![]() At Agincourt, Henry had at least 7,000 of them at his disposal.Īnd the English king knew first-hand the damage that arrows could inflict, having had a barb from one penetrate his own cheek at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. Although he knew his small force had no chance of conquering France, he still hoped to make a big showing while he was there.Īrchers, which cost him 6d per day (roughly half as much as a man-at-arms), proved to be an inexpensive means of filling out the ranks of his army.īowmen were also useful for sieges, as well as raiding parties and, of course, invaluable in pitched battles. The 28-year-old Henry crossed the Channel in the late summer of 1415 to press England’s long-standing claims to the French throne. Archers played a decisive role in Henry’s strategy. Yet no one studying the actual events of Agincourt can ignore just how significant the archers were to Henry’s victory, combined of course, with his own exceptional leadership. After their great victory Henry’s long bowmen supposedly raised their two digits to show they still had them - a great story but an invention of the 20th Century. The story goes that the French had threatened to cut off the fingers of any archers they captured. Later, a lecture script sent out to accompany Lawrence Olivier’s patriotic 1944 film adaptation of Henry V, which was shown in wartime schools and factories, brought to mind the ‘Tommy Atkins’ of the 15 th Century who had broken the charge of the French knights at the battle.Įven today, the myth of Agincourt as the origin of the obscene V-sign gesture persists. Lawrence Olivier’s 1944 performance of Henry V bolstered British wartime morale. In his A Child’s History of England (1853), he contrasts the ‘good stout archers, not gentlemen by any means’, with the proud and wicked French nobility who dragged their country to destruction.Įven in the late 18th Century, it was argued that Agincourt was a manifestation of the ‘radical fortitude’ of the British.Ĭloser to our own times, a short story written by Arthur Machen in the early months of the First World War saw British troops inspired by visions of Agincourt archers fighting alongside them against the Germans. They do appear in the work of that other pillar of the British literary past, Charles Dickens. Ironically, there are no archers in the Bard’s immortal play. The simple reason is that Shakespeare’s Agincourt, as depicted in Henry V (1599), created such a vibrant and enduring image of the young warrior king and his ‘happy few’. 25, 1415, still mean so much in the English-speaking world? How has Agincourt come to symbolize not only British pride in the military achievements of the past but also the triumph of the ‘little man’ of history - the English (and Welsh) archer? WHY DOES THE Battle of Agincourt, fought in northern France on Oct. “Gentlemen of England shall think themselves accursed they were not here” The Battle of Agincourt goes beyond history and has long been in the realm of national mythology in Great Britain. ![]()
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