Battle of Agincourt
Until recently, Agincourt has been fêted as one of the greatest victories in English military history. But, in Agincourt, A New History (2005), Anne Curry contradicts what previous historians have argued, and other contemporary Agincourt historians continue to argue; in Curry's view, the scale of the English triumph at Agincourt has been overstated for almost six centuries.[10][11]
According to her research, the French still outnumbered the English and Welsh, but at worst only by a factor of three to two (12,000 Frenchmen against 7,000 to 9,000 Englishmen). According to Curry, the Battle of Agincourt was a "myth constructed around Henry to build up his reputation as a king". The legend of the English as underdogs at Agincourt was given credence in popular English culture with William Shakespeare's Henry V in 1599. In the speech before the battle, Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Henry V the famous words, "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," immediately after numbering English troops at twelve thousand, versus sixty thousand Frenchman. (Westmoreland: "Of fighting men they have full three-score thousand." Exeter: "There's five to one ..." (Act IV, scene 3). Shakespeare equally overstated the French and understated the English casualties as well; at the end (Act IV, Scene 8), when Henry's herald delivers the death toll, the numbers are 10,000 French dead and just "five and twenty" English. (The well known Olivier film version of 1944 has this as "five and twenty score" i.e. 500, which is closer to the modern estimate of casualties.)
Juliet Barker in Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle (published slightly after A New History) argues the English and Welsh were outnumbered "at least four to one and possibly as much as six to one". She prefers the figures given by Jehan Waurin (a Burgundian in the French army) who is relatively detailed about the French army, and suggests figures of about 6,000 for the English and 36,000 for the French, "based on {Waurin's} suggestion that the French were six times more numerous than the English". Curry's book was published too late to significantly influence Barker's work. In the Acknowledgments, however, while paying tribute to Curry's scholarship, Barker says: "Surviving administrative records on both sides, but especially the French, are simply too incomplete to support her assertion that nine thousand English were pitted against an army only twelve thousand strong. And if the differential really was as low as three to four then this makes a nonsense of the course of the battle as described by eyewitnesses and contemporaries."
Many documentaries about the Battle of Agincourt use the figures of about 6,000 English and 36,000 French, with a French superiority in numbers of 6–1. The 1911 Encylopædia Britannica puts the English at 6,000 archers, 1,000 men-at-arms and "a few thousands of other foot", with the French outnumbering them by "at least four times". Other historians put the English numbers at 6,000 and the French numbers at 20,000–30,000, which would also be consistent with the English being outnumbered 4–1. Curry is currently alone among English scholars in putting the odds at significantly less than this, although she is also the only one to have used French documentary sources. From those sources she estimates the English army c. 9,000 and the French army c. 12,000. Curry's figures for the French are consistent with other documentary evidence from the period about the size of French armies, before and after the battle of Agincourt.[citation needed] However, Curry does not include the numbers of armed French locals who answered the call to arms (for which there is little good documentary evidence to provide a precise figure).
[
See also
- Dafydd Gam: Welsh hero who reputedly saved Henry V's life at Agincourt
- The Agincourt Carol: a well-known 15th century English folk song concerning the battle.
- Henry V
- Henry V (1944 film)
- Henry V (1989 film)
- V sign, for more on the "two-fingers salute" and if derives from the gestures of longbowmen fighting in the English army at the battle of Agincourt.
[
Notes
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2007) |
- ^ Barker, 2005, p. 320.
- ^ Dates in the fifteenth century are difficult to reconcile with modern calendars: see Barker (2005) pp.226-7 for the way the date of the battle was established
- ^ Wylie, James Hamilton & William Templeton Waugh: The Reign of Henry the Fifth. The University Press, 1919, p118
- ^ Seward, Desmond: The Hundred Years War: The English in France 1337-1453. Penguin, 1999, p162
- ^ Wason, David (2004). Battlefield Detectives. London: Carlton Books, p74. ISBN 0233050833.
- ^ Holmes, Richard (1996). War Walks. London: BBC Worldwide Publishing, p48. ISBN 0-563-38360-7.
- ^ a b Staff. Battlefield Detectives - Agincourt. Crowd Dynamics Ltd Battlefield Detectives - Agincourt. Retrieved on September 9, 2005.
- ^ Barker, 2005, p.299
- ^ Barker, 2005, p.337, p.367, p. 368
- ^ Staff. Agincourt – exploding the myth, University of Southampton. Accessed 15 April 2008
- ^ Richard Brooks ( Arts Editor), Henry V's payroll cuts Agincourt myth down to size, Sunday Times May 29, 2005. A review of Anne Curry's Agincourt: A New History
[
References
- Barker, Juliet (2005). Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle Pub: Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-72648-1 (UK). ISBN 978-0-316-01503-5 (U.S.: Agincourt : Henry V and the Battle That Made England (2006)).
[
Further reading
- Bibliography
- Curry, Anne (2005). Agincourt: A New History. Pub: Tempus UK. ISBN 978-0-7524-2828-4
- "Battle of Agincourt" in Military Heritage, October 2005, Volume 7, No. 2, pp. 36 to 43). ISSN 1524-8666.
- Dupuy, Trevor N. (1993). Harper Encyclopedia of Military History. Pub: New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-270056-8
- Hibbert, Christopher (1971). Great Battles—Agincourt. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. ISBN 1842127187.
- Keegan, John (1976). The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. Pub: Viking Adult. ISBN 978-0-14-004897-1 (Penguin Classics Reprint)
- The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge Macclesfield Psalter CD, e-mail fitzmuseum-enquiries@lists.cam.ac.uk
- Articles
- Beck, Steve (2005). The Battle of Agincourt, www.militaryhistoryonline.com.
- Bragg, Melvyn (presenter). Agincourt with Anne Curry, Michael Jones and John Watts from In Our Time (BBC Radio 4), 16 September 2004
- Grummitt, David. (Oxford University), A review of Agincourt 1415: Henry V, Sir Thomas Erpingham and the triumph of the English archers ed. Anne Curry, Pub: Tempus UK, 2000 ISBN 0752417800. Accessed 15 April 2008.
- Hansen, Mogens Herman (Copenhagen Polis Centre) The Little Grey Horse --Henry V's Speech at Agincourt and the Battle Exhortation in Ancient Historiography Histos volume 2 (March 1998), website of the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Durham
- Staff. The Agincourt Honor Roll, Family Chronicle, March/April 1997.
- Staff. The Azincourt Museum, Azincourt, France Accessed 15 April 2008.(The site is in French and English).
For more information review our copyright contact and privacy policy.