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‘CRY GOD FOR HARRY, ENGLAND

AND ST GEORGE’

REMEMBERING AGINCOURT, 1415-2015

Stephen Cooper

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Copyright Stephen Cooper, 2012

The right of Stephen Cooper to be identified as Author of this Worek has been

asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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INTRODUCTION The 25th of October 1415 will mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt,

when King Henry V, at the head of a largely English army, inflicted a devastating

defeat on a much larger French force, near the village of Azincourt, in the Pas de

Calais. It has recently been shown that the English were probably not faced with

such overwhelming numbers as the original chroniclers thought; but even so, all

English historians agree that they were outnumbered. It is only certain French

historians who have argued the contrary.1

For the historian the simple story of a great English victory is complicated by

the fact that at some point during the battle, Henry V ordered that any French

prisoners who had already been captured should be put to death; but no-one, on

either side of the Channel described this as a ‘war-crime’ or ‘massacre’ at the time,

and the number who were actually killed is uncertain, since a very large number of

prisoners remained in English hands at the end of the day.

There are many historical controversies but, in a sense, the precise facts don’t

matter, when it comes to Agincourt. As the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius

Professor of Modern History at Oxford once remarked about Scottish history,

‘scholars customarily overvalue the influence of historical truth as against historical

myth’. It is the myth of Agincourt, which assumed a life of its own, which has

mattered at certain crucial points in English, and British, history.

This is largely due to the astonishing influence of William Shakespeare (1564-

1616), who re-wrote the story of Agincourt as the story of David and Goliath, rather

than England v France, and did so with wonderful poetry and vivid drama. His

play Henry V was written and first produced in the 1590s, when England was

threatened with invasion by the imperial Spain of Philip II. It was possibly the first

play to be produced at The Globe theatre: hence the reference in the text to ‘this

wooden ‘O’’.

During the next five centuries, the country was again threatened with

invasion, first by the French Empire of Napoleon I and then, in the twentieth

century, by Imperial and Nazi Germany. On each occasion, we were outnumbered

and ‘outgunned’, as the English had been at Agincourt. We needed to call on all our

reserves of patriotism and grit, to make up for the very obvious shortfall in numbers,

equipment and weapons. Thus it was that the story of Agincourt, as re-told by

Shakespeare, was repeatedly invoked, very often by the staging of Henry V.

So powerful was the myth of Agincourt that it outlasted both the revisionism

of English historians and the black legend which came to be attached to the name of

the historical Henry V in France. It even seems to have outlasted the occasional

1 Notably Ferdinand Lot, L’Art Militaire (1946), basing himself on Hans Delbruck (Berlin 1907).

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attempt to present Shakespeare’s play as, in some sense, anti-war.

We have needed the myth in the past. Do we still need it today? Will we

need it in 2015? If so, will we really be able to make use of it, given the fundamental

changes in the constitution of the United Kingdom, and the profound changes in

society which have taken place in the last half century? Will the anniversary of

Agincourt be celebrated in the same anodyne way as the 400th anniversary of the

defeat of the Spanish Armada was celebrated in 1988? Will some dire emergency

arise, requiring a more heartfelt remembrance, as happened in October 1915? Or

will we be asked to apologise to the French for the massacre?

The materials for the study of the myth of Agincourt are very rich. There are

contemporary chronicles and archives, on either side of the Channel; the works of

the historians, English and French; the text of Shakespeare’s play and the history of

its many productions. It is also possible to visit the battlefield at Azincourt, which

remains un-built upon; and there is a delightful visitor centre in the village of that

name. There has been very little excavation of the battlefield, but the visitor centre is

a great success, though it is understood that it is mainly visited by the English and is

still a cause of controversy amongst the French.

1 THE BATTLE

On 25 October 1415, an English army of between 5 and 10,000 men, largely

consisting of archers and led by King Henry V, defeated a much larger French force

near the village of Azincourt, near Hesdin, as the English were making their way

home to Calais, which was then in English hands. The port had been captured by

Henry’s great-grandfather Edward III in 1347, soon after the outbreak of what we

call ‘The Hundred Years War’. Henry had invaded Normandy earlier that year, and

taken the port of Harfleur, though he lost many men there to dysentery. (Part of the

reason for the doubt about the number of English present at Agincourt is the lack of

precise information as to the casualties suffered during the siege of Harfleur). The

King could have retired to England directly from Normandy, but he decided to

march for Calais because he wanted to ‘show the flag’ to his new subjects. Henry

regarded himself as the rightful Duke of Normandy, as well as the King of France;

and accordingly he regarded the French King Charles VI as a usurper, and his ‘great

Adversary’.

It is not clear that Henry was seeking battle; but the French, who were

undoubtedly slow off the mark, undoubtedly did. They summoned forces from all

parts of the much larger French kingdom, though by the nature of the geography,

these forces were mainly from the North of the kingdom, and assembled in Rouen.

(Part of the reason for the doubt as to the French numbers is the doubt as to how

many troops were still arriving when the last count was taken). The French were a

motley collection compared with the English, and the Duke of Burgundy stayed

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away. They had no missile arm to speak of, certainly not one to compare with the

thousands of expert archers, equipped with the English longbow, who were at

Henry V’s disposal. The French king did not lead the army personally, as Henry led

the English. Charles VI was not capable of doing this, for he was intermittently

insane. He had, on one famous occasion, dismounted from his horse and

slaughtered several of his courtiers; on other occasions he thought he was made of

glass, and might shatter if another man touched him.

The victory was not just clear, it was crushing. The French made the mistake

that their forefathers had made at Crécy, when Edward III and his son the Black

Prince had defeated the French in 1346 (and again while marching from Normandy

to the Channel): they sent waves of cavalry against the lines of English archers. At

Agincourt, the archers had the protection of stakes, which the King had ordered

them to cut and carry. The French suffered thousands of casualties (perhaps as

many as 10,000 dead and 1,500 prisoners), while the English escaped with minor

damage (perhaps a hundred dead at most, and no prisoners). The battlefield has

never been built on, and it is possible to tour the site and work out for oneself where

the French knights charged, and the English archers shot them down in droves.

The English victory has traditionally been explained by the skill and strength

of the archers; and it is true that the use of the longbow never took root in either

France or Scotland, as it did in England; but there were also other factors at work at

Agincourt, not least a unified command and sound tactics; and certainly the lack of

these things on the French side played a part. So did the fighting skills of the

English knights and men at arms. Though they were few, Henry had a core of

veterans, used to fighting together and on foot, who held their ground in the centre

of the battle-line. The archers were primarily there to defend these men, though they

joined battle with a will once their supply of arrows was exhausted.

The only contemporary account of the battle on the English side was that

written by a man known as ‘The Chaplain’ - the Gesta Henrici Quinti (‘The Deeds of

Henry V’). As the name suggests, he was a priest, and not in the slightest bit

interested in military matters. The Chaplain does not discuss strategy or tactics. He

regards his own role as part of ‘the clerical militia’, which offers up prayer, as

important as that of the men at arms and archers who did the actual fighting. The

main theme of the Chaplain’s book is to stress that God was on the side of the

English. If God is on your side, clearly numbers do not matter. The Chaplain

gives figures of 5,000 archers and 900 men-at-arms for the English, and states that

there were 30 Frenchmen to every Englishman. Jean de Wavrin, a Burgundian who

wrote that ‘the French were six times more numerous than the English’. French

chroniclers wrote that the English were desperately outnumbered; and that the

French expected to crush their enemies and take King Henry prisoner. A tumbril

had been prepared, in which he would be taken to Paris.

But the exaggerated figures which appear in the chronicles have been tested

by the leading British scholar in the field – the doyenne of Agincourt studies,

Professor Anne Curry, of Southampton University. In Agincourt: A New History

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(2005) she created a lively controversy, among academics and others, scaling back

the French numbers and increasing the English. On the basis of prolonged research

in the archives on both sides of the Channel, particularly the French, she concluded

that the French army was about 12,000 strong, and the English army about 9,000. If

this is right, the English were still outnumbered but they were hardly ‘the happy

few.’

Not everyone agrees. Juliet Barker in Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the

Battle (also published in 2005) argued that the English were outnumbered by ‘at least

four to one and possibly as much as six to one’. She suggested figures of about 6,000

for the English and 36,000 for the French; and in a note appended to his bestselling

novel Azincourt, Bernard Cornwell agreed with Barker, whilst conceding that he is

no historian. The Encyclopædia Britannica (2009) still gives figures of around 6,000 for

the English and between 20,000 and 30,000 for the French. In 1415: Henry V's Year of

Glory (2009), Ian Mortimer, notes that Curry ‘minimises French numbers (by limiting

her figures to those in the basic army and a few specific additional companies) and

maximises English numbers (by assuming the numbers sent home from Harfleur

were no greater than shown in the sick lists)’, but agrees that previous estimates

have exaggerated the odds, and suggests that ‘the most extreme imbalance which is

credible is fifteen thousand French troops against 8,100 English: a ratio of about two-

to-one’. Clifford J. Rogers, Professor at West Point, has argued that archival records

are too incomplete to substantially change his view that the English were

outnumbered about 4–1.

Was Agincourt on of the decisive battles of European history? The Victorian

editor of the Chaplain’s account wrote in 1850 that ‘there have been three great

battles which changed the face of Europe, those of Crescy [sic], Poitiers, and

Agincourt’; but in his Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: from Marathon to Waterloo

(1851) Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy omitted Agincourt, though included Joan of

Arc’s victory at Orléans in 1429. Likewise, J.F.C.Fuller did not include Agincourt in

his Decisive Battles of the Western World and their Influence upon History of 1954-6.

Amongst modern historians of warfare, there is a widespread view that the

importance of battles in general has been exaggerated in the past; and that the

average medieval soldier spent most of his time engaged in other things - guard-

duty, siege-warfare and raiding for example. Philippe Contamine, in his widely

regarded La Guerre au Moyen Age (1980) only devotes a few pages to Agincourt. On

the other hand, Anne Curry considers that ‘Agincourt has not been seen as one of

the decisive battle of the western world, but it should be’.

Much depends on the time frame, and the geographical context we choose to

look at. Agincourt was undoubtedly decisive in the sense that it enabled Henry V to

conquer Normandy and much of Northern France, and this led on to the Duke of

Bedford’s conquest of Main in the 1420, after Henry V’s death; but this was only

significant in terms of the Hundred Years War; and the English were driven out of

all their possessions in France (except Calais) by 1453. In terms of European warfare

as a whole, the battle does not compare in its consequences, with the Turkish

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victories at Kosovo (1389), Nicopolis (1396) and Constantinople (1453), which gave

the Ottomans a stranglehold on the Balkans which lasted for centuries.

Yet, in the short-term, Agincourt made Henry V a respected figure on the

diplomatic stage. It was such a crushing victory that the French were unable to re-

assemble a major field army, for several years. (They were reduced to forming an

alliance with the Scots, who sent over unprecedented numbers of soldiers to assist

them). Henry was able to mount a second invasion of Normandy, two years after he

had led the Agincourt expedition; and when he conquered the Duchy, he did so

unopposed. This was an unprecedented and startling achievement for an English

king: Normandy had been lost by the English Crown by King John in 1204.

At home, the victory consolidated Henry’s position on the English throne.

His father Henry IV had suffered from repeated baronial revolts, because he had

usurped the Crown in 1399; but there were no more plots after Agincourt. There

were no more plots; and the King had little difficulty in persuading Parliament to

vote him all the taxes he asked for. The victory was seen as the verdict of God, and

presented as such to the King’s subjects, in proclamations, addresses to Parliament

and sermons. God, who was the God of battles and the supreme arbiter in military

affairs, had clearly recognised the justice of Henry’s claims. Diplomatically, Henry V

used his victory to good effect when the German Emperor Sigismund visited

England in 1416. Henry persuaded him that the French were guilty of duplicity, and

a treaty of friendship was signed at Canterbury. He was also able to make good use

of the many French noblemen whom he had captured, including the Duke of

Orleans, who was held as a prisoner in England for 25 years.

Was Agincourt in any sense ‘the English revenge for Hastings’? This is not an

idea which was current in the late Middle Ages. The two battles were separated by

three and a half centuries and the nations involved had each changed considerably

in the intervening period. It was true, however, in the tactical sense, for whereas

Duke William of Normandy’s cavalry had overwhelmed the English infantry in

1066, it was English men at arms and archers, fighting on foot, who had defeated the

French knights in 1415.

Did Agincourt in any way mark ‘the rise of the common man’, given the

importance of the longbow, which was not a weapon used by the aristocracy or

gentry? This is an idea which has enjoyed some popularity with radical and socialist

historians; but the answer, unfortunately, is ‘not really’. We have to await the

twentieth century before we can truly hear the Anthem for the Common Man. Yet

Shakespeare realised that there was a case for saying that the battle was won by the

yeomen, whoever they were.

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A LATE MEDIEVAL VIEW OF THE BATTLE

AND OF THE DUKE OF ORLEANS AS A PRISONER, IN THE TOWER OF

LONDON

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A MEDIEVAL ARCHER, LEEDS ARMOURIES

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HENRY V’S CHANTRY CHAPEL,, WESTMINSTER ABBEY

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2 MEMORY News of the victory brought great relief to the people of London, because there had

been rumours of a disastrous defeat. Agincourt had been fought on a Friday, and

accurate information arrived in the capital the following Tuesday (the day Henry

arrived at Calais). The City celebrated accordingly: the Mayor, Aldermen and ‘an

immense number of the Commonalty, joined in a procession on foot, like pilgrims.

A month later, when the triumphant army returned, there was a magnificent

pageant in the City of London, recorded by the Chaplain. The citizens were used to

staging events like this – the mayor and aldermen paraded several times a year – but

this time the scale of the celebrations was unprecedented. No expense was spared:

When the tower at the entrance to [London] bridge was reached, there was seen placed

high on top of it, and representing as it were the entrance into the city’s jurisdiction, an

image of a giant of astonishing size who, looking down upon the King’s face, held, like a

champion, a great axe in his right hand and, like a warder, the keys of the city hanging from a

baton in his left. At his right side stood a figure of a woman, not much smaller in size,

wearing a scarlet mantle and adornments appropriate to her sex; and they were like a man

and his wife who, in their richest attire, were bent upon seeing the eagerly awaited face of

their lord and welcoming him with abundant praise.

The giant of London Bridge features in more than one account. He appears in

verses attributed to John Lydgate, and the message is clear:

Upon the gate there stood on high,

A giant that was full grim of sight,

To teach the Frenchmen courtesy

It was carnival time – within the limits of Anglo-Saxon culture. All the way from

London Bridge to Westminster Abbey, the crowds were tightly packed. Thomas

Walsingham tells us that

It is impossible to describe the joy, rejoicing and the triumph with which [King Henry] was

welcomed by the Londoners, because the elaborate arrangements, the enormous expenditure,

the variety of spectacles would need a short book to themselves. [He] was met by an

extraordinarily large crowd – it seemed to comprise everyone in London.

Those few who had fallen at Agincourt were remembered in St Albans on 1

December 1415. Thomas Walsingham recorded the funeral service held in London

and it is striking that this was for the dead on both sides and that the king’s uncle,

the Duke of Exeter came from Harfleur for the service, though the town was under

siege by the French at the time. A roll of the arms, of those who had taken part, was

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prepared on the King’s orders in 1416.

Henry V was known for his piety and he meant what he said about God’s

part in the victory. He wanted to ensure that Agincourt would be remembered,

forever, on the anniversary of the battle, but in accordance with the rites of the

Christian religion; but Christian liturgy and the Christian calendar were complex

affairs and commemorating the anniversary of the battle was not straightfoward. It

was for the Church to make the necessary changes.

St George had become the patron saint of England in the time of Edward III;

but Agincourt was fought on Friday, 25 October 1415, which was the Feast of Saints

Crispin and Crispinian, twin martyrs of the Church who lived in either Soissons in

France or Faverhsam in Kent – according to which legend one believes. There was

even a third candidate for veneration – and one who had the advantage of being

indubitably English. This was St John of Beverley, a bishop who had founded his

monastery in Yorkshire in the late seventh century, though he had not been

canonised until the fourteenth. St John had died in Beverley on 7 May 721; but his

relics had been transferred (or ‘translated’) to a new shrine in the Minster there on 25

October 1307. Conveniently, on the day that the Battle of Agincourt was fought, his

shrine in Beverley had oozed drops of holy oil which resembled beads of sweat.

This clearly indicated that the Saint had been exerting himself in Heaven on behalf of

his English compatriots. St John of Beverley therefore had as good a claim to be

remembered on 25 October as Saints Crispin and Crispinian, and a better one than St

George, whose day fell in April. Moreover, he would be a popular candidate in the

North of England.

In December 1416, having consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry

ordered the Bishop of London to celebrate the Feasts of St John of Beverley, as well

as of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, on 25 October each year throughout his diocese

and in perpetuity. St George’s Feast was given the status of a ‘greater double’ – a

day on which all servile work ceased and parish churches were to be attended by

everyone, as was required at Christmas. Further, St John of Beverley should be

celebrated both on 7 May and on 25 October, by means of a service which also

commemorated Saints Crispin and Crispinian.

Agincourt gave rise to a number of popular ballads, including the Agincourt

Carol, which was sung on state occasions (for example at the coronation of Henry VI

in 1430):

Our King went forth to Normandy

With grace and might of chivalry

There God for him wrought marvelloulsy;

Wherefore England may call and cry

[Chorus]

Deo gratias!

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Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria!

Then went him forth, our king comely

In Agincourt field he fought manly;

Through grace of God most marvellously,

He had both field and victory...

The Carol was still included in a popular songbook as late as 1926.

Agincourt was also celebrated in verse and in song in the great halls and in

the taverns of England. Some of the verse had a long life. In 1765 Thomas Percy

published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which contained a ballad known as

Agincourt, or the English Bowman’s Glory

Agincourt, Agincourt,

Know Ye Not Agincourt,

How the French were beat down

Shot by our Bowmen…

As for the history books, Anne Curry prints extracts from 26 contemporary

accounts and chronicles, English and French, which narrate the battle of Agincourt,

in her collection of source materials, The Battle of Agincourt, Sources & Interpretations

(Boydell 2000); but there are only three which stand out. These are the account of the

anonymous Chaplain (‘the Deeds of Henry V’ or Gesta Henrici Quinti) the chronicle

written by Jean Le Fèvre, a Frenchman who, for some unknown reason, was with the

English army during the battle; and the chronicle of Jean de Waurin, a Burgundian

who was a pageboy in the French army. Whereas Le Fèvre and Wavrin compiled

their accounts some decades later, the Chaplain’s account was written shortly after

the return of the English army from France. The Chaplain was therefore an eye-

witness; but at the same time, he was no soldier. He was not in the least interested

in the things that interest the modern historian: tactics, strategy, logistics and

weaponry. For him it was a sufficient explanation of the victory that God was on the

side of the English. Having said this, the Chaplain’s account is full of vivid detail.

He tells us what it felt like on the night before the battle:

When at last the light failed and darkness had fallen between us and them, and we, still

standing our ground in the field, could hear the enemy after they had taken up quarters, each

one of them calling out, as usual, for his fellow, servant and comrade... and our men had

begun to do the same, the king ordered silence throughout the whole army under pain of

forfeiture of horse and harness on the part of a gentleman should he offend, and of loss of his

right ear by a yeoman and anyone else of lower rank who presumed to infringe the royal

order, without hope of obtaining a pardon. And he at once moved in silence to a hamlet

nearby, where we had houses, although very few of them, and gardens and orchards in which

to rest, and heavy rain almost the whole night through.

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After Joan of Arc’s brief career (1429-31) and the dissolution of the Anglo-

Burgundian alliance which lasted between 1419 and 1435, the English found it

increasingly difficult to hold onto their conquests in France. In the 1440s, Henry VI

(Henry’s son by Catherine of Valois) tried to negotiate his way out of the quagmire,

but his ‘peace-process’ failed miserably. The English were swept out of Normandy

and then Gascony between 1449 and 1453, and they were defeated in battle, at

Formigny and Castillon. The military catastrophe they suffered was a prime cause

of the civil disorder which followed in England, and which we call the Wars of the

Roses.

In the late fifteenth century, men still looked back fondly on Henry V and the

triumph at Agincourt. Patriotism, and even chauvinism, stilled burned bright in

William Worcester’s Boke of Noblesse, first written in the 1450s for Sir John Fastolf,

who had fought in France for over 20 years. Agincourt showed what could be done,

even with a small number of men: it also showed how the fortunes of war could

change in a day; and that the English fighting spirit would prevail, if only it could be

revived.

In 1461, there was a change of dynasty, from Lancaster to York, and this

meant that the chroniclers now emphasized the role taken at Agincourt by the 2nd

Duke of York, who had been the highest-ranking member of the English nobility

who was killed there. York was now made into a heroic commander in some

versions of popular chronicles. One version of The Brut ascribed the decision to

supply the English archers with stakes to York, rather than to Henry V.

In 1475, the Yorkist Edward IV took up the Lancastrian project to pursue the

Crown’s inheritance in France. Like Henry V before him, he assembled an army of

invasion; but, unlike Henry, his point of entry was Calais rather than Normandy;

and he did not even commit his forces to battle. Instead, he allowed himself to be

bought off by the French King Louis XI, at Piquigny. He took the opportunity, when

he was in France, to visit the field of Agincourt; but his expedition came to an

inglorious end.

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A BEARDED HENRY V, IN YORK MINSTER

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THE WEST FRONT, BEVERLEY MINSTER

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CAISTER CASTLE, NORFOLK, CIRCA 1459

FOTHERINGAY, THE BURIAL PLACE OF THE DUKES OF YORK

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THE EARLIEST KNOWN PORTRAIT OF HENRY V

CHAUCER’S YEOMAN, ACCORDING TO PYNSON

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3 SHAKESPEARE In 1818, in his Account of a Tour of Normandy Dawson Turner wrote that ‘Not one

individual troubles himself about history, whilst a thousand read the drama’; and

most people who have heard about Agincourt, probably have heard of it because

they have seen Shakespeare’s Henry V. Henry is portrayed here as the ideal

medieval hero and warrior king, and the Battle of Agincourt is the focal point of the

drama

Shakespeare took liberties with the facts. In his version of events, the battle

leads immediately to the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, where Henry is recognised as heir

to the French king Charles VI and marries his daughter. The reality was that Henry

had to wait five years after his victory for the peace treaty - years during which he

had to conquer Normandy town by town. Moreover, if Duke John’ the Fearless’ of

Burgundy had not been assassinated with the connivance of the Dauphin in 1419, it

is doubtful if the peace treaty would have been signed. It was the open warfare

between Burgundians and Armagnacs, precipitated by the assassination, which

delivered much of Northern France, and Paris, to the English. Still, Shakespeare’s

play made such an impression that it still frames most people’s idea of the period.

Henry V was first staged in the 1590s, when France had ceased to be the

traditional enemy. She was wracked by civil war, and her place as international

bogeyman had been taken by Philip II’s Spain; but, when Shakespeare wrote his

play, the country was still threatened by invasion, despite the defeat of the Spanish

Armada in 1588. Spain still controlled the southern part of the Low Countries,

which we call Belgium; and this was where an army of invasion would have

embarked. The spirit of English patriotism was still highly relevant to the appeal to

arms made by Elizabeth I.

Shakespeare’s Henry V reinforced the traditional image of the king as the

supreme English hero, and made Agincourt a building block of English history, as

taught in schools, down to the 1960s. The worthy but dull speeches to be found in

his sources, Hall and Holinshed, were turned into sublime poetry. The great

speeches made by the King outside the walls of Harfleur and immediately before

Agincourt are unlikely to be forgotten by any patriotic Englishman who has heard

them.

In Shakespeare’s play the English completely defeat the ‘overmighty’ French,

despite being tired, hungry and vastly outnumbered. It had long been a

commonplace of military theory that a relatively few trained and disciplined

veterans could defeat an undisciplined horde. This idea is to be found in the Art of

War by the Roman author Vegetius, who wrote in the fourth century A.D; and he

was widely read during the Middle Ages. For that matter, the idea is also to be

found in the Bible, in the stories of David and Goliath, and Gideon and the

Amalekites; but it was Shakespeare who turned the commonplace into the

unforgettable.

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Shakespeare includes a scene where one of his commanders regrets that they

do not have more men,

O that we now had here

But one ten thousand of those men in England

That do no work today.

The King rejects this idea out of hand: it is the few, the happy few who will win the

victory.

In fact, Westmoreland was not at Agincourt – he was left in charge of the

Scottish marches. If anyone told the king to his face that the English should not fight

because they were hopelessly outnumbered, it was Sir Walter Hungerford. But the

important thing is to show that Agincourt was won despite the odds, not because of

them: that it was a victory of the spirit, not of superior tactics or weaponry.

In Henry V Shakespeare also included a story about a Welshman (Fluellen), a

Scotsman (Captain Jamy) and an Irishman (Macmorris), despite the fact that there

were no Scots at all, very few Irish and only a minority of Welsh at Agincourt. He

did this because of the political circumstances in the 1590s, when it suited the Tudor

dynasty (which was originally Welsh) to encourage the idea of Britishness. Yet in

1415 the Scots were deadly enemies of the English; Henry had played a leading role,

as Prince of Wales, in suppressing Owain Glendower’s revolt in Wales; and Ireland

was witnessing a widespread Gaelic revival which largely confined the English to

the Pale around Dublin.

Shakespeare helped to invent the idea that Agincourt was the victory of the

yeomen of England, rather than of a combination of men at arms and archers, led by

a charismatic leader. At the heart of this there is a simple truth: that the archers

played a major part in the English victory: that the longbow was not a weapon

which was used by knights or men at arms. The average English archer was drawn

from the lower classes: he was not a nobleman or a member of the rising gentry.

Classically, he was a ‘yeoman’; but modern historians are far from certain who the

yeomen were. They were certainly not landless peasants.

`In the late sixteenth century the yeomen were thought to be England’s finest,

the very backbone of society:

And you, good yeoman,

Whose limbs were made in England, show us here

The mettle of your pasture; let us swear

That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not.

This idea has had a long life. The opera Merrie England, first performed in 1902,

included a song, The Yeomen of England:

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Who were the Yeomen -

The Yeomen of England?

The freemen were the Yeomen,

The freemen of England!

Stout were the bows they bore,

When they went out to war,

Stouter their courage for the honour of England.

Despite its intense appeal to the patriotic fighting spirit of the English

underdog, Shakespeare’s Henry V was not much performed in the seventeenth

century. It was only in 1738, after an absence of over 120 years, that it returned to

the stage, when it was performed at Covent Garden. Thereafter, it became a regular

part of the London repertoire. When Shakespeare’s statue was set up in Westminster

abbey in 1741, it incorporated a bust of Henry V. During the Seven Years’ War with

France (1756-63) Henry V was performed every year.

Henry V became one of the great roles: it was played by John Kemble (1757 –

1823) on sixteen occasions between 1789 and 1792, when the play was popular

because of the fear of revolutionary France; by Charles Kean (1811 - 1868); and in the

time of the great actor-manager, William Macready (1793-1873), who staged a

memorable performance in 1838. Frank Benson directed the play at the Shakespeare

Memorial Theatre in Stratford in 1897, in a production which was revived there in

fifteen of the following 30 years and which was characterised by vigour and

athleticism.

It was in the Victorian period also that the play became a favourite subject of

study in schools. I remember studying it for ‘O’ level in 1963.

There are those who argue that Henry V is both an heroic and an anti-heroic

play: that inside the official play there is a secret one, which is anti-war. This is

largely based on the character of the archer Michael Williams, a common man and

archer who quarrels with Henry about the justice of the king’s cause. Though

ultimately loyal, Williams has a mind of his own. Yet it was the official version

which transformed the memory of Agincourt, and made it fit for an English, and

then a British nation, whether the enemy was France, Spain or Germany.

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THE SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL IN SOUTHWARK CATHEDRAL

AGINCOURT SQUARE, MONMOUTH

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MONMOUTH CASTLE, BIRTHPLACE OF HENRY V

PLAQUE IN FAVERSHAM, COMMEMORATING SAINTS CRISPIN AND

CRISPINIAN

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THE SUPPOSED SITE OF THE SWAN INN, FAVERSAM

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RAMSAY’S MAP, 1892

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4 HISTORIANS

There was very little written about the late Middle Ages during the seventeenth

century: England and Scotland were now ruled by the same Scottish dynasty, the

Stuarts; and the reading public was either interested in the history of more ancient

times, or else in current affairs. There was, after all, enough to be interested in,

including the Civil War of 1642-5, Oliver Cromwell’s conquests of Scotland and

Ireland and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The Act of Union of 1707 created the United Kingdom, uniting Scotland with

England and Wales under a Protestant monarch and a common Parliament at

Westminster. As we know Henry V had been Prince of Wales, and he was Lord of

Ireland, as well as King of England, but he never ruled in Scotland; and it was an

overwhelmingly English army which fought at Agincourt. Why should the British

be interested in Agincourt? The fact is that, between 1707 and, say, 1965, the British

– or at any rate the English – had no difficulty in identifying ‘England’ with both

‘Britain’ and ‘the United Kingdom’. Histories of the country were routinely and

unashamedly histories of England; and Scotland, Wales and Ireland were routinely

awarded a few pages at the back of the book. A.J.P. Taylor’s volume to the Oxford

series in 1965 was still entitled English History 1914-1945, as late as 1965.

Meanwhile, France had once again resumed her role as traditional enemy, of

Great Britain and of the United Kingdom rather than England alone. Louis XIV, the

French Republic, Napoleon I and Napoleon III succeeded Philip II of Spain as the

great ‘Adversaries’; and the Anglo-French rivalry, which had survived into the Age

of Discovery and expanded in the Age of Empire, lasted right down to the modern

era, ending only with the Entente Cordiale of 1904.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were favourable periods for the

patriotic myth of Agincourt, and for Shakespeare’s Henry V, despite the radical

changes in constitutional arrangements. Thomas Goodwin’s History of the Reign of

Henry the Fifth was published in London in 1704 – the year of the Duke of

Marlborough’s victory over Louis XIV at Blenheim; and in his preface, Goodwin

wrote that ‘our Black Prince’s and Fifth Henry’s wars are now no longer acted only

on our theatres, but are revived in the field too’.

Yet the eighteenth century at least was also an age of scepticism, and there

were voices of dissent. Tobias Smollett (1721 – 1771) was a Scot, better known for

novels such as The Adventures of Roderick Random, who wrote A Complete History of

England. Here is Smollett’s assessment of Henry V:

All his renown was founded upon the most pernicious ambition, which seemed to swallow up

every principle of justice, and every consideration of humanity......he could not but know the

weakness of that title in support of which he shed the blood of 200,000 men, ruined a still

greater number of families [and] laid waste the fairest provinces of Europe...

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In the nineteenth century many Englishmen who read no history took a

simple pride in the fact that an English army had beaten a much larger French one in

1415: the exact numbers did not matter. Whenever there was a war involving the

British Army, and especially around the anniversary of the battle, there were letters

and articles in The Times invoking the spirit of Agincourt. This happened in 1800 (in

response to an article in Le Moniteur which drew unfavourable comparisons between

the army of George III and that of Napoleon); in 1854, (though the British and French

were allies at the time, engaged in fighting the Russians in the Crimea); and in 1899,

(when the first British contingents were sent to South Africa at the outbreak of the

Boer War).

English patriotic pride was demonstrated in various ways: Lord Macaulay

(1800-59) liked to recall that he had been born on Agincourt Day, and from 1796

there was a succession of battleships in the Royal Navy called HMS Agincourt, one of

them a dreadnought which fought at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Not all of this

pride was justified. In the nineteenth century the people of Sheffield boasted that

the English victories at both Crécy and Agincourt were mainly attributable to the

quality of the arrow-heads made in their city; but the region’s greatest historian,

Joseph Hunter (1783-1861) - who was an authority on Agincourt as well as on the

history of what is now South Yorkshire - wrote that he had looked for corroborative

evidence of this in the records of the Exchequer, and found none.

Military History was born as the soldiers involved in the Napoleonic wars

returned home and wrote their memoirs. It was symptomatic of this process that

some officers and soldiers who had fought at Waterloo had their medals presented

to them on the field of Agincourt, though the two battlefields are over 100 miles

apart. In 1818 Sir John Woodford, a veteran of Waterloo became quarter-master

general in the British army of occupation in the Pas de Calais conducted excavations

of the site at Agincourt. He published his findings in the Revue Anglo-Francaise in

1835. His drawing of the battlefield – perhaps the first ever made – is preserved in

the British Library. He appears to have been the first to suggest that the English had

advanced from a first to a second position, in order to provoke battle.

Sir Harris Nicolas (1799-1848) served in the Royal Navy from 1812 to 1816,

then studied law and was called to the bar. He devoted himself to peerage cases; but

also to the academic study of genealogy and history, being regarded as ‘a curious

amalgam of a medieval Crusader with the conscience of a late Victorian

Nonconformist’. Yet his Agincourt of 1827 set new standards, in the way the author

reproduced extracts from documents in support of his arguments. He printed the

Agincourt Roll as an appendix to his book; and was among the first to include maps.

Yet Nicholas was not uncritical of Henry V’s expedition: he described it as ‘wanton

aggression’. The Hon. Sir John William Fortescue (1859-1933), whose best known

work is his monumental History of the British Army, agreed.

In the late nineteenth century, professional history was born. The Schools of

Modern History were founded in Oxford and Cambridge, and the great Regius

Professors were appointed: Bishop Stubbs in Oxford and Lord Acton in Cambridge.

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The so-called ‘redbrick’ Universities, founded around 1900, followed suit. Academic

historians were not exclusively concerned, as Shakespeare had been, to please an

audience or readership. They could write what they liked.

William Stubbs (1825-1901) was an Anglican Bishop, who lived in a time

when England and France were at peace; but war with France was still a real

possibility, as late as the Fashoda incident of 1898; and Stubbs was still a great

admirer of Henry V. It is difficult to think of a more comprehensive tribute than that

paid to the medieval king by the Victorian Professor:

Henry V stands before us as one of the greatest and purest characters in English history…

He was religious, pure in life, temperate, liberal, careful and yet splendid, merciful, truthful,

and honourable; ‘discreet in word, provident in counsel, prudent in judgment, modest in

look, magnanimous in act’; a brilliant soldier, a sound diplomatist, an able organiser

Yet Stubbs also delivered a damning verdict on the war which the king prosecuted

so vigorously between 1415 and 1422 (the date of his premature death):

The war of Henry V in France must be condemned by the judgment of modern opinion; it

was a bold, a desperate undertaking, fraught with suffering to all concerned in it; but it is as

a great national enterprise, too great for the nation which undertook it to maintain.

Sir Charles Oman (1860 – 1946), was educated at Oxford University, where he

studied under Stubbs. In 1881 he was elected to a Prize Fellowship at All Souls

College, where he would remain for the rest of his career. His Art of War in the

Middle Ages was first published in 1885. Yet Professor Oman also thought that

Henry had been positively rash too ‘to act on the hypothesis that a French feudal

army would always do the wrong thing’

So much for the history written by members of ‘the Academy’. Popular

historians in the nineteenth century tended to emphasize the victory of the yeomen

archers, because this appealed to the rising middle classes of Victorian and

Edwardian England, with their voracious appetite for books such as Dickens’s

Child’s History of England (1851-3) and H.E.Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905).

What of the French? France had always regarded herself as ‘the great nation’

– the nation of Clovis and Charlemagne and the leader of Western Christianity. She

led all the important Crusades and established the rules of chivalry. Her royal

family married into all the great houses of Western Europe. The problem in the

fifteenth century was to explain, not merely the defeat at Agincourt but the

ignominy of it. In the main they did so, not by making light of it, but by explaining

the material reasons for the debacle, and contrasting it with the great French

victories which followed in subsequent decades.

The Religieux of St Denis runs through a gamut of reasons for the disaster –

items which were to become very familiar in subsequent historiography, on both

sides of the Channel: the French vanguard was too tightly packed; the English

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archers were able to pour down ‘a terrifying hail of arrow shot’ before attacking the

French with ‘great lead-covered mallets from which one single blow on the head

could kill a man or knock him senseless to the ground’; the English fought with

passion because they knew that, for them, it was a matter of life or death. The

Bourgeois de Paris thought that the English were a nation which was fond of war,

though he attributed the French defeat to the sins of the French; but there were also

French writers who were more critical of Henry V. One of these was Pierre Cochon,

author of the Chronique Normande, written in the early 1430s. According to this, the

English king was a man who:

Never slept but continually looked to his interests and made alliances and provision, as he

saw fit, of young men from various lands, some Irish, all with bare feet and no shoes, dressed

in scruffy doublets made out of old bedding, a poor skullcap of iron on their heads, a bow and

a quiver of arrows in their hand and a sword hanging at their side...There was also a large

quantity of scum from several lands.

Henry was seen by some Frenchmen as a diabolical force – a ‘Machiavellian’

before his time – a man who would stop at nothing, and thought that the end

justified the means. In the early 1430s Jean Juvénal des Ursins (1388–1473), who was

an Armagnac, wrote his Histoire de Charles VI Roy de France. This tells how Henry

makes his way from Harfleur to Amiens ‘committing countless evil deeds, burning,

killing people, capturing and abducting children.’ The French rally to defend their

country. The English win at Agincourt but the archers do not fight fairly. Their

arrow fire does little harm to the French troops, who wear good armour, but the

lightly-armed English archers then attack them with hammers and beat them down,

like blacksmiths hammering on the anvil. The Duke of Burgundy betrays his fellow

countrymen by refusing to take part in the fighting. Henry V is an arch-hypocrite,

who even dares to lecture his prisoners on morality:

It was a great wonder that nothing worse had happened to them because it was evil and sin to

which they had abandoned themselves. They had not kept faith or loyalty with any living

soul in their marriages or in other matters. They had committed sacrilege in robbing and

violating churches, they had taken by force all kinds of people, nuns and others.

It was this baleful, Armagnac, view of Henry V which came to predominate amongst

future French historians, rather than the relatively benign view taken by those who

wrote at the time. Meanwhile, the end of the civil war between Burgundians and

Armagnacs saw the emergence of a standard French line to explain Agincourt, and

the other defeats and reverses suffered at the hands of the English between 1415 and

1430. As a Carthusian monk is said to have remarked to King Francis I in the early

sixteenth century: ‘Through the hole in the duke of Burgundy’s skull, the English

entered France...’ France had been brought low by its own internal disorders, rather

than by the superior fighting spirit of the English.

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Jules Michelet, (1798 - 1874), was a child of the French Revolution. His view

of history is entirely different from that of any English historian. He is like a

novelist, picking out the grand themes, including graphic scenes and purple

passages. In particular he personifies countries - France, England and Flanders. His

account of the years 1415 to 1453 is broadly as follows: England inflicts a nearly

mortal wound on France in 1415; France contracts a serious disease, from which the

country nearly dies, but she recovers her health in the 1440s; meanwhile the English

catch the disease from the French and in turn suffers a serious illness, with the

advent of the Wars of the Roses.

Michelet blames the English nation for the Hundred Years’ War as a whole

Everyone in England needed a war. The king needed one. The elder branch of the family had

had its battles at Crécy and Poitiers. The younger branch could only legitimate its claims in

battle.

Michelet fees us facts which reduce the magnitude of the defeat at Agincourt.

Parliament votes Henry an ‘unheard of sum’ to finance the war; the King assembles

a force of 6,000 men at arms and 80,000 archers. He hires 800 ships from Holland

and Zealand, thanks to his alliance with the Duke of Burgundy. When he leaves

Harfleur, he still had 2,000 men at arms and 13,000 archers . Meanwhile, it is the

French who lose the battle, rather than the English who win it:

We should not forget that our unfortunate country [France] had no government at this time.

The two factions having receded to the North and South of the country, the centre was void.

Paris was worn out, after its great efforts; the king was mad; the Dauphin was sick, the

Duke of Berry an octogenarian.

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MACREADY AS HENRY V

AN EPISODE FROM CHARLES CALVERT’S 1879 PRODUCTION OF HENRY V

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THE YEOMEN (AND ‘YEOWOMEN’) OF ENGLAND, CIRCA 1935

5 THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Strangely the spirit of Agincourt was never called up so directly and so poignantly

as in the twentieth century. This happened in 1914, 1915 and again in 1944, when

Germany had replaced France as the national enemy but when the British were

required to invade France once more, to defend or liberate their old adversaries.

The confrontation with the Kaiser’s Germany dwarfed the encounter with

Philip II’s Spain and Napoleon’s France. Imperial Germany was more populous

than the United Kingdom, and by 1914 she had outstripped her in terms of industrial

production. She had an enormous conscript army, where the British had only a

small professional force, which the Kaiser dubbed ‘a contemptible little army.’

Winston Churchill had feared this confrontation since at least 1911. In that

year, he was staying with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, when news of the

Agadir crisis broke. Churchill woke in the middle of the night:

I thought of the peril of Britain, peace loving, unthinking little prepared, of her power and

virtue, and of her mission of good sense and fair play. I thought of mighty Germany,

towering up in the splendour of her imperial state and delving down in her profound, cold,

patient, ruthless calculations. I thought of German education and thoroughness and all that

their triumphs in science and philosophy implied. I thought of the successful wars by which

her power had been set up.

Churchill found a Bible and opened it at random. He read how the children

of Israel would have to fight

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A people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, of whom thou hast heard say ‘who can

stand before the children of Anak?’

When war broke out three years later, the German steamroller rolled into

neutral Belgium - ‘gallant little Belgium’ as the British called it. The German Army

ran into the British Expeditionary Force Mons, in the west of Belgium near the

French border, around 70 miles from the village of Azincourt. Vastly outnumbered,

the B.E.F. gave an honourable account of itself, but was forced to retreat. This was

the setting for a short story by Arthur Machen, a journalist and popular short-story

writer, published in The Evening News and entitled The Bowmen.

The Bowmen tells how 80,000 British are attacked by 300,000 Germans, with

artillery. The British fight desperately but eventually, they concluded that all is lost.

One of the British soldiers remembers a motto ‘Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius - may St.

George be a present help to the English’. As soon as he pronounces the words, he

hears shouting louder than a thunder: ‘Array, array, array!’; ‘St. George! St. George!’;

‘St. George for Merry England!’ And he sees, beyond the trench, a long line of

shapes, with a shining around them. It turns out that these are the bowmen of

Agincourt, arriving to help their beleaguered compatriots. The bowmen shoot the

German hordes down, by the thousand. In Germany, ‘a country ruled by scientific

principles, the Great General Staff decide that the contemptible English must have

employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds

were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers’; but the Tommy who

called on St George knows otherwise.

Machen's story was fiction but many readers took it for reportage. He was

asked for the evidence for his account of what had happened. He said there was

none, because the story was the product of his imagination and he had no desire to

create a hoax. A month or two later, he received a request from a priest to reprint

the story, stating that it must be true and that he must bemistaken if he asserted

otherwise. As the story was told and retold, the bowmen in some versions of it

became angels. In April 1915, an account was published in the

British Spiritualist magazine, assuring readers that a supernatural force had

miraculously intervened to help the B.E.F. in its hour of need.

Machen, who was puzzled by all this, attempted to end the rumours by

republishing his story, with a preface which explained that it was fiction, and even

protesting that it had little literary merit. The only result was that the story became

a bestseller, and the rumours of divine intervention grew and multiplied. The

legend of the Angels of Mons was born.

By 1915 it was clear that the War was not going to end quickly. The Germans

had retreated from the line of their deepest advance into France, but dug in, in a line

of entrenchments which stretched from the English Channel to borders of

Switzerland. They could only be dislodged by an army that was at least as large as

their own.

On 25 September 1915, the British broke through the German line and capture

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the town of Loos; but the breakthrough could not be exploited. When the battle

resumed the following day, the Germans were repulsed attempts to continue the

advance. The fighting subsided on 28 September with the British having retreated to

their starting positions. The attack had cost over 20,000 casualties. The Battle of Loos

was the first in which the British Army suffered casualties on this scale; and the

newspapers for 25 October 1915 – the 500th anniversary of Agincourt - were full of

lists of the dead and the wounded.

In addition, The Times carried two items devoted to what had happened in

1415 in the same theatre of war. One was a quotation from Shakespeare’s St

Crispin’s day speech. The other was a leading article entitled ‘Saint Crispin’s Day’:

Five hundred years have come and gone today since England won the last and greatest of her

medieval victories on foreign soil. This is the day of Agincourt, when Henry V, with his

way-worn and half-famished band of Englishmen, attacked and put to utter rout the vast

host that barred their way to Calais and the sea... [England] has yet greater wars today, and

her sons again stand embattled in the very fields where the noble Plantagenet with his ‘band

of brothers’ snatched overwhelming victory from the very jaws of disaster... ‘Every subject’s

duty is the king’s’ is the keynote of [Shakespeare’s] play, and in none is the sense of duty

more strongly portrayed than in the King himself. From Crécy and Poitiers, onwards to the

immortal signal at Trafalgar, from Trafalgar and Waterloo to the Marne and Ypres, the

English sense of duty is the secret of our discipline and our success.

In the same article, it was claimed that, at Agincourt, ‘the line beat the

column, as it was so often to do’; and, in a letter written to The Times from the

Carlton Club and published the following day, Sir Herbert Maxwell M.P. (1845–

1937), who was a novelist and politician and – note – a Scotsman, affirmed that ‘The

Battle of Agincourt is memorable as the first recorded instance of the success of line

formation against column.’ Maxwell published a seventeen page article on the battle

in The Cornhill Magazine at the same time.

The idea of the lasting historical importance of the English or British ‘line’

remained part of conventional military wisdom in the 1920s. It is depicted on the

map which appears in Herbert Strang’s novel Claud the Archer of 1928. There was

still an echo of it in Christopher Hibbert’s book on Agincourt in 1964, though it has

very little basis in fact, either in medieval or modern times.

The British were not alone in seeking to invoke the spirit of the past. Both

sides in the First World War appealed to the military glories of the past, especially to

what were thought to be the values of chivalry.2 In 1914, the Germans chose to name

their great victory over the Russians in East Prussia ‘Tannenberg’ (though a number

of other names would have been at least as appropriate from a geographical point of

view) because the Teutonic knights had been defeated there in 1410, by a coalition of

Poles and Lithuanians.

2 See Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War, Allen J. Frantzen (Chicago 2003).

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The spirit of Aginourt was still alive and well in Britain in 1919, when R.B.

Mowat, an Oxford academic, published a popular book about Henry V. This took a

generally favourable view of the King and his achievements:

He educated the nation, and infused it with the spirit of his own youth and energy... He left

an empire that would crumble, but an ideal that could never die... Henry’s most permanent

gift to England is the sentiment of patriotism...

The Agincourt Song, arranged by Gerrard Williams, appeared as the first item

in the Daily Express Song Book, which was published in 1927, following the launch of

a community singing movement in the Albert Hall on November 20 1926.

But there was also a widespread reaction against war in all its forms in the

aftermath of the First World War. In 1919, Gerald Gould published an article

entitled A New Reading of Henry V in The English Review. This argued that the play

had been misunderstood. It was actually intended to be an attack on medieval

chivalry rather than a celebration of it. For whatever reason, Henry V ceased to be

part of the normal theatrical repertoire in the 1920s and 1930s.

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THE ANGELS OF MONS, 1914

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THE CARLTON CLUB

SIR HERBERT MAXWELL

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WINSTON CHURCHILL IN 1914

THE BATTLE OF LOOS, 1915

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6 THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE LATE

20TH CENTURY

Nazi Germany was even more of a threat to Great Britain than the Kaiser’s Germany

had been. Hitler had a more numerous Army, with the benefit of tanks; and a

formidable air force. Having conquered Poland in 1939, the Germans invaded

Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France in the

Spring of 1940. The B.E.F. had to be evacuated from Dunkirk, as the French Army

collapsed. Britain stood alone.

By the spring of 1944 Hitler had made the catastrophic mistake of invading

the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States, the Russians had recovered

from his devastating attacks in 1941 and 1942, and the Americans had shipped vast

numbers of personnel to Britain; but the task of invading France and liberating

Western Europe remained formidable. It was now that Churchill decided to call up

the spirit of Agincourt once more.

Laurence Olivier had performed the role of Henry V on stage at The Old Vic in

1937. During the War, he entertained the troops with a one-man show which

included extracts from Henry V’s speeches. As he later explained:

By the time I got to God for harry’ I think they would have followed me anywhere. I don’t

think we could have won the war without ‘Once more unto the breach …’ somewhere in our

soldier’s hearts.

In 1944 Churchill instructed Olivier to make a film of Henry V as morale-

boosting propaganda for the British troops who were preparing to invade

Normandy though, by the time the film was released, the invasion had taken place,

and Normandy and even Paris had been liberated. The film was dedicated ‘To the

Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it

has been humbly attempted to recapture.’ It won numerous awards, and altered the

perception of Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt for a generation.

The aftermath of the Second World War saw the publication of a good deal of

patriotic history, geared to a new mass market. When A. L. Rowse arranged for E. F.

Jacob (a fellow academic at Oxford) to write a biography of Henry V for his series

Men and Their Times in 1947, Jacob entitled the book Henry V and the Invasion of

Normandy. The book was a scholarly counterpart to Olivier’s film, and the parallels

between 1415 and 1944 were expressly drawn. Jacob also compared the Treaty of

Troyes of 1420 to Churchill’s proposal for a political union of the French Republic

and England in 1940; and explained the similarity between the failure of the French

aristocracy between 1414 and 1422 and the lamentable performance of French

politicians in 1940.

The normally sceptical K.B. (or ‘Bruce’) Mcfarlane, who was a widely

respected tutor of Modern History at Magdalen College Oxford between the 1930s

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and his death in 1966, devoted much of his life to patient prosopography; but, in a

lecture to the Workers’ Educational Association in the 1950s, even he was swept

along by the patriotic tide:

On his deathbed [Henry] asserted that had he lived he would have united Christendom

against the Turk and ‘built again the walls of Jerusalem’...It is possible to believe that Henry

might have bridged the gap that divides Napoleon and Godfrey de Bouillon, and have

succeeded where Richard I and St Louis had failed... Had he been living in 1450 there is no

reason why he should not have rolled up the map of Europe as in nine years he had rolled up

that of France. Indeed it is hard to believe anything else.

In the 1950s, Churchill was widely regarded as both ‘the greatest living

Englishman’; and he wrote history from a position of unique authority. In his

History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956) he wrote this about Henry V:

The English victory of Crécy was gained against great odds upon the defensive. Poitiers was

a counter stroke. Agincourt ranks as the most heroic of all the land battles England has ever

fought. Henry had before all Europe, shattered the French power.

As a teenager in 1960, I remember when the BBC produced, An Age of Kings –

a serialisation of Shakespeare’s history plays, in which Robert Hardy starred as

Henry V. Hardy had played the role on stage, and he went on to appear in an

documentary about the Agincourt expedition - The Picardy Affair of 1962. For a

teenager the most memorable sight was that of the archers letting down their

trousers down as they marched, to ease the pain of the dysentery contracted at

Harfleur. It was as a result of playing Henry V that Robert Hardy developed an

interest in medieval warfare, and he later wrote two books on the subject of the

longbow: Longbow: A Social and Military History and The Great War Bow (with

Matthew Strickland).

Hardy could still write about the medieval archer in the most romantic and

idealised way, as late as 1976:

At his best there was no man in the world to beat him, no matter the odds against him; and

his breed lasted long beyond the longbow; he used the musket and the rifle; he endured in

1915 the same, and worse, than his forefathers had suffered in 1415... He will never entirely

perish because for all the sloth and the cantankerous emulation that lie side by side in his

nature, he shares with the best of mankind, courage, clear sight and honesty.

In the late twentieth century, however, there were several attempts to stage

Henry V as an anti-heroic play - what John Arden, in 1964, called ‘the secret play

inside the official one’. In the same year Peter Hall and John Barton produced it as

part of the celebrations of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday. Their production was

unglamorous and unheroic and some even thought that they strove to reflect the

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feelings of those who were opposed to the Vietnam War. In 1986 Michael Bogdanov

and Michael Pennington’s English Shakespeare Company staged a production in which

the English soldiers behaved like football hooligans, parading about in loutish

fashion, with a banner which bore the slogan ‘Fuck the Frogs’. A reviewer in The

Guardian wrote that this was ‘the first version of the play I’ve ever seen where you

wanted the French to win.’

Yet Kenneth Branagh’s award-winning film version of 1989 was certainly not

anti-heroic. Indeed, it is frequently compared with Olivier’s, though the visual style

was grittier and more realistic.

Henry V has not played well in France. It has been written that, the reason

…is not that the French monarchy is vanquished at Agincourt, but the depiction made with

Shakespearean violence and crudity, yet also with consummate artistry, of the moral faults

and weaknesses of the French

In 1999, the play was performed in French at the Avignon festival. Perversely,

the director played up the representation of the French as ‘braggarts; jerky feathered

puppets; stupefied simpletons; escaped lunatics; and pretentious cretins’, all equally

ineffective on the field of battle. The production was reviled by the critics (one said

it was more like Monty Python than Shakespeare) and the play was a flop.

Fifty years ago, when I was a schoolboy, it was still possible to evoke the

spirit of Agincourt in an uncomplicated patriotic way; but it is difficult to imagine

that we will be able to do that in 2015, when the 600th anniversary occurs. Times

have changed; and so has the country, socially and politically, as well as its position

in relation to other countries. The relationship forged with France by the Entente

Cordiale has been superseded by our common membership of the European Union.

Whether we like it or not, we are committed to an ‘ever-increasing union’ with all

our traditional enemies, including Spain and Germany.

But England has changed too. We may still be a monarchy, but we are no

longer a deferential society, as we were in 1415 and in 1915. Socially, there is no-one

nowadays whom one would call, or who would call himself, a yeoman.

In 1965 we still sang The Yeomen of England, including this curious verse:

Where are the Yeomen -

The Yeomen of England?

In homestead and in cottage

They still dwell in England!

Stained with the ruddy tan,

God's air doth give a man.

This was untrue, even in 1902, let alone 1965. Large numbers of men were

found unfit for military service at the time of the Boer War: a government report

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published shortly afterwards found that between 40 and 60 per cent of volunteers

had been rejected on these grounds; and there were certainly very few of us who

lived in homesteads and cottages in the 1960s. If anyone had a ruddy tan, it must

have been acquired on the Costa Brava. Yet, in 2003, in The Adventure of English,

Melvyn Bragg could still write that ‘it was the English bowmen with their hearts of

oak who turned the battle.’ This is is scarcely serious history but it is stirring stuff,

like the song in Merrie England; and for the same reason, there is still a tendency in

modern historical fiction to portray the archer as a man of the people. Michael Cox’s

Jenkin Lloyd and Bernard Cornwell’s Nicholas Hook are both landless peasants; but

we know that many of Henry V’s yeomen were probably landowners, though by

definition, they lacked noble or gentle status.

Agincourt was an English, not a British, victory. This did not matter in 1915,

because the Union with Scotland was strong, even if the South of Ireland was about

to break its links with the United Kingdom; but it matters now. Scottish nationalism

seems to go from strength to strength. A Scottish Parliament was re-created in 1999.

By 2015 Scotland may well be on the road to full independence. It is, perhaps the

Scottish dimension to the political debate which helps to explain why David

Cameron did not mention Agincourt by name when he made his appeal to the

fighting spirit of the British at the Conservative Party Conference held in October

2011

Britain never had the biggest population, the largest land mass, the richest resources, but we

had the spirit. Remember: it’s not the size of the dog in the fight it’s the size of the fight in

the dog…..Let’s show the world some fight…

The proper place to remember the battle is Azincourt itself. The site has been

visited many times by modern historians, including Woodford in the early

nineteenth century and Wylie in the early twentieth, though Wylie took the

eccentric view that the Chaplain’s account was ‘as good a guidebook for the tourist

as when he wrote 500 years ago’). When Robert Hardy visited the battlefield in 1961,

he found that that the family who owned the fields were very reluctant to give

permission for filming. He was told ‘It was a bad day, for you as well as for us, and

many dreadful things were done by you to us, here’. Further, they said ‘we

defended our fields in 1415 and in 1915, in 1939 again, and often in between.’ Things

are entirely different today.

An attractive new visitor centre was opened in 2001, which makes excellent

use of visual techniques. These include a ding a scale model of the battle, and two

full-size mannequins of Henry V and the French commander, the Constable d'Albret,

which start with blank, moulded faces but become animated and even speak – to

great effect. The shape of the longbow is cleverly incorporated into the exterior

design of the building. The centre is a triumph, though it is not the patriotic French

war memorial which the historian René de Belleval wished for in 1865.

The chief merit of the visitor centre (2009) is that it contrives to make the

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battle palatable to the French by portraying the English as underdogs. The French

are shown as proud bullies, heading for a fall. The displays also emphasize the

dynastic nature of the struggle rather than the national. Why should it matter to a

modern Frenchman, living in a country which has been a republic on and off for

over 200 years, which branch of the royal family, Plantagenet or Valois had the

batter title to the French throne? Even King Henry V's massacre of French prisoners

is presented dispassionately. Yet it is understood that the majority of visitors are in

fact British, or even English.

How, then, will we remember Agincourt in 2015? There are several

possibilities. First, some dreadful catastrophe may occur, some threat to the life of

the nation, which would cause us to invoke the spirit of the battle in the same way as

was done in October 1915; but even here, we have to remember that Agincourt was

an English victory, not a Scots one. It is hardly likely, in today’s world, that the Scots

will commemorate the 600th anniversary of Agincourt in 2015, when they can

celebrate the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn in 2014.

Second, it is conceivable that we may apologise for the battle, or at least for

Henry V’s massacre of the French prisoners. This is not so far-fetched as it sounds.

There have been calls for an apology for the slave trade, and for the Crusades. In

March 2010, Henry V was tried for war crimes in a mock trial staged in the United

States. The ‘Supreme Court of the Amalgamated Kingdom of England and France’

ruled unanimously that the slaughter of the French prisoners of war was legally

unjustified, even if one applied the medieval laws of war. Henry had no right to

order the elimination of prisoners who had at the relevant time effectively become

non-combatants.3

In all probability, none of these things will happen. In all probability, the

600th anniversary of Agincourt will simply be overlooked, in favour of

commemorations of a far greater, more bloody, and more recent event. In 1765, Dr

Johnson published a commentary on Shakespeare’s plays. Noting that Henry V had

proclaimed

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered

Johnson wrote

3 In Henry V, War Criminal (2000), Professor John Sutherland pointed out that in Laurence Olivier’s

film, Henry V never gives any command to kill the prisoners. Likewise, in Kenneth Branagh’s

version. The dreadful words (which certainly appear in the original text) are simply omitted. Stage

productions of the play in England have routinely done the same.

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It may be observed that we are apt to promise to ourselves more lasting memory than the

changing state of human things admits. The prediction is not verified: the feast of Crispin

passes by without any mention of Agincourt. Late events obliterate the former: the civil wars

have left in this nation scarcely any tradition of more ancient history.

Sadly, but inevitably, memories of the First World War, and the all the

centenaries which will occur between 2014 and 2018, will probably drown out the

memory of Agincourt, even in England, in 2015.

LAURENCE OLIVIER AS HENRY V

KENNETH BRANAGH AS HENRY V

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A MODERN ILLUSTRATION OF THE BOWMEN OF ENGLAND

SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE, AS REBUILT BY SAM WANAMAKER, 1997

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THE VISITOR CENTRE, AZINCOURT, 2009

COMMEMORATIVE STONE, AZINCOURT BATTLEFIELD, 2009