Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory. Com and join the club. That is therestishistory. Com. This story, Shall the Good Man Teach His Son? And crisp and crispian shall ne'er go by from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition, and gentleman in England, now a bed, shall think themselves a curse they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whilst any speaks that fought with us upon St. Crispin's day. That is stirring stuff, Tom. It's the most famous speech on a battlefield ever written, one of the most famous speeches in English history, or English literary history, anyway. It's Henry the fifth, The Battle of Ashencourt. I know you love the Kenneth Branher version. You've been watching it on a loop on YouTube to inspire your sofa today's episode on Ashencourt. Branher does it brilliantly, doesn't he?

He does it with a rising lilt.

He does. And his production, I remember at the time, his production was seen as a ground-breaking in a film version because it broke with this technicolor, slightly manicured look of Olivier's Henry the Fifth. And he was down in the mud, wasn't he? A soldier among soldiers.

So Olivier's one was very deliberately done as being patriotic as made in 1944. All the awkward bits in Shakespeare's play that makes Henry the Fifth as a hero, slightly ambivalent were cut. And Branagh, as you say, there's lots of mud, there's lots of rain, which is very authentic to the actual battle. But in that speech, he really goes in hard. It's absolutely thrilling. And we've talked about this before. It's undoubtedly the reason why Agencourt blazes in the imagination of the English, perhaps more brightly than any other victory won by an English army.

Yeah, I think that's true.

But it's not just down to Shakespeare. So So it's clear right from the beginning, long before Shakespeare, that the English do see Agencourt as being exceptional in a way that neither Cressine or Poitou had been. And in Henry the fifth, that great speech, which you read, so powerfully dominant, is prompted by a lament from one of Henry's peers from Westmoreland, that they're terribly outnumbered. So Westmoreland, he's looking out at the French and he says, Oh, that we now had here but one 10,000 of those men in England that do no work today. And Henry replies, I pray thee, wish not one man more. If we die, we don't want any more. And if we win, then the glory is all the greater. And the thing is that Shakespeare is not making this up. So this is reported by the chaplain, who is one of the two competence on the English side who have written accounts of Agencourt. And the chaplain reports a night as making the same complaint that Westmelen makes in Shakespeare's play. Henry's retort, according to his chaplain, is, I would not, even if I could, have a single man more than I do.

But there's a slightly different emphasis in Henry's words, as reported by the chaplain, because Henry says, Do you not believe that the Almighty, with these his humble few, is able to overcome the opposing arrogance of the French who boast of their great number and their own strength? So the emphasis there is on the idea that the victory proves God's backing for Henry. And this is clearly It's hugely important to Henry because the battle for him is a test. He's putting his claim to the French throne in the balance.

And isn't it interesting how those themes that are hit both by the chaplain's account and by Shakespeare, they resonate so deeply in English history, the idea of the humble few against a massively superior army, the arrogance of the French, all of that thing. I mean, you've got the Band of Brothers that we mentioned before that Nelson was inspired by, the idea of the few that obviously Churchill and whatnot played with in the the Second World War. But at the time, I guess that also reflects a wider political geographical reality that France is much larger, economically more powerful, has far greater manpower than England. So the English, the sense of themselves as being the underdogs. It's very Russia and Ukraine or something, isn't it? They've launched an incursion into the enemy territory. They're massively outnumbered, but they are absolutely convinced that right and justice are on their side, even though, that, presumably, the people living in the surrounding French villages might see things rather differently.

Yeah, might have a slightly different perspective. But they capitalize on it, as we will see, so they benefit from it, too. It also reflects the fact that clearly for the English, when they crest this hill, which we described at the end of the last episode, and they look out and they see the French forces in front of them. It's terrifying. So again, to quote Henry's Chaplain, he sees the French cavalry thundering from all directions to block their path. And he says they're like a countless sworn of locuses. And he has no doubt that the English are absolutely massively outnumbered. So he says their numbers, the numbers of the French, were so great as not to be even comparable with ours. And of course, he and Henry and everybody in the force is aware that there are other reasons why the English are not in peak fighting form, because they have traveled 250 miles in 17 days, from Harfleur the Somme, down the length of the Somme because the bridges and the fords and the causeways have been held against them, and then back up again. And the corollary in turn of that is that they haven't eaten properly for several days because Henry had only taken supplies for eight days.

The weather is terrible, icy sleet. It's become very hilly, so they've been going up and down. So that's more tiring than just marching across flat land. And I think it's clear when they see that force in front of them, they They are feeling very demoralized, the feeling that this is it, this is absolute curtains. But I do think that there is certainly one man in that army who does think, We have a chance here, and that man is Henry himself.

This is where individuals matter, right? The individuals do matter in war. This is why leadership and inspirational command really makes a difference.

It's why I think, you can look at Shakespeare's play and say, he burnishes Henry's reputation with this incredible incredible poetry. But I do think that Henry clearly deserves his reputation as an astonishing military commander with an ability to inspire people who otherwise might just have turned into a despairing rabble. So everybody sees. He feels no despair seeing the French army. So again, the chaplain describes Henry observing the French very calmly and quite heedless of danger. He orders his men to dismount, to ready themselves for battle. Remember, he's ordered them to wear their armor, to wear their surcoats, to indicate the fact that they are ready for battle no matter when it happens. He clearly stays on horseback. He rides along the battlefront. He gives his stirring speech. So he tells them that they should have a fair day and a gracious victory in the better of their enemies. He states bluntly, I am not going to be captured. If there is a defeat, then I will die in the battle rather than impose the burden of a ransom on the English. It's at this point, not as in Shakespeare, on the eve of the battle, that he makes his comment about not wanting any more men.

You know what?

This is very Theodon at the charge of the reherim before ministerium or something, isn't it? The spectacle of the king on his horse and his men lined up before him and him genuinely infusing them with a sense of mission and a sense of inevitability, I guess, is what he gives them.

I think, absolutely. That sense of he's clearly a very inspirational speaker. But the difference is that he doesn't then launch a great charge because he assumes that they are going to be facing battle that day. So he orders the priests to move through the lines, to take people's confessions. The English kneel down with their hands towards heaven. And there are French accounts of the battle that they're impressed by this. So this has been a theme running throughout the march that Henry is inspiring his men to share in his own sense of a divine purpose. I think quite different to the the chevaché that the Black Prince or Edward III or Duke of Lancaster were launching in the first half. Henry is a very, very devout man, and it's not a hand wringing thought for the day, Christianity. It's a martial, smite them, God is on our side, Christianity. And it clearly inspires the English. So they are down, kneeling, praying, asking for God's blessing. But having done this, the French are not offering battle. No no sign of movement at all from the army in front of them. Henry keeps the English in battle formation.

When he sees the French starting to move people drifting across, he shifts the line so that they are always facing the French ranks. But dusk is closing in. It's cold, it's wet, it's getting dark, and it becomes clear that there is going to be no battle that day. The English can see the French retiring to the nearby villages. So Agencourt is one of them. Ruyseauville is another. They're They're settling down there. They're setting up their tents. Of course, that's agony for the English because they know that the French are going to be much better sheltered, much better fed. They're going to be regularly supplied. But the English stay in battle order until it's completely dark and they can no longer see the enemy. And it's only at dusk, which is about 4:40, that Henry finally stands his army down.

The French have no urgency, right? Time is on their side. They will accumulate more men, probably as time goes on, and the English will become only more hungry, more tired, more wet, more miserable. Actually, it's the French interest to delay as long as possible.

Absolutely. And also, more people will come in and join the French army because people are coming in from across northern France. But Henry is still on high alert. They are so close that they can see the French bonfires. They can hear them chatting and talking. Again, it's one of the themes that is brilliantly used by Shakespeare and derives from authentic memories of the battle that rumors spread through the English ranks, that the French are dicing over the prisoners that they're going to take the following day, that they are so confident of victory that they're already working out who's going to get what prisoner.

Arrogance. Hubris, Tom.

Well, yes. It's loud, it's mouthy, it's boathful. The contrast, again, with the English ranks Henry has imposed, says, I don't want to hear a word. No one is to talk. So all that stuff you get in Shakespeare of Henry, wondering around and people chatting and stuff, this doesn't happen. There is total silence. And the reason for that is he wants to make it impossible for the French to launch a surprise attack by night. And of course, it's quite intimidating for the French. They wonder, have the English slipped away? What is the meaning of this terrifying ominous silence? So the rain is bucketing down. The English soldiers try and find there are woods that they can shelter under the trees. There are hedges, whatever. They try and get what shelter they can. Henry himself and his high command withdraw to a village in their rear called Maisoncel. They don't sleep there because they have a battle to plan. And around mid midnight, Henry sends a group of Pict knights to go out and to scout out the battlefield to work out the precise coordinates of the French lines. When those knights come back and they deliver their report, then he and his high command finalize their battle plan.

Henry does not sleep. His peers don't sleep. Instead, he is armored. Then fully armed, he hears three masses. So again, this sense that he's trusting in God. Then at dawn, as the sun rises, he puts on his helmet, and his helmet has this crown placed on the top. And the crown has the emblems of both England and France, bright gold. And this means that there will be no missing him in battle. So all those Frenchmen who are looking to capture the king, they know exactly where he is. And as we will see, this is very deliberate.

Henry is not a man who would employ doubles, right?

No, absolutely. And then in preparation for ordering his battle ranks, he doesn't climb onto charger. He climbs onto a small gray horse. And I think this is so emblematic of his character. On the one hand, incredible a degree of self-confidence, but at the same time, also this Christian sense of humility fused into this idea of him on a small gray horse. He's drawing attention to the fact that he is humble as well as confident. Riding on the horse, he orders his men to take up their positions. So what is his plan? What is this strategy that he and his peers have been devising through the night? It's determined by two factors. And the first of these is the terrain, and the second is the makeup of his army, and both of them are quite distinctive. The terrain first, they are on the road to Calais. The French have blocked them. And this road, the reason the French have blocked them where they are is that there's an expanse of relatively flat fields. There is a slight dip. So between the French and the English, there's a slight declivity, which means that whoever is going to be attacking will have to go down and then up.

It's not steep, but it's a mild gradient. The fields have recently been plowed. The soil here, it's not light. It's not the soil where rain would drain away easily. It's thick, heavy clay. And that means that the ground is pretty sodden. So that is something else that Henry is factoring into his plans for the battle.

I mean, anyone who I just read the Lady Bird book or something knows that Agencourt is a muddy battle.

Well, yes. I remember one of the first books I read on Agencourt was John Keegan's Face of Battle, which is about Agencourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. And Agencourt and the Somme both have mud.

They do indeed.

That's a binding theme. So there's this road, there's plowed fields, potentially very muddy. There are two villages on either side of the road, and they're about a kilometer apart. So there's Agencourt on the left of the English as they are facing the French. And there's a village called Tramacourt on the right. The battlefield is also bounded by woodland on both sides. And this woodland tapers in from the French positions. I mean, again, not massively, but to a significant degree, to towards the English positions. So this is good for the English because, of course, they have far fewer men at arms. Maybe it will come to the precise numbers, but I reckon around a thousand. And the French have many multiples of that. So the fact that they can't be outflanked because there are the woods is very important.

And it also means that if the French advance towards the English, the ground in front of them will narrow. They will have to crowd close to close together as they approach the English lines.

It does. And so this then segues with the composition of Henry's forces to determine how he's going to line up his rank. So it's conventional in battles in this period for armies to basically divide it into three positions. Henry does this again. Normally, you'd have a front rank, you'd have a Vanguard, you'd have a main body, and then you'd have a rear guard. Henry can't afford to do that. He doesn't have enough men to do that. So instead, he draws them in a line across this kilometer of open field between the woods on either side. And the result is, I suppose, a thin silver line, you might call it.

I thought it was about to say a thin red line.

So Henry commands the central division. And remember, he's got this gold crown. He's got his banner. There's no way the French are going to be able to miss him. He is in the middle of the middle division. On his right, he has a division commanded by the Duke of York, who is close cousin of Henry's. He's a great fan of Chaucer. Perhaps not coincidentally, that being so, he's written a great famous treatise on hunting in English. So he's properly an English peer. And to Henry's left is the third division, which is commanded by a guy called Thomas Lord Camoy's. The reason that he's put in command is that he is 65. So he brings many, many years of experience. All three divisions consist of men at arms. So none of the English, not even the king, is going to be on horseback. But of course, the key decision for Henry is where he's going to place the main body of his army, which consists of archers. The precise details of this is much debate. I mean, you can read multiple accounts of Ashencourt, and they all have slightly different sense of where it is. But I think the outline is pretty clear.

Henry places large blocks of archers on both wings, sheltered by trees in the wood, some of them. And he also positions them in wedges between the three divisions, so in two wedges. And these are placed under another man who is very distinguished and really quite elderly. And this is a guy called Sir Thomas Irpingham, who is the most loyal of loyalist Lancasterians. His loyalty to Lancaster goes back to Henry IV before Henry became king. Thomas Irpingham had accompanied him on crusade where Henry picked up his ostrage and gone to Jerusalem, and all that thing.

So Irpingham really is properly seasoned?

Oh, very much so, and completely reliable. So he was, again, with Henry in exile. He accompanies Henry back to England when he overthrows Richard II. So he's been there, he's seen everything. And the fact that he's now in command of the archers reflects the fact that Henry is putting a premium on experience. He wants people who he can absolutely rely on to hold his back and to do the right thing, even in conditions of incredible tension and danger. But at the same time, as Henry is emphasizing experience, he's also not afraid to innovate. This is why on the march, he had ordered his archers, even though they were weary, tired, hungry, to make themselves some wooden stakes, sharp steaks, and to carry them as well with everything else. This is something that Edward III's armies, for instance, had not had. It's something that is quite novel. So there are various debates as to where Henry might have got the idea from it. One thesis is that the Turks had used stakes like this with their archers against the knights at the Copolis, the great disaster for Christian arms in 1396 that Marshall Bussaco had fought in, the great French Paladin.

I think a likely a theory is that Henry is remembering the Battle of Schroesbury.

Right, because that was the pea field.

The pea field with the stakes.

Stakes there, right? Yeah. And of course, that was the battle where he'd been hit in the face by the arrow. So a very traumatic and defining experience for him. So it makes sense that he would remember that. Yeah.

And it's, I think, important to emphasize that battles are rare events. Pitch battles are rare events. They don't come along very often. But Henry had experienced one when he was very, very young. I think the memory of the role that these stakes had played, which, of course, weren't sharp because they were used for holding up pees, but they had prevented a mass charge by his father's men. I'm sure that probably this is where he gets the idea for it. And of course, the broader experience, as you said, that Henry had from Schroesbury is being hit in the face by an arrow. So he knows what the impact is. I mean, he knows how devastating a hailstorm of arrows can be. And that's why I think it's based on the memories of that. Maybe he doesn't expect to win, but he feels he's in with a very, very good chance. But of course, he's not the only one with a plan. The French have a battle plan as well. And we know this because we actually have it. It's one of only a couple of battle plans to have survived from this period.

This is amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. So they put it down on paper or on partition or whatever.

Yeah, they'd drawn it up a few days before. And it had been drawn by the two great professional soldiers in the French rank, so Bouticot, who we've mentioned, the great Paladin, and Dalbray, who is the constable, the guy who has a nominal control. But there are two problems with it. The first is that they'd actually drawn it up several days before, and it doesn't exactly correspond to the terrain that you get at Ashencourt. But the other problem is that they are no longer really in control. Their command has been superseded by the fact that large quantities of very high ranking peers have turned up. So their original plan was to divide the army into two, that the front rank would be commanded by Buziko and Dalbray as the professional soldiers because they knew that they would be marching into the English Arrow Storm. Dalbray, in particular, he has fought the English. I mean, he's that old that he'd been part of the war back in Edward III's time.

It's a slight myth, isn't it, that they take the English lightly because these guys, they know that the English, they remember the battles in the first bit of the Hundred Years War. They know the Henry V, he knows what he's doing. They are not underestimating him. And in fact, they didn't really want to battle at all.

Is that right? Well, I think they would have been perfectly happy not to fight a battle at all and just let Henry's army disintegrate. They'd have been fine with that. They've been told basically by the king, by the dauphin, by the peers of the realm, No, we have to fight. And so they've drawn up this plan where Bouticot and Daubret will command the Vanguard. And then the second, the main body will be commanded by the Duke of Alessand, who's this great boar of a man. They'll put crossbowmen on the wings, and they will have an elite force of cavalry that will be used to clear the archers. And it will be total warfare, Dominic. So the crossbowmen will fire, the men at arms will charge, the cavalry will sweep down on the archers and get rid of them. And the English basically won't know what's hit them. They'll be overwhelmed in a single devastating moment of impact.

So a Nelsonian, go straight at them and use our firepower to blast them out of the way.

Just everything. Throw everything you've got at them. But the The problem is, because of the woods, the cavalry is not in a position to march down and sweep the archers away, so they can't outflank them. So that's a problem. But the other problem is, is that because all these duks and counts, members of the Royal family have arrived, they outrank Bussica and Dalbray. And because the king isn't there, because the Dauphan isn't there, because the Duke of Allian, who is the highest ranking royal member of the family, is there, but he's quite young. I mean, it's his birthday is in a couple of days. There isn't actually now an obvious commander. They're all shouting and yelling and claiming precedence. They spend all night basically arguing about where they should all go because you've got all these dukes, all these counts. They're not going to hang around at the rear. They want to be in the front. So finally, they come to a conclusion. I quote Juliet Barker in her wonderful book on Agencourt. She says it's a conclusion that was fair but foolish. And basically, the solution is that they will all fight in the front line, although Alesson will retain his command of the main body of the army behind them.

And this means that they have to lengthen the line to fit in all these peers and duks, which in turn means there is no room for the archers and the crossbowmen. So the solution to this is, I will just get rid of them. We'll put them at the back of the army. That's bonkers.

So just before we go to the break, Tom, I know this is very controversial among historians. Talk us through the numbers, because for those of us who grew up in England, reading old fashioned patriotic history books, the impression we were given was that for every 100 Frenchmen, there was one Englishman or something like that. But it is true, isn't it? That whatever historians think about the numbers, there are very, very different accounts. There is no doubt there are far more Frenchmen than there are Englishmen.

Is that right? Well, so this has always basically been taken for granted, and not just by English historians, by French historians as well. It's not just patriotic chauvinism that leads people to say that. The overwhelming body of the sources emphasizes the fact that the English were very, very outnumbered. It seems to me clear that, we said this at the beginning of the show, that the reason why it has this resonance is because from the beginning, the English believe this. To reiterate that I would say the conventional estimate on the numbers of the English at Agencourt is around 6,000 men, so a thousand men at arms, about 5,000 archers. This is based on the evidence of the two eyewitnesses at the battle who were on the English side. The chaplain who we've mentioned, and there's also a Burgundian Lord who fighting with the English called Jean Le Fèvre, and their estimates, they balance out. But the reason why these figures have become controversial over the past 20 years is because Anne Currie, the great historian of the Agencourt campaign-And Harold.

Yeah.

Yes. She wrote this game-changing book called Agencourt: A New History. It came out in 2005, and then it was reissued in 2015 for the anniversary of the battle. She had gone through loads of primary sources. She'd looked at all the scrolls that no one had looked at since 1415 and so on. She'd crunched the numbers, and she'd particularly focused on the recruitment and the composition of the various English contingents that went on the Agencourt campaign. It's Absolutely indispensable work. I mean, I've shamelessly drawn on it for these episodes. But it is also the controversy is that she uses these documents, these primary sources, to estimate that Henry's army had been maybe as as high as 9,000. Actually, over the course of her book, her estimate of how large Henry's numbers were rises and rises and rises. And her estimate of the numbers of the French is that they're around 12,000. So that would be an imbalance of 4,000 to 3,000. So the French have a larger force, but it's not the victory against overwhelming odds that tradition says it is. There has been, I think, quite a kickback against that. So Juliet Barker in her book on Agencourt, she absolutely acknowledges there's no one who has a comparable knowledge of the minutiae of the financial administration of documents of the campaign.

Professor Currie is absolutely the leader on this, but she does kick back against it. And the reason that she does this is, firstly, looking at the French numbers, Basically, we don't know. We don't have the documents that would enable us to work it out because of the wars of religion, the French Revolution, and so on.

They were lost, right? They're all destroyed.

They've all just been lost. We just can't know. But the point she makes that does seem to me, I mean, maybe I want to believe it. I probably do want to believe it, but it does seem to me, really, the clinching argument is that all the sources from the beginning emphasize that the victory is won against overwhelming odds. And I think that if Ancury's figures are accurate, that doesn't make sense. And I think that when you look at her figures, I mean, I think she said before, she's very much not Team Henry. She doesn't seem to like Henry very much at all. She has a tendency to make the English figures as high as she can and the French figures as low as she can. So I'm sure, Dominic, you, maybe lots of our listeners, maybe not our French listeners, if we have any, but I think that they can listen to this and feel that the traditional account of the English being outnumbered, probably two to one, I would think. Maybe two to one, maybe at an extreme three to one.

Tom, this is absolutely music to my ears. Absolute music to my ears. So let's recap, Tom. What I'm taking from what you've just said is the English outnumbered. Sorry, I should say the English and Welsh are outnumbered, perhaps 6, 7, 8 to 1. Tom, is that what you're saying?

Probably 2 to 1. So 10 to 1 odds. A pinch 3 to one. I think no more than that. And on that bombshell, we'll take a break.

And Tom, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers. We will be returning after a word from our advertisers to take on the French. Welcome back to The Rest is History. It is dawn on the 25th of October, 14:15. If you've been a bird flying over the field of Ashencourt, you would have seen a man in a glittering crown on a little gray horse riding up and down this line of silver-clad men preparing Tom to step into the annels of legend. That's Henry V.

Well, you say they're silver-clad, Dominic, but of course, the English armor is pretty stained by this point with mud and rust.

They look like a rugby Scrum.

Yeah, there's quite a contrast with the French who, of course, are much more spruce. But yes, Henry on his small gray horse, riding up and down the English lines, proclaiming the justice of his cause, appealing to the patriotism of his men, reminding them of the record of English armies in France, the victories won by Edward III, by the Black Prince, and making reference to boasts made by the French that if they capture archers, they will cut off two fingers from the right-hand. Of Every Archer, which is where the myth that the V sign originates. Hold on. The myth. I don't think there's actually any evidence of that. This is disappointing. I mean, maybe it's much later, but certainly the readiness of the French to cut off the two fingers of the right arm of the bowman. Henry certainly makes reference to that. And so his men cheer him. Henry then sends his heralds to meet with the French heralds. This is like people shaking hands before football match or something, effectively, because obviously, there is no chance of agreeing terms. The English herald returns. Henry dismounts from his horse, takes his place in the center of the line.

Banner is unfurled, crown on his head. There he is, facing him, the French lines. Again, I'll quote Juliet Barker, On one side stood row upon numberless row of motionless French men at arms, clad from head to foot in burnished armor, armed with swords and lances shortened for fighting on foot, and with brightly-coloured pennons and banners waving over their heads. It had actually been the expectation of the Royal Council that had been held at Rouen a few days before that the mere sight of this would be enough to send the English running away in terror. But Dominic, do the English run away in terror? They know nothing of their bull Dog spirit of an Englishman. The metal. But obviously, as I said, there's a tremendous contrast because the English look an absolute state, it's smeared in filth and dirt. Actually, Dominic. Juliet Barker has this glorious detail, which I also remember Robert Hardy, who played- Winston Churchill.

Yeah, he was always playing Winston Churchill.

But he was very into longbow, famous actor. I remember a documentary where he made the same point that the archers at Ashencourt have cut off their soiled breaches so that if they need to void their bowels, and I guess that the sight of a large French charging you might well make you loosen your bowels. You can just evacuate onto the muddy fields of France.

Do you know Tom, I'm thrilled to hear this because Sambrooke Jr, when he heard that we were doing this podcast, he said this to me about two days ago. Oh, you're going to put that detail in. Is that true? And I'm absolutely thrilled. It is true. But it also strikes me that the sight of... If you're a Frenchman, if you're used to the pampered living of early 15th century France, the sight of a gigantic Welshman with no trousers on, just drinking his hairy legs, voiling his bowels at I know.

That's sad. No wonder they won. But there's something even worse, which is, again, as Juliet Rauwerke points out, that this is an option not available to the men at arms encased in their padded steel plate armor. Grim, though the sight of them must have been, she He writes, The smell was probably worse.

Now, hold on. I said in the first episode, were they a bit ill? Have they got horrendous diarrhea? And you said, Oh, no, no, they're in great form. But this suggests to me that some of them do have...

No, they've been standing there. Well, as we see, they stand there for quite a long time, as we will see. But also, you obviously have nerves of steel. But generally, if you're facing something terrifying, your bowels make churn. That's all I'm saying.

Why is this an issue at Agincourt and not in other battles? Because we don't hear of similar things happening in other battle. I mean, people do this in the... I don't know. They definitely didn't do this in the Battle of Britain, Tom. Sure.

I have to ask my brother that. I think it's bringing alive an aspect of medieval combat that perhaps is often-It's underexplored. It's underexplored. We're probing it.

That's the word. We're probing it.

Right. And one of the reasons why they might be caught short is the fact that the battle lines are drawn up, but then nothing happens. Because as we've said, it's entirely in the French interest to just wait to see if the English Line will disintegrate, to see how many more people will join them. And this insistence on waiting for reinforcements to come proves its worth because squadrons of horsemen and men at arms are coming in throughout the early hours of the 25th of October. So a classic example, tragic example, is the Duke of Brabant, who's the brother of John the Fearless. He comes late. He's He's been having brunch. He gets told the battle is happening. He goes, oh, God. He leaps on his horse, gallops up to the battle, hasn't had time to put his surcoat on. So he reaches for a banner, cuts a hole in it, puts it over his head, gallops into the battle, and properly gets taken prisoner. So that's a very tragic story. And his fate, as we will see, is properly tragic. But as we said, also, the truth is probably Bussica and Daubré, between them, would have been perfectly happy not to fight at all.

It's all the French labels who are itching to have a crack at the English. Anyway, So they stand facing each other for hour after hour. And this is why the toilet facilities is important. Because you don't want to get caught short. And about 10:00, Henry decides, this is ridiculous. We can't afford these delaying tactics. We have to get on with this. So he makes an amazing decision. He decides that even outnumbered as he is, he is going to have to make the first assault. So after the crossing of the Somme, this is the second of three moments of excruciating danger where everything might have just fallen to pieces. He orders the baggage train and non-competence to assemble at the rear of the battle line and to follow as they advance so that they won't be isolated. And to draw the wagons up in a line so that their rear will be defendable. He then gives orders for the entire English line to advance. Every English soldier neels, kiss the ground, and they do this thing where they take a piece of soil and put it in their mouth. It's a trusting themselves to God thing.

They've done that. Then Henry gives the battle cry, St. George, this day, help thine own. Massive cheer, and they start advancing. But this is the moment of peril, Because for the archers who are maybe five-sixths of the entire army, they are basically defenseless at this point. They have to pull their stakes up, move forward, hammer the stakes back in. And the whole time, if the French If the French cavalry had charged, they would have been in no position to fire back. They would have just been overwhelmed. So for Henry, this is... I mean, you can imagine. His heart must have been in his mouth.

Why don't the French charge? Yeah, what's going on?

I think because they're taken by surprise. They can't believe that the English would have the nerve to advance on them. And so they're not on their horses, they're not in the front line, they're not ready to go. And this is an absolute disastrous failure on the French part because the French line is now within the range of the English longbows. And Sir Thomas Irpingham, who is the old veteran who's in charge of the archers, he's got this bat on and he throws it in the air as a signal that they should unleash their first volley. And this is what they do. So in the first minute, 75,000 arrows rain down on the French lines. And by this point, the French cavalry have got their act together and are charging. And they are charging into darkness because these arrows, they blot out the sun. And there's no need for the English to kill the knights. The developments in armor are so impressive that most of the arrows just bounce off the plate. But what they need to do is to knock the knights off their horses. And the sheer volume of arrows descending in this storm is more than sufficient to do that, or, of course, to bring the horses down.

Yeah, 75,000 arrows. I mean, you can't imagine it, can you? I mean, I can imagine 700 arrows. I'm I'm not sure I can imagine 7,000 arrows coming out of the sky. Maybe 75,000? I mean, that is... And they're coming at such a speed. And they're heavy, right? They've got bits of steel or whatever it is on the end and all of that.

Yeah. So the technology of arrowheads has developed. They're much, much... I can't remember exactly why, but it's to do with the weighting and the serration of the arrowhead. It means that they are much more lethal in the effects, as, of course, Henry knows. Henry, unlike Percy at the Battle of Schroesbury, has made sure that There are plentiful supplies of arrows. The English can just keep firing and firing and firing. You have knights who are knocked off into the mud, or you have horses that are shot, wounded horses start couriering round, maybe charging back into the battle line behind them or impaling themselves on stakes. I mean, absolutely hideous. And amazingly, the casualties among the horsemen themselves seem to have been relatively light. And a lot of them just crawl their way out of the mud and draw, and they're later charged with cowardice. But the impact of the failure of their charge to reach the archers is most devastating on the men at arms who are drawn up behind them and who are now advancing in turn. And the reason for this is that they have churned up the ground. They've got frightened horses knocking into them.

The combination of this means that it is really, really difficult for them to advance towards the line of English. And all the time, the the arrows are still raining down on them.

And is it true, which is what I read as a boy, that when you fall down in this mud, this Pastyndale, the Battle of the Somme scene, this quagmire, that if you fall down in your armor, your armor is so heavy that you can't get up again.

Is that true? Yeah. And if the mud is of a sufficient liquidity in due course, there's a serious chance that you will drown if you can't move. So it's pretty hideous. And the time it takes for the French men at arms to reach the English line, if it was solid ground, it would be no time at all. But because the ground is so churned up, because there are all these horses rushing everywhere, because the arrows are falling, because they have to keep their eyes lowered to ensure that they don't get hit through the visor or whatever, it takes them maybe 5 to 10 minutes to cross the gap. And by the time they reach the English lines, those who do manage to reach the English lines, they are shattered. Their armor is very, very heavy. And to be sloping through all this hideous, thick, viscous mud, they are completely exhausted by the time they reach the English line. And adding to the quality of nightmare that they must have found themselves in, they are being funneled. Because remember, the trees draw in towards the English line, and they're being shot at from the wings. So the instinctive reaction, no matter how brave you are, of course, is to bunch up away from the two sides in the middle.

And then on top of that, remember, Henry has this crown, he has his banner, he situated himself in the middle. He is offering himself up as bait. He's saying, Come and get me. And so the consequence of this is the French lines are so tightly compressed that it's very difficult for many of them even to raise their arms. And even if they do have room to raise their arms, many of them are so exhausted by this point that they can't really move.

So this becomes your classic crush, right? They're in a crush in the middle in the mud. Yes. Actually, the arrows are raining down on them all the time. And ahead of them, they've got blokes with no trousers on who are soiling themselves.

Yeah, avoiding their bowels, left, right, and center. And of course, the winds are gusting, so it's spraying into their face. It's chemical warfare at its worst. With all of these horrors manifesting themselves on the battlefield, I think it is really impressive that actually enough French men at arms reach the English line, that the crunch is pretty pulverizing.

Tom, it's lovely that you're being so generous to the French.

I talked about the two previous moments of excruciating peril faced by Henry's army, the Somme, and when they advance. This is the third. Because remember, there are only a thousand English men at arms. It's a very thin line. If that line had broken, Henry would still have lost the battle. The French would have redeemed triumph from seeming disaster. But the English line holds.

So you were saying, sorry, I interrupted you. There was a huge crunch, and they drive the English back a bit, don't they?

Is that right? Yeah. So it's like a rugby Scrum, I guess, smashing into a much weaker, smaller Scrum, pushes it back. But then the English line holds. And it's the fact the English line holds that makes the English victory possible. And Henry's chaplain, who is at the back, he's a non-competent, but he's close enough. He can see what's going on. I mean, he's full of praise for this, he wrote later, never, it seemed to our older men, had Englishmen ever fallen upon their enemies more boldly and fiercely or with a better will. And so the Mele is incredibly ferocious. But the English, amazingly, despite being so outnumbered, have the advantage for all the reasons that we've discussed. The arrows are still falling down, the French are compacted, they're exhausted. And of course, also what is starting to happen is that great piles of bodies are starting to mount up, particularly in front of the position of the king, because all the French lords want to have a crack at him. Gloster, his youngest brother, Humphrey, he's never fought in a battle before. He is bloodied when a sword is jabbed through his groin. Oh, my God.

King stands over him, defending his brother, absolute scenes. Part of his Crown is hacked off. So they really are going after the king. But actually, the main focus of the French line seems to have been on the right wing for reasons that are not entirely clear. Because York is killed there, 86 of his men with him. And this seems to be where the fighting is at its most brutal and hard. But it's brutal and hard along the entire length of the battle line. But increasingly, as the minutes turn to hours, effectively, it is becoming a bloodbath because the French are in no position except to just stand there or perhaps lie there and be slaughtered. And the measure of this is that archers start to sneak out from their positions from behind their stakes, and they have mallets, which they use to hammer in their stakes. And they use these mallets to knock over the French. I mean, it's like knocking over a ten pin with a ball. And the men at arms just kill go over, and then the bowmen will draw out their swords, their daggers, and plunge it in through the eye sockets or through the gap in the neck.

And so it's commented of the casualties in this battle that the vast majority perish of wounds to the eyes or to the neck.

And it's at this point that people are drowning, isn't it? Because in the crush, the crush of bodies, corps, horses, all the chaos, the mud, Frenchmen are falling and just never getting up again because they're being suffocated by the mud and the weight of bodies.

Yeah. And the English realized this And this is why they keep knocking them over. So Thomas Walsh, our friend, the monk in St. Aubin's, he clearly picking up on Eyewitness reports. And he says, The French stood immobilized whilst our men wrenched axes from their hands and felt them as if they were cattle.

And this goes on for three hours, Tom?

Basically, it goes on for three hours. I mean, it's an enormous... Yeah.

Imagine how exhausting. It's hideous.

Just the mud, the blood. Just awful, awful, awful.

Hideous, and yet somehow, oddly rousing.

Well, as we'll see, I think even the English are stunned, and some of them are distressed by the scale of the slaughter. But in the final episode, we'll look at reactions to the battle. But just to finish off the account of the battle itself, basically, it's over by one o'clock. The flower of French chivalry is either dead or taken prisoner. So the English has taken lots of prisoners. And Henry seems to have his victory. But then there comes one final twist, probably the most controversial moment in Henry's reign, features in Shakespeare's play. Essentially, what happens is that Henry thinks he's won, and then a cry goes up from the rear that the French are rallying and are about to launch another attack and that they are attacking the wagons. So Henry thinks he's surrounded. And this is a massive crisis. It's clear that people have broken in through the wagons and they are making off with all his treasures. So his Crown, so not the one on his helmet, but his other one. Lots of jewels, a jeweled scepter, sword of state, a piece of the true cross. I mean, terrible for Henry. And so Henry thinking, my men are exhausted.

We're still outnumbered. He gives the very controversial that all the prisoners that have been taken should be killed. And his men are very reluctant to obey this order, partly because, obviously, for pecunary reasons, a dead prisoner can pay no ransom. But also because this is very shocking. I mean, undoubtedly, they have moral quambs about it. It's against the laws of chivalry. It's against Christian teaching. But Henry does it anyway. And what's amazing is that he's never actually blamed for this by French chroniclers. They seem to have accepted that he did what he had to do. He's a hard man. He's a ruthless man. And he does what he has to do to keep his army going.

He has to do it because if they are being attacked from the rear as well, and they have in their mids this hundreds or whatever of Frenchmen, the Frenchmen will just turn on them as soon as they get the chance. So they have to get rid of... That's his thinking, is it?

If you think about it, if you've got more of the enemy coming frontally, they're coming round the rear, and you have large bodies of Frenchmen in full armor in your own positions, then if they all combine, you're just going to be obliterated. So I quote Juliet Barker again. She says, This was the only order possible. And I think in terms of tactics and strategy, she's right. I mean, morally, it remains a blot on Henry's Ascutian, but I think the context of the time makes it clear why he does it. The irony is that actually the rumor wasn't true. The French are not rallying, and the people who have attacked the baggage train are not soldiers. They're probably locals who have seized their chance to make off with a crown and a bit of the true cross, some jewels and stuff.

They're just local footpads or something helping themselves to the crown jewels. Yeah.

Well, I think they're probably locals who think, well, we've had all our harvest has been absolutely ruined. Let's try and get something out of this business. But obviously, the murder of the prisoners adds to the death toll of the battle, and it adds to the number of magnates who are killed, which for contemporaries is perhaps the most shocking aspect of the whole battle. So they're dead. It becomes clear that there isn't going to be another French attack. And the battle ends very formally. The French Hérald approaches Henry, and Henry says, Do you accept my victory? Have I won? The Hérald says, Yes, we concede. Then Henry asks, he looks around and he sees a castle rising up over the trees, and he says, What is the name of that castle? What is the name of the village that surrounds it? And he's told that it is Asynchor, or actually Asynchor in French. And a Burgundian chronicler reports Henry's reply. And because, said the King, 'all battles ought to bear the names of the nearest fortress, village or town, to the place where they were fought, this battle will now and forever be known as the Battle of Agincourt.

Tom, wonderful stuff. Absolutely wonderful stuff. From this day to the ending of the world, we who did this podcast, shall be remembered. So everybody, we will return next time for the final episode in this series. We'll discuss the casualty figures. We'll talk about what happens to the people taken prisoner. We'll talk about the aftermath of the battle and Henry's determination to make himself king of France as well as England. And we will look at what at the end of his reign. And we'll discuss, Tom, we'll have a little chat, won't we, about Henry V's reputation and his legacy and where he stands today. Because I know that some people, perhaps associated with this podcast, have in the past said foolish things about Henry V for which they will be wanting to apologize. So on that bombshell, we will see you for the tumultuous and decisive final episode of this series next time. Of course, if you remember the Rest is History Club, you hear it now. If you're not, the Rest is history. Com is the place to go to. And that bombshell, au revoir.

Bye-bye.

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