• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1487 0

has inspired books and studies and aficionados, but it was not decisive in the sense of Crécy, which, by leading to the capture of Calais, transformed Edward Ill’s semi-serious adventure into a hundred years’ war, nor in the sense of Poitiers, which determined the loss of confidence in the noble as knight. Agincourt merely confirmed both these results, especially the second, for not even Nicopolis was so painful a demonstration that valor in combat is not the equivalent of competence in war. The battle was lost by the incompetence of French chivalry, and won more by the action of the English common soldiers than of the mounted knights.

Although Burgundy and his vassals held aloof, the French army that assembled to confront the invaders outnumbered them by three or four to one, and was as overconfident as ever. The Constable, Charles d’Albret, rejected an offer of 6,000 crossbowmen from the citizen militia of Paris. No change in tactics had been introduced, and the only technological development (except for cannon, which played no role in open battle) was heavier plate armor. Intended to give added protection against arrows, it had the effect of increasing fatigue and reducing mobility and play of the sword arm. The terrible worm in his iron cocoon was less terrible than before, and the cocoon itself sometimes lethal; knights occasionally died of heart failure inside it. Pages had to support their lords on the field lest, should they fall, they be unable to rise again.

The armies met in a confined space between two clumps of woods. Rain fell throughout the night while they waited to do battle and while the French pages and grooms, walking the horses up and down, churned the ground into a soft mud exactly suited for the slipping and stumbling of steel-clad knights. The French had not attempted to select a battleground where their superiority in numbers could be effectively deployed, with the result that they were drawn up for battle in three rows, one behind the other, with little room for action on the flanks, and forced to follow each other into the valley of mud. With no commander-in-chief able to impose a tactical plan, the nobles vied for the glory of a place in the front line until it was as compacted as the Flemish line at Roosebeke. Archers and crossbowmen were placed behind, where their missiles could not dilute the glory of the clash and were in fact useless.

The English, though tired, hungry, and dispirited by their numerical inferiority, had two advantages: a King in personal command and a disproportion of about 1,000 knights and squires to 6,000 archers and a few thousand other foot. Their archers were deployed in solid wedges between the men-at-arms and in blocks on the wings. Wearing no armor, they were fully mobile, and in addition to their bows, they carried a variety of axes, hatchets, hammers, and, in some cases, large swords hanging from their belts.

Under these conditions the outcome was more one-sided than any since the start of the war. In their overcrowding, the dismounted knights of the French front line could barely wield their great weapons and, hampered by the mud, fell into helpless disarray, which, when merging with the advance of the second line and tangled by flight, panic, and riderless horses, quickly became chaos. Grasping the situation, the English archers threw down their bows and rushed in with their axes and other weapons to an orgy of slaughter. Many of the French, impeded by their heavy armor, could not defend themselves, accounting for the several thousands killed and taken prisoner in contrast to a total English loss of 500, including at least one victim of probable heart failure. This was Edward Duke of York, one of Edward Ill’s grandsons, who was 45 and fat and found dead on the battlefield without a wound. On the French side, three dukes, five counts, ninety barons and many others were killed, among them two of Coucy’s family—his grandson Robert de Bar, and his third son-in-law, Philip Count of Nevers who fought in spite of his elder brother, the Duke of Burgundy. The list