In honour of Saint Crispin's Day, I've decided to tackle Historia Civilis' video on the Battle of Agincourt. For the most part, since all medieval battles which have more than a single detailed source are matters of interpretation, I'm going to avoid talking about his take on the battle itself except for when none of the sources support his view. The meat of the post is going to be on the second half of the video, where Historia Civilis gets a lot wrong about the impact the Battle of Agincourt had on medieval warfare.

0:30-0:35

King Henry the Fifth of England had invaded with a small army and some unrealistic goals

Henry V's army was a massive one by the standards of the time. He had approximately 12 000 fighting men and, counting pages, engineers, miners, carpenters, priest, surgeons and other support personnel, his landing force could not have been below 15 000 men. This was the largest English army assembled since the Black Death and, given that it was very nearly as numerous as the 14-15 000 men Edward III brought on the Crecy campaign, it was probably the largest army per capita that England had fielded up to this point¹ .

Even in comparison to the French it was a large army. Charles VI and the Dauphin Louis only tried to raise 9 000 men in response to the English (6 000 men-at-arms and 3 000 "archers", who were mostly crossbowmen), and at Agincourt there was almost certainly no more than 10 000 men-at-arms and 4000 missile troops. The main point of contention these days is whether every man-at-arms had an armed servant whom he paid out of his own pocket and who was expected to fight or if only a portion of them had these armed servants, and the number of troops not originally contracted who joined the battle.

Regardless, it's clear that the English army, far from being "small" was, in the context of the early 15th century, a very large army.

Additionally, while we'll never know Henry V's goals with 100% certainty, they were far from unrealistic. Not only did he manage to capture Harfleur, a major port city that dominated the sea around Normandy and commanded the entrance to the Seine (the river that flowed through the major cities of Rouen and Paris), but he managed to win a stunning victory over the French. Whether the latter was his initial intention is a matter of some debate, but it is far from an unrealistic possibility that he intended to do just that.

0:36-0:44

After a few months of campaigning and some very modest success, he resolved to head for English Calais, and then back across the Channel.

Henry didn't campaign in France for a couple of months before deciding to head to Calais. While he did spend six weeks besieging Harfleur and then another two recovering from the dysentery that had ravaged his army² , this is hardly campaigning all the way to Soissons or maybe Reims as the map depicts. And, while the siege was probably not as fast as Henry would have preferred, that comes down to him not acting quick enough to secure all the approaches. As a result, a significant body of men-at-arms (300 men) was able to reinforce the tiny garrison, and this undoubtedly stretched the siege out well beyond the week or two it should have taken.

2:44-2:57

The English had an unusual problem. Look at the makeup of this army. It's idiotic, right? They didn't do this on purpose; at the beginning of the campaign, the army was double this size and normal proportions.

Also not true. A total of 11 248 soldiers appear in the payrolls, of whom 2266 were men-at-arms (20.1%). The English did have a slightly lower percentage of men-at-arms at Agincourt using traditional numbers (5000 archers and 900 men-at-arms, or 15.2%) than at the start, but adding an additional 300 men-at-arms would have either added only a single rank to the English lines or extended the center battle by 75 men, and would not have altered the outcome or battle formation.

4:17-4:55

To summarise, HC has the first wave of French cavalry impaling themselves on the stakes in front of the English and then just darting back and front of the English archers until they (the cavalry) decided to retreat. All of the primary sources agree that the vast majority of the French mounted men-at-arms were turned back by the English archery well before they reached the stakes and that only a few even reached the archers³ . No source so much as hints that the mounted men-at-arms then proceeded to ride across the front of the English archers and exposed themselves to even more arrow fire.

Although not explicitly stated in the video, given his description of the charge and later comments and the role of cavalry in medieval warfare up to this battle, HC seems to believe that the charge was intended to break the whole of the English line but failed because of how awesome the English archers were. The French, however, were only intending to break through the archers with their charge and disrupt them so that their dismounted men-at-arms could advance with minimal problems, as the Lombard mercenaries successfully managed to do at Verneuil in 1424.

6:50-7:20

HC suggests that the English deliberately set about slaughtering their captured prisoners in the presence of the French third line after telling it to leave the field of battle or be destroyed. However, what he neglects to mention is that the third battle had, in fact, already fled and was regrouping. The English, who had been taking prisoners and hauling wounded men out from piles of the dead in order to ransom them, had also moved the prisoners a fair distance from the battlefield. Once they saw the third battle, likely with some remnants of the second, grouping, they got spooked and, fearing that there was going to be a battle against a fresh force while they were exhausted and had thousands of prisoners behind their lines, set about killing the prisoners until the French force retreated.

7:40-8:18

HC argues that Agincourt was the turning point for the use of missile weapons and that, prior to Agincourt, the weak "shortbow" was the most common form of bow. The longbow, which could shoot through plate armour, then replaced it and heralded the coming of the firearm.

This is wrong for a number of reasons. Firstly, while shortbows were absolutely in use (see, for instance, the Waterford bow) during the Middle Ages, but they were not necessarily weak weapons and they were probably less common than "longbows"⁴ .

Secondly, Agincourt was hardly the first time the English had used massed archery against the French. Crecy is usually given as the first French experience of English archery, although those fighting in Brittany had a significant amount of experience of English archery by this point, and they had definitely switched from attempting a charge after their own missile forces had softened up the English to relying on dismounted men-at-arms by the time of Poitiers in 1356.

Thirdly, the French already knew the limitations of the cavalry charge. Courtrai in 1302 is traditionally viewed as heralding the decline of heavy cavalry, since the Flemish infantry massacred the French knights, but even there the French were well aware that a straight cavalry charge would be suicidal. Instead, they sent their archers, crossbowmen and javelinmen forward to rout the Flemish missile troops and disrupt their formation enough that a cavalry charge was viable. Of course, the terrain wasn't suitable for a cavalry charge in any case, but this is more a highlight of the French command structure than it was of the existing approach to warfare.

In short, Agincourt changed nothing about how warfare was conducted.

8:20-8:38

HC states that Agincourt was the battle that changed how "heavy infantry" were used by showing how vulnerable they were to missile fire, and that from now on they had to be escorted by a missile contingent.

As I've alluded to above, missile troops had been a key component of even French armies for a long period of time. They might not have always been used as effectively as they should have been, but they were present and played precisely the sort of role that HC is suggesting they were now employed to play. The fact that the French had ordered that 1/3 of their initial force for the Agincourt campaign to be archers or crossbowmen well and truly demonstrates this, and any battle from Hastings to Agincourt where we have sufficiently detailed sources to reconstruct the battle demonstrates this fact as well.

8:39-9:10

Finally, HC argues that Agincourt was the first time that a cavalry charge had failed so spectacularly and that as a result the all out cavalry charge was no longer viable as an army's "all purpose sledgehammer".

This is, again, entirely incorrect. While cavalry had frequently been used to smash a line of infantry after it had been disrupted by missile fire or if it looked unsteady, it was part of a long standing system that combined missile troops, infantry and cavalry. Agincourt wasn't even the largest disaster for French cavalry in the Hundred Years' War; at Crecy over 1500 mounted men-at-arms were killed in front of the Black Prince's battle alone, compared with fewer than a half dozen at Agincourt.

TL:DR

While Agincourt did had an impact on the course of the Hundred Years' War, in particular allowing Henry V to solidify his hold on the English throne and garner enough support to eventually have himself named the heir to Charles VI and only missing out on the French crown by dying a month before Charles VI, its effect on the development of the European military system was practically non-existent. Perhaps the only innovation to come out of it was the use of stakes by archers, and this did not have a very great effect overall. All other changes had either been made before the battle or, as gunpowder weapons developed, well after it.

¹ Edward I did muster around 30 000 men for one of his Scottish campaigns, but this army never actually left England and was quickly whittled away by desertions. He replaced it with an army not much above 13 000 men the next campaign season.

² Ian Mortimer has argued that only 17% of the army was affected by dysentery based on an analysis of the disease among the three camps using the existing sick lists. However, there is no guarantee that the sick lists are complete, so we do not know precisely how many were affected. Additionally, more may have recovered from the disease during the two week wait before Henry V set out for Calais or not have been affected badly enough for them to be invalided home.

³ Whether or not their horses were then impaled on the stakes and the riders jumped off into the English archers or whether the horses knocked the stakes over because the ground was muddy and the stakes not planted firmly and then got in among the English archers depends on your translation of Waurin and Le Fèvre.

⁴ Clifford Rogers has recently argued that there were, in effect, three lengths of bow in use. One, typified by the Waterford bow, had a draw length of only around 24" and correlated to the traditional shortbow. The second, which he derives mainly from artwork, was what he dubs the "medium" bow and had a draw length of around 28". The third, the true "longbow" he sees as developing in 14th century England and having a draw length of 30-32". Although he doesn't seem to have developed his thesis any further, there is good evidence of these "medium" length bows in Iron Age bog deposists in Scandinavia and also in the form of some 10th century burials from sites in the Netherlands. These shorter bows were rather thick and powerful, even if they only drew to 26-28", so the length of a bow was not in any way shape or form a determining factor in the draw weight. A shorter draw is less efficient, but these arrows would hardly have bounced off armour in the way HC is suggesting.

Bibliography

• Agincourt: A New History, by Anne Curry
• The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations, by Anne Curry
• "The Battle of Agincourt" by Clifford J. Rogers, in The Hundred Years War (Part II) – Different Vistas ed. Andrew Villalon and Donald Kagay
• "The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’", by Clifford J. Rogers, Journal of Military History, Volume 37 Issue 3, 2001
• Henry V: The Warrior King of 1415, by Ian Mortimer
• The Welsh Wars of Edward I, by J. E. Morris
• Pfeil und Bogen, by Jürgen Junkmanns
• Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century, by Kelly DeVries
• The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages, by J.F. Verbruggen