The Longbow - Wood Against Steel Decisive Weapons

Of all the weapons in the whole history of warfare,

none in its time was so hated, feared and despised by its enemies

as the English longbow.

The English longbow was the decisive weapon of the Middle Ages.

Nothing could rival it for range, accuracy and devastating power.

The immense power of this thing was REALLY surprising.

There were cases where longbows would literally shoot through trees.

They were capable of penetrating the thickest plate armour at short range,

and mail almost all the time.

There was nothing quaint about the English longbow.

In the hands of a trained archer, it was a killing-machine.

The English archer,

with a good bow in his hand,

could kill a French man-at-arms at a hundred yards or more, every time.

That's how good this thing is.

In a muddy French field in 1415, the longbow won its greatest victory.

Here at Agincourt, 5,000 English archers defeated a French army five times its size,

and an English myth was born.

But we in it shall be remembered - we few...

..we happy few...

..we band of brothers.

But behind the rhetoric lies the reality,

a ruthless and bloody battle won by a lethal weapon, the longbow.

The longbow was made from the simplest of materials.

Its unique characteristics come from nothing more complex than the wood of a yew-tree.

The English longbow,

at its best, was made from Continental yew.

It was one piece, a self-stave of yew, of the best quality possible.

It comprised of the heartwood of the yew

and the sapwood of the yew.

Yew sapwood is an excellent resistor of tension,

while the heartwood resists compression.

One piece of wood is a natural spring.

Well, this is...

a bow stave, before work's started. It's a 7-foot stave of yew wood.

There's the pale, creamy sapwood

on the back, away from the archer, the outside of the bend, and the brown heartwood inside.

The transformation of wood into finished weapon is a precise art developed over centuries.

The stave is honed, for power and suppleness. When the bow's finished,

it is tested for strength and balance on a device called a tiller.

The wood has come alive.

The whole thing describes a perfect arc of a circle.

So this thing had both flexibility and great power.

That's really why it was so lethal...

not because of length but what it was made of.

Although the bowmaker's art survived through the ages,

no-one really knew how powerful the medieval bow was until 1982.

Divers on the wreck of the Tudor warship Mary Rose made a discovery.

138 longbows, perfectly preserved.

For the first time, historians held the real thing. It astonished them.

The power, or draw-weight, of a real longbow was nearly twice what anyone thought.

You have to have bows within the strength range of these.

The strength, the draw-weight, is measured by what you hold apart at the length of the arrow.

That is what the weight of the bow IS.

These bows range from a bit less than 100lbs at the weakest, of which there aren't many,

right up to the very top at 170-180lbs here...

which a lot of people say can't be drawn. But they CAN.

These enormous draw-weights had one purpose,

to penetrate the armour of the medieval knight.

From the early 14th century,

armour developed rapidly. Chain mail had given way to plate armour,

which, by the time of Agincourt, covered virtually all of the body.

A well-dressed knight at Agincourt, one of the gentry class,

would've worn plate armour covering his legs, arms...a solid breastplate.

His head would be covered by a large helmet, a "basinet",

to deflect the blows of swords AND arrows.

Descriptions from Agincourt say arrows pierced the visors of the French helmets,

and the sides, which were less heavily armoured. It has formidable penetrative power.

The longbow may have been simple in concept,

but it demanded strength and years of rigorous training

to use effectively.

You'd have to start from a very young age to learn to shoot the larger bows,

and progress and progress.

Also, you'd have to practise on a daily basis

to be really good with a longbow.

The prowess of the English archer was feared throughout Europe. It was no accident.

For over a century before Agincourt,

English kings made practice compulsory for men of fighting age.

There were rigorous rules...

to make eligible young men practise the bow for war.

Near most large churches in any decent-sized village, there were "butts"

where they were obliged to shoot AT LEAST weekly, probably every night.

Sunday practice was so rigorously applied

that it made illegal other sports,

such as "cambuck", whatever that may be, volleyball,

football! The great national game, the national disease, was forbidden.

All these other games were stopped,

and you were fined for being found at them! So you'd practise the bow.

The result was a corps of highly trained civilian fighters, largely of the middle or "yeoman" class.

Neither aristocratic knight nor lowly peasant, they were a new presence on the battlefield.

Most would've been young men. Pages who served at battles were 12-14.

Some archers would've been no older than 16-17,

perhaps ranging to the mid 20s.

Most would've been unmarried. Some would've been farmers, husbandmen,

labourers, perhaps yeomen in the classic "rich peasant" sense.

Others would've been townsmen with crafts. We KNOW some were butchers, tailors, carpenters and bakers.

Because these yeomen represented a very distinctive social class,

the precursors of what might even be called the middle class,

they were not to be taken lightly.

And they knew it.

Cocksure and insolent, they have left us with an enduring legacy.

The English have a strange gesture

that dates back to Agincourt,

where they stick two fingers up in the air, as a gesture of defiance.

If the French caught an English archer,

they'd cut the two fingers off

on both the right and left hand,

thus stopping him from drawing the longbow again.

It was to these men, and a smaller number of aristocratic knights or men-at-arms, that Henry V turned,

as he prepared to fight the French.

Having inherited his throne from a usurper-king,

Henry needed a war abroad to consolidate power at home.

When Henry became king in 1413, he was only 26.

He wanted to prove HIMSELF in war,

but I think, also, he wanted to improve the lot of his dynasty.

He wanted to prove himself against the ancient enemy, the French.

Henry and his army set sail from Southampton on August 11th, 1415.

His force consisted of 8,000 archers and 2,000 knights.

As on D-Day over 500 years later, they made for the Normandy coast.

FANFARES

The plan was to take Harfleur, then head for Paris.

Things went wrong from the start.

Harfleur held out longer than expected.

The English began to die of disease.

At the siege many men took ill.

They got dysentery, they'd problems with the water supply...

It's said in the sources that they ate fruit from the trees which gave them diarrhoea.

It seems that bodies were left to rot, which was seen to cause disease.

Harfleur finally fell in September,

too late for Henry to advance on Paris.

But he refused to retreat.

Against advice, he decided to taunt the French by marching to Calais, 250 miles north.

This was a show of bravado.

But when he reached the River Somme, his plan ran into trouble.

A French army was lying in wait on the northern bank.

If the English were to reach Calais,

they'd have to out-flank the enemy.

The English army felt its way along the southern bank of the river,

looking for a safe crossing.

The French shadowed them on the other side.

The English were soon out of food. The situation was desperate.

After seven days of being stalked, the English stole a day's march on the French and crossed the Somme.

The French were in pursuit.

Scenting an easy kill, their army was growing day by day.

On October 21st, after nine days' chase,

the French overhauled the English, cutting across their path.

With five times more French than English, the tracks told a grim tale,

as an English eye-witness recorded.

"We found the roads remarkably churned up by the French army, as it had crossed, thousands strong.

"We, fearing battle imminent, raised hearts and eyes to heaven crying out our inmost thoughts,

"that God would pity us and turn us away from the violence of the French."

Three days later, the French blocked the road to Calais.

Battle was now inevitable.

That evening, the two armies bedded down with only a field between them.

It would soon be known as Agincourt,

the greatest test for the English longbow.

DR STRICKLAND: By dawn, the English must've felt their position to be desperate.

They were hugely outnumbered, by as much as five to one.

Their path to safety at Calais had been barred by a major French army, and they were near starvation.

They prayed before the battle.

Each archer took in his mouth some earth - "dust to dust".

I imagine many thought they wouldn't see the next day.

As dawn broke, the English took up position on the battlefield.

1,000 men-at-arms were drawn up in three groups,

with Henry at the centre.

The 5,000 archers were in two flanking groups.

Some may have been alongside the men-at-arms.

They strengthened their position with a simple but effective defence.

The king told the archers to cut six-foot stakes to hammer in the ground.

The archers would fire from behind these.

They acted as a defence, making it hard for the French horses to get near the archers.

The French were in three colossal groups.

The 1st battalion alone is thought to have had 18,000 knights on foot.

On the wings were the cavalry.

So confident were they of victory

that the French pushed their own archers far back to the rear.

They played no part in the battle.

I'm approximately where the French army took position

on the day of the Battle of Agincourt.

The French captains understood perfectly the danger of longbow

and of English archers.

So...they had a plan to fight against the English army,

and this plan was...

to attack the wings and the flanks of this English army.

It's a mistake to see the French as militarily inept. They weren't.

They KNEW the power of the English longbow. Their tactical thinking is in the Somme Plan.

This was a plan for battle, drawn up prior to the Battle of Agincourt.

The Somme Plan, only recently rediscovered,

proves that the French DID have a strategy to defeat the longbow.

A twin-pronged cavalry charge, sweeping wide on both flanks, would encircle and crush the archers.

But the knights needed room to manoeuvre.

But on THIS battlefield there was a great problem.

This battlefield is very narrow.

It is...600 metres, maybe 700 metres wide.

It's too narrow to have great tactical possibilities.

The Somme Plan also depended on a manageable number of knights.

But the French army was so swollen, there were too many on the field.

Far from guaranteeing victory,

their numerical superiority worked against the French.

If the plan had been followed by the vanguard, the French advance force -

only 6,000 men, but more flexible than the huge number that take part in the battle -

the French might well have won.

That tall clump of trees...

marks the very centre of the battlefield.

How do we know? Upwards of 6,000 French were buried there,

after the battle, in three trenches. From this position,

seeing that the French were doing nothing but furling their banners

and sitting down to breakfast, where you see...

that thin line of trees further behind the big clump...

So Henry V had his army move slowly forward in three separate moves,

so as to keep alignment, to keep discipline,

until they were perhaps 200 yards short of that clump of trees,

where, at extreme range, the English archers opened up

and started the Battle of Agincourt.

ARROWS WHIRR AND HOOVES RUMBLE

You could expect to engage the enemy...at up to 330 yards.

It'd give ME a tremendous advantage. They couldn't get nowhere near me,

and I'd be able to shoot more at them and kill more of them...

until they came too close for comfort.

The archers proved highly effective. Instead of encircling the English,

the cavalry were funnelled towards the centre of the battlefield.

As the armoured knights approached the killing-zone at high velocity,

they found themselves in a lethal environment.

Not only could their armour be penetrated by these long shafts,

but their horses were being shot down with great rapidity,

causing them to fly off their horses.

The point is that the armoured knight needed to be at point-blank range

to effect his casualties.

But he was still literally hundreds of yards away from these yeomen.

He was helpless in this environment.

The cavalry charge of the French on either side came in very depleted form.

By the time it got anywhere near our lines, it'd been shot to pieces.

Hundreds...THOUSANDS of arrows hurling at them,

"So thick that it darkened the sky, so heavy that it seemed like hail," said contemporary eyewitnesses.

And the horses were turned back in complete disarray, wounded, out of control,

into the front line of the then-advancing French central infantry.

Some 18,000 seems to me the likely number of the first French battalion.

This was the second phase of the battle.

The French knights now advanced on foot through the muddy battlefield.

The archers, having seen off the cavalry, had a new set of targets.

We're in the centre of the battlefield, the French advancing

across this ploughed field into an arrow-storm.

The great clouds of arrows forced the French knights on foot to bunch inwards.

An almost automatic response to a cloud of arrows is to shy away.

And this constricted an already densely packed body of men on foot.

All the time, they've riderless horses running amongst them, knocking them down.

So they were stumbling, blinded... and panicking, I think, is likely.

CLASHES AND SCREAMS

HORSE SHRIEKS

As the French got closer, to 100 or 60 yards,

the English arrows with bodkin heads would pierce the thickest armour, the visors of their basinets.

And the English could pinpoint weak points in the armour, at limb joints.

This is the type of arrowhead used at Agincourt for armour penetration.

Basically, what you've got are four cutting edges.

And the arrowhead is waisted.

So when it strikes the armour,

it parts the metal, or shears the metal.

And when it overcomes the thickest part of the metal,

there's nothing to stop the rest of the arrow sliding right through.

Medieval doctors knew only too well the devastation that longbow wounds could inflict on the human body.

But modern forensic science gives us an even more accurate picture

of its lethal power.

If we imagine that this block is the shoulder,

and it's struck by an object at 200 feet per second, weighing about 70g,

once it's penetrated the armour it'll EASILY break through skin, into the tissue.

In the shoulder are major blood vessels and major nerves.

An arrow will cut through like a knife through butter. If it hits the bones, it'll smash those completely.

That'll render the person immobile.

It'll certainly immobilise the arm.

Also, because of the force striking the shoulder,

it'll spin them around and throw them to the ground at the same point.

So probably the person will be instantaneously excluded from battle

by pain, by shock, by simply being thrown down.

Once the French and English men-at-arms are in contact, the archers' role changes.

They throw down their bows, take short, heavy swords, "falchions", great chopping blades,

and mauls - the lead-tipped mallets for driving stakes -

and mix it with the French men-at-arms who are bewildered or exhausted.

They are knocked down and held for ransom by the lightly armed English.

For aristocratic French knights, a close encounter with this new breed

was a horrifying and humiliating experience.

They did not approve of being shot at by people they saw as peasants.

THAT wasn't their idea of warfare.

It was gentleman against gentleman, honour against honour.

In that chivalric code, you COULD yield to a noble opponent,

but yielding to people from the soil, yeomen from the counties of England and Wales,

was more than they could encompass.

When the last French knights were forced to yield,

the battle was effectively over. But the English archers had more killing to do.

Afraid the French would now mount another charge, Henry ordered that the French prisoners be killed.

Men-at-arms hesitated, reluctant to break this last code of chivalry. The archers had no such inhibitions.

Henry can't find many men-at-arms who are prepared do it.

He has to appoint a squire and archers to start the slaughter.

At Agincourt, the English archers gave the French an unforgettable lesson in a new kind of war.

From the French point of view, the battle was a disaster.

It showed them to be vulnerable to common, ordinary men carrying bows.

It does undermine the idea that to fight,

you needed to be a chivalrous, well-equipped knight.

Prior to this, the knight had been relatively invulnerable on the battlefield.

The longbow changed all this,

because it put the knight definitely at risk.

It was the beginning of the end, in many ways, for the aristocracy.

The longbow revolutionised warfare.

You no longer had to fight your enemy man-to-man.

Killing could now take place at a distance.

THIS was the longbow's decisive triumph.

But at Agincourt, unnoticed at the time, a new weapon played its part.

On that day, one of the English soldiers died...

killed by a gun.

That lonely gun which killed that single soldier was, at that very point,

much like...a kind of a new species crawling across the battlefield,

ready to one day inherit the world.

Subtitles by BBC