Yet it was so nearly a disaster for Henry V and his small, but well-equipped army. That army had sailed from Southampton Water with high hopes, the chief of which was the swift capture of Harfleur, which would be followed by a foray into the French heartland in hope, presumably, of bringing the French to battle. A victory in that battle would demonstrate, at least in the pious Henry’s mind, God’s support of his claim to the French throne, and might even propel him onto that throne. Such hopes were not vain when his army was intact, but the siege of Harfleur took much longer than expected and Henry’s army was almost ruined by dysentery.
The tale of the siege in the novel is, by and large, accurate, though I did take one great liberty, which was to sink a mineshaft opposite the Leure Gate. There was no such shaft, the ground would not allow it, and all the real mines were dug by the Duke of Clarence’s forces that were assailing the eastern side of Harfleur. The French counter-mines defeated those diggings, but I wanted to give a flavor, however inadequately, of the horrors men faced in fighting beneath the earth. The defense of Harfleur was magnificent, for which much of the praise must go to Raoul de Gaucourt, one of the garrison’s leaders. His defiance, and the long days of the siege, gave the French a chance to raise a much larger army than any they might have fielded against Henry if the siege had ended, say, in early September.
Harfleur did finally surrender and was spared the sack and the horrors that had followed the fall of Soissons in 1414. This was another event that shocked Europe, though in the case of Soissons it was the barbaric behavior of the French army toward its own citizens that provoked the shock. There is a rumor that English mercenaries took money to betray the city, which explains the actions of the fictional Sir Roger Pallaire, but in the context of the Agincourt campaign the significance of Soissons was its patron saints, Crispin and Crispinian, whose feast day was, indeed, 25 October. For many in Europe the events of Saint Crispin’s Day in 1415 demonstrated a heavenly revenge for the horrors of the sack of Soissons in 1414.
Common sense suggests that Henry should have abandoned any thoughts of further campaigning after Harfleur’s surrender. 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 enormously. English chroniclers assess the French forces as anything from 60,000 to 150,000, while French and Burgundian sources offer anything from 8,000 to 50,000. The best eyewitnesses cite French numbers as 30,000, 36,000, and 50,000, all contributing to the wild uncertainty that Dr. Curry made even wilder. In the end I decided that the generally accepted figure was correct, and that around 6,000 English faced approximately 30,000 French. This was not, I must stress, the result of close academic study on my part, but rather a gut instinct that the contemporary reaction to the battle reflected that something astonishing had taken place, and what is most astonishing about the various accounts of Agincourt is that disparity of numbers. An English chaplain, present at the battle, estimated that disparity as thirty Frenchmen for every Englishman, an obvious exaggeration, yet strong support for the traditional view that it was the sheer numerical inequality of the engaged forces that persuaded folk that Agincourt was truly extraordinary. Still, I am no scholar, and rejecting Dr. Curry’s conclusions seemed foolhardy.
Then, in the same year that Dr. Curry’s history appeared, Juliet Barker’s book, Agincourt, was published and proved to be a vivid, comprehensive, and compelling account of the campaign and the battle. Juliet Barker acknowledges Dr. Curry’s conclusions, yet courteously and firmly disagrees with them, and as Juliet Barker is as fine a scholar as she is a writer, and as, like Dr. Curry, she had done her research among the French and English archives, I felt more than justified in following my instinct. Any reader who wishes to know more about the campaign and battle would do well to read all three of the books I have mentioned: The Face of Battle by John Keegan, Agincourt: A New History by Anne Curry, and Agincourt by Juliet Barker. I should also acknowledge that, although I used many many sources to write this novel, the one book to which I turned again and again, and always with pleasure, was Juliet Barker’s Agincourt.