of Frenchmen, many of whom fell and were suffocated under the huge press of soldiers. Packed together with limited mobility, the French were gathered for the slaughter. Many surrendered and were taken prisoner; others attempted to but were cut down in the fray. This was a just war in which such legalized butchery was to be expected and encouraged. The Deeds of Henry V, an eyewitness account, recalls the desperate scene:

  Fear and trembling seized them, even of their more nobly born, who that day surrendered themselves more than ten times. No one, however, had time to take them prisoner, but almost all, without distinction of person, were as soon as they were struck down, put to death without respite, either by those who had laid them low or by others following…. So great was the undisciplined violence and pressure of the mass of men behind that the living fell on top of the dead, and others falling on top of the living were killed as well, with the result that, in each of the three places where the strong contingents guarding our standards were, such a great heap grew of the slain and those of the lying crushed in between that our men climbed up those heaps, which had risen above a man’s height, and butchered their enemies down below with swords, axes and other weapons.37

  English archers were more numerous than men-at-arms; without equal incentive to take knightly prisoners alive for ransom (though they undoubtedly did so, despite popular opinion to the contrary), but more out of fear of what would happen to them if caught, they were not in a mood to be merciful. The ultimate emergency of life and death on the battlefield put survival at a premium. The chronicle undoubtedly exaggerates the heaps of dead (apparently, corpses cannot be piled high in this way), but the scale of slaughter is expressed. Nevertheless, in a battle fought by so many combatants, hundreds of prisoners were taken and passed down the line to the English rear.

  Packed together, the French forces were pushed back onto their second line; the weight of numbers pressing the second division further back as the rout continued. Nearly all the French leaders, most of whom, having led from the front, had been either killed or captured by now; the army commander, Boucicaut, had been taken prisoner. Disorganized and leaderless, the French nevertheless still constituted a substantial force. Their third division had played no significant part in the battle and it was not exhausted by fighting as the English were by now. Although many had fled the field from this division, many also remained.

  It was at this juncture that the impending English victory was threatened with defeat. There was a lull in the fighting, which seemed to mark the end of the battle and English success. French survivors, often pulled out from under corpses, were taken captive. The number of prisoners is uncertain, probably between 1,400 and 2,000 men; whatever the actual figure, all sources agree that it was a large number. There is some dispute as to what happened next. There was naturally much French activity on the battlefield’s far periphery, where many French remained. At some point a cry had also gone up that the English baggage at the rear was under attack. It is not clear who exactly led this attack, but chroniclers settled on the local lord of Agincourt as its leader; a crown and other precious items were looted. Nor is it clear at what point of the battle the assault on the camp took place; it may even have occurred at the very beginning. Some sources claim that it was this event that precipitated the massacre of prisoners. But given the uncertainty of its timing, another even more pressing development provides a more telling reason.

  It was feared that the French third division was regrouping for a major counter-attack; a cavalry charge of some six hundred men-at-arms was about to be launched. This counter-attack was a mortal threat to the English: fatigued and no longer in tight formation on the battlefield, they were extremely vulnerable to a fresh attack. (If the assault on the camp had synchronized with the cavalry charge, the danger was doubled.) At this point of pivotal jeopardy, Henry ordered all but the most important prisoners to be massacred. His knights refused the order. This was partly out of chivalrous and moral concerns, but mainly out of self-interest: the prisoners represented a huge fortune in ransom money, and thus an opportunity for enormous financial profit. A third possible reason for the order being refused is not cited by contemporaries or historians of the battle, but must also be considered: if the English were to be captured afterwards by the French, either here or before reaching Calais, they would likely suffer the same fate.

  Henry was not to be deterred by this act of insubordination. Instead, he relayed his urgent instructions to a squire and two hundred archers; any who refused to carry out the order were themselves to be immediately executed. Not that they would have been as reluctant as the knights to carry out the executions: if defeated, their fate would likely have been the same with or without the killing of the French prisoners. The archers set about their grisly business. Men-at-arms who had surrendered themselves to their captors on guarantee of their safety were massacred. Most of the victims had their throats cut; some were herded into a barn and burned alive. The French chronicler Jean Waurin wrote that the victims were decapitated and inhumanly mutilated.

  The accepted explanation for the Agincourt atrocity is straightforward: Henry’s immediate concern was that the prisoners, disarmed and dishelmed, but still in their plate armour, might break free, overwhelm their guards, pick up weapons that lay all over the field, and assist the counter-attack – and all this at a time when Henry needed every possible man for the expected renewal of combat in the field. This was a real concern, and one that was faced, as we have seen, by other medieval commanders (although this comparison is not made by Agincourt historians). Some contemporaries from both sides make the danger posed by the prisoners explicitly clear. The Deeds of Henry V relates:

  [A] shout went up that the enemy’s mounted rearguard (incomparable in number and still fresh) were re-establishing their position and line of battle in order to launch an attack on us, few and weary as we were. And immediately, regardless of distinction of person, the prisoners, save for the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, certain other illustrious men [and] a very few others, were killed by the swords either of their captors or of others following after, lest they should involve us in utter disaster in the fighting that would ensue.38

  John Hardyng and Thomas Elmham confirm this view, the latter stating: ‘Many new battle lines threatened to enter the fray to fight
against the weary…. The English killed the French they had taken prisoner for the sake of protecting the rear.’39 (Some French sources believe that the knights Henry thought were to attack him were actually leaving the field by flanking to the rear, and blame their manoeuvre for the massacre.)

  Historians (especially French ones) have tended to overlook or make insufficient connections between two facts that lend support to this argument at Agincourt. The first was that Henry had already considered the problem of prisoners. The night before the battle, he had actually released all the prisoners he had brought with him on the march from Harfleur and whom he was taking to England for ransom; the French promised to return to their English captors if their army lost the battle. By doing this he was clearly not only freeing up his own men for fighting, but also avoiding the danger of prisoners becoming combatants in the heat of battle. Secondly, the lustre of chivalry was frequently an illusion: prisoners who gave their parole often broke it. As cited above, the Gesta Henrici reports that some nobles ‘surrendered themselves more than ten times’. This can be interpreted in different ways: one is that the prisoner became separated from his captor in the heat of the battle and so gave himself to another English knight for protection; or, just as likely, the prisoner escaped in the confusion only to find it necessary to protect himself soon afterwards by surrendering again. Certainly, a knight’s oath was only as sacred as he felt it to be. In the early thirteenth century, France’s flower of chivalry and answer to England’s renowned William Marshal was William des Barres; on at least two occasions he broke his parole to escape being held prisoner. What is truly remarkable after Agincourt is that the men Henry had released on the eve of battle held true to their word and fulfilled their promise by later returning to him.