The Battle of Agincourt

Join Matt Lewis and Professor Michael Livingston to unravel the legendary Battle of Agincourt. They cover the lesser-known strategic blunders to the haunting moral dilemmas and learn about the real events that shaped this historic clash. Perfect for history buffs and medieval enthusiasts, this episode dives deep into one of the most iconic battles of the medieval era, debunking myths and shedding light on historical truths. Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Watch the Battle of Agincourt being brought to life now in History Hit's new TV documentary with Professor Micheal Livingston. Sign upHERE https://historyhit.com/subscription for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscription https://historyhit.com/subscribe You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK 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 Yarniger, 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.

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• 1:59Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:47Matt Lewis?

  Agincourt.

• 2:50Matt Lewis?

  The word alone will stir images of a battle in France. You might hear at the back of your mind Laurence Olivier, or maybe Kenneth Branagh, delivering the goosebump-inducing speeches of Shakespeare before the battle. "We few, we happy few, wee band of brothers, For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother, Be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now abed Shall think themselves accursed That they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap, While any speaks that fought with us Upon St Crispin's Day."

• 3:34Matt Lewis?

  I know they did it better, but I couldn't resist. This episode is all about the Battle of Agincourt. To dissect this most famous of moments, I'm joined by Professor Michael Livingston, whose book, Agincourt: The Battle of the Scarred King, is out now, and who's presented a brand-new documentary that History Hit subscribers can watch now, all about the battle. If you haven't subscribed yet, there's a special offer for you at the end of the episode to try to tempt you in. So let's get into the thick mud of a field in France and find out what happened at the Battle of Agincourt.

• 4:10Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to Gone Medieval, Mike. It's fantastic to have you with us to talk about, I guess, a name that everybody knows.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  It's awesome to be here. I mean, you know, Agincourt is always good fun, man.

• 4:20Matt Lewis?

  And Mike Livingston is a name that everybody knows, of course.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Is that good or bad? I don't know.

• 4:25Matt Lewis?

  Always in a good way. So, I mean, subscribers to History Hit will recognise you from films that you've done on the Battle of Shrewsbury. You cropped up in Dan Jones's film on Cressy, The Cressy Campaign, and you've got a new film heading to the channel about the Battle of Agincourt. So you're here today to talk to us all about, I mean, arguably one of the most famous battles in medieval history.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it is, right? So I actually was wondering this question, you know, because this came out of a book I wrote, Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King. And my agent was actually asking, like, so what do you do after that? Like, well, I don't know, there's nothing like, what is, what is a level above Agincourt? I don't know what is. That's, it's pretty much the top of the pops right there.

• 5:08Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's an interesting question. Where do you go next? Hmm. And I guess to give us a little bit of background as we work our way towards that wet, muddy field in France, what are the key events that lead up to Henry V's decision to go on campaign in France in 1415? What is he trying to achieve?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  I really think kind of the story of this starts with the fact that his father, Henry IV, was a usurper. So he takes over for Richard, and the kingdom doesn't do great. You have a lot of revolts, a lot of, you know, conspiracies, a lot of attempts to undo the usurpation. The throne is not secure. And Henry V grows up in this environment. And when he takes over, one of the key things he wants to do is like, let's get everybody on board, right? And sadly, still true to this day, one of the great ways to unify people is to get them all pointing at someone else, and let's go get them. And so, yeah,

• 6:10Speaker 03

  the Hundred Years' War had kind of been quieted down for quite a bit at this point. And Henry V is like, let's, it's time, but let's go over there and get them. And at the time, France is really kind of ripe for the picking in the sense that it's tremendously weak and more or less in a civil war. So the timing is really good.

• 6:33Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. It is striking how little some things change, isn't it? These days, when you watch the news and you see somebody trying to get you to desperately hate a group of people, you always have to wonder why they want you looking somewhere else. What are you hiding by trying to make me look somewhere else? And it's kind of a little bit of that going on here for the Lancasterian kings, isn't it? You know, the kingdom's been really insecure for the 13, 14 years of Henry the Fourth's rule. And Henry the Fifth is, it seems like he's trying to play that little sleight of hand of, you know, don't look at this, look at that over there.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I mean, his father had tried the same thing at the start of his reign. After he usurps the throne, he tries to get everybody to go get Scotland. He's like, let's go get Scotland. And it's an utter disaster. It's an utter disaster. So, so yeah, he, you know, he knows that this is necessary, that is, say, Henry the Fifth. And, and he knows, you know, in a sense, how fragmented things are. I mean, he knows from experience. He was at, you know, you mentioned the Battle of Shrewsbury, like, you know, he was there, right? That's where he takes this arrow to the face. I mean, so he knew about revolts. He'd, he'd cut his teeth fighting Owen Glendur in Wales. So he knows how fragmented things are. And yeah, this is a great way to, to unify everybody. Let's, let's all get on

• 7:49Speaker 03

  side and go get those guys.

• 7:51Matt Lewis?

  Were there any striking reasons, do you think, why Henry shouldn't have done this? Was it too good an opportunity to miss? Or were there potential problems with him attacking France at this point?

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I, I think it was a brilliant decision. And I'm not just because it worked out, because how it worked out was not brilliant. But, but the idea of let's go hit France because they're weakened. I mean, if you're planning to do this at all, yeah, this is the time. I mean, many people in England at the time thought we should have been doing this before. And it's kind of a travesty that we weren't because France is in such a weakened position. So yeah, it's, it's a good idea. And, and the... The logistics of it, the initial landing, where to choose to land, all that is done really, really well. You know, Henry, Henry's not an idiot. He knows what he's doing. He's very,

• 8:44Speaker 03

  very good at it. And, and so all the planning of this, fantastic, fantastic. Things start going a little awry when he gets there, but, but as far as, you know, the strategy, it's good strategy.

• 8:57Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And I guess the measure is not whether the plan goes as it was intended, but how you deal with the inevitable falling apart of the plan once it touches reality. So the first thing that Henry engages with when he, he sails from Southampton, lands near Harfleur in France, and he lays siege to Harfleur, how does that go for him?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  The initial landing goes great. The French, the French knew an army was coming. You can't hide this. It's a lot of, it's a lot of organization, a lot of men. So they knew something was coming. It appears that they assumed he would land at the same place that where the third did in 1346. He's going to land somewhere on the Normandy coast, the lower Normandy coast, but he doesn't. He lands on the upper Normandy coast. That is to say, sort of, you know, north of the mouth of the, of the Seine, near Harfleur. There's really no kind of, nobody there to catch him at the shore. They're all in the wrong spot. So the French are kind of caught off foot and they've got to now reconvene and get everybody over the Seine, onto the right side of the Seine. They've got to start organizing all

• 10:00Speaker 03

  that, which gives Henry a chance to land all his men. And also means that depending on what he is planning to do, Henry doesn't have to worry about crossing the Seine himself, which is something that Edward the Third had had a lot of trouble doing in 1346. So again, it's a really good, good idea, really good plan. Land safely, no problem, able to, you know, set up camp, no problem. And then set siege to Harflor, which, you know, he thinks is gonna fall quick. He's got a lot of cannon he's brought, which is kind of, I mean, not a brand new thing, but this is the first time we get major siege in the Hundred Years' War with cannon. I'll see, like, you know, they're not gonna stand for this.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  This is gonna just tear this place apart. They're not ready for me. This is gonna go quick. And instead, Harflor holds out for weeks, which is, which is bad. I mean, as you know, you don't wanna have a siege in place for very long.

• 10:57Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, never good to be sitting still for too long for a variety of reasons. Disease and the enemy getting a lot closer as well. So ultimately, Harflor does fall. So it's a successful beginning to Henry's campaign. But you kind of get the sense that that isn't enough of a success for Henry. He hasn't achieved enough to be able to go home and say, yes, I captured Harflor. Job done.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. By the time he captures Harflor, by the time this is over, he, Harflor is a wreck. I mean, it is just barely defensible at that point. So you've, you've now conquered a ruin. Wow, good job.

• 11:37Matt Lewis?

  Congratulations.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, congratulations. If you wanna hold it, you better start building it. And, and he's done so at an enormous cost. Not just the financial costs of, of gathering this many men, transporting them, of course, all the horses, all the gear. I mean, Henry himself brings over 60 horses personally. You know, my personal stable of, of horses, so much for the man of the people kind of thing. And, and then thousands have, have been lost of his own men through dysentery, has absolutely riddled his ranks. And so he's left with having left thousands dead, thousands more. They can't fight. They're too weak to do anything. He's gonna have to just ship them home.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  And if he comes home having done this, I, I think he really does have a fear that this will be, you know, what breaks me, that, that no one's gonna think I'm a good, you know, leader, a good king. They didn't think my dad was.

• 12:36Matt Lewis?

  To get it's that shadow of what's gone on before with his father sort of rearing its head again, that if I go home, like my father failed in Scotland, if I go home with this, it's a little bit of a success, but is it enough that people won't turn on me and say, oh, my God, you're just like your dad?

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, the like days before he sails from Southampton, there's a plot that is uncovered to take him away. So, yeah, he knows how real this is. You know, we know that French ambassadors before he leaves, when the French are trying to sort of like, like, don't come with an army, like, let's, let's talk about this. We actually have an account of these French ambassadors talking to each other about what a dumb idea this would be. Like he's, he could end up being a failure like his father or a failure like Richard, who had gone to Ireland, only to come back and find that his throne had been usurped, right? You know, I'm like, this is such a bad idea. So, yeah, if this, if of the ruins of Harflor, all you get out of it, the almost indefensible ruins of Harflor

• 13:34Speaker 03

  at this point, but yeah, that's, that's bad. So he realizes, again, I think smartly, he needs something else. This isn't going to do it. So what am I going to do? And at this point, he's kind of handcuffed by the fact that his force is so obliterated. He has such a weaker force and it's not a force that's of any kind of makeup like a regular army would have been in his time. He's got way too many bloody archers. And so he's like, you know, what am I going to do here? And it appears that this is when he concocts this idea that he's going to march to Calais, that he really does have Edward III in 1346,

• 14:15Speaker 03

  the crazy campaign. He has that in mind. I'm going to do that. I'm going to repeat that. If, if Edward did, you know, X, I'm going to do X. That he's going to march to Calais.

• 14:27Matt Lewis?

  Is that a conscious effort then to associate himself with the success of Edward rather than a bit of distance from the failures of his father and hark back to this much more successful period?

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, Edward, Edward and the, the crazy campaign, you know, that, that's already legend. I mean, that is already like, that is, that is the greatest, that is the like. The top of anything happening in this, in this, you know, kind of fight between us and France was that battle, that campaign. And so, yeah, he says, I'm, well, I'm just gonna do that. And that's the footsteps I'll be in. And, and, and everybody will think I'm awesome. And I will kind of shown my, my strength by marching unimpeded, he thinks, from Harflor to Calais, I will cross the Somme at the fort of Blanchet, just like Edward III very memorably did. I'll do that and I'll show up in Calais and the French won't have stopped me. What a man I am. It'll be great.

• 15:22Matt Lewis?

  Sounds like a great idea. What could possibly go wrong?

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah, our eyewitness accounts says they, he planned for, to do this in eight days. Brought gear for eight days, which is too little. Even if nothing had gone wrong, that was probably not gonna happen. But, you know, as we all know, like, things, things, things went wrong really quick.

• 15:44Matt Lewis?

  Which is quite unusual for Henry, because he's a man who you would generally credit with, with understanding the need to be prepared for war and to have everything, all your ducks in a row, everything lined up as it should be, properly funded, properly supplied. And yet he seems to do this incredibly rash thing against all of his advisors as well, I think.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  You're right. All his advisors, at least according to our sources, they all said like, that's a, that's a really bad idea, sir. And he's like, well, but I'm king. So this is what's gonna happen. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's one of the things I don't really have answered in my head satisfactorily, which is why does he think this can possibly work? You know, what is he thinking here? And one possibility is he truly does think the French are that incapable. He knows they're, they're gathering their forces in Rouen, which if he heads north, they're gonna be kind of behind him. So he just thinks, well, they're chasing and they can't catch up, which, I mean, you know, maybe, but like, you should know better. You, you know that they're gonna have the faster roads. You know that, that they're on home turf.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Maybe that's what he's thinking. I, it's strange that, you know, there's, there's a school of thought that I think is incredibly wrong, that thinks that he's seeking the battle-seeking strategy, that he's going out there to seek battle, which I just find ludicrous, because he knows where the French are and marches away from them. That makes him into a real like, what are you doing? Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fight you. And then you run the other direction. Like, that doesn't make any sense. So. I don't think he's intending to fight about it, he just thinks he can march through and he's enormously wrong because the French right away suss out what he's doing and prevent him from doing it.

• 17:23Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think Henry, to me, he seems to almost deliberately create the image of wanting a fight because he's writing to the Dauphin saying, why don't we just have a one on one duel? Or, you know, I'll fight you wherever you just name the place and I'll turn up there all of the time while he's marching in the opposite direction. So it's almost like he's trying to create this notion that he's very happy to have a fight. But what he's doing suggests that the fight is the last thing.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, Edward III had done the exact same thing. Edward III had been throwing letters behind him as he was running like, hey, yeah, I'll fight you anywhere, pal.

• 17:57Matt Lewis?

  Paper aeroplanes in the wrong direction. Yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And all the while he's like doubled his marching speed in the other direction. Yeah, it's the same. It's the same thing. And that's not to say, you know, Henry's not cowardly here. He's not an idiot is what it is. He knows this is not the kind of army that I would want to use if I was going to fight. I would be greatly outnumbered. No, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna fight. I want to get away. I want to live like that's, I need, that's the plan. So, yeah, he is, he is doing much same thing. Yeah, while he was down there around Harflore, he was, yeah, he was challenging the Dauphin to a duel, like be a man, which of course, nobody expected that to go anywhere. That was just, that was just for show, but it is common to do that sort of thing. That's, that's just how this, these kind of things operate.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  So, yeah, he does his bolt, the French, it's a race and the French win it.

• 18:50Matt Lewis?

  So the French catch up with Henry. He is placed in a position where it becomes increasingly obvious he's going to have to fight somehow. What do we know about, kind of, we get to the morning of Agincourt. What do the two forces look like? What numbers does Henry have? What condition are they in and what numbers do the French have there as far as we know?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  So what had happened after he leaves Harfleur, he marches north thinking he's going to cross the Somme at this forward. He's cut off. The French get there first, bar him from getting across. He has to march upriver, which is not the way you want to go, deeper and deeper into France. So by the time he's finally cornered at Azencor, Azencor in the sources, but today A Z I N. Do not do not put into your GPS A G I N in France, you'll go in the wrong, you'll go the wrong place. So A Z I N. Once he actually gets kind of cornered there, at this point, he's been marching, his eight day, you know, tour has become

• 19:55Speaker 03

  this grueling march over hundreds and hundreds of miles lasting weeks. His men are desperately tired, desperately hungry. They've lost men. They're probably still have, they're running with dysentery, which is, which is not ideal. His force has got way too many archers. Now, what the numbers are, that gets kind of squirrely. So our eyewitness says that we have roughly just over, well, just shy of 6,000 men. Okay, roughly speaking. He's there. He's, he's a royal chaplain of Henry's. And that's what he says. That's not, if you, if you

• 20:39Speaker 03

  study the muster roles of the campaign, which Ann Curry has done, Ann Curry, if anybody knows anything about Azencor, you know this name, Ann Curry, she's just an absolute force. She's amazing. And has done more than anybody to study the Azencor campaign. Her work in studying the muster roles and figuring out how many men there were, how were they paid, all that stuff, points to a much larger force, a much larger force. There were might be, you know, 9,000, we're pushing much bigger English force at this point. There's continuing debate in the field about which, which is correct. Do we believe the, the guy who's there? Or do we believe these administrative accounts from the time

• 21:23Speaker 03

  period, right? They're both, they're both contemporary sources, right? But like, which, which do we favor?

• 21:29Speaker 03

  And I mean, I don't know. I wasn't there to do a head count. What I typically do when I reconstruct the battle is I start with the smaller numbers. But that's also because I'm trying to sort of figure out if the traditional story that we have of it will work. And as a test case, I'm like, well, will it work with the smallest numbers? Because the bigger the numbers are, the less likely it's going to work. But can I even get it to work with the small numbers? So like in my book, that's what I use is the small numbers. And like, but that's not saying that for sure that's the truth. We just don't know. But he's got a weak force, for sure. They're very, they're

• 22:11Speaker 03

  very tired, very exhausted. They've been sleeping in the field. They're hungry. A lot of them are sick. And he's got way too many, too many archers. He can't do the kind of thing he would normally do. And we know that the French have more. He's outnumbered at least two to one.

• 22:29Matt Lewis?

  And what do we know about the location of the battle? Because I think the traditional version tells us that Henry is able to pick the location, manages to pick this field that's lined by woods, which will favor his smaller force, and it's churned up by mud in the night. How much do we know about where the fighting actually took place?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  On the one hand, we know quite a bit. This is a, this is a battle in which we have certain triangulation points that are pretty secure, which is good. So you know, the battle happened within a pretty defined area. Now, sort of main triangulation points are the fields of, are the towns of Azenkor, Tramacor, and Maisoncelle. Maisoncelle is where Henry spent the night, the night before the battle. He did not pick this. He's cornered at this point. This is where he's trapped. He's trying to make a run, still trying to make his run to Calais. He's trying to get to this main thoroughfare, this main road to Calais, and the French managed

• 23:28Speaker 03

  to get, have him cut him off. And this is after, I mean, you know, Henry had actually during the march, made an agreement that he was going to fight the French in a pitched battle at a chosen location. He had bailed on that and run away. So the French are just like, we've had it with this guy. You know, he's broken faith, he's dishonorable, we got to take care of this. So he's cut off there, spends the night in Maisoncelle. Now, the traditional story says that the French, though they cut them off, and all our sources say they're like within earshot of each other, they're just a couple of bow shots away, the two encampments, that the French, and then there's this horrible rain during the night. Fields are all muddy.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  That the French retreated north of Agincourt for reasons unknown. And that then, when they wouldn't charge back over all the stuff that they just retreated from, Henry decides to advance his lines from Maisoncelle to in between Agincourt and Tramocourt, which is a tight space, as you said, like in all the maps, they always put woods on either side. So he's moved in this really tight space, and there provokes the French to attack him. And then the French all die, and this tight space means that the French numbers can't be used against Henry, and so isn't Henry brilliant, not the French stupid?

• 24:53Speaker 03

  And one of the things I've done is like just try to dismantle that like piece by piece, that this isn't working out, even with the small numbers, which again, if Ann Curry's right, and she may well be right, I have no reason to think that she's necessarily wrong here. If she's right, like it's a lot more men that should fit there, but we can't even get the small numbers to fit in this space. So like that, like physically, you can't put the English army here, that's a problem. It's also a problem that if they were located there, the one thing we know is there at that point is a small castle. Agincourt, in Agincourt, there's a small castle. If the English are where everybody wants to put them, then Henry V has pinned the

• 25:37Speaker 03

  left, his left flank, the end of his line on the left, on a French castle. Which would be kind of odd, odd that he would think that's a good idea, odd that the French would let him do that, odd like it just, and you'd think somebody would have mentioned it, like, and nobody does. So I've kind of really taken all this to task and suggested that, yeah, somewhere in here is where the battle is, but this idea that he made this big advance and is just ludicrous, that the battle much more likely happened near Maison-Cell. He makes his initial lines and he doesn't do much movement from there, and the French are the ones that have to charge all the way across the fields. And

• 26:21Speaker 03

  that's why it goes so poorly for the French, because of the mud. I mean, that the mud, the stories of the mud are true. And they had to go, you know, hundreds and hundreds of yards across this horrific mud to get to the English. And there goes your charge, like, there goes your momentum. So, yeah, he does not choose this field, he doesn't choose the battle, he does what he can. I doubt he thinks he's going to make it, but he makes it. Like, it's kind of an amazing thing.

• 27:03Matt Lewis?

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• 30:44Matt Lewis?

  I guess the version of the start of the battle that we most often get is this idea that there's a bit of a stalemate, that the archers have driven these wooden stakes into the ground, there's a bit of a stalemate during which Henry has them uproot all of these stakes, move within bow range of the French, replant all of those stakes. Because there's always been a sense that in that moment, the French almost missed an opportunity because the English were defenceless. So do you think that maybe didn't happen or that did happen?

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's no way that happened. And you're exactly right. Like, if you were going to do this, right, when we know that he had done this, he'd had everybody sharpen stakes because he knows he's not going to be able to fight on ground of his choosing. So how am I going to protect these archers? Maybe I'll try this stake thing, which nobody there had done, really. I mean, it had been done kind of at the Battle of Nacopolis, way in the east. But, I mean, this is like new fangled thing. I don't know. Will this work? We'll see. So he has all these archers plant the stakes. And yeah, the traditional story has got them, well, the French aren't going to come. All right, everybody pull your stakes. Let's march across this muddy field, like, you know, 700 yards or something through this mud. Keep formation as best you can, boys. We have no defences. Let's get there.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Now, everybody re-sharpen, well, replant your stakes, doing which is going to blunt them. Now they're no good. So now everybody's got them planted again. All right, everybody sharpen your stakes again. Okay, all right, now we're ready. Like, this isn't...

• 32:10Matt Lewis?

  Isn't it generous of the French to wait while we do this?

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Right. Isn't it wonderful? Right. It's not, and it's like, it's, yeah, is it a, in this, you said this moment, a missed opportunity. That's not a moment, right? This is like, 40 minutes, like, something that the French, and all of our accounts have got the French just so desperate to fight, like, I'm going to be the first in the fight, I'm so... But then in this, well, here they come and they can do nothing, we can slaughter them all. Yeah, well, let's just timeout, you know, like, timeout. They called timeout, they called safe, like, we can't do, like, these are children, like, what are you doing? Like, there's no way that happened. They would have been run over, and that didn't happen. So probably that's not what happened. And it would be, you know, besides anything else...

• 32:57Speaker 03

  It would have been insane for Henry V to think that that would be a good idea. Like, there's just no way he would think that was a good idea. He's way too smart a commander for that. So, yeah, that can't work. And part of what drives that, and there's a number of things that are driving that story. I mean, it's all this, we think we know where it happened, so let's make everything fit that. Right? And if that means that the French have to just stand around to wait for their cue to die, well, I mean, that's what we gotta do. In the book, I liken it to, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there's that scene where Lancelot's charging Swamp Castle, and they just show the same clip of him going across

• 33:39Speaker 03

  the fields again and again, and then, oh, then shockingly, he's there. And, yeah, that doesn't make sense. Why were people thinking the battle was in that spot? There's no archaeology to say that it was, and it's been gone over very, very closely. In fact, the whole idea of it maybe not happening there, that's not something I came up with. That's Tim Sutherland, amazing conflict archaeologist, like, he's the man. And he wrote a couple of incredible articles where he says, you know, look, we got no evidence that the battle was there. It does, like, there's some serious problems with it. Maybe it was somewhere else. And nobody was, like, looking into it, which I just found fascinating. Like, why is nobody taking him up on that? Let's find out.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  But there is this one source that says, and it's not one of our best sources, but we have a source that says, at least in the translation everybody uses, that says that the English marched up to within a few paces of Agincourt. And so everybody's used that to make sense of why, not make sense of, but to say that this is what happened. But, like, you know, when I looked at the Latin, it's like, well, that's not what it says. It says they moved that few paces towards Agincourt, which is a very different thing, a very different thing, and means that we're far away from the village. So, yeah, it's...

• 35:02Speaker 03

  What I kept finding when I was looking into Agincourt is again and again, like there's these stories that I accepted, right, that we've all accepted. And then well, that's, that doesn't make sense. Or that's not, that's literally not what our sources say happened. So what did happen? Which is kind of, I mean, fun. I mean, it's also a little bit disconcerting, right? You know, because like, I know, I know Agincourt.

• 35:29Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's interesting how little of what we think we know, we can definitely, definitely pin down and it, and how much we can just buy into this mythology that grows up around, you say, everyone knows what happens at Agincourt. We can recite the story. But actually, how much of that can we pin down to the sources, to the location and to, to everything else? And, and I guess that's, you know, what Tim Sutherland suggested and what you've been working on, is that it just doesn't fit.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Right. And, and, and yeah, the, you know, I had taught Agincourt, like, it's not, you know, in, in kind of like writing the book, I'm like, I was wrong. Like, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Look at all this, all this stuff. And, I mean, but that's how history is supposed to work, right? That's, that's what we're supposed to be doing is, is let's look, look again. Let's, you know, let's check for bias in this way. Let's, let's do this. What new facts do we have? I know it can be very disconcerting for some people. I, you know, I get a lot of people very upset, you know, well, that's not what happened because I saw the Kenneth Branagh movie. Like, well, it's a good movie, but.

• 36:37Matt Lewis?

  You're talking to someone who spends a lot of their life dealing with Richard III, in the sense that I'm a Ricardian. So, you know, whatever you might think about Richard III, I'm very much with you on the idea that, you know, history is about continuing to reevaluate and challenging what we think we know, because in so many places, it just doesn't stand up to the evidence that we have. So I, I feel like I'm, I'm with you on that.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, which is good, right? Because, and, and that's not to say that, you know, we all have to agree on the outcome. You might support what I'm doing and say, well, but I think your story of Agincourt isn't correct. Like, oh, okay. Like, that's fine.

• 37:11Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. But I think that process of reexamining it is what history is, isn't it? History is not accepting what we've always thought we knew for centuries. It's, it's checking that. And it's reinforcing it or challenging it.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I always I always get a kick out of anytime somebody says, you know, well, this is revisionist. And I'm like, but that's history. So I don't know. I don't know what you think it is. But that's, that's, that's what it is, literally. So, so, yeah, this Agincourt is a great case in point for this. You know, because the story is so famous, right? Because it's so well known, it's so ingrained. And then, yeah, you start poking at it and boy, that, that doesn't check out. That doesn't make sense. And, and well, what does, right? What can make sense of this? To me, the, the story you actually get when you start from scratch, like pull off everything we think we know away and just start building up is way more interesting.

• 38:04Matt Lewis?

  So how do you see the Battle of Agincourt? How did it start? And how did it then play out? And where is that different from the traditional narrative that we have?

• 38:14Speaker 03

  So the first thing that happens is Henry, Henry's men line up just north of Maison cell. And he's taken, he's put them in a very interesting formation. Everybody agrees on this, that there's this kind of weird formation he has because our sources say he has his archers in the middle of his lines in wedges. And what that means is, I mean, I don't know how there's dozens of articles trying to figure out what the heck this means. I think it, I think it means like, like literally a wedge, like a little triangle, a pointy triangle of archers that he's put interspersed into his lines of dismounted men at arms. So that the sort of standard practice at like Cray C and things like that was wings of archers, dismounted men of arms in the center. And he's basically done that in triplicate is, is what he's done.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  So he can keep using the same tactics, but he has to like, has this funky, you know, tactic within the tactic kind of thing. So he does all that. They then talk about whether or not there's going to be a fight. There's a parley. We obviously, we want to check that box, you know, we gave them a chance to live. They didn't take it. According to our, our French sources, Henry makes some extraordinary offers. He's, he's like, I'll give you back car floor. I'll give back all my claims to this. I'm like, I might, one of the sources says he'll, he'll give away the claim to, to the French throne. If only you'll. Just let me leave alive. He's that convinced of his poor position. And the French are like, no, we're going to take everything, pal. And so, and so it comes to the fight.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  And at that point, it appears that the French, though they are anxious to fight, are also thinking, you know, if we can get him to come to us, that's better, right? Like, which is pretty much true of any fight. If you can find the defensive, you're in a better position.

• 39:54Matt Lewis?

  I always try and say to people, when you think about medieval battles, generally, the army that moves first is going to lose as a rule of thumb. So you don't want to be the army that moves first.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and well, and of course, generally, they're very short, right? You know, I mean, that we have this Hollywood idea of battles just being these hours-long slogs. And sure, some of the famous ones are that way, but that's probably isn't the famous ones. Most of them were overmuch quicker. So, yeah, he doesn't want to advance because he's got all these stakes that he's planted to try and protect his archers. Because that's his biggest fear is if the cavalry overrun, the French cavalry runs my archers and they're in my backfield, we're gone. So he doesn't want to do that. And the French don't want to advance. But Henry knows every minute, I'm weaker, they're stronger. Because the French army is still gathering up. So he knows, like, this is going to happen. If I'm going to have any shot, it's now.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  And at that point, he takes his center where he is, his banner. And he advances that, probably not far, I mean, we're talking like 20, 30 paces. Horns blaring, trumpets going, banner shaking. He starts advancing and that trips the French line. They say, okay, we're doing this. And they, and they start moving forward. And at that point, I think Henry probably at least stops. I think he probably pulls that 20 paces back into formation. Say, okay, they're coming, let's take the hit. And the first thing that comes in is the French cavalry. And they are better suited to take the longbow shots than they had been at Craysee, for instance, in 1346. They now have better armor. Great, awesome.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  But like it's still your horses, you can't really armor them for this kind of thing. And when the arrows are coming, though the plate is is stopping most of the arrow penetrations, it's also turning the arrows into like effective like shrapnel, like all these splinters and things going everywhere, which are easier to get into eye slits and things like that. So some men are going down from injury, but a great many more of the cavalry are simply being turned back because their horses are going nuts. And as those horses, that charge disintegrates and then starts coming backwards, it's now running into the advancing French on foot, causing that all to get chaotic.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  And of course, all this is happening across hundreds and hundreds of yards of deep sucking mud and which is only made worse by the horses, only made worse by the men tramping through it. And the French idea is we're just going to have like push these lines. We got three lines and they're just going to bam bam bam and overrun. And so as this chaos is taking away the momentum of the forward momentum of the French, and of course, more arrows are coming in, it's just kind of compounding, right? It's a compounding problem. The the French, to their credit, the infantry make it to Henry's lines. We know that because they're pushed back, the English are pushed back a spear's length, we're told.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  So they buckle, the English buckle, but they don't break. And it's, I think, one of the biggest testaments to Henry is that they don't break. You know, in many battles, this would be where they would break and people would turn around, especially this tired and exhausted and knowing that they're outnumbered by this much, they kind of had every excuse to break and they don't. And that's really, really kind of amazing command and control on Henry's part. And so, yeah, they start pushing back and now that first line of the French. Is like buckling in in front of the the English and a second line of French is coming over top of them. So a lot of the killing, a lot of the melee is men actually scrambling

• 43:39Speaker 03

  to climb on top of fallen men to have better footing in the mud to get at the guy in front of them. So we have these descriptions of these these heaps of men and fallen in the mud that are islands upon which the the English are climbing under the top of them to like get at the the French behind. Probably more French died from the mud, suffocating in the mud than than than died by, you know, by battle injury, which is which is horrific, absolutely horrific. And as this kind of keeps going, the English are just getting the better hand of it. The English longbowmen run out of arrows pretty quickly, get out their daggers and flying in from the sides to to help surround these the melee and get men. And that's when the prisoners start getting taken en masse.

• 44:24Matt Lewis?

  So there is as well that bit of an elephant in the Agincourt room when we think about it as this this glorious victory for the English, however unexpected it was. One of the things that is often leveled at Henry V is this notion that he ordered the execution of prisoners of war once they'd started being taken, as you mentioned then, that there was this threat of an attack from the rear and Henry ordered the prisoners to be killed. How much of that do you think happened? Were many prisoners killed, do you think? And if so, can we put that into any kind of context? Is this an unforgivable act to execute prisoners of war like that?

• 45:00Speaker 03

  So he does. I mean, I don't I don't think there's any way to to kind of like straight face, given the sources we have, argue that that he did not order the execution of prisoners. He did. The timing of it and the and the why of it is is where things get interesting. His baggage train, his his like his camp, his wagon, was hit during the battle. There's kind of two camps. Like, the French tell this story one way, French historians tell one way, English historians tell another way. I'm an American historian. I don't I don't really care. I just want to know what happened. The the English usually try and reorder events so that this his his killing of the prisoners is because his camp got hit.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  And so you guys broke the rules. And so it's okay that I broke the rules. There's not a, I can't find a shred of evidence that that's what's going on. His, his encampment is hit, but he does not know it. He does not know it at this time. And the idea that, well, you guys did something dishonorable. I mean, first of all, it wouldn't have been that dishonorable to hit the encampment. But even if it was, that that would, would, the response to that would be to kill the prisoners is, is just bonkers, right? The prisoners are money. That's the reason you take them prisoner. That's money. You're not gonna like, you guys stole, like, some of my outfits. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna burn money to spite you. Like, that's not how anything works. That's not how Henry would think. This is money.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  So the only reason he's gonna order the execution of prisoners is because he thinks it's the, the better tactical choice. And the reason for that, when you kind of put everything together and put all the timelines together, is that third line of the French. The first two lines come in and he's, they've, they've just gotten swallowed up. And now he's got all these prisoners. And the rumor begins that the third line is gonna come in. And he's desperately, he sees the third line and thinks, oh my God, if those guys charge in, we're out of arrows. So that's, that's already a huge problem. And we're also exhausted from everything we've done so far. And also, some portion of my, like, half my guys, who, you know, who knows the exact

• 47:09Speaker 03

  number, but a huge percentage of my guys aren't going to fight because they're guarding the prisoners they've taken. We will have won two thirds of a battle only to lose the battle if that third line comes in. And recognizing the danger, it's, it's horrible, but this is the calculus of war. He decides, yeah, killing the prisoners is dishonorable. Yeah, killing the prisoners means we can't. Ransom them, but also if I don't do that, we may all die here. And that's when he gives the order to do it. And initially, the men won't do it. He has to like, he has to task a unit of, of, of, of lower ranked guys who do not have any prisoners.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Like you guys go do it because they're, they, nobody wants to again, burn money, which is what this would be by executing the prisoners. Uh, even aside from any moral issues, there's just, this is economically a bad idea. So, so yeah, how many get executed? A lot. I mean, our sources are pretty clear. It's a lot. Uh, how many we don't know. Nobody was counting the numbers. We do know that, you know, a lot aren't killed because as soon as the, the third line of the French, um, rolls off the field, they, they go to retreat. He orders execution stopped that, you know, there's, there's no reason to keep doing this. And then we, you know, know the, all these guys who we have lists of the prisoners who are taken back to England, including a great number of really, you know, high ranking dudes. Uh, you know, the Duke of Orleans among them.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  So, so yeah, how many died? I mean, it's hundreds, I would think for sure, but exactly the number we, we just don't know. And it's horrifying. I mean, I, I call it a mass execution because like, I don't, I don't know what else you would term that as. I mean, you know, I, I'm not making a moral judgment. I'm just like, that's what that is when you, when you, when you kill a bunch of people who are at your mercy. That's an execution and it's a mass of them. It's a mass execution. So yeah, it's bad. Um, this is a, a bit of a moral stain. It kind of slipped under the rug because Henry wins, um, and, and everything kind of keeps going well. Uh, but it is a, uh, something he shouldn't have done.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  I, I think in a kind of moral sense, but again, in a, like in a military tactical sense, well, you know, I understand entirely why you would have given this order. I'm not sure he would have been happy about it.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Uh, but necessary and you gotta do what's necessary in war.

• 49:29Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, absolutely. And you do get that sense that even the French chroniclers don't particularly criticize Henry for, for doing that. They sort of accept that he probably had no choice and that maybe it's even their own fault for. Botching the attack kind of thing.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  That's mostly what you get. Yeah. I mean, they like to point out, you know, and this and this makes sense, right? If you wanted to point out, well, Henry's such a bad guy for being mean to us after we lost so miserably. Like, that's not a winning, winning argument. So so that's not what we get. What we get instead is the blame game of of who made the mistakes that led to us being in that position, right? Of having that man prisoner's taken, like, who screwed up? And mainly, the the, you know, excuses there go towards pride, right? We shouldn't, we shouldn't have gone in. We should have stayed back. All that was pride. Our lines were front loaded with the main leadership. So as soon

• 50:26Speaker 03

  as things started going bad, we had no command and control, which is pretty much true. They weren't all on the front line. They were in the front two lines. So there was no, nobody really to put together the third line, which then retreated. And had anybody been there, they could have overrun the English. But didn't happen. So there was lots of blame to go around on that. And and a lot of blame for like, why didn't we just take the deal? Right? I mean, if he offered all this stuff, why on earth did you guys not just take it? And they keep pointing back to Poitiers, because the Battle of Poitiers, the same thing happens. Where you have the Black Prince, who's so cornered at Poitiers, and he's and he's begging King John the Second, let me go, let me go, I'll give you anything. We'll relinquish the the claim to the title of France. We'll give you anything. Just let

• 51:11Speaker 03

  us go. And the French are like, no, man, we're taking you out. And of course, that ends up with King John the Second in an English prison. So yeah, there's a lot of blame that goes around, but it's not moral blame against the English.

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• 53:05Matt Lewis?

  We tend to, at least in Britain, we tend to remember Agincourt as this glorious victory. But should we think about the English winning it? Or should we think about the French losing it?

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Like most things, I think both are true, right? I mean, you know, the French make some horrendous choices, but Henry takes advantage of those choices, right? So, so any sense, and this is, I mean, this is true of any, any battle, any engagement, to say that like, well, one side had all the answers, one side had all the losses, like, you know, it's always a combination of things. And that's very much the case here. You know, Henry has made a sequence of really, really bad decisions to be in this position. Being in this position, he makes a sequence of really good decisions to get out of it. Like, you know, so like, you know, on the scorecard, what do you do with that? I mean, and I understand the kind of nationalistic rationale for saying, well, it's just, Henry's just utterly brilliant.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Let's forget about and ignore all those really, really bad decisions he made and just like, let's just look at this bit. Yeah. And, you know, okay, you can do that. That's fine. I'm, I'm, I'm kind of not worried about that myself. Um, so I'm like, well, I'm interested in both these aspects, right? What, why on earth did he think he could make this march to Calais? What the heck were you doing like? And even along the way, he's making decisions that like, what are you, what are you going? What are you thinking? This is the wrong decision. And if this had gone the other way, everybody would be blaming you. And say, you know, this guy's one of the worst kings, but it doesn't go the other way. But not because of what you did, because of what they did, but also them having doing what you had, you made the right decision.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  So yeah, it's, it is this complex. It's not as simple as, as we ever like it is. History never is. We always want our myths to be nice and clean, but they're not. You know, 1346 is amazing when it crazy, not the clean story. Everybody thinks it is and not the clean story that Henry the fifth thought it was. When Henry the fifth is making that march, he's doing so in the footsteps of a myth, not reality of a myth. And yeah, so are we all like, we're all working in those, in those pictures.

• 55:10Matt Lewis?

  What would you say is the immediate legacy of Agincourt? I would say that it feels to me a lot like, you know, Henry goes home and okay, they've, they've killed a lot of French senior ability. They've captured a whole bunch of other people, but it almost seems to lack an immediate legacy in that Henry can't capitalize straight away on such a massive victory.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so this is what things you find as a military historian is that few battles are ever decisive, right? I mean, even Poitiers, they capture the French king, doesn't end the Hundred Years' War. Like, um, so, so yeah, after this, I mean, Henry's in no shape to do anything. Shakespeare kind of elides a bunch of things to make it look like after this, there's just triumph. I mean, no, Henry's army is in the middle of France. They're now out of arrows. They're even more tired. And now they got to get these prisoners somewhere. So they continue their march to Calais and get back home as quickly as possible, get out of danger. And from that point, what has happened isn't sort of the immediacy, but the setting the stage for what's to come.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Because the loss at Agincourt, you know, I said sort of at the start, there is this more or less civil war going on in France. So, so Henry's only defeated like half of France. I mean, you know, there's this. Like France with one arm tied behind its back. But the result of that, of this big loss, this crushing loss, is that that civil war gets worse. That civil war gets worse. And so Henry, when he comes over in the following years for his Normandy campaign, he is got very little to fight against him. And he's able to steamroll Normandy. And that's how we get the Treaty of Troy in 1420. And this idea that Henry VI is going to be now the King of France and King of England when he's born.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  All in and that sort of moment where it looks like England has won. It's not directly because of Agincourt, but it's because Agincourt has like, it's just a wedge driven into this crack in France and has just broken it open. And so France can't really defend. And many people in France are so distraught over what's happened to their kingdom that they're thinking, well, maybe this foreign guy's got a better chance at running it than we do. And are willing to go on with the Treaty of Troy. So, yeah, it's not, you're absolutely right. It's not decisive in that moment, but it leads to a continuation of the Hundred Years' War and a huge shift that sees the English almost winning the Hundred Years' War, if not for this Scal Jones showing up.

• 57:37Matt Lewis?

  And I guess, you know, it obviously has a much longer legacy. It has this really long tail to it in that it becomes a nationalistic focus for how a small English army can defeat the odds and beat the, you know, the cream of French chivalry on French ground. And that's something that audiences will come back to. You think in the 20th century, when they're making Shakespeare's Henry V, it's all about this nationalistic drive in the middle of the 20th century, when there is war going on in Europe and all of that kind of thing, and drawing on some sense that Agincourt has planted alongside Cressy and Poitier and things, that the English will always win.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you're quite right to mention this. You know, the great Olivier Henry V movie, right? That's pushed by the British government. They're like, we're going to have to cross the channel and, you know, D-Day is going to happen. How are we going to help get people excited for this? Man, Henry V, let's like, here we go, here we go, Agincourt, we did this before, we'll do it again. That is an incredible part of the story that that you just can't get away from. You know, Agincourt holds that mythic heart of France, which is really, really cool. Really, really cool.

• 58:55Matt Lewis?

  Well, I mean, subscribers to History Hit will be able to find out even more about this in your documentary on Agincourt. What can people expect to find out in that, Mike, that we maybe haven't even discussed today?

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so it's it's a it's a fun thing to do. One of the things I love about doing documentaries is you you get like cool chances to do cool things. So, you know, in this case, you know, getting the chance to to, you know, we we follow the path across the the English Channel, which is which is amazing. It's just just cool, very moving. And, you know, some of the things we're able to do and show in Harflour, you know, to really get people a sense of what that is like, really amazing and and quite fun. And and yeah, just trying to sort of show this story in a way that's not mythologized, right? Let's set aside the myth. Let's just what really happened here and get viewers to have a sense of that and the reality of warfare. So I really hope people are gonna love it. I loved

• 59:50Speaker 03

  shooting it. It was it was amazing. It was such a great time. Such a great time. So so yeah, I hope everybody can check it out.

• 59:56Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fantastic. Another good reason to subscribe and go and check out Mike's fantastic new documentary on the Battle of Agincourt. And I feel like having torn Agincourt apart, maybe you ought to come back and do Cressy for us next time.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's tear apart Cressy. Let's do that, man.

• 1:00:08Matt Lewis?

  Let's destroy everything we've ever believed about medieval battles.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Maybe we could do one where where it's not the case. Like, maybe we'll just, everything you thought was true. Like, let's do one of those. That'd be fun.

• 1:00:19Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, we'll have to find one of those. Brilliant. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for talking us through Agincourt. It's been wonderful to go through it with you. Thanks, Mike.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  My pleasure, Matt. Thank you.

• 1:00:27Matt Lewis?

  Thank you.

• 1:00:34Matt Lewis?

  If you want to find out more about Henry V, you can find an episode with Dan Jones on his new biography of the king, in which we explore the years before Agincourt in detail. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries, now including Mike's newest one on Agincourt, when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:01:16Matt Lewis?

  There's a special gift you can get 50% off your first three months when you use the code MEDEVIL at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

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