CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“FELAS, LETS GO!”

And then there was stalemate. “Everywhere and on all occasions that foot soldiers march against their enemy face to face,” the military textbooks stated, “those who march lose and those who remain standing still and holding firm win.”¹ So each side waited in vain for the other to make the first move. Neither did. As the minutes ticked by and turned into hours, it became a test of nerve and discipline. Who would crack first?

The contrast between the appearance of the two armies could not have been starker. On one side stood row upon numberless row of motionless French men-at-arms, clad from head to foot in burnished armour, armed with swords and lances shortened for fighting on foot, and with brightly coloured pennons and banners waving over their heads. Behind them and on the wings were those crossbowmen and archers whose services had been retained, together with the guns, catapults and other engines of war which had been brought from nearby towns, all waiting to discharge their shots on the enemy. The only movement was at the rear of the army, where the restive horses were literally chafing at the bit in the cold and damp of the late autumn morning and had to be exercised by the mounted men-at-arms and their valets. Well fed, well armed, secure in their superior numbers, this was an army brimming with confidence and eager to crush the tantalisingly small force that had had the temerity to invade France and capture one of its finest towns.

On the other side were the English, an equally fearsome sight, but for different reasons. These were trapped and desperate men, who knew that only a miracle could save them from death, and were therefore determined to sell themselves dearly. For almost three weeks they had marched across hostile enemy territory, their supplies of food and drink dwindling away to nothing, unable to wash or shave, their armour tarnished and their surcoats and banners grimy and tattered by the constant exposure to the elements. Some, it was said, were even barefoot, having completely worn out their shoes during the trek. Stomachs and bowels, already churning with dysentery and starvation, were now turned to water by fear. Many of the archers were reduced to cutting off their soiled breeches and undergarments in an attempt to allow nature to take its course more easily—an option not available to the men-at-arms, encased in their padded steel plate armour. Grim though the sight of them must have been, the smell was probably worse.²

In the end, it was the nerve of the English that broke first. After perhaps several hours of this motionless confrontation, Henry realised that the French were not going to make the first assault, as he had expected, and that they would continue to stand astride his route for as long as it took: they did not need to attack because fear and starvation would do their work in destroying his army for them. Indeed, one of the arguments put forward in the royal council at Rouen when deciding what battle plan to adopt had been that the mere sight of so many French princes in the front ranks of the army would be sufficient to strike such terror into the hearts of the English that they would simply run away. This was clearly what the French were still expecting to happen.³

Aware that the longer the impasse continued, the more his men’s morale would ebb away, Henry decided that he would have to tear up the rule-book and make the first move. He ordered the baggage, the horses, the royal chaplains and all those who had been left behind in and around Maisoncelle to move forward to the rear of the army, so that they would not be left isolated and at risk of pillagers when the fighting began. Once most of the baggage train had taken up their new position, all the priests in the army were now commanded to employ themselves in prayer on its behalf: “then, indeed, and for as long as the conflict lasted,” wrote our timorous chaplain, in perhaps one of the most evocative and human moments of the entire campaign, I, who am now writing this and was then sitting on a horse among the baggage at the rear of the battle, and the other priests present did humble our souls before God and . . . said in our hearts: “Remember us, O Lord, our enemies are gathered together and boast themselves in their excellence. Destroy their strength and scatter them, that they may understand, because there is none other that fighteth for us but only Thou, our God.” And also, in fear and trembling, with our eyes raised to heaven we cried out that God would have compassion upon us and upon the crown of England . . .⁴

With the words of his priests ringing in his ears, the king gave the order for the army to prepare to advance. Every man, regardless of rank, now knelt at his command, kissed the ground and took a morsel of the earth from beneath his feet and placed it in his mouth. This extraordinary ritual was conducted with all the solemnity of a genuine Church sacrament. It combined elements of both the Last Supper and its commemoration, the Eucharist, in which the Christian receives the bread in remembrance that Christ the Redeemer died for him, but also of the committal words of the burial service, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Physical death and spiritual salvation were thus represented in the single act.⁵

The vitally important command of the archers had been given to one of the most experienced of all Henry’s military officers, the steward of the royal household, Sir Thomas Erpingham, a fifty-eight-year-old Norfolk gentleman who had begun his own military career at the age of eleven, serving with the Black Prince in Aquitaine. In 1380, at the age of twenty-three and already a knight, he had become a retainer of John of Gaunt, fighting for the rest of the decade in French and Spanish campaigns to establish Gaunt’s claim to the crown of Castile and León. He had accompanied Gaunt’s son, the future Henry IV, on crusade in Prussia in 1390-1 and again, in 1393, on crusade to the Holy Land. In 1398-9 he had shared Henry’s exile and played a significant part in his triumphant return by commanding the ambush that captured Richard II, whom he then kept a prisoner in the Tower. As a reward for organising Richard’s deposition, he was made constable of Dover and warden of the Cinque Ports, carried Henry’s sword before him at the coronation and, in 1401, was made a Knight of the Garter. Henry V had appointed him his household steward on his accession and made him a witness to his will, as well as entrusting him with the negotiations for the surrender of Harfleur.⁶

It was Sir Thomas Erpingham who now had the responsibility of ensuring that the deployment of the archers was not jeopardised by Henry’s decision to move all his battle lines forward. The king was taking an enormous risk, particularly with regard to his archers. They had first to pull out their stakes, which was in itself a difficult task, since they had been hammered into the muddy earth at sufficient depth to resist the weight of a charging horse. Because of the angle at which the stakes had to project towards the enemy, the archers would not have been able to pull them out from behind, but would have had to go round in front of them, exposing themselves to enemy action while they did so. This dangerous manoeuvre had to be repeated once they had taken up their new positions as the archers would have had to stand with their backs to the enemy—this time within their artillery range—to hammer in the stakes again.

This was the obvious moment for the French to launch an attack, when the archers were at their most vulnerable, preoccupied with their tasks and unprotected by their stakes. Yet the cavalry corps designated for the task did not even attempt to mount a charge and the crossbowmen and gunners failed to shoot. Instead, the whole French army seems to have stood and watched as Henry ordered his banners forward with the cry, “In the name of Almyghti God, and of Saint George, Avaunt baner! and Saint George this day thyn helpe!” (or, depending on the source, possibly the more prosaic “Felas, lets go!”). His troops roared out their battle-cries, his musicians sounded their trumpets and drums and the whole army advanced in battle formation towards the French lines. Incredible though it seems, the English were allowed to take up their new position and replant the archers’ stakes without any opposition. They were now within longbow shot of the enemy.⁷

Where was the French cavalry at this crucial moment? The answer is unclear. Chronicle accounts of the battle are confused, sometimes contradictory and often dictated by nationalist pride or party politics. The Breton Guillaume Gruel claimed that there were large numbers of “Lombards and Gascons” among the cavalry and accused these “foreigners” of fleeing at the first fusillade from the English archers. Others, such as the monk of St Denis and Gilles le Bouvier, laid the blame squarely at the door of the Armagnacs Clignet de Brabant and Louis de Bourdon, who were in command of the elite cavalry corps. The only thing most French chroniclers agreed on was that at the moment when they should have launched their cavalry charges against the English archers many of the mounted men-at-arms were not at their stations and were simply not to be found. Gilles le Bouvier, for example, asserts that they simply did not expect the English to attack, so some of them had wandered off to warm themselves and others were walking or feeding their horses.⁸

In other words, it was a classic case of being caught by surprise. And in this instance the sheer size of the French army was a major impediment to effective action. If the cavalry were at the rear, and not on the wing, they could not have observed the English advance and reacted promptly. Instead, valuable time would have been lost in relaying the information down the line and then in attempting to rally and mobilise their scattered forces. By the time sufficient mounted men-at-arms had gathered to launch a cavalry charge, it was too late. The English had taken up their new position and were now not only firmly entrenched behind their stakes again, but, having advanced into the narrower gap between the woodlands of Azincourt and Tramecourt, were protected on their flanks.⁹ It would now be impossible for the French to carry out their planned manoeuvre of riding round in a semicircular pincer movement to attack the English archers from the sides. Instead, they would have to do exactly what they had been trying to avoid: launch a frontal assault straight into the firing line of the archers.

Anywhere between 800 and 1200 mounted men-at-arms should have rallied to the standards of Clignet de Brabant and Louis de Bourdon; perhaps as few as 420 did so. It was a catastrophic diminution in numbers because the effectiveness of a cavalry charge depended on the weight behind it. Not only did the French not have enough mounted men to ride down the massed ranks of English archers; they were also unable to maintain the serried ranks that were the other component of a successful all-out strike. This was the result not just of a lack of discipline—a charge the chroniclers were quick to throw at them—but more of the state of the battlefield. Henry’s wisdom in sending out scouts in the middle of the night to test the ground now paid dividends. As the French cavalry discovered to their cost, the heavy rain had turned the newly ploughed fields into a quagmire of thick mud and surface water, slowing down their horses and causing them to slip, stumble and even fall. In such conditions it was difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a united front for what was supposed to be an irresistible onslaught.¹⁰

In the event, therefore, only 120 men-at-arms charged from one side of the French vanguard and 300 from the other towards the archers on each wing of the English army. Because their own lines were much broader than those of the English and the woods on either flank effectively channelled them inwards, the French were forced onto a converging trajectory over the battlefield. The men-at-arms of the vanguard, who had begun their own advance immediately after the cavalry set off, therefore found themselves in increasing difficulty as they got closer to the enemy because they were compelled to cover more of the same ground that the cavalry had already ridden over. The combined weight of heavily armed men-at-arms, charging on armoured horses, had churned up the already wet and muddy ground to such a depth that those on foot now found themselves floundering in mud up to their knees. The problem was exacerbated for each row of densely packed men-at-arms following in the footsteps of the men in front. Dragged down by the weight of their own armour, their plate-clad feet slipping as they tried to keep their balance on the uneven, treacherous ground, and struggling against the suction of the mud at every step, it is not surprising that they too were unable to maintain the good order in which they had set out.

As the French cavalry bore down on the English archers, answering the English battle-cries with their own “Montjoie! Montjoie!,” Sir Thomas Erpingham, who had dismounted and joined the king on foot in the front of the main battle, threw his baton of office into the air as a signal to fire and shouted the command “Now strike!”¹¹ Five thousand archers then raised their longbows and loosed a volley of arrows so dense, so fast and so furious that the sky literally darkened over as though a cloud had passed before the face of the sun. One can imagine how the English stood listening to the reverberations from the bow-strings and the whistling of the flights as they sped through the air, followed, after a few heart-stopping moments, by the thud of bodkin arrowheads striking through plate-metal armour and tearing into flesh, and the screams of the wounded and dying. The terrified horses, maddened by the pain of the arrows, plunged, reared and fell, throwing off their riders beneath their flailing hooves and into the suffocating mud. Those horses that got as far as the front line were either impaled on the stakes or wheeled round to avoid them and fled out of control: a very few managed to escape into the neighbouring woodland, but most were either struck down by the deadly hail of arrows or galloped back—straight into their own advancing front lines, scattering them and trampling them down in their headlong flight.¹²

Three of the cavalry leaders were themselves killed in this first assault. Robert de Chalus, Ponchon de la Tour and Guillaume de Saveuses all suffered the same fate: their horses were brought down by the stakes, causing them to fall among the English archers, who promptly dispatched them.¹³Tensions within the leadership of the cavalry unit might have contributed to its ignominious performance. Guillaume de Saveuses, “a very valiant knight,” had ridden ahead of his companions, expecting them to follow. They did not. It may have been that they were deterred by the hail of arrows and the stakes, but it may also have been because de Saveuses and his two brothers Hector and Philippe were prominent Burgundians in a primarily Armagnac force. Hector had been a notorious captain of a gang of men-at-arms who had plundered and terrorised large areas of Picardy; captured by the Armagnacs while supposedly on a pilgrimage to Paris, he had escaped execution only through the intervention of the countess of Hainault and two Armagnacs whom his brother Philippe had captured in retaliation and forced to intercede on his behalf.¹⁴

One can well imagine that there was no sympathy, very little trust and probably some rivalry between men such as the de Saveuses brothers and their fellow captains who were loyal to the Armagnac cause. The relationship with their nominal leader Clignet de Brabant, in particular, was fraught with difficulties. De Brabant was an Armagnac through and through, a chamberlain of Charles d’Orléans and a renowned jouster, who had chivalrously dropped his own lance in a feat of arms against a Portuguese knight earlier in the year because his opponent’s visor had flown open. Like the de Saveuses brothers, he had a reputation for roaming the countryside round Paris at the head of an armed band, terrorising the inhabitants and laying waste their lands. Though he did this in pursuit of the Armagnac cause, he had his own personal reasons for loathing the Burgundians, who, four years earlier, had executed his brother as a rebel after besieging and capturing the town of Moismes, of which he was captain.¹⁵

There were also private quarrels between the leaders of this group, as well as the more obvious political ones. Not many years earlier, Geffroi de Boucicaut and Jean Malet, sire de Graville, had had a very public falling-out. They had both fallen in love with the same woman, Charlotte de la Cochette, a maiden in the queen’s household. De Boucicaut, a younger brother of the more famous marshal, had struck de Graville in a jealous rage and de Graville had sworn to exact his revenge before the year was out. At around eight o’clock on the evening of the last day of the year, he had therefore set upon de Boucicaut in the streets of Paris and given him a severe beating. Neither de Boucicaut nor de Graville forgot or forgave the insult he had received, and the whole shabby episode was gleefully immortalised by the chroniclers, the tabloid journalists of the time.¹⁶

However great the horsemanship skills or the superiority of their armour that had led to the selection of the men-at-arms for the prestigious cavalry force, these were probably not enough to outweigh the political and personal rivalries between their leaders. Why should a de Saveuses take orders from de Brabant? Why should de Brabant risk his own life to come to the aid of Guillaume de Saveuses? Why should de Boucicaut fight side by side with the man who had humiliated him so publicly? However much they hated the English, these men hated one another even more.

What is most striking about the leaders of the cavalry corps is not so much their failure to achieve their military objective in the battle, but the fact that they almost all escaped with their lives. Clignet de Brabant, Louis de Bourdon, Hector and Philippe de Saveuses, Geffroi de Boucicaut, Jean Malet, sire de Graville, Georges, sire de la Trémouille (another unsavoury character who, some years later, dragged the sire de Giac naked from his bed, drowned him and married his widow),¹⁷ Jean d’Angennes, Alleaume de Gapannes, Ferry de Mailly,¹⁸ all survived and evaded capture. This made them unique among the companies who fought for France that day and lends weight to the contemporary complaint that, after their abortive attempt to destroy the English archers, they made no further effort to rejoin their compatriots in the fight.¹⁹ In the words of Gilles le Bouvier, apart from the handful who were killed, “all the rest failed to do their duty, for they fled shamefully, and never struck a blow against the English.” As a herald, and a recorder of such things, he duly noted the names of each of these leaders on a roll-call of eternal dishonour.²⁰

The failure of the cavalry attack had far more serious consequences for the Frenchmen following in its wake than for those actually taking part in it. As they toiled through the churned-up mud and tried to avoid being trampled by the fleeing horses, they were completely at the mercy of the English archers, who bombarded them with volley after deadly volley. Arrows flew so thick and fast that the French were convinced that Henry had planted a secret ambuscade of two hundred selected archers in the woods of Tramecourt to attack them from the flanks as well. (The story was repeated by several chroniclers, but flatly denied by le Févre de St Remy: “I have heard it said and certified as the truth by an honourable man who, on that day, was with and in the company of the king of England, as I was, that he did no such thing.”)²¹

The accepted tactical response to a bombardment of this kind was to return similar fire. This the French were unable to do. Most of their own crossbowmen and archers were at the rear of their ranks and therefore unable to get a clear sight line at the enemy or, indeed, to inflict a comparable mass volley without injuring or killing their own men, who stood between them and their targets. Those on the flanks were in a better position to do so, but they could not maintain the speed or fire-power of the English longbows. The French artillery—consisting of catapults and some cannon—made a desultory attempt to launch a bombardment but, from fear of the English arrows, they were over-hasty in taking their aim, did little damage and, as the chaplain related with evident satisfaction, beat a hasty retreat. They succeeded in inflicting some casualties, for the exchequer records note that Roger Hunt, an archer in the retinue of the Lancashire knight Sir James Harington, had the misfortune “to be killed at the battle of Agincourt cum uno gune [with a gun].”²²

As the English arrows rained down on them, the men-at-arms of the French vanguard, closely followed by those in the main body of the army, continued their inexorable march towards the enemy. Those without shields (which were not commonly used at the time) were forced to lower the visors of their bascinets to protect their eyes and faces from the lethal hail falling upon them. Even this was not sufficient to defend them completely, for eye-slits and ventilation holes were vulnerable to the narrow points of bodkin arrowheads, so they had to lower their heads as well.²³

With visor down, the bascinet was like a diver’s helmet, but without the manufactured air supply: it plunged the wearer into a disorientating and isolating artificial darkness. Vision was restricted either to a single slit, half an inch wide, which gave a narrow but unimpeded horizontal line of sight, or to a slightly wider opening of similar length, but with vertical bars to protect the aperture from a sword stroke, which created several blind spots. Though the visor projected outwards, like a pig’s snout, and was punctuated with holes to allow the wearer to breathe, the circulation of air was very restricted and, in the throes of exertion, a panting man-at-arms must have felt almost suffocated by the lack of oxygen. If he dared, or was desperate enough, to raise his visor, he risked receiving an arrow in the face, just as Henry V himself had done at the battle of Shrewsbury.²⁴

Ironically, had the men-at-arms been professional or lower-class infantrymen, such as the citizen militias of the neighbouring towns in Flanders and Picardy, they might have suffered less. The lighter, more flexible equipment of the ordinary infantryman, combining pieces of plate with mail andcuir bouilli, or boiled leather, made them more vulnerable to English longbow arrows, but enabled them to move faster and with greater freedom. The French nobility, clad head to toe in “white harness,” or suits of plate armour, were literally bogged down by the treacherous terrain. In other circumstances the weight of their armour—between fifty and sixty pounds—would have been as irrelevant as carrying his full kit is to a modern soldier: Boucicaut could not only vault onto his horse but also climb up the underside of a ladder in full armour. The French were not vainglorious amateurs playing at war, as they are so often portrayed. They were hardened veterans who had spent their lives in arms: on crusade, fighting in Italy, Spain and Portugal and, most recently, in their own civil wars. They were as used to wearing their armour as their civilian clothes.

At Agincourt, however, the quagmire created by the hooves of the hundreds of horses that had charged over the newly ploughed, rain-soaked earth was literally a death trap for those wearing white harness. Sweating and overheated in the confines of their close-fitting metal prisons, the French men-at-arms were exhausted by the sheer labour of having to put one foot in front of the other as they struggled to extract feet, shins, sometimes even knees from the heavy, cloying mud. The heavy plate armour that marked them out as gentlemen of rank and wealth, and in other circumstances would have made them virtually invincible, had now become their greatest liability.

With heads lowered and unable to see properly where they were going, the French men-at-arms, many of them already wounded by the arrows hurtling down upon them, stumbled and slipped across the battlefield. As they struggled to maintain the solidity of their ranks, they had also to contend with the obstacles in their path: the fallen men and horses of the abortive cavalry strike, some dead, others dying or wounded; the frantic chargers that had escaped the slaughter, some of them riderless and fleeing out of control straight at them; the bodies of their own comrades who had fallen in the mud and were unable to get to their feet again in the crush of men pushing on them from behind.

It says something for the determination and discipline of the French that they overcame these difficulties to close with the enemy lines in such weight and numbers that the English were driven back six or twelve feet with the first shock. At the sight of this setback, the chaplain and the “clerical militia” in the baggage train all “fell upon our faces in prayer before the great mercy-seat of God, crying out aloud in bitterness of spirit that God might even yet remember us and the crown of England and, by the grace of His supreme bounty, deliver us from this iron furnace and the terrible death which menaced us.”²⁵

Despite being hopelessly outnumbered (and despite the disheartening wails of the terrified clergy behind them), the thin line of men-at-arms miraculously did not break under the French onslaught. Not only did they hold their own, but they recovered quickly and began to push forward again to regain their lost ground. While they closed with the enemy in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, the archers kept up a constant volley of arrows which, in these close quarters, were even more deadly than before, piercing visors and slicing through steel plate as if it were made of cloth. When the arrows ran out—as they must have done fairly quickly—the archers cast aside their longbows and took up their swords, daggers and the lead mallets that they had used to hammer in their stakes. Running out from behind their barricade, they attacked with all the fury of men who knew they could expect no mercy for themselves. Striking down the men-at-arms with their mallets, they plunged their swords and daggers through the visors of the fallen.²⁶

The battle was now at its height. The chaplain could only marvel at the transformation in the English. “For the Almighty and Merciful God . . . did, as soon as the lines of battle had so come to grips and the fighting had begun, increase the strength of our men which dire want of food had previously weakened and wasted, took away from them their fear, and gave them dauntless hearts. Nor, it seemed to our older men, had Englishmen ever fallen upon their enemies more boldly and fearlessly or with a better will.” The situation was so desperate that there was no time to take prisoners: every French man-at-arms, “without distinction of person,” was slaughtered where he fell.²⁷

And they were falling in their hundreds, brought down not just by English weapons but also by their own weight of numbers. Their ranks were so densely packed, and the men-at-arms so hemmed in on all sides, that they found it difficult to wield their weapons effectively. Worse still, when those in the front ranks recoiled in the face of the English rally, they came up against those behind them, who were striving to engage with the enemy. These men too were being pressed forward by the ranks behind them, who could not see what was happening at the front. So great was the pressure of the impetus forward from so many thousands of men that those in the front lines, caught between that and an immovable enemy, were simply overwhelmed, pushed over and crushed underfoot

In the chaos and confusion, the living fell among the dead. Great piles of bodies began to build up in front of the standards indicating the presence of Henry V, the duke of York and Lord Camoys, which were the main focus of the French attack. Many of the wounded and those who simply lost their footing in the crush were suffocated under the weight of their compatriots or, unable to remove their helms, drowned in the mud. The ragged archers ran hither and thither, administering the coup de grâce to the stricken and helpless. Others, arming themselves with the weapons of the fallen, joined their men-at-arms in clambering on top of the heaps of slain to butcher the hordes of Frenchmen below, who continued to advance relentlessly into the jaws of death.²⁸

The English did not have it all their own way. Had the men-at-arms not recovered so quickly from the first assault and held their line, the English position would have collapsed immediately, with disastrous consequences. And for some considerable time afterwards there was a real danger that the French would overwhelm them with sheer numbers. There were desperate moments, too, in the hand-to-hand fighting. Every French man-at-arms worth his salt wanted the honour of striking a blow against the king of England and, in the grand chivalric tradition, a group of eighteen Burgundian esquires in the company of Jehan, sire de Croy, formed themselves into an impromptu brotherhood before the battle and swore to strike the crown—with its provocative fleur-de-lis—from the king’s head, or die in the attempt. “As they did,” le Févre reported drily—all eighteen, to a man, were killed (as were the sire de Croy and his two sons), though not before one of them had got close enough to Henry to sever one of the fleur-de-lis from his crown.²⁹ In what may have been part of the same incident, Henry’s brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was wounded by a sword-thrust in the groin and fell at his brother’s feet. Careless of his own safety, the king stood astride his body and fought off his attackers until his brother could safely be carried away out of the mêlée.³⁰

For three long hours the slaughter continued, as the English hacked and stabbed their way through the vanguard and the main body of the French army. At the end of that time, the flower of French chivalry lay dead on the field. The oriflamme, the sacred banner of France round which they had rallied, was also lost in the battle, probably trampled underfoot when its bearer fell; it was never recovered. The English now felt secure enough to begin searching through the mounds of dead and wounded to take prisoners for ransom. In this way, some of the grandees of France fell into the hands of the ordinary Englishmen whom they had so foolishly despised. The duke of Bourbon was captured by Ralph Fowne, a man-at-arms in the retinue of Sir Ralph Shirley, and Marshal Boucicaut by a humble esquire named William Wolf. Arthur, count of Richemont, brother of the duke of Brittany and younger son of Henry V’s stepmother, was discovered alive, with minor wounds, under the corpses of two or three knights; their blood had so drenched his surcoat that his coat of arms was barely recognisable. Charles d’Orléans was found by English archers in similar circumstances.³¹

At this moment, when victory seemed assured and the English were preoccupied with taking as many prisoners as possible, a cry went up that the French had rallied and were about to launch another attack. In this crisis, Henry gave the only order possible. His men were physically and emotionally exhausted after three hours’ intense fighting, they were about to face an assault by an unknown quantity of fresh troops and they had in their midst large numbers of the enemy who, although they were prisoners, could not be relied upon to remain inert and neutral during renewed fighting. He therefore commanded his men to kill all except their most eminent prisoners, “lest they should involve us in utter disaster in the fighting that would ensue,” as the chaplain explained.³²

In humanitarian terms, Henry’s decision was indefensible: to order the killing of wounded and unarmed prisoners in such a cold and calculated way violated every principle of decency and Christian morality. In chivalric terms, it was also reprehensible. “It is against right and gentility to slay the one who gives himself up,” Christine de Pizan had written a few years earlier. The law of arms stated that a man who surrendered should be treated with mercy, “this is to say that his life should be spared, and, more important, the master [that is, the captor] is obliged to defend his prisoner against anyone else who would harm him.” On this reading, not only the king but the men to whom the prisoners had surrendered were in breach of their chivalric obligations. In military terms, however, Henry’s decision was entirely justified. The safety of his own men was his overriding priority. Even Christine de Pizan had admitted that a prince had the right to execute an opponent who had been captured and handed to him if he was convinced that great harm would befall himself and his people if he allowed him to go free.³³ The prisoners might have had their bascinets removed on capture and be unarmed, but the battlefield was littered with the armour and weapons of the fallen, and it would not have required much ingenuity or energy for the French to re-equip themselves while their captors were preoccupied in fighting off a renewed attack. And to be attacked on two fronts at once would spell death to the little English force.

It is impossible to know how many French prisoners were killed as a result of Henry’s order, not least because we have no idea how many had been taken at this stage of the battle. The eyewitness accounts of how the executions were carried out are contradictory, which adds to our difficulty because they also imply a lengthy process that cannot have been practical in the crisis of the moment. The chaplain says that all the prisoners, “save for the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, certain other illustrious men who were in the king’s ‘battle,’ and a very few others, were killed by the swords either of their captors or of others following after.”³⁴ Who decided which prisoners were sufficiently illustrious to be spared? How were they and the “very few others” separated from the rest condemned to die?

Our other eyewitness, le Févre de St Remy, says that when the order was given, those who had taken prisoners did not wish to kill them—a reluctance that he, rather uncharitably, attributes to a desire not to lose their ransoms, rather than to any sense of chivalric duty towards the captives themselves. Faced with this insubordination, the king was compelled to appoint a single esquire and two hundred archers to perform the mass execution. “So the said esquire fulfilled the king’s command; which was a very pitiable thing. For, in cold blood, all the French nobility were there killed, and their heads and faces were cut off; which was a shocking thing to see.”³⁵ Again, this raises the question of how quickly a body of two hundred archers could be raised to carry out the slaughter and how they could be spared from the imminent battle. If there were perhaps several thousand prisoners, as some modern commentators have suggested,³⁶ then how long must it have taken to behead them all? And if there were so many, why did they not resist when they had nothing to lose?

On this particular occasion we have a third eyewitness who sheds a rather more chilling light on the killings. Ghillebert de Lannoy’s military career had begun in 1399, when he had taken part in a French raid on the Isle of Wight, followed by another in 1400 on Falmouth. From 1403 to 1408 he had been in the service of Jehan Werchin, the seneschal of Hainault, accompanying him on crusade to the east, to a tournament in Valencia and to war against the Moors in Spain. Though he had fought in the duke of Burgundy’s campaigns of 1408 and 1412, he had also rejoined the Spanish campaign, and fought in the Prussian crusades, where, after being seriously wounded at the siege of Massow, he received the order of knighthood. He had just returned from a period of captivity in England, where he had been imprisoned while on a pilgrimage to the throne of St Patrick, and had obtained his release by paying a ransom to which the duke of Burgundy contributed.³⁷

It was now his misfortune to be captured a second time. Though he has nothing whatsoever to say about the battle—which he calls the battle of “Rousseauville”—he records that he was wounded in the knee and in the head and lay with the dead until he was found by those seeking prisoners, captured and held under guard for a short time, before being taken to a nearby house with ten or twelve other prisoners, “all of them helpless.” When the cry went up that everyone should kill their prisoners, “to have it done as quickly as possible, fire was tossed into the house where we were helpless. But, by the grace of God, I dragged myself outside and away from the flames on all fours. . . .” Unable to go any further, he was recaptured yet again when the English returned, and, recognised by his coat of arms as being of value, was sold to that canny collector of ransoms Sir John Cornewaille.³⁸

Ghillebert de Lannoy does not divulge the fate of his fellow-internees, though one assumes they perished in the flames. The casual brutality of his account has a far more authentic ring to it than those of either the chaplain or le Févre de St Remy and it would have been a faster and more efficient method of disposing of large numbers of prisoners. Even so, one must doubt how many could have been killed by this means, since not all prisoners had been removed from the field, and some must have been slaughtered where they stood, as the other eyewitnesses testify. Yet to claim, as some modern historians have done,³⁹ that this mass execution was the reason why so many French nobles perished at Agincourt ignores the fact that victory could not have been achieved by such a small army without extraordinarily high levels of casualties among their opponents during the course of the battle, as indeed contemporary chroniclers so graphically describe taking place. The decision to kill the prisoners was undeniably ruthless. Yet if Henry had spared them and they had launched a second front, the outcome of the day would have been very different and Henry himself would be accused of destroying his own men through faint-heartedness or misplaced charity. Significantly, not one of his contemporaries, even among the French, criticised his decision.⁴⁰

Was there any real need to kill the prisoners at all? Some historians, following the monk of St Denis, have claimed that there was no genuine threat of a renewed French attack, and that the whole terrible episode was based on a panicked response to a false alarm. Ghillebert de Lannoy, on the other hand, thought a rally by Antoine, duke of Brabant, prompted the order.⁴¹ This is a possibility, as the duke arrived on the battlefield very late in the day. Like his older brother John the Fearless, Antoine had not joined the other French princes for the muster at Rouen. Instead, he had held aloof until the English crossed the Somme and it became clear that battle was imminent. At that point his loyalty to his country proved stronger than his loyalty to his brother. On 23 October he began a headlong dash across his duchy, posting from Brussels by day and night at such a pace that not all his men could keep up with him. By the morning of 25 October, he was at Pernes, midway between Béthune and St Pol, hearing mass before resuming his journey. Just as the host was being elevated, he was brought news that the battle would take place before midday. With some fifteen miles still to go, he and his household leapt on their horses and rode like furies to Agincourt, arriving to find the battle already in progress. In his haste, the duke had not had time to put on his full armour or his surcoat bearing his coat of arms. He therefore borrowed the armour of his chamberlain, and tearing two pennons bearing his arms off his trumpets, he put one round his neck as a makeshift blazon and the other on a lance to serve as his banner. He then plunged into the battle, followed by his men, and was promptly cut down and slain, his unorthodox coat of arms having failed to protect him.⁴²

Throughout it all, the French mounted rearguard had apparently stood idly by. Contemporary chroniclers blamed this on the absence of their commanders, who had left them to join those fighting on foot, so that there was no one to lead them into battle or give them the order to advance.⁴³ In fairness, it has to be said that there was little that they could have done. Their intended role had been to pursue and cut down the English as they fled, after the cavalry, vanguard and main body of the army had broken their lines. When this did not happen, they could not intervene effectively because their route to the enemy was blocked by their own men-at-arms. It was not until their own forces had been massacred or retreated in confusion that any sort of cavalry attack was possible—and by then it was a forlorn hope.

Those in charge of the rearguard, the counts of Dammartin and Fauquembergue and the sire de Laurois, had struggled to keep their men together and in order once it became clear that the battle was going against them. Although they were unable to prevent many of them fleeing, they now, finally, rallied a significant number and, with banners and ensigns flying, they made as if to mount a charge. Whether or not they were joined by Clignet de Brabant himself, this motley band of French, Bretons, Gascons and Poitevins united in one last brave effort to save the honour of France. It was doomed to failure. Like those before them, they were met with a hail of arrows and fell with their comrades on the field. All their leaders, except the count of Dammartin and Clignet de Brabant, were killed. The nobility and self-sacrifice they had shown earned them nothing but contempt from their compatriots, who laid the blame for Henry’s order to kill the prisoners squarely at the door of “this cursed company of Frenchmen.”⁴⁴

The finger of blame was also pointed at a third group of people. In the final stages of the battle, while the English were occupied elsewhere, the alarm was raised that they were being attacked from the rear. Had this been true the English would have been caught between two fronts and in mortal danger, again giving sufficient reason to order the killing of the prisoners. In fact, though there was indeed an attack, it was not upon the army itself, but upon the baggage train. Contemporary chroniclers accused local men of carrying out the robbery and suggest that it was a spur of the moment affair, prompted by the rich pickings available. Three Burgundians, Ysembart d’Azincourt, Robinet de Bournonville and Rifflart de Plamasse, accompanied by a small number of men-at-arms and about six hundred peasants or “people of low estate” from the Hesdin area, were said to be responsible.⁴⁵

It is possible that this was part of the official French battle plan. An attack on “the varlets and their carts” behind English lines had been envisaged in Marshal Boucicaut’s earlier plan and a company of several hundred mounted men, under the command of Louis de Bourdon, had been appointed to carry it out.⁴⁶ On the day of battle, de Bourdon was reassigned to more important duties, but this does not necessarily mean that the idea was abandoned, especially as there was no shortage of men in the French ranks. What more natural than that the task should be given to local men, who knew the lie of the land intimately and could secretly work their way around the English lines?

The English chaplain, however, suggests that it was an altogether more opportunistic affair, with plunder as its sole objective. He was best placed to know, since he was himself in the baggage train, and had noted that “French pillagers were watching it from almost every side, intending to make an attack upon it immediately they saw both armies engage.” According to him, the attack occurred not in the final stages of the battle but as soon as the fighting began and while the baggage train was still being brought up from its original position in and around Maisoncelle. The pillagers “fell upon the tail end of it, where, owing to the negligence of the royal servants, the king’s baggage was.” This seems a more likely scenario, especially as John Hargrove, a servant of the king’s pantry, later received a royal pardon for losing the king’s plate and jewels at Agincourt.⁴⁷

Whenever the raid took place, it was successful beyond the dreams of the perpetrators. They acquired £219 16s in cash, jewels (including a gem-studded gold cross worth more than £2166 and a piece of the True Cross), the king’s crown, his state sword and the seals of the English chancery. The sword, which rapidly acquired the reputation of having once belonged to King Arthur, was later presented by Ysembart d’Azincourt and Robinet de Bournonville to Philippe, count of Charolais, in the hope that it might persuade him to intercede for them if their theft incurred any repercussions. It was a fruitless gesture. Once the rumour had gained ground that it was their actions which had prompted the killing of the French prisoners, Philippe was forced to give up the sword to his father, John the Fearless, who had the two men arrested and imprisoned. If nothing else, they were convenient scapegoats and punishing them would appease not only the outcry in France but the duke of Burgundy’s English ally.⁴⁸

Back on the battlefield, it soon became clear that the attempt to rally the French had failed. With their leaders dead and the king of England advancing menacingly towards them, the last remnants of the rearguard realised that further resistance was futile. Those who still had their horses gave themselves up to flight, abandoning those on foot to their fate and the possession of the field to the English. Though it was obvious that victory was his, Henry had one last formality to observe. Before the battle began, he had ordered that his heralds “should diligently attend only to their own duties” and should not take up arms themselves. As le Févre de St Remy explains, the English heralds had then joined their French counterparts to watch the course of the combat together.⁴⁹ By reason of their office, they stood above partisan loyalties and were there as impartial international observers. As if they were attending a joust or tournament, it was their role to record valiant deeds and, ultimately, to award the palm of victory.

It was for this reason that Henry V now summoned them to his presence. He formally requested Montjoie king of arms, the senior herald of France, to tell him whether the victory had fallen to the king of England or to the king of France. In acknowledging that God had indeed given victory to Henry, Montjoie was thus forced to admit that the king of England had won his trial by battle and that he had proved that his cause was just. Afterwards, Henry asked him the name of the castle that stood close to the battlefield and was informed that it was called Azincourt. “And because, said the king, all battles ought to bear the name of the nearest fortress, village or town to the place where they were fought, this battle will now and for ever be known as the battle of Azincourt.”⁵⁰