There are certain decisive times in history, certain times that determine with perfect clarity in which direction the most significant of world powers will go.
America under President Trump in 2016 is one; the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the decisive battle of the Hundred Years War between England and France, two of the most powerful nations in the western world, was another. This conflict would decide who was to be the most powerful.
Henry V was the charismatic young King of England, having succeeded his father, Henry IV, just two years before. He was already known as a brilliant and accomplished warrior, who was looking to prove himself outside the shores of England.
Henry had pawned the crown jewels of England to make the voyage to France, in order to claim what he considered to be his hereditary lands in that country, in August, 1415, and started by laying siege to the town of Harfleur in Normandy with 11,000 men. This coastal town surrendered to the English forces after five weeks, but during this siege Henry lost half his men to disease (dysentery), and battle casualties. Because of these catastrophic losses, he decided to march his army northeast to Calais where he would meet the English fleet and return to England. He was to discover on the way, however, that at Agincourt, a vast French army of 20,000 men stood in his path, greatly outnumbering the exhausted, ill and nearly starving group of English archers, knights and men at arms.
Henry had some very important decisions to make. These were the facts the English king had to face: there were 8,000 English troops left of his original 11,000, 2,000 of whom were men at arms and knights, who were armored, and the rest were archers, who were longbowmen. They could not proceed around the French forces, however, as they were presently stopped dead by the enormity of the group in a thin and impassable field surrounded by forests and as such could not proceed to Calais where the English fleet awaited them.
Henry had no choice but to take a stand and fight. It had been raining heavily for four straight days and the field where the battle would take place had recently been tilled which made it into an even worse field of mud making it impossible not only for horses to negotiate it in heavy armor, but even more so for heavily armed knights and men at arms to do so; they were seen sinking in the mud up to their knees in the field of Agincourt. It was estimated that there were 20,000 French forces in the field of Agincourt, with the cream of French nobility represented on the field that day. There were no longbowmen there, but only crossbowmen, a kind of weapon that counted for much less force than that of an English longbow.
Henry was helped with his men greatly by his reputation as a worthy warrior and a stern disciplinarian. His first orders were to his longbowmen, instructing them to create sharp stakes to be imbedded in the ground diagonally in front of and surrounding their ranks in great numbers, an order with which they immediately complied. He then ordered his entire army to “pass the entire night in silence.” This order was followed under royal threat of losing “horses and harnesses” for the men at arms and the knights, and “a right ear” for the lowers ranks. One could hear a pin drop the night before the battle.
The contrary was case across the field of Agincourt on the French side. There was much revelry in the Gallic quarters as the pre-celebration of the French victory was conducted, as there was no way the French could lose it was thought, not only due to the superiority of their numbers, but also because the French troops were fresh, were not suffering as were the English troops so recently from disease, and had more recent supplies of food and other sustenance. Victory was within their grasp, or so they thought.
The day of the battle dawned. It was the Feast of St. Crispin’s, October 25, 1415.
The French knights began their slow advance across the muddy battlefield, weighed down by their heavy armor, as the English longbows flew through the sky made dark by the bombardment. No one in the French forces could stop the arrow assault because of the effective defense of the many stakes that protected the longbowmen, and as the armored Frenchmen and horses became increasingly immobilized by the mud, and then by each other flailing in the mud and thus unable to reach their weapons to fight, the battle became increasingly chaotic for the French forces. As many French died in the Battle of Agincourt by suffocating and drowning in the mud as by weaponry as forces in the front couldn’t move and forces in the back couldn’t stop advancing and bodies and horses converged in a deadly nightmarish mess of English arrows, mud and blood. And to make matters worse for the French, the only people who could move on this unlovely killing field were the unarmored English and Welsh longbowmen, who, when they put down their lethal bows, took up their other weapons of choice, their poleaxes and lead mallets, and made quick work of the survivors of the melee on the bloody field of Agincourt.
It is believed that some 8,000 Frenchmen lost their lives during the Battle of Agincourt, including many of the senior nobles of France. English losses are thought to have been in the hundreds, with very few notables’ deaths, among them the Duke of York, who died in the battle, as did the Earl of Suffolk, whose father had died in the siege of Harfleur the month before. Another English notable who did not survive the battle was Sir Piers Legge, about whom it was said that while he “lay wounded in the mud…his mastiff dog fought off the French men-at-arms. Only when Sir Piers’ squire and servants came up after the battle would the mastiff allow anyone to approach his master. Sir Piers did not survive his wounds, but the dog returned to Lyme Hall and is reputed to have sired the English Mastiff breed.”
King Henry, not one to let an opportunity to gloat pass one by, held a dinner after the battle at which he “entertained his senior commanders (at) dinner, waited on by captured French knights.” It was also said of the king that he massacred over 2,000 captured Frenchman at the conclusion of the battle, but that is still disputed by certain historians.
Henry actually remains largely a beloved figure in history today, it is thought either because he died just two short years after this extraordinary victory, considered one of the most significant in world history, a magnificent and brilliant young warrior frozen in glory. Or, it could be because the great English shill, William Shakespeare, made Henry V the immortal Prince Hal of the most popular of his histories; made the brilliant young king the speechgiver of the most profound battle dialogue of Shakespeare’s authorship; made the inspirational deliverer of “we happy few, we band of brothers,” the recurring wartime rallying cry for the British for evermore.
We shall see if the determiner of this highly significant time in our history, the great Donald J. Trump, will be remembered as greatly as does Henry V. The way he’s proceeding at this point, he very well might be.
Susan Smith brings an international perspective to her writing by having lived primarily in western Europe, mainly in Paris, France, and the U.S., primarily in Washington, D.C. She authored a weekly column for Human Events on politics with historical aspects.. She also served as the Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs and Alcoholism, and Special Assistant to the first Ambassador of Afghanistan following the initial fall of the Taliban. Ms. Smith is a graduate of Wheeling Jesuit University and Georgetown University, as well as the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France, where she obtained her French language certification. Ms. Smith now makes her home in McLean, Va.