This musical score is the 15th-century “Agincourt Carol,” and it celebrated the English victory at the eponymously named battle. The English have Agincourt as a celebrated place in their history, because the battle came to stand as an example of triumph against overwhelming odds. Also Shakespeare loved it. And it was fought 607 years ago today, on October 25, 1415. And I covered it in my Medieval class today quite serendipitously, not having planned the auspicious date for my lecture on the Hundred Years War.
The main thing about Agincourt IMHO is that it represented a sea-change in how wars were won in Medieval Europe. Knights — heavily armed men on horseback — comanded armies and made up the aristocracy, but at Agincourt it was the foot soldier wielding longbows that won the day.
Agincourt was the last major battle the English won during the 100 Years War (not 100 years btw, but 1337-1453), and the odds were against them. About 6,000 English fought against four or five times as many French (accounts vary), and before they hit the battlefield, their numbers were thinned by dystentery.
The English King Henry V put the longbow-men behind a palisade of spikes, and the French, who were more weighed down by heavy armor, had to trudge through heavy mud from recent rains. The French cavalry was unable to flank the English because of woodland, and they bunched together, slipping in the mud, their horses felled by arrows. The primary source Gesti Henrici Quinti reads:.
“For some of them, killed when battle was first joined, fall [sic] out at the front, so great was the undisciplined violence and pressure of the mass of men behind them that the living fell on top of the dead, and others falling on top of the living were killed as well”.
After Agincourt it seemed like the English, most improbably, would defeat the French. However, the death of Henry V, and the arrival on the scene of a 19-year-old teenager (Joan of Arc), were a couple of reasons why that didn’t happen.
