I wasn't going to do this, since I don't want to seem like I have an axe to grind against Shad¹ , but after rewatching the section of his video I have particular issues with, I think it's worthwhile doing a post. The video in question is Netflix, The King, historical analysis review: CRIMES AGAINST MEDIEVAL REALISM, and I'm focusing exclusively on the section where he discusses the Battle of Agincourt, since that's where I feel the bulk of the issues regarding historical accuracy are.

34:44-35:15

This section is not wrong, but Shad missed the perfect opportunity to excoriate the film for making it seem like the idea of English knights dismounting and fighting on foot was new to everyone under Henry's command and that Falstaff is proposing something revolutionary. This had been the preferred English method of fighting for at least eighty years by this point and was the common form of combat by both English and French men-at-arms by 1415.

36:45-37:26

In discussing Falstaff's plan, Shad makes two points: that the French wouldn't needed to be baited into attacking the English because they were more than happy to, and that the French committed to a single all out assault. He's wrong on both these points.

Firstly: for reasons we can only speculate about, the French held their position for most of the morning and the English not only had to advance towards the French but had to send archers forward to shoot them and provoke them into charging. One theory, proposed by Anne Curry, is that the French were actually much smaller in number, just 12 000 men, and the English much larger, 9000 men, than previously thought and so the French were reluctant to start such an uneven fight² . The more common one is that the French were appropriately cautious of the English and knew very well what effect the mud would have on their advance, so they simply tried to hold position and either starve the English into surrender or else force them into a disadvantageous advance³ .

Secondly, the French, even when provoked by the English, did not make a single rash assault. They certainly had some command issues and almost all of the French commanders were in the vanguard, which resulted in the French defeat when there was no one of sufficient rank or motivation to command the main battle, but they nonetheless sent forward their cavalry to attack the archers so that their men-at-arms could advance with more ease. It was not the single uncoordinated rush of those in front that the movie and Shad suggest. It was poorly coordinated and clearly no one in the French camp the night before had considered the effect of exercising their horses in front of where they were going to fight the next day, but the French had a definite plan to defeat the English beyond a zerg rush.

37:27-37:57

This is what caught my attention the second time around. Shad says that only 10-12 000 mounted French knights⁴ participated in the battle. This number, he says, comes from the sources and the "people who actually study this". I don't know who he's been reading, but I would be very surprised if they had said that there were more than 10 000 men-at-arms in the whole French army, let alone in the vanguard⁵ . The generally agreed number of men-at-arms in the whole army is 9-10 000, with Anne Curry preferring 9000 and Clifford Rogers preferring 10 000. Where the dispute comes into play is how many gros valets should be included as fighting men, with Curry discounting their contribution as fighters entirely and Rogers arguing that every man-at-arms would have had an armed gros valet⁶ .

This may not seem very important to arguing against Shad, but it's important context here because it seems as though he has mistaken arguments over total numbers for arguments over numbers involved in the actual attack on the English. Of these, only about 1000-1200 were intended to attack on horse - most of whom did not turn up for their attack⁷ - and another 5000 advanced on foot⁸ , and these were the only French other than the cavalry who participated in the battle. This was absolutely not some massed attack of French cavalry, it was a two pronged attack, one part on horse to knock out the archers long enough for the second element to arrive on foot and defeat the English men-at-arms⁹ .

Edit: A mea culpa is in order here. I misread an administrative account that I though supported my selection of the Monk of St-Denis and Pierre de Fenin over the Burgundians in attempting to reconcile the accounts. It now appears certain that the main battle did engage with the English, although how heavy the fighting was remains an unanswered question./end edit

44:30-44:41

Addressing Henry and most of the army being off to one side, ready to ambush the French, Shad makes the very bold claim that "there are no accounts at all" of the English lying in wait off to one side to ambush the French. There are, however, two accounts. One by the Burgundians, that the English sent 120 archers off towards Tramecourt to shoot at the French vanguard in order to provoke it to attack, doesn't bear much resemblance to the movie and two of the Burgundians, Waurin and Le Fèvre mention the event only to deny it. however, Jean Juvenal de Ursins both the archer ambush - which he claims was sprung after the vanguard had engaged the English and was therefore shooting into the rear of it - but he also adds a second, larger, ambush party of mounted men-at-arms who attacked and routed the main battle after the English engaged the vanguard.

While this ambush never happened and is probably a fusion of English scouts burning a building in Agincourt before the battle and Henry sending a mounted force to harry the main battle after it broke and fled, this may well be where the writer and director got their idea for a major ambush on the French flank after they were committed.

¹ It does seem like it, but I really don't. There are any number of his videos that I think are actually quite good and provide a useful summary of the topic, it's just that sometimes when he's talking about the "TRUTH" about a topic or discussing the "crimes" of a particular piece of media and he's obviously wrong I just can't help myself.

² The French practice of dividing up into several distinct battles dramatically reduce the number of combatants facing the English at any one time. At Poitiers, for instance, the French might have had as many as 12 000 men-at-arms and several thousand good infantrymen besides, but with these divided between four separate battles (vanguard, two central battles and the rearguard), the 6000 Anglo-Gascons outnumber their opponents somewhere between 1.5:1 and 2:1 every time the French came to fight. At Agincourt, with Curry's numbers, the effect would be even worse.

³ I, personally, think that, since you can't deepen the ranks of archers past 4 men on flat terrain, the French were hoping to force the English to divide their army into two battles and so halve the number of archers that would face them. Instead, the English placed the archers forward in wings (contrary to a lot of older scholarship, this was a situational tactic, not a universal one), allowing them to employ all of their archers and increasing the distance the French would have to march while being shot at. This interpretation is supported by all the major chronicles (the Gesta, the Monk of St. Denis, Thomas Walsingham, the Burgundian chroniclers, etc) either saying or implying that the archers were sent forward in the wings after the English made their initial advance.

⁴ I'm not going to be petty enough to chip Shad in the main body of this post, but I am petty enough to use the footnotes to say that very few of the French involved were knights. Most were men-at-arms who, although members of the gentry and aristocracy, were nonetheless not knights.

⁵ Old and outdated scholarship excepted.

⁶ Although Jonathan Sumption largely follows Anne Curry's figures for Agincourt, albeit boosted to 14 000, estimates he made for previous battles indicate that the number of armed gros valets in early 15th century French armies was generally 60-80% of the men-at-arms. My estimate is that there were 10 000 men-at-arms, 6-8 000 gros valets and 4-5 000 archers/crossbowmen, or somewhere between 20 000 and 23 000 men.

⁷ According to the Monk of St-Denis, 1000 men-at-arms were chosen to lead the charge against the English, which matches well with the 1000-1200 mentioned by Monstrelet, Waurin and Le Fèvre. However, it seems that on the morning of the battle only 800 of the men could be found when the English began their advance and then, when it came time to charge, only 420 were actually ready and willing to attack. Although no numbers are given, that far fewer were present to attack than had been ordered is confirmed by the Chronique de Ruisseauville and Jean Juvenal de Ursins.

⁸ Based on the Berry Herald, Jean Juvenal de Ursins and the Monk of St-Denis. Higher numbers are given by the Burgundians, but these only work if you accept army sizes of 36-50 000.

⁹ The use of heavily armoured cavalry to break the shot of the archers, as one chronicler puts it, was a perfectly valid concept and worked perfectly on one wing at Verneuil a decade later. However, this was not new - the mounted French men-at-arms at Poitiers had been invulnerable so long as the archers faced them dead on, and the English archers had proven incapable of driving off the French cavalry charge at Mauron in 1352. Additionally, even though they hadn't succeeded in charging home against the archers, the third battle of the French at Nogent-sur-Seine in 1359 had be capable of distracting the English archers from the main fight and allowing the first two battles to break through the English men-at-arms. Whether physically breaking the shot of the archers as at Poitiers or Mauron or by doing so metaphorically as at Nogent-sur-Seine, this was a good plan under most conditions. Agincourt just didn't have suitable conditions.

Bibliography

• Agincourt: A New History, by Anne Curry
• The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations, ed. Anne Curry
• "The Battle of Agincourt" by Clifford J. Rogers in The Hundred Years' War (II): Different Vistas ed. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay
• The Hundred Years' War, Volume 4, by Jonathan Sumption
• The Great Warbow, by Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy