Agincourt: was it a war crime?

Who is bad-mouthing Agincourt?

A group of French academics who met in Agincourt three weeks ago on St Crispin’s Day (25 October) for a conference to mark the 593rd anniversary of the battle. According to British reports, the French historians ridiculed the idea that it was a heroic English victory against overwhelming odds; the size of the French army, they said, had been vastly exaggerated. Worse, it was reported that Christophe Gilliot, director of the Centre Historique Médiéval (a museum in Agincourt) had described the English as behaving “like war criminals”, setting fire to prisoners and killing French noblemen who had surrendered – after an order from their king to slaughter captives.

What, then, is the traditional English version of events?

Some 11,000 men under Henry V had invaded Normandy in August 1415; but, exhausted after a long siege of Harfleur, and weakened by disease, the English were heading back to Calais when the French army intercepted them. Contemporary English sources describe the enemy as ten times the number of Henry’s forces. About half of these were longbow archers who, undeterred – so the legend goes – unleashed a storm of arrows that scythed through the French cavalry and created a famous victory, glorified by Shakespeare and long held as one of England’s greatest. It was “a victory of the weak over the strong”, writes military historian Sir John Keegan, “of the common soldier over the mounted knight, of resolution over bombast, of the desperate, cornered and far from home over the proprietorial and cocksure”.

So what were the actual numbers?

A lack of reliable sources makes it hard to determine. Some British historians, like Anne Curry, tend to agree with the French revisionists. In Agincourt: A New History (2005), she estimates that the French only outnumbered the English three to two (12,000 Frenchmen against 7,000 to 9,000 English). Agincourt, says Curry, who uses contemporary administrative records rather than partisan accounts of the battle, was a “myth constructed around Henry to build up his reputation as a king”. But most historians still think the English were outnumbered at least 3-1, probably more. Juliet Barker, for example, argues that the administrative records are too incomplete to rely on; instead she uses the testimony of Jehan de Waurin (a Burgundian in the French army) to come up with figures of 6,000 Englishmen against 36,000 French.

Were English archers the key?

Yes, but they didn’t win with their longbows, they won with hammers. Pinned down between the villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt, the English managed to compress wave after wave of French attacks into a wet, muddy front only 900 yards wide. Their arrows did help to drive off the mounted knights – historians agree that at least 100,000 rained down on the French – but the real victory came as the mobile, lightly clad archers picked up hammers, lances and poleaxes and set about killing the cumbersome, French men-at-arms, as they dragged their heavy armour through the mud. “There would have been the ghastly sound of hammers crushing helmets, the screams of men falling,” says Bernard Cornwell, author of Azincourt, a new historical novel. By dusk,