A history of England

by Charles Oman

BATTLE OF AGINCOURT. 1415.

Battle of Agincourt.

When King Henry reached Agincourt, he found the French army drawn up across his path, and was forced to halt. The Constable, like King John at Poictiers, was confident that he had the English in a trap, for they had exhausted all their provisions, and had the flooded Somme in their rear. Henry, however, was determined to fight, and put his hope in the bad management which always characterized the disorderly armies of feudal France. He was not disappointed: the Constable dismounted all his knights and bade them fight on foot, for fear of the effect of the archery on their horses. Only a few hundred mounted men formed a forlorn hope in front. He arranged his army in three heavy columns, one behind another, and formed the front entirely of mailed men-at-arms; the cross-bowmen and light troops were placed in the rear, where they could be of no possible use. The week had been rainy, and the space in front of the French was a newly ploughed field sodden with water, and hemmed in with woods and villages on either hand. At its further end the English were waiting. Henry had drawn them up in a single four-deep line, in order to make a front equal to that of the enemy. So arranged they just filled the space between the woods. The archers were on the wings, protected by chevaux-de-frise of pointed stakes which they had planted in front. The king with his men-at-arms formed the centre; a small flanking force of archers had also been sent into the woods on the right.

The Constable led his men straight on the English front, but they had a mile to go across the greasy mud of the fields. To men arrayed in the full knightly panoply, which had vastly increased in weight since the days of Edward III., the ploughland was almost impassable. After a space they began to sink as far as their ankles, and presently as far as their knees, in the mud. The mounted men struggled on, and gradually drew near the English, but they were shot down one after another as they slowly forced themselves up to the stakes of the archery. The main body of the first column never won its way so far; it literally stuck fast in the tenacious clay and stood a few score yards from the English line, as a target into which the archers emptied whole sheaves of arrows. The crowded mass was soon full of dead and dying, for at such short range armour could not protect its wearers. The whole column reeled and wavered. Then King Henry, seeing the moment was come, bade his whole line charge. The lightly equipped archers could cross with ease the ploughland where the men-at-arms had found themselves unable to move. They flung themselves upon the French knights, and by the force and fury of their assault completely rolled them over. Though unprotected by mail, they obtained a complete ascendency over the enemy, dashing them down with their axes and maces till they lay in heaps two or three deep. Henry and the band of men-at-arms around him seem to have met with the only stubborn resistance: the king had to fight hard for his life, and was nearly slain by the Duke of Alençon, who had already struck down his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Alençon, however, was slain, and after his fall the whole of his column was destroyed or captured.

Without a moment's hesitation, the English pushed on to attack the second column, which was slowly advancing through the mud to aid the van. Incredible as it may appear, their second charge was as successful as the first, though the victors were exhausted and thinned in numbers by the previous fighting, and did not muster half their adversaries' force. Just after he had routed this second column, Henry received an alarm that a detached body of the French had assailed his camp in the rear, and were coming up to surround him. He at once bade his men slay the prisoners they had taken, a harsh and, as it proved, an unnecessary order, for the French in the rear only plundered the camp, and then dispersed with their booty. Although the king had completely scattered or destroyed the second French column, the third still remained in order before him; but, cowed by the fate of their comrades, they turned and retired hastily from the field, though they should by themselves have been more than enough to overwhelm the exhausted band of English.

In this astonishing victory, Henry's small army had slain a much larger number of men than they mustered in their own ranks. The Constable of France, Anthony, Duke of Brabant—brother of John of Burgundy—the Dukes of Bar and Alençon, and a whole crowd of counts and barons, had fallen; it is said that no less than 10,000 French were slain, of whom more than 8000 were men of gentle blood. In spite of the massacre of captives in the midst of the fighting, there were still some prisoners surviving. They included the young Duke of Orleans—the titular head of the Armagnac faction—the Duke of Bourbon, the Counts of Eu and Vendôme, and 1500 knights and nobles more. The English in this terrible fight had lost less than 200 men, but among them were two great peers, the Duke of York—the Edward of Rutland of whom we read in 1399—and the Earl of Suffolk.

Henry returns to England.

Henry retraced his way to Calais, and crossed to England with his prisoners and his booty, there to be received with splendid festivities by his people, who regarded the glory of Agincourt as a sufficient compensation for the losses of a costly campaign which had added nothing save the single town of Harfleur to the possessions of the English crown. The ransoms of a host of noble captives were relied upon to replenish the exchequer, and the fearful losses of the Armagnac party, who saw half their leaders slain at Agincourt, would evidently weaken the strength of France in the remainder of the war.

End of the Great Schism.—Council of Constance.

Henry did not cross the Channel again in the year 1416, which he spent partly in negotiations with the Duke of Burgundy, whose help he wished to secure against the Armagnacs, partly in treating with the Emperor Sigismund about the common welfare of Christendom. Sigismund was hard at work endeavouring to put an end to the "Great Schism," the scandalous breach in the unity of the Church caused by the misconduct of the rival Popes at Rome and Avignon. He visited England, and won Henry's aid for his plans, which brought about the reunion of Christendom at the Council of Constance—a reunion under evil auspices, since it was marked by the burning of the great Bohemian teacher John Huss, who had made the doctrines of Wicliffe popular among his Slavonic countrymen in the far East. Moreover, it restored the unity of Christendom, but did not reform either the papacy or the national Churches. As this was not done, the general outbreak of religious ferment was made inevitable in a later generation; after the failure at Constance to reform the Church from within, it became necessary to reform her from without.