Forbidden History - Unearthing Agincourt: Band of Brothers

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

In this episode, we take a closer look at the Battle of Agincourt through the eyes of archaeologists. While the battle is often remembered through legend and literature, the evidence beneath the soil reveals what really happened in 1415. Cast List: Tim Sutherland: Archaeologist, University of York Prof. Anne Curry: University of Southampton Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. The most infamous battle of the medieval age. The most famous army in English history. Henry V's Immortal Band of Brothers. It's a battle victory and the French are too scared to face Henry in battle again.

A decade-long archaeological quest. A lost map, a lost castle, lost graves. The mysteries which surround the Battle of Agincourt. Of all the battles in the medieval age, Agincourt is among the best known. And of all the times English armies clashed with the French, it was the most terrible. We all grew up in England reading about the Battle of Agincourt.

We learn about it at school, we see it at a theatre. And to some extent, it's part of our national identity now. I think for most people, the Battle of Adjinkort is Shakespeare's Battle of Agincourt. The play, Henry V, written in 1599, possibly the first play at the Globe Theatre when it was newly built. 40 miles south of Calais in northern France, the Normandy fields lie silent. nowhere more so than around the tiny village known as Agincourt. These fields hide secrets that have puzzled historians and archaeologists for many years. We think we know everything about the Battle of Agincourt, and that's one of the problems,

because what we really know is very little, and so we need to look for the truth. That's what we need to be aiming for. Battlefield archaeology is a relatively new academic discipline. Archaeologists like Tim Sutherland are uncovering new data on medieval battles in a way that documentary research alone cannot. Tim has investigated many medieval battle sites and located the last resting places of many of the nameless men who lost their lives. But Achencore is a thorn in his side. Thousands are thought to have died here, yet no mass grave nor single skeleton can now be found. The battlefield and its lost dead have come to haunt and obsess Tim.

What we need to consider now is where are the dead from the battle? Are they in the immediate vicinity or are they nowhere near here? So somewhere around here there are thousands of the dead from the Battle of Agincourt, but we just can't find any traces of them yet. Tim's quest to find the Agincourt graves is inextricably linked to the Agincourt graves inextricably linked with his research into another historical figure, who lived 400 years after Agincourt. John George Woodford is Tim's archaeological forebear and an enigma of a man. A British Army officer, Woodford supposedly located some of the graves from Achencore.

Tim has been trying to work out where? It's a detective trail that he's been on for more than a decade. In the years after Waterloo and Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the British Army remained in France. There was no more fighting to be done, and so instead Woodford could turn his attention to his passion for antiquities and history. In 1818, he took a company of his soldiers with the intention of exercising them in the new art of archaeology. Their objective, not far away, was the battlefield of Agincourt. Over the years, Tim has become captivated with the tantalizing accounts of what Woodford found at Achencourt. He was one of the first archaeologists and perhaps the first battlefield archaeologist in the world.

He claimed to have found not only bones, but arrowheads, rings, and a gold coin. These are the only archaeological finds from the battle ever recorded. The problem is, where did he find them? After a long search, Tim has found some of the letters and the sketches Woodford made of the finds. But the trail ran dry as the key papers were thought to have been lost in a fire. Now he's found that some of the Woodford collection may have survived. To investigate, he heads to the north of England. Woodford lived out his days in the Lake District.

An eccentric antiquarian, he lived in a house overlooking Derwent water, surrounded by his notes, letters, and artifacts, maybe including some of those he found at Ashencore. But when he died, it was all split up and much of it was lost. Tim has found that part of this scattered material has come to light in Keswick Museum in Cumbria. Well, hopefully, we're going to examine one of Woodford's diaries, or his notebooks, and hopefully it will contain some information we're after

concerning his excavations on the battlefield of Agincourt. At the time of his death in 1879, Woodford was a major general, the last British officer still surviving from the Battle of Waterloo. He and his brother Alexander served in the British. of the Duke of Wellington. Many of the letters and papers in the archive relate to this time in Woodford's life. It makes me wonder whether Woodford was as interested

in Agincourt because he fought at Waterloo. This was his own personal, huge battle. Waterloo meant a great deal, obviously, because he was English and he were victorious, but also he was there with his brother, part of his family, and then as a sort of an animal, there's a sort of an anticlimax after anything major, but something the size of Waterloo, this battle, it must have been a massive anti-climax afterwards.

And how do you fill your time after something like that that's taken over your whole life? And so what he does is he goes to visit another famous battlefield which isn't far and goes to Ajin Kour, starts to map the terrain, make a grand plan, then he actually gets permission to carry out an excavation on the site of the battlefield. And he's very successful.

finds a mass grave and he finds artifacts related to the battle in the mass grave. The map, the finds, all enticing. But up till now, Tim hasn't been able to find the all-important evidence. Can these notebooks reveal a clue? This is his private notebook. He's not expecting it to be published. In his day, he was almost unique. He was walking around doing what I would consider battlefield archaeology. He was going to certain sites and he was recording what he saw and what was there to record, including carrying out small excavations. And in Tajinkor, this is crucial because in 1818, this is one of the first times this ever happens and he's on record as happening. All the little key elements that we need to pinpoint his excavations, the Tajinkor are just

not here yet. I've still not found them. And maybe they just don't, don't, don't see. exist any longer. There's definitely a page missing because it starts in the middle of a sentence, which means that this is not all the original book. How much is missing? That's the crucial thing. The papers are fascinating, but there's nothing here about Agincourt. Then Tim notices something else and realizes what might have happened. I was just about to pack up all the notes and the letters, including the notebook, when I realised that some of the letters are also on paper that is gold-lined. And I've seen this paper before. This paper is the exact same paper that John Woodford wrote to his brother in February 1818. So it was from a notebook identical to this,

that he removed the paper, wrote a letter to his brother. Now, one would assume that that that That notebook is the one that he was using during the excavations, in which case has the whole notebook been disassembled and is now in fragments. So are we not looking for a notebook anymore? Are we looking for hundreds of pieces of paper, some of which contain the details of the excavations from Agincourt in 1818? He still doesn't know where Woodford found the mass grave. There's only one missing now, and that's it.

We've got everything else. We know all we need to know about Woodford. His detail about how he walked around the landscape, his letters from the king, we haven't got that last little bit of information about exactly where he was digging. That's all I want and I can't find it. How close can you get? How frustrating is it? It's unbelievable.

I just wish he was here. I could just wish I could ask him, where were you? Where were you at Ashenk? There's no magic X to mark the spot. So Tim goes back to where he started. Reading Woodford's notes and the letters home about his excavations at Agincourt. Where did he discover the graves? More coming up after the break.

Tim returns to the battlefield. Using all his experience as an archaeologist, he has a hunch as to where Woodford made the finds. As part of his work in 1818, Woodford drew a map showing his interpretation of how the English and the French battle lines may have fitted into the landscape. Of course, it doesn't show the exact site of his excavations, but it does show the site of the Calvert, traditionally where the French dead are commemorated. So we're in the field to the south of the Calvair,

and we're in the field that's officially never been ploughed. This looks like a pretty flat field. There's certain rises, certain depressions, and of course one of the biggest anomalies in this field, that a distinct depression in this field. Now, we don't know what this is. In 1818, Woodford somehow knew where to look. Is this, for example, a natural sinkhole?

Because underlying all this landscape is chalk, and they form natural sink holes, where everything goes down, it finally fills up with soil. But of course, this could be a mass grave. And it could be also the mass graves that excavated, was excavated by Woodford in 1818, subsequently filled in, and of course it falls again, becomes a hollow yet again, so it could be the place we're looking for.

And without more survey, without archaeological excavation, we don't know. The problem is that for a geophysical survey, French law requires not only landowner permission, but also the go-ahead from the Archaeological Directorate, the DRAC. This is the one field for which Tim cannot obtain archaeological permission. We've been coming here now since 2002. We've been in and out of France. Every single time we come here, it's paperwork. You've got to go through the administration, and every old and all the nice it is.

The primary objective is to do the archaeology. And of course, that's not as easy as it sounds. You can't just walk into a field and dig a big hole. Tim remains the only archaeologist since Woodford 200 years ago to conduct serious work here. And all this in the run-up to the 600,000. anniversary of the battle in 2015. Back in 1818, Woodford's opening of the graves caused such offense that he was ordered by his overall commander, no less than the Duke of Wellington himself, to stop the work. But Tim has been involved too long now to stop his research. There were other

aspects of Woodford's investigations that could reveal more about the story of Ashencore. One target of Woodford's research had a direct link back to the events of 1415. The Castle of Achencore. Several of the Chronicles describe how Henry V's victory got its now famous name. Heralds had a privileged position in medieval warfare. Their diplomatic immunity meant they could move freely between the English and the French armies. They were observers and sometimes arbiters and had important functions to perform even when the

fighting was over. Henry called the French herald to him after the battle and said, what is the name of that castle? And the herald said, Azancourt. And then you get the story that the king says, we shall name the battle as Ankur, Agincourt, after that castle, as is the tradition. In fact, it's the first known mention of this idea. tradition that battles were named after castles.

Even if the chronicles are accurate, no castle remains to be seen at Agincourt today. Most of the village dates to the 19th, the 18th, or at the very earliest, the 17th centuries. But research is showing a little of what was here in 1415. The only medieval sites that survive in the village are the castle site, and there are no standing remains now, but there have been excavations there in the 1970s, and the church, the church dates back, or the site of the church, dates back to the middle of the 13th century, but the current structure is 16th century. There's no record of the church or castle playing any role in the battle,

which is today believed to have been fought on open ground to the east of Agincourt village. But as Tim's previous work has shown, there's no actual evidence to prove that the battle was fought in this area. No archaeological finds have ever been made. Historical maps showing the position of the battlefield can't be trusted either. No medieval maps exist, which show the battlefield. The earliest are too vague and only mark its approximate location somewhere near Agincourt. The later 19th century maps are full of detail, but Tim and Agincourt expert Anne Curie have shown how they all simply copy one source, John Woodford's own personal interpretation of the location and layout of the battle. Neither he then nor anyone now can say exactly where the actual battlefield

lies. But if the castle was the reason the battle was named Aschencore, then it must have been fought close to the village, perhaps even within sight of the castle's walls. Woodford noted what remained of the castle when he visited in 1818. So when Woodford came into this field in 1818, apparently there was the remains of a tower and also in the bottom of the field he marks down a moat. Now whether it was a real moat or not, I don't know because it would unlikely to be a moat that surrounded this hill because the back of the hill is significantly higher than the front. But that's gone now. So of course we can't see any of that, but it's presumably something that existed of the castle when

Woodford walked into this field in 1818. Now it's a grassy field. But to the trained eye, there are traces of archaeology here. There's obviously something inside the hillside, which makes me believe that something like a structure, something that stops the grass from growing and gets the moisture away from that area. But at other places, a very lush green grass,

where there's obviously, you know, definitely hollows in the ground, and there's moisture content there, and it means there's something wet. So of course down here we'd expect that, that's where the moat used to be. And up there, we'd expect less of it, which is just exactly what happens, where the grass is shorter and where there's less moisture on the hill where the castle used to be. In 1976, a chance discovery led to ruins being unearthed here in a very unexpected way. The owner of the farm behind me decided to put in some land drains,

or a big drain from the top of the hill down to the bottom to the stream. And so got an earth-moving machine, a big digger in, and he started to dig what he thought was a simple trend from the top to the bottom of the field. He came across some limestone rubble and then some building material and then some huge amounts of soil and silt and ash and all sorts of things. And that attracted the attention of the locals, and they all came to have a look down this hole. The locals had unwittingly revealed the foundations of massive walls or vaulted stone rooms, perhaps cellars underneath the castle. buildings or towers. They were there for three weeks digging this big hole, and then officially somebody came along and said, excuse me, what you're doing?

This is a castle and it's an archaeological site. Would you mind stop doing this? And the whole thing was shut down and backfilled, and people had wandered off sight with all sorts of things from tiles and bits of pottery. So all of this was disseminated around the village, and that was the end of it. After almost 40 years, all that's left is a slight scar on the hillside. where the excavation took place. Nothing can be seen above the ground, but what about below?

On the flat area on top of the Castle Hill are the modern farm buildings. One of the barns is hundreds of years old. It probably dates to at least a century or so after the battle, but it could stand on the footprint of an earlier building. The owner has agreed to let Tim have a look at the oldest remaining part, the cellar, which lies beneath. Maybe this dates back to the period when the castle stood here. It's in immaculate condition. It's absolutely fantastic. There's nothing all with it at all.

It's been blocked up, there's got a blocked up doorway here and blocked up doorways here and there and hatches. And we don't know how old it is. And we don't know if it is on the site of an earlier cellar. But it's significant that it's so close to the castle site. And it's obviously below ground. We're well below ground here. Behind these walls, are there other walls, for example, some stone walls. Like the existing farm, the castle would also have needed cellars, but it seems unlikely.

It would be nice to think this was part of the castle, but unfortunately most of these bricks are a lot later, and it would have been a significant building if it had been made a brick in that period. So we're still looking for stone structures, and this is one of them. So although it was quite exciting to be told that there's an old cellar down here and then climb down into all this, that presumably very, very few people have seen for a long time. It's still much too late for the castle as you go, but it's not too late for Woodford. And so did Woodford ever come down this cellar and do exactly like I'm doing, shining his torch around looking for bits of the castle?

It's a nice thought that maybe he was here 200 years ago. As nothing medieval has survived, to get an idea of the castle, Tim will have to piece together what evidence he has. When the castle was abandoned and fell derelict, much of the accessible stone was probably sold or robbed, leaving behind just the mounds of Earth. An account describes the castle as being in ruins in the decades after the battle. So even of the building was only on a modest scale. We can visualize the fact that it would have had stone round towns, would have had some

sort of curtain wall. And so the scale would have been relatively impressive in terms of the village, but we don't know how big or ground it was in the greater scheme of things. And that's one of the things that we're interested in. Tim goes back to Woodford's research. He's found a

clue and it's tantalizing. As well as digging in the ground, Woodford also spoke to the villagers of Agencore. recording stories relating to the battle handed down over generations. They're impossible now to prove or disprove, but they do offer fascinating insights into where the battle might really have been fought.

At that time, it would have been really important for Woodford to tap into the local folklore, to find out what they believed about their environment and how their fathers, their grandfathers had grown up in that environment, and also the stories they would have told each other. If we can find out what Woodford found out himself from those locals, it's almost like listening to the locals themselves 200 years ago. Contained in Woodford's letters are references to some of these discoveries.

A now lost stone in the village thought to have been a memorial to a French knight on the spot he was killed. The traditionally held belief that the battle actually began here in the village, not out in the fields. and evidence to support this in some of the surviving place names. A field known as L'Angley, a hill called perhaps grimly Mont Morival. Look, in all this evidence that we've accumulated from Woodford's notes, it just made me think that maybe we could possibly be missing something that's quite obvious. Maybe the battle didn't start where it was supposed to have started. And there is an alternative view.

It's not like today, back in the medieval period, roads would have gone from village to village so that people could have communicated with each other. They would have moved from village to village across a landscape and an invading army would have done exactly the same thing. They would have gone from village, taking what they had, moved on to the next one. And so they wouldn't be just moving around the landscape

willy-nilly. They would have actually been going for one set place to another set-place and moving on progressively across the landscape. When Woodford came here, he was told, by the French that this local area here is where the battle started. Now that's significantly different from where everybody else is saying that it started. And so one would expect that for some reason the locals thought this battle started here. I think one thing to bear in mind is that there is still no archaeological evidence to the Battle of Agincourt.

And that's really important because without that everything is conjecture. We're looking at local legend, folklore, little bits of history. Basically it could be anywhere. And it's the archaeological evidence that will finally tie it down or nail it down to a very specific spot in this landscape. If there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of men buried somewhere at Achencore, what's certain is that they were mostly French? But what about Henry's victorious soldiers? Their casualties were relatively low, and after the campaign was won, many returned to England.

Who were they? The narrative accounts of Agincourt, both on the English side and the French side, only really mention the aristocracy by name. That's particularly true of English accounts. They mention very, very few people. They're only interested in the king and his immediate royal family and leading nobles. Our studies have suggested there are about 45 surviving tombs or brasses of people who are known to have been on the Agincourt campaign. Not all of those, of course, actually fought at the battle. some were invalid at home.

Shakespeare leaves us with the idea that these 45 were among Henry's Braves, his happy few, his band of brothers. But was this really the case? So I've always wondered whether Henry's Knights came home from the Battle of Ajeure

and were celebrated as heroes in their own right. Was it like the Battle of Waterloo in Woodford's time where they were known as Waterloo men for the rest of their lives and celebrated as such? Did England really have a sense of its great victory?

Or did Shakespeare invent this for the benefit of his contemporaries 200 years after the historical events? What we hear there are Shakespeare's words, not words of 1415. Take, for example, the idea of the band of brothers, the idea that those people who fought together at Agincourt had some special relationship with each other as a result of it. That's completely an invention of Shakespeare. What we're dealing with here is a professional army.

We have about 320 people entered into contracts to serve on the campaign of 1415. The tombs and memorials of the Agincourt victors are scattered throughout England. These are mostly just the men who survived the campaign, who came home and continued their lives and who died in many cases decades after the battle. Were their lives enhanced by being able to proudly say

they were at Agincourt? Agincourt. It was a campaign for which they indented to serve for 12 months, so it was probably a campaign of conquest rather than towards a battle. The nobility on the campaign would have known each other already pretty well, and there would have been knights and other members of households, again, that are well linked to the commanders, but the idea that there was something very special linking all of these people together, that after the battle they had a kind of like an old comrades club emerging from the fact they'd served together at Agincourt is a complete myth.

Most of the effigies, brasses or inscriptions of Achencore veterans are of privileged men who would have been memorialized anyway. Now after years of fruitless searching for the graves at Agincourt, it seems Tim and Anne Curry will finally encounter the remains of one who was there in the battle that day. They have come to St. Albans, where they've been granted special access to the tomb of one of the main English figures in the battle, and one of the brothers of King Henry V himself. Henry set off in 1415 with two brothers with him, his next eldest brother, Thomas Duke of Clarence, who was invalided home with dysentery from half Fleur, and his youngest brother,

Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and he is with him at the battle. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was 25 years old at the time of the battle. He lacked fighting experience and was perhaps eager to prove himself. You've got to bear in mind that these are the aristocracy. They'd have trained in the use of arms from an early age, the use of the horse, all of that kind of thing. Maybe he participated in the foot jousts, various other activities of that sort, and he would have been closely linked to his brother. Unusually, Humphrey's bones today aren't buried or sealed away.

The coffin is in an open vault just beneath the shrine of St. Albion himself. The tomb lay lost and undisturbed for over two and a half centuries before a concealed staircase was rediscovered by accident. So this tomb was prepared for Humphrey? It was indeed. He died at Burry St. Edmunds and he was brought from there after being disemboweled and embalmed, brought from there and buried in here on the 4th of March, 1447. Some people, of course, think that he was murdered at Bury St. Edmunds. He'd been arrested for

treason and died a few days later. In the decades after Agincourt, Humphrey had become embroiled in the factionalism of the early years of the Wars of the Roses. The exact cause of his death is still shrouded in mystery and conspiracy. In 1703 they opened the coffin up and there was a decaying corpse in there but because it had been embalmed it had a lot of embalming liquid with it, like alcohol and there was a good trade in that being taken away whether people drank it, I don't know, but rumour had it that it was topped up with alcohol later on and it remained open till 1872 it was still visited and that's probably why we've so much graffiti. On the 25th of October 1415, Humphrey commanded one of the largest retinues in Henry's Army. So finally, we were going to be confronted by somebody who actually thought to Tatshing Corps. We are indeed. Tim has excavated many skeletons bearing evidence of medieval battle.

He's looking for any traces that might be left on Humphrey's bones. I'm looking to see if there's any obvious evidence of trauma. He didn't have that active a military career. Argincourt was his only battle. Humphrey led from the front, in the thick of the fighting, and as some accounts have it, alongside King Henry himself. The Latin lives of Henry V, written in the late 1430s, speak of Humphrey being wounded at the Battle of Agincourt,

falling to the ground and his brother sort of striding over him and protecting him against the French. It's a very heroic image. Do you think that's true, though? It certainly is. Difficult to tell that it associates him with his brother, Henry VIII. That's the most important thing about that. And it's an iconic image.

It's a marvelous. Henry standing over his wounded. Yeah. After centuries of exposure to tourists and souvenir hunters, Humphrey's skeleton is no longer complete. But there's enough for Tim to assess the remains and compare them with what's known about Humphrey. He was described as a tall athletic man,

strongly built, a natural warrior. And in terms of, heightwise, then he's round about six feet. So according to this bone, it would appear he's quite tall. Yes, yes it would. So there is a tooth. Oh, you can get all sorts of information from a tooth. Most of the finer bones at the base of the skull have gone.

Obviously the areas around the ears are damaged. The zygomatic arches have gone on either side. Unfortunately, there's nothing left now of the facial bones. But there's more evidence of the strength and athleticism of the man, even though he was in his fifth decade at the time of his death. This is quite a good indicator of a robust muscle on the back of the neck. So it's very pronounced there. And the bigger the neck muscles, the more this ridge is pronounced.

There's nothing weak about this at all. So the fact that we know something about this, we can start working backwards. It's all right, is he, does this skeleton look like it should be 57? Yes, it does. Does he look tall, robust? Yes, he does. And so at the moment, I would say all this is not giving us any surprises, which is good news. It's rare to come this close to the bones of any well-known historical figure.

It's an unbelievable experience because we've been talking about Ajinquil. For far too long. For far too long, we've been walking the battlefield but probably far too long as well. We've been carrying out all sorts of work, but it's so rare to be able to look into the face of a person who was actually there on the day. I mean, this is so long ago. We know where he was on the 25th of October in 1415.

And we know he was in the main division with the king, not in the vanguard or the rear guard. This man was centre stage. He would have been with his brother in the central division, in the main battle, and he would have seen what was happening to the vanguard. where the Duke of York was killed. Like all the English knights at Agincourt, Humphrey fought on foot surrounded by the men at

arms of his retinue of around 800 soldiers. As the battle and the day drew to a close, the fighting was bitter. We have the story that he falls to the floor himself, so he's very much involved in the hand-to-hand fighting, which is what these heavily armored peers and knights were intended to do. After the arrow volleys, these are the people who are doing the hand-to-hand fighting in a very skillful manner against their equivalence on the French side. For Tim and Anne, the meaning of Achencore's real band of brothers now becomes clearer. These are the two brothers that fought at Agincourt.

We're talking about the band of brothers as the concept, but these are physical relatives. They are brothers to each other. I think this is the real band of brothers. As you know, I'm dismissive of the... Shakespearean thing. It's really Shakespearean invention. Armies are very hierarchical. But here we have a real band of brothers. Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and his brother the king fought alongside each other at the battle. Henry protected his brother when he fell. They discussed

the battle in advance, they fought together, they enjoyed the benefits of victory afterwards. Humphrey fought alongside Henry on subsequent campaigns. Really this is a very, very important link, I think. These are brothers in arms, brothers fighting together and winning the Battle of Ajincourt. These were violent times. Henry and his brothers were born into leadership. Family, the dynasty, was all. Ashincourt may have been fought while his army was trying to escape, but overall, the campaign was far from defensive. The English were the invaders. I think what I'd like to recall is the fact that the English really had no right to be there. We've got never to forget that Henry V was an aggressor.

He didn't really have a claim to the north of France. Maybe he had a claim to Gascany, but it was an invasion. It was a war of aggression. Quite often, he is portrayed as a hero. In fact, maybe we should see him as an aggressor. The other thing we should bear in mind is the English and the French, were enemies for many centuries, 1904, the Entente Cordial, and then the First World War brought them together. Maybe we should look back without too much idea of the heroism and the

colourful nature of medieval warfare, but regarded as warfare and quite a serious thing, that we should condemn as much as we condemn modern warfare. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network,

check out where did everyone go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places, available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.