A Great and Glorious Adventure (37 page)

The army was now in battle array. We do not know what King Henry actually said to them, although the words Shakespeare later put in his mouth must rank as one of the most evocative speeches in
the English language:

Of course, the practical difficulties of addressing 6,000 men spread out over a distance of half a mile without a public address system are considerable, even allowing for the fact that medieval
orators were accustomed to addressing and being heard by huge crowds.
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The likelihood is that whatever Henry said was repeated by officers stationed
along the front, as was the practice in British armies of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or that he simply cantered down the line repeating a few encouraging words –
‘Good luck, and do your best’ – as might any modern commander.

King Henry’s plan was the tried-and-tested English tactic: find a favourable piece of ground and wait for the enemy to attack. When it was clear that the enemy was not going to attack, or
not just yet, Henry ordered the banners to advance – that is, the signal to be given for the army to move forward. The decision to move was doubtless influenced by the English flanks being
unprotected and thus vulnerable to a French encircling movement. It is unlikely the French would have been capable of carrying out such a manoeuvre, but they could very well have despatched cavalry
to work its way round behind the English line. So the archers uprooted their stakes and the whole army began to move forward in line across the muddy open fields. When all three divisions and their
flanking archers had covered around half a mile or so, they were able to anchor their flanks on two woods: the wood of Tramecourt on the right and
that of Agincourt on the
left.
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This move was, of course, risky, as a more competent enemy might have launched an attack to catch the English on the move. Henry was confident,
however, that, given the distance from the French line, there would be ample time for his army to halt and take up the defensive, although an archer trudging through the mud with his stake over his
shoulder and wondering whether his very tatty hat was keeping his bowstring dry may have felt rather less convinced.

Three hundred yards from the French line, the English army halted, realigned its formation and planted its stakes, watched by the enemy host. The size of the French army was such that there was
not room for the usual formation of two battles forward and one back in reserve, and the three formations were one behind the other. They had learned something from previous defeats by the English:
the front battle, of around 5,000 men-at-arms, was formed up dismounted, with the 5,000 men of the second battle behind the first and similarly on its feet, while the men of the third battle at the
rear, another 5,000 or so, remained mounted. Other mounted men were stationed on each wing, perhaps 200 or so in each detachment. Missile support consisted of mercenary crossbowmen and some
archers, most placed on the wings in the English fashion but some spread along the front. The standard French military establishment had two men-at-arms for every crossbowman or archer, which would
indicate the presence of 7,000 crossbowmen, far more than were actually present. However, in the event, they played no part in the battle, so we need not detain ourselves overmuch in estimating
their numbers.

There was certainly a French plan. The battle would open with an attack by the dismounted French vanguard, which would occupy the attention of the English infantry, whereupon the French heavy
cavalry on the wings would circle round and take the archers in flank. Once the archers had been driven off, then numbers would tell and the English would be slaughtered, probably without the
French even calling upon the second and third battles, although the mounted third battle might be used to pursue the fleeing remnants of Henry’s army. It was a perfectly sound plan, but in
hindsight it was not the best plan that the French could have made. They, after all, could afford to wait and Henry could not, so, if the
French had simply remained on the
defensive, then Henry would have had to either attack them, to his disadvantage, or starve. Even better, the French could easily have placed themselves between the two woods, instead of allowing
the English to anchor their flanks by doing so.

Henry was well aware that his only hope was to make the French attack him. If he could panic them into a precipitate attack, so much the better, and the means to do just that was at hand. The
overall commander of the archers was the sixty-year-old Sir Thomas Erpingham. A native of East Anglia, he had been a soldier from the age of thirteen, when he had accompanied his father to
Aquitaine in the service of the Black Prince; he had campaigned with John of Gaunt in Spain and with the future King Henry IV in Lithuania, Prussia and Palestine; he had fought the Scots, the Welsh
and the French: Erpingham was a true professional and there was little that he did not know about soldiering. He had directed his archers to their positions, supervised the hammering in of stakes,
the stringing of bows and the placing of each archer’s arrows in the ground in front of him, cantering from one flank to another as he ensured that his men knew what they had to do. Now, at a
signal from the king, Sir Thomas trotted out ahead of the English line and hurled his baton in the air. It was the signal for the archers to unloose hell.

In the first thirty seconds, 25,000 arrows fell upon the French. The target area was such that no archer needed to pick a specific target; he just had to ensure that his arrow fell anywhere on
the French army. The result was chaos, horror and surprise. Shot at extreme range, the heavy war arrows falling out of the sky were far too many to dodge, even if the packed ranks of men-at-arms
gave any room for ducking and diving, and the only option – or so it seemed to someone on the French side, probably one of the royal dukes – was to order an immediate assault by the
leading division, which began to move down the slight slope towards the English line. What should have happened now was for the French crossbowmen and archers to provide missile support until their
line closed with the English, and for the cavalry then to attack the archers. It did not happen. The mounted knights on the flanks, stung by clouds of arrows to which they had no reply, bundled the
crossbowmen out of the way, or rode over them, and launched a headlong charge against the English flanks. Headlong it may have been to start with, but over newly
ploughed
land on which rain had been falling all night, it soon slowed to a procession through the mud, with horses sinking to their fetlocks and soon barely out of a trot. Those riders that did cover the
300 yards between the armies found their horses blown and their way barred by a hedge of stakes. In the one-and-a-half minutes that the French heavy cavalry would have taken to reach the English,
the archers would have discharged 75,000 arrows, not all at the horsemen, but enough to wound and kill men and madden and cripple horses.

A horse will not normally bolt, whatever the situation, and the medieval bit would have pulled up a charging elephant. But these horses were terrified and in great pain; arrows were stuck in
their rumps, breasts and necks, and blood was streaming from their wounds. Heads thrown in the air, riders sawing ineffectually at their mouths, they panicked and charged wherever they could to
escape the hail of arrows, and in many cases this meant bursting through their own infantry still plodding down the slope. The infantry, already seriously disorganized and disorientated by the
arrow storm and exhausted by struggling through the mud in their full armour, were now even more disrupted, but they did, at last, slipping and sliding, hit the English line. Even if only half the
leading French division survived to close with their enemy, they still outnumbered the English men-at-arms by two-and-a-half to one, and at first numbers told and the English began to give ground.
The fighting was intense, particularly around the centre of each division where the commanders and their banners were. The duke of York was killed on the right, the king himself stood over the
stunned body of his brother, the duke of Gloucester, and sustained a severe blow to the head that dented his helmet in the process, but then the archers changed roles and became light infantry.

Over the last fifty yards or so of the advance of the French, the archers had been shooting directly at them, and at that range the narrow bodkin arrowhead would go through plate armour, causing
yet more death and destruction. Once the lines closed, however, the archers had done their duty and no more might have been expected of them. Unlike the French missile arm, however, these were not
cowed foreign mercenaries but free-born Englishmen, and, dropping their bows and drawing their long knives, the archers stepped out from behind their protective stakes and attacked
the French in flank. Normally, an armoured knight would have nothing to fear from such a lightly armed opponent, but, faced by English men-at-arms in front and the knifemen at flank
and rear who stabbed though visors and severed hamstrings from behind, the French could take no more and the tide of battle quickly turned. Those in front tried to retreat but could not do so in
the press of men from the second battle coming behind them, and soon knights and men-at-arms began to surrender, first in ones and twos and then in whole sub-units.

It was at this stage that the English baggage-train came under attack. When the army moved forward from Maisoncelle in the morning, the baggage followed so that the runners bringing the resupply
of arrows had less distance to travel. It is uncertain who actually attacked the wagons. It was probably not the third, mounted French battle, many of whose members, seeing how the wind blew, or
did not blow, had wisely left for home; it may have been the local landowner with a levy of his tenants, who would have known the paths through the woods, enabling them to get behind the English
without being seen. Whoever it was, the balance could now swing back in favour of the French: the unblooded third battle might come back, the large number of surrendered knights, outnumbering their
captors in many cases, might decide to reconsider their surrender, and there were plenty of weapons lying about the field for them to pick up. The only way to ensure that the hundreds –
perhaps thousands – of prisoners could not renege and restart the battle was to kill them, and that is what Henry ordered. The men-at-arms demurred: not only was this extremely bad form but
also the prisoners represented very large sums of money in the shape of ransoms. The archers had no such inhibitions, and the butchering of the prisoners began. The attack on the baggage-train was
beaten off, those French who could do so fled and the third battle made no attempt to return. The Battle of Agincourt was over.

It was a great and stunning victory, ranking with Blenheim in 1704, Waterloo in 1815 and Amiens in 1918. The French dead included Eduard, duke of Bar, Antoine, duke of Brabant, Jean, duke of
Alençon, Charles d’Albret, constable of France, nine counts, ninety barons, 1,500 knights and several thousand lesser nobility, although how many were killed in battle and how many as
prisoners is not known. The dukes of Orléans and Bourbon were taken prisoner, as were the counts of Richemont, Vendôme and Eu, and the
marshal of
France.
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It was the greatest slaughter ever of the French nobility, from which it never really recovered. Today, the killing of the prisoners would be
regarded as murder and a war crime, but Henry had little option. Many of the prisoners had surrendered many times and had then slipped away when no one was looking. If they were allowed to re-enter
the fray, Henry’s tiny army could yet be defeated. He did what he had to do, and no one at the time – not even the French – criticized him for it. On the English side, casualties
were few, although probably more than were admitted to, with only the duke of York, the earl of Suffolk and two newly dubbed knights mentioned in the
Gesta.
If we assume that a French
estimate of 600 English dead and wounded is too high, then the real figure is probably between 300 and 400.

There was little time to celebrate, for the army still had to get to Calais. The dead bodies were stripped of anything wearable, for the English army’s clothing was falling apart, and left
for the local peasants first to plunder and then to bury. Four days later, on Tuesday, 29 October, the army had covered the forty-five miles to Calais; and, on 16 November, having received the
Harfleur prisoners with their ransoms, Henry and his army sailed for Dover.