If you should happen upon Michael Livingston out on a historic battlefield one summer’s day, you may well assume that he is mad.
In recent years the 48-year-old American professor has reshaped our understanding of some of the most famous battles in British history: Brunanburh in AD937, Crécy in 1346 and now Henry V’s decisive victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415, 608 years ago this week. Livingston debunks myths, he explodes long-cherished historical theories and he moves battlegrounds — sometimes by a few hundred yards, sometimes by dozens of miles.
His methods are, on the surface, sane and sober: he reads hundreds of sources in the original manuscripts, compiles huge databases of evidence, then hits the terrain with a drone and his files to work out how they fit the landscape. But Livingston in the field can resemble an Einstein thought experiment by way of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot. “I’ll be walking around, looking at my iPad screen, waving my arms, literally arguing with myself out loud,” Livingston says, laughing, from his home in Charleston, South Carolina, where he lives with his wife, two children and a French bulldog, and where he teaches budding US cadets at the Citadel military college. “I’m asking myself, ‘Everyone says this is how things went down. I don’t agree. But how do I make them right and myself wrong?’ ”
So he beats himself up. He calls himself names. “I’ll say, ‘Mike, you’re an idiot. It can’t be that, come on.’ I’m trying to find some way to break whatever theory I have. And I’ll do that until I reach a point where I have to admit whatever theory I have holds water better than anything else.”
His theories can be controversial to say the least. In person Livingston is cheerful, energetic and generous, quick to laugh and eager to set others at ease. As well as his academic work he writes novels, hosts a podcast called Bow and Blade and is an expert on the cult fantasy writer Robert Jordan. He loves fly fishing. (“I don’t eat fish, but I put them through near-death experiences for fun,” he jokes.) His fans include the novelist Bernard Cornwell, who has written the foreword to three of his books and describes him as “a remarkable man”. Yet Livingston’s arguments have been known to drive other scholars into spittle-flecked frenzies. “I remember one time a colleague just screaming at me, yelling, ‘Respect the historiography! Respect the historiography!’ ” he says. “Like spitting, screaming in my face.”
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The online abuse can be worse. In 2021 Livingston published Never Greater Slaughter, a book about the Battle of Brunanburh, in which the Anglo-Saxon king Aethelstan defeated an alliance of Scots, Irish and Vikings. The site of this battle has been much debated, with many scholars favouring a location near Barnsdale in Yorkshire. Livingston argued that it took place a hundred-odd miles away, near Bromborough, on the Wirral. For this he received not only hostile Amazon reviews, but death threats.
Undaunted, Livingston has this month published a book that takes on the most cherished British battle of all: Agincourt. In Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King he proposes a significantly different order of battle to that usually described by historians, film directors and of course Shakespeare. Consequently, he argues, the site of Agincourt cannot be where we have long assumed.
This is not quite Brunanburh: Livingston has not picked up Agincourt and dumped it in Antwerp. He argues for an adjustment of about a thousand yards. Nevertheless, few can doubt the emotional attachment of the English to the events of October 25, 1415, when “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” smashed a vastly superior French army and set the course for the conquest of northern France. For Livingston to tinker with this canonical triumph is risky. But he can’t help himself.
“Whatever has been written in the past it’s not sacred, right?” he says. “History by definition is not written in stone. It’s a story that’s always being retold.”
In 1415 Henry V had been king of England for two years. He was 29 years old.
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According to Shakespeare’s English history plays, as a young prince “Hal” was a frivolous drunk. His dramatic journey is one of cleaning up his act so he can assume the awesome responsibilities of kingship. As usual this is Shakespeare bending history to suit his own ends, but the basic principle is correct: Henry had a tricky relationship with his father, yet when he finally assumed the crown in 1413 he was ready for the job.
Moreover, he was battle-hardened. Livingston refers to Henry as the “scarred king” because he wore on his face the marks of the first battle he fought, at Shrewsbury, against a rebel English army led by the Percy family, when he was 16. The young prince was hit in the face with an arrow, the metal tip burying itself at the back of his skull. A brilliant surgeon extracted the arrowhead, stitched up Henry and saved his life. But he could not save his good looks, which may be why Henry is the only king in the National Portrait Gallery who is painted in profile.
What’s more, Livingston suggests, the experience left Henry mentally changed. “Henry had suffered brutally, a trauma that is hard to imagine,” he writes. “But more than this, he had survived what perhaps no one else had survived, a triumph that is hard to comprehend. He might well have believed himself blessed by God.”
This may be why, as king, Henry pursued such an aggressive strategy towards England’s longstanding continental enemy, France. Seeing the French kingdom crippled by civil war stemming from the madness of Charles VI, Henry invaded in the summer of 1415, besieged Harfleur and then set off on a march towards the English-held town of Calais.
En route, however, he was intercepted by a huge army commanded by many high-ranking French noblemen. By now it was late October. The weather was foul. The English were weary, hungry, diseased and outnumbered. When they camped in silence near the town of Agincourt on the night of October 24, they had no right to expect anything the following day but a massacre.
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Which is what happened. But it was the French and not the English who were butchered, because — well, that’s where Livingston and the historical establishment part ways. Traditional accounts of the battle suggest Henry devised an ingenious tactic to defeat the French. He arranged his bedraggled troops with longbowmen protected by sharpened stakes driven into the thick, churned mud of the battlefield, and tried to goad the French into charging.
The French responded with a Gallic shrug, so Henry ordered his army to dismantle their position and move 300 yards closer onto a narrow plain lined with trees. A volley of arrows finally got the French moving, but as they charged they were bogged down in ploughed, rained-on ground and tormented by a hail of arrow-shot. As a result, they failed to dislodge Henry from his position and were killed in droves. Henry’s archers took prisoners but did not keep them, because late in the battle the king gave an order to kill them all. After a while the French ran out of steam, men and hope, and backed off.
Livingston quotes the great military historian John Keegan, who wrote that this version of Agincourt is “a good one; it would in any case be profitless to look for better”.
Needless to say, he disagrees.
Livingston has a number of pithy rules about studying military history. He teaches them to his students and he repeats them in his books. One of his favourites is “no man is a fool”. In his view the standard account of Agincourt breaks this rule egregiously. “The entire thing depends upon the French being stupid,” he says. “They just allow Henry to move from a less advantageous position into a better one. Why? Why would you allow him to do this? Plus it’s, like, a thousand yards.
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“So the English would have had to take their defensive position apart, march forward a thousand more yards and re-establish that position in a better spot than they had started. And then the French, having waited through all of that, have arrows shot at them and instead of just pulling back ten yards, decide to charge? Wave after wave after wave? That’s just dumb.”
Then there’s the famous Agincourt mud. “Our sources keep talking about the field being muddy and that this was so essential,” Livingston says. “So the French couldn’t get through the mud and they’re constantly getting bogged down. But the English marched a thousand yards across that same field, no problem? And yet the French are, like, ‘Oh man, we can’t do it’? That doesn’t make sense either.”
Then there’s the fact that archaeologists have found no trace of a battle where Agincourt is supposed to have been fought. Livingston paraphrases one of them, Tim Sutherland, a battlefield expert at York University: “ ‘Currently there is no evidence that the Battle of Agincourt ever happened.’ A battlefield should show thousands of artefacts. But we’ve got nothing.”
It was Sutherland’s work that prompted Livingston to open a file on Agincourt and to go out into the field and work out what other historians had missed. It was his own tried-and-trusted methodology that led him to conclude that the traditional site “is not where the battle was. The battle was south of there. The field is named Agincourt but the battle was closer to Maisoncelle.”
All of which helps explain some of the logical puzzles of the standard accounts. The English, Livingston says, did not shift their camp at all. “The initial English position was little different from the final position Henry took. They didn’t make this huge advance. They more or less stayed in position.” Livingston believes that the appearance of movement was actually Henry ordering the central division of his troops forward to provoke the French charge. “But the longbows? I don’t think they ever moved. They were in play with their stakes as they should have been. And the French had such difficulty with the mud because they were the only ones who had to go through it. The English didn’t.”
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This scheme of battle also makes sense of the position of the remains of a small castle at Agincourt, which in Livingston’s re-evaluation now becomes part of the French position rather than the English. “What Henry’s doing now makes sense. What the French are doing makes sense. How all these people died makes sense. It’s no longer this kind of weird, silly thing.”
Over the past two summers I have spent several days tramping battlegrounds with Livingston. In 2022 he gave me a tour around his proposed, revised site for the Battle of Crécy during the Hundred Years’ War, a dry run for Agincourt in which Edward III used longbowmen to destroy the larger army of Philip VI. (Livingston’s Crécy is several miles from the traditional site.) This year we explored Shrewsbury, where young Hal took the arrow to the face. (Livingston hasn’t moved this one — yet.)
The experience is mesmerising. Livingston, a down-to-earth, self-described “mountain boy” originally from Colorado, is a born storyteller. Having trained as both a historian and a palaeographer — a student of historical writing systems — he knows the original sources inside out and in most cases has translated them from the original languages. He is unfussy, inquiring and eager to be challenged. He understands topography and military strategy.
He is also frank about the fact that his theories are only theories. Unless permission is granted by French authorities for archaeological digs on his new sites for Crécy and Agincourt, there is no way of testing them further. That means he may well face criticism from Agincourt purists: both scholars attached to old arguments and jingoistic Britons who enjoy the notion of French idiocy as a defining factor in our comparative histories.
Does he worry about the emotional over-investment people place in these long-ago clashes? For once, he is diplomatic. “We establish our identities based on looking backwards,” he says. “So of course we become engaged in these moments. That’s what history is.”
For stiff-necked scholars, however, he has less sympathy. There is, he says, a deferential culture in academia that makes it hard to put forward radical ideas: “You stand on the shoulders of giants, you don’t take out their knees, right?”
Livingston laughs again. “I think there’s this idea that because of Brunanburh, because of Crécy and now because of Agincourt, that I’m just walking around trying to wreck everybody’s theories. And that’s not the case at all. There are plenty of battles that I’ve studied, dived deep on and gone, ‘Yeah, the traditional story is correct.’
“I don’t want to be right, I just want to get it right.”
Agincourt by Dr Michael Livingston (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC £20). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members