What Happened at the Battle of Agincourt?

Documented record Why an English king was marching through France in the rain

Henry V was in his late twenties and had been king for two and a half years. He claimed the French crown, as his great-grandfather Edward III had done when the Hundred Years' War began in 1337, and France was in no state to argue: its king, Charles VI, suffered long bouts of mental illness, and the great noble families were close to civil war with one another.

In August 1415 Henry landed in Normandy and besieged the port of Harfleur. He expected it to fall quickly. It held out for over a month and surrendered on 22 September, by which time dysentery was running through his camp. Thousands of men died or were sent home sick. Henry left a garrison in the town and, in early October, set off with what remained of his army for English-held Calais, about 120 miles up the coast.

It should have taken about a week. The French were waiting at the fords of the Somme, so the English had to march far inland to find a crossing, which they managed on 19 October. By then they had been on the road for two weeks, food was running out, and it kept raining. On 24 October they found the French army drawn up across their path near the castle of Azincourt.

Contemporary account The night before

Both armies spent the night in the open, a few hundred yards apart. According to the chaplain who travelled with Henry and wrote the Gesta Henrici Quinti shortly afterwards, the king ordered complete silence in the English camp, on pain of punishment. The French side was by most accounts noisy and confident. It rained heavily all night on a field that had recently been ploughed.

That rain matters more than any speech. Shakespeare's Henry walks through the camp in disguise and talks to his soldiers; there is no evidence that happened. What the sources do describe is an army that was hungry, wet, ill, and expecting to die.

Documented record The battle in four moves

1. Henry moves first. The field lay between two woods, those of Agincourt and Tramecourt, which narrowed the space toward the English end. For hours on the morning of the 25th neither side attacked. The French could afford to wait; the English could not. So Henry did something risky: he moved his whole army forward until the French were within longbow range, and his archers hammered sharpened wooden stakes into the ground in front of them, angled toward the enemy.

2. The cavalry charge fails. The French horsemen on the wings charged the archers. They had to cross wet, ploughed ground into a storm of arrows, and the woods kept them from going round the English flanks. Horses wounded by arrows or caught on the stakes turned and bolted back through their own side.

3. The mud. Behind them, the main French force of dismounted men-at-arms was already advancing on foot, in full plate armour, across the same churned field. Every step sank. As the field narrowed, the men at the front were pushed together by the ranks behind until, by several accounts, they had little room to raise their weapons. Men who fell could not get up; some were crushed or smothered under others.

4. The archers join in. When the French line reached the English men-at-arms, it was exhausted and packed tight. The English archers, lightly equipped and able to move on the mud, dropped their bows and went in with swords, axes and mallets. The fighting at the front became a slaughter.

Documented record The order to kill the prisoners

This is the part the play softens. With the battle apparently won, the English held a very large number of French prisoners, valuable for their ransoms. Then came news of an attack on the English baggage train, and the remaining French troops seemed to be preparing another assault. Henry ordered the prisoners killed. English and French chroniclers both record it, and many English soldiers were reluctant, partly because a dead prisoner paid no ransom.

How many died this way is unknown, and historians still argue about whether the order was a cold-blooded necessity, because the English were too few to guard their captives and fight again, or something worse. Most accept that it was not considered a crime by the standards of the time. It still sits uneasily next to the heroic version of the day.

Disputed interpretation How outnumbered was Henry really?

The legend says the English were outnumbered five or six to one. Medieval chroniclers put the French army at 50,000 or more, which no modern historian accepts. The most influential modern study, by Anne Curry at the University of Southampton, used English pay and muster records to estimate about 8,500 English and about 12,000 French, which would make the odds closer to three to two. Her point was partly practical: the field was too narrow to hold the numbers the chroniclers claimed.

Other historians think the French army was much bigger, perhaps twice that size or more, and the debate is not settled. What everyone agrees on is that the English army was mostly archers, roughly four or five for every man-at-arms, and that it was the weaker side that morning.

Documented record Who died, and who was taken

The French losses fell hardest on the people who usually survived medieval battles: great nobles worth ransoming. The dead included the commander, Constable Charles d'Albret, and the dukes of Alençon, Bar and Brabant. Charles, Duke of Orléans, the king's nephew, was taken prisoner and spent the next twenty-five years as a prisoner in England, where he wrote some of the finest French poetry of the century.

Common estimates put the French dead in the thousands, often around 6,000, though every figure is uncertain. English losses were small by comparison, in the hundreds at most, and English chroniclers claimed far fewer. The highest-ranking English dead were the king's cousin Edward, Duke of York, and the young Earl of Suffolk.