Hello, fellow BadHistorians. Today, I shall discuss one of the documentaries in the History Channel series "Warriors", which can be found here. It basically discusses medieval knights and the Battle of Agincourt. Keep in mind that, I'm no expert in this field, so I might make mistakes. If you find any, or if you have any other comments in general, do let me know.

05:53—The lance being the deadliest weapon of the middle ages? Honestly, I’m sure you can’t say that for any single weapon, especially not the lance, due to its dependence on cavalry(which can be thwarted using, say, pikemen).

08:00—From here begins a pretty long monologue on the significance of chivalry and how noble it is and how it included protecting the weak. In reality, as I’m sure many of you know, chivalry wasn't that rosy an ideal. Knights had their share of violent, war-mongering shitbags. Ultimately, even the better versions of the chivalric code were merely on paper, with many knights not choosing to follow them at all or choosing to follow the code only when it was helpful to them. According to this article:

Knights were expected to be fully active Christians and were limited by its prohibitions just like any other gentile. However, they could also be guilty of terrible atrocities, generating a tension that was often acknowledged but never really solved. Usually concessions were made by Christian figures in specific situations (as Saul discusses in Chapter 12, killing enemies while on crusade was acceptable because they were heretics and thus outside the Christian hierarchy) while knights stayed their hand against enemy knights whenever advantageous. This dispensation, however, did not extend to the peasantry who were often slaughtered unremittingly whenever they were deemed in the way.

Edit: As /u/TheSteelShepherd has pointed out, you had virtuous knights and you had the terrible ones. Sorry for not taking a more nuanced viewpoint earlier.

13:37—Ah well, a weapon which all young warriors had to master? As our friends at AskHistorians have already pointed out swords were incredibly expensive and hard-to-obtain weapons of their time. The poorer foot-soldiers would have used simpler and cheaper weapons.

(Edit: As /u/nanashi_shino pointed out, fencing was a popular sport in the Late Medieval period amongst young adults, and older, rustier swords were available for as little as two pence, according to scholagladiatoria. But I haven't heard of any accounts stating that it was ever compulsory for "young warriors" to learn how to use swords in military capacity.)

(Edit 2: Scratch the last part as well, /u/EquinoxActual has repudiated it well in their comment.)

14:41—A sword cutting a man from shoulder to hip? Let’s take a break from anime-style fantasy and remember that the human body is way too dense and way too full of bone to allow that sort of stuff. The mythbusters tried to cut a block of ballistics gel with a samurai sword, and it only got through 9 inches before stopping. Now imagine the resistance which bone would put up, and you’d realize that the feat they’re talking about is impossible, regardless of what sword you consider.

14:50—Okay, so now a sword goes through a helmet and a skull, only to be stopped by the teeth? While one could give them the benefit of doubt and assume that they’re talking about a weak helmet, such as one made of leather (even then, it sounds very difficult to pull off), the implication they’re making involves a steel helmet, which is pretty much impossible to cut through with a sword strike, as Mike Loades can attest to.

15:47—Commoners and peasants wouldn’t be able to afford or gain access to the sword? What about it being the weapon that all warriors had to master? C’mon guys, at least be consistent in your bad history.

(Edit: As has been brought to my attention by /u/nanashi_shino, older swords were way cheaper than we assume in the late medieval period, costing as little as 2 pence each)

16:42—There were many different forms of dubbing, and they did not necessarily use a sword.

17:40—The shaft of the arrow which was shot into Henry V’s face was removed with the help of other people, and it required a lot of painstaking effort to remove the arrowhead, which was embedded 6 inches deep in his skull. So yeah, he didn’t exactly pull the arrow out by himself.

22:06—I doubt that an English longbow would ever have a draw-weight higher than 185 lbs at most.

22:07—The range of medieval English longbows isn’t exactly known, and a 400 yard flight has not been achieved in modern shootings of the English longbow, rendering the 200-400 yard figure somewhat doubtful. A bit of a nitpick, but I thought it was necessary to point out.

22:52—For one, I find the 180 mph figure unlikely, because I haven’t read of speeds that high anywhere. Again, if you can correct me on this, you’re welcome. In any case, release speeds would vary depending upon the draw-weight of the arrow, something which they haven’t specified for the 180 mph figure. The same can be said for the figures given for the range and impact speed of the longbow; you must specify the relevant draw-weight, otherwise they mean little.

30:17—There’s no horse that weighs as much as two tons.

(Edit: Okay, I'm sorry for adding a Google search results page as the source. In any case though, the largest horse ever weighed in history weighed 1524 kg, leading me to believe that yeah, two ton horses were still non-existant)

31:46—Wounding a full armored knight at 250 yards and killing at 100 yards? If the knight were indeed fully armored, and, as the documentary implies, the kills were achieved by penetrating the armor, I find that highly unlikely, even at point-blank range, especially because fully armored knights also wore a gambeson or a padded jack underneath their armor.

32:59—A knight lost 70-80% of his combat effectiveness when unhorsed? Where in the name of ever-loving fuckery did you get those statistics from? And why would knights even engage in combat on foot in such a case? I will directly quote the linked AskHistorians comment here:

By the time of Agincourt it had become standard practice for knights to "dismount for battle and stand with the archers, "and always a great number of gentlemen did so in order that the common soldiers might be reassured and fight better.'"[…]
At Agincourt the vast majority of the French and English knights fought on foot.

39:11—The French weren’t within a distance of 150 yards from the archers when they let loose their arrows. As a matter of fact, the archers shot earlier, when the men-at-arms were 300 yards away:

The plate armour of the French men-at-arms allowed them to close the 300 yards or so to the English lines while being under what the French monk of Saint Denis described as "a terrifying hail of arrow shot."

Edit: Do let me know if I've gotten anything wrong, or if there's any additional badhistory that I've missed. Also, I fixed one of the youtube links...the previous one wasn't working anymore.