Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [188]
A good archer could shoot fifteen accurate arrows in a minute (I’ve seen it done with a bow that had a draw-weight of 110 pounds, some twenty to thirty pounds lighter than the bows carried at Agincourt, but far heavier than any modern competition bow). Assume that the archers at Agincourt averaged a mere twelve a minute and that there were 5,000 bowmen; that means in one minute 60,000 arrows struck the French, a thousand arrows a second. It also means that in ten minutes the archers would have shot 600,000 arrows and the conclusion is that they must have run out of arrows fairly quickly. Yet what that storm of arrows achieved was to drive the flanks of the disordered French advance inward, onto the waiting English men-at-arms. That shrinking of the French line must have exposed the flanks of the English army, both composed of archers, to the French crossbowmen, but there is no evidence that the French seized the opportunity. Apart from a few volleys at the very beginning of the battle the French archers appear to have taken no part, a fatal error that must be ascribed to the abysmal lack of leadership on the French side.
The battle lasted between three and four hours, yet it was probably as good as over in the very first minutes when the leading French battle struck home. The French men-at-arms were weary, half blinded, disordered, and mud-crippled. What seems to have happened is that their leading ranks went down quickly and so formed a barrier to the men behind who, in turn, were being pushed onto that barrier by the rearmost men. So the French stumbled into the English weapons and the English (with some Welsh and a few Gascons) had more freedom to fight and to kill. That first French battle had contained most of France’s high nobility, and so it went to the slaughter and the great names fell; the Duke of Alençon, the Duke of Bar, the Duke of Brabant, the Archbishop of Sens, the Constable of France, and at least eight counts. Others, like the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Bourbon, and the Marshal of France, were captured. The English did not have it all their own way; the Duke of York was killed, as was the Earl of Suffolk (his father had died of dysentery at Harfleur), but English casualties seem to have been remarkably slight. Henry undoubtedly fought in the front rank of the English and all eighteen Frenchmen who had sworn an oath of brotherhood to kill him were killed instead. Henry’s brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was badly wounded in the fight and it is said that Henry stood over him and fought off the Frenchmen trying to drag the injured duke away.
The second French battle went to reinforce the first, but by now the French were trying to fight across a barrier of dead and dying men, and they were also fighting the English archers who had abandoned their bows and were now wielding poleaxes, swords, and mallets. The advantage the English archers possessed was maneuverability; unencumbered by sixty pounds of mud-weighted armor they must have been lethal in their attacks. I cannot confirm that the British two-fingered salute began at Agincourt as a taunt to the defeated French, demonstrating that the archers still possessed their string fingers despite French threats to sever them, but it seems a likely tale.
Sometime after the advance of