Gone Medieval - The Battle of Agincourt

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

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 up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. 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. Agincourt. The word alone will stir images of a battle in France. You might hear at the back of your mind, Lawrence Olivier or maybe Kenneth Branagh, delivering the goose bump-inducing speeches of Shakespeare before the battle. We few, we happy few. We banned. of brothers, for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother being there 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. Oh, 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 hits 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.

Welcome to Godman Evil, Mike. It's fantastic to have you with us to talk about, I guess, a name that everybody knows. It's awesome to be here. I mean, you know, Agincourt is always good fun. And Mike Livingston is a name that everybody knows, of course. Is that good or bad? I don't know. Always in a good way. So, I mean, subscribers to history hit will recognize you from films that you've done on the Battle of Shrewsbury. You cropped up in Dan Jones's film on Cressie, the Cressey 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.

Yeah, I mean, it is, right? So I actually was wondering this question, because this came out of a book I wrote, Agincourt, Battle of 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 a level above Agincourt? I don't know what is. It's pretty much the top of the pops right there. Yeah, it's an interesting question.

Where do you go next? 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? 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 conspiracies, a lot of attempts to undo the usurpation. The throne is not secure. And Henry VIII 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, I'm 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, the Hundred Years' War had kind of been quieted down for quite a bit at this point. And Hunter of the Fifth is like, let's, it's time, 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. 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 4th rule and Henry V is, it seems like he's trying to play that little slight of hand of, you know, don't look at this. Look at that over there. Yeah. And I mean, it's 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 um it's an utter disaster so so yeah he you know he knows that this is necessary um that is the henry the fifth and um and he and he knows in a sense how fragmented things are i mean he knows from experience he was at you know you mentioned the battle shrewsbury like you know he was there right that's where he takes

this arrow to the face. So he knew about revolts. He'd cut his teeth fighting Owen Glendor in Wales. So he knows how fragmented things are. And yeah, this is a great way to unify everybody. Let's all get on side and go get those guys. 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? I mean, that's a great question. I think it was a brilliant decision. And not just because it worked out because how it worked out was not brilliant, 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 a good idea. And the logistics of it, the initial landing, where to choose to land, all that is done really, really well. Henry, Henry's not an idiot. He knows what he's doing. He's very, very good at it. And so all the planning of this, fantastic, fantastic. Things start going a little awry when he gets there, but as far as, you know, strategy, it's a good strategy. 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 sails from Southampton lands near Ha'Fleur in France, and he lays siege to Haarfleur. How does that go for him? The initial landing goes great. The French knew an army was coming. You can't hide this. It's a lot of, that's a lot of organization, a lot of men. So they knew something was coming. It appears that they assumed he would land the same place over 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 north of the mouth of the saying 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 saying onto the right side of saying they've got to start organizing all 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 saint himself, which is something that Edward III had had a lot of trouble doing in 1346.

So again, it's a really good idea, really good plan. Land safely, no problem, able to set up camp, no problem. and then set siege to Harfleur, which, you know, he thinks is going to 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 100 years of war with canon. Seethy's point, you know, they're not going to stand for this. This is going to just tear this place apart. They're not ready for me.

This is going to go quick. And instead, Harfleur holds out for weeks, which is bad. I mean, as you know, you don't want to have a siege in place for. very long. 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, Halfleur does fall. So it's a successful beginning to Henry's campaign, but you kind of get the sense that 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 Halfleur, job done. Right. Yeah, by the time he captures Hartflour,

But if this is over, Hartfleur is a wreck. I mean, it is just barely defensible at that point. So you've now conquered a ruin. Wow. Good job. Congratulations. Yeah, congratulations. If you want to hold it, you better start building it.

And he's done so at an enormous cost, not just the financial costs 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 horses, so much for the man of the people kind of thing. And then thousands 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 going to have to just ship them home. And if he comes home, having done this, I think he really does have a fear that this will be, you know, what breaks me, that no one's going to think I'm a good, you know, leader, a good king. They didn't think my dad was. 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? 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 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 Harfleur, all you get out of it, the almost indefensible ruins of Harfleur at this point, yeah, 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 forces 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, what am I going to do here? And it appears that this is when he concoxed this idea, that he's going to march to Calais, that he really does have Edward III and 1346, the crazy campaign. He has that in mind. I'm going to do that. I'm going to repeat that. If Edward did X, I'm going to do X. That he's going to march to Calais.

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? Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, Edward, Edward in the crazy campaign, you know, that's already legend. I mean, that is already like that is the greatest. That is the top of anything. happening 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 going to do that. And that's the footsteps I'll be in. And everybody will think I'm awesome. And I will kind of show in my strength by marching unimpeded, he thinks, from Hartfleur to Calais. I will cross the Psalm 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. Sounds like a great idea. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah, our eyewitness accounts, he planned 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 going to happen. But, you know, as we all know, like, things went wrong really quick.

Which is quite unusual for Henry, because he's a man who you would generally credit 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. You're right. All his advisors, at least cornered our services, they all say, 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 going to happen. And yeah, it's 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 gathering their forces in Ruan, which if he heads north, they're going to 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 know that they're going to have the faster roads. You know that they're on home turf. Maybe that's what he's thinking. It's strange.

You know, 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 going to 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. Yeah. So I think Henry, to me, he seems to almost deliberately create the image of wanting a fight because he's writing to the Dofan saying, why don't we just have a one-on-one jewel? 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. Yeah, Edward III had done the exact same thing. Edward III had been, you know, throwing letters behind him as he was running. Like, hey, yeah, I'll fight you anywhere, pal. Paper aeroplanes in the wrong direction, yeah. Yeah, and all the while he's like doubled his marching speed in the other direction. Yeah, 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 our floor he was yeah he was challenging the dophan to a duel like be a man which 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 just how these kind of things operate.

So, yeah, he does his bolt. The French, it's a race, and the French win it. 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, you know, we get to the morning of Agincourt. What do the two forces look like? what numbers does Henry have? What condition are they in? What numbers do the French have there,

as far as we know? So, you know, what had happened, you know, after he leaves Hartford, he marches north, thinking he's going to cross the Somathus Ford. He's cut off. The French get there first, bar him from getting across. And 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 Azenkour, Agincourt in the sources, but today, A-Z-I-N. Do not put into your GPS, A-G-I-N in France. You'll go in 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 tour has become 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 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 a, he's a, he's a, royal chaplain of Henry's, and that's what he says. That's not, if you study the muster roles of the campaign, which Anne Curry has done, Anne Curry, if anybody knows anything about Agingor, you

know this name, Anne Curry. She's just an absolute force. She's amazing and has done more than anybody to study the Aging Corps campaign. Her work in studying the muster roles and figuring out how many men there were, how they paid, all that stuff, points to a much larger force, a much larger force. There were, you know, 9,000, we're pushing a much bigger English force at this point. There's continuing debate in the field about which is correct. Do we believe the guy who's there, or do we believe these administrative accounts from the time period, right? They're both, they're both contemporary sources, right? But like, which do we favor? And, and I mean, I don't know. I wasn't there to do a headcount.

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 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. 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? On the one hand, we know quite a bit. This is a battle in which we have a sort of 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, or the towns of Azzancor, Tramacor, and Maison Sel. Maison Sel 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 third. This main road to Calais and the French managed 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, bends the night in Maisonsel. 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 bowshots away, the two encampments, that the French, and then there's a horrible rain during the night. Fields are all muddy. 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 Maison-Salle to in between Agincourt and Tramacourt, 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? 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 Anne Curry is 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 like.

located there. The one thing we know is there at that point is a small castle. In Aschencourt, there's a small castle. If the English are where everybody wants to put them, then Henry V has pinned his left flank, the end of his line on the left, on a French castle, which would be kind of odd. Odd, odd that he would think that's a good idea. Odd that the French would let him do that. Like, you 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, and it is just ludicrous, that the battle much more likely happened near Maisonsel. 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 that's why it goes so poorly for the French because of the mud. I mean, that the mud, the stories of the mud is 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. And, but he makes it. Like, it's kind of an amazing thing. 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 defenseless. So do you think that maybe didn't happen or that did happen? 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 sharpened 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 steak thing, which nobody there had done, really. I mean, it had been done kind of at the Battle of Nicopolis way in the east. But I mean, this is like a newfangled thing.

I don't know. Well, let's 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 defenses. Let's get there. Now everybody resharpen, well, replant your steaks, doing which is going to blunt them. Now they're no good. So now everybody's got them plants again. All right, everybody's sharpen your stakes again. Okay. All right.

Now we're ready. like this isn't Isn't it generous of the French to wait while we do this? 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. It'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 flight.

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 time out, you know, like time out. they called time out they called safe like we can't do like these aren't children like what are you doing like there's no way that happened um 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 it would have been insane for henry the fifth to think that that would be a good idea like there's just no way he would think that was a good idea um he's way too smart a commander for that so yeah that that can't

work. And part of what drives that, and there's a number of things they're driving that story. I mean, it's all this, we think we know where it happens, so let's make everything fit that, right? And if that means that the French have to just stand around to, you know, to wait for their cue to die, well, I mean, that's what we got to do. In the book I liken it to, in Monty Python, the Holy Grail, there's that scene where Lancelot's charging swamp castle. And they just show the same clip of him going across the fields again and again. And then, oh, then shockingly, he's there. And yeah, that's, that doesn't make sense. Why were people thinking the battle was in that spot? There's no, 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 may be 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 incredible articles where he says, you know, look, we got no evidence that the battle was there. It does like, there's, and 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 has nobody taken him up on that? Like, let's find out. But there is this, this one source that says, that'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 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 on the, you know, far away from the village. So, yeah,

it's, 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 what's like, well, 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 Agingor. Yeah. it's interesting how little of what we think we know we can definitely definitely pin down and how much we can just buy into this mythology that grows up around, you say, everyone knows what happens at Ashinga. We can recite the story, but actually how much of that can we pin down to the sources, to the location and to everything else? And I guess that's what Tim Sutherland suggested and what you've been working on, is that it just doesn't fit. Right. And, and yeah, the, you know, I had taught Agincourt. Like, it's not, you know, in kind of like writing the book, I'm like, I was wrong. Like, I'm wrong. I'm wrong. I'm wrong. Look at 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 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 Brunha movie. Like, well, it's a good movie, but... 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 the third, 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 feel like I'm with you on that. Yeah, well, which is good, right? Because, 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. 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 checking that and it's reinforcing it or challenging it. Yeah, I was, I was get a kick out of any time somebody says, you know, well, this is revisionist. And I'm like, but that's history. So, I don't know what you think it is, but that's that's what it is literally. So, so yeah, this Aging Corps 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 doesn't check out. That doesn't make sense. And well, what does, right? What can make sense of this? To me, 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. 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? So the first thing that happens is Henry's men line up just north of Maison's 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 literally a wedge, like a little triangle, a pointy triangle of archers, that he's put interspers 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 what he's done. 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 French sources, Henry makes some extraordinary offers. He's like, I'll give you back our floor. I'll give back all my claims to this. I'm like, I might, one of the first, versus says he'll give away the claim 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 it comes to the fight. 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 defense, if you're in a better position. I always try and say to people that 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. Yeah, 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 I'm sure some of the famous ones are that way, but that's probably isn't their 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 overruns 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 has got to happen. If I'm going to have any shot, it's now. And at that point, he takes his center where he hit. He is, his banner. And he advances that. Probably not far.

I mean, we're talking of like 20, 30 paces. Horns, blaring, trumpet's going. Banner's shaking. He starts advancing. And that trips to the French line. They say, okay, we're doing this. 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. So, 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 Krasi, for instance, in 1346. They now have better armor. Great. Awesome. 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 islets 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 um 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 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 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 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 as Spears length, we're told. 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 um and people to turn around especially this tired and exhausted and knowing that they're there's outnumbered by this much they kind of had every excuse to break and they don't and that's really uh really kind of amazing command of 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 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 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 heaps of men and fallen in the mud that are islands upon which the English are climbing onto the top of them to like get at the French behind. probably more French died from the mud, suffocating in the mud, than died by, you know, by battle injury, which is horrific, absolutely horrific. And as this kind of keeps going, the English are just getting the better hand of it. The English longbow and run out of arrows pretty quickly, get out their daggers and flying in from the sides to help surround the melee and get men.

And that's when the prisoners start getting taken en masse. So there is, as well, a bit of an elephant in the Agincourt room when we think about it as this glorious victory for the English, however unexpected it was. One of the things that is often levelled at Henry V is this notion that he ordered the execution of prisoners of war once they 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? So he does.

I mean, I don't think there's any way to kind of like straight-faced, given the sources we have, argue that he did not order the execution of prisoners. So he did. The timing of it and the why of it is where things get interesting. His baggage train, his camp, his wagon, was hit during the battle. And there's kind of two camps. Like the French tell the story one way. French historians tell one way.

English historians tell another way. I'm an American historian. I don't really care. I just want to know what happened. The English usually try and reorder events so that this, his killing of the prisoners is because his camp got hit. And so, you know, 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 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, the response to that would be to kill the prisoners is just bonkers, right? The prisoners are money. That's the reason to take them prisoners. That's money. You're not going to like, you guys stole some, like some of my outfits. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to burn money to spite you. Like, that's not how anything works.

That's not how Henry would think. This is money. So the only reason he's going to order the execution of prisoners is because he thinks it's 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 they've just gotten swallowed up. And now he's got these prisoners.

And the rumor begins that the third line is going to 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 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 knows the exact 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 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 task a unit of lower-ranked guys who do not have any prisoners. like you guys go do it because nobody wants to again burn money, which is what this would be by executing the prisoners. Even aside from any moral issues, there's just this is economically a bad idea.

So yeah, how many get executed a lot? I mean, our sources are pretty clear. It's a lot. 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 third line of the French rolls off the field, 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 of 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 that took a rolling on among them so so yeah how many died i mean it's hundreds i would think for sure but exactly the number we just don't know and it's horrifying i mean 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'm not making a moral judgment. I'm just like, that's what that is. 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. This is a bit of a moral stain. It kind of slipped under the rug because Henry wins and everything kind of keeps going well. But it is something he shouldn't have done. I think in a kind of moral sense but again 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 but necessary and you got to do what's necessary in war yeah absolutely and you do get that sense that even the French chroniclers don't particularly criticize Henry

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 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 um 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 many prisoners taken like who screwed up And mainly the excuses there go towards pride, right? 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 as things started going bad, we had no command and control, which is pretty much true. They weren't all in the front line.

They were in the front two lines. So there was nobody really to put together the third line, which then retreated. And had anybody been there, they could have, you know, overrun the English. But it didn't happen. So there was lots of blame to go around on that. And a lot of blame for like, why didn't we just take the deal? I mean, if he offered all this stuff, why on earth did you guys not just take it? And they keep pointing back to Poitier, because of the battle of Poitier, the same thing happens,

where you have the Black Prince who's so cornered at Poitier and he's begging King Jean II. Let me go. Let me go. I'll give you anything. We'll relinquish the claim to the title of France. We'll give you anything. Just let us go. And the French are like, no, man, we're taking you out. And of course, that ends up with King John II in an English prison.

So, yeah, there's a lot of blame that goes around, but it's not moral blame against the English. We tend to remember, at least in Britain, we tend to remember Agincour's this glorious victory. But should we think about the English winning it or should we think about the French losing it? 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 any sense, and this is, I mean, again, this is true of 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 the, 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. 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 kind of not worried about that

myself. So I'm like, well, I'm interested in both these aspects, right? 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. Like, 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 did, you made the right to say. So, yeah, it's, it is this complex. It's not as simple as we ever like it. As history never is. We always want our myths to be nice and clean, but they're not. You know, 1346, this amazing one at Krasy.

Not the clean story everybody thinks it is. Not the clean story that Henry VIII thought it was. When Henry VIII 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 pictures. 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 killed a lot of French senior ability. 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. Yeah, well, so this one of the things you find as a military historian is that few battles are ever

decisive. I mean, even Poitiers, they capture the French king. Doesn't end the 100 years war. 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's in the middle of France. They're now out of arrows. They're even more tired. And now they've 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. 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 Henry's only defeated like, half of France. I mean, you know, there's this like a 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 has got very little to fight against him. And he's able to steamroll Normandy. And that's how we get the Treaty of Tuat in 1420. And this idea that Henry the 6th is going to be now the King of France and King of England when he's born. And that sort of moment where it looks like England has won. It's not directly because of Ashencore, but it's because Ashincourt has, like, it's just a wedge driven into this crack in France and is 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 of running it than we do. and are willing to go on with the Treaty of Troyes. So, yeah, 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 Gall-Jone showing up.

And I guess, you know, it obviously has a much longer legacy. It has this really long tale to it in that it becomes a nationalistic focus for how a small English army can defeat the odds and beat the cream of French chivalry on French ground. And that's something that audiences will come back to you. Think of 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 Cressie and Poitiers and things that the English will always win. Yeah, I mean, you know, you're quite right to. to mention this, you know, the great Olivier, Henry the fifth movie, right? That's pushed by the, British government. They're like, we're going to have to cross the channel and, you know, DDA is going to happen. How are we going to help get people excited for this? Man, Henry the fifth, 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 you just can't get away from. You know, Agincourt holds that mythic heart of France, which is really, really cool. Really, really cool. Well, I mean, subscribers to history here will be able to find out even more about this in your documentary on Aging call. What can people expect to find out in that, Mike, that we maybe haven't even discussed today? Yeah, well, so it's a, it's a fun thing to do. One of the things I love about doing documentaries is you get, like, cool chances to do cool things. So, you know, in this case, you know, getting the chance to, you know, we follow the path across the English channel, which is, which is amazing, which is just cool, very moving. And, you know, some of the things we're able to do

and show in Hartflore, you know, to really get people a sense of what that is like. Really amazing and quite fun. And, and yeah, just trying to sort of show this story in a way that's not myth, 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 going to love it. I loved shooting 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. 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, maybe you ought to come back and do Cressy for us next time.

Yeah, let's tear apart, crazy. Let's do that, man. Let's destroy everything we've ever believed about medieval battles. 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. 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. My pleasure, Matt. Thank you. Thank you. 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 installments of

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