4

 

Interpretations from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

 

 

It can be claimed that every century rewrites the history of the past. It is possible to detect contemporary considerations influencing the study of the battle of Agincourt over the last few centuries, but the debt both to specific chronicles of the fifteenth century and to certain historians of the sixteenth century also remains constantly apparent. Indeed, an examination of writings from the eighteenth to the twentieth century can reveal how frighteningly dependent historians were on what had gone before.¹ Why write one’s own narrative when there were already some splendid earlier accounts in print on which to draw? And why, when they were so splendid, bother to draw on more than one? If the sense of drama flagged, there was always Shakespeare to fall back on. In this context, therefore, although many works do tell us of the battle, they do so without much in the way of personal comment or interpretation. Until the present century, and even within it, many studies of Agincourt have been almost entirely narrative in approach.

This is a sweeping statement. We must now be more discerning. It is necessary to distinguish between works not only from a chronological perspective, but also on the basis of genre. Most accounts of the battle occur within studies of the history of England as a whole. There are some, although perhaps surprisingly few, studies of the reign of Henry V alone. There are also discussions of the battle within military histories, and works which focus entirely on the battle itself. A seminal work of the latter type, Sir Harris Nicolas’ History of the Battle of Agincourt (1827–33), must be mentioned right at the start, although it will be returned to for fuller discussion in due course. Nicolas provided the first serious study of the battle and was all the more significant for bringing to public notice sources beyond the chronicle accounts. As we shall see, his near contemporary, Sir Joseph Hunter, also carried out important and in many ways more significant documentary work on the battle, but produced relatively little in print, and certainly nothing which has reached the readership of Nicolas.

My study of the interpretations of the last three centuries concentrates on works in English largely for the sake of space. Not surprisingly the French have not shown any inclination to write books on Henry V, so that their study of the battle has tended to arise within the context of general and military histories. But they have their own Nicolas in the shape of René de Belleval’s Azincourt (1865). Both works show their antiquarian leanings in their desire to establish who was at Agincourt, but it is testimony to the contrasting outcomes and impacts of the battle for the English and French nations that Nicolas concentrates on those who participated in the campaign, and Belleval on those who died. This difference is also the result of the contrast between the surviving documentary sources for the English and French armies, and thus will lead us neatly into a more detailed examination of this subject in the next chapter.

 

Narrative histories from the early eighteenth to early twentieth centuries

 

The organisation of this chapter is not strictly chronological, for I have tried to bring out various themes and approaches rather than simply to consider each work in turn. But it is sensible to start with the first single-volume study of the reign, Thomas Goodwin’s The History of the Reign of Henry the Fifth, King of England, which was published in London in 1704. Christopher Allmand assessed this work as ‘a promising beginning’, whilst also emphasising its shortcomings.² We shall consider the latter in a moment, but it is important to place the book in its contemporary context. In 1704, England (or more correctly Great Britain) was at war with France in the War of the Spanish Succession. The dedicatory preface to John, Lord Cutts, who had himself taken up arms against the traditional enemy, is unsurprisingly bombastic and patriotic in tone.³ As Goodwin puts it ‘our Black Prince’s and Fifth Henry’s wars are now no longer acted only on our theaters [sic] but are revived in the field too’. The year his book appeared saw another great victory over the French at Blenheim (12 August). Henry’s pre-battle speech is based on fifteenth-century versions but with certain new emphases which might have served to remind his military contemporaries of past English ambitions and glories. French disorder and cowardice are also stressed, as for instance in this extract towards the end of the engagement.⁴

 

The French troops in the rear were yet in good order, and if they had not wanted courage might have renewed the fight, and made the victory yet doubtful; but when they saw the two first lines of their army entirely destroyed, they were disheartened; and their fears increasing, when they observed that the English horse by King Henry’s order wheeled off to charge them in the rear, they fled without making any resistance. The English soldiers had now nothing to do but to kill and take prisoners, and the French were so dispirited as tamely to offer their throats to be cut or their hands to be chained.

 

The work is most emphatically a narrative history which derived its blow by blow account from chronicles and sixteenth-century histories. Indeed, it is perhaps the most obvious example of something noted earlier in this study – the piling up of all the various different accounts into one with no discrimination at all between sources written close to the event and those written later. Thus in the marginal notes, Stow and Polydore Virgil are cited alongside Le Fèvre, Monstrelet, Walsingham, the Religieux of Saint-Denis and other chronicles. Waurin does not seem to have been used. David Powel’s History of Cambria (or Wales) (1584) is cited as the authority for the actions of Davy Gam before the battle.

 

Captain David Gam, who attended King Henry with a party of valiant Welshmen, having been sent to review the strength of the enemy, made this gallant report to his royal master: ‘may it please you, my liege, there are enough to be killed, enough to be taken prisoner, and enough to run away’. The king was extremely animated by this undaunted answer of a gentleman, whose actions afterward in the battle were no less surprising.⁵

 

Goodwin tells us in his preface that Thomas Rymer had communicated materials to him. Rymer had been commissioned by the government in 1693 to search out and publish materials on diplomatic relations from the middle ages to the present.⁶ The first volume of his Foedera was published, as was Goodwin’s book, in 1704. Although the ninth volume of the Foedera dealing with the reign of Henry V did not appear in print until 1709, it is clear that Rymer had been collecting documents for it from the very start. From 1696 to 1707 he had employed as his assistant Robert Sanderson, who was thus partly responsible for the collection of materials on Henry V. Sanderson also prepared his own history of the reign. The latter was never published, however, and volumes survive in manuscript for the period from 1416 to 1422 only.⁷ Many more documents were collected for the Foedera than were actually printed, as the surviving notes of both Rymer and Sanderson indicate. Even so, volume nine included important materials for the Agincourt campaign deriving from royal administrative records, and thus offered authors a useful complement to the chronicle sources.

Marginal notes in Goodwin reflect the information Rymer had supplied in advance of publication. For instance, Goodwin mentions the letter which William Bardolf, lieutenant of Calais sent to the duke of Bedford and which included a report that the duke of Lorraine was gathering troops to threaten the March. Goodwin gives as reference ‘MS. in Bibl. Cott. Caligula D5’: this text was later printed by Rymer in volume nine of his Foedera.⁸ But such use of documentary materials is not extensive in Goodwin’s account of the Agincourt campaign, and he cites no texts verbatim, whereas he does do so for later years of the reign. Allmand accused Goodwin for relying too heavily on sixteenth-century writers. In the Agincourt section this observation is not entirely justified, for there are many earlier works cited, although it is possible, for instance, that the references to Tito Livio are in fact not derived from the original Vita but from the First English Life, or even through Stow and Holinshed who themselves used the latter.⁹ Goodwin appears to have consulted a wide range of narrative accounts, and, most notably, referred to a number of French chronicles which had been printed by the Godefroys in the mid-seventeenth century, such as Jouvenal des Ursins, and de Cagny’s chronicle of Arthur, count of Richemont (the story of Richemont’s meeting with his mother, Queen Joan, being included, for instance).¹⁰ Goodwin was also enough of a historian to include a short discussion on the different sizes of the armies put forward in various works.

Since his is a narrative history, it is not easy to characterise Goodwin’s opinion on the battle, and his tendency to heap up material does not help. The king himself is spoken of highly. ‘He acted not only the part of a general but of a common soldier too, and excess of courage made him hazard a life on which alone depended the safety of his whole army.’ Goodwin then uses the account in Le Fèvre of an attack on the king by eighteen French gentlemen, one of whom managed to come close enough to strike the crest of his helmet, although they were all cut down. But here again he uses Powel’s History of Wales, as updated by Wynne in 1697, to give further personality to Davy Gam.

 

Here it was that the valiant David Gam (whom we mentioned before) signalized himself in defending his prince, with loss of much blood and at last of his life, himself and two of his relations having received their mortal wounds in this encounter. The king was so sensible of their service that afterward, as they lay languishing in the field, he came to them and knighted them, this being the only acknowledgment he could make of their bravery, for they soon after died.

 

Oddly, however, Goodwin does not then give Gam amongst his list of the English dead a few pages later.¹¹ The lack of discernment in the use of sources and the following of the sometimes garbled sixteenth-century accounts also leads to oddities, so that the duke of Exeter and the duke of Clarence are both at the battle. The disposition of the army is particularly strange and reflects more of deployments at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with sixteenth-century overtones, than in the fifteenth. ‘A strong body of horse being placed in the woods on the flanks and detailed to assault the enemy in the rear ... a battalion of archers was placed in the van commanded by the duke of York... behind him was the main battle with King Henry at the head of it ... the rear consisted of archers and such as were armed with spears, halberds and bills ... led by the duke of Exeter’.¹² There was no thought here about whether the archers were intermingled with the men-at-arms in wedge-like formations, or whether they were on the wings.

History in the eighteenth century was taken seriously not least because of its didactic potential. The great deeds and statesmen-like acts of the past were seen as usefully instructive for gentlemen of the present. Take, for example, the preface of Paul Rapin de Thoyras’ History of England, published in French in 1723–5 and dedicated in its English translation (1726–31) to Frederick, Prince of Wales.¹³

 

For History, however useful to others, is infinitely more so to a Prince and particularly the history of that crown he is born to wear. How instructive, as well as agreeable, must a fair and impartial narration of the lives and actions of a long series of predecessors be to him. And that such is the following history, originally penned by a foreigner, who had no party to serve or interest to promote, may be undoubtedly conducted from the universal approbation it everywhere meets with.

 

Rapin was the first historian to make extensive use of the printed volumes of Rymer’s Foedera; this is revealed by the reference to ‘Acta Publica’ in his marginal notes. Indeed, Rapin had published French abridgments of each volume of the Foedera as it appeared. These were subsequently published in English by Stephen Whatley under the title Acta Regia. Rapin also consulted a wide range of chronicles, mostly the same as those consulted by Goodwin, and the latter work is also cited, with the Gam story being imported almost word for word. Not surprisingly the account of the campaign is close to Goodwin, but showing more of a tendency to judgment. This is well demonstrated in the following extract on the folly of the French commander’s choice of battle site.

 

On 25th of October, the day appointed for the battle, the two armies were drawn up as soon as it was light. The constable d’Albret committed on this occasion an unpardonable fault in choosing for the field of battle a narrow ground, flanked on one side by a rivulet and on the other by a large wood. He thereby lost all the advantage which the superiority of number and especially in horse, could give him. It is most certain that this general ought to have posted himself in a large and green place, where he might have had it in his power to surround the English who were but a handful of men in comparison of his army. But by drawing up on so narrow a ground he was forced to make a front no larger than that of his enemies and thereby depriving himself of a very manifest advantage. Neither can it be said that the choice of field of battle was not entirely in his breast. As the English were marching to Calais, it was his business to expect them on a spacious plain, capable of containing his whole army, and where they might have all fought at once. His blindness therefore is astonishing, and can only be ascribed to his presumption. He seems to have intended to stop up that narrow passage that the English might not proceed without considering such a precaution can only be advantageous to the weakest. I have dwelt a little upon this error as it was, probably, the principal cause of the unfortunate success of the French in this action. The Constable, blinded by the number of his troops, drew them up, as I said, on this narrow ground, but so close that it was easy to foresee confusion would ensue during the battle.¹⁴

 

The generalship of Henry is contrasted with this lack of French leadership. Rapin claims that the English only had two battle lines because of the small number of their troops, the first commanded by York and the second by the king himself. The stakes are placed across the army as a whole, and are uprooted and planted again as the English army moved from its first position to its second. The archers, for whom there is no mention of being on the wings, or anywhere else for that matter, moved in front of the stakes to fire on the French cavalry and then ‘nimbly retreated behind the stakes with a wonderful discipline in which the king had exercised them himself for some days’. Subsequently Rapin has the English first line engaging, and Henry then sending in his second line, as though his forces were grouped behind each other in eighteenth-century style, as implied in Goodwin, rather than being ranged across the field. Like Goodwin, Rapin also includes a discussion of the numbers of casualties which refers to the variance in different sources and historical interpretations. He notes that figures given by English writers for their own dead tend to be low, whereas ‘Mezerai mounts the number to fifteen hundred and lowers the loss of the French to six thousand’.¹⁵ He ends perceptively by observing ‘it is very common, on these occasions, to see the like diversity in the historians of two opposite sides’.

Rapin’s work remained the standard history of England, being reprinted several times in both its French and English versions, until the publication of David Hume’s History of England between 1754 and 1762. Hume also displayed a critical eye.¹⁶ He expressed scepticism of the excessively low numbers of English fatalities cited by many, and was also one of the few writers of the period to emphasise the significance of the French civil war as a key to understanding Henry’s success.

 

The success which the arms of England have, in different ages, obtained over those of France, have been much owing to the favourable situation of the former kingdom. The English, happily seated in an island, could make advantage of every misfortune which attended their neighbours, and were little exposed to the danger of reprisals. They never left their own country but when they were conducted by a king of extraordinary genius, or found their enemy divided by intestine factions, or were supported by a powerful alliance: as all these circumstance concurred at present to favour their enterprise, they had reason to expect from it proportionable success.¹⁷

 

Hume believed, like many modern historians, that Burgundy was a potential ally even if no formal alliance as yet existed. But it is the contrast in command which is later brought centre stage.

 

The three great battles of Cressy, Poitiers and Agincourt bear a singular resemblance to each other in their most considerable circumstances. In all of them, there appears the same temerity in the English princes, who, without any object of moment, merely for the sake of plunder, had entered so far into the enemy’s country as to leave themselves no retreat: and unless saved by the utmost imprudence in the French commanders, were, from their very situation, exposed to inevitable destruction. But allowance being made for this temerity, which, according to the irregular plans of war followed in those ages, seems to have been, in some measure unavoidable, there appears in the day of action the same presence of mind, dexterity, courage firmness, and precaution, on the part of the English; the same precipitation, confusion, and vain confidence on the part of the French; and the events were such as might have been expected from such opposite conduct.¹⁸

 

But for Hume the battle was less significant than one might have thought. ‘The immediate consequences too of these three great victories were similar; instead of pushing the French with vigour and taking advantage of their consternation, the English princes after their victory seem rather to have relaxed their efforts, and to have allowed the enemy leisure to recover from his losses.’ As he notes, it was two years before Henry returned to France. ‘The poverty of all the European princes, and the small resources of their kingdoms, were the causes of these continual interruptions in their hostilities; and though the maxims of war were in general destructive, their military operations were mere incursions, which, without any settled plan, they carried on against each other.’ Hume was strikingly more perceptive than most, although his account of the battle proper was predictable and short, taking up less space than the general observation cited above. He was not, it seems, particularly interested in military matters.

The variations between accounts of the battle in the general histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are relatively few and far between for authors continued to draw on the same sources – and on each other. Many would fall foul of a modern university’s rules on plagiarism. But it is perhaps in the minor variations and turns of phrase that we can see contemporary and personal perception most clearly. Thus in Carte’s A General History of England, the killing of the prisoners was started without receiving orders from the king and in response to the attack on the camp, ‘but they were stopped in taking this bloody, though necessary precaution by Henry’s orders, who sending a herald to the rallied corps of the French with notice that if they ordered to advance he would put all the prisoners to the sword, that body retired immediately’.¹⁹ Henry’s own reputation was not to be diminished, and to this end most works gave considerable space to Henry’s bravery in the face of the attack by the duke of Alençon and the eighteen French knights, in which Davy Gam might also feature. Some developed the theme of Henry’s bravery by linking this incident with another, which also had its origins in several chronicle accounts but which could be embellished for the sake of the cult of the hero. Thus in F.P. Barnard’s A New Universal and Impartial History of England,

 

Henry now darted into the thickest part of the battle, but his ardour and impetuosity again involved him in the most imminent danger. His brother, the duke of Gloucester, who had fought be his side, was struck to the ground and the enemy pressed in crowds to avail themselves of the incident. Henry was again surrounded by a host of foes but being a stranger to fear, he covered the body of his brother with his shield and defended him with his sword. In this situation he received so violent a blow on his helmet with a battle-axe that he fell on his knees [this was not the same blow as that which was ‘cleft the crown on Henry’s helmet’; we have to wait for the next paragraph for Alençon to deal that one!] and would possibly have been seized by the enemy had not the duke of York advanced to his assistance at the head of a fresh body of troops. This intimidated the enemy; they fell back and Henry and his brother had time to recover from their alarming situation. Another reinforcement immediately followed that led by the duke of York, and Henry again attacked the French with such fury that they were unable to support the shock; they fell into disorder, and a dreadful slaughter ensued.²⁰

 

York is then killed by Alençon but then Henry himself kills Alençon and the French flee. Barnard’s account of the battle is mostly made up of a series of vignettes featuring the great and the good, as too is that given in Oliver Goldsmith’s highly derivative History of England.²¹ One might be forgiven for thinking from these accounts that the English army contained no rank and file. Although Barnard does allow Henry three divisions, the right and the rearguard are here considered as wings to his own centre division. He follows the notion that the rear was made up wholly of archers and ‘such as were armed with spears, halberts and bills’, under the command of the earl of Dorset (who was, of course, not present at the battle, but at least he is not anachronistically promoted to duke of Exeter in this account). Goldsmith displays no interest at all in the deployment of the king’s army, but is one of the earliest to imply some conscience over the killing of the prisoners, the significance of which he is at pains to excuse. The killing is for him due to both the rallying of the French and the attack on the baggage.

 

Henry, now seeing the enemy on all sides of him, began to entertain apprehensions from his prisoners, the number of whom exceeded even that of his army. He thought it necessary, therefore, to issue general orders for putting them to death; but on the discovery of the certainty of his victory he stopped the slaughter, and was still able to save a great number. This severity tarnished the glory which his victory would otherwise have acquired: but all the heroism of that age is tinctured with barbarity.²²

 

Sir James Mackintosh, who published his History of England in 1830, was more obviously critical.²³

 

A deplorable incident sullied the victory ... a troop of peasants began to plunder the baggage: rumours of the advance of French reinforcements were spread, and Henry in an evil hour too hastily believed that the safety of his small army required the slaughter of his numerous prisoners ... the greater part of the noble prisoners were slain, mutilated, disfigured, mortally or painfully wounded, before it was discovered that the whole was a false alarm, to which Henry had lent too credulous an ear. He stopped the massacre, but too late for the purity of his name.

 

By 1830, too, the national differences were again worth stressing.

 

Nothing was favourable to Henry but his own calmness, perhaps the coolness of his nation, and the inconsiderate impetuosity which has sometimes marred the brilliant valour of France. It is scarcely possible to doubt that the result of this famous battle must have been different if the two nations could have exchanged generals.²⁴

 

As noted earlier, in many works, it is the bravery and courage of the king which are given pride of place. This was not surprising when a reign-based approach was used as the structure of the works. As the nineteenth century wore on, it also appealed to the increasingly large popular market for history. Thus the king’s personal role features prominently in J.R. Green, A Short History of the English People, and is reinforced by a line drawing of the king’s helmet, shield and saddle in Westminster Abbey.²⁵ It is a line which will be all too familiar to those brought up on the Ladybird and school history book tradition, and is one which has been fanned by the Shakespearean image of the king.

In 1901 C.L. Kingsford, who did much on a scholarly level to identify and explain the chronicle sources of the period, produced a 400-page biography of Henry in the ‘Heroes of the Nations’ series, which took as its motto, ‘The hero’s deeds and hard-won fame shall live’.²⁶ This, as he explains in the preface, was a development of his original article on Henry in the Dictionary of National Biography, but had involved a fresh look at the very abundant sources for the reign. Henry was ‘the perfect pattern of the medieval hero’, loved even by some of the French. But Kingsford was also a man of his time, one of many who saw the dawning of the twentieth century as offering a brave new world. The future did not lie with such as Henry. The modern order was not to spring from men like him ‘who ruled a willing people as a trust from God, of a society based, not on equality, but on the mutual interchange of rights and obligations’. ‘Europe, however unconscious, stood at the parting of the ways and must enter upon her inheritance of progress by a rough and novel road. Henry, for all his genius, was not fitted by temperament to be her leader.’ Far too medieval!

Kingsford’s book offers a fairly straightforward narrative of the battle, largely following the Gesta and Jean Le Fèvre. The strong discipline in Henry’s army is contrasted with the disarray of the French, which offers Kingsford one of many opportunities to emphasise the lack of supreme authority, and hence of unity, in the French army. The way the French were drawn up, in three dense masses one behind the other, also shows their division and poor counsel. He has the English line drawn up as four deep but with archers on the wings of each of the three battles. Thus he accepts the notion of six groups of archers, placed as inverted ‘V’s (or herses), suggesting that ‘the wedges were formed with the apex in front, and the archers, being somewhat in advance of the men-at-arms, could use their weapon to the best effect’ (see fig. 1). Kingsford does remark, however, that ‘some authorities seem to imply that the whole of the archers were placed in two masses on the extreme right and left of the line’. Kingsford’s plan of the battle was almost identical to that provided in Ramsey’s Lancaster and York of 1892. Ramsey’s two-volume study provided a well-referenced account of the fifteenth century which was much drawn upon by later writers. His plan has all the signs of nineteenth-century military organisation on it, especially with regard to the supposed positioning of the guns (fig. 3). Here the English are grouped into three battles. Each battle has wedges of archers on both flanks, portrayed by inverted v-shapes. Ramsey justified his interpretation thus:

 

In view of his slender numbers [Henry V] drew up his force in one fighting line, without reserves. This line consisted of three little battalions of dismounted men-at-arms, each apparently with its complement of archers; slight breaks marking off the divisions. The archers seem to have been formed in wedges, with the points towards the enemy, the formation “en herse” of Froissart, an excellent formation against cavalry. As the organisation of each division seems to have been complete in itself, we must suppose that there were in all six wedges of archers, two to each battalion. But this cannot be asserted with confidence. It may be that there were only four bodies of archers; while Le Fèvre and Waurin seem to assert that they were massed in two bodies on the two flanks of the line. Yet Monstrelet again clearly understood that there were archers attached to each division; and to this view we must adhere.²⁷

 

A good example of how history had developed towards 1900 is also provided by Charles Knight’s History of England.²⁸ For Knight, Henry’s men were ‘formed in one line, the men-at-arms in the centre, with wings on the left and right, the archers being posted between the wings, with their stakes fixed before them’, which seems to imply that there were only two groups of archers each positioned between the centre and one of the flanking battles. The killing of the prisoners is due to ‘a momentary alarm’ on the part of Henry, ‘the hasty instinct of self-preservation dictated the order’. Henry’s ‘nature was not cruel’... he stopped the carnage ‘when he found that the danger was imaginary’, and, in case the point needed further reinforcing ‘the French chroniclers mention this horrible circumstance in terms of sorrow rather than of blame’. The account here is still in the narrative form but in a less bombastic tone which more closely resembles the style we have become used to in our own century.

 

Battlefield and commemoration

 

Significantly, too, for the rise of empirical, investigative history, Knight had visited the battlefield.

 

Between Agincourt and Tramecourt is a small enclosed piece of ground, which we saw planted with potatoes in the summer of 1856, where great numbers of the illustrious dead were buried. It is kept sacred to their memories; and here it is proposed, four hundred and fifty years after the eventful day, to erect a memorial chapel. There is nothing to tell of that time of bloodshed and terror. Now and then, indeed, the upturned soil gives forth evidence of the presence of the dead. In 1816 an English officer of the Army of Occupation found relics of the slain with many coins of Charles V and Charles VI. A peasant, now living in one of the farm cottages of Agincourt, shows a large thin gold coin of Charles VI, which he found in his field labours.

 

Writing in 1835, Charles Labitte tells us that before the French revolution, there was an expiatory chapel on the edge of the battle field, and that every twenty-five years a service was held on 25 October in memory of the French killed at Agincourt.²⁹ This ‘chapelle de la Gacogne’ had in fact been built in 1734 by the Marquise de Tramecourt ‘in accordance with a vow made for the return of her son from Italy’.³⁰ But this monument was destroyed in 1793 during the Revolution, and by 1835 its remains were being used as a stable by a farmer of Ruisseauville. Labitte confirms Knight’s comments that, during the occupation which followed the fall of Bonaparte, the English undertook some excavations in the area where the French dead were buried, finding remains of armour and bones. He goes on to claim:

 

Exalting in the memory of their recent victory [i.e. at Waterloo], the English had built a large grave casket in circular form where they deposited the bones found in their diggings. They wanted to take back to their homeland these sacred remains as a monument to their victory. But the authorities, who tended during that period to cave in when faced with the exigencies brought about by invasion, had on this occasion the strength to oppose with courage this arbitrary act and violation of tombs....³¹ The English were allowed to take back with them the remains of arms found in the ground, which they had gone over with a fine tooth comb. But the grave casket was buried in the cemetery of the church of Agincourt. No stone indicates where the French rest. Only the grave digger who buried them and who is still there could tell us the grass which covered them.

 

The excavations of the early nineteenth century were in fact undertaken by Sir John Woodford, a veteran of Waterloo, who was quartermaster-general in the Army of Observation in the Pas de Calais from 1815 to 1818.³² Finds were taken back to England but are thought to have been destroyed by fire in 1874. A plan of ‘the ground on which the battle of Agincourt was fought’, which Woodford drew in 1818, does survive, however, in the British Library (fig. 2).³³ This is the earliest attempt at a graphic representation of the battle that I have discovered. It is interesting to speculate that it may have been consulted by later writers, although this can only be proved in the case of Wylie.³⁴ The plan marks roadways and landscape features presumably as they were in the early nineteenth century, although Woodford notes that enclosures to the west of Tramecourt are thought to extend further in his period than at the time of the battle. Woodford marked three lines of French. Nearest the English was an advance guard of 8,000 knights, 4,000 archers and 1,300 crossbowmen under the command of the Constable, the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, the counts of Eu and Richemont, and marshal Bouccicaut. Behind this was the centre or main body of the French army under the dukes of Bar and Alençon, and at the rear a body under de Marlay, Dammartin and Fauquembergue. Woodford positioned the advance guard just south of the road between Agincourt and Tramecourt. The English he portrays in two main groups; at the rear, a thousand yards or so north of Maisoncelle, is put the English army commanded by the king. In front of this Woodford placed the ‘advanced line of archers under the command of the duke of York. We must assume that he was here following the tradition found in Hall and others, based on the Brut, that York’s van consisted exclusively of archers. For both parts of the English army Woodford indicates a forward movement towards the French advance guard by means of dotted lines. He also traces the routes of 200 English archers said to have been sent into a meadow near Tramecourt, and of ‘400 men-at-arms turning the French by Agincourt’.

Woodford also indicates the place of burial of 5,800 French knights north of the Agincourt-Tramecourt road. There were French efforts to set up a monument in the mid-nineteenth century, complete with wall mounted lists and armorial bearings of those who had died in the battle – ‘véritable hécatombe de la noblesse française, et l’une des plus meutrières que l’histoire ait eu à enregistrer’.³⁵ But it was the psychological impact of the Franco-Prussian war which led in 1870 to the erection, at the burial place indicated by Woodford, of a large calvary by the vicomte de Tramecourt and his wife in memory of the French soldiers who had fought so bravely in 1415.³⁶

The issue of commemoration has certainly had some part to play in reflections upon the battle. In his ‘epistle dedicatory’ to Queen Anne at the beginning of Foedera, volume nine, Rymer linked recent victories with Agincourt.³⁷

 

May it please your most excellent majesty, with this volume you raise to life and set forth the acts and achievements of that most victorious prince, your royal progenitor, King Henry the Fifth. From whence the world may observe how well you trace, how justly you parallel, how far you surpass the most surprising actions of former ages. Armies and battles and victories and glory are become familiar, and an everyday entertainment, in the proceeding of your majesty’s most auspicious reign, for some hundred years a long train of quarrels, enterprizes and hostilities, yet no memorable battle ensued till the time of Edward the Third. His long (more than fifty years) reign was famous for Cressy and Poyctiers. And now in the time of King Henry the Fifth, for ever renown’d is the field of Agencourt; and to blazon on it the more, after the mode of the time, an herald is created by the name of Agencourt. Would your majesty, after so noble a president, go into that fashion and create a Blenheim herald, a Ramiles herald, an Audenard herald, a Blaregnies herald, where might you stop? But to go on to Paris and there erect a new college for your heralds in the Place of Victoire. Thus most redoubted sovereign, thus you set out, thus you begin your reign. These are the Dawn, the morning glympses, and first tokens of your rising sun. What must the world expect from your meridian splendour? Yet fortune has no share in your success: God Almighty is manifest in all you undertake, in all you do. And what may we not promise from the superior steddy conduct of your general, and the determin’d bravery of your troops, supported by your majesty’s uplifted heart, your firm devotion and pious zeal for God’s service? After various adventures, treaties of peace, and operations of war, this volume ends with a peace and a marriage. In the eighth year of King Henry the Fifth are brought to an agreement with him on his own terms. In this in the eighth year of his reign, the Great Peace, as they call’d it, and a royal marriage are concluded and solempnized. Whatsoever yet remains, which may add to the felicity and glory of your majesty, that God grant, is the prayer of your majesty’s most devoted servant, T. Rymer.

 

Later in the century, however, Samuel Johnson was less effusive. When commenting on the famous line from Henry V, Act IV, scene 3 (‘And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by/From this day to the ending of the world/But we in it shall be remembered’), he uttered a characteristically pithy remark:

 

It may be observed that we are apt to promise to ourselves a more lasting memory than the changing state of human things admits. The prediction is not verified: the feast of Crispin passes by without any mention of Agincourt. Late events obliterate the former: the civil wars have left in this nation scarcely any tradition of more ancient history.³⁸

 

By sheer coincidence, the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava (1854) also occurred on 25 October. As Kingsford observed in 1901, ‘Now, almost into our own time, the charge at Balaclava has added fresh lustre to St Crispin’s Day, and year by year the anniversary of the modern battle recalls to memory the hero of the ancient victory’.³⁹ Soon there was to be even more reason to call the battle to mind. In 1915, the five hundredth anniversary of the battle, Sir Herbert Maxwell wrote an article on the Agincourt campaign for the Cornhill Magazine.⁴⁰ This held extra piquancy by the fact of the war situation which then prevailed. Maxwell’s account of the battle is unremarkable, but more significant is his observation at the end. ‘It was a fruitless and costly enterprise, but one which contributed not a little to establish the prestige of British infantry, which is being so nobly sustained by King George’s troops on the same old ground at the present time’. It was at this very time, of course, that stories were circulating about soldiers’ visions of ghostly medieval archers.⁴¹ Maxwell began his article with a contrast between the Kaiser and Henry V.

 

Krieg ist Krieg is an axiom much in vogue in Potsdam circles at present. It is incontrovertible that war is war; but it has been reserved for the Kaiser and his generals to interpret the word as a synonym for rapine and sacrilege, slaughter of unarmed citizens and their children, violation of women, and senseless destruction of all that is beautiful but not portable. A year ago we were so simple as to believe that men had become more humane than their forefathers, and that means had been devised at The Hague and elsewhere to purge even war of the worst of its horrors. Certainly it is not to mediaeval chronicles that we should have turned for guidance in their merciful conduct of a campaign; yet the five-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Agincourt my remind us that Henry V of England, in setting forth upon the invasion of France (a campaign, be it admitted, of sheer aggression) issued the strictest orders against plunder of all sorts, burning of houses etc., sacrilege and violence to women under pain of death, and prescribed minor, but very severe, penalties upon soldiers who should wantonly injure orchards and vineyards.⁴² All conception of war by those who have never been on active service and all experience by those who have so served, have been so utterly set at naught by the scale and fury of the conflict which has now raged for more than a year, that one might hesitate before reviving memories of less stupendous strife. It is somewhat remarkable, indeed, that among the myriad battle-fields of Europe, that of Agincourt should still be reckoned famous; for not only was the English army equivalent in numbers to no more than a couple of modern brigades, but the victory proved barren of all advantage to the conqueror and is memorable only as a soveran (sic) feat of arms.

 

In the school of decisive battles, Agincourt was indeed to have little place, but before we turn to how military historians dealt with it, we must retrace our steps to look at how work on both chronicle and administrative sources affected the historical study of the engagement.

 

The search for sources:

Sir Harris Nicolas, Sir Joseph Hunter and J.H. Wylie

 

Maxwell’s account of the battle relied heavily on Ramsey’s Lancaster and York (1892), and the plan he provided was identical to that provided by Ramsey. But he was able to add in references to the First English Life. Ramsey had not been able to use this text as it was only identified early in the twentieth century, and edited by Kingsford in 1911. Indeed, as the work of Ramsey and Kingsford shows, it was not the impulse of the desire to commemorate the battle or a study of the field itself which generated new insights. Such insights were only achieved through fuller attention to the source materials. Already in the later Tudor period, the heralds had exploited a listing of men at the battle which certainly had its origins in the period itself. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Thomas Rymer and Robert Sanderson made transcripts and extracts from other royal records, some of which found their way into volume nine of the Foedera and thence, as we have seen, into secondary works. In the early 1700s too, Thomas Hearne produced editions of Tito Livio and the Pseudo-Elmham. But it was the printing of the Gesta, or as it was then called, ‘The Chaplain’, by Harris Nicolas in his Battle of Agincourt (1827) and subsequently by Benjamin Williams in 1850, which contributed most to historians’ accounts of the battle from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Williams produced a straightforward edition of the Gesta with some extracts from the Chronicles of Normandy. Nicolas had done much more by producing what is still the only extended study of the battle. But he was far from what we would now consider ‘a historian’ both in background and in approach. His career is so fascinating and his book so important that it is worth giving an outline of both.⁴³

The end of the Napoleonic wars put Nicolas, like many other naval officers, on half pay; financial difficulties (a seemingly recurrent problem throughout his life) forced him to seek another career. He trained for the bar, being called at the Inner Temple in May 1825, and specialised in peerage claims lodged before the Lords, an activity which no doubt complemented his developing interests in the medieval and early modern periods. If the end of his navy career was one stimulus to his research, his marriage was another. His wife, whom he married in 1822, claimed descent from William Davison, secretary of state to Elizabeth I. This prompted Nicolas to research her illustrious ancestor. In 1824 he was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and joined its council in 1826, but after attending one meeting he never seems to have been present again. Whatever the precise circumstances there is every indication that he had fallen out with the Society. Alongside his impecuniousness was a propensity for arguing with members of the antiquarian establishment. He soon began to ask questions about the state of the Society of Antiquaries, demanding its reform. An unsurprisingly cool response from its officials led to his withdrawal from the Society in 1828. By 1830 he had switched his attention to the Record Commission (which the government had set up to investigate and publish records), inveighing against its constitution and cost. His views were communicated to Lord Melbourne in his ‘Observations on the state of Historical Literature and on the Society of Antiquaries, with remarks on the Record Commission’. But his criticisms this time bore some fruit; a Select Committee was established to look into the Record Commission in 1836 and Nicolas was amongst those who gave evidence to it. Ten years later, he was engaged in another dispute with the Director of the British Museum, Sir Anthony Panizzi. This stemmed from Nicolas’ observations ‘on the supply of printed books from the library to the reading room of the British Museum’, a dispute which may ring many modern bells and which generated a good deal of pamphleteering and article writing in the Spectator. In October 1831 Nicolas was appointed knight of the Guelphs of Hanover, and later rose to chancellor and knight commander of the order of St Michael and St George (1832) and to the grand cross of the latter in 1840, honours which testify to his standing. It seems that his criticisms of the archival fraternity bore fruit for some reforms did ensue, and he was well regarded in retrospect, especially for his publication of records which brought materials to wider knowledge. But his parlous financial position was never successfully resolved, being exacerbated by his family of eight surviving children. In 1848 he was forced to leave London because of financial problems and took exile in a suburb of Boulogne where he died on 3 August of the same year.

The first edition (1827) of the History of the Battle of Agincourt was dedicated to King George IV ‘under whose auspices the splendour even of that victory has been rivaled, if not eclipsed’, as Nicolas put it rather obsequiously. As he explained, the stimulus for this book was his discovery in the British Museum (now Library) of an early seventeenth-century herald’s copy of a list of the English army at Agincourt (Harleian 782). He initially intended to publish this with a few pages of background but subsequently resolved ‘to collect all which had been said by contemporary writers of both countries on the subject; together with an account of the preparations for the expedition itself from the public records’. A central part of this project was a translation of the hitherto little known Gesta, against which he set translated extracts from other French and English chroniclers. He also drew on extracts from administrative records which had been prepared by Robert Sanderson for Rymer’s Foedera, and which were by then in the British Museum, although unfortunately Nicolas gave an incorrect reference for these (Sloane 6400 instead of the correct 4600). To this he added much miscellaneous material from the Foedera proper, and from Cottonian manuscripts in the British Museum, a miscellaneous collection of copies and originals which enabled him to provide further details on the campaign and on the English army.⁴⁴ The History of the Battle of Agincourt takes the form of Nicolas’ own narrative of the campaign, a translation of the Gesta from the point of embarkation to the morrow of the battle (which is glossed by comparisons with other chronicles), and numerous documentary extracts and listings, including the Agincourt roll. For a second edition in 1832, Nicolas reordered the book and added further materials to it.⁴⁵ The third edition of 1833 is essentially a reprint of that of the previous year.

What Nicolas did with some of this material was sometimes misconceived and led to some new myths and confusions, but there can be no doubt that he brought a vast amount of material into the public domain for the first time, including literary materials and administrative materials. Particularly significant was the fact that he based his account almost entirely on fifteenth-century chronicles rather than on sixteenth-century histories. This was a tremendous achievement, even if, to the modern eye, it is sometimes lacking in critical bite (especially on the chronicle sources which Nicolas tends to treat with some awe) and in a true understanding of the workings of medieval military administration. His account of the deployment of troops is not in itself odd.

 

The main body of the English army consisting of men-at-arms was commanded by Henry in person: the vanguard, which at the particular request of the duke of York was committed to his charge, was posted as a wing to the right; and the rear-guard commanded by Lord Camois, as a wing on the left. The archers were placed between the wings, in the form of a wedge, with their poles fixed before them to defend them from an attack of cavalry; and the flanks were protected by hedges and coppices.

 

What is strange, however, is the diagrammatic representation which he gave of this where he had Henry’s main battle at the rear across the width of the field (fig. 4). The van and rear guard are placed in front of it, with the archers positioned in one giant triangular shaped wedge between them.⁴⁶ There is no further discussion of this formation in the text of the book, but it is important to realise that Nicolas’ plan of the field was probably the first to appear in print in Britain, as Woodford’s plan of 1818 remained unpublished. Either Nicolas, or his printer, placed the village of Agincourt to the right rather than the left of the armies.

A shortcoming which is obvious to a modern eye is the lack of use of original manuscripts from the public records proper.⁴⁷ With only one or two exceptions, every reference is to stray originals, copies and extracts in the British Museum collections. Nicolas lacked an overall context in which to place these. He also believed that he had established who was present at the battle. He based this assumption on his transcript of the list in British Library Harleian 782, taken from a larger collection of materials assembled by Ralph Broke, York Herald in c. 1604. Nicolas collated this list of ‘dukes, erles, barons, knights, esquires, serviteurs and others that wer withe the excellent prince King Henry the Fifte at the battell of Agincourt’ with a late sixteenth-century list in the College of Arms, believing the latter to have been transcribed from an original manuscript.⁴⁸ Both lists gave numbers of archers but not their names. Thus arose the myth that we did not know the names of the archers at Agincourt.⁴⁹

Nicolas did not use original documents which were still kept in the ancient Exchequer repositories at the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey. This was partly because of the chaotic state in which the public records lay. As Nicolas himself lamented, such Exchequer records were ‘now lying in bags in Westminster Hall, in their present condition perfectly useless, and as little heeded as if, instead of illustrating the history of this country, they were the papers of an insolvent tradesman’.⁵⁰ Indeed this gave him the opportunity to lambast the authorities once more and one cannot help feeling that one of the reasons for his lack of access to the public records may have been his truculent attitude towards the antiquarian and government establishment.

It fell to his contemporary, Sir Joseph Hunter (1783–1861), to begin the systematic search of the public records and to indicate their potential for the study of the battle.⁵¹ As an establishment figure, his career provides an interesting contrast with that of Nicolas. Hunter was born the son of a cutler in Sheffield, but even as a child he developed an interest in antiquarian matters. After training for the Presbyterian ministry he moved to take charge of a congregation in Bath, but his first publication concerned the history of Hallamshire, his place of origin. Between 1800 and 1837 there were six Royal Commissions into the public records. The first (1800) recommended the publication of calendars as well as of whole texts in the case of significant manuscripts, and led to the setting up of the Record Commission. In 1833 Hunter was appointed one of the latter’s sub-commissioners and moved to London. Here he edited several volumes of records, including the earliest known Pipe Roll of 1130–1. By the 1830s there was much criticism of the operation of the Record Commission, not least by Nicolas. Its operation was thus terminated in 1837 as a result of the last Royal Commission into the public records, which recommended instead the setting up of a proper Public Record Office. Hunter was immediately appointed an assistant keeper and given the task of compiling a calendar of the records of the Queens Remembrancer, part of the vast Exchequer collection, within which lay the materials concerning the Agincourt campaign. In 1850 he published Agincourt. A Contribution towards an authentic list of the Commanders of the English Host in King Henry the Fifth’s Expedition to France in the third year of his reign.⁵² In preparation of this small book, he examined many of the records which were at that stage still kept in rather random fashion in the ancient Exchequer repositories at Westminster Abbey and the Tower. (The search rooms in the Public Record Office did not open until 1866.) Some of the notebooks from his study of the Queens Remembrancer materials are still extant in the British Library.⁵³ Here he made abstracts of some of the accounts which captains presented to the Exchequer after the campaign. These are useful but are no substitute for reading the originals which are now helpfully catalogued in the Public Record Office, and which will be discussed in the next chapter. In fact, one does need to exercise some care in using Hunter’s notebooks. Based on one of them, Allmand tells us that Sir Thomas Erpingham stayed at Harfleur after the siege, and thus by implication was not at the battle.⁵⁴ This may come as something of a shock to those who have read the accounts of Waurin, Monstrelet and Le Fèvre where Erpingham has a role in deploying the army and setting the battle in train, or of the many secondary works which put him as commander of the archers. In fact, the page in Hunter’s notebook has been bound in the wrong way round, so that the reference is not in fact to Sir Thomas Erpingham. From the original materials in the Public Record Office relating to Erpingham’s post-campaign account roll, on which Hunter drew and which he transcribed accurately, we can be certain that Erpingham was indeed at the battle, even if they cannot confirm the chroniclers’ account of his specific military command.

Hunter’s publication of 1850 shows that he was to some degree responding to a major obsession which exercised Nicolas and other antiquarian minds, namely who served on the campaign. He thus produced a catalogue of names organised under seven heads: princes of the blood royal; earls; barons; bannerets and knights; esquires and other persons who indented singly; persons indenting jointly; and persons not military, attached to the army. He also gave information about each person and his retinue based upon what he had found in the Exchequer material. A couple of examples will suffice:⁵⁵

 

(Knights.) Sir Simon Felbrigge. He indented to serve with 11 men-at-arms and 36 archers. Robert Todenham and Bartholemew Appleyard, two of the men-at-arms died at Harfleur. Six returned home from Harfleur sick. The rest, and the 36 archers were at Agincourt.

(Esquires and others who indented singly.) Thomas Wilcotes. He indented to serve with one man-at-arms and 6 archers. The name of his man-at-arms was William Wykham. On 28th September he and 2 of his archers had license to return from Harfleur, on account of sickness. The rest were at the battle. He appears to have died of the sickness, the Account being rendered by his mother, Elizabeth Wilcotes, who was his executrix, and John Wilcotes, junior, his brother and heir.

 

Hunter’s ‘authentic list’ was accompanied by a short discussion of the organisation of the armies and the nature of the documentary evidence. He printed some useful specimen texts showing a full understanding of how the archives had come about, much fuller than that displayed by Nicolas who had not used the original materials. Hunter carried out pioneering work in the archive materials but he was well aware of the limitations of his ‘small tract’ and that it did not exploit the material to the full. At this stage, the Exchequer materials were difficult to use as they were largely uncatalogued. There are thus no document reference numbers in Hunter’s published work, though some are supplied in his notebooks. He was also responsible for organisation of the Exchequer Accounts Various in which the Agincourt musters and other documents were placed.⁵⁶

His book on Agincourt was not, it seems, widely known, but it stimulated at least one other commentator early on. In 1863, William Durrant Cooper produced a study of ‘Sussex Men at Agincourt’ based on surviving materials in the public records and giving complete transcripts of the names in some retinue rolls. There was a strong genealogical bent here. ‘Many a familiar name, to be found alike in the following lists and in the recent muster roll of the Artillery and Rifles on Brighton Downs, will prove, however, that, after the lapse of four centuries and a half, the bearers of those names in our day are as ready to defend their own hearths and homes as were their predecessors to uphold the military renown of their sovereign before the walls of Harfleur and on the banks of the Ternoise.’⁵⁷ This statement makes more sense when we remember English fears of French invasion in time of Napoleon III, and the elaborate and expensive fortifications along the south coasts which they prompted.

By the early twentieth century, the public records enjoyed a greater degree of organisation and accessibility. This is apparent from the work of James Hamilton Wylie (1844–1914), as manifested in his article on the Agincourt roll published in 1911.⁵⁸ In this, Wylie applauded Hunter’s work as being ‘of the first importance’, and was fairly certain that he had been able to identify in the Public Record Office every document which Hunter had used in his book of 1850. Wylie’s article is of the utmost importance. Not only did it assess the heralds’ Agincourt rolls and the list of retinues Nicolas had taken from materials associated with Rymer’s Foedera, it also began to set in context the various documents from the Exchequer accounts.

Wylie’s understanding of the procedures of the Exchequer and hence of documentary survivals was impressive, as is revealed by his Reign of Henry V. This was intended as an extremely thorough account of the reign, although such unmitigated comprehensiveness places the work still in an antiquarian tradition. Whilst many primary materials were used by Wylie, so too were many secondary. He tended to treat all the information he had collected as of equal veracity, and he was the master of the gratuitous and tangential footnote. As a result, there is no hierarchy of facts and often no critical discussion of events. Wylie was not an academic by profession but spent most of his life as HM Inspector of Schools, although the respect with which he was held in the scholarly world is testified by his being Ford Lecturer at Oxford in 1900.⁵⁹

As noted in the introduction to this present book, Wylie died before completing his study of the reign of Henry V. The first two volumes, together numbering more than 1,000 pages, take the story to 1416. These were his own work, whilst the third volume, covering the remainder of the reign in less than 500 pages, was written by W.T. Waugh, although drawing wherever possible on Wylie’s notes. There is much in the first volume on the preparations for the campaign. Henry prepares to set sail at the very end of it, and lands in France at the beginning of the second volume. The siege of Harfleur, battle and its aftermath occupy over half of the latter’s 480 pages. The style is on the whole narrative, but Wylie shows a good grasp of the administrative records. On the latter, his footnotes are a mine of information although the organisation of the work can make it difficult to pull the various references together. In chapter 35 of volume 2, he shows his awareness of the hazards involved in using chronicle sources for a study of the battle.

 

It remains therefore to look as narrowly as we can into such scattered evidence as has come down to us from eye-witnesses or at least contemporaries. The usual plan has been to call out everything that is picturesque in the accounts of the various writers who narrated the events anytime within the succeeding century and blend them together into a patchwork whole, provided that they do not carry contradiction on the face of them. My own effort has been to depend for essentials only on the statements of those who saw the battle with their own eyes or had good means of information at the time.⁶⁰

 

Wylie’s analysis of the reliability of the chronicles is broadly the same as my own. He subsequently tries to establish the ‘just estimate of the causes of the gigantic failure of the French...out of the mass of contradictory evidence contained in these various writers’. Here, however, he succumbs to mixing early and later interpretations so that the resulting analysis is confusing. He observes that in the nineteenth century, criticisms of the French began to be supplanted in their own histories and even in some English works by a stress on French ‘bravery, devotion and folly’. He notes that Jules Michelet praised Nicolas’s study for its impartiality, and even claimed Nicolas as French because his great-grandfather was a Huguenot.⁶¹ Wylie also observes perceptively that ‘it did not take long before swarms of circumstantial myths began to gather round the story, and so deeply have they struck their roots that we may despair of ever again being able to read it in its original simplicity’.⁶² Here again, however, he mixes texts of the period with those of later centuries, although his conclusions may strike a familiar chord.

 

In short there is not a single detail of the battle that does not get transformed or turned completely upside down somehow or somewhere except the fact that the French lost and the English won ... In presence of all these intricate contradictions it becomes a matter of some importance to enter a word of caution likewise against a peculiarly subtle and fascinating form of self-deception that will beset the student as he looks into the evidence for the details of the battle. For in the general dearth of anything approaching first-hand knowledge the Victorian publisher discovered that the reader could best be allured to accept a theory if it was illustrated by a plan or a map. Hence arose a great outburst of graphic representation in which a succession of modern savants have tried their hands at illustrating what they consider to have been the tactics of the field, even recording the changes at different hours of the day. But as these sketches, where not directly copied, differ wholly from one another in setting out their pretty squares, oblongs and triangles, with neat batteries of guns packed on either flank, they can but serve as a pictorial warning, and when we examine a few of them side by side they only help to emphasise the fact that we have not yet arrived at certainty in regard to the first essential details of that eventful day and on the existing data I fear we never shall.⁶³

 

There is some hypocrisy in Wylie’s view here, however, for whilst not stooping to the drawing of a plan himself, he did come to a conclusion on the positioning of Henry’s troops, based on an agglomeration of material from different chronicles. Henry ‘put himself at the head of the main battle which was formed up in one unbroken line, four deep, in front of the wood at Maisoncelle... the king himself took command of the central portion of the main body, throwing out two wings to right and left in echelon... spanning his whole front and circling it from flank to flank like a crown were placed the archers, clumped in triangular wedges, each block being ranged in masses of about 200 men each in the usual open order like a hearse or harrow, with the apex tending inwards, thus presenting broad volleying faces in every direction’. Wylie then has the English moving forward, although he is vague about how far they moved and how in terms of time and space this related to the intended French cavalry assault on the wings ‘who were to charge down upon the archers, trample them and drive them in and then roll up the main body by mere weight of numbers’.⁶⁴

Wylie’s book is not easy to use because of the heaping up of detail. In addition he cites contemporary and later sources without discriminating clearly between them. But in his defence, he was all too aware of the ‘mass of contradictory evidence’ and of the different perspectives of English and French chroniclers. He also includes a useful discussion of the ‘circumstantial myths’ which developed from the sixteenth century onwards.⁶⁵ Until there is a full study based upon modern historical standards, Wylie’s account of the battle will continue to stand as the most comprehensive. It also gives us a fascinating insight into the styles of research and the formation of historical judgments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

 

Military histories, military men

 

Wylie’s vitriolic outburst about the folly of attempting diagrammatic representations is immediately followed by his restrained apoplexy on the interpretation of the battle put forward by Delbrück. The latter was one of several authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to write a history of warfare covering an extended period. Indeed, this style of approach, with its handmaiden, the ‘decisive battles’ school, gave rise to works which have remained highly influential well into our present century.⁶⁶ There are two distinctive elements in Delbrück’s interpretation. The first is that he sees Agincourt as demonstrating the application of the defensive tactics of Crécy to an offensive situation. The English army at Agincourt was similarly comprised of men-at-arms and archers, but with a much greater preponderance of the latter compared with 1346. The higher ratio of archers explains why Henry deliberately chose to move his men towards the French so that they might come within shooting range of their enemy. Once there, they replanted the stakes in front of the archers on the flanks. The French foolishly ‘allowed the English enough time to shift this part of their defensive tactics into the defensive’. Then Henry had his centre advance ‘so that their hail of arrows against the French foot troops would force the knights to attack, leading them then into the volley of arrows from the withheld and palisaded English flanks’. The subsequent French error, Delbrück suggests, was two-fold. First, they adopted far too defensive a position themselves and made no effort to move against the English. ‘It would probably have been even more appropriate to attack the English somewhere during the preceding days of marching, since the French army, by its composition, was simply unsuited for the defensive.’ Delbrück suggests that Henry had foreseen this possibility, which was why he had ordered his archers to prepare stakes during the march on the assumption that, with a gross imbalance of archers to men-at-arms, they would need to form a strongly defensive position whenever attacked. The second French error was to divide up their army. ‘The French mounted units that were supposed to attack the archers were only a part of the French army, and in their advance they encountered the total strength of the English, whereas the main part of their army waited inactively in the defensive position... the defensive is a very poor form of combat for an army with close-combat weapons. The proper action for them would have been to move over into the attack with both their mounted troops and their foot soldiers at the moment when the English marksmen were close enough.’

The second distinctive feature of Delbrück’s interpretation, and that which perturbed Wylie most, was the argument that the English outnumbered the French. He suggests that the reason why the French did not attack Henry after the latter’s crossing of the Somme was that they were still awaiting reinforcements. Although the French moved faster and were thus able to get ahead of Henry and block his passage, this was ‘at the price of preventing their reinforcements from catching up under such march conditions.’ Although the duke of Brabant himself managed to appear at the battle it was without his troops. Thus, based on figures initially advanced by Niethe, Delbrück puts the English at the battle at 9,000 men and the French at between 4,000 and 6000.

This argument on numbers was maintained by Ferdinand Lot in his general history of medieval warfare.⁶⁷ He expands on the view that chroniclers’ numbers cannot be trusted: ‘the number for them was a matter intended to produce an effect of astonishment and marvel on the part of the reader: it falls within the art of literature.’⁶⁸ In his account of the battle,⁶⁹ he considers that the situation of the French was ‘not as advantageous as one might have thought. Their number, despite what has been said, probably did not exceed the number of the English if even it came as high, as we shall see’. He later suggests, however, that the French army cannot have been as large as the 6,000 he assigns to the English. This he argues on the basis of the width of the battle field, which he places at 700 metres. He claims that if the French had outnumbered the English by four to one, the weight and strength of their army would have been great enough to push back the English; they would not simply have piled up in front of the English as the chroniclers tell us happened. Moreover, when the French were mounted and in three lines one behind the other, there would only have been room across the field for 1,800 knights. Thus according to Lot, ‘If one accepts the hypothesis that there was twice the number of archers and crossbowmen, one arrives at the conclusion that the French army was not superior but probably inferior in number to the English army.’⁷⁰

Lot also blames the French for being slow in assembling an army, noting that Charles VI only took the oriflamme from St Denis on 10 September. By not mounting an immediate attack to relieve Harfleur, the French king had effectively to resummon his army at Rouen in order to pursue the English. Lot also blames divisions within the French even on the day.

 

‘The constable d’Albret only enjoyed a minimal prestige in the eyes of the princes of the blood. He and the marshal Bouccicaut, mindful of what had happened in the past, were in favour of a defensive plan. They had dissuaded the king and the dauphin from going to the aid of Harfleur. At the moment that the battle was about to begin, they wished to temporise, believing that exhaustion, hunger, and sickness would yield up the English army without the need to fight. The young men, on the other hand, were in favour of a full and immediate charge, and they disputed bitterly amongst themselves the honour of being in the van. Finally they decided to stay on the defensive. The weather played its part. It rained all might and on the morning of 25 October, it was clear that a full scale cavalry charge by the French was impractical on the sodden ground. And furthermore, the narrowness of the battle field, 700 metres at most, made deployment of one single line impossible. They had to range their army in four lines: behind a van which was mounted [on the next page he has the first line of French as dismounted and weighed down by their armour], two lines of dismounted cavalry, in imitation of the English, and a third of mounted cavalry. As for the archers, they had them moved straightaway back to very rear for fear that they might share in the honour of the day for the French knights had no doubt but that they would be victorious. They were in such little doubt that they refused, in the early hours of the day, Henry’s request that he should be allowed to pass on to Calais.’

 

Lot has the first line of French going in on foot and driving back the English, but suggests that the situation was re-established by the English archers attacking the French in the flank. Though he does not mention a French cavalry attack here, he then has the first line retreating on foot or on horse, and thus harassing the second line as in advance. Only 600 men could be gathered to form a third line. The blame must therefore lie with the French. ‘Whatever is claimed, the French knights had displayed the same bravery as in the past but also had proved the same level of tactical incapacity.’ But praise is also given to Henry for his confidence in daring to advance against the enemy, and for his planning, as in the use of the archers, although earlier Lot shows his patriotism by describing Henry as ‘a bigot, consumed by ambition and an all consuming deceitfulness’.

Even if it is accepted that most chronicle estimates of French numbers are too high, it would seem difficult to accept that the French did not have the numerical advantage. Lot does appreciate, however, the difficulty of knowing the English deployment for certain. Although Waurin has the archers on the wings, other writers have them divided between the three battles. The latter version had already been accepted by Sir Charles Oman, who also wrote a general history of medieval warfare in the late nineteenth century.⁷¹ For him, the English army was arrayed as at Crécy, with archers on each wing of each battle: ‘they were in each case thrown slightly forward so that where the archery of the centre met those of the vaward and rereward two projecting angles were formed’ (see fig. 5). He also has three French lines, as well as small cavalry groups to launch an initial attack. The latter were driven back but he does not have them clashing into the advancing van on foot, suggesting rather that the latter were weakened by ‘having to open the ranks to allow the flight of the beaten cavalry’. When Oman wrote of the battle thirty years or so later in the Cambridge Medieval History, he expressed himself more convinced that Henry wanted a fight in 1415. ‘Agincourt saw a new modification of tactics: finding the enemy’s main body slow in coming on – the recent heavy rain had made the fields into a slough, and the French could only shuffle forward at a snail pace in their heavy armour – Henry took the offensive. He advanced against the enemy, halted long enough to let his archers riddle the front line with arrows and then ordered a general charge, in which the lightly equipped bowmen joined in with their hand-weapons’. Thus in this later account, Oman omits any mention of French cavalry charges as the first stage of the battle.⁷²

Lot inveighed against the use of battles as the main illustrations of military development. This line has become a mantra of all modern works, so much so that recent general studies of medieval warfare, such as Contamine’s War in the Middle Ages, have solved the issue by saying relatively little about Agincourt.⁷³ J.C. Fuller did not include it in his Decisive Battles of the World. This is perhaps not surprising for it was also omitted from the mid nineteenth-century best seller, E. Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, on which Fuller was exceptionally dependent.⁷⁴ Agincourt’s place in general histories of warfare is thus not substantial, perhaps because it was seen as a similar victory to those of the fourteenth century: indeed, I have been struck by the relative paucity of modern writings on the battle. Perhaps it was felt that the works of Nicolas and Wylie said all that was necessary. There is one group of writings, however, which deserves some further comment – the observations of serving soldiers and veterans upon military actions of the past.

We have seen already how the First World War stimulated interest in Agincourt. Even before this, however, soldiers were fascinated by it and other actions of the past, from which they hoped to draw lessons for the present and for the future. A good example of this is an article on the battle published by Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice in 1908.⁷⁵ Here we have the eye of the seasoned commander (assisted by Colonel Hime of the Royal Artillery who provided ‘the sketch and description of the defensive preparation made to protect the front of the archers at the battle’), claiming that Henry V would not be best pleased to find his march from Harfleur criticised as rash or dangerous (as Wylie had done). As Maurice wrote, ‘Now it seems to me that the essence of Henry’s skill as a commander consisted in that apparently rash march which tempted he armed chivalry of France to attack him at a time when he was firmly convinced that, if he could induce them to do so, he had in the coming battle, surprises in store for them which would ensure him the victory.’ These surprises included Henry’s guns – pretty surprising for modern historians too as there is no documentary reference to justify that the English had any ordnance at the battle. Maurice remarked, ‘It is probable that he [Henry] counted very largely on the heavy and cumbrous artillery that he dragged with him to the field; but as the guns required ten minutes or a quarter of an hour to load, they could not have effected much, as the battle lasted only three hours.’ He went on to claim that the appearance of artillery at the battle was important as an indication of the change which was coming over the nature of warfare’ [as he later notes, ‘from the very first the new arm, the artillery, became in both countries part of the royal forces’], but for the time being the main surprise was the use of the archers, behind defences and in herse formation, with Henry V being, according to Maurice, the first to realise the advantage of the long bow.

Worse is to come. ‘The effect in England of the fact that the Norman king [here he means Henry V] and his chief barons had become by the battle popular heroes was of great social influence in this country in blending together the two races: and that the victory should have been won by the Saxon yeomen under the leadership and by the skill of the king, tended very greatly to make a nation out of elements that had only hitherto consisted of a dominant and a subject race.’ This is as near as we get to a Whig interpretation of the battle and its effects. It is also applied by rather dubious means to France by reference to the end of the great feudatories such as Burgundy under Louis XI. Agincourt is thus ascribed an overwhelming importance in historical change.

 

It is in the promise for the future that the battle of Agincourt throws a light upon this dark time – order coming out of disorder, national strength out of internecine squabbles that were making it impotent against any force from without. Properly speaking the battle closed up the conditions of the Middle Ages, and opened the beginning of the new era. Thus the battle has a far greater historical importance than has usually been attributed to it. I venture to hope that our modern historians may look into the matter for themselves, and accept my suggestion as to the mode in which the presentation of the case to the generation that succeeds ours needs to be amended.

 

Another form of this quasi-empathetic stance is illustrated by Famous Engagements and their Battlefields Today, published by Lieutenant-Colonel Howard Green in 1969.⁷⁶ This was essentially intended as a guide to what can be seen from the battlefield today. Although Green was of the opinion that certain ‘famous engagements’ turned the course of history, he followed the line of Creasy and Fuller that Agincourt was not one of them. Instead he applies the eye and experience of the modern soldier to empathise with his military predecessors. So, for instance, he imagines the difficulties of transporting men across the channel with their horses and equipment. ‘After their prolonged period on board the really very small ships in appalling discomfort, the men were very “soft” and not up to the hard work that was immediately required of them’ and which ‘taxed heavily their already lowered stamina’, prompting them, in the hot weather, to eat fruit and to drink ‘the unaccustomed wine’, thus causing dysentery. And later, ‘Prima facie the peasant population was naturally hostile to an invading army from a traditionally enemy country. Nevertheless the British soldier was, in 1415, as adept at making friends with foreign civilians, and especially the girls, as he was in 1914, and the local ale-houses were crammed in the evenings with thirsty archers and men-at-arms who had a little pay to spend’. There is a similar tone in W.B. Kerr’s work: ‘they had all the ups and downs of a soldier’s life ... they had felt the depth of gloom and the joy of deliverance...life for a short space had been full and varied’.⁷⁷ Note too Green’s anachronistic use of ‘British’. In article published in 1944, R.L. Mackie took to task a French writer for calling Agincourt a British victory, reminding his readers that ‘since the few Scottish soldiers who did take part in the battle fought on the French side, Scotland can claim no share in the glory or the guilt of Agincourt’, and that it was Scottish soldiers who liberated the French peasantry in the 1420s.⁷⁸

The most well known work by an ex-soldier must be Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Burne’s The Agincourt War.⁷⁹ Burne was much influenced, both in his account of Agincourt as of other engagements, by his own experiences as an artillery commander in the First World War, where he served with much distinction. He had much confidence in his ability to interpret the battle not only from the ground itself but also from ‘inherent military probability’, based on his own experiences and his reading of military history in general. He was thus dismissive of Wylie’s account.

 

Wylie was not a soldier, and if he visited the ground he did not attempt to draw a battle plan. One gets the feeling that he was so immersed in detail that he had not himself a clear idea of the actual course of events, still less of the lessons to be drawn from this famous battle.⁸⁰

 

For Burne, there was a delightful order to the English army, ‘a regular trained army of selected soldiers’, whereas the French were ‘a vast rabble-like horde of hastily raised troops, of a heterogeneous nature’.⁸¹ The ground over which they fought was ‘easily described for it is beautifully symmetrical. If the two contestants really desired a field that would give no advantage to either side as they declared, they certainly found it at Agincourt.’ As Burne drew in a sketch map in his book,

 

the arena formed a rectangle, the two sides being formed by the woods surrounding the villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt, the open space being 940 yards wide at the narrowest point and the two ends being formed by the two armies in line, just over 1,000 yards apart. There was a barely perceptible dip between the two armies, but the two flanks fell away appreciably, a surprising discovery to the visitor, for no account mentions the fact. Owing to the slight dip between them the two armies were in full view of one another, each army filled the open space, a newly-sown wheat field, and as the arenas was slightly wider on the French side it follows that their line was slightly longer than the English, about 1, 200 yards to 950.

 

Burne followed the same line as Kingsford in believing that each of the three divisions of the English army had archers on its wings, but he also spoke of the following:

 

a strong force of what we should now call “army archers” attached to no division but formed in two bodies one on each wing [see fig. 6]. The archers of the centre division would thus be in contact with the archers on the inner wings of the flank divisions: likewise the outside archers of the flank divisions would be in contact with the ‘army archers’. Thus, looked at from the front at a distance as the French would see them (and this is important for my argument) the English army would appear to have men-at-arms in the centre, divided by two small clumps of archers, while the main archer force would be on the wings. I suggest that the army archers were about 3,100 strong and the divisional archers 1,850. Thus the biggest clumps, viewed from the front, would be on the wings, each nearly 1,900 strong. A simple calculation shows that such a formation should just fill the space of 940 yards between the woods.’

 

Here as elsewhere Burne followed what he called ‘Inherent Military Probability’, based not just on common sense but also on his own experiences as a soldier. There is a major flow in his interpretation to my mind. Whilst the chronicles do present problems over the positioning of the archers, there is no way by which one can calculate from them the relative numbers in each group, nor do they give adequate support for the notion of two different types of archers. But Burne was right in seeing the significance of the archers as more than a role as artillery to soften the French attack before it could reach the English lines. He sensibly stressed ‘that glittering initiative’, which led them to drop their bows and enter the mêlée, to kill with knives, daggers and even stakes. This was what for him carried the day for the English.⁸²

It is easy to dismiss the judgments of soldiers of later centuries as anachronistic, and to criticise their selectivity when it comes to the use of sources (although Burne does include some assessment of chronicles). Burne was aware that ‘the reconstruction of all history is largely conjectural, and this applies more to military than to any other branch of history.’⁸³ But he, like other military men, displays a desire to see military neatness and order, and to draw clear lessons from the past. In this context, therefore, such writings tell us as much about the period in which their authors were living and serving as about the era of Agincourt.

 

Recent studies

 

In the last thirty years or so, there have been several studies of the battle. Their authors have focused on the chronicle sources, whilst being all too well aware of the difficulties of using such sources. To quote Christopher Hibbert, for instance, writing in 1964, ‘I have not, however, attempted to explain the wearisome processes which have resulted in my reconciling conflicting statements in the chronicles, since although the reconciliation has led me to an interpretation of some events different from that reached by previous writers of books on the subject, I can make no claims that I have proved anything. We are all merely guessing and the points at issue are, in any case, only relatively minor ones of time and place.’ Hibbert accepts Burne’s view that the archers were both in wedge-shaped groups positioned between the battles and also on the wings, curving into the centre ‘so that the French, when provoked into attack, could be subjected to a hail of arrows not only from the front but from the sides as well’ (see fig. 7).⁸⁴ John Keegan displays equal confidence in the chronicle sources, arguing that the events of the battle are ‘gratifyingly straightforward to relate’. He provides us with the bare outlines of the battle,

 

... as recorded by seven or eight chroniclers who do not materially disagree over the sequence, character or significance of events. Of course, even though three of them were present at the scene, none was an eyewitness of everything, or even of very much, that happened. An army on the morrow of a battle, particularly an army as small as that of Agincourt, must, nevertheless, be a fairly efficient clearing-house of information, and it seems probable that a broadly accurate view of what had happened – though not necessarily why and how it had happened – would quickly crystallize in the mind of any diligent interrogator, while a popularly agreed version, not dissimilar from it, would soon circulate within, and outside the ranks. It would seem reasonable therefore to believe that the narrative of Agincourt handed down to us is a good one; it would in any case be profitless to look for a better.⁸⁵

 

Keegan gives the same version of the positioning of the archers as Hibbert, but adds wisely that we have no real idea of how the archers were commanded. He sees as crucial the fact that the French men-at-arms fell over, for otherwise their weight of numbers would surely have driven back the English, although he does not follow Lot’s conclusion about French numerical inferiority. Once the French became stationary, the outcome of the battle was inevitable. As there were no French troops constituting a threat to them, the archers were able to come in for the kill, as Burne had also stressed.

 

If the archers were now able to reproduce along the flanks of the French mass the same ‘tumbling effect’ which had encumbered its front, its destruction must have been imminent. For most death in battle takes place within well-defined and fairly narrow ‘killing zones’, of which the ‘no-man’s land’ of trench warfare is the best known and most comprehensible example. The depth of the killing zone is determined by the effective range of the most prevalent weapon, which, in infantry battles, is always comparatively short, and, in hand-to-hand fighting, very short – only a few feet. That being so, the longer the winning side can make the killing zone, the more casualties can it inflict. If the English were now able to extend the killing zone from along the face to down the sides of the French mass (an ‘enveloping attack), they threatened to kill very large numbers of Frenchmen indeed.⁸⁶

 

Although this interpretation is inspired, as was Burne, by later analogies, it is altogether a more reasoned analysis. By the time Jim Bradbury considered the battle in his Medieval Archer in 1985, and Matthew Bennett published his study of the battle in 1991, a new document had come to light in the British Library, a French plan of battle.⁸⁷ This could be used as a check against the chronicle sources to explain French tactics. As Bradbury wisely notes, ‘the plan shows that chronicle accounts of battles tend to prolong and separate movements that must often have been designed to coincide. There is clear intention to make one major effort, that would strike at vital points, at the same time engaging all the English forces so that there could be no reinforcement against a successful breakthrough’.⁸⁸ Also, because it seemed to have fallen into French hands before the engagement, the plan could be used to explain Henry’s own actions, especially his ordering a defensive stake hedge for his archers. Bradbury is convinced that the archers were only on the flanks of the whole army, and provides a useful discussion of the issue, emphasising the potentially misleading phraseology of the Gesta where it claims that the king placed ‘wedges’ of archers between each wing (intermisisset cuneos sagittorum suorum cuilibet aciei). Bennett follows the same line (see fig. 8), and usefully provides a discussion of the debate.⁸⁹ Allmand is more equivocal in his biography of Henry: ‘While it is possible that there were groups, or wedges, of archers between the three sections, it is clear that the majority of them were placed on the wings, looking slightly obliquely towards the centre of the French army which opposed them’.⁹⁰ Only Robert Hardy in recent years has followed the older view of archers being placed within the English line as well as on the flanks.⁹¹ Bennett elucidates three phases of the battle: the English advance and French cavalry charges; the main French attack and mêlée; and the killing of the prisoners. In addition, he suggests that the French attack on the baggage was part of the original French battle plan, and not ‘an extemporised attack by a greedy local lord’.⁹² His book is particularly useful for photographs of the field and for coloured diagrams of the English and French positions, although these are by necessity stylised in form and we cannot be certain about the extent and nature of local vegetation in 1415.

Save for the issue of the archers’ positioning, all modern writers have tended to rely in the main on the Gesta’s account. They have in general brought a number of other published chronicle and administrative sources to bear. Although there remains an occasional lack of discrimination in the use of chronicles, with faith continuing to be placed in late accounts and even sixteenth-century versions, recent writers have produced sensible narratives and discussions which are generally consistent with each other, and which benefit from our increased knowledge of medieval military matters as a whole. All modern writers emphasise Henry’s generalship, and the folly of the French, although there remains some uncertainty over the exact tactics and deployment of the latter. But these two basic factors are seen to have combined to produce an overwhelming victory for the English, quickly and with relatively few casualties on the winning side. Such conclusions stand in a long and consistent tradition from the contemporary chronicles onwards, as mediated through histories from the sixteenth century to the twentieth.

One important change of emphasis can be detected, however. Authors of the eighteenth century, writing for an upper class audience, tend to give most stress to the importance of leadership. It was in the nineteenth century that the English archers began to come to the fore, not so much in the work of Nicolas or Hunter, but more in works of a more popular nature, at least at first. Initially this was by virtue of patriotic leanings, and was a development of existing views of the French. The picture of the gallant but socially humble English archer pitted against the debauched and scornful French gentleman was one which appealed to the rising bourgeoisie of Victorian Britain.⁹³ One of the most extreme portrayals occurs in Charles Dickens, A Child’s History of England, with lines such as ‘on the English side, among the little force, there was a good proportion of men who were not gentlemen by any means, but who were good stout archers for all that ...the proud and wicked French nobility who dragged their country to destruction and who were every day and every year regarded with deeper hatred and detestation in the hearts of the French people, learned nothing, even from the defeat of Agincourt’. Dickens was, however, struck by ‘the real desolation and wickedness of war’, a theme which has also coloured modern views, where there has been a much greater willingness to debate the killing of the prisoners, as for example in Keegan’s Face of Battle, and to assess French mortality rates without patriotic hyperbole.⁹⁴ In recent times the English archers have been assessed on military rather than chauvinistic criteria. It is interesting to speculate that views were influenced by both the First and Second World Wars where massed and ‘non-professional’ troops were much deployed. In many ways, the Agincourt archer has been interpreted and portrayed as the ‘Tommy’ of the fifteenth century. As we observed earlier in this book, a direct link was drawn in the popular psyche in the First World War. Today we are more aware of the military significance of a massed firing of arrows in terms of its weakening the French before they were able to engage. In addition, it would appear to have been a tactic which prevented the French from pursuing their own intended plan of battle. Although there have been some variations in emphasis, in general all accounts over the centuries have suggested that the battle was as much lost by the French as won by the English.