In yesterday’s New York Times. (I figured I’d hold off ’til the actual anniversary of the battle, which took place 594 years ago today.)
Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt
By James Glanz
The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.
No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.
But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.
The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.
4 Comments
Great! Now some yahoo will claim McClellan didn’t really outnumber Lee that badly on the Peninsula …
We many, we unhappy many…
Funny, but “Rotov” doesn’t sound French…
Call me skeptical. There’s an eagerness to de-bunk going on in that article that should make us cautious when a scholar is trying hard to make new history.
Records are sketchy business going that far back in a society where literacy was uncommon and bureaucratic tidiness a secondary concern to more immediate and pressing military matters. We can also be fairly certain that of the records that were created at the time, not all of them survived to the present day. The pieces are not the puzzle.
We can also be reasonably sure that commanders were at least capable of counting and drawing a rough estimate of enemy troops as well as their own forces assembled on the field, even when they did not have a precise headcount. Nor was Agincourt simply about numbers per se.
Actually, didn’t Lee have ~90K against McClellan’s ~100K during the Seven Days? But anyway, having read both Curry’s book and the most recent scholarly history from the “traditional” viewpoint (Juliet Barker’s _Agincourt_), I think the ball is in the traditionalists’ court & they have some heavy lifting to do. Even so, I think the French most likely did have a significant numerical advantage that they did not utilize well, to put the most charitable face on it. The X factor may well have been Henry V himself — undoubtedly one of the most competent soldier-kings of the higher Middle Ages, in my opinion. (Curry denigrates him, giving him too little credit for his achievements in Wales.)The French, by contrast, really had no single leader able to exert control over their “army.” It certainly is an interesting historical episode.