The Battle of Agincourt, 1415

In October of 1415 an English army under Henry the Fifth was trying to reach Calais. It had been marching for two and a half weeks and was sick and hungry, and the French were gathering to bring it to battle before it got there. The war between the two crowns was already old; your historians call it the Hundred Years’ War. The army did not reach Calais. On the morning of the twenty-fifth it stood at one end of a strip of newly ploughed farmland between two woods, near a village called Azincourt, and at the other end stood the assembled chivalry of France, in numbers your historians have been arguing about for six hundred years and will not settle. The lowest serious estimate has the French outnumbering the English four to three. The highest has four to one.

The field did most of it.

What is not in dispute is the ground. It had rained. The field had been turned over for winter sowing, and a ploughed field in Picardy in late October, under rain, is not soil. It is a substance. The woods on either side squeezed the French front until men were pressed shoulder to shoulder before they had even begun, and their line had nowhere to widen into, so the numbers that should have settled the day had nowhere to go.

They came on foot, most of them, in full plate, across three hundred yards of that. Armour that a man can fight in all day on turf becomes a sentence in mud that takes him to the knee at every step. They arrived slowly, and they arrived tired, and they arrived packed too close to lift their arms properly, and while they came they were under what a monk of Saint-Denis called a terrifying hail of arrow shot.

Understand what the arrows did and did not do. They did not punch through good plate at distance. Most of the men in the French first line were not killed by archery. What the archery did was worse: it made them lower their heads and close up, and press inward away from the flanking shafts, and hurry, and arrive as a crowd rather than a line. Then the English archers, who were five of every six men Henry had, put down their bows and came out from behind their stakes with hatchets and mallets and swords, onto exhausted men who were standing in mud up to the knee and could barely turn.

It was not a battle after that. It was work. The French front rank went down and the ranks behind pushed into the space and fell over the bodies and were killed on the ground, and the chroniclers describe the dead piled in heaps. The Constable of France died there. Three dukes died there. Nine counts died there. Whole houses ended in the male line in one afternoon, and parts of France lost a generation of their gentry in a morning.

And in the middle of it Henry, who had taken more prisoners than he had men to watch them, and who had an unbroken French third line still in front of him and an alarm behind him in his own baggage, gave an order that his own knights refused as dishonourable and that he had to give to the archers instead: kill them. How many died is not known. Your historians argue whether it was thousands or whether the threat did most of the work. It does not matter to me which. I was there for whichever number it was.

The archers went home to England as men who had won. Some of them were still alive fifty years later, telling it.

I passed one of them in the mud that day. He had been shooting since first light and had a bill-hook in his hands by the end of it and no idea, none at all, that I had come as close to him as I had. I could give you his name. I did not take it that afternoon, and that is not mercy. I do not do mercy. It was recognition, and it cost him nothing, and it changed nothing about where he was going. It only changed the year.