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By Root 1377 0

He could have just garrisoned the newly captured port and sailed home for England, but such a course would have amounted to a virtual defeat. To have spent all that money and, in return, gained nothing more than a Norman harbor would have looked like a paltry achievement and, damaged as French interests were by the loss of Harfleur, the possession of the city gave Henry very little bargaining power. True it was now English (and would remain so for another twenty years), but its capture had wasted precious time and the necessity of garrisoning the damaged city took still more men from Henry’s army so that, by the time the English launched their foray into France, only about half of their army was able to march. Yet Henry did decide to march. He rejected the good advice to abandon the campaign and instead set his small, sickly army the task of marching from Harfleur to Calais.

This was not, on the face of it, an enormous challenge. The distance is about 120 miles and the army, all of it mounted on horseback, might expect to make that journey in about eight days. The march was not undertaken for plunder, Henry had neither the equipment nor the time to lay siege to the walled towns and castles (into which anything valuable would have been taken as the English approached) that lay on the route, nor was it a classic chevauchée, one of those destructive progresses through France whereby English armies laid waste to everything in their path in hope of provoking the French to battle. I doubt that Henry did hope to provoke the French to battle because, despite his fervent belief in God’s support, he must have realized the weakness of his army. If he had wanted battle it would have made more sense to march directly inland, but instead he skirted the coastline. It seems to me he was “cocking a snook.” At the end of an unsatisfactory siege, and facing the humiliation of returning to England with no great achievement, he merely wished to humiliate the French by demonstrating that he could march through their country with impunity.

That demonstration would have worked well if the fords at Blanchetaque had not been guarded. To reach Calais in eight days he needed to cross the Somme quickly, but the French had blocked the fords and so Henry was driven inland in search of another crossing, and the days stretched from eight to eighteen (or sixteen, the chroniclers are maddeningly vague about which day the army left Harfleur) and the food ran out, and the French at last concentrated their army and moved to trap the hapless English.

And so Henry’s risibly small army met its enemy on the plateau of Agincourt on Crispin’s Day, 1415. Without knowing it, that army had just marched into legend.

In 1976, when Sir John Keegan wrote his magnificent book, The Face of Battle, he was able to write of Agincourt “the events of the Agincourt campaign are, for the military historian, gratifyingly straightforward…there is less than the usual wild uncertainty over the numbers engaged on either side.”

Alas, that confidence has vanished, if not for the events, at least for the numbers engaged. In 2005 Professor Anne Curry, who is among the most respected authorities on the Hundred Years’ War, published her book Agincourt: A New History, in which, after detailed argument, she proposed that the numbers engaged on either side were much closer than history has ever allowed. The usual consensus is that about 6,000 English faced around 30,000 French and Dr. Curry amended those figures to 9,000 English and 12,000 French. If true, then the battle is an impostor, for its fame surely rests on the gross imbalance between the two sides. Shakespeare could hardly be justified in writing “we few, we happy few” if the French were very nearly as few.

Now Sir John Keegan was right in describing any attempt to assess numbers engaged in a medieval battle as beset by “wild uncertainty.” We are fortunate that a number of eyewitnesses wrote descriptions of the battle, and we have other sources from writers who left accounts shortly after, but their estimates of the numbers vary