Agincourt War Walks

MUSIC: "The Agincourt Carol"

In October 1415, starving and riddled with disease,

an English army beat a French force that outnumbered it by five to one.

This epic victory has flashes of storybook heroism,

and a darker side of horror and butchery.

Today, you can still follow in King Henry V's footsteps

on the road that leads to Agincourt.

It's never been easier for an Englishman to get to France,

but when Henry V took his army here 600 years ago, it took two days to make the crossing.

He believed that he was rightfully King of France. On 11th August 1415,

he sailed from Southampton for this little port of Harfleur.

He hoped to use it as a base -

perhaps to overrun Normandy or threaten Paris -

and expected to take it easily.

BATTLE CRIES

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!

If you can only recite one line from Shakespeare's Henry V, that'll be it.

Harfleur was a walled town - held by determined garrison.

Although Henry's primitive cannon knocked about the forts and houses,

the siege went on for over a month.

The centre of Harfleur is a tangle of medieval alleys,

scattered with restaurants and superb fresh food shops.

But if the English had been hoping for a gastronomic crusade,

they were in for a nasty surprise.

Their supplies ran low so they tried some unsuccessful location catering.

True to being Englishmen abroad, Henry's men laid into local seafood.

It came, then, from marshes which were, in effect, the town's sewers.

Dysentery broke out in the cramped and filthy siege lines.

2,000 of Henry's men died. Others became so ill they were shipped home.

But the French were in worse trouble.

The garrison knew if Henry took the town by force, they'd be annihilated.

But if they surrendered, they might escape with their lives.

With no relief in sight by September, the gates were opened to the English.

Many townspeople had sheltered in the 11th-century church of St Martin to escape the English siege cannon.

On the 23rd September, Henry walked barefoot here,

to give thanks for a victory which cost him a quarter of his men.

These losses meant he had to rethink his campaign.

His advisors recommended that he should garrison Harfleur and go home.

But Henry, ever convinced of the rightness of his cause,

decided to march straight through French territory to Calais.

Although only 28, Henry was already an experienced soldier.

He'd fought successfully against his father's English and Welsh opponents.

He now hoped to mount a lightning raid through France,

travelling fast with the force of 900 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers.

They'd live off the land, or more to the point, off its French inhabitants,

who can't have welcomed the bedraggled, diseased Englishmen

whose hunger grew with every mile.

By car, you can cover Henry's route from Harfleur to Calais in a day...

more comfortably in two.

But it took his army three days to reach Arques, 60 miles from Harfleur.

There are traces of the woods that would have cloaked the land then.

But much of the country is rolling, open farmland.

The great castle at Arques is now a hulking ruin,

high on a bluff overlooking the town.

When Henry came on October 16th 1415,

the gates were barred.

Henry at once sent an envoy to the gates and demanded food.

But the governor's resolve was less solid than the walls of his keep.

He knew what had gone on at Harfleur,

and that the French army would probably not relieve him.

The town below the castle was at Henry's mercy,

so the English marched on, loaded with bread and wine from Arques.

Add non-combatants to men-at-arms and archers, and there are about 10,000 men in Henry's army.

That made it larger than most English towns of the day. That was a lot of mouths to feed.

The men expected two pounds of bread and half a pound of meat every day.

The army was a huge maggot, eating its way across the countryside.

Drink was the enemy of discipline, and armies had a strong taste for it.

Later in the campaign, a commander told Henry his men were simply filling their bottles with wine.

Henry snapped back that they made bottles of their bellies and were very drunk. But who can blame them?

Miles from home, stranded in a foreign country, marching in the rain, outnumbered five to one.

It's small wonder that many saw all this as more of a dangerous pub crawl than a crusade.

This was Henry's real problem.

The River Somme lay between him and his objective, Calais.

He had hoped to cross it here, by the ford at Blanchetaque.

But upon arrival on the 13th October,

he found the ford blocked with stakes and the far bank garrisoned.

Indeed, the French held all the bridges and fords along the Somme.

Henry had to find a place to cross,

and the spirits of his army must have sunk lower by the minute.

Heavy rains turned the swampy Somme Valley into a cloying morass.

Many of Henry's soldiers suffered from dysentery so badly that they had cut away their breeches.

On the other side, was a powerful French army, growing by the day.

During their long march,

Henry issued an order that must have added to the burden of despair.

Henry's archers were heavily laden,

but he told each to cut a six-foot stake and to sharpen it at both ends.

It was a burden that none could have welcomed, but later their lives were to depend upon it.

The road goes through water meadow and woodland, along the Somme Valley, to Henry's next destination.

Henry arrived here at Boves, near Amiens, on the 16th October.

It was now clear that his plan of campaign had gone wrong.

The army couldn't cross the Somme and it was fast running out of food.

Henry blackmailed the garrison here into giving him bread

by threatening to burn the town if they didn't supply it.

But there was too little to go round.

Soon, the men had to forage in the fields for nuts and vegetables -

bad news for an army of carnivores.

The Somme remained an impassable barrier, even for Henry's lightly equipped force.

Every crossing was guarded. Every ford was held.

There were fords across the Somme here at Bethencourt and at nearby Voyennes.

The causeways were broken but on the 19th October, the English repaired them using timber from nearby houses.

And by nightfall, Henry's army was across the last major natural obstacle between it and Calais.

Yet there was another even greater obstacle on Henry's route home.

Calais was 100 miles away and the French outnumbered them five to one.

At first, Henry could avoid them

but a few miles from the tiny village of Agincourt,

his route was finally blocked.

Agincourt's not a battle the French commemorate with great enthusiasm.

It's the kind of thing that can sour an entente cordiale

if mentioned at the wrong time.

In the village there's a tiny, but well-intentioned, museum.

Here, glamorous myths are perpetuated.

For instance, at Agincourt the English fought largely on foot.

And so, for that matter, did the French.

Men-at-arms on both sides wore full armour.

To give us some idea of how it looked, Ian Pyecroft is here to help.

I've started with long riding boots and a quilted arming jacket.

Where do we go from here?

-We'll put on your cuisse and poleyn leg protection.

-I'm in your hands.

You must have full flexibility in this.

The surprising thing so far, is that this doesn't feel at all bad.

The mail shirt is composed of about 20,000 riveted iron rings. Arms through the holes.

-Looking good!

-Looking good, feeling fit. It weighs about 15lbs.

Your father's polished breastplate.

-What's a grand guard?

-It protects the inside of the elbow.

-It's the same as the...?

-Side wings.

The shield was becoming obsolete by this time.

-This piece of articulated iron does the same job as your ancestor's shield.

-The articulation works.

A linen coif.

Try this on. A basinet with a mail aventail, or a mail collar, already attached.

I'll bring the mail collar out to protect all the joints.

Cover up all the gaps.

Here we've got some fine, Gothic-style gauntlets, as made in Germany.

Wonderfully lightweight, but heavily fluted.

The little ridges and flutes make them strong.

-This could give a deft blow to an unprotected face.

-Yes, they've spiked knuckles.

I'll bring the hound-skull visor down - hound-skull because it has a semblance of a dog's skull shape.

I'll give you an example of how blows would glance off the armour.

Can we make the blows as glancing as possible, please?

Here we've a small, blunted for safety reasons...a small sword.

CLANGING

-That was surprisingly unpainful. Well-padded.

-This is the idea.

You've got a good shape for a late-14th-century knight.

The only problem is you can't strike back,

unless you peck them to death with your visor.

-So if we lift the visor so you can breathe more easily.

-That's better!

I think it's time you had a weapon.

This one...weighs about three and a half pounds.

It could be used in one or two hands.

Razor-sharp.

You can thrust with it.

A good blow from above your head could cut a man virtually in half.

-It is actually...

-We have excavations from a battle in Denmark,

showing skeletons which have been separated...

from the shoulder to the groin.

This is a poleaxe or a war hammer - a two-handed, vicious weapon,

designed for cracking plate armour,

penetrating mail, punching through helmets.

-You can see the damage it could do.

-Yes, I can thrust with this part...

-It's swung over the head...

-I can pierce mail with that.

-That'll puncture any known armour.

This is a very satisfactory weapon.

I can imagine myself wading into somebody with that.

It fills you with a desire to give a swipe at whatever's within distance.

Well, the armour fits quite well

and was quite comfortable when I started.

But after a few hundred yards,

I'm really conscious of the weight of it all

and the abrasion on the whole of my body.

I can't see really very much without...

turning my head from side to side.

And I can't hear anything.

I certainly couldn't hear any orders that were shouted.

This mud is a real problem.

It's hard to keep my footing and if I fell over, I couldn't get back up.

If the snout of my basinet got jammed into the mud, as it easily might, I'd probably drown.

I can see what a dreadful experience this must have been for the French,

even before they got hit by arrows.

Despite their finest efforts at metal haute couture,

the French were vulnerable to the English longbow.

The longbow legend IS Agincourt.

'Stephen Burke is so captivated by that legend, that he has visited the battlefield over 100 times.'

This is the famous longbow. How is it actually made? Is it carved?

It's carved normally, so you'd need a six-foot piece of straight timber.

It's like a D-shape. The rounded shape is the belly.

The flat bit is the back. It faces away from you.

-Tell me about the bow string.

-It's made from different materials including hemp or linen.

Hemp is the same family as cannabis.

-But it would need looking after.

-Yes. They would have dozens of spare strings for each archer,

because fraying strings will snap easily.

Do you need to be strong to use one?

Yes. The Mary Rose evidence almost suggests that they were malformed.

They were built like gorillas - six foot tall and their upper limbs were much bigger than the norm.

-What are you firing from it?

-Shooting!

-I knew I'd get it!

What we're actually shooting is...

We've got a range here... of various arrowheads

and they've been in the mud so they've picked up mud too.

-But that would be quite a sensible thing to do.

-To pick them up quickly.

And it's biological warfare because the mud then would've had all sorts of ingredients.

We've nocks carved in the wood, but strengthened with a piece of horn.

-That's actually horn?

-Yes.

The feathers were glued on with a fish glue,

and tied or strengthened by the cord here.

The shafts are ash and at the other end we have the arrowheads.

This long bodkin one here, designed to go through plate and mail.

We've got a bullet point here,

and we've got some armour-piercing ones of different designs.

In films, we see arrows being pulled out of wounds. Possible or not?

-You can't do a John Wayne with them, no.

-Well, let's see you in action.

OK...this is just going to be a general distance...shoot.

That looks pretty good, I must say.

What's it actually gone into?

What it's gone into is a layer of mail here,

and underneath, 22 layers of fabric.

So our long, bodkin-headed arrows have gone in through the mail,

into the fabric, and if we turn it over, you'll see the head has gone right the way through.

It went in one side, out the other?

Right through 22 layers of fabric - that's the doeskin on the back - and the second layer of mail.

What's chastening is the idea that when I was in armour today, that covered my stomach.

So archers were unpopular! What did the French do if they caught them?

There were two options. One was to hang them.

The second was to disable them so they couldn't shoot again.

So they'd chop off the fingers they used to shoot the bow - that is, these two fingers here.

That possibly gives us the origin of the old V-sign like this.

Before the battle the archers would prove they could shoot their bows, taunting the French by doing this.

If the two-fingered salute was intended as a morale boost,

the English certainly needed it on the eve of battle.

It was a ghastly night.

Henry's men were tired, wet and hungry.

There was only room enough in the hovels for the king and some nobles.

The men-at-arms and archers spent the night huddled up under hedges.

Henry ordered his army to keep silent.

There was a low murmur as soldiers confessed to chaplains.

If the queues for chaplains were too long, they confessed to friends.

Our spirits are lowest in the small hours, and even Henry's morale wavered that night.

He released prisoners and sent word that he would return Harfleur and pay compensation

if the French would give him free passage to Calais.

When Sir Walter Hungerford offered another 10,000 archers

the king snapped back that all they had were God's people

and no harm could become a man who trusted the Almighty as he did.

Well, for once the weather's got it about right,

as it was an awful morning on the 25th October 1415,

when Henry's army formed up here, parallel with this road.

We can't be sure what it looked like

but there were probably armoured men-at-arms dismounted in the middle,

and the much more lightly clad archers on either flank.

Henry rode out on a grey pony and addressed his troops.

Then, he dismounted, took position in the centre of his army,

and waited for the French to attack.

Inconveniently, they didn't. They stayed up at their end of the field.

Eventually, Henry ordered,

"Advance banners in the name of Jesus, Mary and St George!"

The whole line then knelt down...

..kissed the earth -

which most soldiers probably expected would soon cover them -

then, stepped out across the plough towards the French.

It was a long, slow, plodding march with plenty of halts to keep the lines straight.

It was so bad that archers threw away their shoes,

marching barefoot to keep their footing.

A longbow shot from the French, the line halted.

The archers drove in their stakes,

and turned to Sir Thomas Erpingham, a veteran in command of the archers.

He threw his baton high into the air,

and the first arrow to be fired that day flew off into the French line.

The French had mounted detachments on both ends of their line.

They hoped to attack the English flanks and rear but these woods stopped them.

They came head-on into the archers and into as many as 80,000 arrows in a minute.

It was a hopeless venture but the French knights were very brave.

Their leader ran right onto a stake.

He was thrown off his horse, onto the ground, where an archer

knifed him as he lay helpless.

Then, the French problems began.

The surviving horses were maddened by arrows,

and galloped full-tilt into the mass of dismounted men-at-arms,

causing chaos and throwing the first French line into a confusion

from which it never recovered.

The first great block of French men-at-arms, about 8,000 strong,

came on into a blizzard of arrows.

They were tightly packed.

Knights who weren't hit fell over those who were.

The French collided with Henry's line about here.

What happened then is best summed up as bloody murder.

Men hacked and stabbed at each other as long as their strength lasted.

At this point, the archers joined in, bounding in from the flanks,

to ply sword and dagger with deadly effect.

The first block of French men-at-arms was driven back onto the second.

It was more like a Hillsborough-type disaster than a battle,

with knights being crushed to death.

The carnage on the battlefield wasn't the end of the slaughter.

Hundreds of French prisoners were taken during the battle.

Late in the afternoon, a few French knights and peasants attacked Henry's baggage train.

Fearing the prisoners might revolt in the confusion, Henry ordered their execution.

200 archers butchered many captives using knife and axe.

Later, the wounded had their throats cut.

No-one knows how many Frenchmen died, but there were at least 6,000.

Most of them were stripped of armour and valuables and buried in huge grave pits.

Henry had won a stunning victory

that further strengthened his claim to the throne of France.

The French king, Charles VI, agreed he should succeed him when he died.

But Henry died first - six weeks before Charles.

His victory never quite delivered what he wanted.