“Our King went forth to Normandy/ With grace and might and chivalry/ Where God wrought for him most marvellously”. The opening lines of The Agincourt Carol were sung with triumphant brio by Londoners who had swarmed on to the streets in November 1415 to welcome Henry V and his army when they returned home after a desperate battle. His stunning victory on October 24 was proof of God’s favour, not just for his claim to the French throne, but for the still shallowly rooted Lancastrian dynasty. The way was now open for the piecemeal conquest of France, or at least the rich province of Normandy.
For the moment, Henry V had acquired nothing beyond than “great renown”, that virtue prized by princes, noblemen, knights and squires who aspired to the codes of chivalry. It had been the lodestar of Chaucer’s Knight and the poet listed its ingredients as: “Truth, honour, greatness of heart and courtesy”.
These qualities distinguished the king in Shakespeare’s Henry V, which combined the apotheosis of the Agincourt legend, a portrait of an ideal prince, and a clarion call to Elizabethan patriots. This was what Englishmen could accomplish if they were united under a strong, wise and gallant ruler. The play ends with a warning: Henry V’s great achievements were squandered as the nation succumbed to the factious power struggles of the Wars of the Roses. Take heed anyone who plotted to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.
There was a darker side to the glories of Agincourt. Chaucer, a veteran of an earlier bout of the Hundred Years War, had witnessed the horrors of battle. In his Knight’s Tale he writes of the nightmarish vision of the Temple of Mars — “The out-houses that burnt with the blackened smoke”, the tell-tale mark of the passage of plundering soldiers. There were also: “The carrion in the undergrowth slit-throated/ And thousands violently slain . . .” This was how the battlefield of Agincourt appeared as the French retreated.
Among the corpses were those of several hundred blue-blooded French prisoners who had been killed at Henry’s orders in the final phase of the battle. Was this a war crime, or was it the result of a panic triggered by fears of a sudden French encirclement? Anne Curry analyses the evidence with the characteristic clarity, balance and authority of the doyenne of Agincourt historians. Her conclusion suggests that the order was the result of confusion and the natural anxiety of a general whose troops were exhausted and, as far as he knew, still outnumbered. Henry commanded roughly 8,500 men, over two thirds of them archers, against a French host of about 14,500 with a strong contingent of armoured cavalry.
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In theory, well-mounted knights with lances should have ridden down their opponents who were on foot, but the attack was on a narrow front and its impetus was broken by a brief barrage of arrow fire and a barricade of stakes. The bowmen created a killing zone for horses and their thrown riders found themselves bruised or with broken bones struggling in the mud. In her excellent narrative of the fighting, Curry dispels some myths. The English soldiers were not weakened by dysentery — the sick had been sent home after the capture of Harfleur, just over a fortnight before. Long-bowmen were not like modern snipers: their effectiveness derived from the weight rather than the accuracy of their fire. Rarely did their arrows penetrate the highly efficient plate armour of the period.
Details of armour and weapons are part of the handsomely illustrated The Battle of Agincourt, a collection of scholarly essays edited by Curry and Michael Mercer, curator of Tower History at the Royal Armouries. The sections of armour and weapons take us into the antiquarian world of bascinets, vambraces and sabatons and the “ballock” dagger, decorously described as of “phalliform shape”.
Elsewhere, Curry to tell us how much a complete suit of plate armour weighed — between 30 and 50 kilograms. The price of protection was some restriction of movement and difficulty of breathing, but both were overcome by rigorous training: contemporary handbooks urged the would-be knight to accustom himself to wearing armour and master the arts of swordplay. The result was an agile and formidable fighting machine.
The knights who fought at Agincourt were professional soldiers who raised detachments on behalf of the king whose exchequer paid their wages. Bowmen got a sixpence a day, an earl more than 12 times that amount. Bonuses came in the form of booty and the ransom of prisoners: a French squire could yield a few hundred pounds, a duke more than £30,000. Chivalric custom dictated that the captor treat his prisoner in the manner befitting his rank for as long as it took for his family to raise the ransom. Poor soldiers therefore sold on prisoners to men who could afford to keep them. One archer received £99 for a French gentleman. The pursuit of profit as well as honour bound together Henry’s “band of brothers”.
Charles, Duke of Orléans, the biggest prize at Agincourt, spent 25 years in captivity in England, charming his jailers and writing elegant love lyrics in French and English. For a time he was in the custody of William de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk, whose wife Alice was a war widow. She was Chaucer’s granddaughter who, at the age of ten, had been wed to a paragon of knighthood, Sir John Phelip, who had died at Harfleur. According to the inscription on his splendid brass in Kidderminster church, he was cherished by the king and fought gallantly during the siege. He bequeathed his child bride a gold cup and basin, but did Alice mourn him? In her fascinating essay on the Agincourt widows, Rowena Archer thinks not. French widows, however, did weep plenteously after Agincourt, moving a contemporary chronicler to report that: “It was a sight to bring tears to the eyes to see women crying bitterly at the loss of husbands.”
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As for Alice, the Countess and finally Duchess of Suffolk, she died 60 years after her first husband and is buried at Ewelme in Oxfordshire under an exquisite, brightly coloured tomb on which she is described as a “serene princess”. It is worth a visit. So too is Arundel where an Agincourt campaign veteran the Earl of Arundel is buried under another magnificent tomb. He was a fastidious aristocrat, for his campaign kit included “a new iron seat for a latrine” — perhaps a prototype of Apthorpe’s “thunderbox”? Such vivid details enhance both books.
Agincourt: Great Battles Series by Anne Curry, OUP, 256pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £16.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
The Battle of Agincourt edited by Anne Curry and Malcolm Mercer, Yale, 328pp, £30. To buy this book for £27, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134