1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (70 page)

A few minutes earlier the French commanders had been wholly confident of victory. Suddenly they had cause for grave concern as their sole means of breaking up the ranks of English archers had shattered on the hailstorm of arrows. The problem was the mud. It was so thick that the men-at-arms on the wings could not gallop. The lightly-armoured English archers were thus able to get close and send showers of steel-headed arrows at them while the French ponderously trudged through the churned-up sludge, slipping this way and that. The horses were terrified at the shouts and trumpets as well as their lack of footing in the quagmire of trodden ground. And it was even worse than they had imagined, for the untrodden land on to which they had charged was a newly ploughed field, with soft earth that had soaked up the rain and now gave way between the horses’ heavy hooves. The English archers were able to run forward again, and shoot for the weak points in the horses’ head and chest armour, and for their legs. If they got within thirty yards, close enough to puncture the steel armour, they could target the men-at-arms themselves, sending the riderless horses careering back terrified into the French vanguard.
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The French commanders could only look on with dismay and
mounting consternation as the riders on the wings rode chaotically back into the vanguard. Even those who had not lost their horses, and who had clung on, had great difficulty controlling their steeds as they careered in panic away from the arrows. No horses could have been trained to face such an onslaught, and nor could their riders have expected their sudden inability to ride together in formation. There was only one option left open: to sound the trumpets commanding a full onslaught of all the troops, and to overwhelm the English through sheer force of numbers. To this end they followed what must have been a pre-arranged plan, dividing into three columns – one for each of the English battles. They charged together – men and steel spears aiming for the hearts of the English commanders, where the standards of the duke of York, the king and Lord Camoys were being held aloft.
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Few Englishmen can ever have seen a charge of eight thousand men-at-arms. None of the Englishmen at Agincourt that day had done. No one can have been confident that they would withstand such a colossal attack. But they all knew what they had to do. They were engaged in a fight for their lives. They had been facing death since leaving Harfleur, and it showed in their readiness to throw themselves into the fray. The French on the other hand had thought up until now that they were simply engaged in a quest for glory – it had not occurred to them that they might actually lose this battle. Their confidence had been rocked. And it was shaken even more as they charged, alarmed, and in confusion, for the two hundred English archers hidden in the woods on the Tramecourt side of the battlefield opened their shoulders and let fly a barrage of arrows. Turning to face them, the French on the duke of York’s side were distracted; and the next thing they knew, the duke of York’s archers ahead were advancing towards them. Between them, the English archers were shooting about a thousand arrows every second, penetrating their armour, killing the horses beneath them, and making them rise up and fall over. Barrages of arrows were loosed, the coordinated flights of steel points a testimony to Henry’s determination to bring his own self-doubt and all the questioning of his legitimacy to a final, deadly resolution.

At the back of the English army, the priests had thrown themselves on the ground at the first sign of the French advance, begging that God in His Mercy might ‘spare them from this iron furnace and terrible death’. If they had looked up at that moment, they would have seen
the strange fruit that grew from the seed of the massed archers’ arrows: huge piles of dead and dying men and horses, higher than the height of a man – more than two spears’ height. It had been remarked on at the first great longbow victory, at Dupplin Moor: the charging men could not retreat, so they had to scramble over the dying men and horses in front of them. But at a rate of a thousand arrows a second, no one could escape for long – and those climbing were also shot, making the barrier higher. Those at the bottom were held immobile and crushed. Some suffocated. The French could not find a way around the dead and dying, as the woods on either side held them to the same small patch of ground. Those in the third rank of one column of the French vanguard were so tightly packed they could not use their swords. And they could see their heroes being struck down and turning in flight. For those near them, it was deeply disturbing to see men like Guichard Dauphin and the count of Vendôme yelling at their men to retreat.
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Such were the numbers of French men-at-arms clambering over the dying front ranks that it seemed to the English that God was holding their enemies helpless for them, presenting them to be slaughtered. But not all the English were finding it easy to pick off the men-at-arms. The column of Frenchmen that pressed hardest was that facing the duke of York. It was here that the fighting was fiercest. The archers may have run out of arrows, allowing the French the advantage as they came on. And wearing quilted leather, not steel armour, they were no match for the fully-armed men-at-arms. Their best hope in the hand-to-hand fighting was a previously unknown weapon: a weighted, sharp-pointed mallet designed for penetrating steel armour and helmets: a poleaxe.
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With these, and normal axes, the archers fought against the French knights and esquires, hacking and bludgeoning them with short, rapid sweeps. But the French men-at-arms were trained to deal with hand-to-hand warfare. Gradually they advanced on the duke of York’s standard. The battle was so furious, so bitter, that all thoughts of taking prisoners had long since vanished. Englishmen tried to use their poleaxes to crush the helmets of the attacking Frenchmen; the French wielded their swords to cut and kill the English archers. In the duke of York’s own retinue ninety men were killed as they fought to protect their lord.
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Despite their great struggle, the French managed to break through and strike the
duke himself. Down went the king’s much-loved cousin into the mud, fighting to his death for his king. All his regrets about his brother’s treason died there in the mud with him.
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York was not the only English casualty. The young earl of Suffolk, eager to prove himself after his recent inheritance, was killed. So too was the recently dubbed knight, Sir John Mortimer of Worcestershire, and Sir Richard Kyghley of Lancashire, Sir John Skidmore of Herefordshire, Dafydd Gam of Breconshire, and many archers.
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At this stage of the battle the English began to sustain terrible wounds from the swords of the French. But even on the hard-pressed duke of York’s side, the lords who were second-in-command (probably Sir Gilbert Umphraville and Sir John Cornwaille) rallied the men so that the line did not break. And gradually the English became aware that they were actually holding the French and forcing them back. The French had no room for all their heavily armoured men. They could not retreat, due to the press of men behind them, nor advance, due to the strength of the English ahead. So the French onslaught turned into a supply chain of victims as each man fell and left room for another cumbersome man to wield his sword against the English poleaxes. The English, still in a state of terror, killed every Frenchman they could see in a few crazed minutes of frantic, panic-stricken killing. For these few minutes, as the men in the central French battle pressed forward, those in the column attacking the king were simply pushed towards the English men-at-arms, who slaughtered them bloodily in a kill-or-be-killed frenzy. Indeed, the word ‘kill’ is the operative one in most accounts of this stage of the battle. ‘No one was captured; many were killed,’ commented one chronicler, continuing ‘the English were increasingly eager to kill for it seemed there was no hope of safety except in victory. They killed those near them and then those who followed …’
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Thus the French were pushed to their ignominious, bloody deaths in the mud.

When the French did stop pushing forward, it was not because of a general’s command: the men at the rear were beginning to withdraw. This allowed the English men-at-arms with Henry to break through the central column of the vanguard. When that happened, all was suddenly confusion in the French army – there were no columns, no vanguard, no main battle, just a mass of desperate men fighting
for their lives, or trying to surrender and being killed as they tried to give themselves up. Few Englishmen had time to take prisoners. It was at this point, when the English were making real advances into the French ranks that the intensity of the fighting around the king increased to an uncontrollable level. Some French knights – some French chronicles give the credit to the duke of Alençon – burst through and hacked their way towards the king. The king’s bodyguard came under attack, and fell back. The king’s brother, Humphrey, fell backwards under the force of the French onslaught, wounded in the groin, and was lying in a precarious position until Henry himself stepped forward and stood astride him, swinging his battle axe, fighting directly against the front rank of the enemy. In those long, exposed moments, while Henry fought in person, the French realised that the king of England was within their reach and redoubled their efforts to kill him. Someone – perhaps the duke of Alençon, or perhaps one of the eighteen men of the seigneur de Croy who had sworn to knock the crown from Henry’s helmet – managed to break through and bring an axe down on his head. But they only succeeded in hacking off a portion of the gold crown; and as soon as the blow had landed the protagonist was beaten back by the knights who came to Henry’s assistance, rescuing both the king and his brother in the same forward movement.
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This was the scene that confronted the duke of Brabant as he arrived now, about midday, having ridden hard from Lens, thirty miles away. He must have been exhausted. His horses must have been similarly exhausted. He stopped near a thicket and, seeing the dire situation in which the French army now found itself, realised that he had little time to prepare for battle. His armour, surcoats and accoutrements of war were all in his baggage many miles behind – so he had one of his chamberlains, Gobelet Vosken, take off his armour. He ordered one of his trumpeters to tear off the Brabant coat of arms hanging from his trumpet and, having made a hole in the material, put it over his head as a makeshift surcoat. Another trumpeter handed over the Brabant arms to serve as a flag for the duke’s lance. Then, together with the few companions who had been able to keep up with him on the road from Lens, he yelled his war cry, ‘Brabant! Brabant!’, and set his spurs to charge into the fray.
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One chronicler stated that the duke of Brabant arrived with very few men – just those of his household – ‘right at the point of defeat’.
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In one respect this was true; the balance had shifted. Many French were lying in the mud, bleeding to death, or trapped by their horses, or suffocating under a mass of bodies. Some were in flight. One of the duke’s own men, John de Grymberg, who had the hereditary right to carry the Brabant banner, took one look at the battlefield and galloped as fast as he could in the opposite direction.
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But according to the Burgundian writers, the rearguard – or some body of men-at-arms that amounted to a rearguard – was still mounted at this point. The French who had taken flight were regrouping in companies.
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In the confusion, few people could establish what was happening. This regrouping by the French seems to have coincided with an attack on the English baggage wagons. The way almost all the chroniclers describe this attack is as an opportunistic looting spree; but there are good reasons to believe it was a planned attack on the English, directed by a French commander. This would mean that the point at which the duke of Brabant arrived was not the end of the battle. It only appeared to be so with the benefit of hindsight.

When Henry had given the order to advance banners, he had also taken the precaution of ordering the baggage wagons to close up on the rear of the English army. Only ten men-at-arms and twenty archers had been guarding the baggage, so it fell to them and the carters to bring forward the wagons and the horses, and to help the sick and the injured, and to protect the pages stationed at the rear. They had only partially accomplished this task – if, indeed, they had started it. So the baggage and horses remained largely in and around the village of Maisoncelle. It was attacked here by Isambard d’Agincourt, Riflart de Clamance, Robinet de Bourneville and other men-at-arms, together with six hundred local men, mainly drawn from Hesdin.
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The fact that men-at-arms were involved suggests that this was not meant to be a self-seeking raiding party, even if it turned into one. Nor was it without organisation – an attack on the English baggage had been envisaged in the first battle plan, drawn up at Rouen on or about the 12th. The French were attempting to do what the Black Prince had done at Poitiers when the battle was turning against him. On that occasion the prince sent a small body of men to unfurl his banner at the rear of the French army, and to attack the king of France’s battle from behind; it only took a small number of troops on that occasion to cause confusion throughout
the whole army. Such distractions could be decisive. But bringing them about was not easy. Hence local men, who knew the land, had been sent to find their way around to attack the English from behind. The problem was that they had taken too long. When they came across such rich plunder as the English horses and the king’s jewels, they delayed further, to help themselves. They found a sword set in a jewel-encrusted gold scabbard that was supposed to have belonged to King Arthur, and two crowns of gold, the orb, many precious stones and a gold cross containing a piece of the True Cross. This failure to bring the baggage forward was a huge piece of luck, for the raid did not distract the English at all, and they continued to hold the French onslaught.
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