Raining Arrows

We don’t know what Henry V said to his troops before the battle of Agincourt. No doubt it was less eloquent and stirring than Shakespeare’s Crispin’s Day speech. But we do know how the English won the battle, and it’s vividly described in Gorgon Corrigan’s recent account of the Hundred Years War, A Great and Glorious Adventure:

“In the first thirty seconds, 25,000 arrows fell upon the French. The target area was such that no archer needed to pick a specific target; he just had to ensure that his arrow fell anywhere on the French army. The result was chaos, horror and surprise. Shot at extreme range, the heavy war arrows falling out of the sky were far too many to dodge, even if the packed ranks of men-at-arms gave any room for ducking and diving, and the only option . . . was to order an immediate assault by the leading division” (246).

This proved difficult, as the French cavalry got bogged down in mud, while the archers continued to shoot: “In the one and a half minutes that the French heavy cavalry would have taken to reach the English, the archers would have discharged 75,000 arrows, not all at the horsemen, but enough to wound and kill men and madden and cripple horses” (247). When the French got too close for arrows to be useful, the archers put aside their bows and attacked with long knives.

The result was a general slaughter of the French, and especially of the French nobility. Several dukes, “nine counts, ninety barons, 1,500 knights and several thousand lesser nobility” were killed. “The dukes of Orleans and Bourbon were taken prisoner . . . and the marshal of France. It was the greatest slaughter ever of the French nobility, from which it never really recovered” (248-9). 

Corrigan’s swashbuckling title tells a lot about his assessment of the war, and Corrigan’s enthusiasm for England’s victory is nothing daunted by Henry’s slaughter of the prisoners: “He had little option,” he claims, and besides no one criticized Henry at the time.