Battle of Agincourt

The Battle of Agincourt is remembered as the ultimate David versus Goliath victory, where King Henry V’s small, exhausted army unleashed a devastating "hailstorm of arrows" to obliterate a French force twice their size. Dr. Eleanor Janega and Matt Lewis uncover how this legendary clash was actually a brilliantly calculated slaughter against a fractured nation, securing Henry's throne and permanently forging the myth of the English underdog. MORE Queen Isabella: She-Wolf of France Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/queen-isabella-she-wolf-of-france/id1564113746?i=1000698125125 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1549buXakOjWxxmQXqgnXc After Agincourt: Henry V’s French Campaigns Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/after-agincourt-henry-vs-french-campaigns/id1564113746?i=1000766609438 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Llf84BfZpVfoTcP2fcnWg Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and Dr. Eleanor Janega. The video producer is McKenna Fernandez. Edited by Matthew Wilson. Studio manager is Hanif Hussain, production manager is Beth Donaldson. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Watch Matt and Eleanor's film The Ascent to Power: Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II now on History Hit TV. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yanega, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:49Eleanor Janega?

  The Battle of Agincourt. It is the ultimate David versus Goliath story. In October 1415, a small, exhausted army of English archers, led by King Henry V, faced down a French force twice their size and somehow won a devastatingly swift victory. King Henry V lured a massive French cavalry charge into a narrow, swampy, tree-lined bottleneck, his hidden archers unleashing an armor-piercing hailstorm of arrows, obliterating the trapped forces. Panicked, a crowd crush ensued. Horses bolted. Under the weight of their armor and mud, thousands of men suffocated to death

• 2:34Eleanor Janega?

  without ever being struck by a weapon. Henry V ruthlessly broke the laws of medieval warfare and took no prisoners. It was an absolute slaughter and carnage. But how did an exhausted, disease-ridden English army pull this off? Welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanega.

• 2:57Matt Lewis?

  And I'm Matt Lewis.

• 2:58Eleanor Janega?

  And today, we are getting knee-deep into this bloody clash to find out how it not only secured Henry's precarious throne, but also forged an underdog myth that still defines the British national memory today.

• 3:29Eleanor Janega?

  Well, Matt, before we can get into what Agincourt was and how it played out, I think we kind of have to talk about what the Hundred Years' War is and why it started. Because I think people now are really confused by this. It's like, why on earth would the King of England have a claim to the throne of France? Right? It seems really crazy to us. But that doesn't seem weird at all from a medieval perspective, right?

• 3:53Matt Lewis?

  Not at all, no. It's perfectly normal. And also, I mean, I'm British, so I'm gonna have to say, "Agincourt, Agincourt."

• 4:01Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, no, oh, no. It's like his Britishness has been activated.

• 4:04Matt Lewis?

  This is massive, yeah. I'm alive. Yeah, so we're gonna get French nobility being killed. We're gonna get kings of England almost being killed. We're gonna get archers with diarrhea having accidents everywhere.

• 4:16Eleanor Janega?

  Normal, yeah, standard.

• 4:17Matt Lewis?

  One of the foundational moments, if Shakespeare can turn this into the foundational moment of English history for most people, I think. So it's gonna be amazing when we get there. But yeah, there is so much background to how we even arrived here. And we'd probably have to go back as far as 1066 and get to the Norman conquest. Because that's the moment in which someone with an interest in France is suddenly now King of England. And from a French history point of view, I think they would probably see this as the beginning of all of their problems for centuries and centuries to come. Because England, up until this point, has largely looked to the North Sea and Scandinavia for all of its connections and has been quite insular otherwise

• 5:00Matt Lewis?

  and lightly connected to the continent, but not really interested. And all of a sudden, you've got a Norman king who has all of this territory in northern France, who has a relationship with the King of France that isn't always friendly with William the Conqueror. And he now has a crown as well and all of this extra land and resources. So suddenly, the French king is having to think very carefully about what he does with one of his subjects, effectively. And also, the King of England is reorienting English focus to northern Europe instead of out to the east.

• 5:35Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, and I think that this is, it's very difficult to put too much emphasis on how important this is for English history. Because it is, as you say, just a complete reframing of where politics happens and where money comes from. And I think that it is very important for us to state, for example, that Normandy is an incredibly rich province, right? This is, there's a reason why a bunch of Vikings went there and were like, "Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna leave." Actually, right, so there's a ton of money to be made there. And especially when we see William the Conqueror kind of come over, he's like, "Oh, yeah, I've conquered England, but still here. I am here in Normandy, thanks very much." And so you do have this constant, where does the actual power lie? And where does the money come from?

• 6:19Eleanor Janega?

  And I think that only becomes more complex when you get to our favorite married couple, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II, right? Because when you then have Henry marry Eleanor, and Eleanor is the largest landholder in France, suddenly, the kings of England control more land than the King of France does, right? And there is always this dance back and forth that they do where the King of France, you know, you'll get a new king, and they'll be like, "Okay, English king, you've got to come do fealty, like kneel, and you're my vassal." And they're always like, "I can't, I'm sick."

• 6:54Matt Lewis?

  I've got a bad knee.

• 6:54Eleanor Janega?

  "I don't want to go down there." You know, and so there is this always like, "I don't want to admit that I am your subject when I am" thing. So there's always this Frenchness. And I mean, let's be so for real. If you met the kings of England at this point in time, they would not speak English.

• 7:10Matt Lewis?

  They would seem like Frenchmen. They would sound like Frenchmen. You would think that they are. And they probably would consider themselves more French than English still at this point by the time you're Henry II.

• 7:19Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 7:20Matt Lewis?

  He's an angevin.

• 7:21Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, right?

• 7:22Matt Lewis?

  He's from the heart of France.

• 7:23Eleanor Janega?

  And they speak French, they don't speak English. English is that's for the people that they control. And I often argue as a counterfactual that had, you know, the English won the whole thing. You know, they win a lot of good battles, as we'll get to. I think that we would probably be speaking French right now, is what would have happened. It isn't that like France would have become English. It's that England would have become France.

• 7:43Matt Lewis?

  When we get to the Hundred Years' War, it's a big kind of existential question in England, isn't it? What if we do this? What if we win and the King of England becomes the King of France? And France is the much bigger, much wealthier territory. Does England then become subservient to France? Because nobody in England wants that. So there is this whole kind of question of what it would mean if the King of England becomes the King of France. And I think that begins even under Henry II, because you get particularly Louis VII, while he's struggling to have a son, and Henry is just accumulating all of this territory and looking more and more threatening, having more and more sons and being more and more impressive and successful. I think you see moments where Louis is like, "What if he comes to Paris?"

• 8:25Eleanor Janega?

  And I think that that is very difficult for us to get our heads around now because we think of nations as always having existed as having these really neat borders, and that's just not medieval, right? And I mean, to be fair, I guess that things are going really, really well for Henry. For John, his most trash son, which is saying something, you know, a lot less so. Because John does manage, like, from the 13th century, to lose a lot of the French territory.

• 8:53Matt Lewis?

  This is the thing, I mean, John manages to be the worst of a really bad bunch of sons.

• 8:57Eleanor Janega?

  So bad.

• 8:58Matt Lewis?

  And he just can't keep hold. I think it demonstrates just how impressive Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine were, that they hold all of this together. And we tend to mark 1204 as the year that John loses it all, which is also the year Eleanor of Aquitaine is no longer around.

• 9:13Eleanor Janega?

  Oopsie, I can't, I don't know how that happened, right?

• 9:15Matt Lewis?

  No, it's almost like she's gone, and it just fragments and falls apart. And John simply doesn't have the talent that his father had or even the ability of Richard, I guess, to lead men and inspire men into battle. And it just falls apart. He also meets an incredibly impressive French king in Philip Augustus, who's just good at playing these games and who has arranged the chessboard while John's not looking ready to go into checkmate mode. But, you know, John loses pretty much everything. There's Gascony, really, is about all he has left by the end of his reign.

• 9:51Eleanor Janega?

  But Gascony's pretty good, though.

• 9:52Matt Lewis?

  Well, Gascony's a good bit.

• 9:52Eleanor Janega?

  Shout out, but...

• 9:53Matt Lewis?

  Good wine, good wine. But it's still important to the English economy, and you still feel like the French are looking at it and thinking, "Yeah, we'll get there, we'll get there soon." Because they want to get the English, the English king, out of France altogether.

• 10:05Eleanor Janega?

  And you can understand why.

• 10:06Matt Lewis?

  Absolutely. And Gascony is still the bit that causes this friction, this, the problem of you need to go and do fealty for Gascony. But no English king wants to get on his knee in front of the French king. So you often want to send your son to do it, or make your excuses and get around it somehow.

• 10:24Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. And then I guess then if we fast forward to the 14th century, this is then where you somehow get the idea that possibly the King of England is supposed to be the King of France. So I think we, in order to understand that, we got to start in about 1328. And this is when Charles IV's line fails. And now this is like, when I start getting very, very interested because the reason his line fails is there were a series of affairs.

• 10:52Matt Lewis?

  It's a massive scandal, isn't it?

• 10:54Eleanor Janega?

  Huge. Yeah, the, the Tara of Nestle affair, where it's, it turns out that not only was the Queen of France playing away, but like all of the princesses, all of the duchesses were having these affairs with knights. The knights in question are lightly tortured and killed as a result of this. But the thing that happens is that the succession is called into question because Charles did have heirs, but then everyone was like, well, we don't know if that is actually your kid. So and then enter friend of the podcast, Isabella the She-Wolf. We love Isabella.

• 11:31Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And I mean, up until this point, the Capetians have been incredibly successful at producing father, son, father, son, father, son, father, son. It's been great. But Charles is the, the third of three brothers to sit on the throne and fail to produce an heir that succeeds him. And all that's left of that line is their sister Isabella. And she's, she's happy, happy to claim the throne for her son. You know, I've got, I've got a son. He's, he's pretty cool. He could come over and be King of France. That wouldn't be a problem with it.

• 12:01Eleanor Janega?

  She's also the one who leaked about all the affairs too. Coincidentally, it's funny that Isabelle noticed all of the shagging and then it's like, oh, but I do have a son.

• 12:11Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Eleanor Janega?

  Isn't it? Isn't it?

• 12:13Matt Lewis?

  We, we call her the She-Wolf of France. I wonder if they call her the She-Wolf of England. Chuck this hand grenade into French politics.

• 12:18Eleanor Janega?

  I like how they call her the She-Wolf as an insult. And I'm like, no, that's so cool. That's actually real boss. So I'm just always like, yeah, the She-Wolf.

• 12:25Matt Lewis?

  If you get that on a badge or a hoodie or something.

• 12:26Eleanor Janega?

  So good, right? And but the fundamental fact is, what I find quite interesting here is she's right. Like she is right. She is, she is the heir and technically, technically her son should be the King of France. Like legally, from a legal standpoint, she is correct. And the French are just like, no, no, cause, cause, no, no.

• 12:50Matt Lewis?

  Because there's a big problem with her son in that he is already King of England. He is King Edward III of England. And the French are looking at this and thinking, we, we can't have, we've spent centuries now trying to stop this happening. We can't just give the Crown of France to an Englishman and the English king. Worst of all, we have got to find a way around this. One thing that medieval people are really good in these situations is going to the archives and finding themselves a long lost law.

• 13:17Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. And that is exactly what they do now. They go into the archives and they go,

• 13:20Matt Lewis?

  and they go scribble, scribble, scribble.

• 13:21Eleanor Janega?

  It's this crazy. I found this and it says here that women can inherit. Wow. Well, I really wanted, I really wanted Edward to be the king, but oh, I found this in this dusty tome. I found this thing that actually says women can inherit. And it's like, interesting. You want to go back in time and explain that to Eleanor of Aquitaine?

• 13:42Matt Lewis?

  And I like the idea that Isabella is like, can I have a look at that document? And they're like, yeah, as soon as the ink's dried, hang on a sec. Hang on.

• 13:47Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. Here it is, you know.

• 13:49Matt Lewis?

  Because like, what they do is claim that the Salic law in France, it means that women can't inherit. And this dates back to the seventh or eighth century or something else. But if you go back to seventh or eighth, Salic law is a thing. But nowhere does it say that women can't inherit. In fact, it specifically sets out the rules and the boundaries around female inheritance.

• 14:08Eleanor Janega?

  And in fact, in the earlier medieval period, you're more likely to get women inheriting than you are in the later medieval period. Because primogeniture and this idea that everything should go to the son, it hasn't been invented yet. It's a women inherit on a regular basis. So it makes no sense from a historical standpoint to say, oh, this thing from back then says that women can inherit, when that would actually be more likely. Right? It's like, you may as well just go back and say, well, we don't want to. Right? It says here, no, you can't be, it's the no kings of England club.

• 14:36Matt Lewis?

  But they, they pull the ancient card. They're like, ancient law says, ancient law states.

• 14:41Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, no, but I love it. I love it when medieval people do it. I love it when you have the donation of Constantine. I love it when you have like Salic law. I love it whenever they forge something. I think it's adorable, actually.

• 14:51Matt Lewis?

  So, so they get around the idea of giving the throne of France to an Englishman by giving it to one of Charles' cousins, one of Isabella's cousins, Philip. And they're like, oh, you know, he's, he's the, the next male line heir to the throne. So we'll just give it to him. And I think initially it seems like Edward is like, oh, whatever.

• 15:08Eleanor Janega?

  I think Edward has kind of got his hands full with reestablishing the status quo in England.

• 15:15Matt Lewis?

  He's got some Scots to fight.

• 15:17Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. You know, there was a lot going on. We're trying to show that there is a steady hand on the tiller, given the weirdness with his mom, you know, see our episodes on, you know, Isabella for more information. But by the 15th century, this changes, right? So the disputes still going on by the time we hit the 1400s, right?

• 15:40Matt Lewis?

  Absolutely. Edward has, I mean, it all comes to a crunch really when the French king lays claim to Gascany. They give this final effort to drive the English out altogether and Edward won't have it. And you know, that's really the spark for what we will call the Hundred Years' War, which I always like to imagine going back in time to the middle of the 14th century and saying, oh, we're right near the beginning of the Hundred Years' War. And like, the what now? The what did you call it now? So yeah, so by the time we get to the beginning of the 15th century, this is still rumbling on. So Richard II, Edward III has been quite successful until his later years when he's older and, and less able to pursue the war. Richard II utterly disinterested in the Hundred Years' War, more often making peace with the King of France. I mean, can you imagine such a thing?

• 16:20Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, well, he's very busy killing his own subjects.

• 16:22Matt Lewis?

  Marrying French princesses.

• 16:24Eleanor Janega?

  Honestly, honestly, you know.

• 16:26Matt Lewis?

  Henry IV similarly faces so many domestic problems that he would like to pursue the war in France, but he never really gets the opportunity to do it. So hostilities are still there, very much just beneath the surface. And when Henry V, Henry V's son comes to the throne in 1413, I think he sees in the war in France, an opportunity to unite a kingdom behind a questioned and a questionable claim. So his father has faced 14 years of endless struggles and rebellions and desperate bids to prove that he's the legitimate king. And I think what Henry V, the masterstroke that he has is nothing will unite the kingdom behind me like taking everybody to go and bash the French.

• 17:08Eleanor Janega?

  Now, this is an important point because can you talk a little bit about why it is that Henry V sort of needs this? Like, he needs a win, right? He needs some way of pointing public attention at something big he does. Because the situation at home is dicey, is it?

• 17:24Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Yeah. The Lancasterian claim is still wide open to claim. There are others, particularly the Mortimers in the country, who some people are thinking, well, if the Lancastrians can't do it, the Mortimers arguably have a better hereditary claim to the throne. Maybe we should try that. And Henry has been, he's been raised in the conflicts of his father's reign, particularly in Wales. He spends a lot of his teenage years prosecuting a war to subdue Wales to Lancastrian rule. And he's exposed to all of the aspects of military life, you know? When, when he does go on campaign to France, we will see him meticulously planning his funding, his supply chains, making sure that everything is in place, that you complete each step before you move on to the next one.

• 18:07Matt Lewis?

  And I think that's a result of his experiences in Wales. Because we so often see him writing back to his father and to parliament and saying, we have no money. We have no men. Nobody's willing to fight for us anymore. We can't win a war like this. And I think he actually learns the lessons from all of that. So that when he becomes king, he's like, he's got his little checklist of how you have a military campaign and he means to pursue it. And he's also, you know, he's a man, 1403, the Battle of Shrewsbury, when he's, what, 16? He's caught up in, in a battle with his father, for his father, on his father's side, against all of these rebels, the most notably the Persis, who are also fighting in favor of the Mortimers and some Welsh rebels and things.

• 18:49Matt Lewis?

  Oh, England do it doesn't turn up there unfortunately, which is probably a good thing for the English. But Henry V, when he's still Prince Henry at this point, is at some point during that battle, hit in the face by an arrow, which embeds itself several inches into his cheek. And there is this whole process of royal surgeon named John Bradmore gets called, you know, lots of doctors are looking at it. It's like, I don't want to pull an arrow out of the prince's face.

• 19:12Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, it's so metal though, right? I mean, it's got to be the most metal injury that any king takes in the medieval period. So they shout out.

• 19:21Matt Lewis?

  I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. And this royal surgeon, John Bradmore, you know, he has to invent, because they, they can obviously pull the. The arrow shaft out, but it leaves the head.

• 19:29Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Matt Lewis?

  Embedded in the face. And somehow you've got to get this out without touching nerves and damaging anything or causing too much blood loss. So John Bradmore ends up inventing this special implement that you can, you put it into the gap that where the arrow shaft has left it, and then it spreads itself. You screw it down and it spreads itself wider so that it grips the inside of the arrow shaft. And then you can, you can pull it out. And he has, he writes a book about this treatment because it makes him a celebrity.

• 19:53Eleanor Janega?

  Obviously.

• 19:54Matt Lewis?

  He just saved the Prince of Wales' life.

• 19:55Eleanor Janega?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:56Matt Lewis?

  And he, he talks all about how you have to do this so carefully. And then the, he goes into detail of how he packs the wounds over the several months that follow, changing the dressings regularly, using honey, which we now know is a really powerful antiseptic. And he gradually packs the wound with smaller and smaller packing so that it seals and heals slowly around it. And Henry is left with a scar down his face for the rest of his life. It's, it's suggested that that's the reason the only portrait that we have of him is in profile, because it's the side of his face that doesn't have a massive scar. I mean, if you've got a scar like that.

• 20:28Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, I would show it off. I'd be like, oh, this, this little thing.

• 20:31Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Eleanor Janega?

  And that's why I'm the king.

• 20:33Matt Lewis?

  This is what happens if you miss.

• 20:34Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, right. It's like, you know, imagine being able to take an arrow to the face and live to tell the tale, right? And, I mean, I do think that this is just such an important part of the backstory, because what this does is it kind of establishes for him what he is, like what he does. Now, this is a guy who is, he's an action king.

• 20:52Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Eleanor Janega?

  You know, there are diplomacy kings, there are do nothing kings who kind of mess it all up. There are court kings, there, there's different ways of doing it. And he is a military guy, right?

• 21:04Matt Lewis?

  And I think for that, for me, that wound is also a little bit, it's like a boxer the first time they get in the ring. The idea of taking a punch in the face must be really hard to think about. But here's a man who's taken the hardest punch that isn't going to kill you.

• 21:16Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. What are they gonna do? Shoot me in the face with an arrow?

• 21:19Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Eleanor Janega?

  I've already lived through it, you know?

• 21:21Matt Lewis?

  And if you survive that, there must be a bit of you that feels a little, a little bit invincible. God must want you to be here for a purpose. He wants you for a reason. And what is that reason? Maybe it's to conquer France.

• 21:33Eleanor Janega?

  So how does he go about doing this? Because it's like, it makes sense that we're having these fights back and forth with Wales, many such cases, the English simply love to fight whoever's next door. What makes him say, we're getting in the ships, boys, we're going down to France?

• 21:46Matt Lewis?

  I think it's, it's a combination of his own problems at home and focusing everybody on the idea of glory and wealth and plunder abroad is always a unifying thing. It's something that everyone can get behind. They can kind of forget that they don't like the Lancastrian regime if this works, because it will make them rich and it will make them famous. And everybody wants that. But allied to that, we have a situation in which the, the current King of France, Charles VI, has been on the throne for quite a while.

• 22:12Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm.

• 22:12Matt Lewis?

  But he is suffering from incredible mental health problems. He's the king who will frequently think he's made of glass and be terrified that if one of his courtiers touches him, he'll shatter. He's had breakdowns in which he's killed members of his court before. There are moments when he doesn't wash for months and months. He won't change his clothes. He doesn't recognize his own wife and children very often. His wife is having to act as regent of France while dealing with the fact that the king behaves like this. One of his palaces, we're told they brick up all of the downstairs doors and windows because he's prone to wandering around in the night and just going off, out the door. And they find him wandering around the, the grounds of palaces in the cold in the middle of the night. So they brick everything up so he can't do this. So France as well

• 22:58Matt Lewis?

  is in a mess. And this makes France vulnerable. And so Henry, Henry has this kind of perfect storm of, I need to solve problems at home, and I've got a really soft juicy target over there that everyone will get behind me attacking.

• 23:11Eleanor Janega?

  So what does he put together in terms of a constituent army in order to do this? Because obviously what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to scoop up the nobility. And yeah, it's very smart on his part, because if you go manage to kidnap some French people, if you're sort of raiding the French countryside as opposed to the English countryside, right? It's like, okay, great, we can go get paid. So who is he able to bring along on this little money-making enterprise?

• 23:36Matt Lewis?

  I mean, most of the nobility of England, they want in on this because there is the opportunity of land and money and eternal fame and glory. But he also raises a really significantly sized army, probably about 12,000 men. This is a significant English army for the period, probably. And one of the things that he does, so he alters the, the constituency of an English army. He, he only really looks at taking 25% men at arms. So the men who are going to fight either on horseback or, or dismounted with pole arms, probably not swords, but the other 75% is archers.

• 24:15Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm.

• 24:15Matt Lewis?

  So he's leaning heavily on the success of the English longbow in the previous century. You know, Edward III has really brought this to the fore. And he's, he's redoubling the reliance on that. The French still haven't found a way to deal with English longbow warfare. French chivalry doesn't allow them to believe that an ordinary man should be able to come off his fields on the farm and kill a French knight who's been training for 20 years to get here. It shouldn't be allowed to happen. It's an abomination. And somehow they just don't feel the need to deal with it. It's like, well, they just shouldn't do it.

• 24:49Eleanor Janega?

  Well, yeah, I think that you're bang on here. It is one of these things where it's cultural, where basically they're saying, this is an inversion of the natural order. You know, this idea that there is a natural order with the nobility at the top. And so it's like, well, just don't do that. No, don't. You're being weird. That's weird. And so, and to, to an extent, I think what is happening here is that to pivot and say, okay, well, obviously they're going to be coming with a bunch of longbowmen. Maybe we should develop archery skills. Like, everyone's like, no, I will never develop archery skills.

• 25:21Matt Lewis?

  Well, what is our tactic for dealing with this? We don't need one.

• 25:23Eleanor Janega?

  And they're like, no, no, got a horse, big, big horse back there. You know, and, and so it is, it is actually for them almost existential, right? If you admitted that an ordinary dude with a bow was a problem, then why do we have the nobility at all?

• 25:41Matt Lewis?

  It's the end of your lifestyle. If you're, if you're a French knight, whose entire existence revolves around doing this, if you admit that what you're doing is pointless and worthless on a battlefield, and anybody could do it better, what's the point of you?

• 25:54Eleanor Janega?

  And this is, I think, so crucial to understanding what goes on in the Hundred Years' War, because people are just sort of like, how, how is it that the English kind of keep doing exactly the same thing over and over again? And the French keep running into this trap. Listen, military theory is very different in that they don't really have some here. It's a cultural thing. It's an existential thing. This means something, right? And, and we will see this happen throughout the medieval period over and over again. And indeed, like, one of the hallmarks of moving into the modern era is where people being like, it does seem as though poor people can kill us. Hmm, you know?

• 26:33Matt Lewis?

  Who'd have thought?

• 26:34Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Matt Lewis?

  It's only been almost 100 years of proving that this is the case, but we might have to accept it. And, and Henry does, as he's preparing to leave England on the south coast at Southampton, the need for this campaign is really reinforced for him because I mentioned the Mortimers earlier. So Edmund Mortimer, the Fifth Earl of March, kind of comes to Henry the Fifth at Southampton. And he's like, there's, there's a bit of a plot to make me king, and I don't want to be king. But here's the list of the names of people who are planning to do this.

• 27:03Eleanor Janega?

  Just so you know, I will absolutely rat these people out.

• 27:07Matt Lewis?

  Turning state's evidence in, in return for immunity. And, you know, he, and he does turn in several of his close, his brother-in-law is the most significant among these.

• 27:16Eleanor Janega?

  Living the dream. Who, who amongst us doesn't want to turn on our in-laws now? I love my in-laws. Shout out in-laws.

• 27:21Matt Lewis?

  And this is also Richard of Connesburgh, the Earl of Cambridge, who is the father of Richard, Duke of York, the grandfather of Edward IV and Richard III. So this is kind of the, the Yorkist dynasty getting off on a really bad footing with the Lancastrians and Henry the Fifth here. So Henry the Fifth executes, you know, the three ringleaders, including his brother-in-law, and a couple of others who were close friends as well. You know, he's probably feeling quite personally betrayed at this point. But I think what this does is reinforce to him the absolute necessity of doing this.

• 27:50Eleanor Janega?

  Like, we have got to get a project. These guys are too busy. We all, you just have to focus their attention somewhere else. And, you know, like, listen, a little money comes flowing in. You don't care about being king of England anymore, or advisor to a new king of England, right? Just you have enough money. Go on a nice holiday.

• 28:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. So, so having done that, you know, he fairly quickly. Gets all of the men and horses and supplies into a ship, well, 1,500 ships and sails them across the channel.

• 28:18Eleanor Janega?

  And so they go to Harfler first. What is it about Harfler that makes them decide this is the number one target?

• 28:25Matt Lewis?

  I think Henry is looking for a good beachhead, a good, a good base, somewhere that he can take, that he's then able to defend, from which he can set up the supply chains that he's going to want in order to help support the rest of his campaign into Normandy. You know, he can't know what that's going to look like, but I think all of that stuff in Wales has taught him that without that firm base, you know, you could tear around the countryside. We see the Black Prince doing it in the previous century with all the Cheva shades, but that doesn't actually win you territory. It upsets people. It annoys people.

• 28:57Eleanor Janega?

  It does, yeah.

• 28:58Matt Lewis?

  But it doesn't actually win you. You need to take a town from which you can base yourself. And Harfler is somewhere just across the channel on the coast. If he can take that, he can base himself there and he can ferry supplies backwards and forwards much more easily.

• 29:12Eleanor Janega?

  And they do take Harfler and then-

• 29:14Matt Lewis?

  But it takes longer than he wanted it to.

• 29:15Eleanor Janega?

  Well, right, because it, I think that he's right that it was the softest target, but it's not just, oh yeah, well, here you go. You may have Harfler, right? Because to an extent they're like, yeah, the English might come over at any moment. They are over there, right?

• 29:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And, and this is, Harfler is where Shakespeare gives us the once more into the breach and the glorious storming of a hole in the wall in the city, but it didn't happen.

• 29:37Eleanor Janega?

  Well, listen, we do like it. I mean, the, the man is allowed some dramatic license.

• 29:41Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I mean, Harfler is just starved and beaten into submission because Henry, Henry doesn't want to do too much damage to the city if he can avoid it because he's then got to repair that damage.

• 29:51Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. Like, I mean, you don't want to, you do not want to actually bring down the walls of a city that you're intending to take and uses a strategic base to ferry men and supplies across, right? That would be bad.

• 30:01Matt Lewis?

  But also it's not the longest siege in the world, you know, it's about six weeks. We get a nice outbreak of dysentery.

• 30:06Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, it's standard.

• 30:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Henry must be used to by now.

• 30:09Eleanor Janega?

  I know, right?

• 30:10Matt Lewis?

  Watching men having violent dysentery everywhere. But, but it has delayed him longer than he wants. He's probably done more damage to the city than he would have liked to have done. And, and now he has to garrison that city.

• 30:24Eleanor Janega?

  Yep.

• 30:24Matt Lewis?

  And set about repairing it well enough for that garrison to defend it too. So that requires him to divide his force already, which is not ideal. He must have known he was going to have to do this to keep Harfler, but maybe he was hoping he could leave a smaller garrison there. But so many men either have to stay in Harfler or have been killed during the siege or died of dysentery or had to ship back home. Some of the nobility, you know, have to ship back home ill as a result of, of the siege of Harfler, that by some estimates, half his force is consumed by all of this and he's only left with maybe just over 6,000 men by the time he comes to leave Harfler.

• 30:58Eleanor Janega?

  Which is crazy when you think about it, right? You know, you come over with this incredible mass of people and it's like, who would win 12,000 men or one little city on the Norman coast? And it turns out, I mean, they will win, but not by much. It's not glorious.

• 31:13Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, they don't make it easy. And you get lots of discussion amongst Henry's advisors at this point of what they should do next. Cause I think a lot of them are like, well, obviously we get back in a boat and go back to England and we, we reset and we prepare to come again. You know, we hold Harfler maybe till next year and we'll come back and, and springboard from there. And I think Henry is the one who is so acutely aware that this isn't enough. The idea of this project is to unite everyone behind him. If he goes home, having raised loads of taxes and loads of loans and raised loads of hopes and promised his nobility so much, if he now goes home and says, we took one town.

• 31:50Eleanor Janega?

  And it's one thing if you have to go home yourself because it's like, I'm afraid I have dysentery and I might be dying. Like, it's okay for you to sort of exit across the channel. It's different to say, and well, our work here is done. I said we were going to take over France and by that I mean Harfler, you know, it's, it's a come down at the very least.

• 32:11Matt Lewis?

  So it seems to be Henry's idea that they go to Calais instead, which is a city that they, a town that they still hold on the northern coast too, since Edward III's reign, he'd taken that. It's a little enclave of, of England on the north coast of France. And he says, well, we'll go to Calais and all of his men are great, great idea. We'll sort the ships out and we'll sail around to Calais. And Henry's like, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to sail to Calais. Everyone's like, what? We're going to have a nice stroll.

• 32:41Eleanor Janega?

  She's like, oh, come on, just stretch the legs a little bit, you know? You know what's going to really help you get over the dysentery? Yeah, just a bit of a walk.

• 32:47Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Eleanor Janega?

  Walk it off.

• 32:48Matt Lewis?

  What, what could possibly go wrong as well? We'll just march through hostile territory for, for several hundred miles. We'll take enough supplies to last us maybe the length of the march plus a day. That'll be fine.

• 32:59Eleanor Janega?

  Fine. We've got one day, you know?

• 33:14Matt Lewis?

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• 33:56Matt Lewis?

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• 35:05Speaker 04

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• 35:55Matt Lewis?

  As it turns out, the French aren't willing to just let them have a little casual stroll. There's a French army that had been closing on Harfler that now begin to tail the English army. There is another French army in the east who have been massing and are moving to meet the English army. And you get this, this cat and mouse across northern France. Henry is desperate to recreate Edward III's crossing of the ford at Blanche Tac. That's seen as a glorious moment for Edward III that he achieves this. And Henry makes a beeline there and is clearly like, I need to emulate Edward III. I need to show people who I am and what I'm going to achieve and that I'm not scared of the French because I should be the king of France, right? And all of these French armies are closing around him.

• 36:39Matt Lewis?

  And, and again, before, before we get to Agincourt, we get this, this weird moment where the French kind of cut Henry off and they send representatives to negotiate and Henry's like, yeah, sure, we can have a talk. And they say, we'll arrange to have a battle. You know, we'll, we'll go maybe 50 miles to the northeast somewhere. We'll pick a nice, nice open field. I've got to adjust the spot. It'll be great. We won't be interrupted.

• 37:04Matt Lewis?

  And we'll, we'll march there together and then we'll have a fight when we get there.

• 37:07Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:08Matt Lewis?

  And Henry's like, yeah, that sounds absolutely great. We'll do that. I'll, I'll follow you. And so the French set up completely believing that Henry is, is into this, that he should be bound by chivalry.

• 37:18Eleanor Janega?

  To be fair, that's literally the way wars used to be prosecuted. This is something we get asked about a lot. It's like, well, how did they pick a time and place for battles? Like, they would talk about it.

• 37:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Eleanor Janega?

  They would say, hey, yeah, come meet me at this field and we'll hit each other, you know? And, and that's literally, literally how it was done. And it's because of these conceptions of, of chivalry and what you owe to each other at this level of society.

• 37:41Matt Lewis?

  It's like when you were at school and there was always a spot that everyone went to for a fight and it's like, I'll see you there at lunchtime and the whole school will gather around and shout, fight, fight, fight.

• 37:50Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 37:50Matt Lewis?

  It's exactly the same as that, really. And so they, they begin to march off towards this appointed spot and Henry, you know, starts to march a little bit slower, lets the French get a little bit ahead of him. And it's like, oh, you know, my, my bad knee's playing up. The, the scar on my face is aching a little bit. I can't walk quickly with a bad face. And he lets them get a little bit ahead of him and then he turns north and tries to run to Calais.

• 38:14Eleanor Janega?

  I love it, I love it, you know.

• 38:16Matt Lewis?

  And the French, you know, obviously they look over their shoulder at some point.

• 38:19Eleanor Janega?

  Wait a minute, where'd those guys go?

• 38:21Matt Lewis?

  Where did they go?

• 38:22Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Matt Lewis?

  And so they, they then moved to cut Henry off before he gets to, to Calais. And that's why this happens where it happens. Henry manages to pick this, this field near the town of Agincourt, which there's a forest on either side, so it narrows the field a little bit more. So this is clearly him picking tactics that he thinks are going to favour him. You know, the French force is clearly absolutely huge. If he just stands there in a field and fights these people, he's going to lose. And so he is doing whatever he can to try and craft and create any advantage possible. And he's going back to that, you know, Spartan 300 principle of, of getting the hot gates

• 39:03Matt Lewis?

  and narrowing the field because that suits Henry's smaller numbers. And so by the time he's camping there in this field, he's calculating that this is where he wants to fight the French because it's the, the only hope that he has of, of even surviving, let alone winning.

• 39:18Eleanor Janega?

  Absolutely, because there are just so, so many French troops. They are not, at this juncture, riddled with dysentery and tired and behind enemy lines. You know, every single thing is going for them. They've got the numbers, they've got the health. It would, in an even contest, if it was just one big open field, there's, there would be no hope, really. You do need to use every tactical advantage that you can. And he does this. And to his credit, the English play a blinder, right? Like, they really, really do. Absolutely kick the hell out of them.

• 39:55Matt Lewis?

  Absolutely. And, and, you know, Henry picks this field between these two bits of forest. It's freshly tilled as well.

• 40:00Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, great.

• 40:01Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, great at hampering a cavalry charge.

• 40:03Eleanor Janega?

  Yep.

• 40:03Matt Lewis?

  And the night before the battle, it rains. So all of that tilled soil becomes mud. And Henry, again, you know, God help me survive this because he wants me here for a purpose. Now God is creating conditions I couldn't barely have hoped for. We've got now a muddy field that the French are going to try and charge their heavy cavalry across. And at some point as well, worth mentioning, at some point during those, those earlier meetings and negotiations, Henry's managed to capture a couple of French people.

• 40:31Eleanor Janega?

  It's just like, I'm sorry, it is really dishonorable. It's very, very funny. It's like, you can't, you don't get to kidnap people who have like a come to negotiate. And he's like, yeah, I do. Says who? What are you gonna do? You know, like, oh, God.

• 40:44Matt Lewis?

  But he, he, I mean, he, the English sources don't tell us this, but he almost certainly engages in some light torture to extract from these people the French battle plan. And the, the French battle plan is clearly, well, plan A is a heavy cavalry charge. Plan B is to try plan A again.

• 41:00Eleanor Janega?

  I'm like, I love the idea of having to torture some French knights. It's like, babe, I could tell you that for free. I think that you could just go ask the peasant down the way and they'll be like, as things are probably going to use their horses, no? You know, like.

• 41:13Matt Lewis?

  The only tactic in town.

• 41:14Eleanor Janega?

  It's like a hundred percent just that. So, I mean, and, and this, I think this is important, right? Because I think we do look at this, this decisive victory and this very interesting thing. And we go, huh, the plucky English. What are they like? And I'm like, um, kind of bad, actually. Like, these are bad people doing bad things for like no particular reason. And, and who does it end up weighing heavily upon? Like, I don't really care.

• 41:40Matt Lewis?

  No.

• 41:41Eleanor Janega?

  About what happens to the French, you know, cavalry. I care about the peasants who are like, this was my field. I was going to book claim here.

• 41:48Matt Lewis?

  I do, I do.

• 41:48Eleanor Janega?

  You know, like, yeah.

• 41:50Matt Lewis?

  I should be really careful doing French accents.

• 41:51Eleanor Janega?

  I know, sorry, listen, I love them and I wish that my French was better. Thank you, so.

• 41:56Matt Lewis?

  By this point, so, you know, we've got, in terms of the English army, they've, they've been walking for 200 miles. The detours they've made to avoid the French mean the march has taken longer than it was meant to. And they really started to run out of food. Their shoes are worn out. They are down to maybe five, 6,000 men, mostly archers at this point, which isn't really the way you would want to prosecute a battle. Henry's going to have to make the most of that. And of course, they've all got dysentery. So we get one, I mean, we get some really nice source material for Agincourt. There's a, an, an English monk who's in the baggage train, who's, you know, sitting there on his cart, writing down everything that's happening. And people like him are telling us that some of the archers are so ill

• 42:38Matt Lewis?

  that they're having to line up and cut the backs out of their hose so that they can freely have dysentery on the field behind them without distracting themselves.

• 42:48Eleanor Janega?

  Yo, like, the way I would just be like, it's fine, I'll die. I guess I'm dying. It's, uh.

• 42:54Matt Lewis?

  It's pretty gross. And interestingly, there's another bit of source material that tells us that the English, all take a knee before the battle, take a piece of soil from the ground and put it under their tongue, almost as if they're receiving communion at mass. But you combine that with people cutting the backs out of their hose and having diarrhea on the ground.

• 43:11Eleanor Janega?

  Listen, you know.

• 43:12Matt Lewis?

  It gets pretty gross pretty quickly.

• 43:13Eleanor Janega?

  Unfortunately, like, we're not beating the allegations currently. You know, we're sort of, we are constantly like, listen, the entire medieval period wasn't muddy and gross. And then like Agincourt happens and I'm like, there are some exceptions.

• 43:24Matt Lewis?

  Agincourt, Agincourt was muddy and pretty gross.

• 43:26Eleanor Janega?

  But Agincourt is weird, though. That's why, that's why we talk about it, right?

• 43:30Matt Lewis?

  And the other thing that Henry has done as well is cause all of his men to, to get a kind of six foot length of wood and sharpen it at both ends, so these big stakes. And his big move is to drive these into the ground in front of his army to provide what the French would call their hedgehog formation, this, this way of fending off a heavy cavalry charge. But he's going to do it with wooden stakes instead of using men to do it because he doesn't have enough men. So this is a bit of a masterstroke, unless you're a sick archer who's had no food and has dysentery and now you've got a six foot pole to carry around as well. Thanks for that, Henry, very kind of you.

• 44:02Eleanor Janega?

  Cool, cool.

• 44:03Matt Lewis?

  So the English get up in the morning, hammer these stakes into the ground and stand there, ready for battle. And on the French side, we've got the absolute flower of French chivalry. At a time when French chivalry was the flower of European chivalry. Some of the finest knights in France are there, Marshal Bossigor, all of these kind of really famous names. The Duke of Orleans turned up. The issue that they have is, unlike the English, they have no king there.

• 44:28Eleanor Janega?

  Yep.

• 44:29Matt Lewis?

  So Charles VI, King of France, too ill to be on the battlefield. His son, the Dauphin, the Prince of Wales, doesn't show up.

• 44:39Matt Lewis?

  Unlike the, the film The King.

• 44:41Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Matt Lewis?

  Where Robert Pattinson turns up with a funny French accent and falls over in the mud. The Dauphin just doesn't show up. So the problem for the French is, some of the sources give them between 60 and 100,000 men, because of course they do.

• 44:52Eleanor Janega?

  Of course they do. Probably not, folks. I mean, I would, I would say probably 20, I would, I would reckon, yeah.

• 44:57Matt Lewis?

  I think you're talking somewhere around that, which is huge. But what they lack is solid leadership. And what they've got is maybe 20 men who will want to stake their claim to be in charge, who will want to argue about who's going to go first, who's going to get the glory of killing the English king. I mean, this, this is a moment in which reputations to the French mind are going to be defined for generations to come. You could be the man who killed the English king at Agincourt. Imagine. And so they're all squabbling and fighting over who's going to get the, the glory of doing all of this. And Henry is, is standing there watching this. And the other thing, the other advantage the French have is they can wait as long as you like.

• 45:35Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Matt Lewis?

  The English are the ones who are trapped and have no food and nowhere to go. And so Henry watches all of this argument going on. The French clearly aren't quite ready for battle yet. And he's standing there just out of longbow shots. And so what he says to all of those tired, dysentery ridden, hungry archers is, you know those six foot poles you just planted? Yank them all up. And what we're going to do is move forward into longbow range and then replant the, the staves. And at this point, I mean, one of the big what ifs, what if the French had seen the English pulling those stakes up?

• 46:07Eleanor Janega?

  And were like.

• 46:09Matt Lewis?

  And like, now's the time.

• 46:09Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:10Matt Lewis?

  They would have absolutely ridden through the English, even in the muddy field and everything else. The English with, with staves, with big long poles in their hands, not got their bows ready. The, the heavy French cavalry would have just ridden down the English in moments and it would have been over. But Henry is relying on the fact that the French are too busy arguing, which it turns out they are.

• 46:30Eleanor Janega?

  They are.

• 46:31Matt Lewis?

  They are. So he moves closer, replants those staves within longbow range and tells his men to start firing. Because this puts all of the pressure on the French. The French can no longer just stand there and wait and, and starve the English out and force them to move first. And one of the, the maxims of medieval warfare is the army that moves first will tend to lose. And so Henry, he's moved his position forward, but he's now holding that position. And he's relying on the longbow fire to, to force the French to move. They can't just sit there under the shower of arrows all day. They're going to have to move. And by forcing them to move, he's giving himself another advantage.

• 47:09Eleanor Janega?

  And this is interesting because part of what happens, there is of course the fact that, yeah, getting shot at by arrows, that is going to, it's going to clarify things, right? But they can't retreat because there's so many people and you're funneled into this small space. So, you know, trying to get everyone to retreat would mean that like the baggage train has to move and then you have to, and everybody's got to move, right? Because this is, again, the flower of French chivalry. We've got all of our heavy cavalry up the front. So they're all standing there and it is, you know, like a gadfly. You know, these things, it's just kind of poking at you. There, there is nowhere to go except forward.

• 47:47Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 47:47Eleanor Janega?

  Right?

• 47:47Matt Lewis?

  And it's taunting. It's like, are you really just going to sit there on your horses and take this? You're not going to come and fight us?

• 47:53Eleanor Janega?

  Wow, like, I thought that you were a big fancy knight and you're, and you're just going to let these commoners shoot at you? That's crazy.

• 48:00Matt Lewis?

  Are you scared?

• 48:01Eleanor Janega?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 48:03Matt Lewis?

  Are you scared of us? And so the taunting works and the French, you know, they go back to the battle plan and like, what was it we're going to do? Oh, yes.

• 48:11Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, charge with the horses, yeah.

• 48:14Matt Lewis?

  And so they decide to, to do that across the muddy wet field, um, under heavy fire from the English longbows. And, and Henry, at this point as well, it's worth mentioning, has, has put a crown on his helm. And this is really striking because it's an odd thing for a king to do in battle. You're really marking yourself out as a target. But you're also showing your men exactly where you are.

• 48:38Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Matt Lewis?

  And you're saying, I'm here, he's at the front of the army. I'm going to fight with you. And if we're going to die, I'm going to die with you. I'm not staying at the back on a horse, hoping to get away.

• 48:47Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Matt Lewis?

  We're very much all in this together. And that's such a powerful thing for a king to say, you know, an ordinary archer can stand next to the King of England and know that he's going to fight with you. And but I also think, I'm utterly convinced that this is also Henry, putting the Lancasterian claim to the throne of England before God for judgment. Because who's going to decide the outcome of this battle? The odds are stacked against Henry, but God's going to decide the outcome. And if God wants Henry for a greater purpose and wants him to be King of England, he's saved him from that arrow because he wants him. If this is his purpose, then God will save him today.

• 49:21Eleanor Janega?

  And I think it's difficult for people now to understand this.

• 49:25Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Eleanor Janega?

  But this is a legitimate way of organizing the world according to medieval people. They really do believe that God is looking in on things, especially from a royal perspective. The entire reason that royalty exists is they say, oh, yeah, well, God probably wants it this way. Right? And so you can add this meaning on to things. You can say that essentially, we can allow God to prosecute this.

• 49:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Eleanor Janega?

  And yeah, I mean, to be fair for Henry, plays a blinder.

• 49:58Matt Lewis?

  It does, you know, the the French get churned up in the mud, cut down by the arrows. They go back to their battle plan and they're like, right, this isn't working. What was plan B?

• 50:07Eleanor Janega?

  Right.

• 50:08Matt Lewis?

  It was to do plan A again. Right, let's do it again. And they just keep pouring in this heavy cavalry, who are now having to to try and charge over their own fallen men. And there are horses running back at them without their riders anymore. There are French knights being trampled into the mud. There are bodies piling up in front of the English forces. When the English archers run out of arrows, we're told, you know, they all draw their daggers and run out into the mud and they're just delivering killing blows to all of these knights on the floor. And it's absolute slaughter and carnage. And the French just keep going, just keep going.

• 50:43Eleanor Janega?

  And I think one of the things we should point out here is part of the reason the French keep going. And part of what is so confusing about this is you're not supposed to kill the knights.

• 50:52Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Eleanor Janega?

  You're supposed to kidnap the knights and then you're supposed to ransom them back for a bunch of money. You're not, no one is supposed to be dying in these circumstances. If you die, it's kind of unlucky. But if it is an international battle, the thing that you're supposed to be doing is rich guy tag. One rich guy is supposed to be like, ha, ha, I've got you. You come with me. Now you're going to stay in my castle until the people at your castle give me money. And these guys are like, no, we're killing them.

• 51:20Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Eleanor Janega?

  Because if you are some random archer, you know, like you've you've come down from Chester or something like that, right, then you're like, I can't ransom anybody, right? Like, that's not how.

• 51:32Matt Lewis?

  Have a castle to keep him in.

• 51:33Eleanor Janega?

  No, exactly. So you're just like, I want to survive. And the best way of doing that is killing these people because it's the poor people who die. It's not the rich people who die.

• 51:41Matt Lewis?

  And that, but there are some English knights who are taking some of the really high profile French prisoners that survived and taking them to the back of the army with the intention of of ransoming them. So amidst the slaughter, there is still this focus on the financial benefits of a medieval battle, too. And this causes a problem for Henry, quite famously and controversially, when news arrives that there is a French reinforcement coming around the back of the English. So they're about to be outflanked and their baggage train is going to be attacked. And so Henry is then faced with the prospect of being caught between two French armies. And he seems to be worried that if all of those French prisoners were freed and rearmed, it's it's more people behind you.

• 52:24Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Matt Lewis?

  Who are going to fight for you. And so we're told he gives this order to kill the prisoners of war, which is so often held against him as this, it's a war crime, effectively. But the medieval rules of war are really clear on this. They say you don't kill prisoners of war unless unless they will pose a threat to your men. Because Henry's ultimate responsibility is to the the men fighting for him. And if those prisoners are likely to be rearmed and come and kill his men, then he's almost duty bound to give that order. It's expected. It's within the rules of medieval warfare, within the rules of engagement for him to do that. And we also know that when it becomes clear that that rumor of French reinforcements was false, that he gives, he receives, he rescinds that order, he takes away that order.

• 53:09Matt Lewis?

  So we don't know how many prisoners are killed. We don't know if any are killed. But as soon as he's able to, he takes back that order. So it's definitely not a nice thing to be doing, but in the context of 1415.

• 53:21Eleanor Janega?

  It's it's pretty standard. You know, actually, it's even weirdly beyond standard because it it's sort of like, yeah, the reason it doesn't come up a lot is that this doesn't happen. You don't ordinarily have people getting sandwiched between two parts of an army. So the reason other people don't get faced with this is that Agincourt is just weird.

• 53:43Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Eleanor Janega?

  It's just odd.

• 53:44Matt Lewis?

  One of the striking things is that afterwards, we don't see a single French source criticize Henry for giving that order. We see them criticize the French for being disorganized, for failing to capitalize on all of the advantages that they had, for squabbling amongst themselves. We even see French sources that criticize a force that was turning up late for creating the rumor that there was going to be attack from the rear that causes Henry to give this order. So they're pretty clear that Henry was well within his rights to do this. And the French created a situation in which he was almost compelled to give that order. And there's also, one of the other moments in Agincourt that I like is that, not that I like, no. I think it's interesting. Interesting. Is that Henry's little brother, Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, is there.

• 54:29Matt Lewis?

  And he, at one point, fighting in the front lines, is knocked to the ground.

• 54:34Matt Lewis?

  And all of these French knights gather around him to deliver the the killing blow. And he's, you know, in his late teens, about to be slaughtered at Agincourt. And all of a sudden, cinematic moment, this literal knight in shining armor steps across his body, swinging his sword and beating all of these knights away as other men reach him from behind and drag Humphrey's armored body away through the mud. And this figure that has stepped over him is only his big brother, the king, Henry. And we're told that this is the moment at which Henry gets so close to the French that one of the fleurs de l'oeil on his crown is hacked off by the blade of a French weapon. Now, he's, he's put himself within a whisker of being killed in order to save his little brother. I mean, that's impressive and cool.

• 55:19Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, we do like that. It is nice to actually rescue people.

• 55:22Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Eleanor Janega?

  Fundamentally.

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• 57:33Eleanor Janega?

  Like, look, incredible battle. One of the things that I think is most impressive about it is how short it is.

• 57:40Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Eleanor Janega?

  Three hours. Like, what do you mean it's three hours, right? We see medieval battles that happen and it goes all day. It goes into the night. It's, you know, they're, they have a light breakfast and then they're back at it, right?

• 57:52Matt Lewis?

  This one, they're done by lunch.

• 57:53Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 57:54Matt Lewis?

  And given the overwhelming nature of the French forces, you feel like it should have gone on and on and on. But the, the ground just gets so impassable. The bodies get piled so high and the losses are just so devastating. The French leadership is just being wiped out. And everybody at the back is thinking, well,

• 58:13Eleanor Janega?

  What's the point?

• 58:13Matt Lewis?

  We don't even, they gave us Plan A and Plan B, but we don't know what Plan C is. So do we just go home?

• 58:19Eleanor Janega?

  Quite right, too. I would. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

• 58:22Matt Lewis?

  And it's at this point that, you know, Henry instructs the heralds of both sides to come together. And the function of a herald is to decide who has won the battle. The English and French heralds have a confab and a, well, pretty clearly.

• 58:36Eleanor Janega?

  It seems like,

• 58:37Matt Lewis?

  The English have won.

• 58:38Eleanor Janega?

  You're all dead.

• 58:39Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Eleanor Janega?

  So.

• 58:40Matt Lewis?

  And Henry asks the French herald for the name of the nearest French castle, which is how you name a battle. And he's told it's Agincourt. And so it becomes called the Battle of Anglicised Agincourt.

• 58:53Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 58:54Matt Lewis?

  And Henry has won completely against the odds. And this is a huge propaganda victory.

• 59:00Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:02Matt Lewis?

  A religious victory. You know, God really loves Henry now. So who is going to rebel against him in England? And he has devastated the French polity because that's not just all of the men in France who know how to fight. That's all of the politicians of France as well.

• 59:16Eleanor Janega?

  Absolutely. And I think that it's this resounding victory for the concept that the English can cause problems, right? We're sort of, you know, it's, it's been, it's been quite some time since, you know, Cressy, we've learned nothing, which is cool. But basically what it shows is that this is something that can continue to happen. And I mean, I think most crucially for Henry V, what it really does is it, it secures England, right? I'm not sure that it really means anything in terms of like the Hundred Years' War writ large. You know, it's a very smashing victory and we talk about it all the time because of this propaganda victory, right? So the first thing that Henry does is he's like,

• 1:00:00Eleanor Janega?

  everybody go home and talk about how cool I was and I saved my brother and I killed all those French guys and they didn't have an answer for this. And it's like,

• 1:00:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Eleanor Janega?

  And we're still doing it. We're doing that propaganda right now. That's how successful that was, right?

• 1:00:12Matt Lewis?

  And Henry is writing letters home saying, you know, it'd be really nice if there was a pageant when I got home, just so everybody knows how impressive this is.

• 1:00:19Eleanor Janega?

  Wouldn't it be crazy? There was like a big party when I go home. Just, I don't know. I don't know. Right?

• 1:00:24Matt Lewis?

  If you guys could throw me a surprise party, that'd be great.

• 1:00:26Eleanor Janega?

  Cool. And, but this is the thing. I do think that within the Hundred Years' War, especially if you're in the Anglophone world, we're like, well, at first there was the Battle of Cressy and then there was Agincourt and then Joan of Arc. And I don't know what happened.

• 1:00:43Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Eleanor Janega?

  It was crazy, right? And it, it's interesting because those are the ones that we really latch on to. Those are the ones that we talk about. And yes, okay, so England has gained some territory here. You know, we've got these toe holes. It's not just Calais anymore. You've got a little bit more. Hmm. How does this really shake out in terms of territory, though?

• 1:01:03Matt Lewis?

  I mean, Henry's gained nothing in territory. He's still just got half-leur to add to Calais and that's it. He hasn't taken any lands while he's been marching, limping his way across France. And so what he does is, is realise that he's actually improved his opportunity to go back and do it again, because not only do the French now have a weakened, ineffective king, they have no nobility. And they've demonstrated to him that whatever nobility is left has no sense of unity and purpose. They're busy squabbling amongst themselves. And this particularly breaks down into the Burgundian and Arminiac factions in France. And in a short time after Agincourt, you see them tearing at each other's throats.

• 1:01:46Matt Lewis?

  And so Henry is sitting in England thinking, well, that looks really enticing.

• 1:01:50Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm. Hmm. And I mean, I think that this is actually really important. I mean, I love the Burgundian-Arminiac civil war in the first place because I think it's just so messy and I love mess. And I think what is interesting here is what this clarifies for the French is actually nothing about England. They're just like, gosh, English people are really annoying. Anyway, back at it. I hate. And, and they don't, they don't care. You know, it's, the English are like, we did it. We did it, guys. Really show those French a thing or two. And the French people are like, I hate the Burgundian faction.

• 1:02:22Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And it's, you know, the, the Arminiacs are essentially focused around the, the Dauphin, the heir to the French crown, and the Burgundians around the Duke of Burgundy. So when the Arminiacs assassinate the Duke of Burgundy, his son and heir, the new Duke of Burgundy is like, well, I know someone who'll be on my side.

• 1:02:38Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. And that, all it really does is set up this interesting new faction for, within the French. And I think that is actually more interesting. I think that that is actually looking at Henry V as this master political player who's really good at getting this quick win, who has, it's an impressive victory. It's a very impressive victory. And he's able to propagandize that. That tells me more about Henry V than talking about Agincourt as this sort of like defining moment.

• 1:03:09Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Because I think that, that is the real value of Agincourt. Agincourt doesn't win anything apart from Henry's security in England. What, what gets Henry back into France really is the assassination of the Duke of Burgundy and the door that that opens for him to offer some sympathy to the Burgundian faction and say, we could get our heads together. We, we could beat the Arminiacs together.

• 1:03:32Eleanor Janega?

  We could do it. We could do it.

• 1:03:33Matt Lewis?

  Which sees him, you know, go back to France. And certainly the victory at Agincourt allows him to, to build momentum and to meet much less opposition in France than he would have because there's so much of the French nobility has been either killed or captured. You know, lots of the, the key French leaders will spend years, if not decades, or the Duke of Orleans will spend 30 years as an English prisoner after Agincourt. So he, he is now dealing with a significantly weakened enemy, but really it's the alliance with the Burgundians that helps him back into France. And, and I think all of that experience that he can put into place. So the next campaign that he goes on are much more about taking some territory. This is like, this is aimed at conquering Normandy, taking Rouen, the

• 1:04:16Matt Lewis?

  capital of Normandy, and actually holding some territory, which is what he's failed to do in 1415. And we do see him go back and be devastatingly successful at that. Criticised again as very ruthless, the siege of Rouen. You know, he will, the, the people of Rouen kick out anyone who can't fight. The, the young and the elderly and the weak. And they assume that the English will let them pass the blockade. And Henry's like, but, but you're doing that to prolong the siege? And that's not how warfare works. That's not fair. This from a man who has demonstrated.

• 1:04:51Eleanor Janega?

  I can't, I cannot with this man and that's not fair. No. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:04:55Matt Lewis?

  He's demonstrated he doesn't care about these rules when it suits him not to. But, so these people end up spending a winter up against the outside walls of the city of Rouen, most of them freezing and starving to death. Christmas Day, Henry gives them some food, but that's the extent of his mercy.

• 1:05:11Eleanor Janega?

  Well, which is also interesting when you're sort of prosecuting a war in theory to say, you should let me be your king. And it's like, and what are you going to do about that? I'll starve you. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to starve you. So can I be the king? It's like, yeah, looking great. People love that, actually.

• 1:05:27Matt Lewis?

  Absolutely. But, you know, but he does manage to, to subdue Normandy. He's pretty much in control of Normandy by 1419. This is really building momentum that, that hasn't been seen since the beginning of Edward III's campaigns, really. And he's taking back land that the English crown hasn't really held for a couple of hundred years.

• 1:05:45Eleanor Janega?

  Yep.

• 1:05:45Matt Lewis?

  By this point. So he is being hugely successful. And, and it culminates really at the Treaty of Tours in 1422, when Charles VI, who is still King of France, has been there for an incredibly long time, but he's so disgusted at what his son, the Dauphin, has done. Charles VI has enough about him to realise that his son has royally screwed up.

• 1:06:06Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Matt Lewis?

  In assassinating the Duke of Burgundy. So all of this culminates at the Treaty of Troy in 1420, when Charles VI kind of disowns and disinherits his own son.

• 1:06:17Eleanor Janega?

  Quite right, too.

• 1:06:17Matt Lewis?

  And says, Henry can be Regent of France for as long as I'm alive. He can marry my daughter Catherine. And when I die, Henry becomes King of France. And at that point, it looks like the English have done it. They've won the Hundred Years' War. It's done. It's over. But only two years later, Henry dies at the age of 35 of, drumroll.

• 1:06:36Eleanor Janega?

  Dysentery. It's like, I mean, literally the number one way to die.

• 1:06:42Matt Lewis?

  What a way to go.

• 1:06:43Eleanor Janega?

  Like, it is, it is the way, I think, probably more English kings have died of dysentery than anything else.

• 1:06:49Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:50Eleanor Janega?

  Certainly than on the battlefield, than of old age, you know, of the plague. It's, it's actually dysentery. Like, dysentery is a hell of a body count.

• 1:06:57Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. But it's one of the big what ifs, isn't it? You know, Henry 35, he dies at the absolute height of his powers. The big question it leaves is, could he actually have solidified all of his gain? Could he have made it work? Could he financially have sustained the effort of fighting the rest of the Armunyac faction? Because Charles VI dies, you know, Henry, Henry leaves behind a nine-month-old baby to be King of England in Henry VI. But Charles VI dies a few weeks later as well.

• 1:07:24Eleanor Janega?

  I think it really depends on what the Burgundians do, I think, because they are the ones who are bankrolling a lot of this. And they are the ones who are kind of looking at it. And I, I think that in a very real way, the Burgundians are sort of the kingmakers of Europe at this time. So, yeah.

• 1:07:39Matt Lewis?

  And ultimately lead to kind of, just after 1430, Henry VI, when he's about 10 years old, is taken over to Paris and crowned as King of France.

• 1:07:48Eleanor Janega?

  Which should have been the end of it.

• 1:07:49Matt Lewis?

  Well, but, but it's a tricky thing, isn't it? So, I mean, it's weird that Henry VI, as deeply unimpressive as he is as a king, is the only man in history ever to have been crowned King of England and France in, in both countries.

• 1:07:59Eleanor Janega?

  He's crowned in the wrong place, though, G. That's not where they crown him. You don't crown him in Paris.

• 1:08:03Matt Lewis?

  No.

• 1:08:03Eleanor Janega?

  You don't crown him in Paris.

• 1:08:04Matt Lewis?

  And this is a symptom of the fact that the French are re-resurgent. And they have him crowned to reinforce his claim to the throne. But what it really does is cause a completely intractable problem. Because now you've crowned him, you can't like undo that. There's no going back from that. And so you've lost that shifting bit of ground, like that thing of having to go and do fealty to the French king. You've lost that bit of play of being able to say, well, I'm King of France, really, you know, I could come over there and get crowned if I wanted to, but, you know, let's chat about it.

• 1:08:31Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, but they did it wrong. And I do, I do think that that is important. It's like, that's not the, that's not the correct place. And you didn't have the oil.

• 1:08:38Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Eleanor Janega?

  If you don't have the oil of Saint-Denis, if you haven't gone over to, to get this done in the correct place, like that's, that's part of it. And it's part of the Frenchness. It's the knowing, right? These are a people of legacy. They are people who say there is a certain cultural way we do things. Like, there's a cultural reason we've lost Agincourt, right? Like, and to them, these, these cultural things matter. So it is, it's interesting that you are able to actually keep this alive despite the treaty, despite the coronation, because they can literally like, well, no, you did it in person. That's weird.

• 1:09:16Matt Lewis?

  Because what does Joan of Arc do? You know, she goes and relieves Orléans. And then she literally plows a path to Rhein Cathedral.

• 1:09:21Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Matt Lewis?

  Because that's where Charles needs to go to get crowned. That's like laser focused.

• 1:09:25Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, she's like, you have to go to, wow. And if you do not get there, then we are all in trouble, right? And, and she plays a blinder there. And it's that cultural know-how. It's, it's that religious import. And again, from our standpoint, it doesn't make sense. We say, but that, there was a treaty and that guy got crowned. But there are these cultural markers. There is this baggage around it that you have to understand or you, you don't get it right. There, there is, you have to have the special oil that Saint-Denis burnt down from God, you know, in order to be the King of France. And you just do. That just is true, you know?

• 1:09:58Matt Lewis?

  And, and I guess, you know, the, the legacy of Agincourt goes on. It's a, a point in the historical map that even people who aren't really interested in history can, can navigate around. They know Agincourt. And they know roughly where it sits. And Shakespeare, you know, by the end of the 16th century, Shakespeare has given us the absolutely legendary Henry V play.

• 1:10:16Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Matt Lewis?

  With all of these talks about, you know, once more unto the breach and we band of brothers. And all of that patriotic motivational kind of stuff that, that is recycled, you know, World War II.

• 1:10:29Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:29Matt Lewis?

  There's a reason Laurence Olivier is doing a performance, a filmed performance of Henry V in World War II, because it reminds the English of how they can beat the odds.

• 1:10:38Eleanor Janega?

  And do you think that that is why Agincourt has the legacy that it does? Is this a Shakespeare thing?

• 1:10:43Matt Lewis?

  I think it probably is. I mean, we owe him so many things that we, we probably wouldn't talk about in history otherwise. And I do think Agincourt is slightly overstated in terms of its immediate impact.

• 1:10:55Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Matt Lewis?

  It definitely, it clears the, the French nobility out of Henry's way a bit. But they've already demonstrated they're not very effective when they're there anyway, because they can't agree with each other. And it's not the Battle of Agincourt that, that wins Henry Rouen. And it's not the Battle of Agincourt that sees him achieve the Treaty of Troy in 1420. It's not those things. It's going home, resetting and coming back again with more of a, a conquest in mind. And so I think for both the French and the English, Agincourt has an immediate impact, but not that much of a legacy. And the, the legacy is, I think, something that we kind of have inflated.

• 1:11:37Matt Lewis?

  And we sometimes project backwards and we see the glory of the victory of the underdog. And that somehow that can lead to monumental change. But I think it's slightly more complicated than that.

• 1:11:48Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I think this is a real case of us seeing what we want to see. You know, we want these ideas about, uh, you know, patriotism, which, bzzt, wrong. No such thing. Like, there's no patria, babe. Like, you know, this isn't the English doing anything for England. You know, this is you supporting your king to make some more money, right? We like a plucky underdog story. And sure, they're, they're massively weakened and there are fewer of them. But like, do I care particularly what these guys who have just like invaded another country are, not really. But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter culturally. So two things can be true. It can be different to the way that we speak about it.

• 1:12:28Eleanor Janega?

  It can also be that it doesn't make that much of a difference really in the grand scheme of the war. But it does have a cultural importance in the way that we talk about it. And I think that is significant and worth thinking about in and of itself.

• 1:12:43Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I think if you're a dysentery-riddled archer from a farm who survived the Battle of Agincourt, you're dining out on that for the rest of your life.

• 1:12:49Eleanor Janega?

  Hell, yeah. I'd be like, he's just down, down in being like, who wants to buy me another round? And hear about Agincourt? And everyone's like, ah, Peter's on it again.

• 1:12:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And I'm realising now as well that I've just said, we massively overstate the, the importance and the impact of Agincourt and everything else. And I started this episode by going, Agincourt, Agincourt.

• 1:13:08Eleanor Janega?

  Listen, you know, you are not immune from propaganda, babe. Yeah.

• 1:13:11Matt Lewis?

  No, I'm falling for it every day.

• 1:13:13Eleanor Janega?

  Listen, that's beautiful for you and I'm going to let you have it. I think it's great, actually.

• 1:13:16Matt Lewis?

  Thank you. I'm just going to revel in that for a moment.

• 1:13:19Eleanor Janega?

  Thank you for joining us today. And if you want to hear more about the key events and people around the Battle of Agincourt, we have episodes on all of this, including Queen Isabella, the She-Wolf of France, and Henry V's campaigns after Agincourt. You can find those links in the show notes to this episode. And if you want even more history, you can watch our new film Medieval Summer on History Hit. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week, as well as early access to our favourite podcasts, ad-free. You can sign up at www.HistoryHit.com/subscription.