Battle of Agincourt (1415): Henry V's Famous Victory

The Battle of Agincourt was fought on 25 October 1415, near the village of Azincourt in northern France, between the army of King Henry V of England and a much larger French force. The exhausted and outnumbered English, most of them archers, won a crushing victory on a muddy field, killing or capturing a large part of the French nobility. Agincourt revived the English claim to the French throne in the Hundred Years’ War and became, largely through Shakespeare, one of the most celebrated battles in English history.

Background

The Hundred Years’ War between England and France had begun in 1337, when Edward III claimed the French crown. After English victories at Crécy and Poitiers in the mid-14th century, the French had recovered most of their lost territory by the 1370s, and the war had settled into long truces.

By 1415 France was weakened by internal conflict. King Charles VI suffered repeated episodes of mental illness, and two factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, fought for control of the government. Henry V, who became king of England in 1413 at the age of about 26, saw an opportunity. He demanded the French crown, or at least the return of the lands once held by his Plantagenet ancestors, along with a marriage to Charles VI’s daughter Catherine and a large dowry.

Negotiations failed, and Henry prepared an invasion. Just before he sailed, he uncovered and crushed the Southampton Plot, a conspiracy by several nobles to replace him with Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March.

The siege of Harfleur and the march

Henry’s fleet sailed from Southampton on 11 August 1415 and landed near Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, on 13–14 August. His army numbered perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 men. Harfleur resisted for more than a month, and the English camp was struck by dysentery, which killed many and forced others to be sent home. The town surrendered on 22 September.

With the campaign season nearly over, Henry decided to march his remaining army overland to the English-held port of Calais, about 200 kilometres to the north-east. They set out on 8 October. Finding the main ford across the River Somme guarded, they were forced to march far upstream, short of food and soaked by autumn rain, before crossing on 19 October.

Meanwhile the French gathered a large army. On 24 October, near the villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt, it finally blocked the English route to Calais. Both armies spent a wet and miserable night within sight of each other.

The armies

The size of the two armies is one of the most debated questions about the battle. Traditional accounts gave the French a huge advantage of five or six to one. Historian Anne Curry, using surviving administrative records, has argued for a smaller gap, with the French perhaps around 12,000 against 8,000 to 9,000 English. Others, such as Juliet Barker, accept a larger French army of 20,000 or more. The consensus is that the English were clearly outnumbered, perhaps by two to one or more.

The composition of the armies was strikingly different. Roughly four-fifths of Henry’s army were archers armed with the longbow, a powerful weapon that took years of practice to master. The rest were men-at-arms, fully armoured soldiers who usually fought on foot. The French army was dominated by men-at-arms from the nobility, with smaller numbers of crossbowmen and archers who played little part in the fighting.

The French king and his heir, the dauphin Louis, were not present. Command was shared by the Constable of France, Charles d’Albret, the Marshal Boucicaut and several great nobles, including the dukes of Orléans, Bourbon and Alençon, whose rivalries made coordinated command difficult.

The battle

The battlefield was a stretch of open, recently ploughed farmland, about 1,000 metres wide, between the woods of Agincourt and Tramecourt. Heavy rain had turned it into deep mud. The narrowing ground meant the larger French army could not use its numbers to outflank the English.

On the morning of 25 October, the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, the armies faced each other for several hours. Neither wanted to attack first. Henry finally ordered his army forward to within long bowshot of the French. His archers drove sharpened wooden stakes into the ground in front of them as a barrier against cavalry and began shooting.

Provoked, the French mounted wings charged, but the horses were checked by the stakes, the mud and the arrows, and many turned back into their own advancing men. The French vanguard of dismounted men-at-arms then advanced across the field. Weighed down by armour, slowed by the mud and pressed together as the field narrowed, they struggled forward under arrow fire.

When they reached the English line, the fighting was savage. The front ranks were pushed forward by those behind, men fell and were unable to rise, and the archers joined in with swords, axes and mallets. The second French division followed into the same crush and suffered the same fate. Edward, Duke of York, was among the few English nobles killed.

The killing of the prisoners

With the battle apparently won, the English held many French prisoners, worth large ransoms. Late in the fighting Henry learned that the English baggage train had been raided, and he saw the French rearguard apparently preparing to attack. Fearing that the prisoners might rearm, he ordered them killed.

Several contemporary chroniclers, both English and French, recorded the order. Some knights reportedly refused to kill men whose ransoms they would lose, and Henry assigned archers to the task. The number killed is unknown, and the order was halted once the threat of a new attack passed. Historians continue to debate whether the decision was a military necessity by the standards of the time or a breach of the laws of war.

Consequences

French losses were very heavy. Commonly cited estimates put the French dead at around 6,000, though figures range from about 4,000 to over 10,000. Among them were the Constable d’Albret, the dukes of Alençon, Bar and Brabant, and hundreds of knights. The dukes of Orléans and Bourbon and Marshal Boucicaut were taken prisoner. Charles of Orléans spent 25 years in captivity in England, where he wrote much of his poetry.

English losses were small, perhaps a few hundred at most; estimates range from about 100 to 600. Besides the Duke of York, the dead included the young Earl of Suffolk and Dafydd Gam, a Welsh squire who had fought against Owain Glyndŵr.

Henry reached Calais and returned to a hero’s welcome in London on 23 November 1415. He invaded France again in 1417 and conquered Normandy. By the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 he married Catherine of Valois and was recognised as heir to the French throne. However, Henry died in 1422, just weeks before Charles VI, and the English position later collapsed after the intervention of Joan of Arc.

Myths and facts

Myth: the English were outnumbered five or six to one. The ratio is uncertain, and recent research suggests it may have been closer to two to one, or less. The English were still clearly outnumbered.

Myth: the two-finger V-sign comes from Agincourt archers. No source from the time records this story; it appears only in much later popular accounts.

Myth: the battle was won by archers alone. The longbow was crucial, but the terrain, the weather and French mistakes mattered just as much, and much of the killing was done at close quarters.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1413, 21 March: Henry V becomes king of England.
• 1415, 11 August: the English fleet sails from Southampton.
• 1415, 22 September: Harfleur surrenders after a five-week siege.
• 1415, 8 October: the English begin their march towards Calais.
• 1415, 19 October: the army crosses the Somme.
• 1415, 25 October: the Battle of Agincourt.
• 1415, 23 November: Henry V enters London in triumph.
• 1420, 21 May: the Treaty of Troyes names Henry heir to France.

Legacy

The victory was celebrated at once in England, in sermons, chronicles and the song known as the Agincourt Carol. Its fame grew through William Shakespeare’s Henry V, first performed around 1599, with its St Crispin’s Day speech and the line “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”. Laurence Olivier’s film of 1944, made during the Second World War, turned the play into patriotic propaganda, and Kenneth Branagh’s version of 1989 gave a darker view of the battle.

Agincourt also became a case study for military historians. John Keegan’s The Face of Battle used it to show what medieval combat was really like for the men in the ranks. The battlefield itself has changed little, and the village of Azincourt has a museum dedicated to the battle.

Why it matters

Agincourt revived English fortunes in the Hundred Years’ War and made Henry V, for a few years, the most powerful ruler in Western Europe. Its heavy losses deepened France’s political crisis. In memory, the battle became a lasting symbol of victory against the odds.