by Sean McGlynn
So concern for the security of the French prisoners and keeping them as non-combatants was a genuine problem and one that Henry had already considered. But this explanation can serve only up to a point. It poses real logistical difficulties. Christopher Allmand, in his magisterial biography of Henry, raises these difficulties and questions the scale of the slaughter. Would so many men, still in armour, offer no sustained resistance to being murdered? How could Henry afford the men for the task? Was it because they had too few arrows left to shoot at the cavalry? (If so, one could also ask why the men-at-arms were given the initial orders.) The number killed is also difficult to ascertain: Henry returned to England with well in excess of a thousand prisoners, so how many were actually slain at Agincourt? (Allmand may have forgotten the Harfleur prisoners who presented themselves after the battle.) Most relevant of all, with up to two thousand prisoners, how would Henry have expected them all to be killed in the short time before the imminent cavalry charge, by a number perhaps one-tenth their size? As John Keegan has noted, the mechanics of such a gruesome task would have entailed a lengthy process. He judiciously infers that the number of victims was in the low hundreds, if that.
The impracticalities of this battlefield slaughter – so unlike the postbattle massacres of Acre, Hattin and Wexford – pose the question of what the most substantive reasons behind Henry’s orders were. Again, we must turn to the lesson of terror in medieval warfare. Henry was using terror for two ends. First, he was demonstrating to the prisoners what their fate would be should they have thoughts of escaping to help the counter-attack; he wanted them cowed into submission and away from the battlefield. Secondly, and more importantly, he ensured that the French third division could see the executions: he was warning them that not only would their charge put his other prisoners – their comrades – in deadly peril; but also that they could expect the same treatment if they, too, fell into English hands. As a matter of clearheaded urgency, he even sent a herald to the French to relay this message explicitly to them. Some of the sources openly attribute the killings to this purpose. Titus Livius writes that the English
feared that they might have to fight another battle against both the prisoners and the enemy. So they put many to death, including many rich and noble men. Meanwhile, the most prudent king sent heralds to the French of the new army asking whether they would come to fight or would leave the field, informing them that if they did not withdraw, or if they came to battle, all of the prisoners and any of them who might be captured, would all be killed by the sword with no mercy. He informed them of this. They, fearing the English and fearing for themselves, departed with great sadness at their shame.40
The Pseudo Elmham and Brut chronicles corroborate this, the latter writing: ‘Afterwards, news came to the king that there was a new battle of Frenchmen drawn up ready to steal upon them and come towards them. Immediately the king had it proclaimed that every man should kill the prisoners he had taken…. When they [the French] saw that our men were killing their prisoners, they withdrew, and broke up their battle line and their whole army.’41
That Henry immediately brought the massacre to an end when he saw the French retreat is confirmed by a French chronicler. Both sources quoted above attest that it was at this stage that victory was finally claimed and celebrated. Henry’s brutal tactic had worked; victory vindicated his ruthless actions.
The crucial explanation for the killings lies in the fact that, for Henry, the battle was not conclusively over: enemy activity convinced him that victory could easily be turned into defeat. At this juncture, his prisoners, though technically non-combatants, were, as conventional opinion rightly points out, potentially a real threat to Henry; but what is overlooked is that they also constituted a powerful weapon for him. In threatening to kill them, and in being seen to carry out his threat, Henry, being a highly capable, hard-hearted military commander, was turning a weakness into a strength. The power of this weapon was too great for the enemy and ensured Henry’s complete triumph at Agincourt.
As arguably the most famous battlefield massacre of the Middle Ages, it is perhaps surprising that by no means all contemporary accounts include the episode in their versions, and that protestations against what happened were muted, even on the French side. One might have expected writers from the defeated nation to have comprehensively discredited Henry for his actions, and poured opprobrium on him; the scale of the defeat and the killings – whether on the battlefield or after it – were lamented as an epochal tragedy, but the massacre was passed over without condemnation. The Monk of St Denis, writing the earliest French account of the battle, possibly offers a brief exception with ‘O eternal dishonour!’ (although this may actually refer to the shame of knights being killed by common soldiers in battle), but he was far more concerned with the national loss of face: ‘Most galling of all was the thought that the defeat would make France feeble and the laughing stock of other countries.’42 The lack of outcry reflects contemporaries’ realistic acknowledgement of the precedence of military necessity in a kill-or-be-killed situation. Medieval writers on war and chivalry such as Bouvet and Christine de Pisan might have decried slaying of prisoners, but the exigencies of battle required decisive and ruthless commanders. There is an almost discernible tacit understanding in the sources that the French may have done the same in a similar situation. After all, before the battle they had unfurled the oriflamme, the sacred blood-red war banner that the French carried into battle at a time of national crisis as a symbol of France and of guerre mortelle: seeing this, their enemy could expect no quarter. In practice, the oriflamme did not preclude the taking of prisoners; nevertheless, it was a sign of intent and, crucially, that nothing, not even mercy, would stand in the way of complete victory. Henry did not need such a symbol: his relentless ambition and hard-hearted generalship meant, as we shall see again later at Rouen, that he approached every military challenge with his own psychological oriflamme.
There is an even more pertinent explanation for the sources’ lack of censure: the judgement of God. No one was prepared to take issue with the divinely guided outcome of the battle. In this, all the sources – both English and French – concur: Henry had won against the odds because God had favoured his just cause. Henry certainly recognized thanks were due; as Thomas Walsingham observed: ‘The king, ascribing all these good outcomes to God, as he ought, gave ceaseless thanks to Him who had bestowed an unexpected victory and had subjected savage enemies.’43 This echoes the Deeds of Henry V: ‘…far be it from our people to ascribe the triumph to their own glory and strength; rather let it be ascribed to God alone, from Whom is every victory…. To God alone be the honour and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen.’44
French sources are no more reticent in accepting the will of God, the Monk of St Denis noting that Henry owed his victory to ‘the special grace of God’, and thus he was being used as a divine instrument in bringing low the French in all their ‘insolence and pride’.45 One French source relates how Henry explained his victory to his noble captives in terms of celestial intervention and moral rectitude: the French had only themselves to blame for their defeat as they were over-proud, sinful rapists and despoilers of churches and people. Another interprets the calamity in similar terms: in France, ‘men of worth said that it was divine punishment and that God wanted to bring down the pride of many’.46 The idea that Henry had punished the French for their sins was widely accepted; therefore, criticism of his battlefield massacre was perforce muted: no one was going to pick an argument with God. It was clearly a case of might makes right.
Historians generally agree that the pious Henry firmly believed that he was doing God’s will; when he returned home to England, his triumphal procession being received ecstatically by huge crowds, he did so as God’s favoured and humble servant. Yet it is easy – and probably necessary – to cast a cynical eye over this heavenly justification for victory, and even to question how completely contemporaries accepted it. English propagandists expressed com
plete faith in the justness of their cause, so why, as Walsingham reveals above, should the victory be ‘unexpected’? And why also explain the victory in terms of English prowess? Similarly, God’s final and decisive judgement did not prevent the French from analysing what had gone wrong at Agincourt: tactics, poor discipline, morale and political disunity were all proffered as contributing determining factors. Apologists would rationalize defeat in any number of ways. As seen above, the Monk of St Denis’s main concern was that the defeat made France a ‘laughing stock’, and not that God had rejected his country. Medieval writers were also acutely aware of how risky a business battle was, and how the wheel of fortune was forever spinning. Writing in the fourteenth century, John of Trokelowe observed, ‘… the fates of battles are unknown. For the sword consumes now these and now those … with fortune turning its wheel.’47
The religious angle was useful for both victor and vanquished. For the latter, a ruler might exculpate himself by blaming instead the sins of his people and nobility; likewise, subjects could concentrate moral failings in the person of their prince. In either case, God’s will precluded culpability on the grounds of military or political incompetence, matters that were harder to rectify than the cleansing afforded by a quick confession and repentance. For the victors, the display of practical powers was elevated even further by the display of spiritual ones. Then, as now, political capital was to be made from enjoying a special relationship with God. Who could stand against you if God were clearly on your side? Rebelling against Henry was now tantamount to rebelling against God. As Anne Curry has observed, Henry exploited God’s unambiguously bestowed favour to the full: ‘Victory was God’s will and … Henry was God’s chosen warrior. This was the line that Henry himself encouraged…. His prayers were answered. His steadfastness, his willingness to kill in God’s name, had been rewarded.’48
So Henry escaped the Agincourt massacre with his chivalric reputation not sullied, but enormously enhanced. The prisoners killed were undeniably non-combatants who had surrendered; they had been accepted as prisoners and so, in accordance with the practice of the time they had been promised their safety. Henry breached this agreement in the most spectacular and egregious way possible, slaughtering tens – and possibly hundreds – of France’s chivalry, all Christian brothers in arms. Yet he escaped censure: the religious and practical legitimacy of victory combined with the accepted acknowledgement of the military imperative ensured that Henry did not require any exoneration for his brutality; instead he was exalted amongst the greatest princes of Christendom.
For all that, and for all the consensus of the sources, there is a tantalizing indication that the massacre was nevertheless considered to be a disreputable, or at least an objectionable, act. Why, otherwise, did most of the earliest English sources recounting the killings omit to lay the order of execution at the feet of the King? The Deeds of Henry V, Thomas Elmham and Titus Livius all make an intentional omission of the royal command (although the last does relate how Henry sent his herald with a minatory message of no quarter), while the Brut chronicler and French sources specifically name the King as the author of the order. It can be argued that, like Walsingham (who does not refer to the massacre at all), those ignoring the King’s role considered the incident of little importance or significance, and that later English chroniclers latched on to the event for political reasons, establishing an anti-Lancastrian (i.e. anti-Henrician) stance in the new Yorkist age. But on the same lines, political motivation may well have prompted silence in the first place; and the fact that later writers felt they could latch on to the massacre meant they perceived something incriminating in it. Chronicles such as the Deeds of Henry V, in this case composed by the royal chaplain (possibly John Stevens), were designed to glorify the writers’ patrons to a wide audience; the Deeds was meant to elevate Henry’s reputation throughout Europe, something that may well have been hindered by unequivocally identifying him as a killer of knightly prisoners.
No one is certain how many died in this famous battle, whether as combatants or as prisoners. The many highly inflated figures have to be dismissed; just as English sources exaggerated the size of the French army so as to make the victory all the more impressive, so they would overstate the enemy’s casualties. (And, as seen earlier, medieval sources were frequently disconcertingly wayward when dealing with army sizes.) French casualties may have been as high as over five thousand, but that still seems very high; sources indicate that English casualties were as low as in the thirties, though they may well have exceeded a hundred deaths. All agree that the disparity was huge (this often being the case in decisive medieval battles). The mortality rate of Agincourt is regarded as one of its most salient features. Another is the killing of a large number of prisoners who might have been ransomed, which many historians consider a unique and distinctive event. But it is hard to portray the Agincourt massacre as unique: such an assertion sits uneasily within the norms of the brutality of medieval warfare, whether before Agincourt or after.
Henry’s actions at the battle were not so alien to contemporaries: in France during just one month of his reign (January 1420), the English massacred a large force of Armagnacs who had been retreating under safe conduct, while the Bastard of Alençon slaughtered his numerous English prisoners at La Rochelle. In 1373 at Derval, it was the sheer want of compassion and compromise that led to both sides slaying their prisoners: neither of the forces’ commanders could concur on the terms of surrender. The French who survived the carnage of the historic engagement at Agincourt (including the following day’s despatching of wounded soldiers still lying on the battlefield) were the lucky ones, even if their lives were spared only to be incarcerated in England until death or ransom: the French commander Boucicaut died in captivity in 1421; the Duke of Orleans was not released from the Tower of London until 1440. Rather, Agincourt owes its notoriety to a number of specific aspects: it was a major and decisive battle; the scale of victory/defeat ensured it has received detailed study by historians; the attraction of Henry V and his iconic personal role, illuminated further still by Shakespeare, has spread its fame more widely; and, crucially, it is well represented in contemporary sources.
Agincourt was a sensational and renowned victory which nevertheless produced nothing in the way of geopolitical and strategic success in the same vein as acquiring Harfleur. Henry had to return to France later in his reign to accomplish his greater objective of winning Normandy. However, there were tangible results in the number of important prisoners taken and the financial value they represented. More important were the intangible benefits: France’s loss, either through death or imprisonment, of so many of its leading nobility; greater domestic political stability for Henry in England; and Henry’s embellished reputation as a foremost warrior prince and a leading figure of chivalry. Henry’s ruthless conduct at Agincourt had secured all this for him. The massacre was not a one-off incident, but all as one in his pitiless mindset. We shall see this mindset applied again at the siege of Rouen.
Towton, 1461, and Tewkesbury, 1471
The case of Agincourt exposes the fine line between battlefield exigency and calculated murder; between the rout of absolute victory and the cold-blooded slaying of the captured and vanquished. Soldiers fleeing the field of combat habitually dropped their weapons and discarded their armour so that they could run all the faster. The need for speed was made even more urgent by the practice of using cavalry – ‘prickers’ – to mop up the enemy in flight. But despite these open signs of ceasing hostilities – throwing away weapons, removing armour and panicked retreat from the field – the soldier running away was still considered fair game for killing. Surrender ostensibly guaranteed personal safety, but in a rout it was fraught with danger: those pursuing might not be inclined to stop and deal with the taking of prisoners while allowing others, some of whom might be of high rank, the time to make good their escape. A rout was the background to the credits of a victory already won; in such cases, unlike the not-quite
-finished encounter at Agincourt, the taking of prisoners would not offer any immediate military advantage in the field. Chasing the enemy from the place of battle ensured high-adrenalin activity: the rush of battle and the bloodlust of mortal combat meant that many soldiers were still operating in killing mode. The lull at Agincourt gave time for the combatants to recover from the immediate psychological and physical crisis of battle; that, together with the prisoners already having been corralled, makes the massacre here a cold-blooded one, and not the hot-blooded decimation of a defeated enemy being routed.
This fine line has recently been revealed in an analysis of the Battle of Towton in 1461, the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, which ended with an infamous rout. When in the mid 1990s a funding body asked me to assess and evaluate a proposal for an archaeological excavation of the grave pits for this battle, I was happy to lend my approval, expecting some rich findings to result from the dig. All expectations were exceeded, resulting in an important book and a television documentary. The analysis of skeletons from the burial pits has led to speculation that the rout was not the cause of most of the deaths, but a post-battle execution of prisoners. Fought in south Yorkshire on 29 March 1461, the battle proved to be the decisive engagement during the first phase of the Wars of the Roses. At the beginning of the month, the nineteen-year-old Edward of York had proclaimed himself King Edward IV. He took the war north to confront the Lancastrians, meeting them at Towton. There are no detailed, reliable sources for the battle; but from what evidence there is it is clear that the numbers involved were exceptionally large, as were the casualties: the total for the latter is often given as an excessive twenty-eight thousand; the lowest contemporary total is nine thousand. All concur that the battle was an especially murderous one, one source observing of the soldiers that ‘so great was the slaughter that the dead carcasses hindered them as they fought’.49
